JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today Tom and Jason focus on Hands to the Plow’s recent trip to Ethiopia.

JD: Welcome to GearTalk. This is Jason DeRouchie and I’m here with Tom Kelby after his first trip to Africa. Welcome back, Tom.

TK: Thanks. It’s really good to be back and I’ve been back long enough now. I feel like I’m adjusted to the side of the world that I’m on. So it’s really good. I won’t fall asleep during this podcast.

JD: This is good. Well today we have a little bit of vision casting. We’re hoping that our listeners will stay attuned just to learn more about what God has been doing in Africa and specifically in Ethiopia. This trip that Hands to the Plow just got to take. And then with that to talk about summer plans, Tom, for both you and I as we switch gears. That’s kind of funny to say on our podcast. As we alter the course of our lives here for a little window and give our listeners a little in-road into how we’re going to be spending our time and what the podcast is going to look like. So that’s where we’re heading today. And why don’t we start there, Tom, before we even talk about Africa? Why don’t we take a little glimpse into the summer?

TK: I think that’s great. I think for both of us this has been a priority. We’ve loved it. Given your rhythm of life, it’s been a good thing for you to take summers off. So that’s a starter I guess, Jason, is you’re not going to be doing GearTalk this summer.

JD: That’s right. Come June, I will take a break from GearTalk and focus fresh attentions. Our church is preaching through the book of Ephesians and I have a number of messages lined up that I’m going to be preparing for. I also have a book on missions that I am—I’ve been shaping for several years. I didn’t even know that I was shaping it, but as I’ve been presenting relevant material in overseas contexts, I’ve seen God shaping a book that has some distinctiveness to it with respect to a whole Bible theology of missions and then addressing a number of practical issues that those seeking to make disciples across cultures are constantly facing, be it prosperity theology or wrestling with the promises of God, theological education on the ground and how it can work in nontraditional contexts, how people can be thinking about it in local churches and equipping leaders. And then areas like spiritual warfare that are so apparent across the world—in our naturalistic culture of the West it’s downplayed often but it’s just as apparent—and so wrestling, trying to help us think about how does the Bible consider the absolute sovereignty of God and his relationship to the problem of evil and all that Satan is at work doing, whether in pain like persecution or sickness or in false teaching and how we think about confronting it as war. So a book on the kingdom’s advance, and then I finally, after decades of work in the book of Deuteronomy, get to switch attention this summer and into the fall into the book of Deuteronomy to continue work on the Pillar Old Testament commentary on this amazing book that was one of Jesus’s favorites, indeed one of the prophets’, Old Testament prophets’ favorites, cited most often as these Old Testament preachers were engaging their audiences. So that’s a little bit of a taste for my ministry update. Tom, how about you? What are you going to be focusing on and what’s GearTalk going to look like?

TK: Well start—I’ll start there. GearTalk is going to look a little bit like it did last summer. We did something we called a summer of stories and we lined up either students of Jason’s or co-workers and had them look at a story from the Bible and how it fits into this grand story of the Bible progressing, integrating, climaxing in Christ. So we’re going to have a summer of stories. I’m really looking forward to it. I will miss doing this with you, but it will—summer’s going to go quick. It always does. Both of us have lots of family things—you didn’t mention that, but I’m sure you have some family vacations coming up too, which will be sweet—and we will as well. Just this morning got a call from my little grandson and wants to know if I’m going to his tee ball game. So that’s a couple hour drive, but both my wife and I felt like—

JD: Priorities.

TK: This is a big deal. We got to go to tee ball.

JD: There we go. I love it. I love it. And Tom, you’re planning to begin to engage some more research and writing, so tell us about that.

TK: I am. So my dissertation was on book one of the Psalms, which I’ve spent quite a bit of time in even prior to the writing the dissertation, but the preacher’s guide we have to the book of Psalms, I would like to update that. I love our preacher’s guides. I feel like they’re a real help, but there’s just a lot more there that I would like to add to and go through book one. I don’t know how far I’ll get, but that’s something I’d like to work on. We have a couple other things we’re working on which will be revealed Hands to the Plow-wise, which we’re going to be kind of rolling out here in the months to come. Can’t announce some of these things yet, but we’re really excited about those and you’re going to be hearing about those shortly. But as far as my writing goes right now, in the book of Psalms, some other things possibly, but that would be the one first and foremost. Also been just focusing a little attention on book two of the Psalms, and so that would be Psalms 42 to 72 and how those are fitting into the whole story being told in this five-book book, and that’s been fun for me—fun to kind of move forward in the Psalter. So that’s where I see just putting some time.

JD: Love it. Well I am eager to see what the Lord allows both of us to accomplish. I pray that it will be for the good of his church and for the sake of his name. You, Tom, have traveled much of the world, but God had never let you engage Africa, and Hands to the Plow is a discipleship organization and very often we are crossing cultures in mission, and you got to engage in mission in Africa’s horn and got to go with a team to meet people and to visit places that I love and I’m so glad that you recently got to go. And I thought it would be great for our listeners to hear a little bit of nitty gritty of Hands to the Plow in action in another part of the world. So I would love if you could walk us through your experience, even leading up—what were you anticipating? you had a great team to go to—highly equipped hearts for Jesus, many of them international, just having taken a number of international trips. They were just mature and ready. As you were leading up to the trip, what were your thoughts and how did this team make you excited?

TK: In taking a trip like this, a team is really so critical because it can be a downfall of any ministry—heart motives or just a carelessness. And I would say from Mark Maloney, our ministry manager, said he setting up the team and really organizing the details, so having full confidence in the arrangements of this trip as he’s working with our partners in Ethiopia, to each member who went, the care they took in preparing. So we went through the section of the Old Testament—the second section, it would be our second gear as we’re laying it out in our six gears—the Prophets. But we had several training sessions just going through this section and then using our picture-based curriculum, just working through this stuff so we would be ready when we got there to help these brothers and sisters as they’re working with the church there. And then we also worked through the book of Hosea as a sample of a book in the prophets—this is the sort of things the prophets are doing. So even before we went, I was excited about the caliber of the team that went and the heart of preparation for people going. The whole team really pulled together and that made for a sweet experience. Won’t say it was easy. I think every member was battling some level of sickness while we were there, and so just heard from a number of people while this was a hard trip, but everybody would follow that up very shortly with but a really good trip.

JD: So, on this trip you had a couple pastors, you had a director of women’s ministries and her husband who’s a medical doctor, you had a doctoral student, and was there anybody else? Is that cover—

TK: And then Mark Maloney who’s our ministry manager?

JD: Yep, our ministry manager. So a very well-equipped team. And you get to fly—you all met up in Chicago, you had a thirteen and a half hour trip ahead of you, you land in Addis, the capital of Ethiopia, and you’ve been many places in the world, Tom. How did getting off that airplane in Addis and your first tastes of this major African city—what thoughts were on your mind? Similarities, differences? And then you got to meet one of our chief contacts, pastor Fekadu, your first sense of him as you enter into this week?

TK: And his son Barnabas, who was with us all week. Even backing up before that, just kind of a funny story, which you would be well aware of—we went with quite a few duffel bags full of gear and different items, and this sounds like this is the third of our trips in a row where staying at the hotel we were in in Chicago, the driver showed some degree of dismay and shock at the number of bags we brought, and just watching Mark navigate that to get us everything to the airport—thinking I’m so thankful for this brother we have with us that the Lord grants us favor. All our bags made it, and I would say landing there, I was expecting certain things and saw a lot of what I was expecting, but it was different also. And I think that’s true of anybody who travels—you can think you know something based even on demographics, like say a country is Islamic or a country was a former Soviet bloc nation or something like that, but each place is unique. Getting there, clearly poverty is a major problem, but something interesting about the city is they’ve done a lot to cover up the poverty, I would say. So walls in the city, for instance, where if you’re driving through the downtown or the city, you won’t see some of the reality that’s right there, but you might not notice it. Right.

JD: And some of that is—even a significant part of that has happened only in the last year as begging has been outlawed, as many people have been displaced, moved out of homes they’ve been in even for decades, in order for the government to establish parks and to attempt to really elevate the infrastructure within the city to bring it into a note where the capital on the African continent. But it’s also come at great cost to the people of Ethiopia and most specifically those living in Addis, the majority poor.

TK: I think that’s anywhere we go, just praying Lord, help me see what I need to see, because the very quick perception I might have somewhere like wow, this is so clean or this is so beautiful, I might be missing the reality of that place. And that would be a picture of it there, certainly. It is one of the reasons you had wanted our team to take a trip outside of the city, and so we did that on our first day there and went to another—they would call it a small area. It depends where you’re from how small it might seem

JD: A little bigger than Spooner, Wisconsin.

TK: A little bigger than Spooner, Wisconsin is true, but that was good because it gives you a taste of this is the side of Africa without the walls covering it up.

JD: Right. So you see 85% of the country is agrarian, and you get outside that city and you begin to see how most of Ethiopia is living. You see the huts, you see the large farms, you see in the area where you were, I imagine, mountains and jungle-like settings and lots of people.

TK: Lots and lots of people. And that’s the amazing thing about our Lord is he knows these people and he cares about these people. And I would say that this is really significant for us—we can have a tendency, I think, to forget about places that are very different from us or that we perceive are very different from us and not enter into their struggle. But love of neighbor has to extend for a believer beyond just loving those who are close to me. And so being able to see an area—and we certainly can’t be everywhere, but say Lord, how can I help? What part can I play in places that you’ve opened doors for me? So one of the things we did was we hosted just a one-day marriage conference led by Andrew Mountain, my pastor.

JD: I love it. It’s just beautiful what God has done in this region, roughly two and a half, three hours west of Addis Ababa in Ambo. In the last two decades, nearly a hundred churches have been planted in a context that prior to this was traditional religions, worship of demons, and God has entered in, captured hearts and made people new. And I just love that the Lord equipped Andrew to speak to marriages on the ground, giving words of life from the word that God had purposed that these people would hear and grow and receive.

TK: And it’s one of the beautiful things—we can all have a nervousness about going to a new people group and just thinking they’re so different from us, but realizing very quickly they’re not that different. And watching Andrew, for the very first time in his life, work with a translator, and he was just Andrew. He did it the way that I would have expected—with excellence and integrity and humor and a winsomeness that draws people in. And he’s talking to these couples—so pastors, leaders—about their marriages, able to get them praying together, speaking together about their marriages, and then with a really good heart, praying with them and challenging them on what—why aren’t you talking about certain things? How can we make a change in this area? And it was just really fun, Jason, to watch them engaging with each other. It’s almost like then our team and Andrew disappeared from the room as they’re focusing on their marriages.

JD: Beautiful. And this is in a context that even professing Christians have often not had much training in biblical manhood, biblical womanhood, the interrelationship of a husband and a wife, biblical complementarity, what proper headship is, what it means to be the glory of the man for the man, his function of leading, for the woman what submission looks like—it just hasn’t been taught. And because of that there’s been twistedness, abuses, wrong perception. And I praise the Lord that his word can run and how beautiful that an American pastor simply opening up the book in one English translation could communicate through an interpreter in a way that works in another culture, because that’s how God is—the unchanging God able to speak throughout time to all peoples in all cultures, a word that is steady and true and faithful and sure. And God used Andrew to minister to these couples, likely in ways that they have never been ministered to before.

TK: And he started in Genesis 1—why God made people to bring his image into all the earth—and kind of work through Genesis 1, had couples reflect together: is this happening in your marriage? How can this happen? Had us work through Genesis 2. It was just sweet, brought us—it was a crash course in biblical theology of marriage. Really sweet.

JD: Love it. So you’re on the ground and you got to connect with a missionary family, Matt and Miranda, and their host of children, and they are—

TK: —and pony—they have a horse now.

JD: All right, they have a horse. So they are newly planted along with Barnabas, who you already mentioned, who is joining them as a missionary on the ground in this new area. And share with us a little bit about their ministry and their vision for now reaching these nearly 100 church plants and equipping the church leaders in faithfulness.

TK: One of the awesome things about being in the body of Christ is seeing people that the Lord has put something in them and wired them a certain way that you can have at the same point an amazement that Lord, you put something in them for them to make it here and not only make it—like they’re gonna thrive. And I would say that our whole team came away looking at this couple and their children that not only is this family making it, they are thriving, and that can only be because of the grace of God poured into their life. So even things like just them having a horse and being able to laugh about it and laugh about the kids and the things they love to do. But they have a vision which I would say is not a short-term vision—it’s a long-term vision for bringing change, and they’re working hard to get all the necessary paperwork and things to be working with the national church there. And character-wise—you’ve known that longer, I’ve known him from before the trip just briefly—but seeing them there, seeing the witness they have, this is a really good example of why we want to support missionaries on the ground. They’re getting a lot done.

JD: Yes. I mean the vision that they have matches that of pastor Fekadu. It’s holistic. At the core it is faithful doctrine, but it overflows in a life that is transformed, a joy that is pervasive, and so—Christian school, how to farm as a good steward of God, a Bible training school for all these churches that are needing increasingly equipped leaders. And like you said, this family is uniquely equipped. They’ve already had extensive ministry on the continent of Africa. They’ve gained greater training, and the kids, like you already mentioned it, the kids are just amazing that they can enter into this brand new culture and they are all in and honoring their dad and mom, working hard to love one another, establish relationships across culture, and it is beautiful to see. May God bless their ministry.

So you got to worship together. What was it like for you on that Sunday morning, Tom, to worship in that African congregation?

TK: It was far more exuberant than you might see at a more Scandinavian church in the upper Midwest, I would say. And it’s interesting—like so I’ve spent a lot of time in Bangladesh, it very different from there. Different instruments. I think worship in song was a lot longer than a lot of us are used to, and it was really sweet.

JD: I appreciated that you were able to send us that podcast of your whole team reflecting on pastor Nate’s message that morning. What a good word from—I think it was the gospel of Luke on Zacchaeus and Jesus’s pursuit of him. If you haven’t listened to that podcast, I encourage you to go back and hear those reflections. I just rejoice that you got to worship with brothers and sisters. It’s just amazing that God can receive praise through different vessels in different cultures, and it is honoring to him and it is beautiful to him. And what a gift to be able to worship with saints all over the world.

TK: Amen. And again, as I said with pastor Andrew, pastor Nate—he is preaching and he disappears because it’s God’s Word. And you and I were reflecting before we started recording today—just Nate has an ability to say what is in the text very clearly, sitting right on the surface, but I can miss it. And say oh wow, that’s such an obvious point. And it is the point. It was there all along. I just—I was really blessed by all parts of that morning, but the message was really good and challenging for me. I loved it.

JD: Love it. So you leave this—it’s a good-sized town, Ambo is—you travel back through rural Africa and you get to the main capital. We have a city of well over a million people, and you get to minister in a local church to men and women from numerous tribes literally in the country and different heart languages. So share with us a little bit about what a week on the ground teaching the developing leaders curriculum—what does the schedule look like during that week and how were the teams set up and what was it like for you to partner in this new context of ministry?

TK: Yeah, so I don’t actually know the population of Ambo, but pastor Fekadu said estimates for Addis are in the 10 million range right now. It’s so much like so many of these major cities in the world—how do you count? There’s just people everywhere. But we had—we got back on Sunday night, had Monday where we were able to do a little visitation and make plans and see the ministry pastor Fekadu is doing among the poor, which was really sweet to see. Then Tuesday we had pastors coming in from all over—pastors and leaders—in several languages, but we would be teaching. It’d be translated into two major languages, and we divided up our team. Pam took the women, which clearly they love her. Kelly, our illustrator Mark’s wife—she went last year, and the ladies had to stop and FaceTime her, and it was really sweet. It was like they’re like, we’re not doing this without you, Kelly.

Love it. So that was really fun. But then we just divided up—myself and Pam’s husband Barry, we led the group of Oromo speakers, and then the Amharic speakers were between pastor Andrew and pastor Nate, and then Jonathan Lumley and Mark Maloney also had an Amharic group. And so we had probably in the mid-eighties, I would say, of participants going through three days of a picture-based curriculum with translators and then going through the book of Hosea—of this is how the prophets work. So that’s the basics. You can ask me any questions about kind of how we did it, but I would say that part felt a lot like teaching in, for instance, Bangladesh—people seeing things in God’s Word and at first a wondering maybe about why are we teaching using pictures, and then a really leaning into and absorbing, okay, this is giving me the big idea, and an embracing of it. So that’s kind of what we did and just spent the day going through God’s Word, then eating together, and did that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, half of Friday.

JD: With the prophets, you have half the text is narrative—Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings—and the other half is what we more commonly think of as prophetic literature, dealing with books Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the twelve minor prophets. So share with us a little bit—as the Ethiopian leaders were walking through first the story books and then the more traditional prophecy books, how were they responding? How was it landing on them in fresh ways? What did you see happening?

TK: The ones who had gone through the Law—so the group, so the Oromo speakers had not gone through the Law. That hadn’t been translated last year, and we’re just wanting to go through the different sections of the Bible, showing how they progress, how they integrate, how they climax in Christ. Well, the ones who hadn’t gone through the Law, it definitely took some catch-up to get there, but how were they responding? I think they were loving being able to picture in their minds this is what the Scriptures look like. I’ll often talk to people and say, Jesus didn’t have a Bible—there was no book that he could carry around with all the Old Testament in it, but he definitely had, if you want to say it, the books in his mind, and he had them arranged on a bookshelf, kind of like he could picture where he’s taking a book out on the shelf. And we said, really, that’s one of our goals is for you to be able to picture the Scriptures, the Old Testament Scriptures, and where things fit in the story, like you’re again taking a volume off the shelf and saying yep, I know these books. I’m actually looking at my books, Jason, as I’m talking to you right now, and I have them arranged similarly—like books are from certain categories, and so if I’m looking for something, I’ll go over to that section of my bookshelf. And so it was really fun watching them get these categories back. And something all our classes did—I think it was Jonathan and Mark and Nate and Andrew really started, and they said you need to do this—they had all the participants teach the pictures back to them, and it was really fun seeing they did not miss any of the pictures and what they’re teaching—a lot of day, which I think is one of the big things, especially cultures that learn by—learn a lot by rote learning, like just memorizing, which would be a lot of the context I’ve been in before. That’s something I wasn’t surprised about. I was expecting it. But it seems like a lot of learning methods that people have had where maybe they’ve been preached to and they’ve listened a lot, but they haven’t been encouraged to ask questions and to think critically about things in the same way that a lot of other cultures—and their strengths and weaknesses to all of this. But it was fun to see them approaching the text from a different way and being able to teach the pictures back to us in their own words.

The section Scripture called the Prophets brings up something unique, I would say, to Africa and this section, this portion of Africa certainly, which is these pastors are all dealing with a category of preachers who come, who are more itinerant—they move around—but who would call themselves prophets. And so when you say this is a section of the Old Testament called the Prophets, right away it leads to questions about what about prophets who come into our churches or come into our towns? How should we think about them?

JD: And that’s an issue that there are spheres of the evangelical church in the West that address those issues more than others, but the majority church isn’t even thinking in those categories too often. But as you said, in this part of Africa, it’s a major issue.

TK: Oh, it was—I knew it was major, but I didn’t know it was a dominant thought for these people.

JD: In fact, throughout Ethiopia itself, there are mainly three offices, and deacon is not one of them. It’s you’re a pastor or you’re an evangelist or you’re a prophet, and these are recognized, appointed positions. And as you said, the prophet can often be an itinerant speaker, and if, as is common, he’s associated with prosperity theology and money, then all of a sudden he becomes a massive danger for the church at large because he is not speaking as one who has enjoyed the very counsel of God but instead speaking falsely, twisting, misguiding, misdirecting, and it’s a major problem in the Ethiopian church. And having discernment about how to understand modern-day prophecy is massive. So how did you talk about such things, Tom? And what have the leaders on the ground in Ethiopia even requested of Hands to the Plow?

TK: Yeah, great questions. I think one thing that all of us—we knew going in this would be a major issue, but one of the things we wanted to make clear in teaching was even though prophets as far as people traveling to different cities and villages is a major concern, we want to be able to engage this section of Scripture, the Prophets, and not mix our categories. So we wanted to be able to not just switch topics and say let’s talk about modern-day people calling themselves prophets, but we want to carefully teach this section of Scripture as we will the rest of the Scriptures, Lord willing. And we taught the Law because long-term, the help for any area of pastors, elders, God’s people is that they know God’s Word and it resides deep in their heart and they have a confidence in what God has said. And so even if you’re saying we’re not talking about prophets in that modern traveling sense, it’s in the back of our mind that this is—teaching carefully through God’s Word is one of the ways that we do address this.

JD: And it’s fascinating—go ahead.

TK: Oh, I was—good. That said, though, we definitely did then say we will address this, though, and we will talk about it specifically.

JD: It’s fascinating that as you engage the Old Testament Prophets—that that is the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, that second category—you’re faced with a operation of prophecy very comparable to what we see in the New Testament. Not only prophetic covenant enforcers who are truly messengers of the heavenly court and engaging with a word that is both covenantal and trans-covenantal—and by that I mean they’re operating as old covenant prophets within the framework of Moses’s word as their guide, but they’re also speaking words that are for the new covenant era. They are speaking words of Scripture that are to reach men and women in multiple cultures and in multiple times as the Word of God. But then there’s also another subset of prophets that were apparent in Israel—those, for example, the school of the prophets that was following Samuel. The question is Saul—King Saul among the prophets?—because he began to speak with prophetic utterances like others in the region there. This seems to me to be very comparable to the distinctions that we see in the New Testament. The apostles were end-times prophets whom God used as new covenant enforcers to give clarity regarding the book—these are words from the heavenly courtroom, ambassadors of the heavenly king who are preaching. And then there are other prophets in the New Testament that seemed to be validated—for example, Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5, he can just quickly say don’t quench the Spirit and do not despise prophecies. And the challenge, though, that he says immediately is but test everything, and in the process hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil. So as we see in 1 Corinthians 4, there’s this evaluation that’s being done, and I think that was already apparent in the Old Testament era. They were evaluating the lower-level prophets who were not speaking covenantally to everyone within the covenant, nor were they speaking trans-temporally to people across time, but they were speaking specific words for specific people in specific needs. We see that in books like Kings, and we see false prophets being confronted within the prophetic literature itself as Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the twelve others confronting false teaching, those who were proclaiming to speak a word that ultimately was not from and so these are very practical issues that the church needs to wrestle with. And I’m glad that you were both able to call people back to the book because that is our foundation—the unswerving standard upon which everything that is proclaimed has to be weighed—and yet also be able to recognize, okay, this is a contemporary pastoral challenge that these brothers and sisters are facing, and we need to be able to address it biblically.

TK: And you can imagine what it would feel like if you are a pastor in, for instance, a rural area and you’ve not had the opportunity to go to a seminary, you met the Lord, you love the Lord, you’ve done the best you can study-wise, you’ve been appointed a pastor, you’ve been faithfully leading, but somebody comes into town who, as far as just a personal charisma, far outstrips you, and people are drawn to this person because he has a wealth that you will never have. These pastors were talking about people who will be coming to an area and the church site where they’re going will be sold out—people will be buying seats in the place months in advance. So you can just imagine what that feels like when that sort of spiritual weight, even if it’s not true, but comes into an area, how much diminishment you might really feel and the struggle you have as your people will be tempted to follow after this person.

JD: Yes, yes. So what are some of the takeaways, Tom, with respect to helping the church in Ethiopia that you brought back with you?

One takeaway is I am thankful for ministry partners. So the pastor Fekadu, as with other places we’re working, having somebody who knows people on the ground and works with lots of churches and hopefully has a similar vision—that’s so vital because we aim to help the churches, not to impose something, but recognizing a value in teaching God’s Word. Certainly the way we’re doing it is not the only way to present God’s Word, but being able to see that what we’ve seen in other areas, teaching using pictures and then following it up with going through biblical books and looking at real examples, that this really was a help and a blessing. They uniformly were saying when can you come back? We are so excited to go through the next set. And they were already asking questions about the books in the Writings—okay, if this is what the Prophets are doing, what, for instance, is Daniel doing? Because it’s in the Writings. How is it different? And so it was really fun seeing categories really being formed in people as they’re thinking. So looking at that and saying continuing what we’re doing. And I just like to say if you’re hearing this and you’re saying I’d like to be a part of that, we would love it if you would be praying and joining with us financially because it takes a lot to translate materials and produce materials and go and do this. And so we’re so thankful for those who are joining us. So thank you for doing that.

Secondly, the leaders there asked us if we would produce some materials that would help in areas they are recognizing we are struggling with these areas. One is the area of prophets—and you could add even the title apostle to the mix as well—so someone comes in claiming a level of authority over local churches. How do I think about that? And then also—it was good talking to the women, but they are, rightly so, wondering how should we think about our place within the church? As is—what does Scripture say about us as potential elders or pastors? Is that things Scripture permits or does not permit? Are we allowed to be leaders in the church and how would we define that? So I was able to, with the women and pastor Fekadu at Pam’s request, come in and really speak on that, and they appreciated that. They just said we haven’t had a lot of teaching that has walked us through the Scriptures of how we are supposed to think about our role in the church. But working on some of these things—so not only going through the curriculum we have but providing some things that are more country-specific, I would say. Not only for this place, because I’ve seen these same issues other places, but certainly the Prophets one had a strength in Ethiopia that I have not seen other places.

JD: Sure. So if you’re listening, pray with us that God will help us serve this church in Ethiopia faithfully as we seek to equip them with further resources that can guide them into the word. And if you want to know more about Hands to the Plow, our doctrine, our delight, then go to handstotheplow.org and you can check out our ministry, our statement of faith, and the work—understand further the work that God is doing. So any final word, Tom?

TK: Yeah, I think final word is we’re working hard to get works translated. Mark Jaeger and the team at DKY in Minneapolis have made these landing pages access by QR code so people in-country can access translated materials. So getting resources—whether they’re presently on handstotheplow.org or new ones or just a wealth of things, Jason, that you’re doing, jasonderouchie.com—it’s our joy to be translating these and getting these available there. Again, I’m looking at my bookshelf thinking of the wealth of resources we have to us while so many places don’t have any resources, and it is a joy to be able to at least be part of an answer in that regard. So we’re trying to work hard, and again, if you want to give towards that, we would love to work with you.

JD: Awesome. Well thank you for sharing, Tom, and thank you listener. May the Lord bless you and may God work for the fame of his name throughout all the nations. Bye-bye.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. To download resources connected to biblical theology visit handstotheplow.org or jasonderouchie.com. If you’d like to support projects like you’ve heard about today visit handstotheplow.org.