Written by Janet Orgain
Harding University launched the 50th annual World Missions Workshop yesterday with a fresh approach to an old tradition. Instead of hosting attendees on campus, the workshop is being conducted at Harding University Tahkodah, a missionary training village located a few miles from the main campus. The workshop focuses primarily on hands-on experience, according to student director Kayla Ross.”This year is designed to get people involved, stir their creativity and expand their knowledge of missions,” Ross said. “Instead of sitting in a classroom for 50 minutes getting handouts and PowerPoints, we’ll be in a global village getting our hands dirty and making our minds churn.”The HUT global village includes simulations for Southeast Asian bamboo houses, American poverty settings, a refugee camp and African, South American and Central American compounds. Oneal Tankersley, missionary in residence and director of HUT, said he opened a new compound specifically for the workshop. In response to the Haitian earthquake, the new compound teaches students how to build an earthquake-resistant “earth-bag” house. Experts are helping students actually build the walls of an earth-bag house and practice earthquake response.”We chose approaches [for the workshop] that we are actually doing on the mission field now,” Tankersley said. “These are smack out of the field, not that we wish we could do, but are actually taking place now.”Tankersley and students also added a coffee shop setting to the HUT campus in order to simulate Western urban mission fields. In this learning center, missionaries are showing students how to relate and share the gospel in an urban setting, he said. Discovery Bible Study representatives are also present to help students learn to conduct Bible studies around the world.”We have a beautiful range of basic systems training,” Tankersley said. “Everybody in the world has to get water, food and shelter. Everyone participates in economics, government and transportation. We are giving an intro to the basic systems of life and of how we can help people in the name of the Lord Jesus as we teach them.”According to Tankersley, approximately 600 students and missionaries combined are participating. More than 100 Harding students have also volunteered and helped to make the workshop a success.Tankersley said that, above all, the workshop aims to motivate, teach and network students and missionaries together. “I’m sold on the fact that this is going to be a rich event,” Tankersley said. “We’ve got good students together wanting to serve, and it can hardly go wrong when you have those kind of people getting together.”The workshop goes through Sunday, Oct. 17. For more information, please stop by the missions lounge in the McInteer.
