Mark's Blog

I hate to start with negatives like I did in the last post about the “don’ts” of reporting on short-term missions, but the bad things we do are so easily recognizable in others, and the bad examples provide great contrast for the positive ones.

Here is a short list of positive things to do with reporting that will win friends for missions and glorify God.

• Do ask to report! You might think that church leaders and/or others might be excited about hearing your report, but, more often, they have their own agenda and have checked you off when they wrote you the check. You need to be proactive and ask for the opportunity to report at as many venues as you can.
• Do make your trip real for people. Seems obvious, but many short-termers are surprised that after only two weeks, people at home have forgotten where they were going and what they were doing.  You were not on their radar much while you were gone—accept it and fill the information gap when you report.
• Do talk about the people you served. One good, concrete story about a person you care about is worth a thousand slides of groups or church buildings! Just a sentence or two that touches hearts in your audience may change somebody’s life!  I have often told the story of the woman who wondered if she would ever read the most important book ever written. After reading Luke’s story of Jesus, she told her LST worker: “Now I know I have read the most important book ever written!”
• Do expand people’s vision of the Kingdom of God. Before the first service of a new church in Moscow in 1991, the very new Christians asked if they could video the communion service itself so they would know how to do it after we left. . . . I still am moved by the purity of their young faith and this very simple need. Such stories remind us that the Kingdom of God is much greater than what we may experience every Sunday in our buildings. Share Kingdom stories and you will bless your audience.
• Do encourage those listening to find their own mission. Be careful about making it sound like theirs should look just like yours, but you have a message that they will listen to because you have done it!  If you can do, they can do it! One of LST’s college workers always shared her story with the fourth grade girls that she taught in Sunday school. It should not have surprised us when nine or ten years later, some of those same girls started going with LST because of the seeds planted in Sunday school by their enthusiastic teacher-missionary many years earlier.
• Do show public gratitude for prayers and support. One simply can never show enough gratitude to the people who send you.
• Give glory to God. Do this explicitly with your words, do this with your pictures, do this with your illustrations, and do this with your blog. Do this with your body language, do this with the smile on your face and the gleam in your eye. Talk about God’s work, not about yours!

I personally regret that reporting about missions has such a bad reputation, so much so that it is fairly difficult to access the biggest platforms at our churches any more. In the next posting, I’m going to share with you some of the best venues and how to get permission to report there.