Sherrylee and I have been traveling all day yesterday and today, visiting with LST board members and with LST leaders. We are now in Santa Barbara—what a beautiful place—and finishing preparations to host an Intensive Training Weekend for several teams from Pepperdine University that begins tomorrow.
Intensive Training Weekends have been part of the LST training plan since the very beginning. The very first one was held in the winter of 1982. One of the team members had a cousin who had a “lake house” that they would make available to us. My experience with lake houses was that they were luxurious recreational homes, usually in a resort-type setting.
This lake house was on Voss Lake in western Oklahoma, a man-made pond without a tree within 100 miles! The house did have plumbing, but it was separated from the main house, and the wind came whistling down the plains right through the outer walls of this lake house! And it was in the single digits outside and sometimes in!
Nevertheless, we had a great time and most of the training elements that we still use would found their genesis at this first primitive retreat. We passed information about Germany to the team members, we did team building activities, we had very meaningful devotional time, and we built stronger relationships.
Thirty years later, our Intensive Training weekend is much better conceived, but quite similar to the original. Teams experience about 36 hours of LST project simulation, designed to help them understand who their team is, why they are going, and how they can have a successful mission project.
As team members come in the door, they are met by “customs officials,” who check their passports, their paperwork, and who see if they have brought too much luggage! At their orientation, they reset their watches to “LST Time”—about four hours later than local time—and the fun begins!
Because the teams are going overseas, no overhead projected songs are used for worship and no checking email or texting is allowed; in addition, a fifty-pound pink suitcase is awarded to teams that must carry it around for a while, just to learn how heavy and burdensome too much luggage can be.
The highlight of the weekend may be the field training, when each team is given about fifteen tasks to accomplish on their own (This is why we try to get away from their home city, so that they will be unfamiliar with local sites and resources). They may be asked to interview a stranger and ask them what people in their country think about Jesus. They likely have to find out how much it costs to take public transportation for the retreat center to the local airport, or they may have to find the address and phone number of the nearest American embassy—without using the internet. Every task has some parallel to either a task or decision that the team might be confronted with on the mission field.
They have a very small budget for lunch and they have to all agree on what they will eat. They also have to all try some food that they have never eaten before. It’s all fun, but it’s also a little challenging.
As the hosts of the weekend, we are not only hoping to create an environment where teams get to know each other better, where they catch the LST spirit (which we pray is the same as the Spirit of Christ), but we hope also to observe which teams might have issues.
For instance, one year, a student arrived at the weekend who had totally disregarded the luggage limit that we had imposed. When he was told that some of his stuff was going to be “confiscated,” he got angry and left! Better to deal with that kind of spirit in training than have the same spirit create an incident with the mission church in some foreign country!
We often have interpersonal team issues that have been mostly ignored when people are not together every day, but that surface pretty quickly under the pressure of sitting together, eating together, and sleeping in the same room in sleeping bags on the floor of a church building together. Better to deal with them here than in the pressure cooker of the mission field.
At most of our Intensive Training weekends for students, we gather at 6am on Sunday (10am LST time!) for multi-cultural worship. We start with a Herzlich Wilkommen, and then proceed to a song in Portuguese. Scripture may be read in Spanish, followed by a prayer in Japanese. At some point, where we can arrange it, someone preaches for 10-15 minutes in a foreign language, followed by an English explanation of the lesson.
Communion is often taken by coming to the front as a team, praying with your arms around each other, sometimes sharing one cup—or a few! This hour is precious and one that impacts everyone!
The only major element of the weekend that I have not described is our session on Expectations and Commitments. That particular session comes with so many stories that it deserves its own post!
Look for the next post on “Stories Behind the Expectations and Commitments”.
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