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Archive for the ‘Short-Term Missions’ Category

Top Ten Posts of 2012: 3-How To Prepare For Your Mission Trip: Spiritual Preparation

Posted in Christian Missions, Short-Term Missions, tagged , on December 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Do you need to spend ten hours on learning Chinese if you are going to go to China for a two-week missions project?  Do you need to spend five sessions learning about Communism for your mission trip to Albania?  If you are the missions ministry leader at your church or the youth minister in charge of the teen mission trip,  and you believe that everyone who goes on a short-term mission should go equipped—which I hope and pray you do–, how do you determine the best way to equip those workers going out from your church.

Let’s look in the next few posts at some suggestions about the content of training for short-term mission teams.

God first!

Everyone who goes on a short-term mission needs to be prepared spiritually! Just like you get vaccinations and take vitamins before the trip, you need to help your workers bolster their spiritual health before they go.  They need prophylactic preparation to prevent spiritual sickness, they need instruction on managing their spiritual health while they are there, and then they need to know what to do if they get sick.

  • Talk about motivations for going—and be honest because most people have multiple motivations, including adventure, travel, self-improvement, improvement of personal skills, and—of yes, helping someone else to know Jesus!  Preparation should include acknowledgement of these motivations along with a healthy way to prioritize them.  Acknowledging the lesser motivations helps remove any guilt or shame workers might otherwise carry with them. Good preparation will help them know ways to focus their motivations so that their activities will be both appropriate and effective for reaching their higher goals!
  • Talk about the spiritual goals for this trip. It is not enough to just hope that somehow conducting a VBS will make an impact for Christ. How will you know if you have made a difference or not? Do you have short-term and/or long-term goals? Are you planting seeds or harvesting because of what others have done before you?
  • What spiritual challenges might workers meet?  Most short-term mission projects are mountain-top experiences for the workers, but in every mission situation, there are also inherent possibilities for spiritual challenges.  If your workers are prepared for those challenges, they are more likely to overcome them effectively.

                For instance, sometimes workers are confronted by “differentness” at the mission site: different doctrines, different rites, different styles of worship–and it shakes up their spiritual world for a while. Other workers are challenged when they try to verbalize their own faith and fail to do so adequately. Some workers find moral temptations more alluring away from home and are challenged!

I’ve often said that being on a mission field is like being in a pressure cooker and any little crack in your spiritual armor may be put under enough pressure to split wide open and leave you very vulnerable.  Preparation for such challenges before a worker goes should give him/her an opportunity to check for cracks!

  • What role will praise and prayer play? If you will have daily times together for praise and prayer—and I hope you will—then you will need to prepare for those times before you go!  Nothing is more discouraging than haphazardly prepared devotionals with half-baked thoughts and dashed-off prayer to cap it off.  Nothing is more encouraging than good time with God and your fellow workers, when you are giving thanks, praising Him, listening for His instructions for the day, interceding with Him for those people with whom you are working, and asking Him to work powerfully through you.

Putting a spiritually healthy team on the plane, a team prepared for spiritual challenges while on the field, must be one of the highest priorities for your mission preparations.

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Tips for Short-Term Missions: Making the Decision

Posted in Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 9, 2012| 2 Comments »

Honestly, the first time I was asked to do a short-term mission trip, I agreed only because I could not figure out a good enough reason to say no. I was in college, so I even called my parents because I felt sure that they would want me to come home in the summer . . . but, in fact, their answer was, “You need to do what you think God wants you to do.”  I finally committed with my heart and not just my head—and I’ve never stopped. Thank you, Mom and Dad!

So here are a few tips about making the decision the first time, and I say the first time because I do believe that if you go once and do something meaningful, you will continue to find ways to go.

  1. Don’t expect all of your motives to be spiritual. I think many people do not hear the call of God because they love to travel, love to experience new things, love to meet new people. Who do you think gave you these desires? For what possible reason could He have done this? Instead of viewing these as personal or selfish desires, recognize their intended use and go!
  2. In two weeks or less, you can change the focus of your life!Especially if you are at one of those critical points in life, where you are trying to decide what you are really doing that is meaningful?  People who are now unemployed, who fear unemployment, who are nearing retirement, who are into retirement and finding it boring, who are disabled from physical work, who are unhappy in their profession with just punching a clock—a short-term mission project can give you brand new glasses to see your life with.
  3. You will never have more fun! Time spent doing the will of God—all day long—will beat fishing, skiing, cruising, touring, hunting—because it is everything you enjoy about these activities wrapped up into the same package, but framed with an eternal purpose.  When you show someone how to pray, or tell them who Jesus is for the first time, or hear them trusting you with the burdens of their heart because you care about them; when you see the light of understanding go on in their eyes, when you see your new friend baptized—and the huge smile on their face . . . it is so much more than a great round of golf.
  4. “Can you afford it” is really the wrong question. The fact is that a two-week mission trip will probably be much less expensive than a two-week vacation.  However, your investment in a short-term mission trip will come back to you for the rest of your life—and afterwards. Can you afford not to go?  (I’m going to write about raising funds shortly, so watch for those tips too.)
  5. Age doesn’t matter very much!Eighty-year-olds have gone with LST on missions. Eight-year-olds with their parents have also gone. In many cultures, age is revered.  Years ago, a man said to one of our older workers, “I’ve never met a Christian with gray hair.” His comment was the result of too many American Christians thinking that short-term missions were just a youth group or college student activity.  A friend of ours in her 70s just lost her husband this year, but she took her grief and her loneliness to eastern Europe to fulfill a mission call. Now  she exchanges the grief with the joy of pouring her life out for Christ and the loneliness with all the people God brings to her.  Her new life and joy is palpable.
  6. Be strong and courageous and do not be afraid!Fear is our enemy. God spoke these words to His people over and over again in scripture. Count them up if you don’t believe me—then do something to overcome your fears.
  7. Don’t procrastinate. Do it soon! Why should you wait? Does it sound like any of the excuses given for not coming to the Great Banquet? (business, relatives, obligations) Don’t surrender your seat at the table because of just couldn’t decide to do it.

 

I’m not particularly proud of the story of my first decision to go, but I did learn something that stuck with me. Whatever your reasons for not going are, if you will simply set them aside and go, your life will be changed because you are right in the middle of the will of God. I know that is true.

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Tips for Good Short-Term Missions, Part Two: To Mom and Dad

Posted in Christian Missions, Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , on November 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The biggest hindrance to Christian youth and college students participating in short-term missions is their parents. I really hate to say that but after thirty years of recruiting college students for summer mission projects, I know this to be true.

Here are a few thoughts for Moms and Dads to think about to help them be more comfortable with what their young people want to do for God.

1. If your goal for your child is that he/she holds on to—even grows in—the faith you have tried to share with them, you need to let them go when they feel called. A great study done by a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University may be all I need to cite:  His study of 25,000 young people in churches of Christ showed that a “summer mission experience” was the top factor correlating with those students who continued in their faith after high school.

2. Before you ask your child to be “sensible” and …….(you fill in the blank with summer school, job, visit Grandma, internship, etc), you should ask yourself what message you are sending about the place of the kingdom in his/her life. Young people tend to “walk by faith” a little more naturally than we adults who have learned what the worst case scenarios are and who try to cover ourselves with insurance against such.

3. Check to see if you are afraid for yourself or are you afraid for your child. Some parents have not traveled much, never been out of the country, never had a passport (even if you are governor of Alaska!). No wonder you are a bit anxious about releasing your student to go to China or Africa or ………  Millions of Americans go overseas every year—for much less important reasons that sharing their faith.   “Be strong and courageous and do not be afraid.” We have to teach our children Christian bravery.

4. You don’t want to teach your children fear of random violence! One year we had a grandmother who offered to pay her granddaughter to stay safely in Oklahoma.  While the daughter was safely in Germany, the Edmond post office massacre occurred near her “safe” home in Oklahoma.  Unless we want to be crippled by fear, we cannot be live our lives afraid of random violence.

 

5. The best response to your child is to say YES–and to go with them! There is no better activity for Mom and/or Dad than to share some special time serving with your young person in serving the Lord.  Yes, you can do that any weekend at home, but to really step out on faith together, going somewhere very different, meeting people that are very different, but doing the most important task in the world together—there is nothing like it!

Sherrylee and I sometimes wondered if we were ruining our children by taking them with us each summer to do Let’s Start Talking—from early children through their teen years.  I guess I better let them tell you what it has meant to them. . . . but I know that God used it for good, and they are all people of strong faith.  Isn’t that what you want for your children?

 

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Tips for Good Short-Term Missions: Part 1 – Church Leaders

Posted in Christian Missions, Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , on November 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I have been directly involved in organizing short-term missions (STM) since I was a freshman in college—45 years ago.  Since 1980, Sherrylee and I have sent over 6000 American Christians on thousands of short-term mission projects in sixty-five different countries through the Let’s Start Talking Ministry.

We have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of short-term missions, but we have always believed that if done well, they were of great value.  For the next few days, I’ll give you some of the things we have learned over the years to help you do short-term missions better.

First, to the church leaders who are asked to send and to support short-term missions, here are a few suggestions for distinguishing the more worthy from the less worthy:

1. Who will be benefited by this short-term mission effort? Some of the possibilities are the Worker, the sending church, the hosting church, and the unchurched/unbelievers that are touched by the work.  Is the work intended to just be a good experience for the Americans going and the encouragement it gives to the local congregation sending them? If so, don’t describe it as mission work. It is edification.  If it is for the hosting church, then it is church nurturing, not missions. If it is for the unchurched/unbelievers, then it is evangelism.  All of these are worthy goals, so decide which you want to support.

2. Does the host really want these people to come? I attended a meeting of local evangelists in a foreign country a while back and the common complaint from all of them was how they felt required to host short-term groups who wanted to come work with them—regardless of whether the group would actually benefit their work—because the group was from a church that supported their work.   It was often assumed that every mission site would love to have a group of 30 people appear on their doorstep, but for many obvious reasons, that is not always the case.  Make sure a real invitation from the site has been issued before you go/send.

3. What’s the purpose and how will it be accomplished? Make sure that the activities match the purpose.  If the purpose is to share the Gospel with people, establishing an obvious way to contact people who do not believe is critical. Then, how will the workers begin a conversation with them? There is room for a variety of purposes, but the activities must match the purpose.

4. What’s the plan for the time on site? The very nature of short-term missions means that good use of the time is critical. Showing up to “do whatever the missionary wants” is simply a way to shift all the responsibility on the local people to do all the thinking and preparation.

5. Have the workers prepared to go? Let’s Start Talking provides all workers with a minimum of 20 hours of preparation. Our college students receive more like 50 hours for their mission projects. There are good resources out there for individuals and groups to use in preparation.  Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use the expertise of short-term mission leaders with lots of experience.

6. Is the cost appropriate? I do not believe at all in the “most bang for the buck” model of missions—but we will talk about that later.  But I also know that spending $3000/person for a five-day short-term mission project when two of the days are mostly getting to and from the site does not appear on the surface to be a wise use of that money.  Church leaders should weigh the costs against all of the outcomes, then make a prayerfully informed decision.

Next, I’ll offer a few tips for those trying to decide about a short-term mission trip—or not!

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Don’t Forget the Words!

Posted in Short-Term Missions, tagged , on February 10, 2012| 1 Comment »

Every short-term mission project should include an evangelistic component. Unfortunately, most mission trips planned by churches in recent years are better described as service projects.  I would include in service projects providing medical services, building houses or church buildings, painting or other construction type tasks, taking clothing, food, shelter, and friendship to orphans, the poor, or victims of catastrophes.

Jesus went healing the sick and giving cups of cold water. James says this is pure and undefiled religion. And Matthew records Jesus saying we will be judged for our compassion, so service projects are projections of God’s Goodness by His people in this broken world.

But Jesus came not only healing the sick and feeding the hungry, but also preaching (Matt. 4:23; 9:35)!   Jesus says, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life “ (John 6:63). Just moments later, Peter answers Jesus’ questioning of whether the Twelve would stick with him now that he has started preaching and was becoming much less popular than when he was feeding the thousands: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68)

The words of Jesus are full of the Spirit and Life, not the good deeds of his followers. For this reason, I believe that every mission trip should include a plan to share the Words of Jesus!

One of the reasons many mission trips default to service projects without the Words is because many Christians do not believe they are prepared to speak the Word.  Preparations and training for short-term missions should include skills training in faith-sharing!

Allow me to draw on the training provided by Let’s Start Talking for some concrete suggestions for specifically training your volunteers to share the Words of Jesus!

  • In LST’s very first training sessions, workers are asked to begin verbalizing their faith.  Many have never done this, so it takes a friendly, safe environment and some prodding, but usually it is a marvelous experience for the whole team.  One way of doing this is just to go around the team and have everyone tell the story of their baptism, including talking about what people influenced them and taught them and what prompted them to obedience at just that moment in their lives.  For more reticent groups, LST’s training suggests that each person literally draw a picture of their faith. They are given pencil and a blank piece of paper—and no further instructions.  The results are usually poor artwork, but dramatic insights. Of course, each person explains their picture to the whole group, thereby taking first steps in verbalizing their personal faith.
  • Teach the workers the plan for sharing their faith! Since LST is primarily a faith-sharing mission, the plan is to serve those we meet on the mission trip first by helping them with their English, but LST workers are specifically trained to use the stories of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke as the English “workbook.”  LST workers learn to wait for, but to expect the participants to ask questions about what they are reading together. When the participants raise the questions, then LST workers know that they have been asked to share their faith.  That’s the plan for all LST workers.
  • Equip the workers to execute the plan by identifying the specific skills they will need.  The greatest temptation of untrained workers is to start preaching to the participants before their ears are ready to hear.  Other typical failures of untrained workers are that they don’t listen to the person they are working with, their answers are too long with too much information, and/or they are easily led by the participants away from the gospel story into peripheral questions.  Because of these tendencies, LST training addresses extensively:
    • Learning to wait until asked before sharing
    • Listening more than talking
    • Staying focused on the Story
  • Practice with the workers what they will be expected to do!  Training or equipping is not just telling workers what they should do and how.  Until they can actually do what is expected of them, they are not trained.  If you are responsible for training your workers, you must not only demonstrate to them, but see them demonstrate the skills they need.  LST training does this mostly through role-playing.  Role-playing is not the same as the real moment, but we have found nothing better for training purposes than an experienced person sitting together with a new worker and pretending they are in a conversation session.  Each person who participates in an LST project will have done role-playing on multiple occasions before they have completed their training.

 

To summarize, with clear goals and objectives, you as the organizer should be able to develop your training strategy by determining what tasks need to be accomplished and what skills are needed to accomplish those tasks.  You will choose people for your mission trip who can accomplish those tasks, then equip them with the skills they will need to be the very best workers possible.

Let’s not let the sharing of The Words become a rarity simply because our people have not been taught how to do it.


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Can I Mumble On My Mission Trip?

Posted in Short-Term Missions, tagged , , on February 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

When you have clearly stated goals for your mission trip and well-defined strategies for meeting those goals, then you will know whom you should take with you and what skills they will need.

Most people who want to go with LST have the basic skills to accomplish their tasks effectively, but some people do not. LST mission trips are 90% building relationships through friendly conversations with people who want to improve their English language skills.  One young man from small-town USA wanted to go with us one year, but nobody could understand him when he talked because he mumbled badly and swallowed his words.  LST sometimes has university students from non-English speaking countries who want to go with LST teams—and who often speak English very well for a non-native speaker—but we advise them not to because our experience is that people in other countries do not want to practice their English with non-native speakers.

Some people hate to make small talk; others are not empathetic enough to understand why others can’t speak English right!  Some people hate travel; others hate sitting all day.  These are not moral failures or lapses in righteousness, just different gifts for different members of the Body!

People who are painfully shy or hard-core loners will probably find an LST mission project challenging.  These same people will have all the skills for a different kind of mission trip, however, where verbal and social skills aren’t so critical! The organizers of mission trips must pray for wisdom and discernment—and then not be afraid to use them in recruiting and selecting the best workers for their project.

Here’s a short list of suggestions for you:

  • Determine what tasks are required by the objectives of your mission project
  • Recruit workers who have both the desire and gifts to accomplish the objectives of the mission project.  Every member of the body is made for the work that he/she does best.
  • Don’t be afraid to suggest alternatives for some people!  Asking somebody to do something that they can’t do is not being kind, nor is it putting the health of the Body first!
  • Be responsible for the well-being of everyone that you take with you!  We actually took the mumbling young man—but we spent a lot of extra time making sure both he and the people he worked with were happy.

So now we have clearly stated the objectives and goals of the mission trip and we know who needs to go on the trip, so the next step in designing our preparation and training is to determine good ways of either developing or honing the special skills we might need.

Skill training for short-term missions will be the next topic in our series on Preparing for Short-term Missions.

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Preparing For Short-Term Missions: The Source of Training Specifics!

Posted in Short-Term Missions, tagged , , on February 3, 2012| Leave a Comment »

One of the challenges to short-term missions is short-term planning—which most often results in short-term training—which leads to short-term results! Short-term results lead to disappointment, therefore, short-term interest and short-term funding.  Too much short-term here for me!

Good training for short-term missions requires good planning by those who are responsible. In the previous post, we talked about spiritual training for your short-term team as the necessary foundation for your mission.  Next, let’s talk about training your workers to meet the goals of the mission.

The Planners must know and be able to explain what the goals of the mission trip really are.  If you are going to Honduras with a group of doctors on a medical mission for five days, what are your goals?  If your youth are going to Estonia to do summer camp work, what are your goals? If your team is going with Let’s Start Talking to China for three weeks, what are your goals?

Everybody goes to bring glory to God, but how are you going to know if you have even accomplished that goal? The more specifically you define your objectives, the better you can train your Workers!

For example: at LST, we tell our workers in training that we are a seed-planting ministry, not a harvesting ministry. We are partners with local Christians who will nurture the relationships that our workers have begun and will continue to share the Story with those who will hear, so our goals are

  • to start relationships with people by offering to help them improve their English
  • to bring them into contact with the Word, specifically the Story of Jesus
  • to plant the Good Seed into their hearts and to water it with our love
  • to build a bridge from our short-term work to the long-term work of the local Christians.

With these very clear goals in mind, we can train very specifically.

  • To meet the first goal, LST trains workers in starting conversations with strangers and in helping them with their English in a way that fosters friendships and trust.
  • To meet the second goal, LST created appropriate materials for helping people with their English, which bring them into immediate and direct contact with the Word/Story in a non-confrontational way.  Much of LST’s training is in how to use these materials effectively.
  • Third, each LST lesson in every workbook contains seed thoughts, or very specific ideas that can germinate into faith in a good heart. Workers are trained how to plant the seeds in their conversations with unbelievers, as well as how to illustrate the truth of the Word from and with their own lives.
  • Finally, LST teams hosts social and service events for the local Christians and the participants, with the goal of building that very important bridge from short-term to long-term.  LST teams are trained specifically in ways to host these events to encourage the greatest participation and the best results.

Every goal or objective of your short-term work—whatever type–should produce a specific training component!  The hard part is defining the objectives specifically enough, but when your goals are truly defined, creating your training becomes much easier.

Every mission trip of every sort is conceived with the goal of doing good and bringing glory to God.  Most trips probably achieve these goals to about the same degree that each of us meets these same goals in our daily lives.  We can do better than that!

Excellent short-term missions will have well-defined goals and all of the workers on these mission trips will have been equipped and prepared intentionally and specifically with these goals in mind.


 

 

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Guest Videopost on Kids, Videogames, and Missions!

Posted in Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Clint Loveness, a friend and Let’s Start Talking participant has created a great story video that speaks about young people, video games, and missions. You probably want to share this with your teens and grandteens!  It’s just over four minutes, so click below and enjoy it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJGuAInoOlk

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Stories of Wine and Romance!

Posted in Short-Term Missions, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 15, 2011| 1 Comment »

I promised to tell some of the stories behind the LST Expectations and Commitments, formerly known as the Guidelines.

First, I want to say that almost all of the stories come from the 1980s when Let’s Start Talking was just beginning, and we were learning how to do short-term missions in a very new way!

Secondly, all of these stories revolve around people who were 19 or 20 years old and have since become very mature, responsible people.  These early stories should not reflect on them anymore than they do on Sherrylee and me and Let’s Start Talking now.

Too Much Wine

At the same time when most of the home churches of our students still preached and proscribed total abstinence from all alcoholic drinks,  Western European Christians virtually all drank beer frequently and had an occasional glass of wine.

Almost without exception our first workers were offered beer and/or wine during those early LST projects by their hosts!  One of our young women who had never even tasted wine before saw a glass poured for her at her host’s dinner table one special evening. Panicking a little, she decided that she would just down that one glass quickly and get rid of the problem. Of course, her host immediately poured another glass, which the student chugged as well!  She really doesn’t remember much of the rest of the evening.

After hearing this story, we decided it was just better to insist on abstinence, thus Expectation #7 – Protect the integrity of your testimony!

Too Much Romance

It was the very day their team was leaving for Germany on an early LST project.  They had been dating for some time at college and had come to a critical point in their relationship.  He was ready to ask her to marry him. She was trying to figure out how to break up with him!

As it sometimes happens, she found exactly the right moment to break up with him just before they boarded the plane for their six-week LST project together!  He cries for the entire flight, while she talks to a young Air Force officer that she just happened to be seated next to.

After this team had been on the field for about a week, Sherrylee and I get an emergency phone call! Come to Hildesheim! The entire team is engulfed in civil war, with the guys on His side and the girls on Her side!

Sherrylee and I drove up from Mannheim, met with the team, laid His and Her’s relationship out in the open and tried to bring some peace and harmony to the team. By the end of a very long evening, everyone is crying, everyone is hugging, so sorry for the trouble that has been caused. Everyone is going to do what is right. He is going to be stronger!

We leave, but before the second week is over, we get another emergency phone call from the team! It’s not working! He can’t eat; he can’t sleep; he is so heart-broken that sometimes he can’t even get through a conversation with His readers. She on the other hand is just having a great time—which makes Her team members mad who now almost all feel sorry for Him.

We drive up there and offer Him a little break—a few days away from the team so he can pull Himself back together!  He accepts, and we make the arrangements for Him and take Him to a friend’s home for a few days.

In the meantime, we learn that it makes all the guys mad that He is “punished” by being taken away from the team, when She is the problem!

Anyway, after just 24 hours, He calls us and says he feels so much better and has rejoined the team. Thanks for having given Him such good advice and support!”  So, we think, maybe they will hold together until the end of the project, which is now just three weeks away.

Three or four days later, we get the call and NOTHING is working right, so we drive back up to Hildesheim, move Him off of that team permanently, and place Him with another team about four hundred kilometers away.  It’s not ideal, but it is the best we can come up with.

The Hildesheim team seems to improve with some of the tension relieved. We visit the young man on His new team, who, in general, is better as well—especially since one of girls on the new team has started paying Him special attention!!

Well, two weeks later, all of our LST teams meet at a Frankfurt hotel for our EndMeeting before we fly back the next day. We meet together, pray together, and just celebrate what God has done during the summer!

After the meeting is over, He comes up and wants to talk to me privately. As He explains it to me, before He and She ever left the States on this project, they had planned to travel around a little together, visiting friends in Italy. He wanted to know what I thought He should do in light of the current situation.

I told him, “GO HOME! Are you crazy? After all you guys have been through—what are you thinking??

Against my advice, He and She traveled together to Italy.

Three months later, they were engaged.

In May of the next year I performed their wedding ceremony!!

Unbelievable!

But as we have pointed out to our workers each year since, what was the effect on the mission project? So, because of this incident—and many similar others, LST has a very strict no Romance policy—sometimes called affectionately our NO LOVE policy.  Today it is Expectation #5 – Use all of your time for developing spiritual relationships and none of it for romantic relationships.

Btw, He and She had many happy years of marriage until He died of a brain tumor just a few years ago. They were faithful Christians, leaders in their churches, all of their years together.

Lord, forgive me the sins of my youth!

 

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A Fifty-Pound Pink Suitcase for Short-Term Mission Training!

Posted in Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , on January 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

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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