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Posts Tagged ‘Great Commission’

A Personal History of Let’s Start Talking, Pt. 3: The 80s–Genesis Expanding

Posted in A Personal History of Let's Start Talking, tagged , , , , , , on September 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Oklahoma Christian team 1982

The first three summers of Let’s Start Talking (1981-83) were the years when God continued to teach us how to do what we have done now for thirty years.  For instance, the second summer we wanted to give the OC students who went with us T-shirts to help advertise and attract Readers while they were in Germany. The LST sweatshirts/T-shirts now have an iconic place in our history with a few people who have whole closets full.

Well, the first shirts were a mustard yellow (YUK!) and said on the front, “Ask me, if I speak English!” Sherrylee and I blame each other, but it was probably my idea.  After a week or two in Germany, dutifully wearing their T-shirts whenever possible, some of the girls came to us and said that they didn’t want to wear the shirts any longer. I couldn’t understand why until they explained that the “ask me, if I speak English” sentence was written right across the front chest area, so it made all the men and boys stare at their chests!!  That was the end of our first marketing fiasco.

As I mentioned in the last post, we carried actual Bibles the first year, the New Easy-To-Read version published by World Bible Translation Center. It was a version originally prepared for deaf people, but perfect for what we were wanting to do because the syntax and vocabulary were approximately fourth grade level.  These were the Bibles that during the second summer, we literally cut passages out of Luke, pasted them onto sheets of paper, then photocopied the newly created pages in order to make the first “workbooks.” I don’t really think we had any questions or vocabulary with the texts those first summers, but I’m not sure.

We chose to use Luke as our text from the very beginning for some fairly obvious reasons, We were committed to starting with the story of Jesus , so first of all, Luke was more narrative—more of a complete story, from Jesus’ birth to his death.  Also,

  • Matthew alludes to the Old Testament too often, and we didn’t want to have to continually drop back into Jewish history with our Readers.
  • Mark was just too brief and left out some of the chronological story—like Jesus’ birth.
  • And John was too abstract, too theological for people who had no faith.
  • Luke had an obvious sequel (Acts), so we could already see the path for continuity.

For three summers (1981-83), we took 11-13 students from Oklahoma Christian. Divided into two, later three teams, they spent the summer in the northern German (then West German) cities of Braunschweig, Bremen, Hannover, and Cologne, working with the mission churches there that Sherrylee and I had been most familiar with.  Our family would usually stay in Hannover as our base, but visit each of the teams once each week to check on them and encourage them.

We were pretty content with this pattern and had no further grand design or vision, but God had more in mind.  In the fall of 1983, one of the OC students Amy Keesee (Gordon) who had gone with us each year, began graduate work at Oklahoma State University, fifty miles away from us.  She called one evening in the fall and asked if she could continue to go with us, and we agreed, of course. Then she asked if she could recruit a team from the great campus ministry program that the Stillwater church had had at OSU for many years. After a little conversation, we agreed—and the first embryonic division had occurred! In the summer of 1984, instead of 12 workers, we had 28. Instead of two sites, we had five! Instead of approximately 100 readers, we had 280.

Oklahoma State University team

With this one additional school sending workers, the potential for sharing the Story had more than doubled!  We began to get a sense of what could be . . . . In reality, God was just beginning to stretch our rubber bands.

Factoid: The first printed workbooks (white covers with the LST logo on the front) were designed and illustrated by OC professor Michael O’Keefe. He is personally responsible for the two little characters with spiky hair that are still LST icons—and still unnamed. (It has always been a fear of mine that someone would call them Mark and Sherrylee and it would stick forever!!)

In 1986, two former workers Kurt and Marilyn Siebold were living in California and wanted to go with us again, so we built our first church team around them with members of the Culver Palms Church of Christ.

Another first in 1986 was the first LST team outside of Germany. Kyle and Susan Bratcher had some history in Austria and wanted to go there, so we contacted our friends in Graz, Austria, and worked out the arrangements for the Bratcher’s team to work with the Graz church for the summer.

In the fall of 1986, Sherry and I were teaching a class on our new way of working in Germany at the World Mission Workshop at Columbia Christian in Portland, Oregon.  Two Pepperdine students walked through our classroom, looking for a session on Italy, but heard something about Germany, so they stopped, listened, and were hooked.  Ian Morgan and his future wife Lisa went back to Pepperdine and recruited the first team from Pepperdine—which has continued to be a great partnership.

With Pepperdine now fully on board, the fledgling LST program jumped from approximately 20 workers each summer to over 40 by the summer of 1988. Amy Keesee had moved from OSU to San Luis Obispo, CA, so now we had teams from there as well. Pete and Janine Brazle began to share responsibilities with Sherrylee and me for overseeing the summer teams. They took the southern four teams and we took the northern four—the birth of LST regional representatives.

First Church team from Culver Palms Church of Christ

By the summers of 1988 and 1989, LST was working in Italy and the Netherlands as well.  A Dutch family (Hans and Ans van Erp) had invited us to help them start a new church in Eindhoven, a church which is still growing and flourishing! And approximately 60 workers were going each summer.

People were beginning to ask us if we were trying to do too much. Sherrylee and I always responded that we were just trying to manage what God put in front of us. In fact, in 1986, we almost left OC to return to the European mission field with European Christian College. I had finished my doctorate and was invited to become the dean of that school—which we agreed to do if they could afford to bring on a family of five!  That door shut very firmly about the time all of these new doors were opening with LST, so we began to see God’s plan a little better—or so we thought!

We never dreamed what God would do in the next 24 months in the Soviet Union. No one suspected that the Iron Curtain was about to be torn down and what opportunities that would present for Let’s Start Talking.

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Let the Children On the Plane!

Posted in Christian Missions, Short-Term Missions, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 2, 2010| 7 Comments »

Are you waiting until your children are teenagers before you think about going on a short-term mission trip with them?  DON’T!

I know what the popular wisdom is here:

  • Young children won’t understand or appreciate the experience, so wait until they will get more out of it.
  • Young children are a pain to travel with.
  • Young children are not really useful, so it is hard to justify the expense.
  • Young children are impossible to fund raise for, so you can’t afford to take them.

EVERYTHING ABOVE, I BELIEVE TO BE TOTALLY WRONG!

  • The best time for children to experience missions first is when their young minds and hearts are still soft and impressionable–not after their hormones create havoc in them for a few years.  We have 8 grandkids under the age of 8. Only the two born this year and the 3 yr old have not been on a foreign LST project, and most of them have been multiple times. They have friends in Japan. They are not afraid of foreign languages. They know what the grown-ups are talking about when they tell of teaching others about Jesus. They are very disappointed in the years they can’t go.
  • There are challenges to traveling with young kids–but they make little kids suitcases and backpacks.  They will sleep in the airplane seats. Travel is quite a fun game if the parents will invest just a little time to make it so!
  • Children are magnets on the mission field. No matter whether it is Germany or Africa or China or Turkey, adults accompanied by small children find it much more common to get into conversations with people.  I know of 6-8 year olds who have “helped” other children with their English, while their parents read the Bible in English with LST workers.  Children may be the best missionaries ever!!
  • Unfortunately, the previously mentioned misconceptions do make it difficult sometimes to raise money for children to go. We faced this even more strongly back in the 80s, when the Woodwards were starting LST, towing 3 small children behind them. I just dug in my heels and said, we don’t go without them–and tried to educate people on the good a whole family does who goes together. God provided.

Many, many mission churches do not have whole families. Often only the mother and children come, or only the father, or only the children.  To see a whole family–parents and kids–being Christians together is inspiring to onlookers, no matter what country you are in.

Your decision to take your children on a short-term mission trip will be one of the best decisions you have ever made!  And when you do it the second time, you will thank God for removing the doubts that you had.

And your children, when they are young adults,  will put their arms around you and thank you for doing something wonderful that dramatically changed their lives and helped them know God!

And is there anything in this world you want more than that?

Don’t wait!

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What If Our Kids Can’t Tell The Story!

Posted in Christian Missions, Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2010| 1 Comment »

Several years ago, Sherrylee and I were at the Tulsa Soul-Winning Workshop and heard Harold Shank quote a statistic in his keynote address that said that the number one correlating factor with continued faith in God and a relationship to His church after high school is a summer mission experience.

Sherrylee and I turned to each other literally and said that is what Let’s Start Talking has been offering college students!  But if what he said is true, we can’t ignore high school kids any more. So we put together a mission package for high schoolers called YoungFriends that LST now offers to churches as part of our comprehensive church transformation ministry (Centurion Project).

Several challenges surfaced in presenting this opportunity to youth ministers. One of them concerns me more than the others.  Here is the general list. Can you guess which one concerns me most?

  • Youth ministers are sometimes organized and sometimes not—not any different from anyone else, except it takes a lot of organization and planning to pull off a good summer mission project.
  • Youth ministers are often trumped in money decisions by senior ministers or elders who may or may not share their vision.
  • Youth ministers are also at the mercy of parents, so only to the degree that parents trust their youth minister are they willing to let him step very far out in faith.
  • Youth ministers generally tend towards service projects over evangelistic missions.

Of course, this last point is the one that concerns me most.  In our presentation to Youth Ministers, we have tried to present an evangelistic mission option—one where kids learn to tell the story of Jesus and share their own faith in a natural and non-confrontational way– as one that makes sense in a stair step approach to mission experiences.

Young people start by learning to have a heart for people, but perhaps don’t have the social skills or cross cultural experience yet to really share their faith, but by the time they get to be juniors or seniors in high school, why isn’t it time to help them verbalize their own faith story and show them natural ways for them to share their faith in Jesus with others?

Although this idea seemed to resonant with lots of people in theory, when it got to decision time, most youth ministers opted for the service project over anything evangelistic.  I think they go this way for any or all of the following reasons:

  • Service projects are tangible. Your goal is to paint a house. You buy paint and brushes, you go to the house, you paint, you clean up, and then you go home, knowing that you have accomplished your goal. You have painted a house and done good for the sake of Christ.
  • Service projects are more predictable. Things can go wrong, of course. You can run out of paint, but then you can usually buy more pretty easily. You might not finish, but it looks better than it did. Things that do go wrong are fairly easily remedied.
  • Service projects are generally low risk.  They often can be done relatively close to home. A large group can all do the same thing in the same place for mutual protection. Not much interaction with strangers. Easily supervised.  No risk of rejection.
  • Service projects are familiar to both the youth minister and other adult sponsors, as well as parents and church leaders.

Faith-sharing mission projects are a harder sell for the following reasons:

  • Faith-sharing missions are harder to describe to parents, elders, and kids.  What “strategy” or “method” are you going to use to talk to people? How are you going to meet the people you want to talk to? What if they don’t want to talk to you?
  • Faith-sharing takes most people way out of their comfort zone, so it is a harder sell. (Of course, I’m pretty sure if we did it more, we would be a lot more comfortable doing it.)
  • Faith-sharing has greater risks. Again, what if someone rejects you? What if you mess up and don’t say the right things?  What if they ask you a question and you don’t know the answer?  Isn’t this why most adults don’t share their faith?
  • Faith-sharing mission trips are much less predictable. What if the local church doesn’t prepare well? What if no one responds to advertising? Why if local Christian teens don’t warm up to the visiting group quickly? What if it rains all week, so no visitors come? Because a faith-sharing mission is totally dependent on people, LOTS of things are unpredictable!!
  • Faith-sharing mission trips are not familiar experiences for most Christians.

And they never will be familiar unless we find a way–starting with our young people—to learn to share faith as one of the most natural activities of the Christian lifestyle.

A professor of youth ministry at one of our Christian colleges, when asked why youth ministers do not tend to choose evangelistic mission opportunities, told us that he had queried all of his youth majors about this and that NONE OF THEM had ever had a personal faith-sharing experience. They themselves had only experienced service project missions, so, of course, they tend to do with their youth what their own youth ministers had done with them.  If our ministry leaders have never shared their faith personally . . . .?

If we don’t teach our kids to tell the story of Jesus, who will do it?

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What Is The Real Pain of Missions?

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Missions, tagged , , , , , , , on August 28, 2010| 1 Comment »

I am more. I have . . . been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. 24Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 25Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, 26I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. 27I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. 28Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. 29Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn?  (2 Corinthians 11:23-29)

I am less—much less. Yes, once our car was hit by a bus in Germany, but I only had a sore neck from it. I’m pretty sure I was followed by a KGB-type guy in Russia once—at least he showed up in three different places when I was in one of the former “hidden” cities of Russia. I got food poisoning once at a nice restaurant in China, which led to my first and only experience with acupuncture at a local doctor’s office. I have slept on many couches that were too small, in Japan we even slept on floor palettes—but, of course, almost everyone does there—oh, and there was a small earthquake—but no damage.

I have flown on some pretty scary planes, one with instructions for emergency landings which said, “Throw rope out of window and climb out carefully!” We once rode a Romanian train that was so dark and the windows were so dirty that we actually arrived in Sibiu about 2am and none of us knew that we were there. When we did get off the train, it was so dark that we could not tell which direction to walk on the platform to exit the train station.

Well, enough of this silliness! I’m always moved by Paul’s suffering as a missionary for Christ. But as we were reading this in our LST staff devotional on Friday, the thought that struck me as even more amazing than the physical sufferings he endured was in the sentence: “Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches (v. 28).

Paul is saying, “Sure, I face the possibility of death—violent death—almost every day, but what really bothers me is the stress I have, the stress I feel over the spiritual survival of the churches I have served and the people whom I have taught.”

I do know the sadness of watching a church I have helped to plant struggle and die. I do know the pain of sitting with your children in the faith and listen to them justify their immorality by altering their view of God. But I hear in Paul’s final words in this list of sufferings an intensity of daily concern that far surpasses his fear of floggings, shipwrecks, and bandits.

Paul has the heart of a real parent who would rather die themselves than see their children lost. Paul has the heart of Christ who weeps over Jerusalem.

Who am I weeping over? Daily?

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Part Two: Turning Pain Into Pleasure

Posted in Christian Missions, Other, tagged , , , , on August 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

I dreaded Tuesday night! It was the night the LST staff committed to start telephoning our alumni to ask them to donate during our annual Harvest Call drive. I don’t really like talking on phones, I don’t like calling people I don’t really know, and I don’t like talking about money with people I didn’t want to call in the first place!  Most of you know how I feel!

I dialed 22 numbers in about an hour: nine were bad, six were not at home, and I had seven WONDERFUL conversations with people who had done Let’s Start Talking Projects as long as ten years ago. I had to be pried away from my phone at the end of the session.

I’m telling you this because I believe it bears on our conversation about the distress many Christians feel because they can’t bring themselves to share their faith actively as they really want to.  Personal evangelism and fund-raising belong to the same group of bad words.

In the last blog, I listed a number of rationalizations for not personally sharing your faith, so now I’d like to offer you some practical suggestions about how to avoid those excuses and allow yourself to do what you really want to do!

  1. You must make a decision about Jesus. If you don’t really feel like other people need to hear the Gospel story and that they must decide to put on Christ in order to participate in His redemption of the world, then consider yourself off the hook—you don’t have anything to say to anyone that will make a difference.  If, however, you do believe that Jesus is the resurrected Son of God and that only through Him does anyone have the promise of eternal salvation, then you are back on the hook—but you are more highly motivated.  So decide!  You will feel better instantly.
  2. Overcome your fears by focusing on others. No one wants to be embarrassed or rejected or belittled or even awkward.  Think about the times when you were willing to take big personal risks, however, for someone you love. If your child needs help, what door would you not knock on regardless of awkwardness or possibility of rejection? If your spouse had an emergency, what personal risk would you not take to ensure his/her safety? Love conquers fear—it’s a cliché, I know, but it is true.
  3. Don’t assume you know what others think or feel. If you assume that because someone does not go to church on Sunday that they are not a believer, you could be very wrong. If someone told you three years ago that they weren’t interested in knowing about your faith, things could have happened to open them up.  If people know that you love them, they will not be offended or react badly to almost anything you might say to them in love—even if they disagree.
  4. Start with people you are around! A friend of mine just decided to start speaking to the people she met each morning during her walk around her neighborhood. Then she started praying for the people she met. Next she decided to invite them to join her in a conversational Bible study in her home.   Another friend just decided to invite her colleagues at the surgery center where she works to join her in a conversational Bible study during their lunch hour.
  5. Make a plan for moving from casual conversation to spiritual. This is very important—and where many starting efforts fail! Starting a small group Bible study is an easy way because the purpose for your invitation is specific.  One can learn, however, how to listen for opportunities to open faith conversations, even in the most informal settings.  Asking someone who has shared a problem or concern with you if they would mind if you included them in your prayers. This is a good, honest way to start. You can offer to pray for almost anyone, including people of non-Christian faiths. I have never heard of anyone refusing such a gracious offer. And it might lead to a faith conversation. 
  6. Just start. That’s what I decided to do on Tuesday during the fund-raising call out! Even just dialing the first number made me antsy. Just like you in your first attempt at a faith conversation, I was glad when it turned out to be a bad number.  But I know that after the first genuine conversation you experience with someone who is glad that you talked with them about Jesus, you will be exhilarated and will experience the joy of sharing Jesus.

Of the seven phone conversations I had on Tuesday night, six promised to make a donation and only one said they could not! Almost no one becomes a Christian without someone they know (a family member or friend) telling them their story.  Talk to the people in your class at church who became followers as adults and my guess is that virtually ALL of them will say that they came to Christ because someone who loved them took the time to talk to them.

If you have the fire in your bones (Jeremiah 20:9), then give up trying to hold it in; you can’t. God is too good and you love Him too much!

P.S. The conversational Bible study material published by Let’s Start Talking in its Sycamore Series would be a great tool for you to use as you begin. (www.sycamoreseries.org)

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Are You Looking For Pain Relief?

Posted in Christian Missions, Other, tagged , , , on August 17, 2010| 3 Comments »

Many Christians feel the painful tension between knowing in their hearts that other people in their circles need Jesus, and recognizing in themselves the overwhelming reluctance to do anything actively about it.

Motivational sermons make us feel even guiltier, instructional sermons don’t speak to our fears. Most of what is offered in our churches just makes us feel worse.  Typical churches today, probably concerned mostly with retaining their members, no longer talk about personal evangelism because it just makes people feel bad.

(Even as I write this, I find myself hesitating to use words like evangelism or personal work because they are not only outmoded, but also out of favor! Even the word mission hangs on a similar cliff of unpopularity.)

The Gospel story is so much about sharing, however, that this pain is still there, so we look for relief through less painful means.  For instance, tell me that you haven’t heard—perhaps even used—the following to relieve the pain:

  • Invite people to church, better to a social event at the building, and best, to something for their children.  That’s all you have to do.
  • Just live a Christian life in front of people, that’s enough.
  • Contribute to—at least pray for–someone else going somewhere else to share your faith.
  • Just do some good service in the community.

Don’t hear me wrong. These are all excellent activities for Christians, but if you are burdened with the passionate desire to share the story of Jesus with those who don’t know Him, these good deeds can all be unsatisfactory replacements.

What then would be required for you to find true relief from the painful tension of your heartfelt desire to share Jesus and the overwhelming reluctance to do so? What really keeps you from doing what you know to do and want to do?

Of course, I don’t know about you personally, but here are some ideas that I have thought myself and/or have heard from others attempting to describe what would free them to tell the Story:

  • I would be eager to share if I thought they really wanted to hear the story. I really don’t think they want to hear it, so I feel like my initiative is not welcome.
  • I would be eager to share if I thought I could share in a meaningful way. My fear is that I don’t know enough, or that they will ask me something that I can’t answer.
  • If they would just come to me and ask me, I would tell them. I just don’t know how to find out if they are even interested.
  • If I knew how to get from our daily conversation to a spiritual topic, I could probably do it, but I don’t know how to jump from one to the other in a way that doesn’t feel artificial.
  • I wish I had time to talk to people, but with all my (kids, activities, work, school), I never have a block of time to devote to it.  And doesn’t it take a long time to convert someone??
  • Isn’t this really the job of the ministers? I’m not really trained for it.
  • Isn’t everyone kinda already a Christian?
  • I know I should, but do you really think God is going to send anyone to Hell?  I don’t know if I believe in a God like that.
  • Politics and religion you don’t talk about with your friends or in polite company. That’s what I was taught.
  • I don’t want anyone telling me what to think, so how can I tell other people what to think?

Well, I’ve used all my allotted words listing our rationalizations—and probably could have used more. Search your own heart and add your words to this list, if you want.

With the next posting, I’ll offer you some better words, better options, and what, I believe, are true pain relievers for Christians who want to talk—but can’t.

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Mark 5: Who Are You In This Story?

Posted in Bible Study, Other, tagged , , , on August 14, 2010| 2 Comments »

They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. 2When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an evil spirit came from the tombs to meet him. 3This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, not even with a chain. 4For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

In modern terms, how would you describe this man?  Try staying away from psychological/pathological terms and try finding normal words for how someone in your circle with these symptoms might be described.  Here’s my attempt:

There was a Guy who had a pretty normal childhood, but somewhere along the way, he got into bad stuff—made really bad choices. It cost him everything!  First, he lost his family and friends; he had no one who could deal with his demons, so he ended up by himself.  Then he just went out of control—no boundaries, abusive, into stuff that damaged his body and soul. Sure, some people tried to help with interventions and rehab, but he could not be contained. He broke away from all of that, deeply depressed, and continuing to do destructive things.  No one saw any real hope or future for this Guy.

6When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!” 8For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you evil spirit!”

One day this Guy is confronted on the streets by a random Jesus-person and it scares him to death! He first yells at this Jesus-person to get away, he threatens him and tries to intimidate him, but the Jesus-person just won’t go away. The guy says, “What do you want with me, man? You are killing me! I’m not like you. I used to be, but I don’t even remember what it is like to be like you—and it is too painful to even try!  Do you have any idea who I am?”

The Jesus-person says, “This is not who you are. You are full of the wrong stuff. Are you happy? Are you who you want to be?”

The Guy says, “I am who I am! I am nothing. I don’t know you, but you are killing me! Even if I tried, I can’t get back to where you are . . . . “

The Jesus-person replies, “You are right. Even if you tried, you couldn’t get back. But just listen to my story for a minute.” Then he covers the person with the love of God and the blood of Christ, destroying the old Guy and watching the creation of the New Guy.

As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. 19Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” 20So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis[c]how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed.

After a time, the Jesus-person needed to leave. The New Guy says, “I want to go with you! You are the best thing that ever happened to me—and I need you!”

The Jesus-Person replied, “I love you, brother, but you have a new task and a new message. You need to go home!”

The New Guy says, “There is nothing for me at home. Don’t send me away. I don’t have anyone!  I’ve hurt my family so badly, I can’t go back. They hate me!”

“You are not the same person. Go just introduce yourself to them again slowly. They probably won’t believe that it is you, but give them time. Tell them what God did for you!  Better yet, show them what God did for you. ”

“They will never believe me!  They’ll never love me again. They will never change”

Jesus-Person says, “That’s what you told me when I first met you. It is not you who will convince them. It’s the Story you are going to tell. If it can change you, it can change them too.”

So, of course, the New Guy went home—and what do you know—everything the Jesus-Person said happened. People were amazed.

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God Is Behind Immigration!

Posted in Christian Missions, Other, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 6, 2010| 1 Comment »

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have heard someone say the equivalent of, “Don’t we have enough to do at home? Why do we need to go overseas? Shouldn’t we take care of our neighborhood first?”

When Sherrylee and I were newly married and committed to going to Germany with our newly-formed mission team, I asked a very prominent preacher whom I knew for help raising support. Without thinking about what the implications were, he said, “Man, if only you weren’t going overseas!” I mistakenly took this as criticism back then, but I know now that what he really was saying was that American Christians prefer to support local over foreign outreach.  Bad decision!

Remember how God allowed persecution on the earliest church in Jerusalem and “scattered” people, forcing them into other countries, even to the Gentiles (Acts 8:1,4,19-20). I don’t think He used the same technique with American Christians—although WWII was the real beginning (not the earliest) of foreign outreach in churches of Christ—but I do believe that He has worked in time and space in our day to wipe away our tepid excuses for not sharing the Good News with people different from us.

Look at this snippet from Wikipedia about U.S. Immigration:

As of 2006, the United States accepts more legal immigrants as permanent residents than all other countries in the world combined. Since the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965, the number of first-generation immigrants living in the United States has quadrupled, from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007. 1,046,539 persons were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2008.

If Christians hesitate to “go into all the world,” then why shouldn’t God bring all the world into our neighborhood?  It’s not punishment—it’s who we are and what we are about!!

Let’s Start Talking is best known probably for its short-term, overseas mission programs, but as early as 1990, LST was also training Americans to reach out to international students, immigrants, and non-English speakers in our universities and neighborhoods.  FriendSpeak is LST’s program for training churches to reach out cross-culturally in their own communities—and it is huge!

Rather than tell you about it, I want to give you a link to the Christian Chronicle which just ran an online article and asked for feedback from those who might have used FriendSpeak in their churches. Just click this link and you will see firsthand what can be done here at home for the whole world:

http://www.christianchronicle.org/blog/2010/08/reader-feedback-tell-us-about-your-friendspeak-experience/

Local versus Foreign—not even a legitimate argument anymore—if it ever was. There is only, “Who can I talk to today—and who can I talk to tomorrow—and who will talk with those people over there?  Sure, I will.”

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Obscure Tips for New Missionaries–and Old!

Posted in Christian Missions, Short-Term Missions, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 4, 2010| 5 Comments »

Remember the young missionary couple that Sherrylee and I visited with Sunday evening. In the previous post (http://wp.me/pO3kT-5S), I shared with you some of the insights that I had during our conversation. But, I also promised to share with you the advice we offered that seemed to resonate with them.  Maybe it will for you as well.

  • Treat your team relationships like a marriage. Working on the mission field in a team is much more common than it used to be—and rightly so. However, most teams break up pretty quickly. The reasons for that are numerous—and worthy of its own post—so let me just skip to the conclusion: if you want your team to stay together, then you have to commit to one another like a marriage. If you believe divorce is an option, then you will likely divorce each other. If you do not believe divorce is an option, then you will struggle, but you will prayerfully find ways to make it work because it brings God more glory!
  • Don’t try to be more German than the Germans. When we went to Germany in 1971, I was pretty much prepared to wear lederhosen, eat brotchen for breakfast, and listen to polka music every day for the rest of my life. I knew all about fitting into the local culture. I’m so thankful for the German Christian who told us, “Don’t be more German than the Germans. I eat cereal for breakfast and would not be caught dead in lederhosen!”  Foreigners who over-identify with another culture are still foreigners—and often look pretty silly to the nationals.
  • Don’t pretend you are not an American! The very best missionaries that I know learned how to use their foreignness—their American-ness, if you will—in an attractive way in their new culture. To do this, however, you need a good local friend to help you know what is truly attractive and what is just being an ugly American.
  • Don’t wait too long to come home for your first visit. Our specific piece of advice was to come home for your first visits before you are so homesick that it skews your view of both of your homes. If you wait too long before you come home, then everything about America is too wonderful and everything about your new foreign home is where you were so unhappy! Both of those mistaken views can be avoided by not waiting so long to come home.
  • Read the Roman Catholic Catechism. This couple is going to a predominantly Catholic country, so it would seem obvious that they would want to know about the country’s religion. Surprisingly, many prospective missionaries assume that they will only be telling their own story, not listening to other people’s story.  Reading the primary source (Quran would be another example) is a way not only to learn, but to show respect for your new hosts.

And I just want to emphasize the value of going to the primary sources. Reading books about other religions always has a sub-plot—another agenda—so you can’t really know that you are getting the real story from them. The same is true even when teachers and mentors “explain” other religions to us. I have often cringed when listening to some self-appointed spokesperson explaining to the media or to a public class what my church believes. I’m sure people in other countries do the same.

  • Don’t believe everything that Americans tell you about your new country. I was once in a European restaurant with an LST team. As I would do at home, I put my napkin in my lap, but one of the LST workers who had been there for a couple of weeks already stopped me and said, “Don’t do that! That’s not polite here.”  I took it back out of my lap, but I then looked around the restaurant and noticed that everyone else in the restaurant had their napkin in their lap!  I turned and asked my friend where they had heard this information, and she said, “The American missionary told us!”  Since then, I have had lots of experiences with American myths about host countries, i.e., one American tells another American who tells another American. . . and either it was not true to begin with or it became unrecognizably altered in the multiple transmissions. 

I forgot to mention this last piece of advice to the young couple, but it is a short piece of advice that Maurice Hall gave to us back in the 70’s when Sherrylee and I were the young couple, new to the mission field, and asking for advice. Maurice was an early missionary in France after WW II and one of the last missionaries out of Viet Nam as Saigon was falling. He continues today, beyond his 90th birthday, to practice this advice. He said to me, “Mark, don’t quit!” That’s all, but I have found it to be extraordinarily valuable. I have shared that with many, many prospective and experienced missionaries around the world.

Let me end by sharing it with you: “Don’t quit!”

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Are Your Missionaries Prepared and Micro-Managed?

Posted in Christian Missions, Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , on August 2, 2010| 1 Comment »

Yesterday evening, we had the delightful experience of having a young couple for supper who are headed to South America in a few months as part of a new mission team.  They have received excellent training and mentoring, and they seem to have good churches behind them now, so it was a wonderful evening.

This couple did come, however, to visit with Sherrylee and me because God’s plan for us has included a lot of mission experience, not only our full-time experience in Germany and our short-term experiences with Let’s Start Talking, but also the many, many points of contact all over the world with mission sites and missionaries that we have experienced and observed over the last 40+ years.

But before I share with you some insights that Sherrylee and I offered them, let me tell you a couple of things that I learned from the conversation!

  • New missionaries today have myriad sources and resources for preparation and training. In the last couple of years, this couple and their teammates had been through extensive testing, counseling, cross-cultural training, discipling, and mentoring by people who are both experienced and educated (which are not always the same thing!).  They had gone to their prospective site and done on site research prior to their commitment to that site.  Churches sending new missionaries would be foolish not to require such preparation prior to departure.
  • American churches still believe they can micro-manage mission work in foreign countries, using financial models, success models, evangelistic strategies, and administrative models that they apply to their American church staff—maybe.  Even this young couple had stories to tell of ridiculous requirements imposed on them or their teammates by potential sponsoring churches.  (I’ll get specific about this in a later posting!) Maybe it is because new missionaries are often young, or maybe it is simply the American business model for God’s work, but my advice to all prospective missionaries is to simply bless and release any church that is trying to micro-manage your work. No amount of support is worth the grief that you will experience if unequally yoked to this kind of partner.
  • Both the young man and woman decided to do foreign mission work because of a short-term mission experience. The woman worked six weeks in Europe and the young man did an internship in Brazil. The direction of both lives was radically re-directed because of these experiences. Let me say this as clearly as I can: In my experience, virtually NO ONE enters the mission field without having a successful short-term experience first! Doesn’t it become obvious that to send more long-term workers, we must first send more short-term workers!

In the following post, I’ll continue with the advice that seemed most valuable to these new missionaries.

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