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Posts Tagged ‘short-term missions’

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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Follow-up: Take this Quick Poll

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Missions, Other, tagged , , , , , on August 27, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Following up my post on “I Just Have To Ask . . . ” I thought I would give you a chance to express your own opinion about being asked for donations.  If you didn’t read the blog, go ahead and take the poll, then click on this link (http://wp.me/pO3kT-6S) to go back to it.  Feel free to use the new share buttons and get some of your friends to take the poll. The more, the merrier.  (And you will not get a fund raising request by answering the poll–I know what you were thinking!)

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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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Who Wants To Know What I Want To Say?

Posted in Short-Term Missions, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on July 24, 2010| 1 Comment »

The problem for most short-term workers is not a lack of desire to tell the story of their mission project; rather, it is finding appropriate opportunities to talk to people who really want to hear.  Let’s Start Talking prepares its workers with a twenty-second answer for most people—which is the average attention span for informal mission reports to friends and acquaintances.

The next place everyone thinks about reporting is from the pulpit of your home congregation, where the most people can be addressed—but, unfortunately, pulpit time is as rare as sunshine in Seattle, so let’s spend a few moments listing very appropriate venues where you will find people who want to hear about your work.

  • Church elders/leaders meetings. You will have to ask for this time, but it is worth it. And you may only get five minutes, but it is worth it! Use it to inspire them—to expand their view of the kingdom and to encourage missions. You might change the whole agenda of your home church with such a meeting.
  • Mission committee/leaders. Ask for five minutes and see what you get! Express your gratitude and show them that their investment in you (hopefully) produced glory for God! When you leave, your goal is for them to say, “That was great! Who can we send next?”
  • Adult classes. Build your report into an inspirational lesson. Use Bible texts that have motivated you. Don’t preach; rather, leave the class inspired with a heart for God’s mission!
  • Teen classes.  They never look like they are paying attention, but if you can tell stories about the people you encountered, you are planting seeds for service in virgin soil.
  • Children’s classes. Use a map, show a picture of other children, excite their sense of adventure—which will morph into wanting to do something BIG for God someday.
  • Small groups—I know these are often social, sometimes activity oriented, but what better place to dialogue with people. Leave plenty of time for their questions and interaction.  Tell them that they can do it too.
  • Special groups: Ladies classes, campus ministry devotionals, 39ers nights, etc.
  • Display boards/tables at church.  These will often tell your story for months to people you will never get to talk with personally. Leave some way for people to contact you for more information.
  • Written reports: blogs, newsletters, just plain letters—but use lots of pictures and choose your words carefully. People do not read long stuff anymore.
  • Facebook. Let all your friends know. Label your pictures in a purposeful way rather than just trying to be funny. Include links to fan sites like LST (http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Lets-Start-Talking/293788299554?ref=ts) where people can learn how to be involved themselves.
  • Others: small town newspapers, Kiwanis clubs, other churches

And don’t forget, your window of opportunity is probably only open about 6-8 weeks. After that, it will become increasingly difficult to get onto any platform because the experiences themselves are so distant.

What would you add to this list?

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Don’t Forget To DO This In Your Report!

Posted in Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , on July 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »

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. 

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Don’t Report on Your Mission Trip Like This!

Posted in Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , on July 19, 2010| 4 Comments »

Do you remember when the missionaries always reported to the church with their slide shows in place of the sermon on Sunday night?   (I know, some of you don’t even remember Sunday night services) Especially during the summer months when many missionaries were on furlough, it seems like we might have at least one report each month and sometimes more often! Perhaps that is why we don’t do it anymore—(I mean the missionary slide show report, not Sunday night—other reasons for that!).

As I look back on the reports as I remember them, they were always VERY long, LOTS of buildings and large group shots, and TOO MANY stories to remember. For that reason, part of the training for re-entry that Let’s Start Talking does with all of its workers is on how to report on their short-term mission project effectively.  First, I’m going to write about the DON’TS and get the negative stuff out of the way.

  • Don’t forget to report! It is an opportunity to share the blessing you have received. It is an act of gratitude to those who sent you and prayed for you.
  • Don’t talk about the weather, the food, or the housing. The audience did not experience it and they really don’t care as much about it as you did while you were there.
  • Don’t talk about the problems that you encountered. Every mission project has problems, but if you survived to talk about it, it wasn’t that big! You run the risk of making parents afraid to send their kids or elders afraid to send their members on future short-term missions because “they might have bad experiences like that last team did!”
  • Don’t tell all the horror stories about the foreign culture, i.e., the gross things you ate or the immorality of the people you worked with.  That’s why you went. Will those stories make others want to do missions? Do they give glory to God?
  • Don’t criticize the mission church, its leaders, or the missionary. That’s the last thing any church needs is some American Christian—young or old—to come in and become an expert on both their work and their context in a week or two. “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” especially when judging someone else’s work. If your church and your preacher are perfect, then you can cast the first stone—unless you yourself are less than perfect!
  • Don’t leave the impression that you went on a church-sponsored vacation! Of course you took lots of pictures during your free time, probably more than during the work itself, so if you show all your pictures, you will unquestionably leave the impression that most of what you did was play and a smaller portion was actually what the church sent you to do.  LST tells its workers to NEVER show free time pictures in reports and NEVER talk about free time. They are not really pertinent to why you were sent, so why include them in your report?
  • Don’t post people’s names or pictures on the internet in your blog or website or anywhere without having asked their permission. In some countries, people could go to prison, while in other countries, it might only be an embarrassment to them. Even in a wide-open country like Germany, LST had one of our workers who read with an Iranian refugee, who was sneaking away from the hard-core, militant Muslims that he lived with in order to read the story of Jesus with her.  What might have happened to him, if his group found his name on an LST report website??
  • Don’t talk too long. LST tells workers to prepare a twenty-second answer for the question: how was your trip? Anything more and people’s eyes start to glaze over. Stick to five-minute reports for the elders and mission committee, 15-20 minutes for classes, but for your own family, you can expand to 25minutes—but just once.
  • Don’t make yourself the hero! Don’t talk about the negative that happened—all of the problems and challenges are included– because it makes you look like a suffering martyr—which very few of us are!
  • Don’t talk about how much good it did you! Now this is tricky because almost everyone comes home feeling the change in themselves because of a rich, mission experience, BUT what you have to remember is that you went to help OTHER people. Your church sent you to teach OTHER people.  What they want to hear is that OTHER PEOPLE were helped.  I don’t mean to say this to negate your own experience, but it is not one that you need to talk about a lot—that’s all.

I wish I could tell you that I have never done any of these reporting sins, but, in fact, I have done all of them at some time.  Anyone else have stories to tell?

NEXT:  So what should you do to report well?

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“What If They Don’t Like Us?” Luke 10:5-16

Posted in Luke 10 Series, tagged , , , , , , on July 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

How do we act when we get there? What do we do?  What if they don’t like us? Sounds like questions we would get from LST teams in training. In this third part of our look at Luke 10, Jesus addresses these very questions for the Seventy-Two.

Part of the experience for these disciples was to be taken into the houses of strangers and discern whether they were friends or foes. Showing hospitality to travelers was part of their culture; hospitality was rarely denied, but was not necessarily given cheerfully. These workers were warned of cold receptions, but, strangely enough, not given permission to move around until they found a warmer reception.

No, they were told to “stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you.” It was not about their comfort or their full stomachs, and there was no mention of fulfilling their strategic purpose. It was an opportunity to prepare this house to receive the peace of God. If they moved from house to house to make themselves more comfortable or to get better meals, their motivation would appear to be less than singly  focused on preparing for Jesus to come.

Upon arrival in the town where they were sent, the disciples were given an apparently impossible task and a simple message to proclaim: “Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’”  Jesus’ first instructions were to prepare them for rejection.

What town in its right mind would reject a healing ministry, where the lame walk and the blind see? Christians are eager to go healing and feeding and building and restoring—all part of the plan to prepare for the coming of Jesus—but Jesus warned them of rejection they would receive, not because they were healing, but because they had a message to deliver alongside their healing ministry. If they had only healed, they would have not completed the task Jesus gave them; if they only preached, the same would be true. The warning about rejection makes it certain that Jesus assumed their healings would be followed by proclamation.

In fact, when they were rejected and after they dusted their feet of the sand of that town, even then they were to repeat the message! They were to be bold with their message, delivering it where it was received and where it would be rejected. Receptivity may have been an issue for deciding duration of the visit, but not the reason for the visit. The disciples were to go into the town because Jesus was getting ready to come, regardless of the receptivity.

Jesus affirms his participation in the process in verse 16, assuring the disciples that when they are heard, He is heard; when they are rejected. He is rejected. To give them even more fortitude, He draws God of Hosts into the covenant and says that those who reject Jesus are without God. No wonder the curses on Bethsaida, Korazim, and Capernaum sound so harsh too us—and perhaps even to the disciples then. Jesus was teaching them that the consequences of rejecting Jesus are terrible and frightening.  Those who go out must get the message to all who will hear, for the consequences of not listening are terrible.

Next: Mostly Jesus is pictured as the “man of sorrows,” but what story shows him with a great big smile?

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Don’t take your purse and don’t talk to anyone!

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Missions, Luke 10 Series, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 9, 2010| 5 Comments »

In the first post on Luke 10, we talked about the motivational instructions from Jesus to the seventy-two disciples, He was sending out ahead of him.  Following that in verse 4, he gives them very unusual logistical instructions—but why?

“Do not take a purse or bag or sandals,” but why not? Do not provide for yourself, but let God provide. The lesson in faith that you will experience is much greater than the discomfort you feel in the first insecure steps. Many adults who go with Let’s Start Talking are in a financial position where they can  write a check to cover all of their fund-raising obligations; however, it has long been our practice to discourage this, but rather to encourage them to send out letters to churches, family, and friends, just like our students who don’t own anything but their T-shirts.

Just recently, a couple in their forties, not wealthy but comfortable, intended to pay for their own trip, but finally agreed to follow our advice.  They raised all of their funds and more from friends who wanted to support them in their short-term mission effort. The couple came to us and thanked us for “forcing” them to do this, saying that what they experienced and learned about faith and generosity was already a big enough blessing if they got nothing else from their mission experience. Christians going out in their own strength are Christians who are departing powerless.

“And do not greet anyone on the road.” Perhaps Jesus was worried about distraction. It is really easy for workers going out to stop and chat with friends or those who are nearer or those who are easily addressed. After all, isn’t this person’s soul of equal value with those who are never confronted because we never arrive?

I’m quite sure Jesus would have conceded the equal value of the souls, but He would have asked us, “but didn’t I send you to . . . ? What about those people?  What distracted you? What kept you from arriving? The distraction may have seemed like something good—and maybe it was, but it was not what I sent YOU to do! That person was the task of another disciple . . . . ”

Jesus had just lost three potential disciples who refused to pay the price to follow Jesus without distraction (Luke 9:57-62). The one needed predictability to be secure; the next could not leave his parents in the hands of God; and the third had too many family responsibilities to think about Jesus. But they all were willing later . . . after they took care of these major distractions. “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”  (Luke 9:62) Not even greeting someone on the road is enough reason to suspend your focus on accomplishing His task.

Next: In the next verses, Jesus tells them how to work and what they will experience.  Sometimes a flashforward can be very discouraging. Was this a strategy for preparing disciples that we should imitate?

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Quality Leadership: Standards of Excellence In Short-Term Missions

Posted in Christian Missions, Standards of Excellence for Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 5, 2010| 2 Comments »

We come to the end of this series on the Seven Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Missions. I want to acknowledge my debt and appreciation to the organization SOE that originally published these standards.  This group promotes the standards as well as organizes many groups who voluntarily adopt them. If you would like to read more about the standards and/or the organization, go to their website: www.stmstandards.org and explore it.  Just to clarify, while I have used their standards as the outline, the explanation and illustration of these standards in my blog are purely from me and do not necessarily reflect the intentions or positions of this organization with which neither I nor Let’s Start Talking has no affiliation, but great appreciation.

The last of the Seven Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Mission is qualified leadership. I’ve left this one to last for two reasons: first, I find that qualified leadership is a basic presupposition for each of the other standards. Will the mission be God-centered if there is no leadership? Will true partnerships between those who go and those who receive be established without leadership? Can there be thoughtful purpose and design, appropriate training, and thorough follow-up with leadership?  I don’t think so!

The ubiquitous (sorry, it’s just the right word. Click for a quick definition!) nature of leadership is why everyone writes about leadership. Gifts in such great demand are often neglected, imitated, or abused. Let me explain in our context of short-term missions.

1. Zeal trumps ability in many short-term mission programs. Passion and good intentions are not the same as leadership, but are common substitutes when quality leadership is lacking. Without knowing all the facts, I suspect that the Christian group arrested and held for so long in Haiti for trying to leave the country with a busload of orphans was guilty of only substituting passion and good intentions for quality leadership.

2. Lots of people pretend to be leaders who are not! Again, not all of these people are aware of their lack of leadership gifts, but may truly believe they are leaders. One absolute test of leadership ability is whether and why people follow a particular leader!

I have a missionary friend who certainly believes he is a leader. When he can control a group because of external authority,  people do what he says and stay with him. However, when he tries to lead a group of peers or volunteers, they inevitably either passively or actively rebel against his leadership.

The greatest leader Jesus said of a good shepherd-leader, “. . . the sheep follow him because they know his voice.” (John 10:4) They do not follow a stranger’s (imitator’s) voice. So it is with those who imitate leaders.

3. Abuse in any form is the polar opposite of quality leadership. You can recognize potential abuse when

a. The “leader” starts by reading the rules for the mission trip.

b. The “leader” starts by describing his/her role on the mission trip

c. The “leader” threatens someone with dismissal from the team if they don’t .

d. The “leader” either does not request or disregards input from others.

e. The “leader” is not accountable to someone else.

f. The “leader” has sole control of all of the organizational elements of the mission trip—money, schedule, resources, planning.

g. The “leader” knows things but is unwilling to share the information with the mission group “until they need to know.”

h. The “leader” uses the “because I said so” line!

If you are part of a mission group with this kind of leadership, you should look for another group to join.  Leadership issues lie at the heart of many of the worst experiences with missions.

Secondly,  I left the leadership standard to the end of this series because I want to segue to a new blog series on leadership—not just for short-term missions, but especially in our churches.  Issues and problems with leadership are also ubiquitous!!  I really want to suggest a different model that would transform church leadership, if we can bring ourselves to implement it.

Well, watch for a new series on 1A Leadership starting soon.

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