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Traveling Thoughts: DFW to FRA

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 4, 2010| 1 Comment »

Today Sherrylee and I are leaving for three weeks of extensive travel through Europe for Let’s Start Talking. From the beginning of this missions ministry thirty years ago, we have felt that it was important to know well the sites that we are sending LST teams.  It’s important also for them to know LST well.  If we don’t know them well, we might send a team to a site that was ill-suited to them.  If the mission site doesn’t know us well, their expectations of what would happen when an LST team came could be totally misaligned.  Either of these errors can lead to very poor mission projects!

For the next three weeks, we are making very short stops in Turkey, Romania,  Ukraine, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. At the end of our trip, we will attend the Euro-American Retreat in Rothenburg, Germany.

I will not be taking my own computer, so my hope is to be able to get on the internet as we travel in order to keep you up to date.  This could mean that the blog schedule for the next few weeks is a little erratic, so I hope you will understand.

It’s going to be a great trip with many good conversations with great missionaries. I hope to introduce you not only to the cities and countries, but to the great heroes of faith that we get to visit on these kinds of trips.  You’ll enjoy it, I promise.

So, Auf Wiedersehen–well, not really.

The Germans actually not only use this phrase which means literally “until we see each other again”, but also Auf Wiederhoeren, which they use formally on the telephone to say “until we hear each other again.” I guess I’ll say Auf Wiederlesen–until we read each other again–or something like that!

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For Those Who Have Fire In Their Bones

Posted in Christian Missions, Other, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

You are not the preacher. You are not the head of anything at church. But you have a great ministry just started, or a great ministry idea that you would like to see get traction and grow.  What do you do now? Here are a few tips from our experience of trying to get Let’s Start Talking established in lots of churches. This is what we have learned from watching people enthusiastic about short-term missions try to work with their home congregation.

  1. Don’t even start unless you are committed to doing whatever it takes to succeed yourself! Lots of people want to start things for other people to do. Just forget it! You should be able to accomplish the ministry yourself—at some level—or you will never get others to buy into it. For LST, this means that if you are not willing to go, you will not be successful in getting other people to go.
  2. Try to get the blessing of church leadership from the very beginning. If the preacher and/or church leaders are opposed to your ministry idea, it is not likely to survive. It might possibly survive if they are indifferent, but the chances are much better if you have their blessing.  Notice, I said blessing, not commitment. See below!
  3. Do not expect to get leadership commitment to your ministry until you have proven that it will be successful! LST actually made this mistake in our Centurion project which launched about three years ago. We asked churches to commit to a goal of sending 100 workers with LST over a five-year period—with no financial commitment whatsoever.  Although a few churches committed, we were absolutely shocked at how resistant most churches were to making any kind of a commitment at all.  We have since modified our approach, so that we only ask for permission to test run LST in their congregation to see if their members have a good experience with it.  Church leaders are much more open to us with this approach.
  4. Don’t reinvent the wheel! Join with established ministries who have proven track records and who can help jumpstart your ministry. So you think your teens should do mission trips to learn to share their faith! Rather than asking your youth minister or some parents to plan and organize such a trip, why not ask a ministry like LST YoungFriends to help you, since we have been planning short-term missions, including special ones for teen groups, for thirty years! If you want to start something for the poor, why not contact existing ministries and partner with them–or after-school programs, or abused women, or English As A Second Language outreach??
  5. Be spiritually prepared to be ignored. If I were a church leader and if I knew what kind of transformation happens to every person who spends two weeks on an LST project, I would do everything in my power to make it possible for every person in the church I was leading to participate—there, I said it as boldly and honestly as I can.  However, the fact is that a very small percentage of Christians really want to engage their faith as actively as most ministries require. If you, as the promoter of your ministry, let the massive indifference discourage you, then you are defeated! You must be willing to do your work without recognition, without popularity, and without any other reward than the smile of the Father!  If you need more than this, you will give up!
  6. God has His own schedule for growth! I love flowers—Sherrylee calls them annuals and perennials and I have a vague idea what that means. But I really love flowering trees. I love the blooms on our fruit trees, I love the beautiful white flowers of the Bradford pear trees, and I really love the Oklahoma redbuds!! The time from seed to bloom is very different for these plants. In reality, only God knows the proper time and season for your ministry to bloom. You can choose to acknowledge God’s sovereignty here—or you can try to set your own schedule. Occasionally, we may be able to hothouse something into rapid growth—but these efforts are rarely long-lived. I recommend you let God be in control.
  7. If you are called by God to a ministry, you will never be truly happy until you are answering the call—so get on with it!  I love the story of Jeremiah, called by God to be a prophet to the nations, who yells at God and says, “You deceived me! I did what you called me to do and I’m having a terrible time! In fact, I’ve tried to quit several times . . . but I couldn’t because your word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones–and I can’t keep it in.” (Jer. 20:7-9)

One of the biggest problems ministries have is surviving the exhilarating start-up phase.  I’ll give you some suggestions about that in the next post.

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What Does God Think About Fund Raising?

Posted in Christian Missions, Other, Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , on September 28, 2010| 4 Comments »

Consider the lilies of the field!

Just one month ago, Let’s Start Talking began our annual general fundraising drive.  We had approximately five weeks left in our fiscal year and were $135,000 short of our 2010 budget projections for fund raising—a very serious amount for LST.

We had a multi-pronged approach for reaching our fundraising goals: We all committed to prayerfully ask God; Sherrylee committed to calling all general donors (not worker donors) from the last two years; the staff committed to calling all our former LST workers who had been out of college at least five years, and we would ask the guests attending our Harvest Call Benefit Dinner on September 25th in Fort Worth to give. Our need/goal  was much greater than we had every even dreamed of attempting before.

By God’s grace and mercy, I’m happy to say that we received enough donations to cover the entire ministry shortfall!  I’d like to share with you, not how-to’s, but lessons remembered and learned in this month of intense fund raising!

  • God is rich! He has all the money in the world. If we look at money has something that belongs to us, then we should worry about the hard economic times many of our supporters are facing! If we understand that God is the Creator and Donor of everything we receive, then we and the people we ask for funds are just caretakers/managers/temporary users of His things!  And He is not short of funds!
  • God is grace-full! The core idea in the word grace is that of a gift!  When we ask people for gifts, we are asking for grace. If they give us a gift, they extend grace to us. If God is the First Donor of every good gift (James 1:17), then His generosity is the same as His graciousness—and He is rich in grace (Ephesians 2:7), full of grace (John 1:14), there is no end to His generosity!
  • Asking is part of God’s plan. I know we hate to ask, but this must be our problem because over and over, God has told us to ask!  Listen to these explicit instructions from God:

“If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” Matthew 21:22

“Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” John 16:24

“We have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him”. 1 John 3:21-22.

Maybe our problem is that we have gotten into the habit of asking for ourselves.

“When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” (James 4:3)

  • Offering others an opportunity to be blessed is a wonderful act of Christian love! Donating is a special opportunity to receive God’s blessing, if we really believe  Jesus’ words, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35)

A Choice Between Fear and Confidence!

The economy is poor, everyone’s budget is tight, our home church just launched a huge capital campaign, the economic future is unpredictable—these are all good reasons to fear asking Christians for special gifts to meet big goals.

God is rich, God is generous, and God is good—these are all better reasons for not being afraid to ask Christians for special gifts to meet big goals.

The last month of asking for LST and the astounding goodness of God in fulfilling all of His generous promises has confirmed for me again that fear is a sin, not a choice.

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A Personal History of Let’s Start Talking, Pt. 2: Discovery and Genesis

Posted in A Personal History of Let's Start Talking, Other, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Project Germany team in Woodward home for training (Fall 1979)

I’ve heard Sherrylee tell the story many times of how I was sitting in the bathtub and had the ideas that became the core of the LST philosophy, but I think that is creative memory—mainly because I am a shower person, not a bath person! Here’s my version of the genesis of LST’s core philosophy.

Sometime before we left Germany in April 1979, I read a short article from Glen Jones, missionary in Kiel, Germany, about the power of the Word itself based on John 20:31:

“But these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

I asked myself if I really believed this to be true! And I didn’t know the answer because my experience was all about teaching people what the Word meant, explaining, clarifying, and supplying the missing historical, linguistic, or logical information that they needed to really come to faith.

Even if we believed that the Word was powerful, how were we ever going to get German skeptics to read the Word? With the exception of a few true Seekers, we knew that the masses were not open at all to reading the Word!

This was then the moment that God put all the pieces together! What could we offer the Germans that they really wanted? We could not count the times while living in Germany that people had sought us out to practice their English or to help them translate something important to them from English to German. So what if we offer to help them with their English language skills??

The question that every service ministry faces, however, is how to move from loving service to the Gospel story that produces faith! (This is such a difficult question for many ministries that they simply avoid answering it, sometimes even rationalizing the need for that bridge to faith-sharing as unnecessary. I think that is rowing with only one oar—but that’s a topic for another time!)

Sherrylee and I talked a lot and decided in the fall of 1980 to try something completely new—at least we knew of no one else doing anything similar at all. We decided to recruit a team of college students to go to Germany with us for eight weeks. Instead of moving from city to city in short campaigns, they would stay in one place to enable them to develop stronger relationships with the people they would be talking with.  They would be a small group (4-6 people) rather than a large group, so that they could function more as a “family” rather than as a tour group and so they would not be such a burden on the small German churches that they would be working with.

Members of LST First Team: Valerie Kinnell and Chip Kooi

But the riskiest part of this experiment was that we were going to ask the German church to advertise free English conversation classes and see if anyone would respond. It was very important to us not to trick people into using the Bible, so we had people respond to the advertising by calling a member of the local church who was instructed to always tell them that this group would be using the Bible as the textbook for these conversations.  That’s where we had no idea how Germans would respond!!

In the fall of 1980, Sherrylee and I recruited ten students from Oklahoma Christian, several of whom had been a part of the Project Germany group that we had led under Ralph Burcham the previous summer. We meet with these ten students weekly throughout the school year, sharing our experiences and knowledge about the German culture and training them to open the Word and release its power in a relational and non-confrontational way.

One team worked in Braunschweig with the Gemeinde Christi and the other worked in Bremen, Germany, both German churches that Sherrylee and I knew well. The teams lived independently, cooked for themselves, rode public transportation, and made their own schedules—all of which was pretty new strategy for campaign groups at this time.

The first signs that God was doing something new and wonderful were that there was an amazing response to the advertising and many, many people called, seeking help with their English.  The next amazing discovery was that most of them expressed surprise that they were going to be using the Bible as the conversation guide, in fact, they always asked why; nevertheless, most of the people agreed to register for the program in spite of their skepticism!

At first our workers tried to just open their Bibles to Luke’s Gospel as the conversation guide, but this really put many of their early Readers (our new term for the people who participated with us!) off, so we decided to cut sections out of Luke and make a little worksheet  with a few little exercises for them each time they came—and this made all the difference! They had no problem reading the same biblical texts if they were part of a workbook of some kind.

But would this be an effective strategy? The most common opening statement by every person who came that first year was, “Thank you for offering to help me with my English, but I want you to know that I do not believe that anything in the Bible is true! Is that OK?” That’s when we learned how important it was to serve them unconditionally by helping them with their English, forcing us to believe even stronger that the Word was powerful enough to break through this unbelief!

LST First Team Members Galen and Larale Rawlins (1981)

At the end of this first summer, we came back to the States and told our friends who had sent us that we had seen a miracle! We had seen skeptical Germans read the Bible every day for weeks with our students. The numbers had grown as the summer progressed, not diminished—which we did not expect—because the Germans loved their experience.  They even asked who would continue the program after the Americans left, so we were able to introduce them quite naturally to the local American missionaries.

But the real miracle was that some of those same people whose opening sentences were so defensive and skeptical had been touched by the living Word. Now at the close of the first year, in answer to our prayers, the most common summary of their experience that we heard was “I came only wanting to know English, but I got so much more. Now I also know Jesus!” And a few added, “And I believe!”

They had been changed, and we were changed—and Let’s Start Talking was birthed—although we didn’t know it.

Next:  The 1980s — Genesis Expanded!

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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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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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