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Archive for March, 2008

Latest technology in wake-up calls

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

Sometimes things happen down here that just make me chuckle. For example, last week I stayed in a hotel with one of our mission trip teams. I went up to the front desk and asked for a 4:45 wake-up call the next morning. The guy disappears behind the counter for a minute, reappears with a pink alarm clock, pops a battery into it, and hands it to me.

“Here you go,” he said.

A few minutes later, one of our other staff members walked in and asked for a wake-up call.

“Sorry,” the guy says, “we’re all out.”

Posted in Mexico | No Comments »

Points 2 Ponder #2 – Scaffolding vs. Building

Friday, March 28th, 2008

This is Part 2 in a series of Points 2 Ponder that we are presenting to our mission trip participants this month.

Read the first post in the series here.

Our church planting coach, Rob, explains that as cross-cultural missionaries, we are the scaffolding, not the building. The function of scaffolding is support. Scaffolding is temporary, and once the building is done, the scaffolding is moved elsewhere to work on another building. The scaffolding goes; the building stays behind. For a building to stand, therefore, the scaffolding cannot be a part of it. If bricks or support columns or parts of the foundation are built on top of the scaffolding, then when the scaffolding is removed, the building will crumble.
This analogy holds important truths for the cross-cultural minister. New churches must be self-sufficient. They must be built upon the foundation of Christ, not the foreign missionaries. Cross-cultural church planters should plan on serving among a people group for a finite amount of time and should have a clear exit strategy. It can make us feel good to be in control and have positions of leadership and authority, but doing this puts the churches we plant at risk of crumbling when we leave.
This belief is having a lot of practical implications these days for GFM and the way we minister. For example, in the short-term, it might be helpful for us to provide salaries for local pastors. What happens when we leave, though? Or can we ever leave if we have an arrangement like that? At some point, church leaders we raise up will have to be financially self-sufficient, rather than dependent on foreign funds. It seems a whole lot easier to help them be self-sufficient from Day One, perhaps by working with them to develop new businesses, than to get them dependent on us and then try and cut those ties later on.
Also, when a new church begins to meet, we have the new believers run all aspects of the meeting almost immediately. We disciple them outside of the meetings, but in the meetings we generally won’t do or lead something after about the third time the group gets together. This includes teaching. As long as we are properly discipling the converts, they should have something to teach right away. And after all, to teach something, you don’t have to know everything, right? You just have to know one thing.
By understanding our role as scaffolding, we are able to encourage, support, and disciple, without being the primary pastors or leaders. This allows new churches to quickly mature and become self-sufficient, rather than being weak and dependent on outsiders for years or even decades.

Posted in Church Planting and Discipleship | No Comments »

Points 2 Ponder #1 – Jesus and acculturation

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

During our mission trips this year, we’re sharing thoughts to chew on with trip participants during a segment of our program called Points 2 Ponder. These are things we’ve been learning/wrestling with/thinking about over the past year or so. Normally, you would have to pay US$450 for a 10-day mission trip to get to hear these sound bites. Now, though, just for being a reader of my blog, you get them in written form completely free! What a deal, huh?

Here’s the first installment of Points 2 Ponder:

One of the most important jobs of any cross-cultural missionary is to be a learner. Consider this: Jesus was on the earth for about 33 years, but his public ministry only took place in the last three years of his life. That means he spent 30 years, or over 9/10 of his life, not in public ministry. To quote Alan Hirsch in a recent post, we should find that “profoundly disturbing”. For 30 years of his life, no one really noticed Jesus. He didn’t stick out. He didn’t do anything spectacular. He was part of his culture, working a normal job, doing normal things. Only when the time was right did he begin his public ministry.
In a talk at the 2006 National Short-Term Mission Conference, Paul Borthwick pointed out that, while Jesus waited 30 years to engage in his public ministry, when we get into cross-cultural mission settings, we often can hardly wait 30 minutes to get going. After all, we’ve raised a lot of money, people back home are expecting to hear great reports, and “we’re on a mission from God”.
When we think about the humility and servanthood exhibited by Christ during his life on earth (Phil. 2:1-11)–his cross-cultural ministry, you could say–how does that impact our ministries? What if to be Christ-like ministers we have to get past having all the answers for everyone from Day One and simply become learners? Tom and Betty Sue Brewster, in one of their excellent books, drive home the point that “language learning is communication is ministry”. In other words, even when we’re not saying anything, we’re already communicating. Working hard to learn the language of the new culture communicates something–the kind of humble love that characterized Jesus’ ministry. Being ready to teach and having all the answers from the get-go also communicates something. Unfortunately, the drift people catch from that strategy is usually the air of arrogant superiority the rest of the world sees in the Western world. Like it or not, that’s how people perceive us when we don’t first establish ourselves as learners.
Will there be a time for public ministry and for providing answers to problems? No doubt. But that time may not be during the first week or month or year. The wait didn’t seem to bother Jesus too much or hinder his ministry. We cross-cultural ministers in the name of Jesus would do well to take note.

Posted in Cross-Cultural Ministry | 4 Comments »

The Legend of Burger Boy

Friday, March 21st, 2008

If you have ever been to southern Mexico on a mission trip with GFM, you know about Burger Boy. He’s a legend in our circles. He makes a killer hamburger with some Mexican flavor to it. Here are the ingredients:

a beef patty
a slice of ham
a pile of our area’s specialty cheese
diced tomato
diced onions
avocado
pickled chili peppers
ketchup
mustard
mayonnaise
all on a toasted sesame seed bun

Now that’s a mean burger!

During each mission trip, we usually take the team to his stand to eat, or sometimes we have him bring his cart up to our base. To make it worth his while when he brings the cart to our place, we have to eat a lot of burgers. This means that we usually end up having burger eating contests (because otherwise they’ll go to waste). Here are some burger eating records:

The all-time record for the most burgers eaten was set by a guy last summer–7 burgers
There are about 10 or 12 members of Club 5, including me. To become a member of Club 5, you have to eat five burgers in one hour.
Two girls tied last summer for the new girls’ record–5 burgers. I’ve never seen anything like it!

So if you ever come visit us down here in Mexico, be sure to have us take you out to Burger Boy!

Posted in Mexico, Photos | 2 Comments »

Five new church planting apprentices to join our team

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

During the recent mission trip we hosted, we recognized our incoming church planting apprentices and asked the mission trip teams to be praying for them. They will begin their apprenticeships in late April and serve with our team through August of 2009, with the option of becoming full-time staff members after that. Will you please be praying for them, too, as they dive into language learning later this spring and summer? Here they are in the photo below:

(left to right) J.C., Nick, Tasha, Tucker, (me), Liz

Want to know how to become a GFM church planting apprentice? Click here.

Posted in Global Frontier Missions, Photos | No Comments »

Of interest from other GFMers…

Monday, March 17th, 2008

From Pam: Church planting team gets to suck juice from ant booties as a special treat
From David and Rhonda: Update and photos from March mission trips and other recent events
From Jon and Rachel: This couple who will be mission training school students in September have a very interesting blog going tracking their journey to and early time in Mexico. Lots of photos and interesting tidbits.

Enjoy!

Posted in Global Frontier Missions | No Comments »

March mission trips

Monday, March 17th, 2008

My recent lack of posting is due to the fact that we’ve been very busy hosting two March mission trips. We just hosted a team of 16 from March 8-16, and now we’re getting ready to receive another team from March 19-29. With each team, we provide two days of cultural training, mission teaching, and spiritual preparation at our base, and then we spend several days in various outreaches in town.

One of the most important things we try to communicate to our short-term mission participants is to come in as learners. Christ came to earth with a humble, servant attitude. When we engage a new culture, we need to learn and establish trust with people before we try and have all the answers for them.

The team that came this past week caught the vision of being learners and building relationships with the locals very well. Most people spent the majority of the week tutoring junior high and high school students in English. The timing for this was good, as the high school students had midterm exams last week.

Here are a few photos from the mission trip:

We enjoyed some good times of prayer and worship together

Hannah tutors junior high students in English

More tutoring. That’s me in the middle.

This junior high student lives by himself in our town. His dad moved to the U.S. and started a new family, and his mom lives in the village he’s from. He speaks good Mixtec, Spanish, and English, and was learning Chinese from some of our team members this past week. He indicated a desire to follow Christ and is being followed up on by one of our apprentices.