Want To Improve Short-Term Mission? Join Me At The Forum 2011

“Don’t worry, I’ll show you everything you need to know.” Those were the words of my pastor when I was told I would be leading the youth group on their annual short-term mission trip in 1990.

My training consisted of a shopping list for supplies and a map of where we were going. Once there, I learned how to keep locals from getting in the way of our mission, the subtleties of buying clean drinking water, and what to do when your group scares the local chickens so much they cannot lay eggs.

That was over 20 years ago and certainly many things have changed. However, too much of our short-term training is still based on a model of pray, trust God, and go!

Thankfully, through the vision of a dedicated group of leaders that included people like Roger Peterson, Wayne Sneed, and Gordy Grover, things are a lot different than they were in those early days.

In the mid 1980’s, a small group of leaders began meeting annually to try and bring a little professionalism to a then young movement called short-term mission. Over the years the group of people attending those annual gatherings became known as the Fellowship of Short-Term Mission Leaders.

I became part of the Fellowship in 2004. It has changed my life, my perspective, and my mission. There is no single event in which I participate that I find to be more important to the continued success of Adventures in Life Ministry and my mission than the annual conference held by this group.

As a leader I get a chance to interact with and fellowship with peers in my field. I can seek counsel, test ideas, and see where short-term mission is headed in the coming years. It also gives me a great chance to slow down and consider where I believe God is leading AIL Ministry in future years.

This year’s conference, The Forum 2011, will be held at Green Lake Conference Center in Green Lake, Wisconsin, October 12 – 15.

Our Keynote Speaker will be Robert Guerrero. Robert, the founder of Del Camino Network and an on field host receiver, is going to tell it like it is from someone who has received thousands of STM teams.

If you, your church, or your organization wants to improve your short-term mission, there is no better place to be. If you are a pastor, and your church is sending out short-term teams, you need to be here. If you have been wondering whether God is calling to the foreign mission field, a few days at The Forum can help you better understand that call.

Adventures in Life is better because of this conference. Please consider joining me and the Fellowship of Short-Term Mission Leaders this year at The Forum 2011.

For full details, and to register for The Forum 2011, click here!

Mission and Ministry... Is Our Approach Balanced?

You were walking through the furniture mart looking for the perfect stool. In the distance you saw one that would look great with your décor. It was the right color, the exact height you needed, and, because it was one of those do it yourself gizmos, even the price was right.

So you took the box to the cashier, paid your $39.99 and put it in the car for the drive home.

After lunch you went to work putting it together. And that’s when it hit you. No matter what you did, that stool wobbled. Because the three legs on that new stool you had just purchased were not of equal length.

This is the same problem that faces many internationally missions minded people in the field today. We are trying to make our ministry stools sit level, but the legs which support our ministry are uneven.

While in today’s world we would just return that stool and get a new one, in ministry, we need to figure out a way to make things work.

Let me explain where I am coming from.

I believe our missionary work needs to be multifaceted and balanced. Like our stool, it must have three legs that are equal, or it will not function properly.

It has become my firm conviction that as much as possible, our ministry needs to take into account not only the spiritual health of people, but their physical and economic health as well.

These are the three legs upon which our ministry stool must stand and be balanced.

It is this type of holistic ministry, that I believe holds the most promise for seeing radical transformation of peoples lives and real, faithful, sustained reconciliation with God.

Unfortunately, the church, and by extension, her missionary outreach, has been guilty of putting too much emphasis on the God leg of our stool, to the detriment of a balanced lifestyle rooted holistically in Christ.

Now, I am not arguing that we need less emphasis on the spiritual health of people with whom we have contact. I am arguing that instead of cutting that leg of our stool to match the others, we need to spend some time developing the other two legs.

We need to improve our mission and ministry so that we are able to see transformation in people's physical and economic lives, as well as, their spiritual lives.

Unfortunately, far too often this style of ministry, of seeing all areas of life as interconnected and needing God’s healing touch, is not seen as valid by many in the church today.

I serve with a pastor in Oaxaca, Mexico who had a girl die in his arms of malnutrition. When he asked his pastor friends why this happened, he was told that the work of caring for the poor was not the work of the church. We are to “Preach the Gospel. Besides, the girl was in heaven, a better place.”

I wish I could say that was an isolated response. But it is not. Today the response of many in the evangelical church is to dismiss the types of ministry and mission work that also put an emphasis on physical and economic healing in addition to spiritual healing as somehow not related to the Gospel of Christ.

We see all through the Gospel accounts that Jesus healed, and that he empowered the disciples to do so, also. We see in Acts that the early church felt it was part of their ministry to care for the poor in their communities. We also see in the prophetic call of the Old Testament that God expected His people to work and stand for economic justice.

Yet somehow, many in today’s evangelical church have decided that work on those legs of our stool is not part of our mission or ministry calling.

By neglecting these two vital parts of an effective holistic ministry model, we are effectively telling millions of people around the world that the Kingdom has not arrived for them today.

Unless and until we figure out a way to practically integrate all three areas of health, the spiritual, the economic, and the physical when we are working with people, our ministry stool will forever be like that wobbly one I mentioned earlier.

A wobbly stool is not very useful and unable to really support the fully transformed lives God desires for His people today.

Justice, Oppression, Poverty and Mission... Where Do We Stand?

What do you do when what you believe no longer seems to be orthodox?

What do you do when you have arrived at a place where it seems that if you share where you are at, you’ll be exposed, sort of like the Emperor with no clothes?

In Isaiah 58 we read... “If you do away with the yoke of oppression… and if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will shine in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.”

Years ago I was at a training event for youth pastors. The speaker, a well known Christian leader opened his presentation by saying he did not care if another kid ever came to Christ through his ministry.

You can imagine the uproar that came from the room. Here was this respected leader telling everyone there that what they thought was important, was not very important.

As the crowd readied their pitchforks, he explained.

He was saying he was not interested in getting people to pray the prayer; he was looking for people to develop deep seated long lasting relationships with Jesus. And he wanted the people who he was serving to have food on their table at night, be able to walk the streets of their neighborhood without fear of gunfire and live a life filled with hope and expectation not just for that eternal future, but for the present too.

They weren’t buying it. The Gospel is the Gospel is the Gospel. Period. And let’s not mix it up with all this social justice stuff.

Working in Oaxaca, Mexico has changed me. It has brought me face to face with such systemic evil that at times it is hard for me to even share.

Things like oppression, hunger, injustice and poverty are not just concepts I read about, they are facts of life in the corner of the world I believe God has called me. But here’s the rub, a significant number of people that support Christian missionary work do not believe working to alleviate these horrible realities is part of our Gospel calling.

I believe that justice and everything connected to it needs to be a central part of our holistic Gospel witness. But that belief puts me dangerously close to heresy in the eyes of many in the church. It also negatively impacts the finances that are needed for His work, not just in Mexico, but around the world as people look to ensure their gifts and donations are being used for "pure Gospel work."

As I have lived and served in Mexico, I have come to see the human existence as a stool supported by three legs of health. One of those legs is spiritual, one economic, and one physical. If you take out any one of these legs, the stool will collapse. If any one of those legs is over, or under developed, the stool will not function properly.

For too long, the church has only focused on developing one of these critical legs, which makes for a pretty unstable stool upon which to depend.

As I look across the landscape of ministry in Mexico generally, and in Oaxaca specifically, I see a church that has grown into maturity and is doing a good job in the spiritual health department. Sure, there are areas that need improvement, but overall, the Christian church in Mexico has arrived.

So why am I there? Because I believe that we need to strengthen the other two legs of people’s stools. Because I believe we need to spend our lives on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed!

Then our light will shine in the darkness.

Next up... Connecting economic and physical health to the Gospel.