First Trip to Village "M"

Team M (Me, Dale, Natalia, David, Kyle, and Shaye who didn't go this trip)
Natalia and I are the only first year trainees on our team
Seriously this WAS the best shot of the team 

I am sitting here just amazed at the last 4 days!  I will try to give you a brief overview of this past week.  (Huge side note- the previous week we had Russ Kennedy speak with us for a whole week on the theology of the heart.  It was an incredible class and really wonderful to look into the Bible to see what God says about our heart, not the "thing" inside of us but our beliefs and wants that shape our world view.  I am still processing all that was in there for me.)

Monday:
We were supposed to have classes until noon and then head off to our villages.  With hurricane Ingrid making landfall just south of the villages we were going to in Mexico that morning, it was decided that we should wait until Tuesday morning to see what the hurricane would do and how bad the rain would be.  So we shifted gears and had a full day of class studying Acts in mission.  There is always work to be done here and never an afternoon to be wasted.

Tuesday:
We met at the suburbans and after looking at the reports and a call to someone close to the area, it was decided to go.  So our team of five loaded up the red suburban and headed off to village M (for safety we won't say the names of the villages we go to or the real names of the people we visit with). 
I can't say exactly where we went, but through surprisingly dry conditions (except for a portion of the road) we made it safely to village M.

 

                   

We arrived and began cleaning the house we are able to sleep in while we are in M.  It is awesome to have a place to sleep that isn't in tents. 

 

We are continuing the church planting work started years ago.  There are two Christians in the village we know of for sure.  There is no church for them to go to.  Can you imagine that?  We have trouble picking the church we like the best.  They don't have that choice in their area. 

 

So the rest of Tuesday the second year students took us around the village meeting those who were out and about.  We are blessed to have Natalia with us on our team.  She is a fluent Spanish speaker and does most of the translating for us.  It was great to meet with different people and hear that the hurricane didn't do any damage to their houses or boats.  Most of the houses are made of wood or concrete with a sheet metal roof and approximately 15'x20' in dimension.

We ate with "Roger" and "Abby" (again, not their real names if you couldn't tell) the first night and had a delicious meal.  They are the known believers in the village and it was great and hard to see that they desperately wanted more teaching from the bible.  They want to know more about Jesus and be able to share with their neighbors when they come to them.  Abby talked about how the village seems to come to her when there is a crisis and she wants to know how to help them with more than just the immediate calamity.  She and Roger are both hungry for teaching. 

 We got back to our house at dark and used our headlamps since there wasn't any electricity.  I must have caught a flu bug because that evening I spent the next 3-4 hours really sick outside.  But God was gracious to me and the next day I was ready to go(a little slower than normal though).

Wednesday:
After normal chores getting ready for the day and devotions we again set off to visit more people.  It was great to be able to visit with some of the people the second year students hadn't seen since last May.  It seemed like half of the conversations turned to spiritual things and it was good to know there is interest in the gospel.  This is a fishing village and most of the people survive by fishing.  The fishing hasn't been very good the last few years and most are hoping the hurricane will help bring more fish closer to shore. 

I had the privilege to pray for "Oliver".  We were able to talk with him for quite a while about life and what it means to follow Jesus.  He knows some things about God and Jesus and it will be exciting to pour into him and the other people in the village over the next 8 months.

We ate dinner with Roger and Abby again that night.  In the span of a day they became more open with us and we also started conversing more casually, using our translator when we could, or if they were in conversation with someone else we would communicate with words and gestures and pointing and laughing.  It made me want to dive into Spanish (and charades) all the more!

Finally, after dinner we sat down with Roger and Abby for a bible study.  We used some of the many awesome tools we are learning at school.  We showed them in a practical way how making simple observations of the text of scripture can really bring out great insight and understanding of the meaning in the text.  I wish I could have captured how, just like us in school weeks before, they were starting to see how observations of who, what, where, repeated words, and so on really help us understand what the writer was trying to convey.  They asked great questions and the interaction was so good!  Natalia was exhausted but she did great and our first study was a big success.  We left them with some homework and another text to study while we are gone.  God was so good to us.

Thank you all so much for the prayer during the week.  It is awesome to be a part of the ongoing church planting work here and know that your prayers and support are reaching people in Mexico.  What a privilege to do this with you all!

Praise:

• The hurricane didn't have any effect here in Los Fresnos or in our village!
• We had a fruitful first trip into Mexico.
• We are here.  It still seems crazy!

Prayer:

• Please pray we can continue to disciple the very few believers in village "M".
• Pray that we can give an opportunity for the whole village to hear the gospel.
• Pray I will be able to keep up with the mounting assignments and reading we have! Yikes!
• Pray Brita and the kids will continue to firm up their homeschool routine and daily living here.  
• Pray we continue to raise financial support.  We are currently at 65% of our monthly goal for living expenses. 
• God would be glorified and worshiped through all of this!

                                                                          

Dan's Birthday

I have been meaning to post some pictures of Dan's 11th birthday.  We went to the zoo in Brownsville, had take out from a really yummy taco place here in Los Fresnos, and had pie and ice cream for dessert. 

 

 

September 7th was a fun day!

First Trip to Mexico- *updated

Tomorrow afternoon the five teams of trainees and some of their family members will leave for a three day trip to Mexico. They will be continuing the ongoing church planting work in five different villages in North Eastern Mexico. Josh's team will be going to village "ML". It  usually takes 3-4 hours to drive to village ML but is less than 100 miles from the border of Mexico... but as you may know, there could be significant rain along the way.  All of the villages are quite a bit north of where the storm is predicted to make landfall. 

Hurricane Ingrid 

Please pray that:

•the teams are able to share the gospel in a real and life changing way

•God would be glorified

• all of the teams will be able to make it to their villages, and home again, safely

  Update-

Ingrid has now been downgraded to a tropical storm. However, it is effecting all of the villages that the teams were planning to go to today. The decision was made this morning to delay going until tomorrow, later this week or possibly even next week.  

Thank you so much for your prayers!  Please continue to pray for wisdom for when to go and for the people of Mexico who are receiving 25 inches of rain, strong winds, and flooding. 

Orientation and first week!

Well the first two weeks of school are over!  What a whirlwind of information and activity!  It was so great to have Brita and the other wives there for the morning sessions the first week of school.  I wanted to highlight a few of the things we will be learning here at the Center for Pioneer Church Planting(CPCP).

Probably one of the biggest truths that was covered numerous times was the fact that the GREATEST mission field we have is our own heart!  We need to preach the gospel to ourselves every day.  This is so true!  If we want to reach people next door or plant churches in a village with no opportunity to hear the gospel, we need to let God, through the gospel of Jesus, change our hearts.  The gospel, and Jesus Himself, is the aim of our worship, the object of our affections and the source of anything good that can flow out of my heart and life.

I wanted to give you a flavor of what we will be doing here and how the first week went.  I was going to post the training outcomes for our time here, (and in fact I will at the end of the blog for those who care to read about it.  It's a tall order and packs a lot into two years of training) but instead I will share this past week of school.

It was a week called Exposition in Missions and was a study of expository preaching through inductive bible study.  It was also a survey of the book of Matthew at the same time.  I was very nervous for the start of this class since;

1. I haven't been in school in 11 years
2. I had no experience in exposition or really even knew what it meant,
3. I received my first assignment a week before school started and had to present it the second day of class!  I realized right then that I wasn't going to be living in my comfortable world of spreadsheets and numbers anymore!

And so we were taught straight from the fire hose for four days.  We learned and applied inductive bible study skills to observe, interpret, and apply our assigned sections of Matthew while learning all about observing the text, letting scripture interpret itself, understanding the historical background, proper rules of grammar, keeping texts within the immediate context, and an awareness of its place in the section of scripture or book of the bible.

There is so much more we have been learning about studying the scriptures but I won't bore you with all my notes.  All I can say is 8 hours of class time five days a week on challenging subjects makes  me so exhausted at the end of the day.  But this isn't academic!  This has made me see how incredible God is to give us His words!  There are no accidents in the bible and He has orchestrated it all to point to Jesus and declare Him as the One who redeems and saves those who believe in Him.  There is so much gold in the bible and it makes my heart leap and worship Him!

It's so humbling to go from a job you loved and was good at, to something that is so unfamiliar and hard to get at first.  But this is part of what has been burning on our hearts for the last few years.  We GET TO study and learn and glean how to be missionaries and we get to do missions work in Mexico! I will post more about that later but our first trip will be September 16th.

Brita will be posting on our family life too but it has been awesome to be here and a challenge to figure out our new surrounding and a new way of life.  So here are a few pictures from orientation.  We love you all and are so thankful for your partnership in the mission to the nations! 

                                    



      This is the first day of orientation. 

 

 

 

 

Playing Frisbee golf blindfolded in tall Texas grass is "challenging"

 

 Wondering what we have gotten into with a team building activity in the rain. 

A team building day at the beach!

 

 

TRAINING OUTCOMES 

Have developed an understanding and strategy of church planting, based on the seven-stage model:  

1. Before You Go: forming, preparing and launching the team

2. Language and Culture Acquisition: Reach a level of proficiency in the

3. Evangelism: Preaching the Gospel to groups and individuals

4. Discipleship: Discipling believers while working toward gathering those believers into a body

5. Gather Believers: Developing the body of believers

6. Leadership Development: Empowering and Installing leaders in reproduction who are themselves beginning the early stages of their own reproduction

7. Reproduction and Movement: Continue to lead and guide the church in reproducing itself and planting other churches  

Know, value, and demonstrate expositional preaching/teaching (getting it right), redemptive historical hermeneutics Be able to communicate and apply the Bible and its One Story of Jesus expositionally in a cross-cultural way via:  

Biblical theology, Genesis-to-Revelation, the One Story of the Bible in Jesus

Oral Bible-storying and story-crafting  Have developed an understanding of:   The Bible, history, mission, discipleship, church, and worldview as Christocentric and eschatological in orientation

 The Bible as Biblical theological in its progressive revelation of redemption

 The Bible as missional

 Christ and the Incarnation as "on mission"

 God as a missional God

 The Church as a missionary people
 
Life as a mission activity

The world as a mission field  

Be able to demonstrate, articulate, and communicate a clear biblical missiology, ecclesiology, ethnography, church-planting methodology, and philosophy driven by an observable desire and vision for Christ’s name globally

Be able to demonstrate a skill set for pioneer missionary work through:  
Preaching and teaching skills aimed at church planting in remote areas of the world with limited technology

 An initiative and entrepreneurial spirit by:  
o being creative in hard-to-get-to places

o being adaptive in an extreme cultural context

o being proficient in persevering and enduring

o being willing to get dirty and get wet and eat anything (except humans)

 Survival skills for living in remote areas of the world

 Diplomacy skills in lands and people groups cross-cultural

 Survival skills for staying alive in hostile areas of the world, especially under intense spiritual opposition

 Perception cross-culture among unreached people groups for redemptive analogies

 Linguistic ability in order to communicate the gospel and to be incarnational cross-culturally

 An ability for survival under intense spiritual opposition

 An ability for living long periods of time with a TEAM community in remote isolation within extreme cultural contexts

 An ability to work toward long-term career-like vocational pioneer church planting in extreme cross-cultural contexts.

This ability is characterized by:  
o tough flexibility with team members aimed at team duplication

o the cultivation of a reproducible church planting ministry
with exit plans  
 o the development of reproducible mentoring and cross-training
in the lives of younger missionaries  
 o exploratory and reconnaissance skills for next church planting effort

　

 A proficiency in incarnational ministry.

Incarnational ministry means:  
o leaving home culture and comfort zone and attempting to live in the culture of those they want to reach  

o carefully observing and seeking to understand the native culture in which they minister and, as much as is humanly and biblically possible, conforming themselves to that culture  

o humbling ourselves and living as servants of others in their host culture

o seeking to enter personally into the lives of people and establishing meaningful personal relationships that become the basis of evangelism and disciple-making  

o seeking to live out and embody the essence of the gospel among those to whom they minister   Living out the motto of Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23:
 "For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them…I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings."

 A willingness and ability to live with a warfare mentality, doing whatever it takes and making the necessary sacrifices for the sake of the gospel.

 An ability to work together as a Team in remote areas of the world.

The CPCP graduate will be able to:  
o Engage in evangelistic and discipleship ministry as a team

o Work proficiently in collaboration

o Develop team leaders

o Communicate cross-culturally in working with a translator.

This skill set includes:  
· Preaching

· Teaching

· Story-telling

· Conversation

· Diplomacy

o Recognize each team member’s spiritual gifting

o Aim at the completeness and maturity of the team

o Utilize in ways that best match the particular gifts

o Communicate, clarify, and carry out functions and roles within the team with a view toward the success as a team and valuing team members:  
· Love for one another

· Mutual submission

· Esteeming others better than oneself

· Putting another’s interest ahead of oneself

· Always ready to serve one another



 Display, cultivate, and consistently articulate an attitude of submission toward ministry  leaders through obedience-oriented training

　
Demonstrate administration abilities:

o Crafting a memorandum of understanding for the team

o Vision and Strategy development and articulation by the team

o Perpetual evaluation and assessment of team ministry, strategy and vision

 Organize and lead team gatherings and meetings:  
o Worship

o Devotions

o Regular team meetings

o Regular prayer meetings

 Demonstrate an ability to deal with team conflicts through biblical and spiritual conflict resolution

 Utilize various team member’s gifts to effectively carry out the team’s vision and each team will conduct weekly team worship meetings on Thursday mornings  
 Christ-like character, characterized by biblical leadership (deacon/elder-like) qualifications, apply the Bible to all of life, and able to shepherd, mentor, and model for others (the heart is the biggest mission)

A love for the local church

A love for the Rio Grande Valley and its communities

The demonstration of an ability to put together a strategic plan and organizational development for pioneer church planting ministry

The demonstration of a clear understanding of and commitment to unreached and unengaged people groups

A strong relationship with the sending church, and be able to articulate the role of the sending church in mission

A support structure for families working and living in teams

Cross-cultural disciplines such as ethnography and linguistics