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;
- I haven't been in school in 11 years
- I had no experience in exposition or really even knew what it meant,
- 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!
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
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