Classroom Training, Village "M" Work, and Prayer

It seems like yesterday I was sitting down to express all that has been going on in the training here at To Every Tribe. Thank you for your partnership in this mission.  You are as much a part of this training and work as we are.  But here it is a month later and my brain is brimming with all the classroom training and continuing church planting work in Mexico that has been done in the last four weeks.  I will separate the blog into CLASSROOM TRAINING, VILLAGE "M" WORK, and PRAYER.

CLASSROOM TRAINING 
(equivalent to 18 classroom credits, plus a week in Mexico every month)

What a blessing to be able to learn from instructors who know the word of God and know that it all points and leads us to worship and adoration of Jesus as King, Lord and Savior.  These men are humble and know that if this doesn't lead to knowing Christ in a deeper more intimate relationship resulting in more love and awe for our God and a love for people, it is worthless.

Classroom time

We had a full week of studying the mission of God in Acts.  What an amazing book.  I never studied it this in depth and when I see God's missional purpose expanding, growing, and widening through the preaching and teaching of the Word of God in Acts,  I was wowed by His mission,  the continuation of "all that Jesus began to do and teach" (Acts 1:1).  Jesus was at work then and He is at work now.  What fuel this is for the fire of missions, disciple making, and church planting right where we are and to the ends of the earth!

We also had a full week of Culture Index with Steve Leston.  Steve is an incredible instructor who taught on individual traits- the ways you engage the world and learning styles- the ways you receive information from the world.  It was incredible to see how different people are with the way they engage the world and learn.  I saw how valuable this information is in team setting, even elder and deacon settings.  For example, some people tend to be more "seeing the world at 10,000 feet, big picture, let's get going," type of people.  They are more of a "Ready, fire, aim" person.  Other people tend to be more "seeing every blade of grass, time to process, calculating,".  They are more of a  "Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, rest, aim, aim" person.  I tend to be a spreadsheet loving aimer.

Team training

The reality is that when you work in teams, it's possible to discount certain people because of their traits.  I noticed that when we are planning strategy for our Mexico village, I am shocked when some in the group want to "get out there and see what happens".  This is utterly foolish in my mind and I can tend to disregard their input because of that.  I feel more comfortable analyzing and strategizing but may never get to the point of pulling the trigger and moving forward.  God has uniquely wired each of us and we can use this to:

1. Know our strengths and weaknesses individually
2. Understand where each person leans and how they learn
3. Use our individual traits to equip the team to work in its strengths and shore up its weaknesses

We realize that this is just observation of learning styles and traits.  This is a great tool but can be a horrible master.  The Word of God is our authority with regard to defining who we are.  So if we take this too far and say "because I am a big picture person, I don't have to worry about details" we are turning observations into interpretations and now the traits are the authority over us.  It was a good caution as we worked through this in our Mexico groups. What a great and exciting thing it is to start working out and thinking about team dynamics before we are out in the mission field full time and have so many other pressures on us!  A true blessing!

The week before we left for Mexico was spent going over the biblical theology of missions.  This helped us see what the Bible says about missions from Genesis to Revelation.  It really blew me away how right from the first chapter in Genesis God is beginning to reveal His plan of redemption.  It isn't something that comes out of left field in Matthew 28:18-20, it's written as a continuous, growing thread throughout the entire Bible.  I won't give you all the class notes but it has been a great time seeing how the Bible isn't 66 independent books put together, or even Old Testament and New Testament.  It is one story, pointing to one Man, who did everything we couldn't do!

Beyond this, we continue to have great prayer times, chapel together, and small groups, along with staff mentoring.

Clara and Easton helping out in Chapel

This brings all of the knowledge into the practical and worshipful reality of walking with Christ in community every day.  I have to remind myself of the gospel every day.  I am not sufficient for anything today.  I need Jesus every day.  Not for what He gives, but for who He is.

Trip to Village "M"

Praying before we leave for Mexico

I just got back from our four day trip to village "M".  Every time I think about the opportunity to go and continue the church planting work in "M" I am amazed.  We get the privilege to learn all about the bible, who Jesus is, and gain a ton of valuable tools that we can use for long term mission work.  But we get to do that work now.  We are learning and doing at the same time.  That makes everything so real and immediately practical.

On our way south!

My heart has been growing for village "M" even since the last trip.  In between trips and classes we are working in our teams to identify the greatest needs of our village, how we can pour out love to them, and disciple the three known Christians in the small fishing village.  

Morning at "M"

We had Gary Weaver, the Field Training Director, with us to interpret.  We are still actively (though not as active as I should be) learning Espanol.  We had dinner with a couple "N" and "E" the first night. (Just a clarification here.  I only use first letters not because there is any danger to the people we go to, but as an extra precaution for us as we travel in difficult areas.  It is not always necessary, but is always good practice).  Gary was able to have a good conversation with "N" and "E" about who Jesus really is.  We were able to visit some of the 75 or so people in the village over our four day trip.  A privilege for me was to lead the bible study for "R" and "A" with their daughter.  We had given some homework on a passage of scripture from Luke 5:1-11.  With the teaching on observations last month, we continued to build on the homework we left for them. 

  I love this picture because it reminds me of "M" and the only way anything can happen in this village, through prayer.

 It was exciting to see the husband "R" get excited about the observations they had made.  They started to see who Jesus was.  It was cool to see that "R" was really learning not so much from us, but from his own observations and talking them through to a logical conclusion. Though I realized that a Bible study with a translator is difficult and can be slow, (which makes me want to learn Spanish so much more) it is the living and active words of God that open peoples eyes and His Spirit that helps them understand.  So cool!  We were able to have another bible study the following night and it was rich again.  It is hard to strain for words you recognize in Spanish while people are talking or you try to speak but I've found that people are so forgiving if you mess up trying some word or phrase and that gestures and body language speak volumes!  "R" and his wife continue to ask us to stay longer and teach more to them.  I would love to do that and at the same time it's great to have them start to see that they don't need us to teach them all the time.  As we learn, we teach them and hopefully they will be able to start sharing with those in the village.    

FAMILY LIFE

Brita will be doing a post on family life soon. So stay tuned!

Friends over for a movie

PRAISE/PRAYER

• We are so thankful to be down here learning so many things!  Please pray my head doesn't explode or get buried in all the homework.
• Praise for another opportunity to go to Village "M" and see the growth and excitement of "R".  Please pray for all the people in the village who have no church close and live on very little.
• Praise that Brita is getting the homeschool routine down and settling into the new normal.
• Praise that the kids are making new friends here. Please pray that we would hold these relationships loosely.  One of Dan's really good friends will be going back to southern Mexico in a week or so.
•  Praise that our monthly support is getting closer to our goal.  We are now at 71%.  
• Prayer for homesickness twinges.  We miss our friends and family a lot. 
• Pray that we would continue to connect at our new church.

We are so thankful for each and every one of you!  This is exciting to share this mission together!  Please email us at joshandbrita@gmail.com with any prayer requests you have or just to say hi.  We would love to hear from you!

Evie, Nutty and Nut say goodbye!

At Home Thursday 10:30 am

Just a normal day at home for the kids and me. 

Clara has been able to finish her school work so fast lately that she is already free to play. 

Dan is reading a biography on C.S. Lewis and Paul is reading The Sword in the Tree by Clyde Robert Bulla.  

Evie is having fun with her duckies.

 

And the "dishwasher" is running ;) and I am hoping to get a shower at some point today!  

 Josh is in class.  At noon we have Ekklesea which is our small group. Then back to class for Josh, more school for the kids, a nap for Evie, and some house work for me. We are also gearing up for Josh's second trip across the border. He is hoping to find a small battery operated fan because he had trouble sleeping in the heat last time. We northerners can be pretty wimpy ;) 

Brita,

 for the McKenzie Clan

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