The news sat heavy in my stomach: the weight of sadness, wishing the situation could be different.
I’d just heard that a friend’s marriage was not going to survive.
Category: finding community
My Big Dream (that Starts Small)
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared on Rebecca Hopkins’ blog, Borneo Wife, when she and her husband served in Indonesia. She now blogs from her new American home at rebeccahopkins.org .
A window in my kitchen faces our backyard. Much of my days are spent cooking and watching, washing dishes and listening, making granola and checking. The kids are often dangling or running or whooping outside, playing on our mini-playground with the zipline.
Creative Celebration: Why It Matters Overseas
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Editor’s note: When you’re far from home, celebrations can both intensify and improve that “fish out of water” feeling. Celebrating Thanksgiving overseas might make it feel more like home, richer in the new faces around the table.
How to Build Community as a Missionary Overseas
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Editor’s note: Tucked away in my family room sits a box made of exotic African wood, lugged back using precious luggage weight when my family returned from Uganda. It is one of our most beautiful possessions–not physically, but in its emotional cargo. It was fashioned by hand in the workshop of our organization as one-of-a-kind. Tucked within are loads of letters and laminated photographs of lives we loved and shared in our efforts to build community overseas.
You likely share the goal of my family: to dig in deeply enough to love well, intimately enough to change each other. To work toward the brand of enduring, life-on-life love that models God’s Body.
Choosing an Emotionally Healthy Missions Organization
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Missed our last post on Emotionally Healthy Missions? Grab it here!
When you’re headed overseas, it’s easy to underestimate the effects your organization’s health could have on the ability to thrive overseas.
As I type, I think of the friend who called me recently, voice throaty with tears, as she discussed their lack of ability to care for her after stepping off the field.
Or I remember my conversation with the missionary couple who felt they had no option but to leave their organization once they’re on the field.
Sarah’s Story: Dashed
My Story: Need for One Another
Reading Time: 4 minutes
On Go. Serve. Love, we talk a lot about strategies to reach the 4.13 billion unreached.
This month, we’re sharing stories from Avant Ministries, which since 1892 has focused on planting and developing the church in unreached areas of the world.
Through church planting, church support ministries, media, education, camp and business, Avant hopes to establish churches among the unreached: mature, nationally-led churches that desire to plant more churches, first in their own city, and then all over the world.
Cultural Iceberg: Collectivist vs. Individualistic Societies
Reading Time: 8 minutes
We’re excited to welcome back Sheri of Engineering Ministries International for her final post of her invaluable three-part series on “cultural icebergs”–this time, evaluating collectivist vs. individualist societies.
EMI mobilizes architects, engineers, construction managers, and other design professionals–including those through an incredible internship program–to provide design services for those helping the poor. We’re talking water projects, hospitals, schools, orphanages, you name it. Meanwhile, they raise up disciples and trained professionals in-country.
Snapshots of North American Missions: Urbana 2019
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Go. Serve. Love and its parent organization, Mission Data International, showed up a week and a half ago at Urbana 2019.
Urbana’s an Intervarsity-sponsored “catalytic event bringing together a diverse mix of college and graduate students, faculty, recent graduates, pastors, church and ministry leaders, missions organizations and schools.”
He Said/She Said/You Say? “Should I Go Overseas with an Organization?”
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Part II: The “NOPE” Side of the Argument (and what not to do either way)
Missed Part I, the “yep” side? Grab it here.
Going overseas independently has its benefits–like autonomy, neutrality from agencies’ agendas, and flexibility. What do you need to know if you’re thinking in this direction? Don’t miss these important thoughts. I chose to go the independent route because I felt that I already had (or was able to find) all of the services of a missions agency from other sources at a fraction of the cost. But there are several advantages for being associated with a missions agency, including the following: