Make Local Friends Overseas: 6 Ways

Reading Time: 4 minutes

make local friends

We had been living in Cairo about a year and a half when friends visited from Uganda. We ate at the mall food court when they asked how it has been meeting and making friends with Egyptians. I told them it’s been hard: Where do you meet people you can make friends with?

I mean, you don’t just make friends in the food court. read more

How to Build Community as a Missionary Overseas

Reading Time: 7 minutes

build community

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. read more

Choosing an Emotionally Healthy Missions Organization

Reading Time: 4 minutes

emotionally healthy

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. read more

My Story: Need for One Another

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Need for one another each otherOn 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. read more

What You Need to Know: Muslim Social Pressure

Reading Time: 7 minutes

photo courtesy of imb.org

Ramadan began this week–and there’s still time to pray along with us (c’mon! Everybody’s doing it!) for the 1.8 billion Muslims around the world. So you’ll be seeing a little more from us about these painfully unreached people groups around this third rock of ours.

That’s why we’re honored that the International Mission Board has allowed us to reprint a super-informative article about community in Islam–one of the most significant obstacles to Muslims coming to Christ. read more

2 Ways to Reach Out to a Muslim Right Where You’re At

Reading Time: 5 minutes
Muslims

photo courtesy of IMB.org

A friend who served overseas once told me a story from her recent home assignment. She’d said hello to two Muslims she’d seen walking together on her jog; she saw them in the carpool line where her girls were putting in a semester during their time in the States. She said hello to them, and welcomed them to the U.S.

One of them began crying. We only walk together, she explained. We’re too afraid to walk alone here. read more