LeakeSpeak

In my last post, I described a couple of strategic discussions GFM staff would be having on our annual staff retreat. Here is the current result of the questions we asked and the subsequent discussions:

How can GFM more effectively disciple those who are part of our body?
We’re not making any large shifts in response to this question, but some positive incremental changes are taking place. Most significantly, our staff has a greater focus this year on the need for good discipleship in the context of relationships. I think we are gradually realizing that programs don’t necessarily produce good disciples, discipleship does. This doesn’t mean that programs can’t produce good disciples, but in order to do so they must incorporate effective relational discipleship.

In the long run, we would like to see every person who is a student, staff member, or apprentice with GFM being discipled in a one-on-one relationship with someone else. This is difficult for us right now, because some of those who would be good disciplers are tied up with other responsibilities (such as learning Spanish), and we are stretched thin overall. For this year, we figured out who is available to disciple others, and then we encouraged each staff member and apprentice to 1) seek out a relationship with someone who will commit to discipling them and/or 2) to set up a regular accountability group with two or three people. We have all done this, and the result is that far more focused discipleship will be taking place this year.

What should be the relationship between the long-term (church planting) and the short-term (mission trips, summer internships, etc.) work?
The outcome of this discussion was interesting. We are now realizing that, with our current strategy, it’s difficult for every mission trip we host to significantly augment the long-term church planting work. Mission trip outreaches in our town are able to serve people in practical ways and help the image of our Mexican non-profit organization, but we are worried that hosting so many trips in our town could also begin to hurt the work due to the presence of so many foreigners year after year. Mission trip outreaches here are able to make new contacts for our church planting team (CPT), but we are also seeing that our CPT is really busy with the relationships they already have and not able to effectively follow up on very many new contacts.

What we are now going to try and do is let the church planting work play a greater role in deciding what outreaches happen on mission trips. If the CPT says a certain outreach in our town would help them, that’s what the mission trip team will do. If CPT doesn’t really need anything at the time of the outreach, then we will take the mission trip team to a village in our area, rather than increasing the foreign presence in our town without providing a definite benefit to the church planting work. We love exposing people to mission work through mission trips, and in the villages they will be able to serve in practical ways while having a more neutral impact on the long-term work. We have plenty of experience taking mission trip teams to villages, because for years that’s always what we did with them. We find that some mission trip teams are happy to serve GFM by helping out with different projects at our base, so we are planning on making that more of an option as well.

Here are the different types of mission trips that may now happen with GFM:

1. CPT asks for an outreach in our town, so the mission trip team digs a well or puts on a medical clinic or teaches an English class or does anything that the CPT requests.
2. The team goes out to a village and coordinates with the government to provide some kind of service there. Such outreaches could include things like providing a medical clinic, teaching an English class, or putting on a community health program for kids. Though it is no secret we are Christians, these outreaches would be done under the name of our Mexican non-profit organization, rather than under the name of a church or mission group.
3. The team goes out to a village and comes under the authority of a Christian church there, serving them in any way they request.
4. The team stays at our GFM base and helps out with any work projects we may have going on at the time.

As always, all mission trips will continue to include two days of training at our base on the front end of the trip, and a debrief day at the end of the trip. We hope these new options will allow us to continue to expose people to mission work among the least-reached, while also more effectively serving the needs of the long-term work.

GFM has been in constant flux since its earliest days. This is the way it should be. We change because we learn, so the day we stop changing is the day we start dying. Our mission remains the same:

Global Frontier Missions is a kingdom-minded community dedicated to mobilize, train, and multiply disciples and churches to meet the physical and spiritual needs of the least reached people groups throughout the world.

Our strategy for accomplishing the mission changes as we seek to fulfill the mission as effectively as possible. Striving for better ways to multiply disciples led to our monumental shift a year and a half ago where we stopped working in villages and started focusing our energies on the market town where we live.

For the next week we will be on our annual staff retreat, and we have a couple of significant issues on the agenda for discussion. The outcome of these discussions may well be more big changes for GFM. Here are the issues with which we will be wrestling:

1. At the heart of the Great Commission is one simple command: “make disciples”. Those who know GFM know we are a very program-driven organization–Mission Training School, summer internships, mission trips, etc. The difficulty is that programs can be big beasts to feed that make it hard to find time for relational discipleship. On the retreat, we will be discussing what true, relational discipleship looks like. We are asking ourselves whether dedicating so much energy to programs has been misguided, or whether it is possible to effectively make disciples in the context of our programs. Those are sure to be interesting discussions with all our staff and apprentices weighing in, and I can’t possibly predict what will be the outcome of them.
2. Another intriguing topic on the retreat agenda is what should be the relationship between our short-term work (mobilization branch) and our long-term work (church planting branch). Our philosophy has always been that our short-term work, consisting of mission trips, summer internships, and Mission Training School, should fit into and augment the long-term church planting work. The two reasons we have always had our short-term programs are to help the long-term work and to mobilize people to Great Commission service among the least-reached. The short-term programs continue to be great mobilization tools; that would be hard to deny. The question is whether, with our new focus on our market town, those programs are still an aid to the long-term church planting or if they could actually hinder it. We are seeing plenty of good things come from the programs, but we are also increasingly concerned about the impact of such a strong, visible foreign presence in our town of about 20,000. The questions on the table will be if short-term and long-term can work together, what should be their relationship if they can, or what should we do about it if they cannot. This, too, promises to be a lively discussion.

I’ll try and blog some about our developing thinking on these topics. Stay tuned!

Grant and Jenn, our directors, are over in Thailand this summer with a handful of interns. They are scouting things out for future GFM expansion to Thailand. If you want to hear more about what is going on over there, you can check out Jenn’s blog and Zach’s blog.

This summer, we have an artistically-inclined guy we have set to work making daily highlight videos of our mission trips. He is uploading them to GFM’s new YouTube channel, which can be accessed via globalfrontiermissions.com/videos. Check it out! The videos are pretty neat and will give you a better feel of what summers are like down here.

During the recent mission trip we hosted, we recognized our incoming church planting apprentices and asked the mission trip teams to be praying for them. They will begin their apprenticeships in late April and serve with our team through August of 2009, with the option of becoming full-time staff members after that. Will you please be praying for them, too, as they dive into language learning later this spring and summer? Here they are in the photo below:

(left to right) J.C., Nick, Tasha, Tucker, (me), Liz

Want to know how to become a GFM church planting apprentice? Click here.

• From Pam: Church planting team gets to suck juice from ant booties as a special treat
• From David and Rhonda: Update and photos from March mission trips and other recent events
• From Jon and Rachel: This couple who will be mission training school students in September have a very interesting blog going tracking their journey to and early time in Mexico. Lots of photos and interesting tidbits.

Enjoy!

GFM is looking for a few guys who would like to have an adventurous summer serving God on the foreign mission field.  Do you know a solid Christian guy between the ages of 18 to 25 who would be interested in joining us this summer?  Are you one yourself?  Anyone interested can check out the summer internship pages on the GFM website to get more information.

Missions Extreme interns get a great taste of “real life” missions as they work alongside our church planting team for the summer, doing the types of things our team does throughout the year (some of the stuff I write about on this blog).  It’s a great opportunity for lots of interaction with the local people while being mentored by full time field missionaries.

Global Adventures interns have a blast helping us host teams that come down for 10-day mission trips.  They get to make lasting investments in the lives of the trip participants, while also having plenty of interaction with the locals during outreaches.

A summer internship was how Erin and I first got involved with GFM 6.5 years ago, and I have now been overseeing them for the past 3 years.  I can confidently say that for many people they are absolutely life-changing experiences.

We still have a couple of slots available for girls, too, but those ones are going fast.  If you know anyone who would be a good candidate, send them our way!

I mentioned a while back that the previous weeks had been some of the most difficult I had had in a long time.  Things have actually not gotten any easier since then, but that’s a story for another time.  One of the difficult things we went through a few weeks back was having to dismiss two of our mission training school students.  I was not very directly involved in that situation, but I learned a lot by watching how the leaders around me handled it.  Even though it’s older news now, I have wanted to come back to it so I could make a couple of comments.

The issue didn’t seem like a big deal in the beginning.  We have rules against guys and girls getting into romantic relationships just for the seven months they’re going through our mission training school.  This is so they can devote themselves to ministry and to spiritual growth.  We had a guy and a girl who began to break some of those rules - being alone one-on-one, communicating via e-mail and instant messanger, etc.  I am going to share a couple of Scripture passages dealing with the confrontation of sin here, so that you can look at them as you follow the process that happened with these two students:

“If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you.  If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.  But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’  If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

Matthew 18:15-17

My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.

James 5:19,20

When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.

1 Corinthians 5:4,5

A couple of the guy students saw their brother getting into sin with the young lady by breaking the relationship rules, so they went and confronted him on it.  They did not go to anyone else; they handled it themselves.

The guy did not repent.  Leadership the rules being broken and also found out those two students had confronted the guy with no change.  So a couple members of leadership then went to the guy and the girl, confronted their sin, warned them of the danger of rebellion (the Bible puts this sin on the same level as witchcraft in 1 Samuel 15:23), and called them to repent.  This couple was taking advantage of some gray areas in the rules to deepen their romantic involvement, so leadership made those gray areas black and white by saying, “You can’t do this, this, or this anymore.”

The rule breaking continued.  The couple was caught doing the “this, this, or this” they had been told they couldn’t do.  At this point, leadership took the confrontation to the third and final level.  This meant bringing the couple before the church, which in our context was the entire student body.  The couple was called out in front of the student body, their sin was rebuked, and they were told that if they rebelled again they would be asked to leave the school.

In the days following that third and final confrontation, the couple was once more caught in several instances of doing precisely the things they were told were against the rules.  We had no choice but to ask them to leave the school.  I was in the meeting where this news was broken to the couple, and I was powerfully impacted to see how much love leadership exhibited, the tears they shed, and the way they pled with these two students to repent of their rebellion.  Leadership’s goal was always repentance, and never anything else.  There was no vengeance on their part, only hurt.

Immediately following telling those two the news, we went to the student body to let them know.  The scene that followed was to me a true picture of the Body of Christ.  Upon hearing the news, the students and staff wept; there was hardly a dry eye in the room.  There was some anger and frustration, but the overwhelming feeling was one of brokenness over those two students who refused to repent.  The love for them was tangible.  A soberness about the seriousness of sin also gripped the room.  It seemed to me like a lot of us were realizing that it was only by the grace of God that we weren’t in the same boat.  It just takes a couple of sins left in darkness to lead us into a spiritual bondage that can eventually make it impossible for us to receive correction.  For maybe half and hour, the students cried, hugged one another, and huddled in small groups to pray.  Many encouraging words were spoken to leadership about their handling of the situation and their refusal to allow sin to go on unchecked in the Body.

Here are some things I learned through the whole experience:

• Not meaning to be cliché, sin is far more dangerous than I ever thought.  It’s deadly.  A few simple sins of pride and unsubmissiveness can lead a person down a road into so much bondage that it’s almost impossible for them to hear the Holy Spirit.  If you get to that point, you’re at the mercy of Satan.  The problem there is that he doesn’t have any.  Now I understand why the Bible uses such harsh language, like “hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed”.  The purpose there, of course, is so that his spirit may be saved.  Proverbs 29:1 warns of the incredible danger of not receiving a rebuke: “A man who remains stiff-necked after many rebukes will suddenly be destroyed–without remedy.”

• Christians who confront sin in others are often criticized as being unloving, but confrontation is actually the most loving thing you can do for someone in sin (see my previous point if you don’t agree).  I learned how much grace God has through the pattern He gave us in Matthew 18.  The escalating levels of rebuke give the person in sin every chance to humble themself and repent.  It takes an incredible amount of pride to be brought before the entire church Body and still not humble yourself.  The Matthew 18 model is not mean; it is a loving way of trying everything possible to alert the sinner to grave danger.

• It’s all about the heart.  You could argue that the outward acts of the two students who were dismissed were somewhat trivial.  We have dealt with “worse” sins at different times committed by students who have stayed.  The problem had much less to do with their visible actions and everything to do with the pride and rebellion in their hearts.

I think most of us would agree that the rebuking of sin and church discipline is under-applied in much of the Western church.  But why is that the case, if sin is so incredibly deadly?  Is it because we don’t understand the true power of sin?  Or could it be that we fear man more than we fear God?  Whatever the cause, I hear God calling us back to a practice that was commonplace in the Bible.  Will we love our brothers and sisters enough to do it?

I am often wanting to put little tidbits on this blog but don’t get the chance to.  Tonight, Erin is at a prayer/worship meeting, and I am at home listening for the kids.  I think Erin wanted me to stay up and wait for her, which means I have some time on my hands.  So we’ll see what all I get to.  Here’s one:

Some of our mission training school students this year have blogs, so Grant recently put a page on the GFM website with links to them.  If you’re a friend of GFM or interested in our ministry for whatever reason, you may enjoy hearing what some of our students have to say.

Spouses and apprentices included, we have 13 people on our GFM staff right now.  Language learning is always one of the biggest challenges for any cross-cultural missionary, and it certainly doesn’t happen by accident.  We have recognized the need to take an active role in the language learning of our staff.  Over the past several years, we have been developing ways to help them learn Spanish and to hold them accountable for doing so.

In the past year, this led to the development of periodic Spanish evaluations.  Each staff member is evaluated once every 4 months, until he or she has reached Level 3 or higher on the LAMP language/culture scale.  The idea behind the evaluations is to give us a regular check of each team member’s Spanish ability.  Based on that check, we then develop a Spanish learning plan for the coming four months for each staff member.  The Spanish plan is tailored to help them in the areas they most need to work on.

So today we had our trimester evaluations.  Each staff member did several exercises and was graded on them by the Spanish committee.  The Spanish committee was made up of Grant and Jenn Haynes (our directors), a local Mexican woman, and a gal from our missionary training school who is Mexican and speaks fluent Spanish.  The exercises were as follows:

• Read aloud a couple of pages from a book in Spanish.
• Give a 5-minute sermonette on one or two of the main commands that Christ gave.
• Translate, line by line, a monologue given in English into Spanish.
• Describe, in English, a dialogue in Spanish between the two Mexican women.
• Dialogue with the local Mexican woman, answering questions she asks.
• Do a written evaluation, consisting of translating English sentences in to Spanish.

Through the above exercises, each staff member is evaluated in 5 areas: Extent of vocabulary, grammar, accent, fluidity, and listening comprehension.  The Spanish committee scores the person on a 1 to 10 scale in each of the 5 areas.  This gives us a somewhat objective record that we can compare from test to test to see what sort of progress the staff member is making.  So goals are set according to the evaluations, accountability is based on the goals, and progress is measured through the ongoing evaluations.