We leave tonight to participate with our workers in Asia at the Mission11: Vision Forward conference.
The key elements of these Area conferences are prayer, vision and community.
Pray that each worker would deeply experience each one of these elements and leave refreshed and en-couraged (given fresh courage) to serve in His harvest.
We’ll give updates from our time there.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
It’s funny how the Lord can keep bringing up in conversation a topic on which you have been reflecting for some time. Talking with some fellow colleagues last night, we got on the subject of what needs new workers were voicing after their initial years in ministry. What they were hearing as they traveled around was that new workers desired community and mentoring. Many felt alone in ministry; launched out, if you will, on an exciting adventure, yet with no one to share with or talk through the joys and struggles. Many longed for spiritual input from experienced workers that would help them better navigate the journey of life and ministry.
A Mobilization Project plan is a good thing to spur us all on to praying and working towards mobilizing more workers into God’s harvest. However, that is only one of the shifts that need to occur within our World Team culture. We must re-establish community as a lived out core value, and give of our time to mentor new workers stepping into ministry. An outgrowth would be community whereby mutual mentoring would begin to occur between new and experienced workers. Maybe then, we would create a model of community more easily multiplied.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Wow, stay away from one’s blog for a few days and you can quickly lose track of the discussion. Rebecca and I just returned from the States where I stumbled on an article which piqued my interest. Normally, when I think about mentoring, I think of it in a one directional sense. A recent post from blogs.bnet.co.uk talked about more multi-directional mentoring described as:“reverse mentoring” and “group mentoring”.
In reverse mentoring, the dynamic is changed by allowing the newer member to mentor or help the more senior leader. The more senior leader gains access to information and training that might not otherwise have been available to him/her, and the newer member gains an opportunity to be immediately valued as well as to have immediate impact in the organization. In group mentoring, several upcoming leaders can be mentored at one time, and the group then serves as a community to encourage and challenge one another in leadership development. It would be interesting to hear what this looks like or might look like for some of us.
Filed under: Mentoring, Uncategorized | 12 Comments »
Is mentoring or coaching really that important? I remember attending a Leaderlink conference in the US a few years ago. One of the presenters shared this thought: “If a catalytic event (that is, a major conference or seminar) is not followed by small group processing, and then by one on one mentoring or coaching, then the impact of the catalytic event will quickly be lost in the life of the participant.” If this is true, then some how that one on one mentoring or coaching needs to be part of our outcomes from any training opportunity. I am wondering what that might look like in our WT community context, or how it ought to be worked out in practice?
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Recently I was reading the informational newsletter from the French Evangelical Federation and ran across an article by a friend, Etienne. I thought his closing illustration was an excellent follow up on what I recently wrote in Thoughts Along the Journey (Feb 2010). Let me try and “freely” translate what he wrote: “One of the elders where I pastured early in my ministry was a plumber-heating specialist. While talking with him at one point I learned about how difficult it was to find interested young people to take up this line of work. Seeing the surprised look on my face, he explained that many plumbers because of the pressing demands of work had decided to not take on any apprentices in their work. The time the plumbers gained was significant in the short term, but now they were faced with a greater difficulty: the lack of adequately trained help to second them in their work and take over for them once they retired. You don’t need to take a long time to come to the same conclusion when you look at our situation in ministry. We as well are faced with the difficulty of adequately trained (or prepared) workers to continue the ministry. And it stems from a lack of mentoring or coming alongside new workers as they enter into ministry. The mission we promote and serve is worth so much more than that of the construction business. It is imperative that we re-evaluate our priorities and take the time to come around and support/mentor those who are stepping forward to enter into ministry.”
Etienne gives us another way of understanding what it would meand to develop “missional workers”:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »
Thoughts Along The Journey 