Missions Preparation

At Mission Discovery we spend a lot of time thinking about training and doing training for team leaders who bring group on our projects.

We ask ever leader who brings a group on a Mission Discovery trip to come to a weekend training event we host here in Nashville called Pre-Field Orientation or PFO for short. It is an experiential training weekend, in that we experience through activities what we want to communicate about culture, language learning and telling the story of God's love.

When a youth group or an adult group finally arrives in Mexico for their project or any other MisDis project, we hope that the leader we prepared has prepared his team with the same or similar experiences we provided in training. But some don't prepare the team. Our mission camps are 50 to 175 participants in size each week. There are about 4 to 7 church groups represented in those numbers each week. We can spot the team that is unprepared within 24 hours.

Two summers ago a team leader, who happened to be a medical doctor, was giving me the Opra head shake through the passenger window of my truck. He complained about how hot the bus ride was on the 45 minute trip into Reynosa, Mexico from the U.S. I know they are customers, and I do treat you (them) like customers and appreciate so much them coming with Mission Discovery and I don't like to pass an opportunity to teach when given one. "Doc, look over your shoulder, see that family living in the cardboard shack with no electricity or running water? What do you think they think of the heat today? I would love to take the heat away from you but I don't have that ability...it's a gift from God." I asked him if the heat was "evil." He said "no" so we assumed it was a gift from God according to James 1:12-f.

Our training revolves around three major headings I learned from Tim Gibson at World Servants: Be Learners, Be Servants, and Be Story Tellers. Thanks Tim for what you taught me about the simplicity of preparing a team for missions.

Here is the kicker. Even though a team is not prepared...God is going to do His work through them. I don't want anyone to miss the experience of seeing God at work. Jesus called the untrained and the misfit to His work. Recently Vanderbilt Divinity School took a good friend of mine and graduated him with an MD IV and taught him the ability to READ. What a loss, he use to be a great speaker.

At Mission Discovery be believe in training, but the kind of training that you wouldn't recognize is useful until you are journeying through your next day of activity.

While we receive the untrained, the trained are predisposed to look for God in every part of their day. They are Learners, they are servants, and they cannot contain the stories of what God is doing through them.