How Uncomfortable Do the Poor Make You Feel?

This is a great article from Compassion International. Its not too long and has some helpful insights.

How Uncomfortable Do the Poor Make You Feel?

Missions Discipleship: Some Practical Ideas

I mentioned in a previous post the need I feel for a return to missions discipleship. Here are some ideas for individuals, families, and churches. These are just off of the top of my head, so if you have additional ideas, post them in the comments section:

Read missionary biographies.  Some good ones I've read are:
Through Gates of Splendor &
The Shadow of the Almighty (both about Jim & Elisabeth Elliot)
The End of the Spear (about Nate Saint)
Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret,
Lord's of the Earth (about Stan & Pat Dale)
Peace Child (about Don & Carol Richardson)
And the Word Came With Power (about Joanne Shetler)
William Carey
Jim & Betty Stam
Imprisoned in Iran (about Dan Baumann)
Bruchko (my all time favorite about Bruce Olson)
Torches of Joy (about John & Helen Dekker)
Mary Slessor
Eric Liddell
Gladys Aylward
I Dared to Call Him Father (about Bilquis Sheikh)
The Heavenly Man (about Brother Yun)
Total Abandon (about Gary and Bonnie Witherall,)
Jesus Freaks

Just a note about reading these to children.  Some of these biographies include tales of martyrdom or violence. The biographies from the Christian Heroes: Then & Now series (several have been included above), however, are good reading material for both adults and children. Hero Tales is a collection of short biographies of Christian Heroes that our children enjoyed us reading aloud to them. Many of these biographies have been made into movies.  

Go to missions conferences (ACMC, Urbana, Missions Fest, MissionExpo, Mission Connexion, etc.)  meet missionaries there, sign up to get their prayer letters.

Host a missions conference at your church or work together with other churches to host a community missions conference.

Read the book From Jerusalem to Iryan Jira to get an overview of missions history.

Visit the website for the US Center for World Missions.


Sign up for Missions Frontiers or read it online (a publication of the US Center for World Missions).

Take a Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course on line or in person if one is available in your area or other courses available through  US Center for World Missions.

Find out which missionaries your church supports and ask to get their prayer letters.

Read prayer letters during family devotions and pray for the missionaries.

Write to your missionaries.  (confession: I am really bad at this!) If they are in closed countries, make sure to get a list of guidelines for letters from them or their sending agency.

Pray regularly for missionaries: for fruitfulness, strong marriages, their children, team unity, energy, vision, wisdom, prevention of burnout, refreshment, finances, spiritual warfare issues, loneliness & isolation, language learning, adapting to culture, friends, etc.

Invite missionaries on furlough into your home.

Pray about going on a short term missions trip or better yet, visiting a long term missionary on his or her field (make sure this would not be an inconvenience first). Be sure to take your children. Did I really say that? Yes, especially if it is a third world country. Trust God for your family’s safety. It will be an experience that will change your and your kid’s perspective and priorities forever.

Advocate for missionaries in your church (see if you can post their prayer letters if they are not in closed countries, see if you can do regular "missions spotlights").

Become aware of the persecuted church. Go to Voice of the Martyrs' website and write to a prisoner.

Visit websites of various missions organizations and find out what is happening in the Global Church.

Go through prayer books like Operation World or  take your children through Window on the World.

Include "missions moments" in your children's Sunday School program or VBS.  This can be done weekly in a short segment or once a month, take the whole Sunday School time to focus on a missionary or country to learn about and pray for.  You could include items, food, songs, etc. from that country to make it more hands on. Be sure to invite visiting missionaries to come and share with the children.

Set an example to your children of giving regularly to missionaries. By supporting a missionary, you are helping to fulfill a task God has asked all of us to do -- preach the Gospel to all nations.  My husband likes to use this analogy:  We all have to clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our cars, etc.  These are tasks that need to be done.  We can either hire someone to do it for us or we can do it ourselves.  Similarly, I can't reach those in remote tribal areas of Tanzania, because God has a calling for me here in the States.  So, I am helping friends of mine fulfill the Great Commission  in that area of the world by praying for and financially supporting them in there work there.

Sponsor a child in a third world country through Compassion International or World Vision.

Put together Christmas shoe box packages through organizations like Samaritan's Purse.

Write your missionaries a thank you note.  You will both shock and bless them. We recently received one from a supporter who cut off part of the  thank you we had sent and mailed it back to us with a personal thank you. I also received an encouraging email recently from my friend, Christine. Those words of thanks and encouragement can go so far in preventing burnout, especially if the missionary is living overseas, in a foreign culture, away from family and friends.


Host a "Christmas in July" party.  Put together Christmas missionary care packages in the summertime. Contact the missionaries first to see if they would want this (don't assume).  Have them give you a wish list of items to be included in a care package.  Make sure to find out if there are any customs restrictions.  Have a Christmas tree in the lobby or some other place in the church with paper ornaments with specific items from the wish list written on them.  Be sure to include ornaments with the shipping costs written on them as shipping packages overseas can be really expensive (this is something to consider when deciding which wish list items to put on the ornaments).  Those who participate come to the party and assemble the packages.  The church I attended in high school used to do this in the context of  an international dinner.

Organize and facilitate a missions prayer meeting for missionaries in your church.


Become aware of the physical and spiritual poverty of countries the 10/40 window and  pray for that area.


Again, if anyone has additional ideas to share, please post them in the comments section.

What If . . .

A friend of mine posted the following video on Facebook earlier this week.  Given the topic of my previous post, I thought I would post it.  It is a short video well worth watching.

Missions Discipleship

If you are more concerned about the future of your church than the future of the world, then your church has no future.

We had a missionary from Thailand share in church a few weeks ago about his work with Burmese national church planters. Afterwards, our pastor passed on the above quote. He heard it a pastor's conference he attended earlier this year. The timing of this was perfect as that previous week I had been burdened by what I have observed to be a lack of "discipleship in missions" in The Church in the past 15 years or so.

Side note: This happens so often lately that it is starting to amaze me. I will be burdened almost to the point of distraction about something. I'll talk and "process" it over and over again with my husband, pray about it and then our pastor will teach about it on Sunday. It’s as if God has been preparing my heart all week for "the Good Word" (as one pastor I know would say).

Moving on: My husband and I both came to Christ around the same time, in the early eighties. We didn't know each other at that time, in fact we lived in different states. During that time period, though, there must have been a surge in foreign missions (long term) or something, because both of us had experienced a missional emphasis as part of our discipleship experiences, the courses of which looked really similar.

Long term missionaries from foreign fields would come and do presentations, we would have missions conferences every year, "prayer letters" and "prayer cards" were openly displayed in the foyer (unless of course the missionary was in a "closed" country and needed anonymity), missions was discussed and emphasized both in our youth groups and from the pulpits.

Our youth pastors told us about missionary heroes like Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, William Carey,  Mary Schlessor, Bruce Olson, and Hudson Taylor. Furthermore, they read missionary biographies and encouraged us to do the same. When we were college aged, we learned about those living in physical and spiritual poverty in the 10/40 window and were encouraged to pray for them. "Christmas in July" dinners were held to raise money for Christmas packages for missionaries over seas.

Although we both attended Conservative Baptist (CBA) churches, it wasn't just denominational missions that we were exposed to. We had missionaries from a variety of agencies at our church equally represented along with the demominational ones -- organizations like Wycliffe, Operational Mobilization, Frontiers, AIM, SEND, CAM, New Tribes, Compassion International, etc.

Both Eric and I feel that the expanded world view that missions discipleship offered us has lead to a deeper level of faith than we would have had if we not been discipled this way. We have observed this not only in our own walks with the Lord, but in the commitments of others in our former youth groups. When we look at members of our groups today, many if not most of them have strong relationships with the Lord. Some of them are serving in ministry and/or missions.

Knowing how God is working around the world and seeing others serve sacrificially – sometimes risking their lives for the Gospel --  has been inspiring, convicting and motivating. Missionaries set the example of the type of radical commitment God asks of all of us. I’m not saying that all of us are called to be missionaries, but I am saying that all of us are called to "count-the-cost" levels of obedience. This life is a vapor. The next is "ages to ages". Missionary examples encourage us to live with full abandon in light of the "ages to ages" and not settle for a satisfactory, comfortable "vapor".

When we were in high school, the short-term missions movement was just beginning to take off. I was in tenth grade when I first went to Mexico for a week to do evangelism. I think that this movement has had both positive and negative effects on the overall missions emphasis of the church. For myself and my husband, it has been significantly positive, mobilizing us into a life-time of vocational ministry, both pastoral and missional. In fact, we served as full time missionaries for 17 years with a short-term missions organization focusing on the border regions of Mexico (My husband worked in the administrative office. We lived stateside and commuted several times a year). When short-term missions serves to mobilize The Church toward long-term missions, it can have hugely positive effects.

What seems to have happened in the past 15-20 years, however, is that an emphasis on short-term missions has replaced an emphasis in long-term missions. I was surprised several years ago when I was sitting on a church missions committee whose members had never heard of some of the largest and most prominent long-term, missionary sending organizations in evangelical Christianity (I mentioned some of them above).

Additionally, when I go into churches today, I no longer see missionary prayer letters displayed. One person told me this was because displaying prayer letters was not "seeker friendly". I don’t think visitors are going to walk into a church, see missionary prayer letters and say "Uh oh! I’m outta here!" -- especially if they receive a welcome that is warm and accepting.

Another pastor mentioned that it disturbed the asthetics of the church to have prayer letters displayed. My mother-in-law’s church has opted to place prayer letters/cards in some decorative file folders in wall pockets with an individual missionary’s name printed on each one.  These are displayed in the back of the foyer as an alternative to the former practice of displaying them openly on shelves in the entry way. Although I’m disappointed that they made this decision, at least the letters are available for members to take.

I attended a mega church in California for 14 years.  Although I love this church and experienced significant growth while there, it bothered me that we had attended the church for 12 years before we knew the name of one single missionary family.  This was rather ironic because it turned out that the church generously supported almost 50 missionary families!  I discovered this when my husband and I, along with another couple, decided to facilitate a missions prayer meeting. 

We received all of the financial statements along with the contact information of the missionaries.  While the church was extremely generous with finacial support, they weren't as good about educating the congregation as a whole about who the long-term missionaries were.  When I would visit the church's website, there was a missions page, but only short-term missions trip information on it. The missionary page was "coming soon" for about 4 years. When we were commissioned for our missionary service, we had one person come up to us and say "I didn't know there were full time missionaries anymore".  Unfortunately, for a church of 8,000 people, we only had about 5 to 15 people attend our prayer meetings.  When I visited last month, I noticed that they no longer have a missions pastor.

Question: I realize that my observations are based on my limited exposure to churches I am familiar with or had some involvement in.  If my experience is representative of a larger trend, however, what can those of us who are more missions minded do?

Answer: We must be intentional and disciple ourselves and our children in missions – and not just denominational missions. God is at work around the world in powerful and amazing ways. If we just focus on what He is doing in our denomination, we will miss some incredible opportunities to worship and praise God for what He is doing through other agencies. We also miss out on the chance to pray for these agencies and the countries they serve in.

I’ll include practical ideas for missions discipleship in my next post. In the mean time, check out this Youtube video to see the reaction of one tribe in West Papua, Indonesia upon receiving a the New Testament translated into their language for the first time.

Shaun Groves, Hero of the Faith

I wanted to post a correspondence interview my friend, Christine, held with Shaun Groves, a recording artist and Compassion International employee. This man has a tremendous heart for the poor. I have heard him and his wife interviewed on podcasts this past year and he really is inspiring. He says in his blog profile that he is "helping Christians discover what they were saved for, and being a voice for children around the world, desperate to be saved from poverty." Thank you for being that voice, Shaun! Without further ado, here is Christine's interview with Shaun:

Glory to God: Shaun Groves, Hero of the Faith: "Today's post is about Shaun Groves , a stand-up guy and real hero of the faith. As I've mentioned before, he's a full-time Compassion Inte..."

Be Thou My Vision

So, I thought I would post another song :)  This time I thought I'd post one of my favorite hymns.  We sang this in church this morning.  This is my "keep things in perspective" hymn, whenever I'm tempted to lose my focus. This version is by Selah and it was the best (in my opinion) one that I found on Youtube.  They left out two of my favorite verses, though (verses 3 & 4 below), so I've included all of the most commonly sung lyrics below the video.  Click here to learn more about this ancient hymn.

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight;
Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight;
Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower:
Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

High King of Heaven, my victory won,
May I reach Heaven’s joys, O bright Heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

JJ Heller: What Love Really Means

I've become a JJ Heller fan over the past year.  Her music really ministers to me. I think this is because her songs are simple, fresh and feel so real -- no pretense.  My youngest daughter has some mental health problems and JJ's song Your Hands has been a tremendous encouragement to her (and us) in times of worry and discouragement. A friend of mine who is involved in ministry with us sent me a link to What Love Really Means.  One of the comments we hear frequently from some of our friends is that they don't feel worthy of God's love.  I have explained to them that perhaps the reason they feel that way maybe because we want to put God in the same conditional box we put our human relationships in.  JJ Heller captures the unconditional, redemptive love of God so well in this song.