Tag: Missionary

It is HERE! How to Bless a Missionary: Practical Advice for Your Church and Family

I am so excited to announce that my new book (How to Bless a Missionary: Practical Advice for Your Church and Family) is now available on Amazon in paperback and eBook formats!  I truly believe that this book will be valuable to anyone involved in missions and missionary care.

I also think that this is something that every pastor and ministry leader will be able to use to deepen and strengthen the care they give to missionaries.  But it is not just for pastors!  It will help families become more involved in missions by giving them practical ideas that they can put into practice in their everyday lives.

You can find the entire book on Amazon in both paperback and eBook formats.  You can also read it for free right now with Kindle Unlimited.  The link can be found Here or by clicking on the picture above.  (This is an affiliate link which means that if you click on the link and make a purchase, familiesformissions will earn a small commission at no expense to you.)

I would love to hear any feedback from you – whether directly to me by responding to this post or by leaving a review for the book online. I would also love for you to share this with others!

 

 

What I Read – Books About Missions

I have been working really hard on my new book, and it is going to be released soon. 🙂 It will be titled How to Bless a Missionary. I am so excited that it will be released and ready for everyone to be a blessing to the missionaries that they know for the holiday season. I can’t wait to tell you more about it!
Today, though, I’m going to let you know about a few of the books about missions that I have read in the last few months. I’m going to share my opinions and an honest review of the books so that you can choose whether or not they might be helpful to your interest in missions.  These links are affiliate links to Amazon (which means that if you click them and then purchase something, familiesformissions.com will receive a small commission at no expense to you.)
One book I read was called Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global by Andy Johnson, and it’s part of the 9Marks series of books for Building Healthy Churches. This book talks about how the local church can have the vision for World Wide missions, and it also talks about how your local church can send and support missionaries well. The author of this book really emphasizes that the local church should invest deeply in a few missionaries and not widely in many, many missionaries supported at low rates. He advocates for the church to get to know their missionaries on a more personal level, and he also encourages the local church to consider themselves as the primary source of support for the missionaries. He also talks about the benefits or detriments of short-term mission trips. He emphasizes the need for pastors and elders to visit missionaries, which I fully support. This was a great, short little book, and it is easy to read in one afternoon. It would be great to pass on to your pastor or local Mission leader.
One of the next books that I read is called The Reentry Team: Caring for Your Returning Missionaries by Neil Pirolo. This is a really great book about learning about the returning missionary and the challenges each may face. I highly recommend this to anyone who has a missionary that they support overseas. This is a great book for mission committees and Mission leaders to read as well.
The beginning of the book is written as an introduction and then the remainder of the book is written as a compilation of notes, letters, and first hand accounts of missionaries or missionary kids who returned from serving overseas to their home country (or their parent’s home country). The author then gives some commentary after each short story, and tries to help the reader see the downfalls, errors, and problems the missionaries experienced.  He addresses how the missionary could have had a better reentry into their home society.
Another book written by the same author, Neil Pirolo, is called Serving as Senders Today: How to Care for your Missionaries as they Prepare to Go, Are on the Field and Return Home. Written years ago, it talks about the need for churches and individuals to send missionaries well. It describes the missionary who is going overseas and talks about what they need from their team at home (moral support, the logistics that they will need help with, the financial support, communications support, and then reentry support). Churches and small groups are encouraged to invest in a missionary family and to help them no matter what the need. While it has some great information and good points, I did not enjoy the writing style. I feel like the editing could have been tightened up a little bit. One good thing in this book is that it gives action steps and ideas for your personal involvement at the end of each chapter. This will help you as the reader if you have gotten lost during the chapters to really hone in and focus on what’s important.
   Dispatches from the Front Boxed Set: Episodes 1-5
Another book that I recently read was called Dispatches from the Front: Stories of Gospel Advance in the World’s Difficult Places. This book was written by Tim Keesee, and there is also a video series that can be purchased separately from the book. This book and video series document this man’s journey as the person from the mission agency that went to visit workers overseas in difficult or hard-to-reach areas. The book is written as a journal along his journey, so you read short snippets from each step along the way as if you’re reading his journal or diary. But it gave me a big-picture view of what it would be like to try to spread the gospel in places like China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and India. You can see firsthand from his writings the challenges that the mission workers in those areas are facing and the dangers they confront every day. I would highly recommend this book to mission leaders as well as those who feel that they are interested in serving God in hard-to-reach and dangerous places.
Well, I think this post is long-enough for my first installment of books about missions.  I’ll pick other books for me next update on what I have read and what you might like to read.  What books have you read?  Can you recommend some to me?

Missions Class Ideas for Kids – Mission Aviation

In the previous post I talked about how my husband and I helped with a summer missions class for the grade-school kids in our church. It was great fun to help plan activities and crafts for each week…the kids enjoyed it so much and learned a lot! Go here to read more.

For the week that we featured mission aviation, we talked about current Mission Aviation Fellowship missionaries that our church supports in Africa. My husband did a presentation using pictures from that missionary family, as well as pictures that he took on a mission trip to Brazil. The kids loved seeing pictures of airplanes and the runways where they land.  They learned why airplanes fly and who they help.  If you want more information on mission aviation pilots, you can look here.

During craft time, we used the kid’s activity book that MAF has on their website. You can download it here. Kids can pick from mazes, word finds, decoding, or just color in some of the airplanes. We had ages from kindergarten to fifth grade and everyone was able to find something to do. If you want some more activities and coloring pages, you can find them here.

The missionary from the past that we talked about was Betty Greene, the first pilot that flew the first MAF flight.  She was able to transport two Wycliffe missionaries that needed to reach Mexico.  You can read about her here.

Of course, we finished out the time by praying and singing our song, Be a Missionary Everyday.  🙂

 

Mission Class Ideas for Kids – Japan

I am so excited to be back and blogging again after taking a little time off over the summer for some projects and commitments. I have been very busy working on a new book that will be released in the coming months, and I have been soaking up some extra time with my kids.

I also helped with a summer missions class for the grade-school kids in our church. It was great fun to help plan activities and crafts for each week…the kids enjoyed it so much and learned a lot! I’ll be sharing more about this over the next couple of weeks.

Each week of the class we picked a different set of things to focus on: each week had a featured country, a past missionary story, a current missionary, a prayer station, and a craft. Small groups of kids rotated through each of these and spent about 10-15 minutes in each area. We also had an opening and closing time with song and prayer.

Here is a link to the song that we used (but we added lots of clapping between lines and some motions, too.) 😊  “Be a Missionary Everyday”

One of the weeks, we focused on Japan. Our missionary from the past was Jake DeShazer. He was a prisoner of war during WWII in Japan, and he hated his captors. After being freed, God helped him to forgive them and called him to return to witness to them. You can read more about him at http://www.jacobdeshazer.com/.

Each of the kiddos received a Japanese flag to keep. You can get one for your home or let your kiddos color one easily by making a circle in the middle of a white piece of paper and letting them color it red.

Our church has a current missionary that is working in the country of Japan that happened to be visiting during the summer months, so we arranged for the mother of this family to come speak to our kids. It was fun to have a real person there that was familiar with Japan. She even brought some dried seaweed for the kids to taste. Each child received a prayer card with this family’s picture on it, so they could take it home and remember meeting the missionary. Hopefully they will pray for them, too.

Koinobori (Flying Carp)

Our craft was to make koinobori. This is a Japanese flying carp that is frequently made or bought to be displayed around their children’s day in Japan. Many times, there is one for each family member. The dad’s is usually black, and the children have red or many different colors for theirs.

Here is a fun song in Japanese about the koinobori.

You can make one of these at home pretty easily. You will need a toilet paper roll (or paper towel roll cut shorter), some glue sticks, scissors, tissue paper, and string. Sticker eyes are optional (You can draw in your own.)

Use the scissors to cut circles or ovals out of the tissue paper and then cut each one in half. Let the kids join in with the cutting if they are old enough. The half-circles do not have to be perfect. Start gluing the half circles onto your toilet paper roll at the bottom and make sure the rounded part of the paper is facing the bottom. Overlap your pieces as you go, and continue around and up the roll til you reach the top.

Draw some eyes or use stickers. Make a hole on opposite sides of the top, and attach your string. Cut some straight pieces of tissue paper and glue or staple them to the bottom edge of the toilet paper roll.

Now you are ready to display your koinobori!

I’ll post soon about the other weeks and the activities we did…in the meantime, happy crafting!  If you want some great information about Japan, check out Operation World’s website!

 

Want to Host a Missions Conference at Your Church?

Missions conferences or a time for missions focus at your local church are great ways to help educate people about missions and try to get them interested in becoming more involved in missions. If your church has one of these, you are lucky. It seems they are less and less frequent now, as people are branding them as old-fashioned or outdated. I argue that they still have value.

In my younger childhood years (before my parents became missionaries), we attended a church that was very missions-minded. Each year they had a “Missions Month”. There were missionary speakers each Sunday morning and evening (yes, we still had evening services back then 😊). In addition, there was a focus in each service on talking about missions. I still remember the phone calls with mission partners on the other side of the world; they were live with the pastor and broadcast so the entire church could hear. I also remember a parade of flags where many children carried a flag forward in a procession. Some, including myself, spoke a few words from the country’s flag they carried. I remember my dad helping me learn John 3:16 to recite in Spanish (even though I didn’t know any Spanish at the time). The women invited the missionary wives to speak at a luncheon.

With my mom’s help, a women’s ministry to help missionaries was started. It was called L.A.M.P. (Ladies Applying Missions Personally). They started a “Mission Closet” and requested donated new items to stock it. Each missionary that visited was taken through this room filled with supplies: toiletries, small gifts, handmade bags for traveling with shoes, snacks, blankets, etc. I really do not even remember everything that was there.

Here are some thoughts and ideas as you think about starting or improving a missions focus or conference at your church.

    1. Decide what length of time will work for your church with your church leadership. You may choose to have only one Sunday to start with or you might be able to have a whole week or month dedicated to missions.
    2. Choose dates for your missions focus.
    3. Find out who is willing to help. You cannot pull this off by yourself. You will need volunteers to help (the longer the time and the more activities mean more volunteers are needed!)
    4. Choose activities or plans. Here are some possibilities:
      • Missionary speaker to give the sermon at services. (Keep in mind that not all missionaries are pastors and evangelists. Giving a sermon may not be their spiritual gift. Some might prefer a different role.)
      • Missionary update during the service with prayer to follow.
      • Ladies meeting, Bible Study, or luncheon. You could have a missionary wife speak (again, remember not all ladies are gifted as public speakers) or have a missionary wife panel answer preplanned questions with time for Q and A at the end.
      • Skype or phone call with missionary during the service.
      • Lunch with a missionary update after services. This would require people to sign up if the lunch was provided or to bring a dish if you choose a potluck-style lunch.
      • Church banquet. This can be catered or potluck-style. You could require the purchase of tickets in order to encourage RSVPs and help plan for how many would come. You can plan an international theme or just choose something easy and crowd-pleasing.
      • Walk-through rooms decorated like different countries where you have a missionary or member of the church share about their ministry. Kids can even have passports to get stamped as they complete each one.
      • Create a missionary map in the entryway of the church with a map of the world and a picture of each missionary with a blurb about where they serve and what their ministry is.
      • Get involved with a specific project. Raise money for a specific need that week, or help compile a New Testament in a new language to prepare it for printing. Shower a local ministry with needed supplies or manpower for a renovation/remodel/repairs. Hold a car wash or bake sale somewhere local to raise funds, if needed.
      • Prepare a children’s program for a church service. This could require more time, but could have a lasting impact. Having children participate by carrying and waving flags for missionary partners of your church is a great idea. You could encourage kids to dress up like someone from that country. Kids could sing a song about missions or in another language.
      • Provide ideas for children’s Sunday School teachers to use: coloring sheets, books about missionaries, websites, videos, and letters from missionaries are all possibilities.
      • Make postcards with a missionary picture and ministry description. Ask people in the church to choose one or two and commit to praying for that missionary for the following year.
    5. Contact missionaries to find out their availability and willingness to participate. Many times, they are only able to attend if they are on home assignment or furlough. If they are not able to attend, ask them about updates, Skype, or phone calls.
    6. Plan housing for visiting missionaries. Decide if your church can afford hotel accommodations or if there are members of the church that can host them. Ensure that there is a bed for each family member and that they do not have to sleep with a stranger!
    7. Plan special activities for the missionaries. Can your church take them shopping one day to the local mall? Can you provide a makeover, massage, or haircut for missionary wives? Can you provide babysitting for the missionary couple to go on a date night together? Can you offer to pay for car repairs for the visiting missionaries? Can you gift them with gift cards to use on their travels or for fun? Check with businesses of church members and see if they would be willing to donate services or provide them at a discount.
    8. Advertise the event! Let your church family know that you are planning a missions event. You definitely need to create some interest around the event and try to hype it up! You might even get more volunteers. 😊

 

So, you are probably reading this and thinking, “There is no way we could pull this off at my church.” I would encourage you to give it some more thought and talk to your pastor. You may need to start small – just a “Missions Sunday” may be all your church can handle to start off with. Don’t choose to do everything on the list. It is only meant to give you ideas and a place to start brainstorming. You will probably have your own ideas, too. Do what you can and encourage others to pitch in. You may be surprised at what you will accomplish.

What other ideas can you think of?

 

 

 

Types of Missionaries – Teacher

Want a great chance to be a missionary while influencing the next generation? Become a missionary teacher! There are several ways that you can use your teaching skills in mission work:

1- Teach at a missionary school. There are missionary schools all over the world that need great teachers from K-12. Some of the schools are small enough that they combine grades, but others are large and you could teach a huge variety of things (depending on your training and gifts). Many schools ask for a one-year contract, but some schools will allow people to come for just one semester. Some schools are a boarding-type school, but others have teachers live off campus in an apartment or house. Check out these websites to find great openings:

https://ethnos360.org/go/teach-abroad

https://www.cru.org/opportunities/careers/international/teachers/international-schools.html

2- Teach at an international school. If you want a great opportunity to teach lots of kids that do not know about Jesus, try looking for a position at an international school. These schools can include lots of local kids, but also usually have a large number of international students whose parents are in business or government in a country that is not their passport country. This is a great way to teach kids from all over the world in one classroom! I had several teachers in my local Mexican school that taught everything from grade school to high school Math and Chemistry in English.

https://www.teachaway.com/international-schools

3- Become the homeschool teacher for a missionary. Many missionaries choose to homeschool their kids for a multitude of reasons. Maybe there are no local schools, maybe the local schools are not academically challenging, maybe it is not safe to send kids to school where they live, maybe their child has special needs, or maybe they just want their kids to learn things from a Christian worldview. Some missionary parents struggle with this decision because they know that teaching is not their gift. Some suffer from health concerns that keep them from teaching. Some need to spend more time in ministry. For many different reasons, a missionary may need a person to come homeschool their children for a short season. You can be the answer to this problem and the answer to their prayers.

4- Share your homeschooling knowledge with a homeschooling missionary. You may only have the experience of teaching your own children, but that means that you can be a huge resource to a homeschooling missionary mom. Offer to share resources (when legally possible) and send them links to resources you have found helpful. Keep in contact with them and offer any support or advice you feel they might want.

Is teaching something you think you could do? This can be a great way to see the world while being a great influence on kids in the next generation! Check into it!

 

Types of Missionaries – Dentist or Orthodontist

As I was growing up, my family was richly blessed by a man named Dr. Schaffer. This man was a dentist/orthodontist based in Florida, and he decided to help missionary kids be able to have straight teeth.

Every three months, this man and his wife would load their supplies up and fly to southern Mexico where I lived. He would then spend 3-4 days doing orthodontics for missionary kids. His wife was his assistant on the trips. They would stay in a room at a local Bible seminary, and the local missionary community would organize whatever he needed. I lived in a large city where several missionary families were based, and we would sign up to provide lunches, dinners, and provide transportation to and from the airport and wherever he needed to go. A missionary mom organized the schedule of patients prior to his arrival and made calls to each family. He required no payment for his services.

This was a huge blessing to me! My family did not have enough support (like many missionaries), and braces would have likely been too expensive for us to afford. And my teeth were horribly crooked!

But, thanks to Dr. Schaffer and his generosity, I have straight teeth!

There are many ways that dentists and orthodontists can be missionaries.

  • They can travel and work alone, like Dr. Schaffer.
  • A group of dentists and/or orthodontists can plan to come together.
  • Sometimes they accompany a medical caravan. In addition to medical care, people can have their teeth checked and receive fillings and tooth extractions. This is a great way to help poor indigent people that cannot afford dental care or don’t have a dentist close. This is a great way to partner with a local missionary or church to reach out to their community and teach more people about Jesus.

Have you thought about becoming a dentist or orthodontist? Share this post with your own dentist or someone that you know that is planning to become one!

 

How to Bless a Missionary – Pray For Their Kids

You might be thinking, “Didn’t we already have a post on praying for a missionary?”. And yes, we did. If you’d like to read it, you can go here.

But praying for a missionary’s kids can need a little bit of a different focus. So, today we are going to talk about specific prayer needs for missionary kids.

  1. Adjustment to new situations – Missionary kids are exposed to many new situations, both in their host country abroad and when they come back to their passport country. Some adjust very easily, but some struggle with each change. Prayer for easy transitions is important.
  2. Language acquisition – Some languages are easy to pick up and learn, while others are very difficult. Some children learn languages quickly, while others seem to struggle. Younger children tend to pick up languages more easily and also seem to have a better “local” accent. Pray that they learn the language quickly.
  3. Salvation – This should be the most important thing that we pray for…and the most important for the missionary parents.
  4. Health – We need to pray for general medical health. They need protection from illnesses and injuries. Many children also have learning or physical disabilities, and we should pray that God would provide the appropriate medical care, therapies, and help for their them and their parents.
  5. Safety – This kind of ties into the health request, but missionary kids can be exposed to many different safety hazards. They may travel more often than other kids. There may be people around them that are against Americans or jealous of their family and would like to harm them. There may be wild animals like hippos, spiders, etc. that could cause them harm. They may live in a village with difficult terrain that makes them more prone to broken bones and falls.
  6. Schooling – Choosing how to educate their children is one of the biggest decisions that a missionary family will make. They may choose to homeschool, attend a local school, or send their child to a boarding school. Each of these choices will require a different way of praying, but we also should pray that the child is able to learn well in any circumstance.
  7. Friendships – Missionary kids need prayer to make friends, but not just any friends…the right friends. When they are little, they need good friends to play with. As they get older, they need friends that will not influence them wrongly. We should pray that they do not choose to follow pagan or evil local practices. We should pray that their friends would help their faith grow.

Here is a link with a great article (with scriptures) for you to pray for your own children as well as missionary kids that you know.  Click here to read it.

Let your missionary know what you are praying for their kids!

Types of Missionaries – Missionary Pilots

I was recently talking about different types of missionaries with my kids because I want them to know about all different types of mission work. I realized that there might be parents out there that are only familiar with a few types of missionaries. So, I have decided to write a series of posts that will help grownups and kids both learn more about the types of mission work being done around the world. I will try to include links to websites where you can find missionaries with these jobs. I will also try to include activities that families can do that tie into that type of work, when possible.

First up…

Missionary Pilots

(Photo from http://ntm-aviation.org/photos)

There are missionary pilots serving all over the world. They normally fly in countries where there are people groups that are difficult to get to (like Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Philippines, etc.). They usually live near a base, where the planes or helicopters are kept in a hangar, and they fly out to villages and remote areas when needed. Many times, they can do a flight in an hour or two that would otherwise take days. They help all kinds of people:

  • Doctors taking vaccines or medicines to remote locations
  • Local people who need emergency care or transportation to a hospital or clinic
  • Missionaries that are working to translate the Bible into local languages in villages
  • Local pastors that are traveling and preaching in different villages
  • Missionaries that need supplies

Here are just a few websites that include information about missionary pilots. Take some time to read about a few…some have their own blogs or newsletters that you can subscribe to.

(Photo from http://ntm-aviation.org/photos)

Want some activities for your little aspiring pilots?

  • Look up countries like Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Philippines on a map or puzzle of the world
  • Make paper airplanes and watch them fly. Have a competition to see which one goes farthest.
  • Look up take-off and landing videos on missions websites like the ones above. Imagine landing and taking off from the small, slanted, grass runways!

(Most of the links in this post are to direct you to another source of information.  There are, however, a couple of affiliate links and Families for Missions might receive a small commission if you click on those and make subsequent purchases.)