A missionary couple who had been church planters in Yugoslavia, Vienna, and Czech Republic came for a little bit Saturday afternoon. Being in the presence of certain Christians, interacting with them, even if no theological dialogue is exchanged or specific needs aren’t spoken to in powerful ways, just fills you with a respect and the impression that the character of these is capable of sustaining more than a typical measure of hardship. They’re on home assignment (the new term for furlough) at the moment. They shared a lunch with us, telling stories about the bureaucratic rigamole that is socialistic European life and relating scenes from everyday life, buying food in the market in Vienna, spending time with the families of the members of their fledgling churches, among other things. They underscored a theme most definitely running through the workshop all weekend–that church planting is a team effort, not only from the standpoint that you have people in America supporting you financially and prayerfully, but also debunking the stereotype of the lone missionary or missionary family, isolated in a foreign country and dependent on His grace and the hardiness and resourcefulness of their own personalities to survive. Effective church planting, they stressed, with the utmost concern for the physical and emotional health of the mission, takes on the form of a team of people, each gifted and very comfortable at operating in the specific domains of the way God fashioned them. Mike, the husband, had put together a cursory list of seven skills needed on any church planting team. Over the course of the weekend, through prayer and corporate introspection, we began to discover how we could fit into this team perspective. God wants to stretch us, to be sure, but He also created us a specific way and gave us certain experiences for divine reasons. In that light, and through the great diversity of personalities in the group, there was a collective affirmation and just a blessing that I think we all received.<\/p>\n
It may surprise you to hear that last weekend I became acquainted with the coolest game ever invented. Mike and Shelley (the missionary couple) had created, with the help of the youth group of one of their churches in Yugoslavia, a life-size board game detailing the process of church planting and the various hurdles, joys, pitfalls and successes. It was arrayed much like a Monopoly board. The pieces (people on either team) advanced around the perimeter, and there were several smaller squares in the middle for special events. The game was amazingly detailed, as they had taken into consideration most everything a church planting team would encounter. When a team landed on a square that denoted an outreach activity, Mike or Shelley would share an experience along those lines from their ministry. Both teams rolled a big die and did their best to keep their money up, prayer support solid, health acceptable, and share the Gospel as well as learning new languages and keeping up with day-to-day life. We only played the game for about an hour, far too short a time, I think we all agreed, but the workshop was on a schedule. It was so much fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}