Silly Mission Trips

I am a little discouraged today.

I spent some time reading the blog reports of a short-term mission trip to a foreign country. I have also, in my trips to the US, been a part of missions emphasis worship services where stories of trips to a foreign country were told. It’s always the same thing.

Most of the time is spent talking about how different the place was, how scary traffic was, how weird the food was, and how poor the people are. The conclusion is nearly always how blessed “we” are, and we don’t realize it.

I’ve taken the time to write down all of the ministry item that were done on these one-week trips. I get discouraged when I list them out.

• We picked up trash for a few hours.
• We held sick babies for a few hours.
• We played with the kids for a few hours.
• We helped build something for a few hours/days.
• We passed out tracts because we couldn’t speak to them in their language.
• We gave vitamins and eye-glasses to people.
• We had a worship services with the natives.

Brothers, we need to do better than this. If this is what you are doing, just don’t go. Or, at the very least, learn 25 significant Bible narratives by heart and tell them all, daily and repetitively while you do those things. When people respond, lead them to Jesus, get them baptized and help them either join or start a church before you go home.

I rarely hear church presentations of  recent short-term mission trips where people report that:

• They stayed in the homes of non-Christians instead of hotels.
• They spent their time with one family and ministering with and through that family for the duration of the trip.
• They told and taught others to tell significant portions of scripture narrative.
• They had a significant plan to overcome the language barrier.
• They prayed and overcame Satanic strongholds.
• They baptized new believers and got them celebrating the Lord’s Supper together as a church.
• They and the new believers suffered persecution for the baptisms and conversions.
• They came back with more harvest stories than culture shock stories.
• They came back with a clear vision of the next steps.

I can think of one or two churches that are getting there. They learn from their experiences, both failures and successes and move forward. They are relentless, like Paul was.

Church Retreat with Storying

My wife, Loaise, and I led a 4-day church retreat this past week. I told the first six chapters of Daniel, one chapter for each of our six worship services. The continuity of the narrative had a cumulative effect on engaging the scripture.

We also divided the participants into a number of groups of about 5 people, and trained leaders on how to learn a scripture passage by heart together as a group and follow that with an inductive bible study. Our groups learned stories of 5 to 10 verses. Each leader chose his own passages, so there was a lot of Bible story telling from members of one group to members of another.

The biggest observation we had was that based on our use of this method with unchurched non-christians and with long-time churched Christians, is that the latter have a lot of difficulty both learning to tell a scripture story and honestly looking at it to make valid observations. Those with no experience in any kind of Bible study seem to learn it better and draw out much deeper observations. Others tended to skim past the scripture as a familiar passage and went straight to long-remembered sunday school talking points.

I will write more about this later.

More Lessons Learned: How to be a Missionary

As I mentioned in a previous post, these are lessons I have learned along the way as a missionary.

• Walk, don’t drive. My experience has been that in general taking a car cost much more than it helps. One example: When we needed to go and visit a family about half an hour up the mountain walking, we were tempted to do it in 5 minutes driving. We walked. As we walked with one of the family members, we told Bible stories and listened to her stories. By the time we got to the top, we were in the company of nearly a dozen. All of them hearing these stories. We were then introduced to another dozen people who wanted to hear more. When we got to her house, we stayed for a 15 minute visit. By car, that would be 15 somewhat superficial minutes with a family. On foot, that was over an hour, and highly intimate. We met a dozen more people through an existing relationship.
  
  
• Do copiable things. Today I found out that another friend of mine started reading the Bible with friends at work when he started a new job. I never told these men that they needed to go and make disciples in their workplace by reading the Bible or telling Bible stories, but that is what they did. They saw us doing it, and when they left our company to work in another place (and even country) they did what seemed natural to them.  They had seen it done, easily.  So some of our disciples have gone and made disciples and we never knew about it until much later.
  
  
• Spend the Night. This idea is related to the first. We would go into a small community and have a Bible study with one family, visit another and then take the bus home. We always had to alternate which family would get the Bible study because of time. One night, the family told my wife and I. “Look, you can stay here. Go ahead and miss the bus, take the one at sunrise, you will be back in your city by 7:00.” They gave us their own clothes to wear to bed. The result was that we spend a long time sitting around the kitchen table talking with them and drinking coffee. You know how those kinds of conversations go. In one night, we became family. There was a bond that formed that was stronger than 3 years of weekly 1-hour visits.
  

Interactive Bible Storying with Children

Yesterday, I was invited to tell some interactive Bible stories to a group of children. I expected about 40, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw busloads of kids arriving. There were over 300!

The neat thing about stories, is that once you’ve told them a few times, you don’t forget them easily. (In the case of Bible storying, I would say you should tell every Bible story you know at least once every six months to keep them fresh in your mind.) Once you have learned a number of stories, you can string them together into a bigger narrative. This is a wonderful experience for both the storyteller and the hearer.

Since the children were all sitting on the floor, and rather disorganized, I knew I would have some trouble keeping their attention, so I used a hand sign to represent each story before and after I told it. Every time I got to a new story, I would do all of the hand signs with them from the beginning and say something that would remind them of the story. Most of them were “two-minute stories.” They were only a few verses long. So, I was able to tell these stories straight from the Bible.

Here are the stories I told and the hand signs I used.

From 12 to 50+

I just noticed in a post from October that we had 12 attend our prayer meeting that particular Wednesday. We’ve been running 50+ for about 6 weeks now. The format is simple.

1. We have a meal, (30 minutes)
2. We put the plates away and formally begin with prayer.
3. Each person that wants to can share what God did in their lives that week, or what they learned of God and wanted to share with others, or an experience telling someone else about Jesus.(15 minutes)
4. We sing. (10 minutes)
5. Someone tells a passage of scripture as story. (5 minutes)
6. We talk about it and find ways to apply and obey it. (15 minutes)
7. We break into groups of 3 or so, to pray for one another. (15 minutes)
8. We close, and put the tables away and benches back into their places, and talk.

I do believe the meal is a draw, but the scripture as story and the opportunity to pray with one another is what keeps people involved.

“W” like Gideon

Yesterday morning at our traditional church, I was meeting with 4 new Christians and telling them the stories of John the Baptist’s baptizing, The baptism of Jesus, the command of Jesus to tell the good news about repentance and the forgiveness of sin in his name, and the great commission passage. When we dismissed, an 11-year old boy I will call “W” came to me and told me that he wanted to be baptized too.

I asked him why. He said “It’s the only way. It’s the only way things will change.” I asked him what needed to change. He said. My family is always fighting, everyone. It is horrible. No one cares about anyone and no one is ever happy.

I’d been to his house several times last year, during evangelistic visits. His home is a shack with two rooms, a dirt floor, a tin roof, and 12 beds, stacked like bunk beds. There is no front door, so they put a board up at night. The floor is dirt.

Well, I asked W if he wanted to follow Jesus. He replied that he believes that Jesus is the son of God who was sent to save us, but that he wasn’t sure if he could believe because his family didn’t.

God put Gideon’s story on my heart and so I told it to W, from Judges chapter 6. In the story, Gideon knocks down his father’s Baal alter and cuts down the post-idol and cuts it up for firewood to give a burnt offering to the Lord. The next day the people of the region want to kill him, but Joas, his father had a change of heart and sided with Gideon and sent the people away.

I told W that his faith and obedience to Jesus even when his family is not following Jesus could be just what God uses to call his whole family to repentance. He said I will be baptized and be like Gideon, I will follow Jesus no matter what they say. I hope I can help them follow Jesus too.

We get the baptistery again on April 11th, and plan to baptize 6 more, including W. We’ve baptized 10 in February and 3 in March. Fun to watch God at work.

Power outage leads to great storying

Last night was a rainy night. Only 12 people showed up for the prayer meeting, there are usually around 30. My wife and son stayed at home. He’s had a fever for three days.

We began the church service telling stories of God’s work in our lives. After about 15 minutes the power went out and we were in the dark. As we ended the testimony time, Ronis is picked up a guitar and began to play. We sang praises for a good while. Then someone said, “Steve, tell the Bible story!”

Our eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see silhouettes. There wasn’t enough light to see faces, much less to read. So, I began. “This is a story from Luke 14.”

I told the story as it is in the Bible. When I finished. I helped the group to piece the story back together. We ended up telling the whole passage again as a group. What followed was about 15 minutes of conversation about that passage of the Bible.

When we were done, we broke up in to groups of 3 to 4 people and prayed for one another, as we always do. After about 20 minutes of praying together, we were all surprised by the return of the lights.

When we finished, one man told me, “We spent the whole time in the dark, but I never saw the scripture so well as I did tonight. I won’t forget this.”

Telling a Psalm

I was challenged recently at a Simply the Story workshop to also use the psalms in bible storying. The Psalms are quite different than stories and harder to learn and teach, but they are part of God’s word and they stick just like stories do. There is something very memorable and comforting in the way the Psalms re-tell the acts of God and announce the character of God. Sometimes you can connect a Psalm to another story of Scripture and open its meaning even further.

Sunday I was a guest speaker at another traditional church in the big city. I decided to try using Psalm 90 and 91 for the two services.

Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses and is connected to the time when the Israelite men were denied entry into the Promised Land for the rest of their lives because of their rejection of God’s command to enter. The 40 years that they wandered in the desert wilderness were the years where this prayer has it’s initial context. I prayed this Psalm then told chapter 14 of Numbers. We then learned many things from Psalm 90.

Psalm 91 is a psalm about the Lord’s faithful protection of the godly and how he delivers them from dangers of war and plague. They do not suffer the wrath of God like the disobedient do. This was the psalm that the Devil used to tempt Jesus to throw himself from the top of the temple in Luke 4. I told this story after the psalm, so that we could learn from how Satan tried to misapply the promise of God and how Jesus applied it correctly.

Preparing psalms takes more time than stories, and to be honest, I did not use the STS method this time out, but am anxious to do that in a small group soon.

It never happens the way you expect.

Thursday I returned to the small town and Saturday we did home visits in the high city.

We went to the home of the woman who takes care of so many children. We'd planned on beginning a short evangelistic story set, but when we arrived we saw that she was not well. She'd been sick and wasn't able to receive us in her home. She came out to the street and asked us to pray for she and her mother and the children. We prayed and then left, a little disappointed that we weren't able to start evangelizing.

Sunday morning she brought the children to our church and sent them up stairs, where Loaise was leading the children's service. She came up to me after the service and said. "I know that you are right, I want to be baptized. Come again to my house on Saturday and you can tell the Bible stories to my family."

In the other home we visited on Saturday, I pleaded with a young man to give up his drunkeness and drug use so that he could follow God. He smiled and was polite, listening to the stories from scripture we told, but as we finished, he made it to the crack-house before we got back to the church. The next day, two women from the home came to our service and said. "You are telling the truth, we want to hear more."

May God give the harvest.

Opportunities, commitments, and wishes

Last week I went back to the small town for the first time since recovering my hearing. The last real storying meeting we had was in January. Now we are getting back to business. Thursday Loaise and I will go and begin telling Acts 1 to the families on the hill. We will visit 3 other families.

There are currently 4 opportunities waiting for us: The singer's family, the families on new street, the families across the river, and the family near the bus station. There are 4 other possibilites. The problems are time money and help. I need to go to Tabuleiro twice a week (time and money). I also need to bring some helpers from the city church.

I have already advised the church that I will be doing a training workshop in a few weeks. We plan to introduce 15 or so people to chronological Bible storying and church planting. Most of them will work in the high city (the part of the big city that is on the moutain).

People are also asking for recordings of the stories. This is something else we need to get going.

Pray for all of this to come together soon.

Oh, my hearing is still improving. Keep praying for that too.

December 2nd, 2007

This morning I finished my sermon series on Jesus. I told as a single narrative from the moment Judas went to meet with the religious leaders to plan to deliver Jesus up to the moment that Jesus was taken up into Heaven in Acts 1.

I really enjoyed the chance to tell Bible narrative as a sermon for the past 4 weeks. I am glad to be getting a break for a while. Many of the church members asked me how I could remember such a big story and wondered if I have a super memory. I told them that I actually don't have a great memory, but that I learned the big story as a series of small stories that are only about 2-3 minutes long each. Then when it is time to tell the big story, I string the stories together as a narrative.

After the new year, I will begin a group within this church. I will help them to learn Bible stories, learn to tell them, learn to teach others to learn them and tell them, and learn how to lead people to think through the stories as they hear them, as a form of Bible study.

November 26th, 2007

Sunday, I preached the morning service again at one of the local churches here in the city. It was the second part of the life and ministry of Jesus. I told as single narrative these portions from John:

2:12 - 2:22
3:1 - 3:21
4:43 - 4:53
5:1 - 5:29
7:1 - 7:52
8:12 - 8:59
11:1 - 11:57

I think telling 30 minute stories is taking its toll on me, because it takes a long time to prepare even a 5 minute story, if you haven't told it before. Next week, I will tell the passion and resurrection story of Jesus and then I will take a break from these long sermon-length narratives.

I have had a number of great compliments from the church members. They've told me that they are learning very much and finally able to "see" Jesus. That is really what I had hoped for.

Tonight I will go to the family in the big city and tomorrow the families in the small town.

November 19, 2007

Yesterday, I preached again at one of the traditional churches. I began the story of the life and ministry of Jesus. I told the scripture from his birth story through to the first time people tried to kill him, shortly after he began his ministry. Next Sunday, I will continue the story through the passion and resurrection. The passion story will be somewhat reduced, because I will save some of it for the story of Peter.

Last night, an interesting thing happened. I was asked to take my mother-in-law and my niece to another city to a church, where my niece was supposed to sing. We arrived in the city and were told that it was the wrong city, so we went to the "right" city. Still wrong. As it turned out we found a church that seemed like it could be the church we were looking for. After talking with the pastor, he said that he would be glad to have my niece sing in their service, since it would be impossible to find the other church before the service was over.

Well, my niece sang, and then the pastor surprised me. "And now, the word from the Lord," he said "will be given by our guest pastor..." He signaled for me to come up to the front and preach. There I was in blue jeans and an orange t-shirt. Well, one good thing about learning the Bible in oral form, is that you can pull a Bible narrative out of your head and heart at a moment's notice. I told the story from the end of the morning sermon. It was from Luke 4, when Jesus went back to his hometown and taught in the synagogue. I posed a question to the church after telling the story. Hearts were broken and there was much repentance. God moved.

Here's the question: "Why did these people who were praising Jesus try to kill him a few minutes later?" Go read the story and see if you can answer that. If you figure out the answer, ask yourself one more question. "Why do I love Jesus?"

November 11th, 2007

Today I began a sermon series in one of the traditional churches in the big city. I am telling the Bible as narrative. Today I told the entire life and ministry of John the Baptist as a single narrative. It took about 35 minutes. Here's the scripture references. (Sorry, it's in portuguese, but you can tell which scriptures I used anyway) Next week I will begin the life and ministry of Jesus.

Lucas 1:5-80
Mateus 3:1-12 / Marcos 1:1-8 / Lucas 3:1-20 / João 1:19-28
Mateus 3:13-17 / Marcos 1:9-11 / Lucas 3:21-22
João 1:29-34
Mateus 9:14-17 / Marcos 2:18 / Lucas 5:33-39 / João 3:22-4:4
Mateus 11:1-19 / Lucas 7:11-35 /
Mateus 14:1-12 / Marcos 6:14-29
João 10:40-42