Short Term Mission Preparations
As I wrote in my last prayer letter, I’m leading a small team of students from Credo back to Vanuatu in a little under three weeks time (eeek!).
This has been an interesting experience, as I’ve realised just how easy it is to go overseas on mission by yourself. My preparations followed my schedule, my work happened at my pace… it completely spun me out to have to prepare other people!
Being someone who is always happy to steal others’ good ideas and thinks others are the same, here are some of the meager resources J and myself used to help prepare our teams…
::This::
Now I’m not generally big on these things, but J rightly pointed out that it can be helpful to get the team to realise early how different their personalities can be – even in such a ham-fisted way!
::Adaptation::
One of the most important things to learn when doing X’n work cross-culturally is that peoples’ mental categories are wired differently (sometimes drastically so!). This is a brief exercise in thinking about couching key gospel ideas in different ways.
::Approaching a New Culture::
These are some questions to ask yourself (and maybe nationals) about cultures you’re entering. I have a random document on my computer with some of these, so if I’ve stolen them from you, please let me know and I’ll attribute accordingly!
::Biblical Theology of Culture::
In my corral of hobby-horses is a large one about Christian teaching about ‘culture.’ Most of it is rubbish (one that’s not is mentioned here). Here are some of the passages I used to get our teams thinking about how the Bible describes Christians relating to their society, and what God thinks about that (there’s an annotated edition that explains what I thought of each passage, but I’m too chicken to put that up yet!).
::Bislama Basics::
Finally, a very quick and dirty intro to Bislama (the main pidgin language of V-land) and the key aspects of behaviour that I thought my team should know about.
Posted: Jun 4, 03:52 Category: STM
Tags for this article: credo, cross-culture, mission, vanuatu
nette · Jun 9, 04:10
oo! what’s your personality?
J · Jun 10, 05:00
hahaha…the daftly titled ‘Innovator’ … if i remember rightly it basically means i have a short attention span…