Found some great resources at Round Trip Missions, a ministry of Christianity Today that’s helping the church rethink how we do short-term missions. There is some great stuff here about the church’s philosophy and approach to short-term missions (an experience shared by nearly 2 million Americans every year!). Short-term mission teams have been invaluable to our team in Athens, bringing in resources, creating missions’ advocates around the world, and even raising up new full-time teammates. In fact, the thought of going into full-time ministry first came into my mind – and heart – while on a short-term mission trip to Jamaica with Chatham Christian Church in 1996 (or so).
I really enjoyed this interview with missiologist Paul Borthwick (author of How To Be A World-Class Christian, a must-read primer for missionaries, missions supporters, and every Christian on earth). I copied a snippet below, or read the entire interview HERE.
How would you describe the present state of the short-term missions movement?
When I think about short-term missions, I recall a comment someone made about the People’s Republic of China: “Anything you say about China is true.” Well, almost anything you say about short-term missions is true, too. On the positive side, is it producing new missionaries? Yes, there are cases of that. Is it giving people a greater vision, and taking people across cultures into places they would never have gone on their own? Yes, absolutely.
But on the negative side, are there places where it’s doing cultural harm? Yes. Are there places where people are coming in with incredible cultural insensitivity and maybe undermining the long-term work that’s being done? Yes. So short-term missions is all over the place. It’s big, it’s untamed, and the results, I would say, are kind of random at the moment.
Other questions tackled in the article:
What’s the most common mistake that churches make in short-term missions?
What’s the best thing you have seen short-term teams accomplish?
If you could advise church leaders to do any one thing before a trip to prepare their teams for success, what would it be?
What sort of short-term projects have the greatest potential to serve the long-term needs of indigenous ministries?
What new global trends are likely to impact the way short-term missions is done in the future?
Can you describe what the short-term missions movement might look like 10 or 20 years from now?
How do Christians in the Global South view the short-term missions movement? What are their hopes for the movement’s future?
Not everyone can take a trip overseas. How can short-term teams bring some of the benefits of a missions trip—like an increased awareness of the developing world’s needs—back to their home congregations?
Have you been on a short-term mission trip? How has it impacted your life… ministry… worldview?
We haven’t been snapping too many new photos this week… so how about a walk down memory lane? Flash back to February of 2009: a small group from our team visits the makeshift refugee camp in Patra, Greece (click here for a bit of context). Here are a few photos from that trip:
Meeting refugees in Patra
Refugee housing in the camp
Two young Afghan men at the camp
This Afghan refugee says that he lost his eye to the Taliban
We ordered our new prayer cards last week! We use DPI – and absolutely love their design work. Check it out:
We’d love to ensure that you get one! Shoot me an email (brett.sanner@iteams.org) with your current mailing address and we’ll make sure that you get your very own (especially if we won’t see you in the Springfield or Chicago area)!
Καλό μήνα (“ka-lo mee-na” or good month)! This will be the common greeting today in Greece, as it is on the first of every month. So, in this spirit, have a great month! We sure hope to. This month our home assignment work moves into full speed, meeting with supporters, churches, and potential ministry partners. We’ll be in the Springfield area (Illinois) for the entire month. Here are a few of the highlights:
* I’ll get an opportunity to preach at Chatham Christian Church next Sunday (February 7). If you’re in the area, come by at 9:15am.
* On Sunday, February 14th, we’ll be giving a short update about our ministry at Sugar Creek United Methodist Church. The whole family will be there for the 8:15am service, and Brett will stick around for the rest of the morning.
* On Sunday, February 21st, we’ll visit the 10:45am service at Rochester Christian Church; we’re looking forward to chatting with the missions committee afterward. If you’re there, come say hi!
* In addition to these church visits, we have a number of one-on-one and small group meetings. We’re really excited to share about what God is doing in the lives of refugees in Athens. If you’re interested in getting together, just let us know (via brett.sanner@iteams.org)… because we’d love to (and we still have plenty of open meeting time)!
Happy Friday! We celebrated with friends last week as Kirk and Kristin became Mr. and Mrs. Polley. Here are some photos from the wedding and weekend gatherings with friends. Enjoy!
Monday was a first for the Sanner family: Dermabond! That’s right, Sofia had to get her head glued back together after falling off a chair. Ouch! I’m happy to report, however, that – despite the nasty cut – Sofia is back to her playful self and now has a delightful story to tell her friends about her parents’ negligence! Whoops! Kids shouldn’t climb chairs: lesson learned!
Here’s an update from Athens, written by our teammate Myrna:
Please pray from some of the men who have become Christians. This can be dangerous for them because some of the more radical Muslims don’t take this lightly. One of the men who was recently baptized has been receiving threats. Pray for protection and courage for these men. Also please pray for jobs, especially for some of the men who have become Christians and are so faithful to help out with the work here. Many of them struggle daily with how they will live.
God is at work! Please pray for the ongoing ministry in Athens. Pray for strength, courage, and faithfulness on behalf of these young believers!
Happy Friday! We’re beginning to feel pretty well-adjusted to the time difference here in the US. So now we’re excited to get down to business and meet with our ministry partners (present and future!) and churches. We look forward to reconnecting with you over the next several weeks. Here are a few pictures from our first week back!
As of today we’ve been back in the US for 1 week! It’s been a week full of sleepless nights and cold weather, but we’re beginning to reorient ourselves (and the girls) to life in Illinois. We’ve spent this first week back in the Chicago area, but plan on traveling to Springfield later this afternoon – arriving just in time for some greatly anticipated pre-wedding festivities. My good friend Kirk Polley is tying the knot on Saturday, and the Sanners plan on attending in full force. Here are a few of our favorite things since arriving in the US:
Brett – Dunkin Donuts coffee, catching up with friends, a visit to the Village Discount Outlet (world’s best thrift store), and spending some quality time with the in-laws.
Kristin – Thai food, visiting everyone at Thorn Creek, ready access to a car, and spending some quality time with her mom and dad.
Sofia – Indulging in a Boston Creme doughnut, playing with her cousins, getting a second round of Christmas, and spending some quality time with her grandma and grandpa.
Emma – Sleeping, eating, and meeting her grandma and grandpa (and cousins, aunts, and uncles) for the first time!
Right now we’re seeing scores of refugees from Afghanistan here in Athens: men, families, even unaccompanied minors (i.e. kids on their own, some as young as 12 years old). Although five million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since 2002, millions of Afghans still wander outside of their homeland (2.6 million in Pakistan and Iran alone). Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns (both great reads) and a UNHCR Goodwill Envoy, recently wrote up this short piece for USA Today about the poverty and despair that continue to haunt Afghanistan.
Poverty is not new in Afghanistan, of course. The country was one of the world’s poorest even before it was decimated by nearly 30 years of successive civil conflict. Today, more than 25,000 Afghan women die yearly during pregnancy, childbirth or after delivery. Average life expectancy is 44. One in four children will die before age 5. Seventy percent of the country does not have access to clean water, and half live on less than $1 per day.
Read the entire article HERE and continue to pray for Afghanistan!
Sofia celebrated her second birthday last week! We had a party on Saturday: friends, gifts, pizza, cake… the whole nine yards. Here are some pictures to prove it. Enjoy!
Sofia opening gifts: a new doll stroller!
Pizza, juice…
and cake (note Kristin’s beautiful butterfly design)!
Behind the scenes (I just love Sofia’s face in this one)
As you read this post, the Sanner family is probably… er, hopefully… okay, maybe… somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. We’re excited to be back in the States and reconnect with YOU – our family, friends, and ministry partners! Until then, check out this video from World Relief, a Christian relief agency that seeks to empower the local church to serve the most vulnerable. I love the vision and love this video…
In an effort to learn how we can best encourage missionaries, I emailed some and asked how they would most like to be served and encouraged. This list is drawn from their responses, including many direct quotes.
1. Pray for them and let them know that you are doing so frequently.
2. Send “real mail.”
3. Pray for the people the missionaries serve and not only for the missionaries and their families.
4. Recruit others to pray for the missionary’s area of service (city, people group, etc.) or for the missionaries themselves.
5. Go visit them with the purpose of serving and encouraging them in their work.
6. Send them updates and pictures of you and your family (by mail or email).
7. Ask questions about their work.
8. Continue to be a Christian friend and continue to minister to them.
9. Support them financially.
10. Seek to encourage them when they are on stateside assignment.
Read the entire post (with explanations of each point) here. Thanks for all your encouragement – we need it and appreciate it!
As you read in a post before Christmas, our team’s vision for this ministry is to see “Lives Transformed: planting gospel seeds in the lives of refugees across Greece that take root and bear the fruit of life transformation in Jesus Christ.” Our heart is to share the hope of Christ with refugees across Greece… not only in Athens, not only in our neighborhood (Omonia), not only at our ministry center.
We are praying that God would raise up a network of refugee ministry sites across Greece. Even more, we believe that we know how God will accomplish this task: through the local church. God is working in and through local Evangelical churches throughout Greece; in many of these churches, God’s work is being manifested as a new passion for the nations… beginning with the hundreds of thousands of foreigners (Afghans, Albanians, Iranians, Romanians, Iraqis, Palestinians, and the list goes on) that God has brought to their doorstep.
I envision it like this: our ministry center is one point of light on the map (here a map of the greater Athens area).
But our vision goes beyond this. We believe that God wants to see a dozens of these “points of light” throughout Athens and the rest of Greece. Here is a map of what I imagine what our ministry (through local churches in Athens) might look like in five years.
Can you imagine the impact? On refugees? On the church? On the city? On non-believing Greeks who are seeing this sort of love in action? Pray with us: God may gospel seeds be planted in the lives of refugees across Athens, across Greece, and across the world!
