Transforming Ventures: A Spiritual Guide for Volunteers in Mission

Transforming Ventures

A Spiritual Guide for Volunteers in Mission

Copyright © 2000 by Jane P. Ives

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Scripture quotations not otherwise identified are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

This Is My Song. st. 1 by Lloyd Stone. © 1934, 1962 Lorenz Publishing Co. Reproduced by permission.

Cover design: Kym Whitley

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Cover transparency: PhotoDisc

Print ISBN:978-0-8358-0910-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ives, Jane P.

Transforming ventures : a spiritual guide for volunteers in mission / Jane P. Ives

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-8358-0910-2

Mobi ISBN: 978-0-8358-1750-9

ePub ISBN: 978-0-8358-1751-6

1. Missionaries—Religious life.    2. Spiritual life—Methodist authors. I. Title.

BV2063.I94 2000                                                                         99-32676

266—dc21                                                                                    CIP

To my husband, with whom I share the journey, and to our children and grandchildren, thay they may know God’s presence along the way.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

How to Use This Guide

Part One: Before You Leave Home

Orientation: A Team Convenes

Preparation: Challenge and Opportunity

Theme 1: Discovering God Already at Work

Theme 2: Experiencing Hospitality

Theme 3: Making Adjustments

Theme 4: Liberating Time

Theme 5: Meeting Jesus

Theme 6: Building a Team

Theme 7: Singing the Lord’s Song

Theme 8: Maturing in Christ

Part Two: During Your Mission Project

Theme 1: Discovering God Already at Work

Theme 2: Experiencing Hospitality

Theme 3: Making Adjustments

Theme 4: Liberating Time

Theme 5: Meeting Jesus

Theme 6: Building a Team

Theme 7: Singing the Lord’s Song

Theme 8: Maturing in Christ

Part Three: After Your Return

Theme 1: Discovering God Already at Work

Theme 2: Experiencing Hospitality

Theme 3: Making Adjustments

Theme 4: Liberating Time

Theme 5: Meeting Jesus

Theme 6: Building a Team

Theme 7: Singing the Lord’s Song

Theme 8: Maturing in Christ

Resources

Organizational Helps for Team Leaders

Commissioning and Other Worship Ideas

Suggestions for Group Use of This Guide

Suggestions for Follow-up Study

Notes

Works Cited

About the Author

Preface and Acknowledgements

WHILE LOOKING FORWARD to helping others, volunteers for short-term mission projects often do not foresee how involvement in mission endeavors may change their own lives. Experiencing a different culture, coming face to face with poverty and human need, and building Christian community with other team members can cause radical shifts in our understanding of God’s work in our world. Persons unprepared for challenges to their worldview and self-perception may have difficulty responding positively and appropriating their learnings after returning home. This book, based both on my own experiences and on the reflections of other mission volunteers, offers guidance and resources to help volunteers in mission process the spiritually transforming aspects of their experiences.

During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us.

—Acts 16:9

My first work-team project took place in 1991. Six years earlier, a group from the United Methodist church my husband pastored in Maine went to northern Haiti to dig fishponds, an agricultural project designed to improve the food supply. Donald B. Small, a layman and mathematics professor, organized the trip. My husband, who had long dreamed of such a venture, joined the team, along with our college-aged son and daughter. I stayed home with our younger son, but the stories they told when they returned and the excitement in their eyes inspired my determination to take part in a similar trip someday.

Don Small decided to help establish a vocational school in one of the small, rural villages where the team worked. Every two or three years he returns to Haiti during his midwinter break to monitor and support its progress. In 1991, he organized a second work team to renovate a building at the vocational school to provide dormitory space for students who cannot commute. On the twenty-fifth day of December that year, my husband, our youngest son, and I undecorated our Christmas tree and stuck it in the snowbank outside our door. As we prepared to leave for Haiti early the next morning, I had no idea that this was only the first of many such trips; nor could I imagine how these ventures would impact my global understanding, self-awareness, and spiritual life.

Nine months after our return from Haiti, when we moved from Maine to West Virginia because of my husband’s election to the episcopacy, we were thrilled to discover there a growing volunteer-in-mission program, spearheaded by the Reverend Tom Clark, but also energized by a number of other pastors and laypersons. Tom already had organized and led a number of teams to various sites across our country and to Jamaica, Mexico, and Nicaragua. He was eager to expand this program and excited by our enthusiastic support. My husband and I participated in the first West Virginia work team to Russia in the summer of 1994 and joined one of the three work teams our conference sent to Zimbabwe in 1997. In January of 1998, our educational tour of Israel included a work team extension in Jerusalem. Most recently we spent some time with a West Virginia team working at a barrio church in Mendoza, Argentina, and I participated with several other bishops’ spouses in a trip to Kosovo organized by The United Methodist Committee on Relief. These ventures have altered my perspectives and stimulated in me an ongoing work of personal spiritual transformation. Working on this book has helped me process related insights and learnings, more fully comprehending and integrating the spiritual growth dimensions of these experiences.

The West Virginia Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church now sends out at least five teams a year to work on projects both within our country and abroad. In addition, many local churches send their own teams to work at mission sites within our conference or in other states. I want to thank Tom Clark, who to date has organized more than fifty-three international teams involving approximately nine hundred persons, for his leadership and for his encouragement of this book. Thanks also to Don Small, Monty Brown, and John Bowyer for their leadership of other mission work teams on which I have served. Thanks to the many team members with whom I participated in these adventures, especially those who have so graciously shared their thoughts and journals with me. I wish also to thank my editors George Donigian, who conceived this project and invited my participation, and Rita Collett, who so skillfully brought it to completion.

I owe deepest gratitude to my husband, with whom I share the journey in the fullest sense, for his encouragement and support of my mission ventures. We are grateful that our children, each having participated in one of these trips, can appreciate the significance and impact of our experiences.

Above all, thanks be to God for the ongoing journey and adventures of my life and for The United Methodist Church, which has nurtured me since childhood. My church connects me with brothers and sisters in Christ all over the world. Its Wesleyan heritage, which links personal spirituality with social concern, makes this book possible.

November 1999

How to Use This Guide

PART ONE: Before You Leave Home offers important insights, suggestions, and spiritual disciplines to prepare you for your mission project. Part Two: During Your Mission Project provides Bible study, reflection questions, and response suggestions for individual or team use while at your mission site. Part Three: After Your Return will help you process and integrate your new awareness and learnings when you come home.

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.

—Philippians 1:6

To prepare for a mission project, complete Part One before you leave home. Use Part Two during your project, and work through Part Three after your return. If you have never gone on a mission trip and do not plan to do so soon, use your imagination to participate vicariously in these adventures. Perhaps you can use this guide to partner spiritually with mission volunteers you know, or perhaps it will inspire you to join a team. In any case you will find stimulus for personal growth and discover ways to be a mission volunteer at heart—in your daily life, in your church, and in your community—whether or not you ever travel geographically. If you have already participated in short-term mission projects, join me now in remembrance, celebration, and ongoing spiritual growth.

A Word to Team Leaders

As team leader, you will want to read this entire book before your mission trip, making note of your own experiences that further illustrate its themes and issues. Review the suggestions in the Resources section for group sessions before, during, and after your trip, as well as for commissioning services and other worship experiences. Encourage team members to complete Part One before leaving home, in addition to reading materials related to your particular project and destination.

Part Two provides materials for Bible study, reflection, and response while on-site. Individuals may use these on their own, but studying and discussing them together will enhance the impact for your team.

After your trip, some team members may take months or even years to complete Part Three. It is important that they thoroughly consider and assimilate these concepts rather than hurry through the material. Team reunions could provide an opportunity for members to share their use of Part Three. If it is impossible for the whole team to reconvene, perhaps small groups of persons who live near one another could meet occasionally or on a regular basis. You might even invite mission volunteers from different projects within the same church, community, or cooperative parish to meet for discussion and sharing of Part Three and to support one another in continued spiritual growth and mission.

Train yourself in godliness, for, while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. (1 Tim. 4:7-8)

Orientation: A Team Convenes

NINETEEN OF US crowded into the meeting room of the airport restaurant, surrounded by our carry-on baggage and heaps of coats. Tom checked off the last name and smiled, calling us to attention.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? And I said, Here am I; send me!

—Isaiah 6:8

"Good, we’re all here. Welcome to the January work team for Africa University. We have a good number