Mission focus

After returning from Guatemala with 18 other folks from our church this summer, I've ended up working a lot with a different, but equally amazing group of people from our church. This group - including some deacons, elders, long-time members, and others - planned a great all-church breakfast and mission discernment event on Epiphany Sunday, January 6. We're currently planning a follow-up breakfast and event for Sunday, April 20 (Vincent's birthday!). In the last event we ate cereal, fruit, and king cake, and then Stephanie and I took off with about 10 kids and showed them slides from the summer Guatemala and Appalachia mission trips and engaged in an Epiphany craft activity. Meanwhile, the adults stayed at their tables and talked about mission partnerships and developing authentic, reciprocal relationships not only in mission outreach ventures but also in our church and our families. This next event will pick up on that and push forward to help us prioritize among mission opportunities and rethink those opportunities primarily as relationship-building (for example, possibly with folks in Guatemala, Appalachia, Louisville, missionaries around the world, and farm workers). Once again we've got a great group of people working on this, including long-time church members such as Bob, who gave a fabulous Minute for Mission message last week in church referring to his work as a missionary in India in the 1960s, and Izzy, who helped inspire about eight (other) church people to get up in the fog this morning and head off to help build a new Habitat for Humanity house in Old Louisville and who started us off this morning with a beautiful prayer. I'm so blessed to be working with these and other wonderful people on this effort. Today we got off to a great start, after the Men's Breakfast folks (including two of our own) had invited us and we joined them for pancakes and sausage breakfast (I controlled myself). Then, although our pastor helped rescue us after we floundered a bit, our meeting ran long, and my cell phone went off during Izzy's prayer, we got to start off with introductions and prayer requests. We ended up getting so much planned/accomplished in a process - much like at our meeting in December - that I believe the positive group dynamics and the Holy Spririt helped along as none of us could have come up with all of that/made all of those decisions on our own. (For more information on our Spring Mission Focus Breakfast, you should be able to see, shortly, more about it on a blog (see above and to the right).