Send Me! Your Journal to the Nations
Getting Ready - Step 2
For Best Results . . .
Steve Hoke
If you want to best prepare yourself for future ministry, follow this suggested pre-field conditioning program while rooted in your home church and culture.
• Be accepting of others’ opinions. Acceptance, openness, and trust are three of the most important values you can carry into inter-cultural relationships. When you talk to people who hold differing viewpoints from yours, ask questions like, “Can you help me understand why…?” instead of trying to convince them that your opinion is better.
• Refine the art of conversation. Commit yourself to making new acquaintances. Take the initiative. Ask good questions. Be a responsive listener.
• Practice adapting/stretching. Develop flexibility. Consider alternatives. Look for more than one way to accomplish tasks, and practice praising others for their creativity.
• Be informed about world events. Become a proactive reader of international news and of materials on intercultural relations. Sharpen your perception of patterns and principles relating Scripture to cultures and peoples’ behavior.
• Study other cultures. Ted Ward’s practical handbook, Living Overseas, is an excellent primer. It contains positive tips for learning about other cultures. Study books on cultural anthropology and look for magazine articles describing peoples from other cultures.
• Get accustomed to another language. Tune your radio or television to a foreign language station. Learn basic phrases in another language. Practicing any new language sharpens your mental capacities and makes you more responsive to the particular language you will learn overseas.
• Build a friendship with a person from another country. Establish a long-range relationship. Learn some of your new friend’s language and try to understand his or her perspective.
• Master the fundamentals of spiritual discipline. Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline stresses that you must establish inner order before you can expect your outer activity to have coherence and power. Either you enter the arena of spiritual warfare dressed and equipped for battle, or you step out spiritually naked.
• Strengthen spiritual unity by yielding your rights. Paul said that all things were permissible, but not all things were beneficial (1 Cor. 10:23). Although some behavior isn’t inherently wrong or evil, it doesn’t build unity. Paul was willing not to insist on his rights in every situation (Phil. 4:11-12). He accepted certain limitations or conditions (1 Cor. 9:12, 15, 19). Look for ministry opportunities in which you can yield rather than demand your rights.
• Commit to a team ministry in your church. Work together with people. Share ideas. Discuss goals. Take leadership responsibility. You must learn to deal graciously with inter-ruptions and ambiguity, give and receive feed-back, and have your ideas rejected.
• Keep a daily journal. This is a practical way to reflect on your ideas, thoughts, and feelings in a consistent, organized manner. Record what you saw and felt, why you responded the way you did, and what you learned about yourself. Keeping a journal will sharpen your critical thinking and is one way of tracking your spiritual journey.
• Develop physical stamina. Physical endurance affects every area of life, especially the spiritual. The physical and emotional demands of entering and adjusting to a new culture can be countered through a consistent conditioning program.
• Invest financially in advancing God’s kingdom - both on the “front lines” and “behind the scenes.” Research where this giving can be most effective; then accompany it with prayer.
Reprinted with permission from Wherever, a publication of TEAM.
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Excerpt from Send Me! Your Journey to the Nations Copyright 1999, World Evangelical Alliance, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission. The entire Send Me! workbook may be purchased online at www.wearesources.org.
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