Sometimes I am asked what I do between my international trips. I generally travel to some international location every month, and am gone about 1.5 – 2.5 weeks/month. But what about the time I’m home. Well, that is filled with many things, like unpacking all that happened on the previous trip and preparing for the next trip. But then there are other stateside responsibilities like curriculum development with our Pathways leadership team, Steve, Mike, and Matt. These are good brothers who are tasked with setting the trajectory for the team, developing and refining curricula, and investigating ways to increase our effectiveness globally. We meet about three times/year at one of our houses, and in March the meeting was at our house. We juggled things around and hosted these three brothers and made some good progress on plans for future versions of our material and on the upcoming training for our team and stateside pastors. Long days, but important, and I’m very grateful for these men.
Two days after our leadership meeting at our house, I was off to Rwanda, which you read about in the previous blog. Two days after returning from training church planters in Rwanda, East Africa, barely catching Easter morning service at our home church, I headed out that afternoon to Iowa where we hold an annual training event for team members and pastors who actively train with us globally. It is called Spring Training.
At this event, we meet as a Pathways team of 20+ members of ReachGlobal and catch up on updates in each other’s lives, share about the direction we are moving as a team, and offer some equipping helps to make us more effective in our roles.
For the two days in the middle of Spring Training, we have a group of about 40+ stateside pastors and ministry leaders who are practitioners of Pathway globally converge on the camp in Iowa. We make many connections, offer training, practice principles, and discuss growth areas. Our theme this year was on facilitation (instead of lecturing/teaching) and I led a couple sessions on how to facilitate one of our most popular tools, the “presentation session.” It was a highly interactive time and we received good reports that the event was very beneficial for everyone. I was particularly encouraged by some of the comments from global partners who attended as well as stateside pastors and teammates when I shared about my growing focus on unreached people groups within our Pathways team. I am praying God opens doors in this area of equipping indigenous leaders to reach those who have never heard the Gospel using good Bible study principles for themselves and the lost. I am confident there is a need for this, and God will lead us on in what specifically it will look like.
