Media Missionary Focus

Delays Prove No One is in Island

Here I sit, once again, be-deviled by thunderstorms and delays.

I am writing this posting from the Newark International airport. I’m trying to get back to meet up with my wife Lisa and our two boys (who are waiting for me in North Dakota), but it looks like it might take a bit longer than I expected.

A little over a week ago I flew out to New Jersey to attend a conference in New York City, and spent seven hours in the Detroit airport when my connecting flight was canceled because of thunderstorms. Now, I am waiting for another delayed flight. Assuming my flight actually leaves at it’s new departure time I will have ten minutes to make my connection in Minneapolis. If I don’t make it I will have to spend about 8 hours in the airport waiting for the next flight.

Now, I’m sitting next to a window, and it’s beautiful outside; blue skies, just a couple clouds, not too windy… But apparently, somewhere between here and Minnesota, thunderstorms are spread across the land. It is amazing how something so far away can still affect my travel plans.

That’s just what life is like. And that’s especially what missions is like. I was just talking to a friend about our financial support system. Currently, churches and individuals send in monthly amounts that they have pledged to maintain over the next few years. We have about 120 individuals and churches who do this. Within Assemblies of God World Missions, the average monthly pledge is about $55. So to meet our budget we have to have a lot of those pledges and visit a lot of churches. My friend said he thought it would be better if missionaries had a closer relationship with just a couple of churches who would then support that missionary at a couple hundred dollars a month. That way the missionary wouldn’t have to visit so many churches and there would be more of a feeling of partnership between missionaries and their supporters. Well, in many ways that would be nice, but the problem is the same as the thunderstorms that are plaguing my trip today. If you have five churches that support you heavily, and while you are on the field there is some type of split or problem or something at one of those five churches and they stop supporting you, you could have real problems. In the past missionaries have had to leave the field because of these kind of problems with their support.

Neither system is perfect, but I believe that we can do a combination of the two and get the best of both worlds. We want to maintain closer ties to our supporters, and we hope to have some churches partner more closely with us for high pledge amounts so that we don’t have to spend so much time itinerating, but we also want to keep the broad-based support we have now so that we maintain a variety of options.

Now if I can just get the airlines to work something out with Amtrak or something…

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 10:57 PM