Hi fellow SEND-ers,

June was spent travelling, visiting SEND North as well as a number of churches and donors in British Columbia. So no June edition of the Training Tracks. Now we are a week away from beginning MOP in Farmington, so I want to quickly update you on what is happening in SEND U and training.

SEND U now has its own logo. Our SEND U Leadership Team chose the logo at the bottom of the email after considering a number of different proposals from both fellow SEND missionaries and the SEND media department. The idea of a growing tree was found in many of the suggestions, but Chris Bresnahan (Ukraine) and Kandid Hofstetter (Russia) were the ones that received the $20 Amazon gift certificate for their winning entries. Congratulations, Chris and Kandid and thanks to all who participated in the contest.

You will find the new SEND U logo on the SEND U wiki, the SEND U Facebook page, the SEND U site on SharePoint, and various other SEND U publications and presentations. The logo will emphasize the importance of lifelong learning, and make it a little easier to identify our training initiatives within SEND and also to offer these resources to missionaries from other organizations. Mission organizations are increasingly sharing training resources, and we are thankful that we can both benefit from the wisdom of other organizations and contribute to the training of those from other missions who serve the same God and have the calling that we do.

Talking about sharing, a few weeks ago, Ted Szymczak took a few of our SEND church planters to Minneapolis to participate in the Multiplying Churches Globally training, organized by ReachGlobal with significant input from SEND U. This training happens every year in June, and is highly recommended for all church planters who want to sharpen their skills.

As part of our ongoing process of developing our pre-field training, Lisa Engelsman created and then facilitated a 4-week online course as part of this year's Member Orientation Program. Prior to coming to Farmington, all our MOP participants for the upcoming MOP were asked to spend about 5 hours each week, reading various resources and online texts, and then posting their thoughts in multiple interactive online forums throughout the 4 weeks.

Creating this course and then facilitating it was a lot of work for Lisa, and she is to be commended for tackling and completing this huge project. A special thanks to the new MOP participants, who in effect served as “beta testers” for this brand new online course. By covering a lot of the pre-field training in the online format, we hope to be able to do more interactive, “fun” learning activities in the onsite (face-to-face) portion of MOP, starting next week. Definitely, the depth and scope of the pre-field training has been greatly enhanced, particularly in understanding one's own cultural biases, the complexities of other cultures, and how to live and serve incarnationally in such cultures.

Lastly, I want to highlight the new training initiative of SEND North for its Alaskan missionaries who serve in the bush. Northern Ministry Training is the brainchild of Bill Wilson, the Regional Coach for church planters in Alaska, and Christy Zimmerman has done a superb job of organizing this event, now for the second year at Alaska Bible Institute in Homer, Alaska. Bertha and I had the opportunity to participate in and evaluate the training in June. This one week training program focuses on equipping new missionaries to engage the native cultures of Alaska. Again, in the spirit of sharing, representatives of various other churches and mission organizations were also invited to attend the training. The facilitators were experienced practitioners, all from Alaska, but not nearly all from SEND.

Although the training is only one week long, it includes a “Track 2” for those who had attended the training last year, and in future years, a Track 3 and 4 are also planned. So rather than giving all the training in one extended time period prior to ministry engagement, these Alaskan missionaries are being given bite-sized training, in regular annual intervals, with sufficient opportunity between each training event to implement what they are learning. Furthermore, by pulling all the new missionaries and many of their team leaders together in one place, networking, sharing of ideas and support for our people living in very isolated communities is wonderfully facilitated. Well done, SEND North!

Keep learning,

Ken
Ken Guenther
SEND U Director
currently in North America, but based in Kiev, Ukraine