Hi fellow SEND-ers,


As we approach the end of the year, it is time to create your Individual Growth Plan for 2014. I encourage you to think about setting goals for your own development in the area of spiritual growth, self-management and ministry skills. The SEND amp_igp guide and the SEND U wiki is designed to help you with this process. If you have team leader responsibilities, you can also use the Team Leader Training Curriculum to give you ideas for how you might plan your growth for the coming year.

This month I want to highlight an updated resource or tool for church planters that Ted Szymczak has been working on. Ted has been on SEND U staff since 2011, and has been involved with several church plants in the USA and Poland. This tool is called a Road Map to SEND church planting: Goals and Phases. It outlines the objectives and different phases of the church plant work as a whole, as well as suggesting various activities that would be appropriate at each phase of the work. Furthermore, the Road Map offers a threshold marker that a church planting team can use to determine whether they have now moved into a subsequent phase.

We have been talking about the phases for a few years now, and the document has already seen several revisions. In this latest version, Ted has added a few suggested ways to track the “phases” of personal evangelism discipleship, starting with the Engel scale, and then this scale adapted to the Russian context. The method used by a team to track relationships and maturity of their contacts among an unreached people group is also included in the document. In its 14 pages, the Road Map answers Frequently Asked Questions about these phases, provides some biblical examples, addresses misunderstandings … and more.

If you want a shorter version to whet your appetite, try the 2-page Overview of Goals and Phases in SEND Church Planting. Both documents are available on the SEND U wiki page for church planting.

In the process of revising and updating this document, Ted has been collaborating with and asking for input from various SEND church planters and field leaders, including ones who work in creative access areas. We would welcome even more input, and Ted will continue to update the document. The latest version can always be found on the wiki.

We encourage each area to further adapt these church planting phases and the Engel scale for their own context. The Russia area has already done so. We want the document to assist teams in identifying and measuring progress and to spark fruitful discussions on the team about what to do next, not to limit appropriate contextualization.

Some other new resources on the SEND U wiki:

• Emotional wellness > some new resources under emotional intelligence
• Team-building > new links to a survey used to measure trust on your team
• Member Care > new links to resources on mentoring missionaries

If you would like to listen to the messages and workshops from the Missio Nexus STAND conference in Dallas in September, SEND U has purchased access for you. Download this PDF file with links to all the audio recordings, but do not distribute this file outside of SEND. You can listen to dynamic and inspiring messages by David Platt and Francis Chan and a fascinating workshop by Mike Breen on discipleship. You can also listen to workshops in the different specialty tracks, including the training track, in which we presented our current thinking on best practices in missionary training. Don Johnson's much requested session on “Sex and Missions” is found in the Personnel track.

Keep learning,

Ken
Ken Guenther
SEND U Director
living in Kiev, Ukraine