Category: International Teams

T-Minus 3

It’s officially Monday, now, which means the day after tomorrow I’ll be on a plane.

I’m excited to go back to Ecuador, to see friends, to join ministries that I’m passionate about, to see what God has in store for me for an entire year and to begin to discover how He is going to use me. But most of the time it hasn’t really hit yet what a big deal it is. I just feel like I’m going to a familiar place for a short little while, and wondering why all these people keep hugging me and trying to cry.

One of the side effects of not doing lots of writing this summer has been a lack on information on my blog about the ministry that I’ll be doing. I think another may be that I haven’t fully processed it like I’m used to doing, so I’ll try to rectify that right now with a brief summary of what (I think) the next year has in store for me.

I will be headed back to work with Youth World, where I will be serving in a couple of ways that are right up my alley. I will be teaching music/guitar at at least two of Youth World’s partner ministry sites, Iglesia Carmen Bajo and Mision Emaus. I’ll also be doing some PR for Youth World, which will be in the form of writing for the organization’s web site (linked above) about the ongoing ministries at various partner sites.

When people talk about serving as a missionary, what comes to your mind? I have to say, until very recently, writing web pages and playing guitar would not have been my first answers. It’s fascinating to me that God uses my abilities for His work, no matter how strange a combination of skills I may seem to have, and how unimportant they seemed even to me before I thought about them in the context of ministry. But that’s the thing. Ministry is about people. It’s about relationships, and connecting people, and connecting with people, and God connecting with people.

Music is inherently social. I don’t believe I know anyone who builds, plays, and writes music for guitars. Maybe a couple people who do at least two of those things, but not everything that’s necessary for a beautiful piece of music to eventually get played for the first time. And I certainly can’t think of anyone who would bother to do any of those things if there wasn’t anyone else to enjoy it. I’ve found a love of playing for God, and I’ve even found (despite nerves and lack of talent) the joy of playing for other people in being part of worship. Something I picked up for my own enjoyment turns out something God uses for the benefit of other people, and a way for me to give back to him in a form that’s more personal to me than many others possible ways.

Writing is similar. We wouldn’t need the written word if we didn’t communicate with other people. And God has given me the opportunity to connect with people in some completely different places through things that I enjoy to begin with. How might He use the gifts He’s given you?

Group Identity

One of the things I’ve looked forward to each day of training is getting to hear from a different missionary about their ministry each morning during devotion. We’ve now had Dotun and Ami from the team in Kenya, Margaret, headed to Soroti, Uganda, Ann from IT in Yemen, and the Timmers from Bolivia, as well as watching the ministry video and praying for Sammy in Cameroon. Even aside from Scott’s three classes on the Worldwide Ministry of International Teams, most everyone here at the Elgin Ministry Center has served for varying amounts of time in all kinds of places overseas.

While I’m understandably most passionate about Youth World in Ecuador, it has been incredibly eye-opening to see the needs around the world, and how missionaries from all of IT’s national organizations are spreading the Gospel and serving God. It’s also sobering to realize how dangerous it is for many of them, and even more so for new Believers in certain parts of the world. You can talk about how lucky we are to live in a country that guarantees your freedom of religion, but seeing photographs of a baptism with all the faces blurred out, or hearing a missionary calling a Yemeni woman “Brittany” to keep her identity secret halfway around the world really drives it home in a way that praying from a nice safe North Carolina sanctuary just can’t.

It’s really exciting to see what we are a part of as an organization, and I’m reminded of that even as I look around the classroom every day. During breaks I scan the pictures in the hallway of every MIT class back to 1998 and pick out all of the people I know. And pretty soon ours will be up there and Rich or Karen or someone will be telling some new MITs, “Yeah, that’s Danny and he’s in Ecuador, and there are the Moseys and the Rosses, they went to Bolivia…” Way cool.

Summer 2009 MIT class

Bouncing Around

I’ve spent the last couple of days being challenged and stretched in a lot of ways. From making myself be observant at Willow Creek to planning out an 8-minute testimony presentation to really thinking hard about Grace, Forgiveness, trust, the Love of God, and having a vision and mission in Missions.

Today was no less of a learning experience, but I didn’t bounce around from being exhausted and replenished all day, and my brain was really thankful for that. We started off this morning watching a ministry video and praying for Sammy, an IT missionary headed for Cameroon to evangelize unreached people groups. It’s incredible to realize how many people have come through this building and organization and are connected to each other through shared values and through faith in Christ.

Our Bible study with Rich went through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob today, and I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of any of the people involved in those stories the same way. I could write my whole post on this alone, but since my current goal is cataloging my time in Elgin, maybe I’ll revisit this next week. Suffice it to say that although I see Abraham as a lot less of a mythical figure and in a lot more human way now, I hope I never have to have the failings of my faith thrown at me by Pharoh (the world).

Scott Olson took us through the completion of our overview of International Teams vision and values. I’m still stunned at how many hours the CEO of ITeams USA would spend with us lowly MITs, but have appreciated his honesty and his passion for doing things right. If you have the desire, you should totally read through International Teams USA’s 14 values (which can be found here). We spent a good deal of time today working through each one of these and I both love them and agree that while maybe we should be more vision-based, International Teams does a fantastic job of living out these values.

Lunch was more taco salad, which was great because I don’t think you can ever be tired of taco salad. It does seem funny how we (John Andrew and I, at least) keep bouncing back and forth from (vaguely) Italian to Mexican food with taco salad, pizza, taco salad, lasagna, and fajitas. The trend seems to be continuing as well, with more pizza and enchiladas on the way.

This afternoon our mystery roommate showed up too. Jacob thought he’d had a screw from previous surgery puncture his jaw. Turned out to be a lot less of a problem than that, and he was able to make it to training, so once Nate’s wife and eldest son arrive tonight, all of the MITs who were scheduled for this module will actually be here.

We continued today with Cross-Cultural Communication, which I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of, but you just can’t have enough of those classes and always learn something new (or at least get to exchange hilarious stories, that even among missionaries have a tendency to be accidentally dirty). Finally, we rounded out classes with an orientation to IT Information Systems. Nicole joked as I came in that I could be teaching it, and at the end I actually realized I could have, but that’s mostly because of my experience last year and my Curious George mentality whenever I get some kind of new account activated (I was the only one in the room who knew I had and International Teams e-mail, which I’ve had redirected to Thunderbird since Dave sent me my ITeams financial password in March).

Before you think I have a superiority complex, I’ll just tell you how terribly I did at another kind of bouncing around. We played basketball this afternoon, and I’ve never been very good at it, but I’d like to think I was at least okay at shooting after all the hoops we played in the Alliance Academy gym last summer. Whatever progress I’d made during Quito Quest 2008, I’ve lost in the last ten months, but it was still enough fun that we shot baskets and played HORSE for nearly four hours. John Andrew and I were there that whole block, with Ted, Nicole, Bill, and Jacob joining and then taking off at various times over that period. When the three of us came back to our apartment, we were pretty shot, and really dirty.

We recovered just long enough to get hungry, and had an adventure in cooking fajitas. I’ll be much more efficient next time, and that’s as much story as you’re getting out of that one.

How many times can your world be rocked in one day?

Yesterday I was up at such an incredibly early hour that I thought I’d have no problem waking up today. This morning was totally different, though. For some reason, despite having gone to bed at a reasonable hour, I had to drag myself out of bed at 7:00 to take a shower and have breakfast before class started at 8:00. I was yawning until after lunch, which made me feel terrible because everything we did today was so thoroughly interesting.

We started off hearing about the refugee ministry in Kenya from an IT missionary couple on furlough. Dotun and Ami are Nigerian and Philippina respectively, and met on the mission field working with mostly women and children who have fled into Kenya from Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and other nearby countries. They work with people from backgrounds I can’t even begin to imagine, from the Lost Boys of Sudan to women who have been victims of trafficking. It was heartbreaking to hear their stories, but also uplifting to realize what a passion they have for God and for these people and what their team is doing for the Church in Kenya.

As if my world hadn’t been rocked by 8:30, we did devotions with Rich Becker (Director of Training) and then got to hear Scott Olson’s testimony (Director of International Teams USA), both of which managed to blow me away in their own unique way.

Lunch today included almost all of the Elgin Ministry Center staff, so they all introduced themselves and told about what they do, and all of the MITs introduced ourselves again. No matter how much confidence I seem to exude or how many jokes I tell, I loathe standing in front of a group of people and talking. I’ve gotten much better at it, but my nervousness has just never gone away. Even telling people my name and where I’m from and how I’ve experienced the love of God on my IT journey so far got my heart-rate up and it stayed that way until well after lunch and break were over.

I say that to lead into the fact that we gave our testimonies today. After facilities and mobilization orientations, we split into groups of three or four MITs plus a staff member as a facilitator and then one or two more staff members just for fun for each group.

Now as a little background, I’m Methodist. “Testimony” was like a bad word to me until very recently. In fact, I didn’t even know I had one until recently. Before splitting into groups, Mark Foshager picked three random people out of the eleven of us and asked us on a scale of one to ten how ready we felt to give our testimony. Kelsey, Ted, and I all said we were at about 5. I felt lucky in the group I ended up in, which turned out to be Kelsey and Ted. Rich was our facilitator, and Dave was our active spectator, and we theoretically had 8 minutes to give our story, but spent much more time than that on each person, asking questions when they were finished. I think we were all surprised at some of the things we learned about each other, especially how we keep finding out that everyone here would seem (at least to the world) to have ended up in Missions “accidentally,” Even aside from that, people can rock you just telling you about their seemingly average life and walk of faith. As Scott Olson put it at lunch “They know more about me than my mother does now.”

After we officially finished for the day, John Andrew and I headed outside to “play basketball” with the kids. It started raining, but we eventually made it back outside and shot hoops with the Ackermann guys, and eventually Eric invited us back to their apartment for dinner. It was pretty cool hanging out with them, eating taco salad and telling jokes and talking about Ecuador (the Eric, Carla and their 4 kids are headed to Costa Rica for language school and then to Quito to work at Casa Gabriel).

If the next four days of training are anything like today, we’re going to be well fed, both with home cooking and the Spirit.

Lazy Sunday

This morning I got to sleep in. Usually having to be at church at 8:00am (though I almost never actually make that), I couldn’t believe it last night when we were told to meet for church at 10:30. Since I crashed only a very short time after posting my blog last night, I still got out of bed at around 7:15, but it was really nice to sit around and read and have breakfast and not have to run out the door immediately.

So the four single MITs, the Ross family (dad Nate and five kids are present so far), and the Mosey family (Ted, Caroline and 1-year-old son Jude) were taken to church by Rich and Zo Becker, two full-timers here at the EMC. And we went to church at Willow Creek.

In case you aren’t familiar with it, Willow Creek Community Church is a megachurch just outside Chicago, and about twenty minutes from here in Elgin. It averages 23,000 attendees in a weekend (three services) and the main auditorium holds 7,200 people- the largest theatre in the United States.

Definitely a new experience for me. We came in through the food court (yes, the food court) and found the “Sunday School” classes for the Ross kids and the nursery for Jude (who wasn’t just signed in, but given a computer-generated barcode sticker on his back) and headed for the auditorium, past the waterfall and the escalators. The auditorium has two 14×24-foot LCD screens (I had to look up the dimensions) and a huge stage, aside from just the daunting amount of seating (which was so full I thought Rich would never find a place for us to all sit together).

Typical of a lot of super-contemporary and non-denominational churches, the service was basically music right at the beginning, announcements, and then a message. Although of experienced the lack of liturgy before, it still caught me off guard that there was absolutely no theological context given to the offering (which I noticed on my own) and a little disconcerting to realize there’s not a cross in the building (a fact which I knew beforehand, but was careful to look and confirm). For a congregation whose goal is to reach the unchurched, I understand the reasons behind these (which for the sake of brevity I won’t discuss here), and though I don’t like tradition for the sake of tradition and at the cost of sincerity, I (coming from a very traditional church background) tend to be observant of and opposed to incidents of the Church taking direction from the world.

Not that the service was in any way not great. In fact, it was a very positive worship experience for me when I switched myself from “analytical” mode to “God” mode. The music was both powerful and good, and the message was really Scripturally rooted. In fact, the message was almost entirely Scripture, with the focus being on internalizing Scripture for strength in everyday life (something that’s not necessarily one of my strong points, and so was really good to hear).

After the service, we reunited the group in the food court and had lunch together. It was really nice getting to hang out some more and getting a chance to talk to some of the people like the Moseys who I had only briefly been introduced to before. As Caroline observed, it’s funny how roundabout everyone’s story is of how the ended up with International Teams. Before she said that, I had felt like I was the only one (I mean, I got here because I interned last year because Deborah planted the idea in my head when I went on a team the year before, to which I was invited because I’d been on a team with Julie, who had gone the year before with team members who she’d grown up with, who were connected through the Episcopal Church through Cameron, who had also met Carrie years before at camp and who has her own totally roundabout way of ending up a missionary)1.

This afternoon was grocery shopping. Two unpicky twenty-something guys with an envelope of money in a grocery store. We came back with a lot of pizza.

Seriously though, I will be making enchiladas at some point this week, so that should be an adventure both in cooking and blogging.

After that was more down-time. Having learned in Quito not to sit around the house and wait for something to happen (because you end up sitting around the house a lot that way),2 we headed downstairs to see if anyone was in the lounge. Although it turned out to be locked at the time, we eventually wound up jumping on the opportunity to play basketball and football with the Ross kids, and within thirty minutes half the people living here this week were outside playing, talking and hanging out with us.

Another funny realization (a continual one, really) is the connections between people. It was amazing to me how many familiar names were dropped this afternoon (for example: Matt, Cameron, Lane, Danielle, Teddy, Nicole, Miguel, Bob, Phil and Howie just out of one conversation on the sidewalk). To think of all the places that all of these people have crossed paths, and how much more of that there is because of the twelve people here this week (two years from now some of these people will be saying in Ecuador “yeah, I was in training with Danny Peck.” It blows my mind).

Tomorrow class actually begins with Devotions, The Word of God, ITeams Vision and Values, orientations to Mobilization and to Facilities, and presenting testimonies. Wow.

1What a parenthetical phrase!
2Even if it does produce really great blogs.

First Day in Elgin

Today has been the official first day of my training with International Teams. I got up early this morning (3:30am Eastern, which was 2:30am here in Illinois) to drive to Richmond, VA and flew from there to Chicago. My flight itself was uneventful, and when I rolled off and walked downstairs, my luggage came around the turn on the baggage claim belt just as I arrived. I didn’t even have to stop moving to pick it up and keep walking. I did get stuck in an elevator, but that slight trauma was over quickly, and a few phone calls later I was on a bus to Elgin, where I was met by Stacy who drove me back to the office, a.k.a. IT’s Elgin Ministry Center.

I got a brief tour and discovered I was the first one of the MITs to arrive (that never happens). It was nice, though, to get settled in here before other people started showing up, especially with my total lack of sleep up to that point. The EMC serves as IT’s office as well as its training facility and residences for missionaries headed to the field. Upstairs are (really nice) apartments, each with a living/dining area, kitchen, laundry room, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a porch/balcony. I’ll be living this week with two other guys, one of whom is here already and who will be doing the same training module as me.

Dinner was (roughly) at 5:30 and it was the first time we all got together and got to meet everyone. There is a total of one married couple here without their kids, three married couples with at least one kid, two single girls and two single guys. Most everyone else will be serving long-term, though both of the other single interns are headed to Ecuador as well (John Andrew to Guayaquil and Kelsey to Quito as well). I’m really looking forward to continuing to get to know everyone, and excited to know that there are a couple of people who I will get to see again in August.

The rest of the night was a more in-depth tour of the EMC facilities, some introductory things, and just hanging out getting to know the rest of the staff and MITs. After dinner and our tour, we were officially finished for the night and headed back upstairs. It was about 8 and still light and really nice outside, so John Andrew and I decided to go find the bike/walking path and scope it out. That gave us a chance to hang out and talk some more and get to know each other, and it was really cool sharing our passion for missions and how we ended up here and where we’re going. As an aside, I wish Elizabeth City would hire Elgin’s park planner. Really sweet public bike path that goes down under the road and back around by the creek and the river.

I didn’t realize until I came back and sat down on our couch how exhausted I was, mostly just from travel. Really good thing I flew. Overall, I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone else through classes, hanging out, and cooking, excited about what God will do through our training and worship this week, and ahorita, sleep.

Unbelievably Competative

I am unbelievably competative. I wrote a grand total of four posts on my blog for the entire month of February. I’ve put up four posts in one day before, and it took me an entire (albiet generally gloomy) month to match that in the most recent division of time for which statistics are available.

But now Mike has his blog working.

Together, we have run two web sites at varying levels of success, readership, and profit, but at equal levels of snobbery, mockery, sarcasm, humor, web savvy, wit, charm, and humility (high, higher, higher than you think, higher than we thought, lower than you tink, immeasurable, undeniable, and none, respectively). Seperately, we’ve run such a number of others that it would not increase even my self-admitted humility rating to take credit for it (I have a dozen at first mental count).

Certainly being in a foreign country and cataloging your experiences is innately more interesting than the musings that have been gracing the servers of dp.n of late. I would know, on both counts. But what I’ve learned from the same situation is that while everyday experiences are superficially much more exciting from the perspective of here, and easy to notice from the perspective of there, thery’re still “everyday experiences.” Everyday common, but every day common as well.

That said, expect to see more of me in March. Game on.