Tuesday, January 08, 2008

The Admin Side of Mission

I was part of a marathon lunch meeting last week with the usual suspects involved in mission efforts at GCC. It's the same group of people that I meet with periodically: the person in charge of the Missions Task Force [the MTF]; her husband who is the elder overseeing missions; and the point person for adult teams, who does the same thing I do for students. [I also dragged ESunde along with me.] The MTF is in the middle of managing some serious growth with regard to short term teams, moving from 0 adult teams in 2004 to ten for this coming summer, not to mention the growth in student teams.

Some issues that we discussed included:
- How do we handle immunizations? Included in fundraising or no?
- How do we deal with people who are kicked off of teams, in the off chance that happens?
- How do we deal with people who are totally opposed to raising support and want to pay for short term trips out of their pocket?
- Start the discussion about mid-term people, those that are going for 1-3 years somewhere, which leads to
- Discussion about GCC becoming more like a mission/sending agency which requires us to get better at training, follow up, and care. [Related: See #2 in this post.] Perhaps some of these points may help some of you readers if you are involved in the growth of mission projects for a local church.

I also shared a little bit about plans for 2008 for SPACE. We will reveal those soon enough, but it's again a bit more ambitious than previous years. When I share these plans with normal people, they tell me that I'm either crazy or stupid. This group that I had lunch with though, each one of them said, "I would go on that!"

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