Summer Missions Prep

Some of you probably have some short term missions plans starting to gel - the Super Bowl is over after all. Let me encourage you - first, your plans will probably change. Second, invest a lot of energy in preparing your teams.

Short term teams are notorious for being under-prepared. My three big areas to prepare in? Ministry skills [skills based on what you are actually there to do], missions inspiration [big picture of the world and why we are going there] and building a high performance team.

Ember might be involved in helping some teams prepare for the summer - as we started to think about some of that kind of planning, it reminded me of one of the biggest successes in my previous student missions role - the success known as Mission Advance, a 24 hour immersive experience involving all three of those above.

I'm also reminded that preparing our teams requires innovation and creativity - it doesn't and shouldn't look the same each year. In fact, one of our crazy ideas would have been to run Mission Advance in a urban context: transporting suburban students to the city, with a service project, ministry skills training and facilitators helping the team leaders. Context and culture lessons would have been front and center. That idea is free - take it and run with it if you want. [Here are some other ideas you might want to try.]

If you're interested in picking some of Ember's expertise in training student missions teams, comment or email. We would love to help your students get ready to shape human history.