My friend SH

This is my friend SH. I have known him for a long time, maybe 6 or 7 years, since he was in high school. In fact, he has three brothers and I know all of them pretty well too. We just reconnected tonight at a sort of reunion night for a youth ministry program I used to work with.

He will be going to Argentina in a few weeks with The Navigators on a missions trip. He also went to Argentina last summer, and this summer, they are heading back to the exact same place.

They were there for 6 or 8 weeks last year. At the end of their trip, as they were loading their stuff to go to the airport, a person that had been reaching out to all summer accepted the call to follow Jesus. The only person that summer.
They have some knowledge that now there is a cluster of 6 or so people following Jesus in that location.

We typically break up mission people into three categories: goer, sender, prayer. SH is not only a goer. You've all seen people that talk about their instable ideas - their faces light up, they can't quite explain it, they start to get sweaty... SH has got that about a certain idea about being on mission. He has, you can tell, stayed up late nights thinking about it in his head. He sometimes thinks hes a bit off, a little crazy, telling himself it will never work. Maybe we need to start telling ourselves that its not enough to just send goers. Maybe our paradigms need to shift to be building more than goers.

I don't know what we would call it, or how we would add another category to the three. (Do we even really need these categories of people?) What I do know is that we need people who are so passionate for Jesus, that they are constantly creating and molding new ideas for being on mission. We need people that initiate, not only moving on an idea to go to another country, but that execute from the slightest hint of the Spirit moving from dream and vision to tangible process and relationship. Maybe we have told people for far too long that going is simply enough. Made the mistake of believing that a body and proximity is enough for the Gospel to become unleashed.