A Saturday for the Future

I spent over 2 hours this morning doing some evaluation about our summer trips with a select few people. This morning, the elder at GCC in charge of missions, his wife who is the head of the Missions Task Force, a lady who is the coordinator for adult short term trips and myself had some deep discussions about this past summer and planning for the future.

The topics we discussed included an evaluation of each trip from this summer [GCC had a total of 7 trips - our 5 SPACE teams and Uganda and Honduras,] Finances, Leadership Development and Training. We also tried to do an honest evaluation for each trip - should we go back, was a short term team part of their overall strategy, how did the concept of a locally, indigenous team working with the ministry fit in with the trip. All in all, a really fun discussion because each one of us are passionate about how GCC can be mobilizing workers for the world.

Here is a short list of things we decided to do in the future:
- Find a locally based travel agent and use them for all of our travel logsitics. Must ensure that they can get 'missionary' rates. Also, apparently British Airways allows you to check in 3 bags instead of 2 if you are a missionary or something like that.
- As support funding comes in, that information should go directly to the team members, instead of relying on the team leaders to get the information out. This will allow for team members to know their support status faster and is just as easy over email.
- Target knowing what overseas teams are going in a January timeframe. [They were all laughing at me when we were talking about this...]
- Attempt to have people that might be interested in short term trips make themselves known to the MTF in the Fall.

It was not, at first, at the top of my list on what I wanted to do on a Saturday morning. But there is definitely an organic movement of people in our church that are interested in going on short-term trips. I know that our discussion is going to help frame how GCC is going to get even better as a church that is serious about sending people and helping create churches for the future.