2007 summer leader debriefing

This morning, I met with some other mission team leaders [in SPACE and out of SPACE] in a meeting facilitated by the GCC Missions Task Force for the purpose of debriefing the summer teams leaders. Here are some random and scattered notes that may help you if you are a mission team leader, serve on a mission board or have involvement in sending, supporting or being on teams.

PH - adult short term coordinator
PW - elder, overseeing missions
SW - chair of MTF
J and J - team leaders, adult - Uganda, AOET
S and B - team leaders, adult - Mexico, WorldServants
TS - moi, SPACE in general, SPACE 2007 Hungary
DS - my better half, SPACE 2007 Hungary
TM - SPACE 2007 England
JB - SPACE 2007 NYC

Team prep time:
Mexico - 9 weeks from start to finish - not enough time
Uganda - 12 weeks

What kind of preparation:
logistical
language training
Might help to have single day workshop to cover fund raising, culture and logistics - like Mission Advance
Uganda did personality testing
can and should begin to resource a lot of other people within the Body - language training, cultural engagement, team building

Team application process:
how do we choose who goes - need some level of baseline for participants
interviews
this year for adult teams, short term coord did most of the interviewing and then placed people on specific teams
need spousal buy in and agreement

While the team is on the field:
support for spouses/families - who is left behind
including expectations for communication protocol

Debriefing:
need to meet with teams once they come home again - specific to process not for social
have people who are fully devoted to the experience but gain a heart for missions after they return home
long term view - how is God calling you to this in the future?
bring in a guest facilitator for debriefing teams

You probably noticed that most of these issues are common to mission team leaders. You could also infer that there was a lot more to talk about and these were just the talking points that rose to the top in our limited time. Consistently, the missions piece has gotten tons of empowerment, gratefulness and delegation of authority and leadership from the higher-ups at GCC.

Within SPACE, we have also been thinking about process improvement and I'll be detailing some of our plans along those lines in a later post.

Related MTF debriefing sessions - 2005 and 2006