Missions

Musings and meditations about missions from a missionary.

How Pastors can help their missionaries on Deputation

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How Pastors can help their missionaries on Deputation

How Pastors can help their missionaries on Deputation is help from a veteran missionary of over 30+ years on his opinions and suggestions. Some missionaries have done a jam up job on raising support, and most of what I say is not applicable to them, because they have enough money coming in each month as well as funds accumulated in their bank accounts to live several years without any noticeable financial problems. While some are “well off”, a vast majority of missionaries are on the edge of financial chaos and ruin. It is a miracle how they hold their lives together.

Note: The references to “missionary” or “missionaries” in this article are specifically referring to missionaries home on furlough, doing deputation work, or just resting.

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Helping Returning Missionaries

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Helping Returning Missionaries

Helping Returning Missionaries are my thoughts and suggestions for missionaries returning on furlough to the States.

Helping Returning Missionaries

Helping Returning Missionaries
By Missionary David Cox

I recently saw a post on LinkedIn about helping missionaries returning from the field. I felt it was pretty poor and scarce as far as information and material, so I am making a similar post, and trying to fill it out more.

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Missionary Problems: “I wish I had known how difficult long-term fruit really is.”

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Missionary Problems: "I wish I had known how difficult long-term fruit really is." explores spiritual fruit in a person's life takes time.

Missionary Problems: “I wish I had known how difficult long-term fruit really is.” explores the fact that seeing spiritual fruit in a person’s life is a long term affair.

This post is my own response to an article in “Askamissionary.com”
“What do Missionaries wish they had known before they first went?”

“I wish I had known how difficult long-term fruit really is.”

To be truthful, long term results are very difficult to get.

I have been a pastor and missionary since 1986. Working with people is great. But when you have less than 10 years of working with a group of people, you see fruit. That fruit often disappears over longer time periods. What you thought were great, well-established Christians really weren’t.

I see the problem here in various forms. My observations come from years in the ministry, and from examining my own ministry and its results, as well as other people’s ministries. Some of my observations and comments are very simply my personal convictions. I have always done things like x-y-z, or I have never done things like that.

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Killer Presentation Skills

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTwjG4ZIJg

 1. You have to make the audience comfortable and focused. You have to control anxiety, and this would be very important if the speech is too long. The point is that you as the speaker want your audience to focus on your message, and that won’t happen if they are not focused. Physical problems in the same environment as the speech will distract. Sometimes they cannot be helped. The worse offense is when the speaker himself takes a shipping company attitude, that every time you turn around, the speaker is saying something that causes the audience to leave his train of thought and travel away on some off comment he has made. “Journeys of Self-Discovery” there are all kinds of things you can discover on your own. Direct eye-contact promotes focus with the speaker. YOU MUST LOOK AT THE AUDIENCE

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Presentations: Storyboarding: Tips & Tricks

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In this post, I am going to give you some tips and tricks to storyboarding or moodboarding a missionary presentation.

Also see this website/series of pages: Effective Slide presentations

Recent Posts (last 3 months)

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Presentations: Actual Storyboarding & Software

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In “the olden days” a storyboard was made on 4×6 note cards, drawn in pencil, and arranged freely. This is still a valid method of doing things, although I am getting the impression that with each new generation, these people physically cannot pick up a pencil and write on paper. That “art” apparently has gone the way of the dinosaur. So I will suggest some storyboarding software for the modern generation. But before I do, please take the time to read how we do this with paper and pencil. It is important, and you will get the essentials here, before you go to software.

First thing, you are “brainstorming” here, taking what you have, getting ideas, trying to get some kind of direction (end goal, objective) in sight, and also getting some flow (select elements and put them in order).

The absolutely essential element in your brainstorming is that the means of doing this must be flexible where you can take two “slides” and insert a new one or ten in at that point, and also take a single slide or slides and move them to another place. You can do this with word processing software, or even with presentation software like PowerPoint which is probably the most well-know and serious presentation software.

Secondly, realize that what is on the paper is not the key. It is a representation of a reality in your head. It is a placeholder at this point. So arrange your presentation, and write down things as much or as little as needed depending on how ideas are flowing. You will go back and review what each slide has, and how to get images or design a slide to present that idea.

Again, flexibility is the key. You want your ideas “on paper” so that once there you can analyze them, change them, amplify them, reduce or delete them, or rearrange them. All of this is the brainstorming and storyboarding part of making a presentation. I don’t like the idea of using a big powerful program like Powerpoint for this. Microsoft has a program called Visio to do this before you start in PowerPoint, so PowerPoint really isn’t designed for this either.

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Authority endorsements

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One of the strong points of persuasion is authority endorsements. This is when somebody who has some kind of authority or familiarity with a person, product, or service endorses that thing/person. From research, it is found that even if the person has personal benefits from the endorsement, it still helps persuade people when they hear the endorsement.

For example, when some football sports jock endorses a tennis shoe, everybody knows that he receives millions probably for the commercial endorsement. But none-the-less, many people will buy the product because they saw him endorse it. Even actors that nobody knows endorse products, and we understand that these are not “free-will” endorsements, but paid, and that most of the times, the actor or person talking has never even used that particular product before the day of filming.

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