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Subscribe to the NetworkOnly Two Things
As the New Year dawned I was once again on the road for missions. I attended the Urbana conference hosted by Intervarsity every three years. This year it was in St. Louis and nearly 20,000 college aged Christians gathered to consider mission work. There were to many opportunities to count.
After the conference I hit the road to keep looking for communities where a new single day of service, 1 by Youth, can be launched. Soon I’ll be returning home.
What has struck me about missions is that there are really only two things necessary to make mission happen. Need and Desire. Initially you might think that need is on the side of those you’ll serve and desire is on the side of those coming to serve. If you’re thinking that, you’d be half right.
Need goes both ways. Yes, there’s no mission without people who need help…spiritual, physical, emotional, etc. But there’s also no mission if those with the resources have no sense of need to help. If you’re into mission you might be surprised by this, but there are a lot of good people who claim to be Christian and really have no urge to help others in substantial ways. Perhaps they have the misbegotten notion that missions means a huge commitment of time, expense and travel to a distant land. For whatever reason there’s no need.
As for desire, there are a lot of people I’ve met in desperate situations. The need is evident but they express no desire for help. In some cases they may even be hostile to the help offered. So even the strongest desire of those with resources is turned away.
So here’s the challenge for those of us who make missions our life. Finding both need and desire sufficiently abundant in everyone involved and seeing that all those people find each other. If you’re on either side of the mission experience and having a hard time finding one or both of these things, I’d love to hear from you to see if I can help.
