You don’t become a missionary by raising money and flying to a foreign country. You do it by being obedient to God. Tell people about Jesus where you live. Get out of your comfort zone. Sell something precious and apply it to your debts. Make a sacrifice. Develop better friendships. There is an old saying: “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” While this is not to be taken literally in this sense, (please, don’t start wearing the national garb of the country you want to go to just yet). However, somewhere in the process, we have to make a conscious decision that there is no going back.
Dan and Joy West have had a rich missionary career, yet at a time in their career when they might be tempted to stay in their comfort zone, Dan and Joy are starting over.
More than 30 years ago, the last evangelical church in the municipality of Bergen, Netherlands, closed its doors, leaving no evangelical witness for two generations. But a small yet passionate group of Christians believed God for a miracle in their community.
For most of his life, one of missionary Rich McLane’s passions has been hunting. His wife Lori enjoys playing the trumpet. When they became missionary church planters in Poland years ago, who would have guessed these passions would converge to reach more than 120,000 hunters throughout the country?
Missionaries Steve and Christina Walent have served in Europe for more than 33 years, and in that time, through their ministry Church Basics International (CBI), they have partnered with numerous churches to help them implement positive change. The Walents are passionate about their calling to help churches “rediscover their reason for being and become a church that lives the Great Command and Great Commission.”
“When we first landed in Germany, the only way I can describe how I felt is that my legs were shaking,” related Elina Charvat, who together with her husband Tyler became missionaries to Germany in 2012. They had never been lead pastors and had never planted a church, yet God had placed a calling on their lives—not only to plant a church, but to plant a church-planting church. As they moved to Leipzig, Germany, in 2016 to plant a church, reality began to set in, and the Charvats began wondering if they had made a mistake.
From the start of 2017, one of our churches in the northernmost German province of Schleswig-Holstein had been averaging about 160 attendees for their Sunday morning services. The pastor and the church leadership team were not satisfied with the status quo, so they decided to take part in our CBI church transformation training which started in their region the end of January 2017.
