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?
Comparatively, Pentecostal Macedonia is in its infancy. After the fall of Yugoslavia and socialism in the early 1990’s, people were, for the first time, free to discover Christ. It didn’t take long to launch the Evangelical Church of Macedonia (EC:MK), a baby church movement bombarded from all sides by secularism, paganism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam.
“Friday night dinners are one of the highlights of ministry here.” So say Matt and Natalie Herschberg, AGWM Missionary Associates in Denmark. “It's been great over the summer when we all have more free time. Several students came a couple hours early to hang out and help cook. Matt is always coming up with a new cuisine to share.
We were joining together with an evangelism team and went into a mall in a town in Germany in order to talk to people about Jesus. There was a German man in a little seating area in the center of the mall. As we walked past him, Matthias, one of the team members, noticed the man had a small cross-shaped tattoo on his arm. He said, “Hey is that a cross?” To which the man replied. “Actually it’s a knife. It’s an old gang tat from when I was 15. Some day I’ll get around to getting it removed.”
