They say March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. This is fitting for some of our northern readers who go from harsh winter to gentle spring during the month. Of course, here in Texas, winter is long gone by March, but who’s checking.
“I don’t know what to do, I can’t go on like this any longer, my soul is dry, I want to lead from a deeper place, yet the pressures of ministry and the needs of the field leave me tired and weary.”
The first thing in my experience in discipling, coaching and mentoring is to assess where people are in terms of belief systems. I have however observed that belief systems have lots to do with what eventually would become the person’s identity.
It is one thing to prepare to go overseas by learning approaches for loving the people and bringing them to Jesus. It is yet another thing to be there, in their midst, struggling to survive, tasting their plights, paralyzed and overwhelmed with their needs and with your own limits. I found that the Spirit of Jesus knew that is what I would experience and was there ready to counsel me the moment I would bend my ear to him.
When I left everything in the valley of my hometown in California to move to the hot, dusty brown lands of Northern India, I was still living life through a lens of performance.
It was March 1990. Jamey and I had prepared and been commissioned, and we were moving overseas. As we soared above the Pacific Ocean toward Southeast Asia, we were inspired—no, thrilled—by vision!
In the Spring of 2023, I spent eight days at a retreat center in Virginia. The purpose was to process some of the pain of the past three years and get my heart in line with God’s calling on my life. Just 20 months prior, my family and I had lost our home of 15 years when the Taliban retook Afghanistan. Through the displacement of Afghans in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from the country, we lost contact with many of our friends.
My husband and I were pastors of a migrant community in the City of Buenos Aires, for 37 years. During that time I experienced a radical call to God’s mission—one more conversion in the process to the lordship of Christ.
“Your ministry to others should be an overflow of your relationship with the Lord.” These were the words of my mentor to me on the day I was baptized. Simple words with profound truth. Having been on the mission field for 27 years, I have seen those words play out in my life and the lives of others many times.“
This article offers an interspiritual perspective on spiritual formation from the edge of mission, in the crucible of a creative missional ministry called Awarezen. At the heart of Awarezen is the Order of Awarezen Mitras (OAM), a beloved community of disciples of the Way–Jesus Christ–who is immersed in a lifelong journey of spiritual and contemplative training derived from an interspiritual dialogue of wisdom traditions.
My mission history has been mostly activist; I assume most in my field of ministry would be similar. We each accepted our call of ministry as a call to action, a charge, a task. Recognizing that I needed rest, I sought to establish spiritual practices or retreats to recharge, renew, and rebuild my energy for the task at hand.
One evening in 1996, I heard a knock on my door. I opened the door, and a man with a dark beard stood there, holding a small pamphlet in his left hand. I didn’t know him at all, so after the usual greeting, I asked him, “What do you want? Can I help you with anything?”
In my March/April 2023 MF column Questions of Strategy Part 1, I wrote about some of the criticisms I’ve heard during 42 years on staff with Frontier Ventures. Here are a couple more examples.
The formation that takes place at the edges happens not only among the unreached but in missionaries themselves. This poem speaks to the precious growth that occurs in cross-cultural servants as they consent to the Spirit’s shaping of their lives.