I just wanted to update you on the ISMK program! We are in the middle of a couple large projects right now. The most immediate one is Missionary Training and Missionary Renewal. Last summer was our first summer with the changed schedule. While the schedule is something we can work with, it provided us many challenges. The main challenge was the amount of hours that staff had to work without taking a day off. Most of our staff were physically exhausted by the end of Missionary Renewal, and less effective because of their exhaustion.
One of my goals this year was to make sure they had a day off in between Missionary Training and Missionary Renewal. However, the schedule changed again for this summer, so we have multiple adjustments to make at the same time!
The other challenge is to make sure that the MK staff will make enough money to make it worthwhile to come work the summer programs. If the staff do not make enough money, they will not work. If they don’t work, we are not able have an effective program. Last summer we saw the challenges of an understaffed MK program. These issues have been addressed, but now the challenge is to put it into place and see what it will look like! I believe that this summer we will have a top notch program with the right amount of staff. Also, with the addition of a day to Missionary Renewal, I believe we will be even more effective than we were last summer.
Should you ever have questions, or concerns, please feel free to write me!
The next major project we are working on is the “ISMK Fired Up” discipleship program. You will be hearing about this regularly for the next few months as we prepare to implement this new program. We will be promoting this among the MKs for the next 6 months, with a launch date of September 1st. Pray with us as we work on the details of this program!
The foundation of ISMK Fired Up is the reading of Scripture. We are setting up a global schedule for Bible reading, which will include a discussion guide and small group MK leaders to facilitate the discipleship process. The discussion guides we are going to be using (partly) have been written by the National Youth Ministry of the Assemblies. They are called “Fire Starters”, and can be found on the ag.org website under the youth ministries area. We will be organizing them into a usable fashion for MK discipleship. I would love for all our parents of teenage MKs to encourage their kids to sign up for this program. It will be online for them to apply in April.
Our goal with Fired Up is to provide a Bible training program for our MKs, with qualified small group leaders and a relationship-based internet setting. We will have an application process for the leaders as well as for the MKs. Once the applications are in, we will be assigning small group leaders to MKs (based on geographical locations). I truly believe in the discipleship of our MKs! This is one step closer to a comprehensive discipleship program for our children. We have plans to take it deeper in the future!
We have not sent out the Parental Update form this year, as it is all going digital. We sent out the first version of the update last month via email. However, as soon as we hit “send”… the computer froze that was trying to process the request. We are still on the drawing board, trying to get a suitable solution. The AGWM IT people are hard at work trying to make this work. We pray it will get to you in the next month! Thanks for your patience.
