Stories of Mission

The Whole Church to the Whole World

God’s primary strategy for reaching the world remains the church, everyday followers of Jesus like you and me. To my joy and utter astonishment, that church now includes believers from every continent on the globe, and most of the world’s known people groups.

Workplace Witness

I have never served in business, but my experience as a teacher gives me a window into what it is like to have a genuine and readily understood role in a cross-cultural context. This is only one of many reasons we have embraced the Business for Transformation (B4T) movement.

Striving for Greater Balance

This year the concept of “unreached people groups” turns 50 years old. The idea of UPGs is not new, but it is relatively new for VMMissions to make UPGs a priority in our work. Currently, the percentage of workers we support who are serving UPGs is 43%.

Back to Basics

Global Christians are not just the hapless victims of Western expansion. They are active recipients of new life in Jesus, who makes himself at home in every culture and restores people in all their beautiful diversity to the kaleidoscope image of God they were created to bear.

The Mission Imagination

How is the Holy Spirit continuing to lead us into new horizons in mission today? I’ll name just two. First, the “receivers” of mission have become the senders. Second, the mission field has come home. How is VMMissions responding? By leveraging our resources to get behind what God is doing.

What’s a Missionary?

We invest in the faith formation. We build meaningful relationships with our neighbors and others. We pray for those far from God and look for opportunities to share the hope we have. We support missionaries financially and pray for them. These are things all Christians can do as participants in God’s mission.

Moving Together in Mission

A few years ago while recovering from surgery I picked up a book gathering dust on my shelf called In His Image. I found the combination of medical insight, missionary zeal and biblical wisdom to be fascinating and moving at the same time, especially fitting to read while my own body healed.

Doxological Mission

God’s mission is first and foremost about the pursuit of God’s glory. It includes us, but it is not primarily about our needs, ambitions or hopes. God’s burning desire is for all of creation to know God’s glory and to give him the praise he deserves so that we might enjoy him together forever.

Bridge Builders

What if the God of the universe did not wait for us to bridge the gap between us—and I’m staking my life on the belief that it is—then we have a message that everyone deserves to hear. And they deserve to hear it in the cultural idiom that will make sense to them.

Faithfulness + Patience = Fruitfulness

I confess I feel some discomfort with measuring “success” in missions. Depth of transformation is not an easy thing to quantify, nor do we often see immediate results. Perhaps the key is faithful witness combined with patient trust in the Lord of the harvest.

Catching the Wave

Launching a campaign in the middle of a pandemic has been a venture of faith. We asked God, “Where are you leading us as we enter our second century of ministry?” The clear response was to continue sharing new life in Jesus Christ with all people, especially those who haven’t heard.

Putting on God’s Glasses

In leading a 103-year-old mission agency, I confess it can be hard to see where we’re headed sometimes. We do our best to craft careful plans. But to see the present clearly and make sense of it, it helps me to put on the lenses of God’s future.

Seeds are Bursting Forth with New Life

Patience is hard. We see a broken world in need of Christ and want change to happen right now. But seeds lie dormant for a long time before springing to life. Thank you for providing the support that allows our ministries to bear lasting fruit for God’s kingdom.

Gentle Boldness

A key mentor of mine has been the Anabaptist missiologist, David W. Shenk. He encouraged me to explore my own call to mission as an adolescent. Even after I moved away, he made it a priority to meet with me for breakfast whenever I was back in town.

Patient Ferment

I celebrate the move in Christian missions toward indigenous leadership and simple approaches to discipleship that can easily multiply among new believers. It is a welcome change from models that foster unhealthy dependency on foreign workers.

Declaring the Healing Power of Jesus

I want to share two recent stories of the healing only Jesus can bring. Dramatic physical healing is not always our experience today, yet Scripture promises that the cross is God’s ultimate answer to the sickness of sin. Your generosity makes these stories possible.

Stronger Together

Partnership is one of our deeply held values at VMMissions. This year alone, we joined hands with 92 churches as they added their people, prayers and funds to the task of making Christ known among the nations. We can do more together than we ever can on our own.

The Costly Call of Christ

When we heed the Lord’s call, we never know where we’ll end up. There will be sacrifice and hardship. But there will also be unspeakable joy. Like countless generations of sojourners before us, may we have the courage to say yes to God’s call.

Hope That Does Not Disappoint

Where does hope come from? From optimism about the future? From careful planning to manage the unknown? From confidence in human ingenuity, wealth or strength? These can be temptations for all of us. Yet Scripture tells us that God alone is the source of our hope.

Love Tears Down Walls

Love led John Perkins to tear down the wall of a formerly segregated health clinic in Mendenhall, Mississippi. As he puts it, “God’s love and justice come together in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, and we can’t be about one and not the other. They’re inextricably connected.”

The Power of the Cross

Jesus’ sacrificial death undoes the curse of sin and makes new life possible for those who trust in him and surrender their lives in service to his kingdom. Like a seed that dies to be reborn as a fruitful new plant, death is the path to life in God’s economy.

VMMissions Mourns the Loss of Steve Leaman

With great sadness we share the news that Steve Leaman, our dear coworker and brother, passed away suddenly on April 5. Steve was known as a hard-working and caring colleague, a lifelong learner, a devoted family man, and a faithful follower of Jesus.

Bold Humility: Mission in the Way of Jesus

Contemporary attitudes toward mission are much different than the ones that gave rise to VMMissions one hundred years ago. Today, the claim that Jesus is Lord offends pluralistic sensibilities, but is sharing the gospel inherently oppressive? Not if we follow the Lord’s example.

One Hundred Years of Sharing Jesus with Neighbors Near and Far

This year marks 100 years of Virginia Mennonite Missions helping the church share Jesus with neighbors near and far. How did it all get started? What has God done through our work? Where might God be leading in the future?

The School of Obedience

Discipleship is about the most important kind of learning possible, learning to follow after Jesus. Yet too often, we see it as an add-on rather than an essential part of faith. If discipleship were only a matter of acquiring information, perhaps we would be less inclined to neglect it.

Expect a Harvest

We can get so preoccupied with our own needs that we can’t see the bounty in God’s global harvest. What if we allowed our hunger to drive us into the grain fields of the world? Can we trust that Jesus is already there, beckoning us to reap with joy what others have sown?

Work as Witness

Too often we as Christians have adopted our culture’s divide between the spiritual and the secular. Except for paid ministry, we rarely think of work as spiritual. The Bible, however, makes no such distinction between spiritual and secular.

The Best is Yet to Come

It’s easy to look at the present landscape of the church in North America and get discouraged. Nearly all denominations are in decline. Where are the streams that God is causing to spring up in what feels like a spiritual wasteland? I see at least three streams of renewal.

Lifestyle Evangelism

Do we have the courage to live such radical lives of obedience to Jesus that we stand out from our culture, and perhaps even suffer for it? Do we have the humble confidence to bear witness to the gospel among our family members, neighbors, and coworkers?

The Wisdom of Teams

Have you ever tried playing baseball by yourself? Or singing four-part harmony alone? There are some things you simply can’t do without the help of others. We believe mission is one of them. I want to share five ways why team is our preferred mode of engaging in mission.

Coworkers for the Kingdom

The church often longs for heroes, just like our broader culture. We want spiritual giants whose gifts and charisma loom larger than life. Even so, I’d like to suggest that heroes are not the primary way God brings about transformation in the world.

Setting Sail With Jesus

We live in an age when it’s popular to be spiritual but not religious. Many view the church with indifference or even suspicion, though they may still admire Jesus. So we at VMMissions know we are going against the grain when we say church is the primary instrument for God’s mission.

Kingdom Multiplication

Sometimes multiplication gets reduced to a business model. If we get more people gathered into more churches, we’ll have more money for what we hope to provide. I am certainly in favor of increasing our membership, but church growth is not the primary aim of God’s multiplying mission.

All of Life Under the Reign of Christ

Holistic witness is about letting the gospel declaration that Jesus is Lord permeate every corner of our lives. That’s why VMMissions works not only at evangelism and church planting, but also in many other areas. Christ’s kingdom impacts all of life, and so should our witness as his people.

Mission Begins With God

My father was crazy enough to believe that while it was his job to model and invite faith, it was God’s job to convert me to it. He chose patience over pressure. At VMMissions, we recognize that God is at work long before we ever arrive, and will continue to be at work long after we’re gone.

Extending God’s Embrace

On the cross, Jesus extends his arms in an embrace that’s big enough to reach our entire broken world. Embrace is a compelling image for mission in a divided world. Like Jesus, we open our arms to others, inviting them to the kingdom. To make the offer understood, we learn their language and adopt their customs.

Know Them by Their Fruit

What motivates you? What underlying beliefs and values inform the decisions you make? These are hard questions for many people to answer. Our convictions and motivations often lie below the surface, beyond our full awareness. Yet they are at work all the time.

Renewing our Connections

For the past 25 years, Virginia Mennonite Conference (VMC) and VMMissions have shared the publication, Connections. VMC Executive Conference Minister Clyde Kratz and Aaron Kauffman discuss challenges and dreams that have emerged about this communication tool.

More With Less?

Virginia Mennonite Missions has seen an exponential increase in adult mission workers in 1+ year assignments, but our level of staffing has remained nearly the same. More surprisingly, undesignated contributions have actually decreased. How can VMMissions do more with the same, or even a little less?

Giving Ourselves Away

In a season of uncertainty for our denomination, it’s easy to adopt a mentality of scarcity. The problem with this kind of thinking, according to Jesus, is that in keeping our lives to ourselves, we’ll actually end up losing them. Self-preservation may be a natural instinct, but it’s not a gospel mentality.

In Step With the Spirit

Are we attentive to the Holy Spirit? How do we tell what the Spirit of God is saying to us? Those are key questions, whether we’re discerning our personal vocation, making a major decision, or charting a course as a church. The early Anabaptists wrestled with this question, too.

Will Our Faith Have Children?

Numbers are only one measure of success, and maybe not the best one. Faithfulness—our primary aim—does not always yield impressive figures. The potency of God’s kingdom movement lies not in us, but in the message of Jesus we’ve been entrusted to share.

Partnership as Mission

When followers of Jesus engage in mutual, transparent and interdependent relationships across cultures, they become both an example of God’s upside-down kingdom and a means for its extension into the world. True partnership allows us all to see Jesus more clearly.

People-fishing, Jesus-style

Our mission is “to invite people to faithful living in Jesus Christ.” We seek to be and call forth apprentices of Jesus, not simply start one more program or project. Last summer the Board of Virginia Mennonite Missions approved seven strategic priorities to guide our work over the next 3-5 years.

Ending and Emerging

I come to the end of my presidency of VMMissions at the conclusion of 2013. I have spent my life in the church. As a young adult I ratified the choice my parents had previously made for me and I became a Mennonite. I have no regrets.

Start Here

Seven years ago VMMissions became intentional in providing a “doorway into missions.” People could start with VMMissions and go virtually anywhere that Mennonite missions has been involved, and beyond. The old mission “field” language is obsolete when referring only to some remote exotic far-off location.

Why Short-term Missions?

If you or your congregation are thinking of a short-term mission experience, get in touch with us at VMMissions. We can help you turn a good idea into an excellent experience and avoid the kind of mistakes that have sometimes given short-term missions a bad name.

Word and Deed

An interesting dichotomy has been argued in Christian mission. Should the Christian’s mission in the world focus on verbal witness, or should acts of care and compassion be our priority? Word or deed? I answer the question with a resounding, “Yes! Both!”

Giving One’s Life

During our Christmas holidays my five year old granddaughter came to me and said, “Do you know what, Grandpa? I gave my heart to Jesus.” Bless that little heart! She told her mother, “When Jesus knocks, you must let him in!”

The Consequence of Christmas

When I think of consequences my mind first goes a rather negative direction. We call it the fear of consequences and are reminded that we reap what we sow, or are warned, “be sure your sins will find you out.” There are, however, good consequences.

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