Stories of Mission
Explore mission themes in our quarterly magazine as workers tell stories of making disciples in the way of Christ.
Stay informed of all the latest VMMissions news.
Call to Prayer: Music as Prayer
Recently I was driving alone to the airport and decided to sing prayers rather than think or speak them. I was surprised how much more real my praises and petitions felt to me as I expressed them in this way. The words felt enlivened by the Spirit of God groaning within me, connecting me with the Father God.
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Call to Prayer: Praying for Direction
Prayer isn’t something that I just do before I relate to people. Prayer means carrying something with you all the time. Without it, nothing happens. I need someone to show me the way. How will I minister without the Holy Spirit showing me the way?
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Call to Prayer: Renewal Starts With Prayer
A resourcing network that David Stutzman works with in Germany has hosted a prayer month for three years now. David writes, “There is something about prayer, as a church, that helps us see the spiritual landscape around us and bring into words God’s movement among us.”
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Call to Prayer: Sowing Seeds in the Dust
Sarah Schoenhals, serving among the Isaan people in Thailand, writes, “It’s a lot easier to pray when we’re buoyed by seeing tangible results! And yet, so often, the results we seek are not immediate, nor the kind of results we imagined.”
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There’s More to Mission Than Going
Praying for and contributing financially to the work of mission is also a response to God’s call. This backbone of support is essential for VMMissions to exist and do its best to train, send, equip, support, and encourage people as they serve near or far.
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Call to Prayer: Living the Lord’s Prayer
The greatest shame in Isaan culture is to die without friends gathering, without the monks chanting their blessings. This is what Ying’s family expected. But members of the local church showed up and stayed with the family until the ceremonies were completed. Ying’s relatives were powerfully impacted.
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Call to Prayer: Joining God’s Heart for Mission
Prayer is a fundamental underpinning of how we partner with God to engage in our small part of the great gospel task. As followers of Jesus pray together, the Holy Spirit enables us to see the grand reality of God’s plan for the restoration for humanity, and to see the immediate needs of the people right in front of us.
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Call to Prayer: Praying Together Is Success
“My teammate and I stood soberly looking at each other—wives and mothers with parallel journeys across those seven years together,” Carol Tobin writes. “Both of us had struggled and endured, but because we struggled in vastly different ways, each was always a frustrating enigma to the other. ‘Was it worth it?’ we asked. But it wasn’t a question we were prepared to answer.”
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Call to Prayer: Reminding Ourselves of God’s Future
“It is good that we remind ourselves of God’s future…So often, our prayers reflect our present sorrows, weariness and broken hopes. Our God wants to hear those things, for he cares deeply about us. But, God also wants to speak to us about what he wants to do,” Ruthy writes.
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Call to Prayer: Discovering Parallels with the Past
Ruthy and her teammates didn’t think much about missionaries who may have been in “Metal City” before them, until an Indian believer gave them a church history book describing work that had happened across northern India more than a century before. “We read about the first workers who came in the late 1800s and dedicated the majority of their lives to serving there. What a gift to read their prayer list!” she writes.
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Call to Prayer: Lord, Teach Us to Pray!
“In God’s kingdom we are born anew to multiply, and Luke’s gospel has been teaching us that multiplication is preceded by prayer,” Lizzette Hernandez writes. “So in response to the Spirit’s invitation, we have been meeting once a month for the last year to pray. As we’ve come together, God has done new things.”
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VMMissions to Host Fall Cohort on Cultivating a Life of Prayer
Prayer continues to emerge as a priority as VMMissions looks ahead at the next decade. One concrete opportunity is available this fall: Michael and Ruth Hershey will be leading a three-month exploration and discovery called “Cultivating a Life of Prayer.”
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