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.
The Hands and Feet of Jesus
In the desperate tedium of a large refugee camp, we were entering a world where we would feel sorrow, joy, rage, exhaustion, frustration and happiness, all in a matter of a few hours. Every day. I have never felt more strongly that every minute we were trying to be the hands and feet of Jesus.
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30 Seconds That Threw Lezhë Into Chaos
On November 26 at 3:51 a.m., we experienced a 6.4 magnitude earthquake and numerous aftershocks here in Albania. The church has mobilized to provide help, and I see that the Lord is revealing himself to the lost. We pray that God will be glorified in the relationships built and that there will be lasting fruit for God’s kingdom in Albania.
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What Does It Mean to “Do Good?”
We were ostensibly doing good work in the community, but the lack of transformative spiritual engagement left us feeling empty, dissatisfied, and questioning. This desire to see gospel transformation take root began, however, in a startling and unforeseen way: right in the midst of, and in fact, through, my brokenness.
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Bold Humility: Mission in the Way of Jesus
Is mission a thing of the past? Contemporary attitudes toward mission are much different than the ones that gave rise to Virginia Mennonite Missions one hundred years ago. Today, the claim that Jesus is Lord offends our pluralistic sensibilities. But is sharing the gospel inherently oppressive? Not if we follow the example of our crucified Lord.
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Gratitude to God Funds Mission
The early model of centralized funding depended on donors entrusting their God-given resources to the mission agency to use in accordance with its priorities. But when giving rapidly declined in the 1990s, it became clear that donors wanted to give where they had involvement. A paradigm shift was needed.
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Getting On Board With Business
The call is going out for business, professional and trade men and women who love Jesus and believe that the marketplace is a place for the good news of the gospel. Who will get on board?
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USA Ministries: A Story of Missionaries and Migrants
God knows how to weave good stories, in which the puzzle pieces from one time and place come together to create something new and beautiful in another time and place. In this story, the puzzle pieces are missionaries and migrants, the places are Honduras and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the time will unfold in the telling.
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An Examen: God, Where Have You Been Present?
Now in our fourth decade of short-term missions, what have we learned at VMMissions? Are short-term mission experiences about rendering a service or surrendering to Christ? Martin Rhodes shares his own story of how a short-term assignment in Mexico shifted his focus from doing to being.
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A Dream, a Need, a Gift: the Launch of tranSend
Over 100 persons have explored their sense of call to mission through tranSend since the program began in 2005. What were the dreams and needs behind this one-year mission internship program, and how did it become a reality?
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Extending the Reach to Every Nation, Tribe and Tongue
In recent years, VMMissions has placed greater priority on sending workers to unreached people groups. Thanks to the Lord of the harvest, dedicated and creative VMMissions workers are living incarnationally among some of the fifty largest unreached people groups in the world.
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The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Our Entrance Into Albania
When the walls came down, “We were swept along, praising God for opportunities! We didn’t program it! We could hardly keep up with it,” Willard Eberly exclaimed. An isolated nation after a forty-five year communist regime, Albania opened in 1991 to the outside world and to the gospel of Jesus.
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Will You Go? Our Expansion into the Caribbean
Twila Y. Brunk’s book, Together in the Lord, is an engaging account of the first twenty-five years of the Jamaican Mennonite Church. The following recounts those beginnings, as well as the expansion of VMMissions’ work into Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
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