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Stories of Mission

Explore mission themes in our quarterly magazine as workers tell stories of making disciples in the way of Christ.

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Alisha and a child at the clinic in Uganda

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.

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Aaron M. Kauffman

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.

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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. Later it became clear that donors wanted to give where they had involvement. A paradigm shift was needed.

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Lunch in Central Asia

Getting On Board With Business

Business and practical professional skills are vehicles enabling the gospel to cross into places closed to traditional mission initiatives but open for business. The call is going out for people who love Jesus and believe that the marketplace is a place for the good news of the gospel.

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Loren Horst in 1977

USA Ministries: A Story of Missionaries and Migrants

God knows how to weave good stories 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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Martin Rhodes celebrates a birthday in Mexico

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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Caleb Benner teaches at Lezha Academic Center in Albania

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 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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Lewis and Cora Martin with Franca Ceraulo

From Virginia Into the Heart of Christendom

“I do not believe that it is above what we could expect, if the Lord tarries, that we would have a native Mennonite Church in Sicily,” wrote Truman Brunk in his report to the executive committee of the mission board upon his return from a visit to Sicily in 1950.

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Future site of Calvary Community Church

Tidewater Virginia: Our Antioch

The ministry of the early church began in Jerusalem, but Antioch became an important mission center, similar to the way Tidewater, Virginia, became in the mid-20th century. What made that particular context so special? How did VMMissions promote greater faithfulness and fruitfulness there?

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