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.
Eight Lessons from a Lifetime in Mission
Fifty-two years after Willard and Eva Eberly were called to serve in Italy, they look back on key lessons they learned. “Our basic mission philosophy and methodology was modeling, discipling and equipping believers in every aspect of Christian living,” they write.
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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.
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Worker profile: Lydia Musselman
Lydia leads discipleship groups, weekly prayer on the campuses of EMU and JMU, and Bible studies with women from both universities, nurturing cross-cultural connection and watering their souls with the living water.
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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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Moving Towards Multiplication
“Moving towards multiplication takes time, energy and patient trust in the One who makes the harvest,” Mike Metzler writes. “Yet multiplication is also simple. J.R. Briggs, a church planter who is ministering near my hometown in Lansdale, Pa., caught my attention with this statement: ‘All of us are missionaries disguised as good neighbors.’ His words resonate with me.”
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Engage. Establish. Equip. Empower.
As a discipler with Every Nation Campus and partner in mentoring a number of VMMissions tranSend interns, Carlin Kreider uses four principles:
- Every person is valuable to God.
- Every church, campus ministry, and small group can grow.
- Every minister should prepare others to minister.
- Every disciple should make disciples.
God’s Arithmetic
Life Enrichment Church (LEC), a network of house churches in a forgotten rural corner of Thailand, was planted with the vision of multiplication in the late 1990s. How might God reach this impoverished, minimally educated corner of the country? Those first pioneer missionaries mounted their motorcycles, braving heat and dust – or monsoons and mud – to spread seed broadly, looking for the few who would respond.
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A Call to Shkodër
“We must make disciples for the kingdom of God,” Rafael Tartari writes. “We are not setting goals for our own convenience, according to our own agenda. This is not something we choose to do. It is something for which God has chosen us!”
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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.
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Worker profile: Norma Teles
Norma is the director of the Joshua Center, which provides a safe place for Roma children and encourages the participation of the family, helping them to be involved in positive ways with their children’s development. She also connects regularly through a girls club with girls aged 9-19 and with a group of mothers.
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Call to Prayer: The Honor of Co-Laboring
“God really does want to teach us to pray,” Ruth writes. “Prayer has become much more than something that we ‘should’ do. It is something we desire and enjoy, something that feels like a great honor.”
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Our Family Rediscovers Sabbath
“In December 2019, [my wife] Theresa suggested that we begin a few faith rhythms as a family, mostly concerning Sabbath. We’ve job-shared and worked bi-vocationally these last several years and at times it has been difficult to stop and disengage and receive God’s rest,” Seth writes. Learn what difference these changes made in their family.
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