Stories of 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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

“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.” These were the words of Truman Brunk in his report to the executive committee of the mission board upon his return from a visit to Sicily in November 1950.

“We know that in the time of the early church, ministry began in Jerusalem. Later, Antioch became an important mission center. The Shenandoah Valley is the Jerusalem of Virginia Mennonite Conference. But, realize, Tidewater Virginia is our Antioch!” What made that particular context so special? How did VMMissions contribute to the picture, promoting greater faithfulness and fruitfulness?

In the early days, mission vision emerged at the district level of Virginia Mennonite Conference. Middle District was exemplary in mobilizing witness over the mountains into West Virginia. Though many declined the invitation to serve, a steady stream of workers labored over the years, eventually giving birth to over a dozen churches.