Lou Wagenveld

A pet peeve of mine is when worshiip leaders include songs with reference to raising hands, and then they don't!  Better then to not use a song with those lyrics, lest this detail show us to be less than sincere.

Oh, David.  When I "retired" after 35 years as a career missionary, I came back resolved to really study and dialogue on the STM phenomena which I perceived as taking a lot more away from our overall mission effort than it was giving.   Happily I found  Kurt VerBeek et al were doing a lot of that, and other invovlements have kept me from pursuing that closely.  But your post begs jumping in if only with some all-too-brief comments.  I do love your having followed through, which goes a long way in the right direction, but I'm not convinced that it offsets other considerations,  

 Your postscript goes: " ..thank many supporters...given generously..."  Have you ever added up those expenses, and then looked at the flat budget of CRWM during those 13 years versus the ongoing decline of the number of long-term mission-aries? (stats easily available from the office)  Sorry, but the "feel good" fuzzies you describe, and the "benefits and rewards" just are not there as I see it.  Our youth group (OK, still another visit to a different Central American country instead of returning to a former one) just spent $32,500 on ten days, and came back with about the same kind of feelings to relate, but almost no awareness of things that should have been part of the preparation and debriefing learning.   Three of those kinds of trips would sustain a full-time language trained and culturally oriented missionary family for a year; not to mention how many national workers (see the posts under the Forum topic A Global Mission organization).  Ok, these are the things being studied, discussed, but unresolved...our (church) culture goes against negatively questioning this (you can't be a succesful youth leader without this component, it seems).                                                                                                                                  

David and wife and team, thanks for your interst in "missions." But please read the literature under the online "STM debate" - OK, I'll assume you have, and Brauning has talked about the "comandos"; but I also ask "how much real orientation/reading/ workstudy went into the team preparation and debriefing, etc.?  (our team went with an organization supposedly set up to do that, but they went down there not even knowing what they would be doing! So a lot of it looked like "make work" to me. And how meaningful in the long run is sitting hours on end entertaining children in an "orphanage"? VBS, maybe)  And yes, CRWM & CRWRC make real efforts to help churches prepare; yet questions persist.   Tooooo looong, I'll stop here.... Lou

Steve, while the "big cat" is away - I hope your trip to Central America is going well -                                                                                       this "cat" he play!  (serious play!)