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5 Practical Ways to Be a Great Sending Church

The prospect of sending missionaries can be intimidating - but it doesn’t have to be! There are lots of things your church can do to help send well supported and prepared missionaries. / Photo courtesy of TEAM

Aug 12 2014

Something exciting is happening at your church – you have members who want to serve God overseas! Having missionaries to send from your church is something to be thankful for, but it can also come with a lot of questions. What if your church body is new to sending, or hasn’t sent in a long time? What does your church need to do? Where should you step in? Where should you step back? What if your members aren’t experts on country-to-country moves? The prospect of sending missionaries can be intimidating – but it doesn’t have to be! There are lots…

Millennials are changing the missions landscape and taking on challenges in ways previous generations have not.

May 20 2014

The highways of online media are strewn with attempts to explain millennials, my hard-to-pin-down generation that’s currently somewhere between the ages of 14 and 34 — and even that range is a little squishy. Churches, marketers and, yes, missions agencies, would love to know exactly what makes millennials tick. But most attempts to put us in a box fall short. Millennials — even millennial Christians — are not monolithic. They defy unifying definitions, aside from superficial observations (“Those millennials and their iPhones!”) that often apply as much to other generations as they do to 20-somethings. There is little doubt, however,…

The photos we choose to share in missions photography should represent subjects as the treasures they are, made in God's image. Photographs by Robert Johnson / TEAM

Apr 29 2014

Robert Johnson, TEAM’s Creative Director and Editor-in-Chief of Horizons magazine, shares about subjectivity and how we portray people in images. Her collection of doll parts filled a storage shed behind her house. Plastic arms, legs, heads, and bodies spilled from overstuffed bags onto the concrete floor. Maria Delfina Hernandez had built a small business with these doll parts salvaged from a dump in Guatemala City, cleaning them up, piecing them back together and selling them at low cost in the market. She’s been doing this for years. A gospel analogy using baby doll parts, Hernandez’s story is inspiring to me…

Where culture doesn't contradict spiritual truth, western missionaries must take care to leave it unchanged. Photo by Robert Johnson / TEAM

Apr 15 2014

Today, TEAM missionary Brett Miller shares about how missionaries impact cultures in good and bad ways — and how to avoid the latter. Recently, I went pheasant hunting with some friends of my Dad who were kind enough to include me in their circle. It was a special day and, as one of them pointed out, likely my last day of pheasant hunting. There are no pheasants in Swaziland, where my wife and I are going to serve as missionaries. One of the men I was hunting with made a perceptive comment. He told me that missions had done serious…

TEAM videographer Joel Hager builds relationships with children in a neighborhood near Arequipa, Peru, while working on a story about their community. Photo by Andy Olsen / TEAM

Apr 08 2014

Everyone loves a good story. Except, sometimes, when it’s about them. Like most missions agencies, TEAM has a dedicated group of professionals who work to tell the stories of what God is doing around the world. Our storytelling team (in my opinion) has one of the best jobs around, getting to know our amazing workers on the field and inviting people half a world away to experience their work through words, images and videos. Our goal is to tell the most accurate, compelling and authentic stories we can. But that goal sometimes conflicts with the desires of our story subjects,…

China is a quickly urbanizing country where, by some estimates, more than 20,000 new skyscrapers will be built in the next two decades. Robert Johnson / TEAM

Feb 27 2014

You may have heard it, the saying often attributed to pastor and author Tim Keller, about why God loves the city more than he does the country. The country has more trees than people. The city has more people than trees. Because God loves people more than he loves trees, he loves the city more than he loves the country. This bit of tongue-in-cheek probably strikes you differently depending on whether you live among the trees or the concrete. But at least as it relates to global missions strategy, there is much truth in it. Urban mission is one of…

TEAM founder Fredrik Franson (far left) and the first group of TEAM missionaries to head to Swaziland, in southern Africa, circa 1892. TEAM archives photo

Jan 14 2014

Last December, over 3,000 people gathered in a hot stadium in Manzini, Swaziland, to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the Evangelical Church. The Swazi denomination — not to be confused with greater Evangelicalism — was founded by TEAM missionaries in the early 1890s and now has hundreds of nationally led churches across southern Africa. They invited TEAM CEO Scott Henson to speak about TEAM’s legacy there, which includes founding schools and hospitals along with building churches. He shared the stage with Sibusiso Dlamini, Swaziland’s prime minister and himself a product of the Evangelical Church. Milestones like this are worth a…

Tag - missions strategy

5 Practical Ways to Be a Great Sending Church

3 Ways Millennials See Missions Differently

A Tale of Two Photos

Do Western Missionaries Damage Cultures?

Storytelling and Respecting Subjects

Why Cities Matter (INFOGRAPHIC)

Do Missions Work?