July 26, 2026

The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Year: 2011

Training

Easy Email Newsletters

As more and more of our missionary newsletters are being sent out by email rather than by snail mail, I have been looking at better ways of managing our email list, designing attractive email newsletters, and even tracking who actually reads our newsletters. Recently I have started using Mail Chimp, and see that quite a few other missionaries are doing the same. Mail Chimp is free if you have less than 2000 addresses in your list, and you send less than 12,000 emails a month to your mailing list, which fits both the budget and needs of most missionaries. Mail Chimp helps me design an attractive newsletter with pictures and columns (not just as an attachment). It will send out all of my newsletter in a couple of minutes, without forcing me to break it into batches so that Gmail will accept it. Best of all, it tells me how… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Book Reviews, Learning Attitude

Learning and Servanthood

This past month, I read Duane Elmer’s book, Cross-Cultural Servanthood: Serving the World in Christlike Humility.  Elmer, a former faculty member at Missionary Internship (now MTI) has written a number of helpful books about the process of transitioning into another culture and working effectively as a cross-cultural missionary.   Cross-cultural Servanthood addresses the question of what we need to do so that we are actually perceived as servants by the cultures to which we have come.   As he points out, servanthood is culturally defined, so our efforts to serve others may actually be perceived as superiority and condescension by the host culture and national church. Elmer has heard many host culture people say, “Missionaries could more effectively minister the gospel of Christ if they did not think they were so superior to us.” How do we unconsciously communicate superiority, and how can we avoid this and demonstrate Christlike servanthood? One of… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Spiritual Formation, Pre-field Training

Spiritual Formation Highlights Training for New Missionaries

Bertha and I are on a short home service, and so I am not quite as involved in SEND U activities for the next month or two.  But in July, I was back in Farmington to help lead our 2011 Member Orientation Program.   Twelve participants came from Poland, Austria and the USA.  We were trying a few new things in MOP this year, including visits to Angel House (a Middle Eastern center in the heart of Dearborn), an Iraqi mosque, and an ethnic church.   We will definitely want to repeat these hands-on opportunities for cross-cultural exposure and learning. Again we noticed how the spiritual formation parts of this pre-field training stand out as highlights for the MOP participants.   This year, Carl Kresge led most of the morning sessions on spiritual formation, building up to the “Day Alone With God” which happens the day before MOP ends. Carl emphasized that busyness… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Leadership Training, Team Leadership

Team Leader Training in Germany

All the missionaries from the Eurasia region of SEND gathered in Lemgo from June 8-14 for Family Conference, which happens about once every 3-4 years.   This year, the team leaders and area leaders from Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine arrived 3 days earlier (with their families) to participate in our first-ever Becoming an Effective Leader of a Team training (B.E.L.T.). We met at a beautiful conference center called Sanderhof, just outside Lemgo.… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Book Reviews, Prayer, Spiritual Formation

A Praying Life: Book Review

Equipping missionaries for greater effectiveness must begin with the foundation – a rich and growing relationship with our Lord. A few months ago, I highlighted a book that enriched my personal devotions by showing me a simple method to journal – The Divine Mentor: Growing Your Faith as You Sit at the Feet of the Savior by Wayne Cordeiro. Recently I finished reading another book that has re-energized my prayer life – A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul Miller. Child-like dependency The author helped me to understand more clearly how essential a child-like attitude of dependency is. We need to learn helplessness when we come to God in prayer. Miller says, ‘When Jesus tells us to become like little children, he isn’t telling us to do anything he isn’t already doing.  Jesus is, without question, the most dependent human being who ever lived.  Because… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
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