July 26, 2026

The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Category: Character

Character, Team Leadership

Another Edition of Online Training for Team Leaders Completed

Online module completed.   This week, I finished reading the last assignments and forum posts in the online Team Leader Orientation module I had been facilitating in February and March.   The second edition of this course is now history, and I am very pleased to see that 12 more team or area leaders have completed all the assignments and have “graduated” from this 5-week course.   During those five weeks, each of the course participants identified their key areas of responsibility as a team leader, and what outcomes they desired to achieve in each of those key result areas by God’s grace.  They sought to describe how they would know whether they had achieved these outcomes.  These different components were assembled in an outcome-based job description for themselves, which they then submitted to their classmates for comments and critique.   The job descriptions were very well done, and I know several of the… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Character, Spiritual Formation, Covenant Community

Community and Character

During the last 10 days, I have been in Japan, getting to know our SEND missionaries and their ministries in this beautiful, yet spiritually unresponsive country.   Over the years, I have heard much about the challenges and discouragements faced by our church planters here, but one thing I had not realized is the challenge of creating a real sense of “authentic community” within a Japanese church.   Japanese people are very committed to their work, and with long commutes to work and long hours at work, they often are only available for meetings on Sundays.    As a people, they are also committed to preserving the forms and conforming to the expectations of their culture.   They find it difficult to leave the safety of this prescribed tradition and truly become transparent with one another.   Even believers who share a bond in Christ struggle to get back the polite forms and to allow… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther3 mins read
Confrontation

Declare Your Intent

I have just finished reading The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, a book  Warren Janzen (our International Director) has been talking about.   One of the points that Stephen M. R. Covey makes is that one’s intent (motives) and how that intent is perceived by others have a huge impact on how much people trust us.     While we generally judge ourselves by the motives behind our actions, we judge others by their actions, and by our assumptions about their motives.     And those assumptions are often wrong.   But nevertheless, trust is damaged if our fellow workers or teammates believe that your motive in saying what you did or doing what you did was not to help or build them up but either to promote your personal agenda or tear them down.   So Covey says,  “People often distrust us because of the conclusions they draw about what we do. … Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
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