July 27, 2026

The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Category: Disciple-making

Church Planting, Missionary Roles

Three Missionary Church Planters

This blog post is contributed by Ted Szymczak.  Ted is a SEND missionary who has served in Poland for several terms, and now champions training for church planters within SEND. — What role should expatriate missionaries play in the process of planting churches among the unreached? Recently I took part in training which opened up a whole new vista in my personal view of this critical issue. Having served in three church plants in the USA and three others in Poland, I thought I knew a fair amount about church planting. But as is often the case, I had more to learn.… Read the whole post
Ted1 min read
Church Planting, Missionary Roles, Training

Missionary Roles in Church Planting

Last week, I attended Multiplying Churches Globally, a training workshop for church planters hosted by EQUIP, the training arm of ReachGlobal. SEND missionaries have participated in and helped to lead some of the sessions over the past few years, and we encourage all church planters to attend the training during their first home service. One of our workshop facilitators was Jay Pinney, a church planter with Reach Global in Quebec. I was intrigued by his presentation on missionary roles in church multiplication, and particularly by his description of himself as a “botherer”, someone who disturbs the status quo by asking good questions and prompting lively discussions among local church leaders. I found a more sophisticated (not necessarily better) explanation of these different roles in a 2009 blog post by Jay Pinney, and Jay was kind enough to send me an updated version of this article to use on this blog.… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Gospel

Gospel Saturation

This post is a repost a blog of a friend of mine. He is also an avid photographer and his blog featured some beautiful pictures. He has kindly allowed me to share his thoughts (and one of his pictures) on the SEND U Training blog. Today I wanted to draw your attention to a new page that I just added. Gospel Saturation is a page of resources to help you understand and move towards the process of preaching the Gospel daily – to yourself! Yes, you read that right. Preaching the Gospel to yourself. You can read what I mean on the Gospel Saturation page. The resources that are there are to help us keep on track. You might think, “there’s too much, where do I start?” If you want to start, I suggest starting with the resources below (and no, they are not long or big reads)…… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Resources, Evangelism

Coming Out of Hibernation

Over the past three months, this blog has been hibernating, and I am not happy about it. I could give you a number of excuses such as a busy fall travel schedule and several training and speaking engagements. But now that we are back in Kiev, I am hoping to encourage the blog to come out of hibernation, with possibly some help from fellow colleagues in our mission organization. Let me begin by highlighting some recent additions to our SEND U wiki. The wiki continues to be the primary collection of the training resources that SEND U provides. But I continue to receive emails from various missionaries within our organization asking for some training resource that I have mentioned in the past. I am glad to direct my colleagues to the desired resource, but I have noticed that almost always, the training resource can be found relatively simply by typing… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Book Reviews, Covenant Community, Evangelism, Church Planting, Islam

Critical Issues for the Cross-Cultural Church Planter

This summer I read The Messenger, The Message and the Community: Three Critical Issues for the Cross-cultural Church Planter by Roland Muller.  It was a read that was long overdue.  You see, the author is a friend of mine, and I have followed his ministry closely for about 25 years. About 14 years ago, as the first edition of some parts of this book was being written, Roland Muller asked me to read it and give some feedback.  To my regret, and with some degree of embarrassment now, I admit that I did not finish reading the manuscript, although I did give some thoughts on the part of the book that I did read.   As a result, the author used some of my graduate study research to support one of his arguments and somewhat undeservedly, included my name in the acknowledgments. About seven years later, Roland combined three books he… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
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