January 24, 2025

The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Category: Disciple-making

Church Planting, Coaching

The Importance of Coaching Church Planters

In SEND U, we have been promoting coaching as a means of personal development, and as a help for those in mission leadership.    But coaching is also used extensively in supporting church planters, and this was the context that first sparked my interest in coaching back in 2007. The following article comes from the December 2011 edition of Dr. Bob Vajko’s Help in Planting and Multiplying Churches newsletter.   Dr. Vajko is a church planting consultant with TEAM International, and he and his wife Noreen served as church planters in France for 29 years and then 7 years in Australia.… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Disciple-making, Spiritual Formation, Book Reviews, Self-Feeding

Feeding Yourself and Discipling Others

A book I want to highlight this week is The Divine Mentor: Growing Your Faith as You Sit as the Feet of the Saviour by Wayne Cordeiro. One of our senior missionaries who is well-known for his commitment to discipling young men recommended it to me. He said that he hands it out frequently to those whom he is discipling.   About the same time, I received the book as a Christmas gift. Over the Christmas holidays, I finished it.  It is a very easy read, with lots of illustrations from Cordeiros’ pastoral ministry. Essentially the book talks about the importance of and a method for a regular devotional study of Scripture.  Pretty basic stuff for a missionary, right?  Well, this missionary found that the simple journalling method (S.O.A.P) taught in the book was what I needed to move from journalling once in a while to recording on a daily basis… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Church Planting, Team Leadership

Training for Cross-Cultural Church Planters

In SEND U, we are very open to partnering with other organizations in providing training for our missionaries.   As the saying goes, “Why re-invent the wheel?”  One of the more profitable partnerships for SEND has been with ReachGlobal, the international mission arm of the Evangelical Free Church of America.   Through ReachGlobal’s training arm, EQUIP, SEND U has developed and facilitated an online training module for SEND team leaders.   A second edition of this training module is scheduled to begin on February 14, 2011.   Although the primary target of this training is for SEND team leaders, I am willing to enroll a few team leaders from other mission organizations. More information about this training module is available on the SEND U wiki. Contact me if you are interested in enrolling. Another opportunity for partnership in training comes in the area of training church planters.  Our SEND Directors’ Council recently asked SEND… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Church Planting

Church Planter Training

A few weeks ago, Dick Walton and I joined the SEND North Central Europe church planters and their Polish co-workers for a SEND-sponsored church planting workshop in Karlowice, Poland. Dick was a church planter and my former Area Director in the Philippines, and since then he has also served as area director and church planting trainer in Bulgaria. He was planting churches in the Philippines since soon after I was born! My experience in church planting is much more limited, and I was somewhat surprised that I was asked to be one of the facilitators. I was also very impressed with the quality of the instruction by Adam MaÅ‚kiewicz, a Polish church planter from the Bible League as he talked about how to incorporate new people into church plants. The workshop itself was short (only one evening and the next day until supper), but packed with great ideas and opportunities… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
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