March 13, 2026

The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Category: Leadership

Training, Team Leadership

Finding Assignments for Missionaries

What responsibility do mission field leaders have in finding suitable ministry assignments and opportunities for other missionaries?  In the last few weeks, this question has been asked in a number of different contexts. These missionaries needing a ministry placement could either be missionaries on the leader’s own team, or new missionaries who are finishing language school or missionaries returning to the field after a period of home service or “furlough”.    Sometimes missionaries returning to their home countries after completing their overseas assignment are open to a continuing ministry with the mission if a suitable assignment could be found.   Who bears the responsibility for identifying potential ministry placements? To some, this may seem to be a strange question.   There are so many acute needs on the mission field.   Aren’t mission organizations always looking for more missionaries?   Why is there ever a need to “find” a ministry assignment for a missionary?   Isn’t… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Leadership

Getting Things Done and Avoiding Death by E-mail

Getting Things Done by David Allen is a popular book on personal productivity, and I personally have benefited much from reading and applying the system and principles in this book.   We are in the process of packing up and moving to another apartment this week, so my organizational system is not particularly evident in my home office these days. Nevertheless, despite external evidence to the contrary, the system is working and has made preparing for this move significantly less worrisome. Although I have not followed Allen’s GTD system as thoroughly as I should have or could have, my life and work have become easier to manage and I am not nearly as stressed about the possibility that I may have forgotten an important assignment or meeting.    Believe it or not, my e-mail inbox is empty, and it gets to empty most days. Others in SEND have also profited from studying… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Team Leadership

The Priority of Trust

In his book, “Leading Cross-Culturally: Covenant Relationships for Effective Christian Leadership“, Sherwood Lingenfelter says that the most difficult challenge in leading multi-cultural teams or communities is to build trust within that team or community.   So he places great importance on this leadership task of forming a community of trust, which he goes on to call a “covenant community”.  In fact, he goes on to say that “instead of giving first priority to attaining vision, meeting goals and productivity, they (leaders) must rather give highest priority to the formation of a community of trust and then to doing the hard ‘bodywork’ of creating both community and trust.” This is not the typical advice we give to a new team leader, not even to a missionary team leader.   But when we have served on or worked with a team or church in which its members no longer trust one another,… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
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