April 25, 2024

The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Category: Pre-field Training

A lot more preparation required
Training, Learning Attitude, Pre-field Training

A lot more preparation required

My wife loves to host people.  She is a great cook, and will often spend most of the day preparing a meal for our dinner guests. My participation in the preparations is decidedly less.  Maybe all the guests are thankful for that.  Admittedly, I don’t know much about how to prepare a great meal for guests.  But I have watched someone who does! In a parable-like format, Proverbs 9 presents two different women inviting people to a meal.  The same invitation rings out in both Prov. 9:4 and Prov. 9:16: Let all who are simple come to my house!… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Tanks and Training for Missions
Training, Book Reviews, Pre-field Training, Books, Hardship

Tanks and Training for Missions

God can transform the most painful experiences of our childhood into preparation to bless others.  Joseph told his brothers many years after they sold him into slavery, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (Gen 50:20). I just finished listening to a similar story. In The Tank Man’s Son: A Memoir, Mark Bouman shares his gut-wrenching account of pain and misery, while growing up in rural Michigan. He was the son of an abusive man who owned a tank and ran a gun range near his home where military weapons of various kinds were regularly (and illegally) fired. His memories are terrifying – and at times comical – but always highly unusual. As a young boy, he suffered shrapnel wounds while helping his dad with the shooting range.  He found a huge tree root… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Training, Assessment Tools, Coaching, Pre-field Training

Training vs Development

Recently, I have been thinking about the difference between training and development. Both are important, SEND U is committed to both, but they are different. As Steve Moore said in a recent Missio Nexus webinar, training is oriented around the needs of the organization, while development is oriented around the needs of the individual. Let me illustrate. Our Member Orientation Program is a training event. SEND U has put together a list of objectives for MOP, describing the learning activities and content that we believe will help a new missionary develop the competency they will need.… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Pre-field Training

The Other 76% of the Training Value

These days, we are preparing for another Member Orientation Program, SEND’s pre-field training for those who are within a few months of leaving for the mission field.   This summer’s group is one of the most diverse ones I have ever seen with 18 people coming from 7 different countries and going to 10 different SEND areas of ministry.   As we are preparing for this major training event, the temptation is to focus entirely on what we are going to do during the 2 weeks that we are together on the SEND Farmington campus.   We are arranging and re-arranging the schedule, contacting all the facilitators, updating our PowerPoint presentations, thinking through the logistics of our various “cultural experiences”, notifying those who will be leading chapel times, planning for shopping trips for the cook, and the list goes on and on.   I am very thankful for a superb administrative assistant who works… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Training, Pre-field Training

How Do We Measure the Impact of Training?

How do you evaluate the effectiveness of our training?  This has been a question that we are still seeking to answer in SEND U. One realization that I have come to in the past few years is that asking the participants how well they liked the training is not enough of a measure. We regularly receive positive comments about the various training initiatives we do for our mission members, either on evaluation sheets hurriedly filled out in the last 5 minutes of the training event, or in conversations with people walking out the door. But while it is gratifying to hear that they enjoyed the workshop, what we want to see happen is for the participants to change their behaviors as result of what they have learned.… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
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