Tag: relationships
Many missionaries today live with a quiet tension. On the one hand, they are deeply committed to relationships—within teams, churches, and communities across cultures. On the other hand, they often experience relational fatigue, misunderstanding, and isolation, even while surrounded by people. Conversations that once felt natural can become complicated by language barriers, cultural differences, and ministry pressure.
Heather Holleman’s book The Six Conversations: Pathways to Connecting in an Age of Isolation and Incivility speaks powerfully into this reality. Rather than offering communication techniques or formulas, Holleman calls for a revival of loving conversations—conversations shaped by posture, not performance; by presence, not persuasion.
For those serving cross‑culturally, this message is especially timely. Missionary life places extraordinary relational demands on people, and the quality of our conversations often determines the health of our teams, partnerships, and witness.
Understanding the Author’s Perspective
Heather Holleman is an associate teaching professor of advanced writing at… Read the whole post
Missio Nexus gathers mission leaders across North America. In September, they hosted a session on training for missionary retention. This topic matters because it touches the core of what sustains us in long-term cross-cultural work. Moreover, the discussion challenged me to think deeply about how we prepare and support workers for the long haul.
Three Predictors of Long-Term Sustainability
During the session, facilitator Elliot Stephens shared research that highlights three key predictors of sustainability for cross-cultural workers. First, spiritual vitality. Second, relational maturity. Third, ministry effectiveness.
1. Spiritual Vitality
This area involves dependence on God, love for Scripture and prayer, healthy humility, a deep grasp of grace, and a theology of suffering.
2. Relational Maturity
It includes genuine love in close friendships and marriages, healthy teams with redemptive conflict resolution, and the ability to form local friendships and feel at home in host communities.
3. Ministry Effectiveness
This area focuses… Read the whole post
Starting in a new place
“I’m new in this place. I don’t know anyone. Where do I begin?”
How do we get started when we enter a new town or city? In this blog post, we will provide a few tools you may be able to use to get started in connecting with the local people. A couple of the tools are discovery questions to get to know the people and a brainstorming tool to help you determine how you can enter their world.
It all starts with prayer
When entering a new area, there is no question that we need to begin with prayer. After all, it is the Spirit who opens peoples’ hearts to understand their need for Christ. I had a prayer partner during my Bible College days, and we would pray, even back then,… Read the whole post
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
Editor’s note: We are continuing our blog series on mentoring using the Mentoring Pillars written by Jim Feiker. This third pillar emphasizes how important healthy, authentic relationships are to the mentoring process.
What I regret
The thing that I regret most about my earlier years in mentoring is that not every relationship was a close, healthy one. Though with some, we were meeting one-on-one, there was not that dynamic plus factor of a friendship that bonds people together for maximum mutual growth.
In those early years, I tended to be much more content-oriented and guarded in sharing my struggles and negative emotions. I was not very vulnerable with people, which greatly impacted the effectiveness of our relationship. People could not identify with me as a fellow traveler, still in process, and therefore could not easily share their own struggles. We often had a spiritual relationship, but not a holistic one. We stayed on the surface where it was comfortable and did not risk revealing ourselves to one another in love.
The greatest impact
Christian mentoring is a dynamic, intentional, incarnational relationship of trust. In this relationship, one person empowers another by sharing God-given resources to maximize the grace of God in their life and service. Mentoring best occurs in the context of these healthy, God-focused relationships and community. Here the greatest life-on-life impact occurs in each person. The very definition of mentoring is relationship – one that influences and enables people. It is a relationship of investment.
In 2006 Enoch Wan introduced his paradigm of “Relational Realism” in an article in the Occasional Bulletin of the Evangelical Missiological Society. This paradigm sees reality as defined by the vertical relationship with the Triune God and the horizontal relationships between created beings. In 2017, together with Mark Hedinger, he published the book, Relational Missionary Training: Theology, Theory, and Practice. Essentially, the book applies the relational realism model to the task of training missionaries.
The book aims to provide a foundation for this paradigm. Therefore, the authors look at theological, educational and practical aspects of the model. Their purpose is to describe the paradigm and show how a training program could be developed along these lines.
The authors also note that the book is written with missionary trainers in mind.1p.15 So, that makes me part of the target audience.
The book contains four parts:
- Theology (Chapters 1-3)
- Theory (Chapters 4-5)
- Practice (Chapters 6-8)
- Summary and Conclusions (Chapters 9-10).