Back in 2011-2012, God planted the seeds for building a long-term, healthy missions ministry which would recruit, train, and send out short term inner city missions as well as long term overseas missions. The first baby steps came in 2013 with the first DC team. 2014 saw a bigger team form and go to Philadelphia. We had hoped that God would allow us to continue on this trend and was preparing for the formation of another inner-city missions team. But that did not occur. And yet, that is not the end story.
There are a few things we learned in the past two years in setting up this ministry. First, it’s A LOT of work to build, train, and send a team. It required not only the members themselves, but the whole community to come around them to cheer, encourage, and pray for the team. This is NO SMALL task. Secondly, there are seasons where God will allow missionaries to rest (Acts 18:23 for example). So we don’t lose heart at the lack of a team this year. Rather we see this as an opportunity to invest our collective time, effort, and energy into further growing/nurturing our church’s “missional mindedness”. That simply means that instead of focusing on developing and sending a team, we’ll be focusing on developing our whole church’s missional focus (that there are people whom we are called to go love & serve in the name of Christ) for the DC metro area.
And so instead of one team of 7 or 8 individual, we want to see one team made up of our entire church – united in purpose and focus, which is the further spreading of Christ and His love to our No.VA, DC, MD area! God is doing great things, and yet we pray that through us, He will do greater things still. 