Last summer, I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to Kenya in East Africa. It is a lovely country, friendly and culturally rich! During the first half of the trip, I traveled with my LCU colleague and mission professor, Shawn Tyler. Since I had only one short international mission trip experience, I didn’t know what to expect. I just wanted to learn about the work in the region and meet new people. I told him to treat me like one of his college student interns and teach me all the things. He obliged. Traveling with someone who had lived in the area for decades was quite the experience. The second half of the trip was also amazing, as I traveled with the Come Before Winter team to minister to women serving in ministry at a retreat in Nairobi, Kenya.
It turns out the trip wasn’t so once-in-a-lifetime. I’m honored and crazy excited to return to East Africa this summer to talk about my passion: children’s ministry! Not only that, I will use the layover at Heathrow to extend my trip to visit missionaries in Dublin, Ireland. I will spend a few days with them, speaking at a parenting/children’s ministry workshop for them, culminating in a trip to Oxford to see family.
While all the details are still coming together, the current plan is that I will speak at three workshops near Mbale, Uganda, and three workshops in the Kitale region of Kenya. We are still pulling together our plans, so I’ll write more about them over the coming weeks. Currently, three adult leaders from Lubbock and five college students are planning to make the trip together.
I haven’t blogged in a long time. I’ve had many other projects and planned to give up my blog. But those plans have also changed. The church leaders in Kenya asked that I help find resources for their children’s ministry leaders. Believe it or not, even in the more rustic villages, many people have cell phones with access to the internet. So, I plan to curate lists of free children’s ministry resources and host the lists on the blog. Church leaders can use those lists to quickly and easily find resources that work for them. If you are one of my publisher friends or have free resources to share, let me know, and I’ll add them to the list!
I’ll write more soon. Until then, let me share a few ways that you can help:
- Pray for me as I narrow down my numerous ideas about children’s ministry to the most helpful ones in the E. Africa context.
- Pray for the church leaders already preparing for our arrival in May. Many plans must be sorted out, and those change almost daily.
- Pray for the college students answering a call to travel with us. Only God knows what God is doing in them and will do through them.
- Share children’s ministry online resources with me and help me curate as many great options. (PS – I will have to make some hard decisions about which ones I share on the blog. Please understand that I may be unable to post every suggestion I receive for various reasons.)
- Donate money: much of my expense is covered through LCU. However, I’m sure I have not anticipated all the expenses. If you’d like to share financially to make this trip a reality, contact me. Your donations will go towards the expenses to travel to Africa and Ireland to speak at these workshops and help with needed resources at our host location as our large group travels from place to place.
- Donate stuff: the last piece of this puzzle is still being planned. We hope David will fly to Ireland to meet me for that workshop and a short trip to England to visit family. Over the last several months, we had a lot of unanticipated expenses, so we started cleaning out closets and selling on eBay to pay for house and car repairs. If you have gently used items that we might sell, that will help us take care of some other needs so that David can join me in Ireland. This is an easy way to help out, even if it is somewhat indirect.
