Short Report on Short-term Team

Of all the short term teams I’ve had, this was the best and easiest to work with. Overall, they were more spiritually mature and flexible than any team I’ve worked with. I didn’t have one complaint from them or problem with them, despite many problems with flights and the local political environment.


As far as the work we did, it also went very well. We employed a different strategy than we’ve ever used in that we didn’t do saturation evangelism, but really were looking for a man of peace in a village and were hoping to really establish relationship with a few people in the village rather than trying to share very briefly. I think the team and our national brothers and sisters really bought into this method. One of the locals told me he thought this was better because this way the person doing follow up meets everyone in the village that is shared with whereas the way we used to do it there were so many people sharing in a village that the person doing follow-up only met 1/5 of the people who heard the gospel and that didn’t make for smooth follow-up when he went to do follow-up and the people had no relationship with him. We also weren’t so concerned about professions of faith or conversions, but in sharing the gospel and in being obedient to God. I told the team that they had permission to not share the gospel at all and to just listen to God and say and do whatever He says.

There’s one story of someone just listening and obeying that I want to share. One of the team members said when he came to one house, God told him not to share the gospel, but just to build relationship. He said for more than 30 minutes (maybe it was an hour) they just visited and joked and laughed together. Finally the people asked him why he was there. He then shared a little bit. That family was really open whereas they said before that some Catholics had come to share with them, some German Christians and 2 other groups and they’d always turned them away. God really made a way here.

We told them team not to put an emphasis on praying a prayer, but to just share the whole gospel if opportunity arose. One of our partners told me that something I’d shared with him in passing has transformed how he shares the gospel. I’d told him that in order to present the whole gospel we really need to start with God’s holiness and righteousness and man’s sinfulness and the consequences of our sin. So at one house he was doing that, when all of a sudden one of the men he was sharing with said, “How can I be saved?” This is an awesome example of God drawing someone to Himself through the hearing of the gospel and that’s what we were really looking for. Praise God.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be following up with our partners as we meet with them in our Tuesday discipleship groups. Please pray for them and the 24 villages in which we worked in the Dooars region.