Sunday we hosted our annual Mission Sunday event at our church. Our mission team did an awesome job working together to put this on!
Aaron dressed up as a Sihk and I as a Turkish woman
We had a blast encouraging folks to come in international attire. We had a cultural cuisine as well for our shared meal following the church service and various international games for one and all.
My mom & dad are on the right in their Goth attire
I would consider it a success! This year we had a special focus on encouraging families to see the needs in their own communities. We invited a few local ministries to set up booths and share about their work. It is amazing how much is taking place around you when you just open your eyes to look! Mercy ministries is a passion of my heart…reaching out to meet felt needs of others and sharing the gospel through our actions!
Here are a few more fun pictures:
I want to extend an invitation for all of you to visit our new blog: Extending Our Reach, with a special focus on missions everyday and everwhere. Alongwith a team of individuals from our mission group, we are working together to blog to increase mission awareness. I recently wrote a post titled A Call to Mercy Ministry, which is my cry and something we can all do wherever we are at! Please check it out! We would love your feedback as well.
What a neat missions dinner. I love the idea of experiencing the different cultures. As cute as your parents are, I don’t think they are quite convincing as Goths!
) Great missions site. I bookmarked it and am passing it on to my cousins who are ‘field workers’ in Thailand.
Lindsay,
Check out this website. I truly believe this will be a blessing to you. I personally know this woman, and she is powerful. SHe has a deep passion for missions, and has traveled the world. I was involved in the Jamaica outreach (back in the day), and I went to “YUGO”. I was the only white person in the group, and was not even aware of this until she mentioned it, in a good way of course.
http://www.mtmintl.org/
If you get a minute check it out, and let me know what you think. My hubby and I are regular contributers to her.
How neat! I’d love to hear more about how this was organized. Was the focus on raising money or awareness or both? How did people choose their culture? Did the “teams” do other things than dress up and make food? It looks like a lot of fun.
My husband and I have felt a strong need to help keep the focus, prayers, and support of our congregation on our long term missionaries. Local work and outreach is wonderful and needed, but I know how hard it is for the people our church supports in Africa, Far East Russia, and Papau New Gunea to come back to America and raise more support if we stop supporting them. Recently I’ve been asking for the names of our missionaries to be lifted up in prayer in our assemblies and for extra funds to be allocated towards one time support to continue to help them out. I’ve recently come to realize that this focus of ours might be a gift from God that we can help others focus too.
Thanks for this great post and the pictures (your parents must be really good natured people!).
Andrea,
To answer your questions, the main goal of this event was to increase mission awareness. We just encouraged the church to study a particular culture as a family and dress accordingly and bring a dish from that culture. Some families did this. Others just dressed in cultural attire that they had purchased on a mission trip or received from a missionary friend. Others, like us, simply looked through pictures on Joshua Project of unreached people groups and found items that matched their attire from our local goodwill or thrift stores.
It is definitely possible to make this a fundraising event, but that was not our focus this time around. We just try to have a special missional focus twice a year.
We publish a monthly bulletin that includes prayer requests from our missionaries and article on missions as well that helps keep people aware of specific needs. You can view the archives at our other blog, Extending Our Reach. This might help give you some ideas to get you started!
God bless your endeavors! It is a wonderful thing to help mobilize and increase awareness!
Wonderful Pictures, thanks for sharing:)