Having served as a church planting missionary in London, England for over five years, I had some groups that were a tremendous blessing. I also had others who were a tremendous burden and left my family and the ministry that the Lord gave us suffering when they left. Let me quickly say, a missions trip can be a great blessing to the church planter or it can be a great burden. Below are a few thoughts about short term missions trips that will come from the perspective of a pastor and a church planter:

One of the easy traps for parents to fall into is having shortsighted goals for their children.

In a Christian school, children are able to learn biblical philosophy in a godly and safe environment. The worldly philosophy that is constantly bombarding the family needs to be suppressed by the biblically-sound philosophy taught through a Christian curriculum by godly teachers.

Many years ago, my wife Anna and I made a commitment to train up our children for the Lord with a strong biblical Christian worldview. Because Christian schools weren’t readily available in the Las Vegas area, we opted to educate our children at home.

I believe the Great Commission is worthy of—and even calls for—purposed times and strategic plans for spreading the gospel. Thus, we have several times and locations each week available to members of our church to meet up with a partner for the purpose of saturating our community with the gospel.

North Valley Baptist Church was started by Pastor Calvin Blanton in the downtown area of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1956. For twenty-eight years Pastor Blanton faithfully led his congregation until he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in 1984.

One of my favorite verses is Jeremiah 6:16—“Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls….”

Just as there are loadbearing walls in a house, there are load-bearing pillars in effective student ministry. If you remove any one of these five pillars, it’s detrimental to your entire student ministry.

A furlough is defined as “a leave of absence.” To missionaries, the term “furlough” is known as the time to go “home.” There are many different views on what a furlough is, depending on what a missionary wants to accomplish while he is back in his homeland.

In my previous post, I shared five of the lessons the Lord has been teaching me through my three-year-old grandson Chandler’s illness and hospitalization with severe pneumonia. These are in no real order—just the raw truths the Lord has been teaching me during one of the most difficult times in our family’s life.