Mexico and Africa

I've only been out of North America twice, once to Costa Rica and once on our honeymoon - we took a Caribean cruise. this summer I'm leading a mission trip to Mexico City for 10 days. We'll be joining the work of Arturo Valasco and his church, Lion of Judah. We'll be going down with about 10 people from Memorial Park Church. It should be an amazing trip. It'll be different for me, it's not a work trip. We won't be building anything. We'll mostly be doing relational evangelism and simply joining in the missional work that Arturo and his church do on a regular basis. It'll be cool to stay with families of the church and get to know Christians living in a very different context. We hope that the trip will be a major building block in our relationship with Arturo and in our understanding of cross-cultural mission.

Then, in October, it looks like I'll have the opportunity to go to Africa with World Vision! I will be joining Terry Timm from Christ Community Church and some others from around the area to visit various places in Africa where World Vision needs further funding. The difficult but exciting thing about this trip is that we, the Americans who make the visit, will be responsible for spreading the news for help in Africa. When we get back we'll attempt to each raise 15K a year for three years. It looks like we'll either visit Tanzania or Ethiopia. Currently we are supporting World Visions work in an area of Kenya, but things seem to be going well there, we may switch our partnership to an area in the Africa where there is more need.