Adventures in Missions

AIM Newsletter | Surfing, Perseverance and Wyclef

September 28, 2010
Adventures
Missions Newsletters

In this month’s newsletter: • Thoughts from Our Director • Feature Story • Upcoming Trips • Field Stories :: Surfing the Tension Between Rest & Ministry | Seth Barnes People talk about finding balance in life. I’m not sure what that looks like. It conjures up an image of a tightrope walker carefully moving across a wire. My life doesn’t feel like that. My life feels more like a wave that I’m surfing that curls behind me. I can’t see it, but it’s carrying me...

An Interview: AIM and the NFL Team Up for Swaziland

September 9, 2010
Adventures
Mission Trip Stories

NFL Agent Phil Williams took several NFL players, including Anthony Hargrove (New Orleans Saints), Cornell Green (Buffalo Bills) and George Foster (Cleveland Browns), to Swaziland with AIM. Phil answers some of our questions about the vision trip they took. How did the group come together? Whose idea was it to go Swaziland? Why did you go? It was my idea [to go to Swaziland] but I also knew NFL players, some of African descent, who were interested in going to Africa. I looked at places that would make the most sense; I waited until my wife went there and she said...

Human Trafficking | Three-Year-Old Turned Sex Slave

Written by Marisa Banas (Rodriguez) in 2008, “Three-year-old Turned Sex Slave” is a glimpse at the horrifying nature of human trafficking. Mothers, fathers, and children all across the world are mislead, misguided, and deceived into believing lies straight from strangers. There is a huge importance to educating people on the dangers of human traffickers. What do you see when you look at this picture? Obviously there are four feet, two from an adult and two precious little ones from a toddler. I bet that you would never see or assume the truth behind...

AIM August 2010 Newsletter

AIM August 2010 Newsletter Word from the Director Featured Resource Upcoming Trips Stories from the Field :: Word from our Director – Seth Barnes :: The Faces of Sex Trafficking Statistics and numbers only do so much for me. I know that over a billion people in the world live in extreme poverty, but that does little for my heart in terms of daily life. I need a story to relate, a face to remember. But once I have that face, once my heart breaks for a single person, I can’t forget it. It’s no longer an issue; it’s a human life. ...

My Summer as Seth Barnes’ Apprentice

August 30, 2010
Adventures
Missions (General)

My father, Douglas Drevets, graduated from Wheaton College. His freshman year of college he reconnected with an old friend from middle school summer camp, Seth Barnes. They quickly became fast friends. During their stay on campus, along with a motley crew of companions, they staged a noble and prolonged effort to liven the other students’ quality of life with colorful antics such as disrupting chapel, covering toilet seats with plastic wrap (my dad’s idea), and engaging in other acts of public menace. They eventually graduated, were employed at various...

Costa Rica: Building a Stronger Relationship

We send out thousands of young missionaries across the the world every year. Summertime is our busiest season and typically comes with a powerful batch of testimonies. Arnold Lee shares his testimony from his trip to Costa Rica this summer. The original article, pre-translation, can be found here: Korean UMC website: Hello, my name is Arnold Lee and I recently returned from a 2 weeks missions trip to Costa Rica. I’d like to share some of my experiences as well as some of my new found feelings coming back from an international missions trip. Prior to...

Gwapa Ka: You are Beautiful

August 25, 2010
Adventures
Missions (General)

Cora Healey traveled to the Philippines this summer, with AIM’s Ambassador program. They got the opportunity to work in slums of Manila and she shares some of her experience below. Our team had the opportunity to go with Cebu City Alliance Church (CCAC) to feed and teach a Bible story to a group of children in a village in the city. Once we were done teaching, the kids lined up to be served food and I stood off to the side to watch. There was a little girl kneeling down in the dirt next to me and I knelt down and attempted to ask her what her name was....

The Sex Trade in the United States

At AIM, we talk a lot about the sex trade. With trips regularly going to India, Thailand, and other locations in Southeast Asia, it’s an issue we encounter quite regularly. So, we try to prepare our participants for the heart-breaking situations they’ll encounter — how to minister to young girls and boys who have been sold into prostitution, how to bring healing to little ones who have been forced to perform unspeakable acts. Just this last week, our friend Tom Davis, president of Children’s HopeChest and author of the book Priceless, visited a...

AIM July 2010 Newsletter

AIM June 2010 Newsletter Word from the Director Featured Story Upcoming Trips Stories from the Field :: Word from our Director – Seth Barnes :: The Amazing Luke 10 Journey For the last 20 years or so, I’ve been challenged by a Scripture that’s so incredible, I’m tempted to discount it as being utterly impractical for our modern times. But I can’t help myself – I keep coming back to the account of Jesus sending out his disciples to places they’d never been with a message they’d only recently heard, and authority...

Missionaries = Flashlights

No one lights a lamp and hides it in a jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, he puts it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light. – Luke 8:16-17a (NIV), 17b (ESV) Kyampisi, Uganda – Katie Threet, a Real Life participant, lost a little bit of innocence last week. She met a seven year old boy named Allan, who captured her heart. A year ago, Allan had been attacked as an attempted child sacrifice. Child sacrifice is...

Changing Contexts: Translating Stories from the Mission Field to Home

“You wouldn’t understand. You just had to be there.” Words such as these are often rooted in ignorance or insecurities that destroy conversations before they’ve started. In truth, we’re all guilty of such rhetoric at some time or another. Our youth return from short-term mission trips and aren’t quite sure how to put their experiences into words, or maybe they (and we?) are tempted to exercise some sort of experiential superiority over their peers who were not on the trip. Whatever their reasons for not properly communicating the...

Why Wasn’t I Born in a Slum in Kenya?

This week, a group of young adults went into the Kenyan slums during their Real Life mission trip. To say the very least, it was a life-changing experience for them. On the Kenya blog, you can read their in-depth reports, but we’ll highlight just a few here. Amy Johnson remarked on the unimaginable sights she saw in Kibera: Imagine: smelling burning trash, food cooking from little shacks, and trash dumps. Imagine: feeling the rough, dirty hands of children all over your skin because they have never seen a white person before. Imagine: seeing shack after...

Author: Adventures