The year started with the excitement of business as usual, training and launching new Semesters teams and World Race squads to the field! Adventures in Missions also installed Bheki Motsa, a long-time Swaziland base staff member, as our first Swazi base director.

While World Race and Semesters teams served on 4 continents around the world, Adventures’ Swaziland base started constructing the internal roads for the Umdoni Project, a 70-acre parcel of farmland being converted into a center for sustainable agriculture and tourism. This project will train hundreds of young leaders and their families in holistic leadership skills that will bring spiritual and practical transformation to the neediest communities.

Our Beauty for Ashes Women’s ministry hosted their bi-annual Facilitator Training where they trained up female leaders and deployed them back to their communities to host Christ-centered retreats for women to receive God’s hope, healing, and freedom. Little did they know that the world was about to change due to COVID and this newly trained group would join an army of female leaders hosting virtual retreats throughout 2020, creating online spaces for women to find Christ and community during what would be a very lonely and challenging year.

In response to the COVID pandemic, staff and field leaders successfully navigated flight cancellations, unstable travel conditions, and issues to bring 560+ World Race, World Race: Gap Year, and Semesters missionaries off of the international mission field. Missionaries mobilized to 5 different airports at major cities around the country for emergency debrief and repatriation. Our World Race America squad quarantined and stayed on the field, continuing their journey for the rest of the year.

After the government-mandated stay-at-home order was lifted, Adventures Swaziland was able to feed children at CarePoints while following health and safety procedures to keep the children and communities healthy.

Adventures in Missions started COVID-relief campaigns at our international bases. Adventures’ South Asia base gathered 80,000 lbs of rice and distributed it among 48 villages. Adventures Guatemala has now collected and supplied 13 different villages with over 1200 food and emergency kits. In Cambodia, the team has packaged enough food for 650 families to have a month-long supply.

While the World Race redeployed the first group of participants in the United States, efforts to prepare our campus for Gap Year Racers were in full swing. All of Adventures’ Georgia staff moved into one building in order to transform the other building into a safe and healthy place to house the Gap Year program. We also transformed two shipping containers into shower houses that served not only Gap Year, but widened our opportunities for future training and events.

Adventures’ Gainesville campus welcomed 109 World Race: Gap Year participants, 22 alumni team leaders, and 10 squad leaders for a semester of discipleship, team building, and missional training. Fall Semesters teams launched to missional communities in Wisconsin Dells and Asheville for 3 months. We also welcomed the Global U program and our partner ministry, G42 (usually hosted in Spain) to North Georgia, just 20 minutes up the road, because Spain’s borders had closed.

World Race hosted their first (usually their last!) Training Camp of the year on campus. So many hours of intentional planning and preparation went into hosting a safe and healthy training camp for around 90 new Racers to launch to the domestic and international mission field. Then, we launched G-squad to start their World Race domestically serving with new partners in Chicago!

As Semesters trained leaders who will pioneer our teams to the nations in the coming year, the Gap Year Racers wrapped up their semester. They learned from several of our staff about God’s grace and forgiveness, reading the Bible, and other ways to grow in healthy spirituality. They walked through lessons on conflict resolution, healthy boundaries, the power of vulnerability, and so much more about being the church community God has invited us into. We were also able to spend this unexpected semester diving into deeper training on the Biblical basis for missions, culture and contextualization, and practical applications for ministry.

Our staff wrapped up a year like no other, filled with working from home, virtual meetings, and overcoming new obstacles and challenges to connect, collaborate, and innovate. We navigated through a world affected by global pandemic and the consequential changes and regulations to move forward on the mission that God has given us as a body.