Minutes by Minute

The past week has been memorable. I told my staff yesterday that our trip with St. Andrew's Anglican Church serving with the Staceyville circuit of Baptist churches was everything a mission trip should be. The church was a youth group from Arkansas with four adult leaders. They're an extremely evangelical and charismatic group of Christians who were sold on our vision and purpose from the very beginning of the week. In order to give the proper description, i'd say they have the tradition and structure of the catholic church (everything the catholic church does right) while also having the vision and purpose of a protestant evangelical church. The group leader, Mike Cavallo, is one of the best youth pastors i've ever met. His students follow him and look to him as a leader who leads by example and has a great heart for God. Talking with Tito and Cassie, my staff for the week, we decided that this was one of the biggest differences between this and other mission trips we...

It's been a challenging week in Montego Bay, Jamaica. This week I worked with the Westgate Hills Baptist Church and two different groups. One was a Presbyterian Church from Georgia and one was a non-denominational church from Connecticut. The two groups didn't unite during the week. One was young and eccentric, the other group was mature and reserved. Things just didn't come together the way I pictured they could. The week had a lot of potential and our teams just didn't seem to connect with eachother or the local community in the ways I expected them to. The host pastor, Reverend Dr. Heckford Sharpe, seemed offended by the fact that our teams didn't have money to contribute towards the construction work at the church. There seemed to be little effort from Reverend Sharpe to create genuine relationships in order to establish a long term partnership between his church and our groups. On the flip side, a number of good things came out of the week. One of our te...