So, we’ve gone ahead and purchased our own domain name now: reachpolska.info
You’ll notice (if you visit my blog) it now redirects to travis.reachpolska.info. I’ll be slowly updating everything to reflect this change, for now everything should be pretty transparent. Eventually we’ll have information on our missions on the main page of http://www.reachpolska.info/.
Stay tuned!
This whole missions thing takes dough, the kind that’s green and flat (is that unleavened?), but Jesus can make loaves of the stuff from nothing.
Here’s a break down of nearly all our donation totals for each trip sent directly to our mission accounts. (It doesn’t include team raised funds from some trips).
$9,008 – September 2003 to August 2004 Travis’ year
$349 – 2005 U-Turn Summer youth camp hosted in Poland (team funded the rest)
$3,380 – 2006 U-Turn Summer youth camp hosted in Germany, spent extra week in Poland
$5,070 – 2007 U-Turn Summer youth camp hosted in France, spent extra week in Poland
$1,085 – February 2008 – Poland (still waiting on full report)
October 2008 – Poland (still fundraising) donations to date: $748 goal $9,000 for team
I just have to say, praise and glory be to Jesus. At times it’s been incrediblly stressful (such as the France year, having a shortage of $1,000 in the field sucks, yet He came through). Each year we remain humbled by the generosity and blessings by so many of you. Thanks for serving your father in prayer and giving.
I know this doesn’t apply to many of you, but for those that may be available!
We would like to have a finalized team of 4 people for our trip in October (we leave on the 4th, arrive on the 5th and leave on the 18th). While we are leaving for 2 weeks it is possible for you to either come late or leave early during our time there. So if it is vacation time/schedule problem we are flexible! Please, don’t worry about the money, the sooner we know the full size of our team the sooner we can properly plan fundraising events. We have only had to self-fund a very small portion of our trips, God provides in so many amazing ways.
So what might we be doing, you ask?
Our passions that we would like to bring to the younger generation revolve around small group ministry. We have been using John and Sonja Decker’s book “Holy Spirit Empowered Small Groups” in our own home group, and have seen amazing results with our group going and growing deeper in ways that unhide our shame and speak grace into the dark parts of our past and present.
We will be doing Language School as well, so that will take up a chunk of our time in the day time (Mon thru Fri), our friends who come with us will be watching our daughter, but will be available in any tangible way to serve the Polish people (moving, painting, etc) if there is not anything along those lines than they’ll be having prayer walks around the city and whoever wants to join them is welcome.
Also we are open to meet with people/couples for coffee or in their homes, simply to encourage them and build relationships. We envision taking 3 or 4 nights a week doing a home/small group intensive based on the book. The rest of our time and focus would be on language, sharing with our team mates Poland, praying, and serving in whatever ways we can, by meeting with people and anything else that may come up. We want to focus on character discipleship.
We hope to visit the Nowy Targ/Zakopane area on the weekend of the 10-12 (Fri-Sat), but the details of this are sketchy at best. We are looking into staying at a hotel, and are also open to the possibility of staying in host homes, but we do not want to be a burden on anyone, so only if there are people who are desiring to host us, otherwise we are fine with staying in a hotel/hostel.
Please respond only if you are truly interested, for this to work for us, we really need 2 more people. Thanks and blessings!
People are incredibly hard to motivate. In fact, while we try to fund raise it feels we are trying to herd cats. This little video demonstrates how effective we feel:
So the question becomes; how do we effectively fund raise? Our resources are scarce and we have even less time.
Here’s our list of ideas:
We may have to do a combination of all of those. Our goal right now is get our airfare paid, it keeps going up, and we can’t have more of that!
Gotta pray, gotta ask, gotta receive.
Alexis and I are trying to teach ourselves Polish, and we can tell you it isn’t always easy. There are times where we play an audio track over and over trying to figure something out, and other times where we can’t even figure out the directions in our text books.
There are so many things that are different in Polish from English, such as 7 cases… who can tell me what the heck a case is? I only know because of learning Polish… So good luck.
Thankfully I have found some software for our Windows mobile phones, one is a talking dictionary/translator, another one is a flash card program. These are good for the beginning steps, but as time goes, we’ll need lots of Patience.
Can’t wait for our trip in October where we’ll take intensive lessons for two weeks while in Krak
Alexis and I have been on a fundraising break for a bit, it can be exhausting to always be in fundraising mode. Starting this summer I plan on putting away a bit each month into our missions funds from our own income, but so far we have simply been unable to do that and have depended on donations for 100% of our fundraising.
Then there are times where I feel we need to have faith that God will provide, because he always has. Many times the opposite is also true, Where I think the lack of donations means we’re just not suppose to go. But that does not sit well in our hearts at all. So, I contend as James instructs us to have faith in God without wavering.
Currently, for our October trip, we have $640 of the $4550 (includes language school) that Alexis and I need. Our teammates need $1500 each. If we received just $40 from 100 people, Alexis and I would be done!
Gosh I miss Europe so much. There are times where I browse old photos of our trips to Europe… yes I know, some people don’t ever get the opportunity to see Europe. Sometimes I seem to live life from trip to trip, with the in between times simply being the means to the end. Then there are times like today, where I avoid looking at the pictures (particularly hard on Facebook, as a number of my European friends post pictures or have profile pictures in Europe) because I get a heartache.
And so I digress, submit myself to what I’m called to do here and now, lean in on what the Lord has for me in the moment and pray for those in Europe. I’m beginning to feel like a foreigner here… and yet, I feel very American there…
Alexis and I just sent out an updated newsletter about our Poland missions, you can find it here… Lots of good information, and I promise it won’t take more than 7 min (I timed it) to read. So goto the break room (or kitchen for those folks at home), get a cofee, or whatever your beverage of choice is, and read about what God is doing. Besides, it has some cute pictures of our daughter Emma!
Well this has been a long wait, but Alexis and I have taken the first official steps towards being sent from our home church to church plant, train up small groups, and fulfill the great commission in full, in Krak
According to my feed stats about 20 people are subscribed to this place I call my blog. So for those 20 people I have a question (and hopefully more will answer)…
We are currently in the process of creating our missionary budget, or living and ministry bugets for when we take the plunge and move to Krak
