Inbound Teams With AIM

Inbound Teams equip new missionaries for life among unreached people groups in Africa. Teams exist in urban and rural contexts and last for one year.

HIT PLAY OR READ THE POST BELOW:

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

After weeks and weeks of preparation

reading books and saying goodbye to loved ones, you finally arrived on the missions field.

But one question remains:

Where do you even start?

We're here to share God's love and hope with other people, but we still need to be growing and drawing ourselves closer to Him.And so we can't do that effectively unless we are filled with His Spirit in daily seeking Him.

I haven’t ever been as disciplined in my abiding time as I have since we've been here.

But I've really seen the benefit of it starting my day off and just really kind of grounding me in the word and in what God wants for me that day. And I think with so many new things during this program, that having just that time with the Lord has really helped methrough the harder seasons of living here.

It just helps me stay focused on what God wants me to do, and not what I want to do.

When I first came to South Sudan I often jump into conclusions too early because I often just try to judge or evaluate things based on my past experience, based on my own reasoning, based on my own cultural lenses. But when I get to learn more about their culture and their language, I find that there are so many different reasons why this is happening.

So the language we're learning is called Juba Arabic and we've also been exposed to a few different tribal languages. Because those languages are not formally written languages, they're all usually passed down verbally from generation to generation. So, the conventional method of learning a new a new language on papers do not usually work very well in this area.

And it requires us to spend a lot of time in the community just chatting and doing life together with the local people.

And we also have a language helper who can meet with us once or twice a week to help us expand our vocabulary and also help us correct our pronunciation.

Not only when you come to missions are you going into another culture, you're also more than likely to end up working alongside people from many cultures.

So, for example in this Inbound team, we have six different cultures, in my TIMO team we had seven different cultures.

And you need to be able to not only know how to communicate effectively, but how to resolve conflict effectively, how to take time to listen well, a willingness to laugh at ourselves, a willingness to be vulnerable, a willingness to take risks and put ourselves out there.

So it's really important when we first arrive that we take time to understand where someone's coming from, to listen to them carefully to learn how to resolve conflict, and to appreciate the differences rather than just bump up against the differences.

Church partnership is working alongside the local church, coming alongside the local church.

Being there, being present.

You don't have to start something new, you just have to hedge on to what is already there instead of reinventing the wheel. So that that kind of partnership is saying, "I have a certain skill set, may I?"

Then this is also the aspect of, so what happens when the person leaves?

When you leave, how are you going to hand over the baton?

In Inbound, each one of us is part of a different local church. Building relationships with local believers, encouraging them and strengthening them, and I feel like even more so learning from local believers.

There are so many things that I have learned from my brothers and sisters here in South Sudan.

But I see one thing that is still growing in the local church, is their heart for missions.

And so towards the end of our program, once we've built those relationships, we're actually able to encourage and speak into that and have missional conversations with our fellow believers.

Sharing stories of God’s redemptive work all over Africa in the hopes of seeing Christ-centered, reproducing, culturally-appropriate churches formed among African Peoples.

CATEGORIES:

Africans in Missions

Discipleship

Africa Based Support

African Mobilization

Media in Missions

Education & Healthcare