How can you prepare for a short-term missions trip? What are the hazards to avoid and the opportunities to embrace? Veteran trip leaders Mack and Leeann Stiles offer practical advice, hard-won lessons, and hilarious stories to help you know what to expect as you get ready to see God in action in new ways.

Going on a short-term missions trip can be a life-transforming experience, but it can also involve weeks of physical and spiritual challenges. In this revised and expanded ten-week course, you will find a concise summary of crosscultural principles, help in facing spiritual warfare, tips on avoiding a tourist mentality, spiritual preparation through individual or group Bible study, and discussion and reflection questions.

Revised and updated in 2017. How to Plan, Prepare and Successfully Complete Your Short-Term Mission (STM) will guide you through all you need to know about your STM. The author has been on more than thirty mission trips and has experience: as a team member, a leader and as a host. He has participated in the most incredible mission adventures, sharing the Word in Sudan, preaching in villages in India, supplying Bibles in North Africa, assisting the persecuted Church in Asia, and maintaining mission centres in Europe. The book Includes: • What to buy, take with you and leave behind • Who to go with, where to go and when to depart • To join a mission organisation or plan your own STM • The duration, destination and timing of your mission trip • Types of STMs – evangelistic, preaching or humanitarian • Medical issues, your passport, visa and travelling with money • Emotional and spiritual work before, during and on your return • Understanding culture, language and giving your testimony • How to get the money to go and setting a realistic budget • Food, drink, accommodation and working with the locals • Team dynamics, etiquette, leadership and the team • Security, wisdom and safety – being streetwise • Having a safe and successful STM Mathew Backholer is the co-founder of ByFaith Media (www.ByFaith.co.uk) and films and presents the reality mission series ByFaith TV which airs globally on numerous Christian networks. He has travelled to forty nations of the world and is the author of many books, including: Short-Term Missions: A Christian Guide, Extreme Faith: On Fire Christianity, Revival Fires and Awakenings and Global Revival: Worldwide Outpourings.

Veteran mission professionals Steve Hoke and Bill Taylor offer a practical guide for preparing for intercultural missions. They provide resources for personal spiritual preparation as well as crosscultural skills and hands-on missionary training.

Effective Engagement in Short-term Missions represents the single most ambitious effort to date to understand and improve upon patterns of ministry in STM. In six sections, the authors explore topics such as the links between STM and older patterns of long-term missions; engagement with people of other cultures; international partnerships; specialized ministries such as medical missions; legal and financial liabilities; and last but not least, the impact of STM on participants. The goal of this book is to improve the ways in which STM is carried out and to improve the understandings needed on the part of all who engage in the ministry. In short, this book attempts to provide a knowledge base for those who provide leadership within the short term missions movement. Youth pastors, mission pastors, lay leaders, college and seminary students, and missiologists will all find information that is helpful and relevant to their concerns.

A veteran pastor and university president urges ministries to center themselves entirely on five princples: the Bible, the Congregation, the Spirit, the Plan of Redemption, and the Lord Jesus.

Where is God? How do we encounter God? How do we know it is God we encounter and not some figment of our imagination? Is it possible to know God in some sort of relational way? Richard Peace believes it is. But it requires a certain level of awareness, a certain discipline of the heart. Peace calls it the "spiritual discipline of noticing God." In this book he unpacks what it means to make a conscious practice noticing God in daily life. He explores the various ways people experience and recognize God's presence, including mystical encounters, ordinary daily life, within our hearts, through other people, through Scripture, nature and the church. Throughout he returns to the question of discernment, helping you understand how you can know that it is indeed God you are meeting in each of these places, not just some fanciful figment of the imagination. God is deeply present in our world, and you can actually encounter him. Here's how.

For youth ministry, and mission programs, a book exploring the boom in short-term mission work among U.S. teenagers and how best to support this movement of God.

New college students face a world of adjustments as they take on the challenge of campus life, and one of the biggest tests is learning to thrive in the midst of monumental life change. Student to Student is a collection of reflections written by students, for students, that takes an honest look at the most common pitfalls and opportunities that...

You were not meant to walk alone. Many of us struggle to forge deep relationships with God and other people. Modern society has isolated us as rugged individuals, deceiving us into thinking we can make it through life on our own. Individualism has likewise shaped the pattern of Christian discipleship, privatizing faith and separating us from fellow believers. But we come to know God best when others help us on the way. And our friendships develop best when we seek after God together. What would it look like to pursue God not by ourselves but in the company of friends? According to the model of the New Testament, spiritual transformation takes place in the context of Christian community. By unpacking the Gospel narratives of Jesus' ministry with his disciples, Richard Lamb demonstrates how discipleship develops within the shared community life of groups of Christians. He explores a range of topics--such as spiritual friendship, hospitality, leadership, service, conflict, forgiveness and mission--in light of Christian community. Engaging stories from real-life experience show how people can form one another spiritually when their lives are tumbled against one another. If you long for more of God, deeper friendships or both, this book will help you on the journey. Discover the transforming power of discipleship in community. Join the pursuit of God in the company of friends.