The church and their missionary

This is a sermon I preached this weekend in Kentucky. The pastor is a man that went to the same high school as I. He was a few years older than me and we really did not get to know one another as friends until many years after we had both moved away from Texas.

There was a missionary to Togo, West Africa in the service. She is a nurse who works with a hospital in Togo as well as many other hospitals through her mission agency as a leadership counselor. I refer to her several times in the message.

I wanted to put this up here because a friend recently asked me how a church can be a blessing to their missionaries. This is just a small part of what I want to tell her, but it is a good introduction to what I have to say. Maybe I will write a series of posts and share the ideas I have with you as I share them with her.

Missionary Talks 73: Travis Snode

Missionary Talks 73 is an interview with Travis Snode, missionary in Northern Ireland. Travis is a missionary I met through Twitter. I am not sure how we got connected originally, but Monday I was thinking out loud on Twitter about how I have 4 potential interviews in the wings, but no one had confirmed a time to actually record a phone call. I figured I would look through my Twitter followers/followees and see if I had a missionaries I could interview from there. Beings that they are on Twitter I figured they would be the connected type of people who could do an interview quickly.

I found Travis’ name and looked up his website. Come to find out, while I did not know him personally, it seems that we had a lot of mutual friends in the ministry. I sent him a quick email and he replied positively about doing an interview. When we got on Skype together I asked him what he knew about Missionary Talks. Turns out he had never even heard of Missionary Talks previous to my email. That is not unusual for the missionaries I interview, but the fact that he was gung-ho about doing the interview with me made me think he probably was a listener.

We are in the middle of trying to get ready for our move to Argentina while also being involved in a pastor’s conference this week, traveling to a church in Kentucky this weekend and spending most of next week in a mission’s conference in Tennessee. I am trying to do anything I can to distract me from the fact that I should be packing for a major move in 13 days. So, I spent all morning yesterday recording an interview and editing it. Seemed like the responsible thing to do.

As an added bonus to this episode, if you go to the Missionary Talks fan page on Facebook you can listen to a clip of the interview that did not survive the editing process, but was a very interesting section of our conversation. Don’t forget to become a fan if you go there.

Yes, the above linked Twitter account is the account where I say more mature type things as opposed to my other Twitter account which is the real me.