I am very pleased to get another Missionary Talks episode up at the site.

The interview with Mark Coleman is an interview with a friend. I have known Mark for several years. I was pleased to spend time with him in his church recently and find out a bit more about how he got involved with Deaf ministry. Mark and I started learning sign language about the same time; 20 years ago. I think you will enjoy hearing him talk about how the Lord led him into working with the Deaf.

Getting interviews has been a bit more difficult than I expected while we have been home. It seems that it is easier to do a phone interview than a face to face one. Until recently, I have not had the ability to do phone interviews because my equipment was not set up in our transitional housing. However, I found a new solution for doing an interview via phone. This should allow me to get more interviews up in the next few weeks as we prepare to move to Argentina. Though the move will complicate any kind of schedule I have for a while.

I have another interview recorded that I am working on editing. Some are easy to edit, and others are not. The one with Mark was easy, and therefore was put up within a few days of recording. The other one I have had for 3 weeks and have worked on it a bit at a time, but I still have several more hours of editing to go on that one.

A new idea has been rolling around in my head for Missionary Talks too. I may change up the format a bit. I will still keep the missionary interviews as they currently are, but may add another type of conversation/interview into the mix that will have me talking regularly with some of the missionaries I have already interviewed once. I will keep you posted on what I decide to do.

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Today I was listening to the Spiritual Leadership Podcast with Paul Chappell and he was talking about Developing an Annual Plan. If you are familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) then you will recognize several items that Dr. Chappell outlines in this lesson. While Dr. Chappell does not get into a daily breakdown of how to get tasks accomplished in this lesson, he does talk heavily about roles that we have in our lives and ministries and how they affect our planning for the new year.

While this is not an actual application of GTD to running a church or ministry, it does track heavily with what David Allen teaches.

The thing that I find most difficult to manage in my ministry is “crisis management.” Both Allen and Chappell talk about how that we sometimes get sucked into the trap of managing what is urgent and not what is important. I sometimes allow other peoples’ crisis become my top priority and neglect what I should be doing.

This installment of the Spiritual Leadership Podcast was a practical application of how to define planning based on the roles being played.

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I feel horrible about how long it has taken to get this next episode of Missionary Talks out the door.

Here is my list of excuses:

• I have been traveling and had to dump my recordings to a different computer. That computer got unplugged when we moved (hours before we left on this last trip). I was not able to access my previously recorded interviews.
• Then we were in several great meetings, but none of them were mission conferences. I had no missionaries to interview.
• To make matters worse, I can’t do phone interviews on the road. I don’t carry the equipment I need with me for that.

So there you have it, my list of excuses as to why this has been so long in coming. I will get an interview out soon. We will be traveling again over the next month, but traveling does not keep me from working on interviews. It is the fact that I had none to work on that kept me from getting them up.

In this listener feedback episode I talk about what is going on in my life, what the future holds for Missionary Talks and give a big thank you to the listeners. While one listener stepped forward with a very generous monetary gift, I know that other listeners value the content of Missionary Talks. For that, I say thank you.

At the end of the episode I share some audio from a recent interview. Missionary James Menkhoff shares a story about how God used him to speak a word of encouragment to a pastor who later became a missionary in Africa.

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Actually, one has been up for a little more than a week, but I was not able to blog about it at the time.

Missionary Talks episode 65 was a conversation I had with Jonathan Reed. Jonathan and his wife are going to a remote area in northern Brazil to work with an indigenous tribe on the Amazon River. They will be leaving in April and are excited about the ministry the Lord has led them into.

Episode 66 is an interview with Bob Ingram who works with soldiers at Ft. Benning, GA. Bob does a great job in describing what he and his wife try to accomplish with these men in the short time they are able to minister to them. He also talks about what we can do to help his ministry or other serviceman’s centers around the country.

I was able to interview both these men at a conference I was at a few weeks ago.

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Nathan is a computer programmer that I met shortly after we arrived back in the US. He grew up in Nigeria as a missionary kid. He is a 3rd generation MK. His mother and grandfather also grew up on the field in Nigeria. His family is involved in translation and medical work as well as other ministries.

This interview was recorded during a rain storm. Since we were recording in my car, we got quite a bit of noise from the droplets. I was able to keep the rain noise out of the recording for the most part. But when I ran it through Levelator (which I try to avoid when possible) the rain showed up in a bad way. I manually leveled the audio and came out with a pretty good recording. But there was quite a bit of inequity in the volume between us. I think it came out pretty good in the end.

I already have 3 more interviews recorded from a mission conference this last week. I should be able to release them fairly regularly over the next few weeks.

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