Youth With A Mission, Urban Ministries Winnipeg

As September gets closer, so too does our upcoming Justice Discipleship Training School, scheduled to begin at the end of that month.  Our student roster is already almost completely full (but we still a few openings left!), so we thought we would share with you the great crew we have lined up for this year.

In addition to the students, check out the bios and pics of our top-notch speaker line-up and great full-time staff.  You can find them all by Clicking Here.

It seems like such a short amount of time since our blog title was “Mission Adventures Summer Staff Needed”, especially considering it’s already been several weeks since we said goodbye to our summer staff after an extremely full summer!  That being said, a summary will have to suffice.  First, a bit about our amazing summer staff:  Peter came up from Bemidji, Minnesota, and was immediately enamoured by the fact we have bacon-flavoured chips here in Canada.  We were also very happy when Jesse decided to join us… he was a student on our last DTS, and it was great working with him as a peer this time.  Then, partway through the summer, Brenda decided to show up (we thought we should probably accept her excuse of having to finish up exams for grade 12).

Once staff training was done, all the preparations started, and then our first team arrived!  We housed all our teams at Sargent Avenue Mennonite Church, which has been so generous and flexible in working with us.  Over the course of the summer we had four teams in three 10-day periods.  Throughout the chaos there were, as always, times when things went wrong, but there were also some really good times where God was undoubtedly at work in the teens, their leaders, and even us, as exhausted and frazzled as we were.  The theme for the summer was “Forward”, and each of us staff had the privilege (although it didn’t always feel that way) to share a testimony with the participants of how we were moving forward in our own lives.  Through various outreaches the teams learned about the realities of inner-city life, a completely new experience for many of them.  Our hope is as they settle into life at home again they will remember what they learned in Winnipeg, and learn to apply it to their own lives.

Another exciting bit of news from the summer is we have a new staff member!  On July 9, Kathryn H. Hodge joined our full-time staff.  She was also a student on our last DTS, and it’s been great having her around again.  We look forward to many years of working together! 

Recently, several people have mentioned our frequent use of Micah 6:8 in our materials.  They wondered if it was just because it was a popular verse on justice or if we had really thought through what it means to us.  It is a good question, because it is a very significant and formational verse for our ministry.  The verse says:

“He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you?  To justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

While I won’t develop it in detail here, we read this text through the lens of Jesus’ Great Commandment, to love God with all of who & what we are, and to love others as ourselves.  Jesus said this was the fulfillment of the whole Law & the Prophets.  The Law & the Prophets represented righteousness & justice-right relationship with God and right relationship with others.  So doing justice is at the heart of God’s ultimate intentions, at the heart of the Gospel.

Through that lens, we read Micah 6:8.  Our commitment to “do justice” means that we are committed to both serve with those impacted by the injustice and to address the root of the injustice.  Therefore, there is a degree of prophetic confrontation and activism inherent to doing justice.  We believe that the justice of God is primarily restorative, so our activism is deeply peace-based and non-retributive.  This commitment reminds us that God’s Kingdom is breaking forth into the brokenness of the current world, not just being concerned with a spiritual after-life.

Our commitment to “love mercy” orientates the focus of our justice efforts to be primarily motivated by loving desire for restoration, not condemnation.  Demonstrating compassion and mercy is a critical expression of the loving Gospel of Christ.  Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the mourning- these are at the heart of God, so they should be at our heart as well.  However, mercy reminds us also of God’s merciful grace for us, so we must also approach the perpetrators of injustice with mercy as well (though not compromising justice).  God’s justice seeks to restore all relationships, because that is the nature of His grace.  So too should it be reflected in our commitment.

Finally, our commitment to “walk humbly” reminds us that we are also often complicit in the injustices others suffer.  Whether knowingly or not, how we spend our money, where we choose to live and work, how we use our privilege (be it racial, gender, economics, etc.) are connected to the realities of our increasingly small world.  We must have the humility to acknowledge, repent and change when necessary.  Colonial mentalities still shape well intentioned missions and ministry, which must be continually addressed.  Further, this humility reminds us that we are participating in God’s redemptive work that is essential for our own salvation.  We are not coming as the great hope for the poor, but we come, in the words of Lilla Watson, because our liberation is caught up with theirs.

This three-fold understanding of Micah 6:8 is central in shaping our Justice Discipleship Training School (JDTS).  We are aware of the dangers of short-term missions and maximize the experience to avoid those dangers (NOTE: Our JDTS is significantly committed to the important lessons learned from the book “When Helping Hurts”.  It shapes the nature of our program).  We are still looking for a few more students interested in participating in this program.  Check it out.

Does this resonate with you?  Do you understand Micah 6:8 differently?  What place does justice have in the Gospel?

With summer coming, we are gearing up to run our exciting Mission Adventures program!  We are still looking for short term staff for this summer, as it shaping up to be our biggest one yet.  Alongside experienced, full-time staff, you will have the opportunity to jump in and get your hands dirty, explore the needs of the inner city, letting God challenge you while having a lot of fun!  You will help organize and lead all three of our 10 day programs for groups. The purpose of these outreaches is to expose our participants to the different aspects of urban missions and to challenge them into a lifetime of missions no matter what their vocation may be.

Our needs for staff include: worship leaders and musicians, sound technicians, logistics staff, intercessors, small group leaders, cooks, hosts, and more. We promise this will be a summer like no other!

Our summer staff dates for this next year are June 7th- July 23rd. We would love you to be apart of this amazing experience.

Cost:
$300 for the whole summer.  This includes: food, transportation while here, leadership training, housing and ministry expenses.

However if you respond to this message or mention this in an email we will cut our price in half!  AND if a friend of yours is accepted as well you will be free and your friend will get the half price deal.

We are looking for take on between 5 and 10 summer staff, so get in touch while there is still space!

Blessings,
Kim Arpin-Ricci – Director
Mission Adventures Winnipeg

From Jesse Hunter, JDTS student blogger:

It’s strange to be sitting in our Winnipeg living room yet again. The month in Thailand and ten days in Vancouver were packed with a wide variety and great quantity of experience, however, it feels like it slipped through our hands and into the past in a heartbeat. The pictures and souvenirs, along with each others impressions, will hopefully preserve the stories and senses embraced in the past month and a half for a long time to come. I will share with you some of the stories that made great impressions on the team in my perspective, however, I encourage you to probe deeper into your friends and family who went to find out what their eyes and hearts encountered on outreach. 

The travel to Bangkok brought with it some fun little snags which allowed the team to start practicing patience right off the hop, but thankfully we arrived in Thailand with all our luggage and sanity. One of the first days in Thailand we embarked on a temple tour with our translator and friend Aum who led us into the heart of Bangkok via a myriad of transportation services. I believe we rode a bus, boat, and a taxi all in that first journey. The temples we visited were astonishing. Quantity and quality were both amply present in the different Buddhist artistry we gazed upon. Those worshiping with incense or placing gold foil on the statues, starkly contrasted with the masses of tourists snapping shots of the deeply spiritual experiences being had, made for a confusing atmosphere. At times it felt like a market, others a museum, and still others an extravagant altar for worshippers. Buddhism is very integrated into the Thai culture, and so to be an informed participant in communities there would certainly require some intimate knowledge of the religions inner workings.

We spent two weeks in hill tribe villages in the northern region of Thailand, a couple hours outside of Chiang Mai. Homes composed of bamboo sprang up throughout the hills and valleys that were filled with a lush forestry that spanned all of ones periphery. Small streams winding through the landscape seemed to be icing on the cake of breathtaking geography. For me, God’s goodness and wisdom spoke to me as much through that canvas of earth as it did through any other aspect of the outreach. In the first village, made up of a group of Karen people, we partnered with them to help conserve an area of forest that they have adopted as their responsibility. There is no payment for these people, and yet for more than a decade they have been ascending into the densely forested hills on a regular basis to enforce the absence of illegal or irresponsible hunting and deforestation. During our time with them, we had the privilege to work along side them making paths of fire breaks on both sides of the area they monitor to ensure that wildfires do not devour the land. This mostly consisted of sweeping dry grass and leaves to clear a few meter path up the mountain. On these days, one group would hike up into the mountain, and the other would work nearer the camp doing similar work. Our team worked up a good sweat along side the locals, which proved to be a quick way to transcend language and engage in relationship. The hospitality received there was shocking to us all, and blessed us more than we could have ever hoped to bless them.

The second village was a Lisu village, and during our stay there we worked on an organic farm doing mostly manual labor. The bulk of our work was in transporting a mound of sand and gravel across a bamboo bridge, as well as clearing big rocks from a river bed to prevent flooding. The real treasure of the Lisu village was in the time we spent with the children. Massive games of duck duck goose, which affectionately became known as, “uh uh oo”, had many of the parents amused by the hysteria of screams and laughter. Our time at the Lisu village felt far too short, but even in the week we were there, there were some special connections made. Some of the girls spent considerable time with a lady named Loi from the village who was keen to share her language and love with the whole team. In return, we were able to bless her by purchasing the homemade crafts that are her means of income. During our time in the villages, a local pastor named Manop stayed with us the whole time guiding us through the experience. He was our translator, tour guide, boss, and in the end our friend and brother. He has given his life so wholly to the Kingdoms Coming, and he was a deep well of blessing for our team.

Once back in Bangkok, we worked with the Ruth Center for a week. They have a staff of four, and yet reach out to a great number of elderly living in slum communities, who are in need of some expression of Christ’s love. Perhaps it is prayer for sickness, simple companionship, food, a clean house, or in our case a new bathroom floor, but in any case the Ruth Center utilizes their resources and faith to project life and hope in to the desperation and hopelessness that marks these communities. We spent half of our time cleaning garbage from the toxic blend of sewage and waste that is the lake lying underneath entire communities built on docks in the lowlands. The aromas and sights of such waste were startling to see so close to peoples living spaces. In one man’s house, half of his floor had rotted away, and so the littered black waste water was literally the only thing where his living room should have been. We were able to embark on a two day construction project and build him a safe path to and from his washroom, which before consisted of two narrow beams that were by no means safe. The heat was unbelievable when working in Bangkok, but it was an experience that will not soon be forgotten.

After being in Thailand, we traveled to Vancouver and spent ten days working with the More Than Gold program and YWAM Vancouver, volunteering in many different areas of service. Some things we did were: A silent protest relating to the sex industry, a march for abused or murdered women in the downtown east side, offered prayer on street corners, and handed out free hot chocolate at train stations. The jet leg of such a radical time change combined with the cultural transition created an emotionally difficult atmosphere for many of us, and having to press forward with service and love certainly required us to exercise a deeper trust of the spirit we have learned to draw our life from. I would suggest you ask your friend or family member who went what they thought of the different ministries we were involved in. Our hats are off to the lovely people who have been pouring out months of energy to make our outreach in Vancouver possible.

This will be the last blog of our DTS, and so I will say a final goodbye to all the friends and family who have utilized this as a place to hear a bit more deeply about the experiences we have had. My fellow students and staff are now my family, and we have grown to love each other deeply. Separating will be the greatest challenge we have faced yet, and so your continued prayer and support for us is of great importance. Thank you all for your vested interest in young peoples lives, and for your support through prayer or any other ways, and please ensure you find ways to love the returning students or staff in the months to come.

The JDTS has not had the kind of access to the internet that allowed them to regularly update the blog.  However, their time in Thailand and Vancouver has been great.  Tomorrow they return to Winnipeg for their final week of debrief.  Keep an eye out for some great updates and final posts to the blog!

Peace!

Update: Jesse Hunter, DTS Student

It has only been two weeks in Thailand and honestly so so much has been happening. We stayed in two different villages, one for 4 and one for 5 days. The first was a hill tribe of Karen people from Burma. We stayed in bamboo huts. On a tangent, bamboo is amazing. You can eat it, cook with it, sweep with it, raft on it, use it as a bridge, pretty much anything, it has blown my mind.

We did very hard work making fire breaks to prevent the spread of wild fires in the forest…on a mountain! The tribe has been preserving a huge chunk of forest for the last decade because everywhere else is being rapdily deforested and irresponsibly hunted. They don’t get payed, but feel it theyre duty to preserve it. Very cool lifestyles. Langauge barrier was huge, but workin up a sweat together is way beyond language.

The pastor who has been our guide is named Manop. We have had some great chats about God’s kingdom in Thailand, and without him we would surely be lost here. He has a great and practical love for God, and is fervantly offering his life as a response. We stayed at a Lisu village last week and did more manual labor for the organic garden that Manops ministry is running. He is very wise and an amazing worker, God has blessed us with his presence. Yesterday we rode elephants and went to a crazy night market as we are back in the city…Chiang Mai.

Tomorrow we head to Bangkok on a ten hour bus ride to serve there for two weeks. I know that I miss the villages already. The sun rise and set, playing mafia by candlelight, and especially the amazing food that was prepared for us. Today we ate chunks of chicken blood in a nice curry sauce. It was delectable. The team has come together in so many ways the past few weeks. We bring prayer requests to eachother every day and I feel that has been pivotal in keeping us all atune to eachothers hearts, and being able to respond. In a month we will all be seperated, and that is looming ever so dark on the horizon. Please please pray for all of us with regard to those things.

The country is beautiful, I have thourougly enjoyed being with my friends in such a new place, and he is speaking lots to us. Playing with the masses of kids at the lisu village hjas been a highlight. Swinging them round and round in the hot sun listening to them laugh and scream. We had a wicked large game of duck duck goose the other day and many villagers were enterained by the chaos of screams. Bangkok will be another kind of jungle, and we are all anxious to see how we will be of service.

Update: Michelle Funderburg, Staff

From YWAM UMWinnipeg staff member, Lindsey Ainsworth:

Hey all!  We just wanted to let you know that we have arrived safely, despite a lost passport (then found) and several other minor mishaps on the way.  My first time on Korean Air was slightly disappointing due to the false advertising regarding personal t.v. screens (on an 11-hour flight it’s kind-of a big deal), but was otherwise good.  The food was quite tasty, including the seaweed soup I had as part of one meal.  It took a little getting used to, but by the end I absolutely loved it!

The Korean airport is huge, and I’m looking forward to spending almost a whole day there on the way back.  It even has a place to do free cultural crafts!

Thailand is interesting.  I keep getting confused because there are so many things similar to Uganda and Nigeria, and yet some pretty significant differences.  It’s weird, but I’m sure I’ll adjust in time.  The heat and humidity is icky, as anticipated.  Today we did a Temple tour in Bangkok, which was very interesting.  Those temples sure are beautiful, if nothing else!   And on the way there we got to take a bus, train, and boat.  How exciting is that?  Oh, and the food here is good, but it’s another thing that’s throwing me off since it is similar to food at many Asian restaurants in Canada and I’m used to the food being really different when I go overseas.

The team seems to be doing fine, although jetlag definitely has a hold on us still.  I think our big mistake was sleeping on the flight from Seoul to Bangkok, which got into Bangkok at around midnight.  It meant we all woke up really early, and napped the next day, and so the cycle has continued.  It was pretty funny, actually, this morning when we were asking how everyone slept… pretty much all of us slept until around 2 and then just dozed after that.  And tonight we’re taking a bus to Chiang Mai, which probably won’t help much.  Oh well.

Talk to you all soon!

NOTE: The JDTS is now in Thailand on outreach, so updates will be less frequent as they have access.

After a brief nine day holiday that saw most of us going home, our first week back in Winnipeg was spent working at the Union Gospel Mission. UGM is a non-denominational urban mission in the North End of town that provides food for the homeless, as well as facilitates a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program that houses and counsels men and women that are determined to move towards recovery and healing. The mission also has a chapel in the building where the visitors wanting a meal sit in on the chapel service before lunch is served. Union Gospel was eager to put the six of us students to work for the week, and it was certainly a welcoming and hospitable environment to work in.

Breakfast was at seven every day, and by ten to eight we would all be bundled and on our way out the door. The temperatures through out the week hovered in the minus twenties, and so the walk to and wait for the bus was consistently awakening for the group. Ashley was on breakfast prep and so us addicts were very thankful for the steady flow of coffee that she ensured was present. Getting back into the swing of early rises on top of the eight hour work days at UGM caused some serious fatigue within the students, and so the house seemed to quite down earlier than usual throughout the week. During the days we would often be separated into a couple groups so they could use us more efficiently. Everybody had a chance to work in the kitchen at some point, and that seemed to be the highlight for most of us. The kitchen staff and volunteers do an amazing work preparing meals for upwards of a hundred people multiple times a week using food thats mostly been given by grocers that can’t sell it. Using food that would be destined for a landfill, the great team there prepares meals that are of an incredibly high quality. Most of the world can’t eat as well as the homeless can at UGM, all being done as a practical act of redemption, outwardly expressed as a reflection of the character of our Father. One mans trash is another mans dinner. Between cutting vegetables, plating tables, and turning potatoes into delicious french fries, we all felt a sense of love and care from the staff and residents who work in the kitchen.

We ate lunch daily with the rehabilitation program residents and UGM staff after the open meal was served to people from the street. These lunch times were a highlight for myself from the week, and I think all of us were challenged and intrigued by conversations with men from the program. Hearing stories from lives of very hard knocks integrated with an active awareness of their need for God’s help gave us a very encouraging experience in our time with them. Apart from the kitchen, we also did some cleaning work in the dining room, organizing books and sheets in the sorting room, and preparing bags of donated clothes to be shipped globally as well as locally. Thursday night we had a New Years eve party at the house that was filled with some yummy junk food, loud music, and some spontaneous dancing of course. We played a game that required picking up pieces of cardboard with your teeth, trimming the sides of the cardboard after every round bringing it lower and lower to the ground. The conclusion was that Kathryn is part rubber, or that at some point she trained to be a gymnast, because she was bending in ways that demanded head tilts from the onlookers. Upon juicing every last drop of excitement from 2009, we headed to bed for a short lived rest. Friday morning, New Years day, we traveled to the bus stop, business as usual. It must have been -30, and after 20 minutes of waiting for a bus that was usually right on time, we decided to look at the bus stop to see what time it came at. The sign read “Holidays: No Service”, and so after a quick re routing at the house we found an operating bus route and headed to UGM for our last day of volunteering.

The urban outreaches in Winnipeg ensure that they spread out their Christmas meals to cover a vaster time period, and allow people from the streets to be at multiple celebrations. New years day was the special day at Union, and because of the additional festivities, they brought in an extra 20 or so volunteers to aide with the extra duties. Preparing a full on turkey lunch and cutting pie for 400 people is no simple task, but UGM has been at this now for over 50 years, and so they delegated the willing bodies with an impressive tact. Some of us worked in the drop in coffee area greeting and conversing with people coming for a meal, and some people worked in the dining room helping manage the chaos of feeding hundreds of folks. A handful of volunteers and myself worked in the chapel for the day, taking prayer requests from those expressing interest after the chaplain offered prayer. A very interesting dynamic was in the air of those chapel services. Many people simply wanted the hot meal, and were anything but interested in the 45 minute sermon that preceded. Pockets of people retorting bitterly to the preachers claims, while others seeming fully given to the truth of the message shouting hallelujahs with desperate sincerity. A great deal more lied somewhere in the middle, keeping silence while waiting patiently. I have never been to more intriguing services, and the conversations and prayers that I shared with people throughout the three services ministered to my spirit in many ways. Everybody in the DTS had feelings and thoughts about the way that UGM organized their service, and whether positive or negative, I think we would all say we lift our hats to the lovely brothers and sisters who turn the wheels of compassion that touch so many lives through Union Gospel.

Sunday was the last little flowers meeting before outreach, and this week is outreach preparation week. Thailand is finding a sharper shape on the horizon, and as we ponder the unimaginable that will surely meet us on outreach, excitement levels are on the rise. A cocktail of feelings including anxiety, fear, and excitement are being churned daily in all of us, and our hope is to be increasingly open and honest with our feelings about outreach, so that we can support each other and unite together in our trust of God and one another. While we are on outreach, Jamie and Kim will be remaining at the house, and will be able to update the blog and inform you of how and what were all doing. This will include a post when we arrive safely in Thailand, so that all of you worried family members wont have to wait for your jet lagged loved ones to find a telephone. We are starting to learn of plans for while we are in Chiang Mai which include a week of work with a forestation preservation group, as well as some other equally exciting opportunities. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers, and continue to check the site for blog posts while we are in Thailand and Vancover. We will be back in Winnipeg on February 19th, God bless.