What is this and why do we do it?

This is doing shared interests with our international friends & neighbors for a fun way for them to learn English! Here’s the page we use to invite them to sign up. You can use the same form!

Why do we do it? In a word: friendship. In our context, trust needs time to grow if it is going to support the weight of the truth we long to share. And a shared interest helps to overcome many barriers that might otherwise make it hard to get to know one another.

Oh, and we also hope to have fun!

How do we do this? Here are some questions to help explain…

Question 1: prayer

It may seem routine to do an activity you have done many times before, but we are in a real spiritual warfare and helpless to bring the spiritually dead to life. Please raise prayer support for your ministry to these image bearers. And we’d love to be a part of that prayer team!

Question 2: partners

Christ sent His disciples out two at a time and we believe this is His model for ministry. Serving with another believer also helps to share the load, allows for different gifts to be exercised, and helps ‘iron sharpen iron.’

In addition, we encourage you to prayerfully engage the right internationals (some of whom may be believers!) in the organizing of the event. We’ll give you the list of who expressed interest. When we share the work with them we are actually doing pre-discipleship. If you want examples, look at how Jesus involved His disciples early in ministry.

Question 3: Link support

What level of Link support is appropriate? The diagnostic question in this case is: do you already know the volunteers & internationals you’ll be with?

Option 1: you know them and each other already. E.g. you are a volunteer in an English class & your Co-Teacher and you are planning to have your English students over to your home. You already have the relationships and a familiar activity. We’d love to support you with prayer and encouragement, but we are guessing you’d prefer to plan & lead this on your own.

Option 2: these will be new internationals or new volunteers or both. In this case, we’d love to coach or even model what this type of ministry can be like with questions like these that follow…

Question 4: after

What time frame would the Lord have you think? It’s completely fine to have a “one and done” event in the name of Jesus. It’s also great if you are open to a friendship and come into the event with eyes looking for those who you may connect well with or if you decide to have this event more than once.

Question 5: details

• Who. Link staff will give you the contact info for those who have expressed interest in this activity.
• When. What date & time is best for your internationals?
• How many. What’s your max number of participants & do you want to open it up publicly? Large public gatherings are typically not our method, but in some cases it’s appropriate (e.g. a futbol game… oops, we mean soccer 😉). If so, Link staff can publish on social media and large WhatsApp groups.
• Communication. Speaking of WhatsApp, how will you communicate with the interested internationals? A text or WhatsApp group? Perhaps some of them are only on WeChat. We can give ideas if you want some.
• Reimbursement form. Link can reimburse some expenses, but please get approval ahead of time.