Into The Heart of Argentina

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to reach the country of Needia for Christ. You have exactly four years and a team of up to ten, but no more.

What you need to know is this: Needia is a western European style country about the size of Belgium with a population of 1.6 million. They speak Needian, a Romance language that, in terms of learning difficulty, is equivalent to French. There are four major cities: Neediopolis, the capital, a port city, and the largest metropolitan area with a population of 600,000; Factoria, the manufacturing hub located smack dab in the middle of the country where the largest industry is iron ore and with a population of 220,000; Collegeville has a population of 200,000; and finally there is Funcitia where the tourism industry flourishes amid a population of 200,000. The literacy rate is high at 90% and they do have the Bible in their language, although it is not widely used. There is no visible Christian presence anywhere in the country.

What is your strategy? Who will you recruit for the team? Where will you begin? How will you go about reaching Needia for Christ? This message will self destruct in 10 seconds.

That was the situation posed to the missionaries this week at our Field Preparation Seminar. We’re gathered here in the Atlanta area for two weeks of instruction, training, and testing before we head out for various parts of the world in the coming year. This ‘game’ was the final piece of the first week, to see how we’d use what we’ve been learning.

A pretty intense week! We’ve had classes on everything from life long learning to designing an exit strategy to evangelism to emergency management to training national leaders to models for church planting…and so on. We go from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. every day, plus you’ll usually find the missionaries continuing their discussions and brainstorming over meals and into the evening hours. The testing wasn’t too arduous and we’ve discovered that between the two of us, we have one good brain  Seriously, the tests help us understand where our strengths and weaknesses are, and point out where we’ll struggle with cultural adaptation and language acquisition.

Now we are looking forward to a little down time this weekend before resuming our studies on Monday morning. We appreciate your prayers for us during this time, and for safety in our travels (have any of you ever had to drive in Atlanta traffic?!).

And if you have any strategy suggestions for Project Needia 2012, let us know!