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!

We have a target date for moving to Argentina: February of next year!

That’s in eight months – and there’s a lot to be done in such a short time!

Ivan’s busy calling pastors and lining up meetings where we can share our passion and vision for ministry in Argentina. We had a handful of meetings this spring but look forward to many more this summer and coming fall!

Right now we have almost every Sunday this summer scheduled, except for two weeks in July when we attend Pre-Field. This is for all missionaries who plan to leave for the field within the coming year. We’ll spend two weeks learning more about cultural adaptation, language acquisition, practical and logistical issues, and other things that are important to being effective in cross-cultural ministry. We are currently working our way through a reading list of five books with really good information.

As one of the author says, “If you have the right attitude and can use the right skills to creatively interact with cultural differences, you will…leave a positive, lasting impact for the kingdom of God.” We definitely want to leave a positive, lasting impact for the kingdom of God, so all the reading and pre-field training is important.

So we have a very busy summer and we appreciate your prayers! For safety, strength and stamina! For our walk with God. That God would bring together the right churches and individuals that will form our support team. It has been exciting to see how those already on the team have become so engaged in the ministry in Argentina, supporting us with much more than financial help, but with prayer and encouragement and enthusiasm.

We are more excited as our move gets closer! As you know, we traveled to South America this winter. It was a hectic, but productive five weeks: attending the annual missionary field conference in Uruguay, spending time with Tito and Adriana Ramirez, meeting my language tutor, pricing household goods needed to set up housekeeping, taking a survey trip up the Punilla Valley… You get the idea. We’ve posted a few of the photos from our trip at: http://flickr.com/photos/hoytsonlinecom/

And the Lord is blessing in the work there. In a recent e-mail our co-workers, Tito and Adriana, wrote about one lady who has been coming to the Bible studies for some time. During a recent meeting she heard the gospel message again and said: “I understand all this, and I believe it with my heart, but I never told the Lord; I need to do it now!” We look forward to seeing this happen over and over again.

It will be challenging. We often see things differently than those in other cultures. In fact, one comment often heard around the world is “What do you Americans do with all the time you save?” Sometimes we wonder ourselves. But we know what we will do with the time we have — we will spend it in the urgent and important work of extending God’s work in the world. And we will spend some of it thanking you for your care, and prayer, for us.