January 2017.
Not only the beginning of a new year, but also the beginning of my journey on the World Race. For this month, my squad and I served in Mozambique, Africa. My team specifically, along with another team, partnered with Beacon of Hope, a ministry right next to Maputo, the country’s capital.
Beacon of Hope is home to 11 boys, ages 12-18. It also houses various staff members and Ms. Angie, the organization’s founder. This passionate Texan heard the Lord’s call to become a missionary, and now finds herself in charge of this ministry. The purpose of Beacon of Hope is to mentor and equip these boys to become educated men of God that can serve and better their community. This is done through providing for their basic needs (like food), education, chores, and a great emphasis on the Lord. They teach these boys the importance of integrity and hard work, so they can hopefully bring the Lord to their communities once they leave.
Our team’s specific ministry was to support the work already occurring at Beacon of Hope, which meant spending most of our time mentoring these boys. Our main responsibility was to plan and teach classes. For me, that included English, Bible, and civics! We also spent time nurturing relationships with the boys, showed them how to be men of God, hosted a pizza party, played soccer, worshiped with them, and simply showed them the love of Christ in every way we could.
It was a month that changed how I view missions. I expected the World Race to be all intense evangelism and hiking to remote villages to preach the Gospel. While that definitely is an important aspect to missions, it is not its entirety. There’s missions through evangelism, but there is also missions through relationships. By simply discipling these boys, building community with them and the staff, and showing love however we could, we were spreading God’s Kingdom. We were doing an extremely important part of missions by creating relationships. As ministry changes in the coming months, I hope to continue doing missions through discipleship and relationships. I hope to spread the love of Christ by building friendships with those in need. I hope to be the one person who listens to their story when no one else will.
This is a pretty brief blog, but I just wanted to quickly update you all on how January went! I’ve been using technology scarcely, but still wanted to give you all a quick snapshot of my first month. The Lord is moving everyday and revealing incredible things, and I can’t want to share more with you all. Be on the lookout for future stories! They will be coming very quickly.
