One member of Missio Lux has a business recruiting and bringing teachers from the US and Canada to Korea to teach English.
It's called Adventure Teaching (http://www.adventureteaching.com/).
Part of the dream has been to start missio communites in Korea. Scot went over to join his partner who lives in Korea, and they held their first ever Missio Community training Saturday.
Please read his email and pray for these budding communities to take root and bring forth what God desires for each one of them:
Scot writes:
One of my projects over the past couple weeks was to put together a gathering of Christian teachers that Adventure Teaching has brought over to equip and connect them, and encourage them to launch missional communities. It was quite a headache finding a meeting place that wasn’t going to cost the business an arm and a leg, and would be a central location to teachers coming from all over the massive Seoul metro area. At nearly the last minute though, after stringing all of the teachers along with emails stating “we’re still waiting on confirmation of our meeting place, but plan on Saturday at 2:00”, one of our partner schools finally confirmed we could use one of their classrooms. The best part about it, was that they let us use the room for free.
On Saturday, at 1:30 we planned to be at a Subway station near the school to start meeting teachers and running them over to the school by taxi. We ended up meeting 3 teachers in route, which was pretty fun. Side note: it’s odd how different people are in reality vs. virtual communication over the phone and email. Once we got the subway stop teachers started to arrive. We had decided that Sarah Jane and I would run over to the school and set up the room and get some beverages etc. Our taxi driver ended up getting lost which turned our 5 minute trip to the school into a 15 minute frantic scramble of phone calls and broken Korea until we reached the school, with 10 minutes to spare before the meeting. Sarah Jane gave me a plan for room set up, and then ran off to the store. I ran up and down 4 flights of stairs grabbing chairs. The funny thing about the chairs is that they were all small chairs meant for kindergarteners…
Meanwhile Reuben was back at the subway stop meeting teachers, shuffling them into cabs and then explaining the intricate route to each driver, and working up quite a sweat. He even managed to buy a bunch of fruit and donuts, on his last ride to the school.
Reuben and I were overwhelmed by the turnout. I figured there would be about 12-15 teachers that could make it out, but over 20 teachers actually came, and quite a few more were unable to make it but interested. Meeting some our teachers face to face was such a rewarding experience. We got to see and hear how Korea has impacted their lives. We started the meeting sharing our funniest experiences in Korea and introducing ourselves. It was great to see the teachers who had been there a few months, take the new teachers, freshly arrived, under their wing. There were some great stories told.
Finally we got the meeting underway.
I cast the vision for living a life of great meaning, and how “if we follow Jesus our lives will be full of great meaning, purpose, desire, and adventure. Our lives will naturally be a great story.” I then lead into an explanation of Missio Lux and how missional communities work etc.
The response was incredible. After I was done talking, Reuben just had the sense that people had some things they wanted to share. So he opened it up to people’s response. They seemed to catch the vision right away. Many of them shared about how this is something that they have been yearning for, and praying for; it is the part of their Korean experience that has been lacking etc. Everyone in the room was engaged, and most of them had something to say, even in tears at times.
After everyone had a chance to share, we helped the teachers divide into groups in accordance with their geographical locations. Everyone, although we gave them complete freedom not to be a part of a missional community, was interested in being a part of one of the communities. The communities shifted a bit and certain people shuffled form one group to another that would be easier for them to get to, but in the end… we had 4 groups of teachers, connected, and passionate about making an impact while they are in Korea. Each of the groups had denoted a person who will be the catalyst, or the person who would be the emailer and the person who would try to keep things going.
Of course after it was over an all of the teachers had left, there were a couple of things that we forgot to say of course… Still, it was an amazing success. This is such an exciting step for Adventure Teaching and Missio Lux. Please keep these communities in your prayers and thoughts. I’ll do my best to keep you updated.
Scot Sustad
Director of Teacher Relations
Adventure Teaching Inc.
Seattle, WA USA
1-425-922-5122 (Cell)
1-206-257-0613 (Office)
Skype: adventure.teaching.northamerica
http://www.adventureteaching.com/
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