Leadership Letter #6 Mentoring Along in Missions
With the most rudimentary of strategies and by dint of much effort by an eclectic mix of people my wife and I were part of a missionary church plant among urban First Nations people in Thunder Bay, Ontario in the late 1970s on into the 1980s. In hindsight we really planted 3 successive churches-one on top of the other-since the migrant population ebbed and flowed between the challenges of living in the urban world, and family relationships back at people's home reserve communities. One of the classic dilemmas for a white missionary in such a setting is knowing how to work-your-way-out-of-a-job, since the ideal of having a native leader seemed to be an important component to what constituted a successful cross-cultural church plant. I think now I would be much more pragmatic about whether the ethnicity of leaders mattered that much, but at the time this seemed to be relevant. So, in that context my wife and I along with our family of 2 kids took a sabbatical and went to a Y