I (Sean) realized the other day this blog hadn’t been updated in quite a long time. Not from a lack of ministry that has been done! Frankly it hasn’t been updated because the way our ministry has looked in 2020 simply continued through 2021 so far.
To be clear, our ministry as international missionaries for the past 9+ years now is serving, training, equipping, and helping national CEF ministries throughout the Caribbean. That mission didn’t change when the lockdowns began in March of 2020, and it hasn’t changed over the past year and a half now either.
Here’s the thing, there are only so many Zoom meetings we can write about on the blog before it starts to sound repetitive! From an overall work flow basis, our daily work doesn’t look that different now than it did before March 2020. We stay engaged with the staff and the boards of the eight nations that we serve, through email, WhatsApp, & phone calls. I also work alongside the regional director and regional team with other needs, projects, and issues throughout the rest of the Caribbean. None of that is different now than it was before.
The overall mission of CEF is to evangelize, disciple, and establish children into local churches. So we ask the question alongside local churches, “how can you best reach the children in your community?” But how do you reach children in a public health lockdown situation? Though a new issue to navigate, the root mission and question hasn’t changed. If anything, it has been a refreshing return to the original vision of CEF! You can’t rely at all on past methodology, and this new reality of the past year and a half requires Holy Spirit-fueled creativity to reach out to children under what is allowed in each country.
What has changed since March 2020 are two major things: travel & Zoom. First, I/we haven’t traveled internationally since the board/staff visit to Jamaica in February 2020. This however is planned to change this month (September 2021)! That will be a future blog post. Second, Zoom has transformed our regional team’s ministry since last year. We have conducted board trainings for hundreds of national and local board members, we have trained thousands of volunteers in children’s ministry throughout the Caribbean, we have had special meetings to deal with issues in individual countries, we have held new staff interviews, and all of this has been done with a plurality of leaders participating.
For example, just recently I was involved in dealing with a staff issue in one of the countries, and on the Zoom call was another fellow area director, my regional director, and all of the board members of that countries. People from four different locations and based in three different nations were on the Zoom call, whereas before 2020 it would have likely required a face-to-face, multiple day trip by just one leader. This way, three different leaders from three different cultural & ministry experience backgrounds were able to weigh in on the issue, in real time.
In conclusion, ministry is thriving in many of the nations of the Caribbean, and many countries are using radio, television, Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, and many other technological means of outreach. Many nations by now have been able to return to face-to-face ministry, and though I personally may not have been able to travel to the country, the beauty of CEF’s missionary model is that local ministry is not dependent on me being there in person. The design of CEF ministry since 1937 is that local people in local communities are the ones reaching the local children. All run by national staff and national boards. Only about 2.5%-3% of CEF full-time workers serve cross-culturally like myself. And our purpose as missionary servants to help serve, train, & equip local ministries of CEF throughout the Caribbean hasn’t changed!
