Better is the End

Today in my (Nate) Bible reading I finished up Ecclesiastes. Solomon's words rang true in my heart as I read, "Better is the end of a thing than its beginning." Today we closed the first chapter of our interns' summer here with us in Austria. This afternoon they got on a train with one of our former interns and her sister and headed to the Salzburg area to start the second half of their ministry.

These times are always bittersweet. We know that God has been working in their hearts. It is fun to see their understanding of the culture grow and to see how their questions change as they learn and experience more and more. We are blessed and honored to be able to build into these gals and serve them through their time here. 

As we sent them off, we prayed for the students that were going to be in their cabins, that they would continue to seek them out, that they would work hard to build relationships with their campers despite low language confidence and busy schedules. We prayed that they would have energy and push through when times are challenging. 

We are excited to go and visit them after their first full week of camp. We know that this will be a great debrief time to process with them the things they are learning.

Will you pray with us and for them in this season of ministry? Thanks for lifting them up!

Our Summer Internship is in Full Swing!

The interns having lunch with our colleagues, Peter and Celeste

 Our summer interns, Dani and Kyla, arrived on June 1st, and they've been going non-stop ever since! We are truly blessed to have them join us this summer, and we really have enjoyed watching them learn and process their experiences as they are experience missions in Austria for the first time.

Visiting the Oasis Refugee Center

Our overall goal for the internship is to expose our interns to a variety of different ministries and needs in Austria, as well as give them a "taste" of missionary life. They are taking German classes, navigating public transportation in a foreign city and handling their own grocery shopping, among other things.  Their weekly schedule also includes the following ministry opportunities:

• Volunteering weekly at a refugee center, helping with a women and kids' group
• Prayer walking around the local refugee camp and in the neighborhood where we will be church planting
• Visiting a local anti-sex trafficking/trade ministry and helping them with organizing clothing donations and childcare during an African womens' bible study
• Attending German class and looking for opportunities to talk about their faith with their classmates
• Meeting with Bethany for weekly discipleship & discussion time
• Meeting up with other missionaries in Vienna to learn about how God led them here and what they do

With other volunteers at the Oasis

Their schedule has been full! In between activities, they manage their own time, deciding how to prioritize rest, German study and reaching out to people they've met to meet up. In just 2 weeks, they hop on a train and head west to the Salzburg area to serve as counselors as a Christian English camp ministry, returning to Vienna afterwards to debrief on their time here this summer. 

This is our second year having summer interns and we are so thankful and blessing that God has led Kyla and Dani to serve here with us. We are learning many new things, too, as we walk with them through this significant cross-cultural and ministry experience. God is shaping us into better leaders and disciplers through this experience, and we know God will use this journey to better equip us for our new role as Team Austria field leaders. Praise God for how He is working!

Processing - Part 2

I am continuing to think about my time in Tirol and my observations of our interns there. In part 1, I talked about the role of expectations in ministry and our emotional processing of events. Head over there and check out that part, as well. In this part I want to discuss something that is rarely talked about in leadership today. This idea gets almost no air time at all. No one writes books about this, or gives lectures or conferences about it. But it is essential to the function of a team and is needed in every single leadership role. The idea I want to examine is following. What does it mean to follow a leader? How can we, as those under leadership, work with leaders to make them more effective and help them to equip us to accomplish our roles?

In part 2, I want to discuss something I saw very quickly about camp. Camp is a leadership incubator. There are so many different roles and responsibilities. Camps function different ways, but I can break down a bit of what I observed. Our interns were under three program staff that were running the main operations of the camp. These were people leading games and deciding where events would take place. They spent time with students as well, but their primary role was making sure the camp ran smoothly and safely. Our interns lead their own cabins in teams of two. They invested in their students and focused on ways to connect with them directly. It is, from what I gather, a pretty standard leadership structure.

At the airport sending 3 of the 4 back to the states.

Our interns were moving back and forth between the role of leader with their students and the role of follower of the program staff leading the whole camp. That dynamic in and of it self is not new; many find themselves in such a situation, moving back and forth between leader and follower. However, the role of "Follower" is not something that is often discussed in leadership books. In a leadership structure, it is crucial to be an effective follower.

One way we can be a good follower is to recognize how much power and influence the subordinate actually has, which is A LOT. Much of this isn't direct authority, but we can indirectly push a team towards success. As followers, we have the ability to speak truth into a situation and help a leader understand the most important facets of the problem as well as a solution that is viable. We may not see the big picture that a team leader sees, but we do have a very unique perspective based on the specific needs of our role. When we effectively communicate our needs or how a leader can best support us, we empower that leader to make the best possible decisions and improve our own productivity.

As you grow older, you realize how much you become your parents. One of my father's favorite phrases was simple but powerful. "Nate, think." Deep, I know, right?! But it is so deep. He usually explained it as, "think about what you are doing. Don't just do it. Think about the process. What needs to happen next? What are the tools required for that? How does that fit into what I am doing now? What can I do in this step of the process that will make my next step smoother? How does all this fit into the big picture?" And so on. The questions can continually roll. He wasn't meaning it critically; what he was trying to instill in me was a level of self-awareness. What am I doing? Is this the best way to do that? Apply previously acquired knowledge to the present situation.

This self awareness is so important in team work and in working with a leader. It applies beyond physical tasks to intangible ones, as well. Asking questions like, "What sort of personality is my leader? What are the strengths and weaknesses of that personality? How can I compliment or support that leader in areas where he or she is weak? What ways can I rely on  his or her strengths?" You can see where this is going. The great thing about all this was I saw my interns doing this! I saw them engaging in situations and offering up helpful responses that supported their leaders to do better.

I hope you are enjoying reading along as I process this summer with our interns. I learned a great deal from my time with them, and I am excited to see what God does through them.

Do you think the skill of following a leader is not talked about enough in the church? Throw your answer in the comments below. We'd love to start a great discussion.

Processing and Reflecting

a view up in the Alps

16th century castle ruin near the camp

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to travel to Reutte and go see our interns. Reutte is in Tirol, which is in the bone part of the "chicken wing" of Austria. It is also in the Alps. It was an trip filled with extreme beauty as I took the long bus ride through the small villages and town. It is also the kind of place where you take a picture, look down and realize that it just doesn't capture what you are seeing. 

As much as I did get to see a few things, my primary focus was not to ride through the mountains. My main focus while there was to check in with our interns on the second leg of their journey in Austria. The first half of their time here is encapsulated by this post here.

view from the ruins

So I set off to spend the weekend there and connect with our interns. It was a great time of encouragement and seeing the work that God is doing among the students at camp. I got to do both a large group debrief with all of our interns at once as well as one-on-one times to check in with each individual intern. Through all these conversations a few key themes rose to the top. As I have processed through these ideas, I realize how important they are, not just for short term camp ministry, but also as general life principles. In my next few posts, I hope to discuss some of these ideas and draw out some of these connections.

There is a climbing section
in the grocery store

As I talked to our interns, one topic that came up over and over again was expectations. The more time I spend in cross-cultural ministry, the more I see how our expectations of a situation shape how we experience it. In our missions training, we talked often about how difficulty can be compounded based on our expectations of a given situation. When we walk into a situation expecting it to be different, expecting it to be challenging, expecting a curve ball, we often are not surprised when things don't go smoothly. But if we expect things to flow smoothly, it hurts all the more when we have to adapt and change. In this way, it is like a rubber band around our waist. The farther apart our expectations and reality are, the more the "snap" hurts.

One of the major challenges to this is it is often a backwards looking thing. We don't often get to know or understand that our expectations for a situation are violated until after we feel the snap. *So often that emotional difficulty is a signal to us that our beliefs or expectations have been violated. But if we just focus on the the experiential side of it (what happened and how does that make us feel) - we can miss the chance to explore our beliefs and expectations. We miss the chance to see what is usually unconscious and learn more about ourselves.

This applied in so many ways to the interns. They were navigating cross-cultural relationships with campers, staffers, and even with co-counselors from different regions of the US. They had so many opportunities to evaluate their expectations of relationships and situations. Everyone that has worked at camp knows how intense it is working together closely with people from all different backgrounds. If we had given our interns a pad of paper and a pen before they left for camp, they probably would not have been able to list the expectations that they are now processing through. 

In my next few blog posts, I'll explore other factors and topics from our debrief time with the interns and how they shape cross-cultural experiences.
*I first heard this taught at a college group at Friendship Church in 2006 or so. I have tried to track down a book or teacher to attribute this to, but to no avail. If this sounds familiar, I'd love to know what book this comes from.

Our First Intern Experience

This summer marks the first time we have hosted WorldVenture interns. In fact, it has been many years since anyone from Team Austria has hosted interns for the summer. In truth, it seemed a little intimidating to us when to consider hosting interns after just 3 years on the field. We still feel like missionary babies in many ways...are we ready to oversee college students here in Austria? Do we know enough about ministry and the culture here to guide them through a cross-cultural experience? What do we have to offer?

God placed three wonderful female interns on our team this summer. I'm pretty sure going in, they knew they were our "guinea pigs" in this process. We are all just figuring things out as we go along and enjoying the journey together!

Having the interns arrive here just a few days after we did was definitely a bit exhausting. We were still settling in to life here when they joined us, and it was a busy first two weeks with them. However, it has also brought us so much joy to watch them learn and process their experience here, to see them offering valuable assistance in a variety of ministries, and to discuss all of their learning with them. I have especially enjoyed meeting with them once a week to do a bible study together and check in about what they are learning and how they are doing.

We knew this summer would not be perfect and that we would likely tweak the intern program after our first time through. It has been hard to watch them struggle at times and to wonder if we should have done things differently. On the one hand, cross-cultural living and language learning naturally comes with some struggle. If they weren't being challenged, they wouldn't learn as much. But we also don't want them to flounder, feel overwhelmed or come away from their summer experience feeling negatively about the time and resources they invested in their time here. 

Their biggest area of struggle has definitely been learning German. Because of the calendar, they unfortunately had to start in German class a week later than the rest of the students. Most of the other students in their class had already lived in Vienna for awhile, so they naturally had more language understanding than our interns, and the girls were frustrated with feeling behind and incompetent in the classroom. That was hard to watch, and I wondered if we should have done things differently. At the same time, seeing them struggle reminded me how hard language learning is at the beginning, no matter how many advantages you have going in. Perhaps struggling a bit was a valuable experience for them in understanding missionary life and cultural assimilation. And sure enough, the class did get a bit easier as they caught up and got more experience and time with the language.

We are excited to see what God does through this summer experience in each of their lives. And may He continue to guide us as we guide them!

Making fresh pasta in our kitchen

Dinner with the interns

Kylee on the team scavenger hunt