Category: Thoughts on Missions Page 1 of 6

Your Church is the Community Center

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On December 4, 2025

In Thoughts on Missions

How one EFCA church redefined community outreach––And yours can, too.

In June I attended the EFCA One conference in West Des Moines, Iowa at Valley Church. The conference was great, but I was absolutely inspired by this church. I have never before encountered a church that loves their community so much.

So I interviewed the pastor and a couple of others who have been impacted by Valley and wrote an article about it. It was posted today on the EFCA blog. I hope you are inspired too!

“I’m a Jesus-loving car guy,” says Scott Longstreet. One Sunday, after attending Valley Church (EFCA) in West Des Moines, Iowa, for a few months, Scott was walking out to the parking lot and had an inspiration: this would be a great place for a car show. “I could just see the whole place filled with cars,” he says.  

He took the idea to Pastor Quintin Stieff, who immediately agreed. Scott was taken aback. “In my previous church, nothing happened without going through a lot of channels. Nobody moved a chair without getting permission from someone else.”  

Scott soon realized his request was commonplace at Valley Church––in fact, it is its heart. When Valley says their purpose is to “Mobilize everyone’s God-given potential to deeply love Christ and their neighbors,” they mean it. They see their facility and their work as an expression of the Church’s highest calling. If you check out Valley’s events calendar, you’ll see it includes a breathtaking plethora of choices: coffee and connect for foster and adoptive moms, Movie Mondays, knitting club, card-playing group, support groups for special needs families, and a 8.5-acre farm for refugee families (and a Sunday farmers’ market to sell their produce).  

In 2013, Valley built a 29,000-square-foot community center as a gift to Des Moines. But that was just a natural extension of their DNA: Valley Church was already operating as a community center.  

Read the rest here.

Am I a Missionary Colonizer?

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On August 17, 2025

In Thoughts on Missions

I have devoted my life to Christian missions. Am I guilty of cultural assault? 


My job is to hire, onboard, coach, and train new missionaries. Sometimes it’s a bit disconcerting to work in a profession that so many people hate.  

A couple of weeks ago, I came across an article from The Guardian: “Missionaries using secret audio devices to evangelise Brazil’s isolated peoples.” 

The headline is clickbait for an article that is mostly speculative. Considering that a companion article claims that the same tribe’s longhouses “glow with screens” and are asking for Starlink, I’m not sure they’re as isolated as we imagine. 

But it was the comments that got my attention. 

missionary colonizer

Over a thousand negative comments with over 700 shares. 

Some are valid accusations. History has shown us plenty of ignorant, arrogant, or destructive missionaries. I met some. Sometimes I was one. In fact, the whole reason I am passionate about my job of preparing and equipping missionaries is because I want to prevent them from making these mistakes. From making mistakes that I made. Anyone who has sat through one of my trainings knows that the thing I say over and over again is to enter another culture with humility. 

But I also understand that many people believe that a missionary should never go in the first place. Or that if he does, his work should only be humanitarian. He should never dare to try to persuade someone to change their beliefs.

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Open to God’s Agenda

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On August 1, 2024

In Thoughts on Missions

How an innovative internship changed a missionary’s trajectory—and a church’s heart for missions.

It was a shot in the dark, but that was all Angela had left. 

In May 2022, Angela showed up at First Free in St. Louis, Missouri, on a Sunday morning straight from the airport, luggage in tow. She wasn’t expecting much to come from it. Visiting a church cold turkey usually doesn’t. 

But desperation makes you willing to try anything. 

In 2019, Angela had returned home to Ohio after spending two fruitful, energizing years with ReachGlobal in Athens, Greece. Less than half a percent of Greece’s population is evangelical Christian, and God gave Angela a deep love for Greek people and culture. She knew God was calling her to return for long-term ministry, helping to revitalize and strengthen the local church. So, she went through the long-term application process with ReachGlobal and made the transition to become a career missionary. With it, the budget she needed to raise nearly doubled. 

Angela was just starting to raise additional support when the pandemic hit. Months of lockdowns, personal illness, and turmoil in her home church brought her support-raising process to a grinding halt. And she just couldn’t get it going again. After almost three years, she was defeated and demoralized and questioned whether she would ever get back to Greece. 

During that time, Angela tried just about everything. She had contacted everyone she knew. She had offered to speak at any possible venue that would host her. Once, she even set up a table outside of a car show! She reached out to hundreds of EFCA churches. Yet she’d hardly received any response at all. 

I had the joy of walking with Angela on this journey. Go here on the EFCA blog to read the rest of the story!

Once You See It, You Can’t Unsee It

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On April 4, 2024

In My Memoirs, Thoughts on Missions

I loved telling this story–one of my favorites from our years in Tanzania.

One of the first things that stood out to Peter and Eunice when they visited Reach Tanzania Bible School was that the teachers drank out of the same plastic cups as the students. In their denomination, the leadership would remain distant from those under them. Visiting guest pastors would choose the best hotels and restaurants. And certainly, they wouldn’t socialize with their students.  

But they knew they had found a unique Bible school in Tanzania when they heard the philosophy of the director, Mark Dunker, a ReachGlobal missionary. “If you are looking for a paper to hang on your wall, this is not the right place for you,” Mark told them. “Here we teach for life change.” 

Peter and Eunice were instantly hooked—this was the place they had been looking for. They didn’t realize their lives were about to change far more than they could have ever imagined.

By the time Peter and Eunice stepped into Reach Tanzania Bible School in early 2017, they had already been full-time pastors and missionaries for 20 years. Originally from Kenya, they had joined their denomination (founded by American missionaries) as young adults with a sincere desire to serve God wholeheartedly. They received some mentoring and then were sent to locations all over East Africa, evangelizing, pastoring churches and discipling others.  

They were shining stars in their large international denomination, faithful to teach the truth about how to be born again from Acts 2:36-38: Repent and be baptized. Peter explained that repentance meant regularly making lists of your sins, publicly confessing, and often being publicly rebuked and humiliated in front of the church. Once you’d cleaned up your life enough, you were ready to be baptized—and you weren’t saved until that moment. And even once you had been baptized, you lived in daily fear that you might mess up too much to keep your salvation. 

Like Cornelius or Apollos, Peter and Eunice feared God, earnest in their pursuit of Him. Before being assigned to his denomination’s church in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Peter took classes at a Pentecostal seminary. He agreed to go to Tanzania in 2013 with permission from his leadership that he continue to pursue Bible education, but theological education is sparse in Tanzania. So in 2017, when Eunice saw a Facebook ad for Reach Tanzania pop up in her feed and noticed it was not far from their home, they decided to check it out. 

They quickly signed up and started classes shortly after, but Eunice was disappointed to see that the first required course was on Bible study methods. “I have already been studying the Bible for 20 years,” she thought. “What else are they going to teach me?” 

She was about to get the shock of her life. The first of many. 

Go to the EFCA blog to read the rest.

A Marriage Forged on the Mission Field

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On December 6, 2023

In Thoughts on Missions

The EFCA blog is doing a series on marriage and asked me to write this one.

A bride and a groom smiling at their wedding.

A guy in college told me that if I wanted to be a missionary in Africa, no one would date me. I didn’t care. And he was wrong. 

In fact, it was during college that Gil Medina came into my life, and we got to know each other while co-leading a ministry in a cross-cultural, low-income neighborhood near our church. The two of us became a team before we were even friends. We hit it off and worked well together: he was the visionary, relational guy, and I was the administrative and logistics gal. 

I wanted to be more than friends but didn’t think he did, so I barreled along with my plans to move overseas. I was accepted with ReachGlobal, agreed to teach in Tanzania, raised all my support and got a visa. 

Meanwhile, Gil wanted to be more than friends too, but kept his mouth shut so as not to get in the way of God’s plan for my life. Finally, some mutual friends helped us break through our self-sacrificing martyrdom and pointed us in the other’s direction. It didn’t take long for us to figure out that, really, we wanted to do this missionary life together. 

When we got engaged, we weren’t sure if Tanzania would be as good of a ministry fit for Gil as it was for me and considered serving in a different country. But then a youth sports outreach position opened up in Tanzania, which felt like Gil’s dream job. We got married on October 7, 2000, and nine months later, we were on a plane out of California. We arrived in Tanzania just a year after my original plan to leave. ReachGlobal got two for the price of one and I felt like I had everything I could ever want: I got to serve in Africa, and with my best friend and ministry partner. The Gil and Amy Medina Team couldn’t have been more perfect. 

Turns out, it wasn’t so perfect.

Go here to read the rest.

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