Category Image 2007 Adult Mission Trips


Downloadable information about the three adult mission trips planned this year

Northaven Church is planning three adult mission trips in 2007. Each trip has a unique focus, will be a meaningful opportunity to serve through mission. The dates for each trip are listed below, and clicking on the link will download a copy of each trip's brochure, containing more complete information. For questions about any of these trips, contact Ron Wilhelm.

Guatemala Mission: March 17-25 Download the brochure
The mission team will do light construction to convert at local church into clinic and community center. This is a project sponsored by Northaven member JoAn Dwyer, who is serving as a missionary in the country of Guatemala. It will provide a unique chance to reach out in service to a needy community, and to reconnect with a church missionary who is dearly loved by many Northaveners.

Mississippi Gulf Coast Mission: June 10-16 Download the brochure
Once again, Northaven will partner will members of Hamilton Park UMC to rebuild homes affected by Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast. Last year's trip was quite meaningful and moving, as two Dallas churches --one African-American, one Anglo-- formed one unified team and reached out to those along the Gulf Coast. This year's trip promises to be just as meaningful and rewarding.

El Salvador Mission: July 14-21 Download the brochure
This will be a trip to minister with our sister church in San Salvador, Maria Madre de los Pobres. Activities will include taking children to the pool and 1-2 days in Huisisilapa to visit the cooperative project of Fito Guardado. (The group fled El Salvador to Honduras during the war and returned to El Salvador to establish this new community.) The Huisisilapa project focuses on the youth to discourage them from leaving the country.
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Why do we go in mission?
The Christian commitment is very serious. And above all, our commitment as ministers . . . obligates us to go out to encounter the wounded poor in the road. Monseñor Oscar Romero, 2 April 1978

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8.

It seems that the victim offers us the privileged place (although not the only place) to encounter the truth which sets us free. The poor usher us into the heart of reality. They bring us up against the world and ourselves all at once. To some extent, we all hold reality at arm's length -- fending off intolerable parts of the world with one hand and intolerable parts of ourselves with the other. The two go together. As a rule, our encounters with the world place us in touch with internal reality, as well. In particular, when the world's pain crashes in upon us in the person of the victim, the encounter dredges up from within us the parts of ourselves that we had banished. The outcast outside us calls forth the outcast within us. This is why people avoid the poor. But meeting them can heal us. We will only heal our inner divisions if we are also working to heal our social divisions. . . . . If we let them, the poor will place us before the abyss of the holy Mystery we call God. They are a kind of door that opens before that Mystery and through which God passes to get at us. Clearly we need them more than they need us. Father Dean Brackley, SJ

Posted: Thursday - January 25, 2007 at 03:11 PM           |

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