CRIT Communication Consultation 2010

Every year the YWAM communication network collaborates to hold an international consultation and this year it is being held in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Alongside the consultation, a Basic Communication Workshop (BCW) is offered to YWAM staff to help them improve their ability to communicate effectively on behalf of their ministry projects, and at a personal level.

Tim and Lydia are attending CRIT from the AfriCom office in the south, and the team in East Africa is represented by Vikki and Charles, with Anne going from West Africa. It's a wonderful opportunity for the AfriCom network to connect with one another in person and to consult about communication strategy for this continent, as well as to share ideas and challenges with people from around the world.

This year there has been a strong emphasis on frontier missions, that is mobilizing and supporting YWAM workers in areas where few people have the opportunity to hear the Christian message. In Africa the leadership team have agreed to jointly promote mobilization into the central part of the continent, where we have very few YWAM teams. Life is hard in these places so communicators can play a role, not only in telling people about the need and the opportunity there, but also in strengthening those who do decide to work there. We can do this by helping them stay connected with the wider YWAM body, equipping them with skills to develop prayer and funding partnerships and letting others know about their work by producing articles and video clips. As always, frontier missions is most effective over the long term when done as part of a multi-faceted team. We hope to see a Communication Team developed at CRIT this year that will be specifically tasked with supporting the work of YWAM's frontier missionaries around the world.

Serving the Africa Leadership Team

This week Tim is in Mali where he is attending the annual meetings of both the Field Service Team (FST) and the Africa Leadership Team (ALT). Regular readers will know that Tim is currently coordinating the work of the FST, a loose affiliation of ministries united by their focus on serving the needs of our YWAM missionaries working in Africa. This year the group once again looked at strategies to develop leaders, as well as ways to mobilize more YWAM teams into the challenging central region of the continent.

Every year a member of our team joins the ALT in order to give them communication support. This includes posting daily reports on-line so that YWAM staff in Africa are kept updated on the decision-making processes of the leaders. You can view these daily reports on the YWAM Africa website.

Introducing Christabel Lwiindi

As a YWAM communication ministry seeking to develop a network of communication teams throughout Africa, we do our best to connect with any staff members whose responsibilities include those related to communication. Christabel is one such staff member; she is based in Worcester, South Africa and attached to the southern regional leadership team, specifically to Stefaan Hugo as the Regional Director. Christabel is originally from Zambia and is trained as a journalist, so she brings great experience to her role, both of the region and of communication. She is supported administratively by Judy Guntelach who helps enormously by maintaining the database and sending out emails that need to reach YWAM staff throughout the region.

Miranda and Evelien really appreciated their opportunity to meet with Christabel recently, and are looking forward to working together in the coming months. If you are playing a similar role somewhere in Africa, or you know someone who is doing so, we encourage you to get in touch, so that by working together we can strengthen YWAM's communication capacity more effectively than we can when we work alone!

Email us at: ywamafricom@gmail.com

Communication mobilizes Prayer

One of the really wonderful things that has happened as Youth With A Mission has paid attention to our internal communication over the last few years has been the global monthly Prayer Days. On the first Thursday of every month, YWAM staff around the world join together around a theme and pray. As Com Teams we have the privilege of helping to put together the reading material that directs people's prayers.

This month we are praying for the great nation of China. Back in August, Tim attended the Global Leadership Meetings in Switzerland and was able to conduct some interviews with leaders that were later incorporated into the prayer material for this month.

Today Miranda is in Perth, Western Australia, where YWAM staff have been taking initiative in China for some time, offering training opportunities to believers there. Staff from around Australia joined together this morning to pray, lifting before God their longings for that nation. We can be sure that as our global mission does the same from our thousands of locations, people will be drawn to go to China, others will commit themselves to continued prayer, still others will give towards training and development initiatives in that nation.

All because we paid attention to our communication!

Down Under

Miranda is currently visiting YWAM in Perth, Western Australia, where staff and leaders from around the country are gathering for their national conference. She is there with Sugi, coordinator of AspaCom, the Com Team for YWAM Asia/Pacific, of which Australia is a vibrant part.

There are many skillful communicators working as part of YWAM Australia. Some of the campuses have their own communication or media teams, or ministries like Create International who use media to spread the message of Jesus. The goal of this visit is to connect with as many of these people as possible, to let them know what is going on in the YWAM world in the area of communication, and to invite them to come to the communication consultation in Thailand next March.

Regular followers of this blog will know that CRIT, our annual consultation for YWAM communication staff, has become an engine for communication development for the YWAM region in which it is held. Asia/Pacific is a very diverse region and we currently have a handful of communicators working in various locations. We hope that as a result of the 2010 event we will mobilize more people into regional Com Teams as well as creating a network of trained people who can more effectively serve the needs of the mission in this part of the world.

YWAMers in Australia are well-placed to be a part of this initiative ... Miranda and Sugi are meeting with them in Perth to make sure that happens!

Mission Communicators

There is space in the diverse world of missions to use all our gifts and talents. We often meet people at communication workshops who prior to that encounter had not realized that writers, photographers, designers and illustrators could use their talents to serve the purposes of God.

Today I met Nathan, working with Create International here in Perth, Western Australia. Nathan is a talented illustrator and he has been working on presenting the message of Jesus in pictorial form. He has recently completed 7 stories, the original designs for which have been translated into video format with voice-over in Arabic and other languages, downloadable to ipods or cell phones. His art thus becomes a fantastic tool for a missions worker to share the message of Jesus in an appropriate way.

It is awesome to see people working on projects that give them opportunity to share their passion and skills with others ... plugged into something that makes them come alive and brings life to the people around them. Being a missions communicator offers that opportunity to some incredibly talented people ... if you want to be one of them, contact us!

Global Communicators

Wow, things are busy and exciting in the YWAM communication community these days! This network of people committed to strengthening our mission's internal and external communication includes something called the Global Communication Team. AfriCom's very own Miranda is a member of this team and she was with the rest of the crew at YWAM Harpenden recently for their annual meeting.

These guys discuss some of the big picture communication issues and opportunities facing YWAM. Currently they are overseeing the revamp of our global web presence and hope to go live with the new and improved ywam.org site by the end of year. This year they also discussed issues of security as we serve and protect the needs of YWAM teams in various parts of the world.

The opportunity presented by social media, like Facebook, is something that needs revisiting every year and at this meeting the team tried something new: a live Q&A session with YWAM's International Chairman, Lynn Green, on Facebook. This was great fun and certainly bears repeating, hopefully with different ones of our key leaders. You can read the transcript of that Q&A here.

Connecting a global organization like YWAM is hard work at times ... know what I'm saying?!