Today’s Waterloo (IA) Cedar Falls Courier newspaper features short-term mission efforts of several churches in the Waterloo area, including the Grace Brethren Church of Waterloo (Kelvin Cooke, pastor). Here is an excerpt which includes information about the Grace Brethren mission trips:
Students aren’t the only ones itching to take their faith to all corners of the world. Faith-based service trips are offered throughout the year by Cedar Valley churches and missions societies to adults, too.
Weeklong service ventures assist the efforts of long-term missionaries and local pastors. Short-term missionaries also bring new programs to communities.
In January, a Cedar Valley team with Grace Brethren International Missions visited the Philippines to support the efforts of missionaries Jason and Doni Weimer of Waterloo, who are fulfilling a year-long assignment in Manila. Group members went from house to house sharing the Gospel and publicizing the children’s park programs organized by the Weimers.
Some may question the effectiveness of sometimes costly, not to mention brief, short-term missions trips.
But a well-organized, culturally-sensitive effort impact individuals, communities and local missionary efforts, missionaries say.
“… Ten people on a short-term mission trip can sometimes, literally, do in two weeks what may have taken the local missionary two months to do,” Weimer wrote in an e-mail to the Courier. “They also bring a freshness and new zeal to the area that the missionary has been working.”
The trip encouraged Jesup resident Christy Eichelberger, with Grace Brethren Church in Waterloo, to bring the same zeal to her own backyard.
” … To meet and share God’s love,” Eichelberger said. “… That just made me come back and realize I need to be doing that in my very own neighborhood.”