Just the Numbers: 2010 in review

Here are some short ministry facts from 2010:

Coaching:

• Personally got certified by Lifeforming Leadership Coaching as a Coach Trainer.
• With Pastor Igor Sokolov, led training for three groups of students, one of which was for Indonesians (which included training on-site). This training included group seminars as well as one-on-one and one-on-two training sessions.
• Supervised the translation project for our training materials, a very large project of about 330 pages of written material, plus a few dozen audio lectures.
• Got a $2000 grant from the Des Plaines Foundation for this translation project.

Mentoring:

• Meet weekly with Pastor Igor Sokolov to help him think through ministry and personal questions, sometimes as a coach, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a friend, sometimes as a ministry partner.
• Meet mostly weekly with Yuri, a Harbor graduate, in our home
• Met infrequently with two other Harbor graduates, Natasha and Nastya

Counseling:

1. Conducted counseling and counseling training (often the one led to the other) for several (I count 5) individuals
2. Started prayer counseling training in June with about 15 individuals, which continues to date. We have added new students on two occasions since, and the total number of participants remains about 12.

Meetings:

• Met several new pastors this year, either individually or at a pastor conference
• Met several new ministry leaders
• Met weekly (until the summer) as a member of the leadership team of our local church, Harvest.
• Attended monthly prayer meeting of leaders of ministries to orphans

MIR

• Joined the board of directors in April (officially in June)
• Met weekly with the executive director for personal and organizational coaching
• created a new project for expansion of the hosting program into new regions
• negotiated new programs with ministry partners

Misc.

• Wrote a vision statement for the city of St. Petersburg which will be edited and added to by other missionaries and Christian leaders in the city.
• Consulted with the leadership with the school the boys attend to restructure various aspects of the school and increase parental involvement
• Recruited a new couple onto staff with CRM who want to deploy to SPB
• Met with another couple who is coming on to staff with CRM to come to SPB

Need a little structure

I've been asking myself the question lately in ministry whether I don't need to give more structure to some of the training I do with Russians. So often I run up against an inability (it seems) to manage giving assignments that are too open-ended (whether time-wise, or in terms of how to fulfill the requirement). This lesson got brought home to me the other day in parenting when I was giving an assignment to Kerith.

He and Simon were not getting along over something, and I decided I needed to step in. One of the tasks I assigned was for him to ask them to come up with an appropriate Bible verse to memorize, one "that would please me" (I've been drilling the idea of getting him to try to "catch my heart." He came up with Proverbs 7:18:

Come, let us go make love all night.

Diana's only comment was, "that sure would please you."

And his reasoning: that would be a good verse if people started protesting on the streets. (He had been hearing about Egypt.) I think we need a little more structure next time.