19990530 Brigada Today

1. many Brigada participants coordinate or participate in people group advocacy networks, either online or in person;
2. tons of Brigada participants respond to inquiries put together for future Brigada Today stories… like a collection of TESL resources, for instance;
3. whenever there’s a special resource or opportunity, sometimes hundreds (literally!) of responders come rolling in!

So thanks for being more than just “readers”! Thanks for being part of the Brigada family!

• Interdev (which has volunteered to lead sessions on partnership development),
• Caleb Project (which has offered to lead an Advocacy Training track),
• Southeast Christian Church (which has a weekly worship attendance of 12,000+ friendly believers and a passion to change the world for Him),
• Friends of Bosnia and a dozen other unreached peoples tracks (so far) from around the globe
• Team Expansion (seeking to serve as a catalyst for launching additional PACE Projects), and, of course,
• Brigada.

Others are warmly welcome to attend. Registration will all be done in advance so we’ll be able to plan very specifically for content and direction of each hour. Let’s make this a time when we can finally come together in one place to meet one another and find out more about each other than “such-and-such.com.”

If you’d like to attend, send a message to brigadafest-subscribe@egroups.com to receive regular updates. And if you’re interested in interceding for the event, send a message to brigadafest-prayer-subscribe@egroups.com where the prayer meeting has already begun! Check out this prayer sent over that conference last week from Terry BorkTerry@aol.com, a prayer coordinator for BrigadaFest:
“Dear heavenly Father, Your love for us is so immense. You created each one of us as a unique individual. Help us to see that uniqueness in each other and to appreciate it as you do. As we pray for Unreached People groups, show us the burden of your heart for each and help us to pray your blessings upon them. Jesus, you came to save the lost, help them to know how much you love them, protect them from harm and meet their needs. As we prepare for BrigadaFest 2000 and the Friends of Bosnia conference there in February, keep each of us focused on our specific area that you want us to work in. Send laborers to help plan these events and execute the logistics for them. Give wisdom to the leaders who are meeting to discuss the planning. Jesus, give us the Nations and help us to love them as you love them. I pray this in the precious Name of Jesus Our Lord.”
Yahooo!!!! Join Terry each week and let’s pray that God works mightily in this event!

• Personal Map: 8 1/2″ x 11″
• Place-Mat: 11″ x 17″
• Wall-Map: 22″ x 34″

Until JUNE 30TH, you can place a pre-publication order in quantities of 100 or more and save 20% off their regular bulk prices coming in July. On orders of 1,000 or more, there is even room on the map to print your own logo (small extra charge). For more information, including billing options, write pttw4@gmi.org.

Important: On this and all other auto-responders, it’s critical that you not add any quotation marks to the address. Do it exactly like you see above.

The first tip is a simple one… Do your homework in advance! Depending on the length of your trip and how you’ll be hosted in your destination country, find someone there who will be able to give you some local pointers to getting online there… and email them in advance. Be sensitive to their time commitments. Keep your questions short and to the point and, though it might seem funny to say so, I’d suggest you avoid chitchat. These missionary-types are usually very relational people! Some of them only email as much as they have to … They don’t want to spend their evenings away from family with their face buried into a computer screen! We’ll assume for this tip that you’re on a two-week journey… fairly short as int’l travel goes.

So ask simple things…

1. Will our group be staying near anyone with a computer that we might be able to use to send back an occasional email message to our friends and family back home — say once every 3 or 4 days?
2. If so, we’ll glad reimburse for the time online. (Note: this will probably be a combination of the local “units” [or number of minutes times the price per minute for a local call] plus the cost per minute for the Internet connectivity; still, it’s probably less than the cost of you dialing Zurich or Penang or whatever.)
3. If not, would he or she know of any locations — like a “teleboutique” — where we might be able to get a phone connection to call CompuServe or AOL or any other int’l carrier?

If he or she writes back and says it’ll be too much of a hassle, trust the response and leave the laptop at home. Plan on using a callback service (more on that later) or something similar. Sometimes email just isn’t worth the trouble. Make two or three phone calls during your two-week trip… and that should be plenty to keep friends and family informed. That having been said, I haven’t personally left the computer at home since 1991… … and our mission is at work in over two dozen countries and we’ve traveled through dozens of other lands without an email hitch… so more later on how to get connected from those impossible locations! But for now… trust your host!

Note… you’ll be reading responses on multiple issues eventually… so instructions are provided should you ever decide to unsubscribe. Meanwhile, we’ll ask Shawn to pull together the compiled list for us in two weeks or so. Thanks!

“Is e-mail an overall positive or negative influence on world missions? People are sharply divided between the geeks, who see no reason to limit people’s access to e-mail, and the non-geeks, who say they spend an inordinate percentage of their work time answering e-mail and see that percentage as increasing alarmingly over time. My personal position is the snail-mail metaphor … I’d never say you can only open up the little box on the curb once each week, or only if there is absolutely nothing else to do, or only if you’re in-country for more than a month, etc. I’d be more inclined to say that as long as you’re doing an excellent job, what you do with your free time is up to you. If you want to stay up until 2 AM watching a movie, or surfing the web, then hey, you’re a grown-up; go for it.

“Others, though, say that the geeks fill up the inboxes of the non- geeks with pseudo-conversational babble and it’s hard to do anything other than opening every e-mail and pondering what to do with it. The geeks, in turn, say there are lots of ways to sort and pitch your mail, again, just like snail mail. To which the non-geek reply would be that the geeks tend to have full-time access to fast internet connections and can type faster, so they tend to operate at a higher throughput rate so that they can more efficiently spew forth messages for non- geeks to wade through.

“Both the geeks and non-geeks agree that for some people, the PC can become an alternate, more comforting best friend (which is sad), but the geeks hold that the person in this position would have found some other escapist form of non-work (anti-work?) and thus the PC should not be blamed for the problem. And both would agree that there are, indeed, pointless e-mails that get in the way of real work. Anyway, what’s the solution? Should we ban or severely limit e-mail, or is there a better solution?”

TO SUBSCRIBE — To subscribe to BRIGADA TODAY, send email to brigada-today-subscribe@egroups.com.

TO UNSUBSCRIBE — Send email to brigada-today-unsubscribe@egroups.com. (Subject and text are ignored.)
IF IT DOESN’T WORK — Write Don & Judy, our Customer Services Managers at help@brigada.org. Yahooooo for volunteers!!!

COPYRIGHT — This issue of Brigada Today is Copyrighted © 2001. However, permission is granted to freely redistribute these materials, including those available through email autoresponders, provided that such redistribution is to those who will help the Good News of Christianity to reach the unreached. But please include this phrase: “For a free subscription of Brigada‘s weekly missions publication, write <brigada-today-subscribe@egroups.com>.”
IMPORTANT: To copy or reproduce Brigada Today for any other reason is illegal and is not permitted.

DISCLAIMER — Please note that there’s no way we can possibly screen all the text on all the web sites or items we recommend. We try to check them out first… but if we miss something, please don’t assume that the opinions on those sites are identical to those of the Brigada family of networks. “Eat the corn, leave the cob!”
For subscription questions or problems, write help@brigada.org.

SUBMITTING CONTENT — To submit content or ideas to Brigada Today, first please get a copy of “Guidelines for submitting items to Brigada” Then, once you’ve composed your item in keeping with those guidelines, send your item for Brigada Today to DLucas@teamexpansion.org.
Thanks to for hosting the Brigada mailing list.
Emphasis is placed on items relating to unreached peoples and challenges faced by those reaching them cross-culturally.

PLEASE DON’T SUBSCRIBE US TO YOUR LIST — It’s always better to ask before manually force-adding anyone to your list-serve or mailing list. Recently, tons of well-meaning people have been subscribing Doug to their lists. Since he often travels overseas, he doesn’t join many of those, for obvious reasons (like being charged big-time for overseas access). So as a general rule, please don’t bulk-mail us! See the note above if you’d like to submit items for Brigada Today. Thanks for understanding. Bottom line: We will never create Brigada Today items from bulk mail. Bulk mail gets deleted immediately — sorry. Nothing personal. We suggest you apply the same standard to everyone. Ask first!

WARNING ABOUT FORWARDING EMAILS — Please, before forwarding any kind of request (even if it says “please send this to all your friends”), please check to make sure it has a VERIFIABLE ORIGIN, a VERIFIABLE PURPOSE, and a VERIFIABLE CLOSURE (OPC). By following this simple approach, many “email viruses” could be nipped in the bud… at least in the Brigada family. More information about the full Brigada OPC protocol is available. Thank you.

BRIGADA TODAY IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE FOLLOWING TEAM OF REGULAR VOLUNTEERS:

Global Glimpses: John Hanna, Caleb Project, jhanna@cproject.com

Brigada Website: Bob Mayhew, WebServant@brigada.org

Brigada Customer Service Manager: help@brigada.org

Brigada Coordinator: Doug Lucas, Team Expansion & Brigada, DLucas@teamexpansion.org

and many other occasional contributors too numerous to mention!

But thanks for working together! That’s the dream of Brigada!