While my (Joel’s) travels typically take me internationally, every once in a while I get to travel to a new state. Back in May, our whole family went on a road trip to Pagosa Springs, CO, where we hiked to waterfalls and along rivers, saw historic little towns, and spent time swimming at the beautiful resort we were blessed with a free seven night stay at! On the way back, we also got to visit the “Four Corners,” where you can stand in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico all at once. A novelty for sure, but the kids loved it.
This month, I got to head to Alabama for the first time! While I ate some good food (much of it deep-fried and not friendly to my diet!) and got to spend time with some dear family, this wasn’t for a vacation. The purpose of our trip was for a Crisis Management Training seminar in Auburn, where my friend and fellow SGWM pastor Tim, his wife Jenn, and Rob Douglass and Elaine Sedillos of Ends of the Earth Ministries, met up to invest in the stewardship of our dear missionaries and ministries around the world.
Missions is never entirely safe; there is always risk involved. The purpose of this training was to equip us to: assess risk for each area of the world we have workers and ministries in; come up with and write policies and contingency plans for each of those regions; and create teams to help manage any potential crisis that may arise. We hope to NEVER have to implement a single one of those plans, but we need to be equipped in case anything happens to our precious missionaries. Our job as a home office is to steward them well.
In a couple of weeks, my international travels will continue as I will head down to Rosarito, Mexico to teach workshop at CC Rosarito’s annual church-planting conference (my workshop will be “Building a Worship Team”) and then give my testimony, lead a night of worship, and then teach a half-day class at our Calvary School of Missions on “Worship & Missions.”
Then in September, I will be taking one of my longest trips ever, as I lead a team to Japan to visit our missionaries Jeff & Alishia Root as well as to expose the team to Japanese culture as they pray about their future in missions. From there, I’ll go straight to Thailand (where I took my first overseas missions trip almost 20 years ago!) for the CCA missions conference and then a special retreat/conference for many of our SGWM missionaries in Asia. I ask that you keep my family and I in prayer as we prepare for these big things coming up.
We would love to keep you updated on our ministry via our newsletter email updates if you are interested. You can sign up for those by clicking the link below:
You can also become a one-time or ongoing financial partner with us by clicking the button below, or by mailing a check made out to SGWM with “Joel Garcia” in the memo line to 17451 Bastanchury Rd, Ste 203, Yorba Linda, CA, 92886.
Love in Christ,
Joel, Amy, Maggie, Harrison, Jude, and Clara Garcia