New Samurai: Josh King

Late last year, we noticed that more and more families began to approach us about generating opportunities to allow them to engage in outreach and “missions” with their children or as families. Some of our ministries are already doing this well, but it nevertheless caused us to begin to consider the question of how we might be able to be more intentional about making sure that such opportunities exist regularly at each level within our targets: locally, regionally and internationally. However, in the process, we were likewise committed to not taxing or stressing you guys out, or in diverting resources that you guys are using to explore or discover those opportunities.

Then we met Josh King. Currently, Josh serves as an associate pastor at a church in Pigeon, Michigan, but will be moving to our area to pursue a Master's Degree in Ministry at Bethel College. In addition, Josh has a heart for both missions and families, and has asked to sign on with us as an intern to help create solid bridges for families into the ministries that we are already doing (locally and regionally), as well as create new venues where none exist but may be needed (such as internationally).

Josh has had a significant amount of experience in both designing and leading short term missions trips (primarily to Mexico), as well as focussing on youth and families in his pastoral tenure in Pigeon. His internship will begin in September, and will tentatively run until December of 2008.

What He'll Be Doing Next:
* Local Family Missions: Working with existing and ongoing teams to build family friendly opportunities locally, as well as helping to forge new partnerships where necessary.
* Regional Family Missions: Finding ways to engage families beyond GCC's immediate sphere of influence and into Chicago, Benton Harbor, etc., either in conjunction with existing teams, partners and ministries, or by forging new ones.
* International Family Missions: Finding a good "near next step" for families who want to be engaged in international missions, but by finding a geographically closer next step than Southern India.
* Media and Related Projects: Josh is also very gifted at creating media and using media based software. We will probably employ him to document and produce Missions-related media for a variety of teams and events.