Greetings from your future missionaries!Welcome to our first newsletter! This has been a long time coming, and we’re glad to have so much to report! We’ll respect your time by keeping this message relatively short, but provide links so you can choose which area you’d like to learn more about. At Bar No Sky Missions, we’ve been hard at work since leaving Texas in July. In fact, you can see a broad overview of our journey on our Timeline page. There’s so much that we didn’t fit in there, though, because it would take ages to scroll through. For example, while working on a family farm in North Carolina for a couple of weeks, one of Abbey’s college friends introduced us to a family that just retired from South Africa missions, and they were with our organization! God has been incredibly good in this season of preparation. Upcoming Vision Trip: Fully Funded!
In February, we will be flying out to Durban for a visit with the missionaries currently stationed there. Thanks to some of our generous donors, our Vision Trip is fully funded! We were able to get our tickets reserved and work with the financial department to finalize the purchase. We’ll be meeting various pastors and ministry leaders in Durban, and getting hands-on learning opportunities to see how we can fit into the Durban ministry plans long-term. For more information on what our Vision Trip is about, we did a more extensive write-up on our website: What is a Vision Trip, Anyway? Website & Media UpdatesSpeaking of our website, we’ve put a lot of work into fleshing out our content over the last couple of months, and we’re pretty happy with the final result! We even got a free consult on how to improve it, and the consultant’s feedback was “you should include photos and stories of how your work has impacted lives in Durban.” Well, yeah, that’s coming later, when we get there. But still, we’ve got a lot of great stuff there now! (We think the consultant didn’t really read much of the content, otherwise they’d know we aren’t there yet…)
In the meantime, if you’ve missed them, our last three updates were delivered by video and posted to our social media feeds (links go directly to each video):
The August and November updates are a little long, so I’ve added timestamps and titles in each video description so you can jump straight to the portion of each video that you’d like to hear about. There’s a lot more coming, we’ve just been wrapped up in studying lately, so expect more soon! FundraisingOne of the most common questions we get is regarding fundraising: how much will it really cost to get us there and support us long-term? In short, we don’t know yet. That will be determined at New Missionary Orientation, which should happen for us at the end of March. Still, there are things we can work on now, and if a person/family/organization wanted to make a tax-deductible donation, there is an account set up for that. However, its primary focus at the moment is for our Vision Trip, so whatever’s left over at the end of the trip will get rolled over into our new long-term account after Orientation. So you can donate now, and/or even set up a recurring donation, and the org will save that up for the long-term trip. When the new account is set up, we’d have to stop any recurring donations to the short-term account and set it up again in the new account, but we can handle that. Advent Devotional
One of the things we’ve developed recently is an Advent Devotional that helps families walk through this season of Advent together. Abbey did the majority of the design and family content, while Joe wrote the adult devotions and proofread all of the content. Publicly, we listed it on our Projects page, where this week, the first week of Advent, is available for free for everyone. [Blog update: Those who have partnered with us received the full devotional, as indicated on the Projects page]
Prayer Requests for DecemberDoctrinal Interview THIS WEEK, on Wednesday, December 4, 2024.We discussed it in more detail in the November update (here’s a link that jumps to that section: Doctrinal Inverview Explained, with screenshots of questions involved) — but in summary, no one wants to send a theological crackpot into the field. We want to help local churches grow, not cause division and strife. To that end, an ABWE executive will drive down to WV and ask us questions about our faith to make sure that we can adequately explain what we believe and why we believe it. Financial Provision in this gap periodThis part is written by Joe, and frankly, it’s harder to write. Please bear with me. Friends, I want to be transparent about where we are right now. We had initially planned to prepare for “The Big Move” after an October Vision Trip and November Orientation, but obviously, God had different timing in mind. Though we’re grateful for this extra season of preparation and study, we’re facing some practical challenges. Despite active job hunting, our irregular training schedules have made finding steady work difficult. God has been faithful – we’re housed, fed, and certainly better off than many – but we do have monthly obligations totaling about $2,050 before living expenses. Our savings will carry us for a couple more months, but we’re actively seeking solutions to bridge the gap until we complete Orientation and transition into full-time missions. One potential job (let’s call them MalWart) rejected me outright because I couldn’t commit to open availability for a solid 90-day period. I’ll be in Africa for 2 weeks in less than 90 days… it makes me a little un-hireable. I’ve always struggled with the balance between being self-sufficient and accepting support; in the spirit of transparency, a part of it is my pride that I need to get over. At the same time, I really do believe in personal responsibility, and I don’t want to abdicate my role as a provider because “oooh I’m so holy, send me money.” That’s not my heart, and I never, ever want to come across that way. Still, I’m learning that transparency with our global church family is important, so I’m trying to open up. I don’t know how to pay for everything coming up outside of active ministry. If you feel led to partner with us during this transition period, we have several ways you can help (Zelle, Venmo, CashApp, digital currency) – just reach out for details. Most importantly, we deeply value your prayers for wisdom and direction as we navigate this season.
Thank you again for your support. We’re so glad you’re a part of our journey!
All for His Glory, Joe & Abbey Barnosky Bar No Sky Missions |
