“I don’t want to go to the unreached. But I also can’t ignore this conviction.”

In 2012, I (Jenn) had journaled this sentiment over and over again. As we kept pursuing steps to move overseas, fears of permanent commitments and of wasting my life persisted.

In the summer of 2012, we took a vision trip to Thailand. We were going to learn more about the country, explore different cities and types of ministries, and see what life could look like overseas. As we met missionaries who had counted the cost and heard their stories, I felt hope and joy at how God was moving in Thailand. We experienced God’s victory as we prayer walked through red light districts and Thai neighborhoods. Each experience challenged the doubt I felt. But I remember feeling like a hypocrite – saying that I was ready to move overseas while internally unwilling to surrender.  

One night, the dissonance had reached a breaking point and the Spirit chose to address the doubts in my heart. And in his kindness, he brought Steven to encourage me and pray together with me. In that time God gave me the faith and clarity that I was begging him for – certainty that this was what I was supposed to do. I had thought this vision trip was centered on learning about Thailand, but to my surprise God revealed lies in my own heart that were blocking me from responding to his calling! And He brought me to a point of surrender.

A vision trip is an essential step in the process of recruiting new teammates to your team. As we’ve mentioned before, who you recruit to your team has one of the biggest impacts on your team’s health, culture, and efficacy in pursuing your mission. A vision trip is one of the best ways to evaluate a potential teammate and see how they engage with and respond to the place where you’re serving. It’s also a critical juncture for the recruit to hear from the Lord and discern their future, like the 2012 vision trip was for Jenn.

For team leaders that already live overseas, most of the interaction with potential teammates is through video calls and emails/messages. It’s difficult to get to know a person beyond the surface level without spending some time with them in person. It’s also difficult for a potential recruit to really feel, experience, and understand the place they’re considering without going there to visit. You and they don’t know how they’ll respond when they’re in context. That’s where a vision trip comes in.

We personally would never officially invite a potential recruit to join the team until they’ve taken a vision trip.

We’ve hosted over 20 units on vision trips to consider our teams, and here are some of the things we’ve learned and things we’d suggest as you host potential recruits on a vision trip.

Vision Trip Basics

A note of caution: hosting vision trips takes a lot of work. It will disrupt your normal team and ministry rhythms, but it is a worthwhile investment if you’re trying to recruit new teammates. 

Goal of a Vision Trip: The objective of the trip is two-fold – for you as the leader to evaluate the vision trip participant’s readiness and fit to join your team and ministry, and for the potential recruit to discern their calling to this specific field and team. For them, you want to create a vision trip schedule that allows them to experience your context in enough breadth and depth to get an idea of what life on the field could be like. And for you as the leader, you need to gather enough information about them during this in-person time to help you make an informed decision about whether or not to invite them to the team.

As a leader, take note of their posture and attitude during the trip. Are they eager to learn? Flexible and courageous to deal with strange experiences? Humble and teachable? Do they have good interactions with the local culture or is everything a struggle? Do they relate well with you and your team or is their tension/friction?

How Long Should a Vision Trip Be?: We’d recommend about a week as a target, not including travel time. International travel is tiring, jetlag can hit hard, and giving just a week to focus on one of the biggest decisions in their lives and your team is prudent. Trying to squeeze in what you need in 3 days while jetlagged is almost not worth having the vision trip. We’d also not recommend much longer than 1-2 weeks for a vision trip unless you’re equipped to handle short/mid-term workers, which then is something different than just a vision trip.

When Should You Schedule a Vision Trip?: Generally, vision trips should happen later in the process of recruiting. Potential recruits should have gone through the initial steps of applying for your sending organization and going through assessments before you buy tickets for them to come visit. You don’t want them to raise all the funds, spend significant time, and potentially get their or your team’s hopes up for them to join only to discover major red flags that prevent them from serving long-term. There are some exceptions like if they will already be in the region for some other travel, but those are more like taking advantage of the proximity to get to know someone before recommending them to start the application process.

Also, because of the amount of time investment for your team, we’d recommend that you try to schedule potential recruits to come at the same time so you don’t have to disrupt your schedule multiple times, or if possible, during some slower seasons of ministry.

Preparation for a Vision Trip

In order to take advantage of the major commitment in time and money for the relatively short amount of time they are there, you, your team, and the recruits should prepare well for the vision trip.

Introductory Video Calls: Hopefully, you can have more than one call to get to know them before they come. You want to get through some of the basic introductory conversations before they come so you have a sense of who they are. That way, you can engage in some deeper topics with them personally or context/experience-specific activities when they’re in-person. You can even consider having them join a group call with some of your teammates as well.

Prep Logistics: As those who have already gotten used to living overseas, we forget that international travel is a big deal for people. Some vision trippers may have never even left their country before. Consider logistics like flights, vaccinations, travel insurance, sim cards, housing, food restrictions, attire, packing lists, etc. and help vision trip participants prepare well for these things.

Support Raising / Prayer Team: There’s a significant financial cost for vision trip participants, so some coaching from yourself or your sending agency/church may be helpful for them if they’ve never support-raised before. You may want to give them an example from some of your support-raising documents to help them prepare. Also, provide a clear and detailed budget for what they need to raise for the vision trip costs.

At the same time as support raising, they should be inviting people to join a prayer team that will be praying for the participant to hear from the Lord during their vision trip. It’s very simple to set up a messaging group and send daily updates during their time in-country. This can also become the basis for a long-term advocacy team that will support them as they serve long-term.

Pre-Vision Trip Learning: Any resources (youtube videos, prayer guides, books/articles) about your country, the primary religion, the people, and your ministry that you can send beforehand will help the vision trip participants start to familiarize themselves with your field. We’d recommend giving them some required content as a basic introduction and some more optional things if they’re interested and want to continue learning. It also gives you some idea of whether or not they are a learner, a self-starter, and teachable.

Spiritual Warfare: Vision trips can be significant points for the Enemy to discourage and attack. Obviously, the Enemy wants to prevent people from serving long-term, and this can happen through spiritual warfare during a vision trip. Just as adequate preparation is needed with logistics around international travel, leaders need to prepare vision trip participants for the realities of spiritual warfare. This can be done through sending them some readings/Bible studies, blog posts, or just having a quick online training call before the trip.

Set Good Expectations: Lastly, because of the shortened time and very new experiences for vision trip participants, it’s important to set good expectations for the objectives of the trip and outline details of the different activities and schedule. It can be written up in a simple document and explained before the trip.

What to Include in a Vision Trip

Since every team and every potential recruit is different, vision trips can be adjusted to create the most helpful experience for them. For example, vision trips for families with children would be different from vision trips for singles or couples. Below are components that we would include in every vision trip.

Time to Connect with God: Since the primary objective for the vision trip participant is to discern their calling and team fit, it’s extremely important to prioritize setting aside time to connect with God, process what they’ve learned, and listen in prayer. The temptation is to pack the schedule with cool activities from morning to night, but we’ve found that to be counterproductive on a vision trip. Set the schedule and expectation that every morning, there will be personal time with God, and in the evening, time to debrief and crystallize what they’ve learned. Vision trips will inevitably be a fire hose of information and experiences, so protecting time to process and summarize what God is trying to show them is critical for an effective experience.

Here are some questions (credit to Lauren M.!) that you as the leader can consider as you set up a vision trip for potential recruits:

• What does He want the recruits to see, know, or experience about him, the place, and the people there? 

• What are ways you can create space for recruits to hear from the Lord and connect with Him throughout the trip?
• What was impactful to you in a previous vision trip, or in your first month in context? What helped open your eyes? Could those be helpful for them, too?

Arrival Orientation: When participants arrive, don’t just release them into the wild. Once they’ve arrived and gotten settled, start the first full day with an arrival orientation. Review the objectives for the trip, overall schedule, and expectations. Give a basic rundown on cultural need-to-knows (like avoiding anything extremely offensive), attire, and basic language phrases like “Hello” or “Where is the bathroom?” (very important). At our orientation in Thailand, we even had a long-time worker show us the step-by-step of how to use a squatty potty! And we’ve included this in every vision trip orientation since then!

Cultural Experiences: Helping participants get exposure to the culture and environment is a primary goal during the vision trip. Prepare experiences where they can learn some cultural basics about the history, religion, and people through visiting city centers, markets, museums, and places of worship. Focus on educational experiences where they can see, feel, hear, touch over simply sitting in a room listening to a lecture. 

Allow them to engage with the spiritual climate in your city and country. Encourage them to ask God where He is moving and what He wants them to know about this place. Below, Jenn will give a breakdown on how to do a temple/mosque prayer walk which is always one of the most impactful parts of a vision trip.

Since one of the first things new recruits will do when they arrive is focusing on language learning, you can give them an opportunity to sit in on a language class or have a short session with a language partner or tutor for a fun lesson.

Team Interactions: Set up opportunities for the participants to interact with your teammates in multiple formats including formal team meetings, informal gatherings, out in ministry activities, and personal 1-on-1s. Give them a basic overview of the team history, formation, vision, and strategy. Create the space for them to experience the team culture and values and see if it fits what they’re looking for in a team and vice versa.

Ministry Exposure: If you can let vision trippers shadow you during a mission activity, awesome. But because of limitations like language or travel, inviting several vision trippers into a ministry opportunity isn’t always feasible. As much as possible, try to give them an idea of what day-to-day ministry looks like. At the very least, bring them to a local church you attend, set up a meeting with a local believer, or go onto a college campus to try and talk to / share with some college students who tend to have better English. Vision cast to them where their gifts and strengths could contribute to the ministry and team!

Making Local Connections: This can be combined with the ministry engagements, but we’d recommend giving vision trip participants the opportunity to meet local people, both believers and non-believers. Allow them to ask questions about their lives, the culture, things that foreigners moving to their country should know. Nearly 15 years after our vision trip to Thailand, for me all the cultural experiences, though important, kind of all blend together. But I still remember the first time we shared the gospel with a local shopkeeper, or talked to a university student about life in Thailand. After all, the potential recruits are wanting to join your team and ministry to serve the local people – so let them have an opportunity to meet some!

Do Something Fun!: Make sure you set up times in the schedule to have a fun experience! It could be something unique to your context (on some vision trips we bring people to see elephants in Thailand!), or just a fun activity in general. Vision trip schedules tend to be packed and busy and tiring – times for fun will be refreshing, help keep the participant’s experience positive, and are opportunities for team interactions in a more social environment.

Allow for Exploration Time: Although we recommend preparing a schedule and thinking through logistics, facilitate chances for participants to explore the city or things they’re interested in without a teammate or guide. If the long-term team is always with them, the participants will inevitably look to them for what conclusions to draw from different places, people, experiences. Serving overseas is an adventure, so allow them a taste of what it’s like to navigate a new culture and place on their own! Something like a scavenger hunt can be fun and exploratory. Even if they have a negative experience, help them debrief why or discover what the friction point was. 

Life Realities: Many of the questions that recruits will have will be around what daily life looks like on the field. Even simple things like visiting grocery stores, navigating local transport, answering visa questions, are helpful for people considering moving long-term. Give them an idea of what it is like to live in your city and how they can adjust some of their normal rhythms that help them to thrive. For example, if they enjoy nature, help them figure out where they can find parks or nature environments. Not everything from your home context will have a substitute on the field, but at least exploring these ideas will help your potential recruits feel like they could live in your context.

If you’re considering recruiting families, it’s a good idea to try to have the entire family come on the vision trip even though there’s a significant cost. Especially focus on helping the kids to have a positive experience! 

Vision Trip Resources

Below are two more tools that we use on every vision trip: prayer walking through places of spiritual sites and vision trip debriefs. Feel free to adapt them to your context. There are some blanks for you to insert your team and ministry location.

Religious and Spiritual Sites Prayer Walk: It is important to cast the perspective that our work is ultimately spiritual in nature and that there are spiritual powers at work, both for and against us. Many of the locations we serve will have locations like temples or mosques where much of this spiritual activity can be encountered and felt. The purpose of a prayer walk through these locations is to have participants (1) engage the spiritual climate of your location, (2) to bring the authority of Christ into these places, and (3) experience God’s heart for the people you are serving. This document is a self guided prayer and reflection tool for how to prepare for a prayer walk, how to pray during the walk, how to pray afterwards, and reflection questions for further processing. 

Vision Trip Debrief: Vision trip participants undergo a variety of new experiences, and likely are taking in a firehose of new information. Having an end of vision trip debrief is critical in order to help participants crystallize and process this information and to come up with clear takeaways and next steps. Here is a document of questions to choose from that you can use to help debrief vision trip participants. You can also use that time to ask some potential ‘interview’ questions that you’d prefer to ask in person instead of online.

Conclusion

We know this is a lot of components for a vision trip but many can be combined/included within a single activity. It’s a major commitment for someone to transition to the field, so addressing each of these and any other questions they may have is really valuable!

Also, things will not go perfectly on a vision trip and we shouldn’t expect them to, as life overseas is chaotic and surprising! Challenging moments like missed flights, food poisoning, and confusing interactions in the local culture are good opportunities to see how potential recruits respond and help them understand what God is trying to show them through it.

Each person is on their own journey of discerning their calling from the Lord, and a vision trip can be a cornerstone moment in that journey. We can trust that God is speaking through each processing time, each experience, and each interaction during the vision trip to bring the right people to your team.

10 years on the field – in ministry leadership and through a pandemic, cancer, and role transitions – has felt like the equivalent of 20 years in comparison to what life was like back in the States before we launched. As many have said, life overseas consists of high-highs and low-lows. Those events and the ways we’ve been impacted by them have changed us significantly.

We had the privilege to take our first sabbatical this past year to reflect on the past 10 years and look forward to the next season. I ended up timelining personal, team, and ministry events over the past 10 years and drawing key themes and lessons from each year and each term.

In the last 10 years, we have…

Personal

• Moved to 8 different apartments
• Taken over 400 flights, traveling for 50%+ of the year for 4 of the 10 years
• Fought each other every day for our first year in Thailand
• Missed 20 weddings our first year in Thailand, including 3 weddings of our teammates
• Missed the births of nephews and nieces, and the funerals of grandparents
• Lived through a pandemic lockdown overseas (with Animal Crossing)
• Were repatriated for a medical emergency
• Endured 18 months of cancer treatment including surgery, radiation, and chemo
• Burned out and were ready to quit ministry
• Fostered 2 sassy bunnies
• Served for 6 years on our organization’s executive leadership team
• Transitioned out of our original sending organization to start our own new ministry
• Took 6 years to finish a 2 year seminary degree

Team

• Onboarded or helped our team leaders onboard 22 teammates (and counting!)
• Seen 8 teammates leave the field
• Expanded our original team to 3 new teams

Ministry

• Seen our teams train over 1000 Thai believers in disciple-making and church-planting
• Helped train and oversee 30+ Thai church planting teams throughout Thailand
• Seen God begin to multiply our Thai partners’ ministry in disciples and churches, including 1000+ professions of faith
• Developed, with teammates and Thai partners, a training handbook for planting multiplying churches in Thai

The category of items that were uncountable:

• Hours sitting in traffic
• Roaches and vermin killed or chased away (or that we ran away from)
• Hours waiting at immigration
• Intolerably spicy Thai meals, and related trips to the bathroom
• Misspelled and mispronounced Thai words
• Exhaustion naps
• Video calls around the world
• Team meetings, corporate prayer times, and worship sessions
• Times crying out to God in weakness and desperation
• Discernment, peace, blessing, and power given by the Holy Spirit in response
• Difficult conversations
• Hours spent walking with teammates through major health, sin, and life issues
• Minor and major health issues endured by us, our team, and our partners
• Stories of answered prayer, healings, deliverance, and salvation
• People around the world, especially and including teammates and Thai friends, who prayed for us, encouraged us, and supported us

I’ve looked over this list a few times, and even in bullet form, it is difficult not to feel the flood of emotions, the weightiness, the intensity of what this list represents. It has been a story of our weakness, self-dependence, and shortcomings coming to the surface in the midst of difficulties, challenges, and conflict, and the Lord meeting us in faithfulness, intimacy, and power. The last 10 years have been so much fuller, more joyful, and more rewarding than I could’ve ever thought possible. And it has been so much more difficult, painful, and crushing than I could’ve imagined before we launched.

For the sake of posterity, I’ll write down a favorite ministry memory and a favorite team memory. In another post, I’ll share a few of the lessons and themes that came out of my sabbatical reflection.

I thought about writing out some of the most difficult memories, including the day of Jenn’s seizure or finding out about a teammate’s moral failure, but it is heavy enough looking at that list above without going deep into the really tough stuff. And I’ll also save the numerous funny and outrageous ‘life in Thailand’ memories for another time, including the pregnant rat mother or the cheez-it dust story.

Favorite Ministry Memory

There’s probably two dozen that could go in this spot, including:

• Our very first training in Mint’s province where their family made Khao Laam for us afterwards, one of my favorite Thai foods – a coconut milk and sticky rice with red beans dessert stuffed into a piece of bamboo and roasted over an open fire. Or whenever Mint’s mom made us dinner!
• The first house church training we did with Mint’s new believers when we asked, what can we use for communion, and an old grandpa in the back said, ‘I brought ginger juice and sticky rice for my snack – can we use this?’ It felt like a 5 loaves and 2 fishes moment for our very first communion with a new house church that had come out of our ministry.
• One of the first house church gatherings we went to, when we sat in a circle with a room of mostly brand new believers and cried out in worship, “God heal our land that your name would endure forever!”

But the very favored one that comes to mind is at the end of 2020. After Covid lockdowns for 3 months, Thailand mostly reopened and our partners continued to push forward and see new believers and churches nearly every week. After 2 years of a crazy whiplash of travel and trainings and an explosion of new fruit, our partners coordinated a big celebration camp for all the church planters in the network, over 100 people from 30 teams in 20+ provinces in Thailand. We were big enough as a network to get shirts made! They chose สุดปลายแผนดิน to put on the shirt – “to the ends of the earth” from Acts 1:8.

After hearing countless stories of answered prayers, miraculous healing, deliverance, new believers, new churches, changed lives, sacrifice and suffering, trials and obstacles, and faithful obedience, our team prepared an activity to help each team receive vision from the Lord about where He was leading them to pioneer new churches. We grouped each of the 30 teams in 5 regions: North, Northeast, East, Central, And North-Central. We asked each team to listen to the Lord about 3 places they felt He was leading them to focus on in the next year. We told them that after 10 minutes of prayer and listening, to put a sticker dot on their province map on the wall of where they felt led to pioneer.

As these faithful church planters began putting stickers on maps, they looked like bright points of light against the background of the maps. Spiritual points of light in a land covered in darkness.

It was at that moment that I thought, “This work will continue through these people with or without us.” This was a prayer we had been asking for before we even launched, before we had even met these friends, before many of these people had ever started following Jesus.

And through this group, there was a legitimate chance that the promise of Habakkuk 2:14 could be fulfilled in Thailand – “that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

Overwhelmed and with tears flowing down my face, I had to go to a corner to sit down. After wiping my eyes, I looked over and saw my teammates similarly teary-eyed. And next to them were some of the regional leaders, those that we had trained the earliest like Mint and Talia, also crying. It was God showing all of us that the vision He had promised was beginning to be fulfilled.

Less than 6 months later, Jenn and I would be on a plane being repatriated back to the States for cancer treatment. We wouldn’t return for over 18 months, and the church planting network would encounter its most intense season of opposition, with Covid restrictions shutting down the country, Talia also being diagnosed with cancer, our network leadership team falling apart, and teammates coming off the field.

While we were gone, we weren’t sure how the ministry would go and had to release it to the Lord. Much of the work contracted during that time, but the thought I had during that 2020 celebration camp remained true – the work continued on even without us there. The past 2 years since coming back, we have had a season of ‘starting anew’ to help the network restart their momentum.

But just a week from now, we’ll have our first celebration camp with the whole network of church planters since 2020. Many of the people are different, and the people who remain like us, Mint, and Talia have been significantly changed.

Through trial and suffering and loss, the Lord has brought new life and new leaders and new believers and new churches in new areas that have never had the gospel. We continue to believe that this promise of Joshua 1 will be true for our Thai partners: “every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you,” until the gospel has gone to every people and place in Thailand.

Favorite Team Memory

There’s also way too many to count here, but I’ll bullet point a few favorites:

• Our pre-field team retreat where we tried to go through a desert survival scenario to figure out team dynamics and communication but we ended up all dying of thirst. Whoops.
• Our first team fellowship ever, where I told everyone to buy something on the street that looked interesting so we could potluck – 5 out of 7 people brought roast chicken because everything else looked weird!
• Late night McDonald’s as second dinner while watching Friends after 6 hours of meetings with our leadership team. This was a regular occurrence but some of my favorite times together with our leaders.
• Our sub-team getting together for a meeting during a heavy travel and training season where we all decided to put our heads down on the table for a power nap before starting our meeting because we’re all beyond exhausted.
• Thanksgivings and Christmases, including the Thanksgiving where I was super confused about why the turkey was so cold inside and burnt outside only to cut it open and find some mutant turkey breast that had a 3 inch layer of fat that wasn’t cooking – blegh.
• A family gathering in the States where we brought together all the parents on our original team to spend time together, celebrate, and honor our parents for their sacrifice and support in sending their children.
• A prayer activity with interactive stations at our team retreat in 2017 that Jenn and I frantically created 2 hours beforehand, but the Lord met us with intimacy and power. The last station was from Revelation 5:8, which references the “golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” before the angels and elders proclaim Jesus’ worthiness among the nations. We had teammates write down prayers towards that final vision and put them in the bowls as an offering to the Lord.

The most impactful team memory however, is our last team celebration in 2019 as an original team before expanding into three teams in 2020. We deeply love and appreciate every teammate that has ever come through our teams in Thailand, but there was something special about our original team of 13. We were all so fresh faced, naive, earnest, and so-so-so not ready for what was about to happen. But we were together and we had each other in the midst of all that confusion and newness.

We had the vision to expand into multiple teams even before we launched, because of the uniqueness of the different contexts within Thailand (Buddhist/Muslim/Tribal) and because the Lord had blessed our team with multiple leaders. After 2 years of prayer, planning, and preparing the new team leaders, we had a final celebration as a team before we officially expanded.

We split into guys/gals time and the guys got to watch Muay Thai together. And we reflected on good and difficult times as a team. We worshipped and prayed together. And we celebrated all that God had done in and through us. Jenn and I prepared small gifts for each teammate as well.

We led a reflection exercise where we asked each teammate to think of 3 words that described them and described the team at the beginning and 3 words for themselves and the team now. Blue text is for personal words and black text is for team words.

Perhaps even more than the ministry fruit we got to celebrate together, this list of transformed lives and a transformed community is maybe one of my most cherished things from our time in Thailand.

From selfish, proud, naive, insecure, broken, superficial strangers to joyful, rooted in Christ, safe, abiding, thriving, tested, humbled, fruitful, impactful family. It’s such an unbelievable thing that God did in a short few years to knit us together.

At the end of the time, while crying the hardest I ever have in front of other people, I commissioned our teammates out to their new teams and fields of ministry in Thailand, and commended them to God as Paul does with the elders in Acts 20.

That time together marked a significant transition for us, as soon after we would be in different places, with different teammates added to the new teams, and Covid happening simultaneously with our team expansion. But wherever God will take us – to different cities, different organizations, or different countries – no matter what, that team will forever be family for us. And when those golden bowls of the prayers of the saints – including our prayers from that team retreat – get poured out at Jesus’ return, I’m sure that this family, clothed in white robes and together with those from Thailand we had the opportunity to impact, will save each other seats around the throne. Maybe afterwards we’ll have some McDonald’s.