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Upstream Blog

The Upstream Blog has a range of short articles on various topics around sending. Look through the tags to discover articles that meet your need.

Missions leaders are multi-faceted, and being one requires a diverse set of skills that reflects the diversity of the ministry of global...

Getting excited about sending out short-term teams is easy. A short-term mission experience is, perhaps, one of the most effective ways...

My parents did a great job of teaching me how to work at a young age. In fourth grade I had an after-school paper route. (For those of...

A young man from a West African country asked me, “How can I be a missionary? Missionaries do not come from my place.” The only...

Is Your Church Ready? Care team, what do you do when one of your church’s global workers reaches out and asks for help? What if your...

Most churches have a champion of missions—a missions pastor, a director of missions, a lay leader. Every church needs one of these people...

A growing awareness of gospel needs around the world has produced a sense of urgency in the Church for reaching those far from Christ and...

In a previous blog post, I defined cross-cultural missional partnership as a kingdom-oriented relationship of culturally diverse groups...

The best way to do missionary care is to put people on great teams. There are a multitude of reasons why missionaries leave the field:...

While it's never fun to consider how to respond to crises, it's important to learn how to equip your short-term teams for such occasions.

Strategic Sending Churches are great at partnering with existing team leaders on the field and members that are not from their church.

The Team Sending Church sends a group of people to one or more areas as a church-based team to accomplish a specific missionary task.

Many traditional missions teams can benefit from adding a BAM component to their strategy.

Why does personality matter in missions? Because people matter to God.

I strongly believe that how missionary teams receive new workers is vitally important to the Great Commission task.