East Asia Visit

In a few days some of us will set off to go to East Asia.  For me and my old roommate, it is a bit of a homecoming; for my wife it will be a new place to see.  We will spend the next seventeen days traveling around and helping local workers spread the Gospel there.  As with any international trip, everything could change once we get there, but we have a basic plan in place: -For the first eleven days of the trip we will be visiting a town where I used to live.  We will work with unreached peoples while we're there.  Some of what we will do is catching up with old contacts that I have in villages and helping them with some agricultural projects.  There was also a minor earthquake in the region last week and we might go and help with some repairs in villages to help start some new relationships with people.  I've also been brushing up on my local language so that I can share if there is an opportunity; however I'm INCREDIBLY rusty at it.

-The last four days of the trip will be spent working in a potential coffee growing region.  We will help some of the missionaries with their projects and also look at potential villages to work with for coffee.  Our hope for this portion of the trip is to determine if this is a good place to set up and place personnel.  If the trip goes well and things workout the way we think they will, we will have a missionary living there and working in those villages in the first part of 2013.

Please be in prayer for us as we travel and spend time out and about in villages.

Thanks,

Brian

Resources

One of our desires as an organization is to use our funds well.  We believe that budgets are, at their core, a theological document and therefore should be a working reflection of the beliefs of those who put them in place.  With that being said, Underground Coffee International strives to use the resources that it is given and raises to further the Kingdom in a financially responsible way. One of the ways that we try to be good stewards of our resources is focusing our funds on missionaries.  Currently there is no one on staff at Underground Coffee (as in everyone is a volunteer) and our first staffed positions will be missionaries that can go on the field and spread the Gospel to those who have never heard.  All of us, from the president, to the board, to everyone who helps, does it because they want to see the Gospel go forth and believes that coffee is a great vehicle to open doors and make that happen.

Asians Reaching Asians

Asians reaching Asians, that is one of the major things that we hope to facilitate.  Whenever we look at mission work and trying to reach others, by far the best way to do it is to train up local believers then equip and support them to go out and reach others.  There are so many advantages that they have over Westerners: language, culture, preexisting networks of friends and family, and not to mention their standard of living is much less.  We can sponsor several Asian missionaries for the price of one Western missionary.  One of our hopes here at Underground Coffee International is to mainly employ Asians that can reach Asians.  Our plan is to have our first employees be Asian missionaries.  Even right now we have Asian brothers and sisters waiting on funding so they can go out and reach others. Another organization that is like minded in this has made a great video with this same point in mind.  It is a little long (about eight minutes), but if you have the time it is well worth a look.  The peoples we work with are not in this video, but they are incredibly alike in both culture and need.