Where Everybody's Crazy

Today I had one of those cup-of-coffee-with-agenda meetings with Kevin, who's sorting out the way WEC should be doing life-long learning and development. We kicked around a few ideas about how to mobilize people to become reflective practitioners of mission - that is, not just doing it, but thinking critically about what they're doing. One of the suggestions we came out with was a bit odd: every missionary should be encouraged to blog.

Now by every missionary, I of course mean, every missionary who can. If you're in Deepest Noelectricitia, then you're excused; if you're somewhere you shouldn't be and can't find a way of securely blogging anonymously, (your mission may be able to help with that, though) then you're excused. Otherwise, you're not excused.

Here's three reasons why you should blog:

• It's good for your mission. Talking about what you're doing and connecting with an audience generates exposure, gets the name of your mission around. As well increasing the general name-recognition value (I've taken to calling WEC "mission's worst kept secret" - people have heard of it, but it's still pretty much a secret) it also increases the Internet presence, and that's not a bad thing. I remember a while back the webmaster at All Nations was trawling through his logs and found that the majority of hits to his site came from this very blog. It's no use our communications guys coming up with lovely websites for the mission if nobody actually visits them.
• It's good for your supporters. As well as your regular prayer-letters, more frequent and "mundane" updates can help your supporters get an idea of what life is really like out there. Also, blogs generally provide a way for you to interact with them, and for them to pass comments on to you. If you believe that people like to keep in touch with what you're doing - tell them what you're doing!
• It's good for you. This is where my sneaky plan comes in. I want to get more missionaries thinking critically about what they're doing, sharing information about it with other missionaries, and eventually writing articles and conference papers and MA research papers about it. Encouraging people to write about their experiences in blogs is just my way of softening you, uh, them up. Reflecting on practice is the basis of missiological education. Every missionary should be a missiologist, just as "every Christian should be a theologian", (In the words of +Kallistos.) and so blogging will not only make you a better missiologist, it'll make you a better missionary. And by sharing your thoughts with the mission community at large, you provide them the opportunity both to learn from and to provide input to your situation, which can't be a bad thing. In the vast majority of cases, there are people who have already had to deal with what you're seeing, or who will have to deal with what you're seeing, and so, whether you can be of benefit to them or they to you, it's worth sharing.

Bonus reason for those in non-closed countries:

• It's good for your integrity. As you honestly lay bare what you're doing for anyone to see, you lay yourself open and accountable to the national community and to those who may not necessarily agree with you, and you allow them to challenge you. Removing any element of secrecy from your work can only be a good thing in terms of keeping you honest.

Now the good news is that, as time passes, the number of people coming onto the mission field already blogging will increase, and so this kind of thing will happen naturally. But even so, pour encourager les autres, I'd like to announce Plagnet WEC, a collation of all the WEC missionaries' blogs that I could find. If you're not on the blogroll and you should be, please contact me!

Or, more likely, start a blog, put a few posts in it, and then contact me.