Recruitment Starts A New Short Term Service Program - Global Service Program
Dear Friends,
This past winter and spring Wycliffe’s Recruitment Ministries continues to expand its new program to engage people in short term opportunities called the Global Service Program (www.wycliffe.org/gsp). This work has kept Chuck very busy these past few months in addition to his normal work of directing a team of 120 recruiters in the USA.
Chuck's recruitment team recently signed a cooperative agreement with six of the largest ministries that are working with military people. It is hoped that as a result of this effort we will have many people who leave the military consider serving with us in Bible translation work. Chuck's team just completed similiar work with a number of mission agencies involved in mission aviation and for missionary teachers (www.missionteach.com).
Barb has bene very busy planning GET Global trips for young people to PNG and Guatemala. This involves handling the applications and planning the trips. Barb recently attended a Next Gen retreat to plan how we will work with more young people to encourage them to consider Bible translation work. Take a look at www.wycliffenextgen.com
In addition to this work, we continue to recruit for mission IT personnel. Check out this site we created to help recruit IT missionaries (www.missiontec.com).
New recruitment work is starting in Nashville, TN and Pittsburg, PA. Please pray for recruiters there and for all our work around the country. Pray that we will have 240 people join Wycliffe this year.
Blessings,
Chuck Micheals
Recruitment in Wycliffe Increases 15% In Eight Years!!!
We praise the Lord that recruitment continues to increase each year. Our recruitment since 2002 has risen 15%! When we arrived in 2004, our recruitment the year before resulted in 133 new members. Since October 2004 we have had 1400+ people join Wycliffe. Last year we rejoice that the Lord sent us 207 new members
We are also happy to report that recruitment costs have gone down 29% over last year. This savings has reduced our recuitment costs by $ 300,000!
This year, Chuck and Barb helped lead a short term mission trip to Papua New Guinea. Barb helped organize and plan this trip and will soon be starting to plan for the 2010 short term trips Wycliffe does. You can read about these trips for high school students online at:
In the past two years, we have had three young high school students who have been on GET Global trips in the past make a commitment to become Bible translators and so have begun to apply to undergratudate schools that teach Bible translation and applied linguistics.
Chuck has been very involved in buidling partnerships with other Christian organizations to help Wycliffe find new pools of recruits. In the past year, Churck has worked in building partnerships with Perspectives. He has also worked with Focus on the Family's The Truth Project and now has a site people can go to who have taken The Truth Project and want to learn how they can serve the world's poor by serving with Wycliffe.
Navigators is another partnership Chuck has worked on. In the summer of 2009, Wycliffe and the Navigators had a joint short term trip to Ghana. Our hope is that Navigator students will want to serve with Wycliffe and our college trip participants will join a Navigator group while in college.
Work continues on our 'Military2Missions' partnership. A planning meeting is scheduled for Novembeer to help create a web site where people leaving the USA military can find ways to serve as missionaries with Wycliffe. Here is our draft version of the Military2Missions web site:
We appreciate your continued prayers as we lead Wycliffe's recruitment work in the USA.
New Recruitment Work in 2008 and 2007 Ministry Work
National Recruitment Ministries Leadership Team. We recently hosted our national recruitment meetings in August in California. Our topics for discussion are:
What promotional material do we need to do our recruitment work? A media plan has been developed, but dicussions will be held about how to better engage with the internet, radio and even tevelion to get the word out that Wycliffe needs workers.
How do we better assist people who are applying to Wycliffe? Many people begin the process, but most never follow through after they start.
Wycliffe is looking at various partnerships this fall to help with recruitment work. Some current partners that we have recently teamed up with are:
Our major work these past few months has been to implement the recommendations of a recruitment survey. This has included:
Changing the way we do our recruitment work by focusing more on relationship building than before. We now have recruiters spending 70% of their time in relationship building and 30% of our time in vision casting.
Changing the way we handle our application. It is now more relational and involves a team of two staff to work with each recruit. A pilot project showed that this approach can double our recruitment.
Update our new recruitment brochures. We recently completed six new recruitment brochures. Two more brochures are being planned.
Meeting with a study group to find ways to increase our diversity in Wycliffe. While we have had recruiters recruiting in Korean, Chinese and African American areas for several years, the results have been small. We created a Mosaic Commission to look at the issues related to that and now Chuck is working on implementing the recommendations from the commission.
Setting up a recruitment training program. Chuck now has five full time staff training our 150 recruiters. In August Chuck's training team held its first training event in Orlando, FL. In April another training event will be held in Dallas, TX.
Setting up a new database to track recruits and designing a reporting system to better understand what is happening with our recruitment.
Held two Recruitment days of prayer to focus on our relationship with God through prayer.
Coming Up - Our 2007 Ministry Work Plans
A. In late December and early January Chuck's recruitment department will be representing Wycliffe at Inter Varsity's Urbana program. Urbana will have over 20,000 young people attend this important mission conference.
Here are the seminars Wycliffe is doing at Urbana:
1. Indigenous Expressions of Biblical Faith - Tom Coombs 2. Christian Response to Islam - Abdul-Massih Saadi 3. Overcoming Obstacles to Missions (Debt, Doubt, Indentity Issues & More) - Maralee Gutierrez 4. Women in Missions Today: Role Models and Reality - Maralee Gutierrez (panel of missionaries) 5. Prayer, Revival and Missions: The History of Prayer in Missions - George Cowan
Pray for good recruit contacts at Urbana and for many of these young people to move toward membership with Wycliffe.
B. In March 2007 Chuck & Barb will be attending the opening of Wycliffe's office in Puerto Rico. This opening is a result of over four years of work by Chuck's department in getting the recruitment work established there.
Pray that many new people will join our work from Puerto Rico. Already two women have started the process.
C. In April 2007 Chuck hosts his National Recruitment Ministries Leadership Team meetings in Dallas, Texas. These meetings set the strategy for our work.
Pray for good meetings and that God will continue to reveal His will for our work.
Our July 2006 Ministry Work
In July 2006 Chuck will be traveling to Puerto Rico to work with his recruitment staff to find ways to better support the work going on in that country. Chuck is responsible for oversight of the recruitment work there.
Wycliffe has eight volunteer staff who head up the work there. While they have been active for several years, the response from Puerto Ricans has been slow. While interest is high, the number of people responding to apply with Wycliffe has been low. So, Chuck is heading there to work with our Wycliffe Americas office to find ways to see this work produce fruit.
The Church Task Force concluded its meetings with a recommendation that Wycliffe create a National Church Realations department. Current that proposal is before the Wycliffe President, Bob Creson. We expect an answer soon.
Barb has been busy helping organize two short term trips (Mexico/Honduras) for our Get Global program. Get Global helps high school and college students go overseas to observe our work first hand. We pray that many who attend these trips will apply to Wycliffe or make a committment to study linguistics when they go to college. The Mexico trip leaves June 28 and comes back July 10.
Chuck has also been involved serving as a member of the Mosaic Commission, which was assembled to find ways to see more ethnic communities join us in our work. Recommendations were also made to the Wycliffe President and we are waiting for his response on this issue too.
Chuck is working on budgets this past two weeks. Work needs to be completed by July 7. Chuck's team is also working on producing new media peices for recruitment, creating plans for Wycliffe's presence at Urbana 2006 (December 27 - 31) and helping organize his next National Mobilization Leadership Team meetings in Portland, OR in August.
JanuaryJanuary 2006 Ministry Work
In January 2006 Chuck will reassemble the Church Mobilization Task Force to discuss how Wycliffe will work with the Church in the USA over the next three to five years. This important task force is comprised of Wycliffe Church Mobilization workers in addition to several pastors. Please pray for meetings scheduled in early January and again in February.
January will also be a time when all 150 Wycliffe Mobilizers will assemble for their first National Mobilization Conference at Lake Yale Baptist Convention Center. Chuck called for this meeting to bring unity to a team that is spread out from coast to coast. Oli Jacobson, board chairman for New Tribes Mission, will be the devotional speaker along with Dr. Steve Brown from the Reformed Theological Seminary. Training workshops along with general sessions on the theme "Together In Unity" from Psalm 133:1 will round out our week. Please pray for safety in travel and for a spirit of love and unity among our team.
Chuck & Barb are also traveling to Peru to attend SIL's branch conference there. You can read more about this at the toolbar to the left. Please pray for safety in travel and that Chuck & barb can effectively encourage the believers there.
Chuck is also heavily involved in many new changes in his Mobilization department. You can read about some of these new ventures at the toolbar to the left. These changes have taken him on travels to the states of PA, OK, MI, WI, TX, CA, OR, NC in the past six months. More travel is ahead as he challenges his team with Mobilization's goal of recruiting 7000 new members by 2014. Pray for safety in travel, peace among his staff as they go through these changes and good health.
December 2005 Ministry Work
In late November Chuck attended the National Mobilization meetings in Orlando, FL at Wycliffe's USA Headquarters. These yearly meetings set a new course for our work. We adopted a new Purpose Statement, "Accelerate the pace of Bible translation by recruiting 7000 new members by 2014".
Why that number and year? Well, several years ago Wycliffe adopted a new Vision Statement, "We exist to see a Bible translation project started for every remaining language group by the year 2025." That's a statement that can only be accomplished by God, but it is a challenge to us all to see this work complete in our lifetime!
So, we need these 7000 new members by 2014 so that we have the resources in place to fulfill Vision 2025. It takes several years of training to equip Bible translators and build infrustruce to reach this vision.
Please pray with us for God's provision for this goal.
October - November Ministry Work (Pasts)
Barb & Chuck participated in Wycliffe's national mobilization meetings in Orlando, FL in April. At these meetings Chuck presented the mobilization research he worked on in February and March as did a research firm that did an evaluation of our recruitment process.
June - July MinistryWork (Past)
Barb & Chuck participated in Wycliffe's national mobilization meetings in Orlando, FL in April. At these meetings Chuck presented the mobilization research he worked on in February and March as did a research firm that did an evaluation of our recruitment process.
As a result of these reports and our meetings the need for better training, better recruiting materials to use in the work and the need to concentrate in more focused areas producing results surfaced. Therefore, another meeting was called in early June in which Chuck revisited the Wycliffe center in Orlando with a smaller group of mobilizers to help resolve some of these issues.
At these meetings, our Wycliffe North Central Regional Office was asked to participate in a pilot project whereby mobilizers who do recruiting will also be the ones to handle the recruits application if they apply. In the past, once a person applied to Wycliffe, the person's name was send to our headquarters in Orlando and another person took up the application.
Chuck is currently setting up meetings with mobilizers in the area to begin work on setting up this pilot project. The initial meetings will probably be scheduled for early July.
This pilot project is the first of ten recommendations that we decided on at the April meetings. Other recommendations for training, better material production and more focused recruitment efforts are all underway to some degree by our national mobilization leadership.
April - May Ministry Work (Past)
Barb & Chuck will be travelling to Orlando, FL to participate in national recruitment meetings in the end of April. These meetings will help set the direction of our mobilization work for the next year.
When they return from Florida Chuck & Barb will be hosting their 5th Total It Up course at the regional office where they work for Wycliffe. This week long course is designed to teach young people the basics of Bible translation. Classes are held on phonetics, phonology, grammar, translation in addition to classes on Literacy, Sociolinguistic Survey and several days of Language Learning with speakers of another language.
March - April Ministry Work (Past)
Barb & Chuck travelled to Huntington College (IN) in late March and early April to participate in their college's mission conference. They gave several mission workshops as well as interacted with students and staff and challenging them to involvement in missions.
In April, Chuck & Barb also hosted a Trans Scan, one day workshop on Bible translation, at Huntington College on April 3. We had 26 people attend with 13 students coming from Huntington College. Another Trans Scan hosted by Chuck & barb will be held on April 17 at the Wycliffe regional office in West Chicago, IL.
In mid April, the Lord willing Chuck will be travelling to Minnesota for meetings with the Area Coordinator team there. Chuck will be meeting with the three Wycliffe couples who are doing recruitment work for Wycliffe in the St. Paul and Minneapolis area to help review their first year of work and to help them set plans for the summer and fall.
Later in April, the Lord willing Chuck & Barb will be traveling to Orlando, Fl to participate in Wycliffe's semi-annual national mobilization meetings. These meetings will help set strategy for future recruitment work later on in the year.
Chuck finished the research project he was asked to do by Wycliffe's Vice-President's office. This project researched our recruitment database to help determine what trends exist in our mobilization work. Chuck did research about this for our North Central regional area in December and now he has been asked to do this for our national mobilization work.
This research is needed because Wycliffe's overall number of new members continues to decline in spite of many new programs. This combined with the aging population of Wycliffe members has resulted in the total numbers of people involved in Bible translation work with Wycliffe to actually decline in spite of the fact that last year over 150 people joined Wycliffe. More Wycliffe members are retiring than those joining.
Now Chuck and Barb can do back to their regional mobilization work
Pray that God will move many more people into this work so that the number of new language projects can grow and that existing projects can be better supported. Urgent needs also exist in teaching and aviation areas. Translators are being called in the meet some teaching needs and some translators have not been able to get out to their villages because of a lack of pilots.
