Interview with David Elliott - Short Term Team Co-ordinator
January, 2007
Well, David, what short-term trips do you have arranged for 2007?
I’ll be organising 6 trips to various Far-East countries in March, June, August, September and December together with 2 trips to Indonesia in July and December.
There are also options to go to South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland in September prior to the World Outreach Africa Summit in Johannesburg that month, and even trips to Fiji, Japan, India, and Thailand are possibilities if I can develop the right, available, team leaders to lead teams to these locations.
I will obviously not be leading all these teams, and have already developed a few young adults that are currently leading teams or willing to lead teams on behalf of World Outreach around Asia and further afield.
Please pray, as I spend the first 6 months of this year focusing on raising leaders, many of which I hope to train to lead teams on behalf of World Outreach. A few of the trips I have mentioned above will be leadership training focused, using 'Million Leaders Mandate' material. However at the same time when I lead these teams, there are plenty of opportunities to minister in countless ways like orphanage and slum ministry, village church ministry, labour work etc…
My last team trip to West Kalimantan in early December was an amazing success! We went to Ronny Heyboer’s Living Waters project for 10 days and the team were doing primarily labour work, along with dance, youth, and village church ministry. The team of 10 (7 from Singapore, 1 from England, 1 from Mauritius and me) could not stop raving about the trip and most of them have committed to sponsoring children, and all of them have committed to take the Kairos course starting in Singapore in March. Click on this link to watch a presentation of the trip.
What is the purpose of your trips?
All of my trips are aimed at attracting young adults to the mission field, but there are exceptions where my team was made up of a couple of 35+ and even a few 50+. However that was more due to the fact that the travelling dates worked out for them too, and they were planning on going to the location with or without a team anyway.
What do you mean by 'Young Adults'?
When I refer to young adults, I’m rather liberal with the term by classifying them between the ages of 18 and 35 years old. Up until now I have had a great mix of ages. On a recent trip the youngest was 18 years old, and the oldest was 30 years old. When I went to West Kalimantan early last month, the youngest on my team was 22 years old, and the oldest was 36 years old.
However I if you want me to classify my ideal age range, that would be from 18 to 25. However I have no problem taking individuals slightly younger or significantly older than this.
What size of team do you prefer?
The answer to this question does differ slightly based on location. To certain difficult countries, I would limit my team size significantly and also look for specific skills in the team. However for more open locations like West Kalimantan or Northern Thailand I would be a lot more open to taking larger groups with more general skills.
For difficult countries, I don’t want to take teams larger than 6 to 8 people, including me. This avoids problems when we visit homes to do leadership training, and will also allow for me to split the team to do different ministries or keep them together if necessary.
Locations such as West Kalimantan, I am much more willing to take larger teams of say 8 to 12 people, but generally not much more than that otherwise it will take away from the more personal mentoring experience that each team member goes through during one of these short-term trips.
How do you like to make up your teams?
Most of my teams have been made up of individuals from different churches and countries that may have never met prior to preparation for the trip. If the team member is from Singapore, I will obviously bring all Singapore-based team members together for a team orientation up to two months before the trip.
If the team member is based overseas, as has been the situation a number of times, and not able to reach Singapore until the dates around the trip itself, then I will feed them orientation information over the internet, and talk to them over Skype / MSN / phone, answer their questions and pray for them through these methods, and arrange for the other team members to be introduced to him/her through these means or by emails.
Ideally over time, I would like to have other World Outreach leaders based in the nation of the interested team member, who would be in a position to personally take the individual through the orientation material, and double-check that he/she is fit to be on the team, by observing them over a period of time, and perhaps checking with their church’s leadership about the background of the person. However at this stage most individuals based overseas, which have joined my teams I either know personally, or they have been recommended to me by someone I know and trust
But I also encourage overseas based team members to arrive in a location like Singapore at least 3 days before the trip so that we can take them through a more condensed version of the orientation that they may have missed.
So, how would you summarise your vision?
My vision is to see young and/or youthful (not necessarily young in age but who can work well with young people) mission team leaders raised up within every sending nation, so that they can represent the teams from their own nation. Further, I would like to able to send team members in their direction if their location is closer to the final destination. And as I have mentioned, raising leaders (specifically team leaders) is a high priority this year, and will be, for many years to come.
How can I get more information about short term trips?
Write to me at david.elliott
worldoutreach.org.sg and
tell me that you are interested in going on a short term trip.
Dates are flexible as they are not all determined by me, but I
can let you know the general dates of particular trips that you
may be interested in.
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