If you’ve partnered with Every Nation for a while, chances are you’ve sent missionaries on a trip with Ten Days Missions Experiences, Every Nation’s short-term mission trip program. Our campus missionaries often bring students on these trips to launch them into bold ministry, which they bring back to their campuses. Ten Days started as a series of mission trips that begin with weeks of intentional prayer and fasting before going to serve in other nations by sharing the gospel and meeting the needs of the locals. Over the twelve years since the program began, we’ve reached twenty-nine nations and worked with international Every Nation churches and campus ministries to start new ministries and strengthen existing ones.
This year alone, you’ve sent teams to fourteen cities across Australia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Fiji, Mexico, Nepal, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States! Here’s a report from our Ten Days team about our last trips of 2018 that occurred in Europe.
We rejoice in this generation’s eagerness to go to the nations. We can’t wait to go on mission with you in 2019!
In September, we took ten people on our first Ten Days trip to Sundsvall, Sweden (five of whom were first-time missionaries!). The plan was to use our evangelistic tool, The God Test, to share the gospel on campus every day. However, this came to a halt when the president of the university suddenly forbade the team from campus evangelism.
After much prayer, the team decided to split up, with half going to the city square and the other half to campus. Little did we know, there was a pop-up international food market that week in the city square. It drew hundreds of hungry students, professionals, and families who were also hungry for God. What we thought would be a major set back to our mission actually expanded our reach to the entire city!
Sweden is one of the most secular nations in the world. Most people we met were atheists or agnostics, but rarely were they antagonistic. The word about The God Test buzzed around Sundsvall, and people thought deeply about life’s origin, meaning, morality, and their ultimate destiny. We followed these conversations up with invitations to a seminar about how we can know truth, a talk show where we shared testimonies, church services, and a weekly course designed to introduce Jesus to a secular culture. On our last day, one student got saved!
A few weeks after our Sweden trip ended, our final 2018 trip launched to Romania. The team was made up of twenty-three team members (including two children) from the United States, London, Poland, and Ukraine.
Our primary outreach was campus ministry in Timisoara, which is home to over 50,000 students. The team did The God Test on campus and events in the evenings with small group discussions. We called the events “I Am Human” and talked about human identity, purpose, meaning, justice, and how Jesus fulfills each of those needs. The campus ministry in Timisoara is in it’s beginning phase, and this was their first outreach as an Every Nation Campus chapter.
The first night, only one student showed up. He was agnostic and from Moldova, and he ended up attending every single outreach we had that week! By the time we left, he said that he was still unsure about what we believe, but knew he had so much love for our team and that we had very good ideas. Through the rest of the week, we had three salvations on campus, more students attend our events, and we left the local team with several key contacts for continued weekly small groups.
As we head into the Thanksgiving season, we cannot express how grateful we are for your partnership and faith. We are so honored to have you on our team!