9/20/23 - 2008: No Suitcase? No Fundraising? No Problem!

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to transform the workplace of every Christian into a mission field. What does that look like in your workplace? We're gonna find out right now.

Jim: It's common practice to spend almost a year preparing for a one week long short-term mission trip.

We spend time preparing to raise money, pack the right clothing, learn the culture, and be prepared for our ministry work while we're there, wherever there is. It's amazing that we spend all that time to prepare for one week of our year. Yet for the other fifty-one weeks of the year, we spend little or no time preparing our hearts for our workplace mission field.

Today we are announcing that iWork4Him is going on a Marketplace Mission Trip the first week in November. We invite you to join us on this trip. This week on iiWork4Him we're gonna talk about preparing our heart, mind, soul, and strength for going on a Marketplace Mission Trip to your own workplace- your ministry place, your mission field.

Mike Henry is with us today from Followerofone.org, and he's gonna explain how we prepare our hearts for going to work. Mike Henry, thanks for being back on iWork4Him.

Mike Henry: Hey, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Jim: It's great to have you here, Mike. Why a marketplace missions trip? What's the backstory behind Follower of One?

Mike Henry: I never could figure out why driving to work wasn't a mission trip. Why is it going to somewhere else a mission trip but going to the places where I go not a mission trip? Why did I have to go someplace different? And they came out of a conversation with a pastor years ago where they were trying to talk me into going on an overseas mission trip and I couldn't get away from work.

And I said, but I drive 30 miles a day to work. How is that not a mission trip? And the story just stuck.

Martha: It stuck. It stuck there for a while, didn't it, Mike?

Mike Henry: It did. It took us 12 or 13 years to actually turn it into something.

Martha: But I love the way that you wrestled with that question. I just, I love your heart and you just have such a passion for communicating this process to other people, but we know firsthand that you wrestled with it in your own life. So did you like test that out? Did you say, okay, I'm gonna go on my own little mission trip to work? Or what happened next?

Mike Henry: I actually was just complaining about this to a friend maybe a dozen years after that conversation. And the young friend said, why don't you do a virtual mission trip? My mind started working it. I kicked into gear. What would it take to actually challenge us to go to our workplaces and do this instead of just me whining about it?

And that's where we started out by using a book, but now we've evolved into this kind of using devotional so people don't even have to pay to do this. It's just designed to get us to thinking about going to work and establishing relationships with the people that we work with, such that we might be able to serve them and point them to Jesus.

Jim: A lot of missionaries, I've had arguments with missionaries, overseas missionaries that say, your workplace isn't a mission field. And I say, really? The perspective is, to me, a mission field is a place where you go, where there are people who are lost and hopeless, people that don't know Jesus. That describes every workplace that I've ever been in, and there's always been people like that.

But it's that mentality that you go with as well, and that's part of the paradigm shift of being able to say iWork4Him. You have to be able to recognize that your workplace really is a mission field, a place of ministry, and that you're called to that no matter what your calling may be, whether you're an insurance agent, used car sales guy, a lineman, a manufacturer, or whatever it may be.

Mike, have you ever gone on a short-term missions trip overseas?

Mike Henry: Not overseas. I did some prison ministry back in when I first became a Christian, but I've never gone overseas on a mission trip.

Jim: Was that the time when you had stole that car and there was a felony that he had to serve time in prison or what was it?

 (laughter)

Mike Henry: No, they let leave.

Jim: Why do you think we spend so much time at church preparing to go overseas on a short-term mission trip? A one-week trip. Almost zero time preparing for our workplace mission field. What's, what do you think is the disconnect there?

Mike Henry: The need is great overseas. I don't wanna make light of that need. I don't wanna make light of the people who are called to do that service. But I think what we've done is we've focused on the exception instead of the rule, and we tend to do that.

If you look what's on tv, it's the exception. It's not the rule. What do we talk about? What's on the news? It's always the exceptions and not the rule. Sending people to foreign countries so they can invest in people who don't speak the same language and who don't have the same advantages that we have, that's the exception. That's what we've been called to do. That's exceptional.

However, day in and day out, the person that I work next to, they may even be a believer, but I can still minister to them by helping them. We in Follower of One, we define ministry as helping people move one notch closer to Jesus. Then I don't even have to discriminate against the people that I work with who are believers or not believers. Whoever Jesus brings across my path is someone I can help move closer to Him.

Jim: You bring up a such a good point. And this week on all of our power thoughts, which are heard across the country, and people can subscribe on to our power thoughts on Apple Podcasts, each one of those power thoughts talks about that preparing for going our missions our marketplace missions trip, excuse me, mission trip.

I keep putting the s on there. Martha thinks that's terrible. But what's amazing is that, when we go overseas, we don't know the culture. We don't know the language. We really don't, we don't know the food.

When we go to work, we know the language, we know all the acronyms, we know the people, we know the language, and it, that part is already behind us. All we have to do is let our faith live out vibrantly in us and with intentionality, and that's really what the missions trip is all about, is helping prepare us.

And we're gonna go into more detail in a minute. Martha, you wanna?

Martha: You use a really pivotal and important word, and that is preparing us. And there are so many things every day that we can do to prepare our hearts for the mission field that God has us in. And one of those ways is prayer. And I just wanna highlight that we have at iWork4Him a prayer team, and that prayer team joins together to pray specifically for the work that iWork4Him is doing.

But ultimately that's for everyone because we are an audio, we are a video impression that helps people to live out their faith and work every day, right? And so I just wanna invite people right now to join that prayer team because it is a foundational part of preparing every day for what we are doing as individuals and as an organization. Listeners, you can just go to iWork4Him.com and find the prayer team and join it. And we would love for you to participate in that part of the preparation in our life.

Mike, let's fast forward just a little bit to now and where God has you. What does it mean for someone to go on a Marketplace Mission Trip?

Mike Henry: It's a two-week commitment to be very intentional with your faith, asking Jesus to use you every day in the lives of the people that you work with. Realizing another difference to overseas mission trips is we have to maintain our relationships because we're coming back again tomorrow. And so we're doing this in a relationship context.

It's not like we're flying in and we can do whatever and we're leaving in a week. We have to maintain our relationships, we have to still be valuable employees. And it's these, we practice these five daily activities that we've come up with five daily habits and we learn about those in the first week that's preparation for this. And then the second week is we put those actions into action. We put those, we make those things happen. And God shows up. He does all kinds of cool things in the lives of the people who have done this.

Jim: So talk about how do we prepare our hearts, minds, souls, and strength for this two-week exercise, which we'd like to become second nature.

Mike Henry: So we start with prayer like Martha was talking about. Our five daily habits are pray, appreciate others, know what you believe, serve others, and speak for yourself. And each day of the first week is a devotional and a video that walks you through those five points. And we start praying for the people that we work with and start asking God to use us in their lives. And then look what we see is things start happening.

Jim: All right, those five things. Pray. Appreciate others, and I got the last one. Speak for yourself. What were the middle two?

Mike Henry: Know what you believe is the third one, and the fourth one is serve others, and the fifth is speak for yourself.

Martha: So it's really this training ground, much like when you're training or preparing to go somewhere else to serve. It's that training ground of figuring out how to be ready every day for the mission field. And that's why this resonates everybody. If you've listened to us for any amount of time, you know that we are passionate about where you go to work every day and that it matters.

We hear organizations that talk about business as mission and truly, we are business as mission every day. We are going in as a carpenter, we are going in as an accountant, whatever that job might be, and doing it as a missionary for Jesus Christ. And so we love that connection.

And Mike, I would just love to hear what is your favorite part about hosting a Marketplace Mission Trip?

Mike Henry: I love the stories that people tell. It's exciting when, especially when someone, when it starts to click for them, because for many of us, this is a little awkward. I'm getting on a Zoom call with people I don't know.

And I'm praying about my faith, and it's typically the Zoom check in calls are in the evenings and it's uncomfortable, but when someone actually gets to see God working in their workplace or they see God changing them, they get excited, they jump on the next call and they can't wait to tell people about it.

And those kinds of things are fun. Because you get to see people who realize, oh, Jesus is involved in the people that I work with. He's involved in their lives and He is using me, and it's exciting.

Jim: I wanna make sure everybody knows stay tuned because in just a little bit Martha and I can tell you how to get involved in a Marketplace Mission Trip that we're gonna do in conjunction with Follower of One - iWork4Him, Follower of One. We do a lot of collaboration out there in the marketplace. We wanted to do a trip where we invite our audience to join us with Mike on a Marketplace Mission Trip. Mike, what's the hardest part of preparing for a Marketplace Mission Trip? When do you hear people say this is hard?

Mike Henry: Almost the most surprisingly difficult piece is the fact that our normal life just takes us out. The day in, day out of our busyness, our email, our pressures at work, our to-do list. It makes it really hard for us to be intentional about shoving more of our faith into what we do every day. It's like we've found this level of faith activeness that we do and trying to increase that level is harder than most of us think because the environment that we work in is generally not very conducive to being a person of faith.

Jim: But I think that's because people think they, they make it more complicated than what it really needs to be. We can be a people of faith doing whatever we do - as an insurance agent, selling cars. Jesus inside of us is changing who we are. And as Jesus followers, everything about us is changing and everyone around us should be benefiting from our faith as we wrestle it out, whether they believe in Jesus or not. And I think we make it too complicated. We think I've gotta know the gospel, and I gotta have all the books of the Bible memorized, and I have to have lots of scripture memorized.

No, you just need to be working out your faith and living it for real. And people can, they will learn from you. They glean it from you, and then you'll have opportunities when you notice that they're struggling to actually feed into them. I love that.

Mike, when I was messing around on your website the other day, I noticed you have a free download on your website that maps all of this out. What was that download called again? It was like a six week trip. No, it had the two weeks. The two weeks. What can we get on the website, just so we can see what this looks like?

Mike Henry: There might be a PDF on there where you can get an outline of the Marketplace Mission Trip, the two week version. The six week version of the mission trip is a new workbook that we started publishing just a few months ago.

And so people can do this in an offline fashion over six weeks. It's a little more in-depth study of each of the daily habits. Jim, you're exactly correct. The first prayer we talk about is here I am. We talk about that being like punching in. Here I am, Jesus. What do you want me to do next?

And after that, everything becomes Jesus's problem and He puts us back to work even if we've dropped the ball. And so that's the one of the ways that we battle this overwhelm that attracts or that draws to some people where they feel like they just can't do this or they're not equipped to do it in their workplace.

Martha: So let's compare that just for a minute to taking a short-term mission trip overseas, because a lot of people would say, this is just too hard. Why would I do it? The whole thing is once you do it, once you make that commitment and you prepare and you practice it through the actual attending of it, your life is never the same.

And then you see, wow, this is why people do it. This is why you have to have stick-to-it-iveness, because it might seem scary. Satan might distract us, but at the same time, we then see on the other side of it, I wanna do this again. And I know you've said over the years that there have been multiple people that have participated in more than one mission trip for that very reason.

Because we are people that need accountability. We are people that need to learn things over and over again. And experiencing them in community is the most powerful way we can do that. And so that's why we at iWork4Him have decided to host a trip and to do it with our community and anyone else who wants to join us, but to do it together, to have that synergy of, okay, I'm going to work alone.

I'm not going with all of you to work tomorrow, but I know you're in agreement with me about what we're doing today. That we're gonna work intentionally for Jesus in all that we do. You can tell I'm a little excited, but I love seeing that, just a little, that analogy, that parallel. So tell

us more, Jim.

Jim: I think what's exciting is that November 5th we're going to go on a joint Marketplace Mission Trip between iWork4Him and Follower of One. We're going to join forces and we'll probably even share between what Mike teaches on a Marketplace Missions trip and the iWork4Him Nation, and you'll see how God brought both of those together in a synergistic fashion when we didn't even know each other.

But we need you to go out to marketplacemissiontrip.com, Marketplace Mission Trip . com , and sign up for the November 5th trip. The automation will kick in from then, and that's the week we will start off with preparing our hearts. And then the week of November 12th, we'll actually go on our trip, but we'll spend a couple of weeks getting to know each other.

This is a chance for all of you out there listening to get to know Jim and Martha and Mike Henry too, because he's really the star of the show because God's led him down this road. But we thought it'd be fun to kinda walk with all of you listening on a trip as we intentionally prepare for our faith to live up vibrantly in us as we go about our work.

Marketplacemissiontrip.com, sign up for the November 5th trip.

Martha: So Mike, you have over the last several years had hundreds, if not thousands of people that have gone on a Follower of One Marketplace Mission Trip. So who do you have with us today that's gonna share a little bit about their experience?

Mike Henry: We have Jane Doerman from White Oak Christian Church, and she's also with the, oh, I can't remember the name of the ministry. The Boldly Conference.

Jim: Polished Network, yeah.

Mike Henry: Polished network. Thank you. I drew a blank. I had one line and I blew it.

 (laughter)

Mike Henry: Hey, Jane, how are you?

Jane Doerman: I'm doing great, Mike. You're doing awesome.

Jim: We gotta help him out. Polishednetwork.com. Oh,

Jane Doerman: it's Polishnetwork.org. Polishnetwork.org. Yes.

Jim: We're both in the doghouse, Mike. Thanks for helping me out on that one, Jane. We're so grateful to have you. And we do love Polished and their Boldly conference. And we love Follower of One, even if we screwed up all the websites, it's okay. PolishedNetwork.org.

Martha: It'll all be in the show notes. So just take that burden off of you and everybody can look at it in the show notes.

Jim: All right. Jane, what attracts you to go on a Marketplace Mission Trip?

Jane Doerman: I gotta say about a year ago is when Mike and I first met at the AWOP, XL Summit here in Cincinnati.

Jim: That was At Work on Purpose with Chuck Proudfit.

Jane Doerman: That's right, at Work on Purpose. And it was my first event ever to attend with them, and I was sitting there in the audience and Mike was on stage talking about this idea of a virtual mission trip, and my ears perked up and I was really excited 'cause Mike was speaking my language.

I totally get this idea of I'm on mission every day, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's in my house. Whether it is down the street at Target, going shopping, I'm on mission every single day. And I loved the heart behind it 'cause it felt like, oh my goodness, somebody else gets it. So we met at the, at work on Purpose summit.

We met on Zoom like a week later and we talked about okay, tell me more. I really wanna try this. And he invited me to sign up for the next mission trip, which was like a month later. And so the rest was history. I was super excited to participate.

Martha: So what did you experience in that preparation time that you could give us a little peek behind the curtain?

Jane Doerman: Sure. I will say my experience with the preparation for it... Looking on paper, when you look at what is required of you to participate or you know how to do it, I was a little intimidated 'cause I'm like, oh goodness, this feels like a lot. Like I have a devotion to do every single day.

And then the next week I have a phone call or a Zoom call every single night with it. Can I do that? And I just felt the Holy Spirit really stirring within me to say, I've made this connection with you and Mike for a reason, and I want you to be obedient with stewarding your time with this.

And you know what? Really just setting up your account and seeing the Follower of One community online and connecting, starting to connect with people I'd never met before, it was like this, like whole new world online and just realizing that you're not alone in this and when you actually choose to show up and you like put it in your planner. This is the time I'm going to show up, do the devotional, which took like less than five minutes to do.

And then, that really set the tone for every single day going into it, of creating this heightened awareness of who was in my circle or spheres of influence. Who am I in contact with on a regular basis that maybe I don't even notice on the regular? And God was like, I made them and you're a mission to love them because I love you.

So it was it was a really cool experience and it really just opened up this world to connect with other people that I would never connect with on a regular basis.

Jim: So what was the biggest surprise for you when you went on the trip? Who was the biggest surprise? The person that was in your regular schedule that you never really noticed before? Or that may be harsh, but somebody like the Lord goes, see this? This is one of the people I was talking to you about. Who was it?

Jane Doerman: I gotta tell you, when the first mission trip I went on, it was like in September. So it was around like school had been starting and school life has just been crazy since covid.

Okay. And so they decided our church, or not church, our school staff decided to do a different format of drop-off and pickup line. I don't know if you've ever experienced a drop-off or school pickup line, but it is terrible. Sometimes you're just sitting there for an hour. Bring a snack, hang out.

Jim: I would suggest listening to the iWork4Him podcast while you're there.

Jane Doerman: There you go. That might be better.

Jim: That's right. And the Follower of One podcast. Go to Apple podcast and get subscribed to both of them so you've got something to listen to in the school pickup line.

Jane Doerman: Yes, absolutely. I love that.

Jim: Oh, wait a minute. How about the Polish podcast? 'cause you're gonna be in charge of the Polish podcast.

Jane Doerman: There we go. Yes. We got it all covered. I love that. Yes. Podcasts are essential in the school pickup line. So I was sitting there and it was very, tensions were really high. Things were not going well.

The first couple weeks, and especially in the preparation week, it was awful. Parents were getting out of their cars and yelling at the staff and it was just really not great. I'm sitting there in my car like, I'm frustrated, but come on. And I felt God say, on one of the days, I want you to encourage one of the staff members when you get outta your car.

And I was like okay. That feels weird, but I'll do it. And so when it came to be my time to get outta my car to greet my kids, the assistant principal was there and we were making small talk. And I just remember turning to her and I said. I know things have been really crazy the last like week and a half here, but I just want you to know I really appreciate how you care for our kids and how you are just trying, I know this is hard, but I just want you to know that I see you and I think you're doing a great job. So keep up the good work.

And it was just like the look on her face was like, oh my gosh. Like someone, it was that recognition that appreciating others piece that I think really, if you're not intentional about it, can get overlooked so easily.

Martha: For sure. Wow. How amazing. This is the key here. You were being encouraged to follow through on those prompts, right? And to see the opportunity that the Holy Spirit was giving you, and you were obedient to that.

Okay. So you took the trip, you came back and you then took some people from your church on a trip. Why would you do that?

Jane Doerman: Why would I do that? I serve on the teaching team at our church, and God has put me in a really unique situation where I am in the room with the leaders of our church who make decisions.

And every year we gather for a retreat and we determine the sermon series for the next year. And during that time, we like to have equipping pieces for our people along with the themes that we're gonna navigate. And our lead pastor shared his heart that he really wanted people to be observant in appreciating others.

We use this term "one another," "other people" and how can we do that? And I said, guys, I just did this really cool experience, Marketplace Mission Trip. It was really cool. It was virtual and it's accessible. It makes it accessible to everybody, because we really wanted to do the traditional mission trip, but those were limited in numbers for who could go and, there's all sorts of obstacles that people can navigate to go on a traditional mission trip. But then I said, but this would be a really cool tool for us to use for our people. And so Nathan fell in love with the idea and said, let's get Mike on a call. And the rest is history. We just completed like a couple weeks ago, our mission trip.

Jim: All right. So I wanna know how many people from your church went on the Marketplace Mission Trip with you?

Jane Doerman: We had about nine people.

Jim: So what was the one thing that you saw God do during that trip that just blew your mind? Yes. You have to choose one.

Jane Doerman: Yes. I know. I'm like one? At the top of mind, the first thing that comes to mind and I was like, yes, praise God - was these people like, and I was friends with most of 'em that registered and some were new to me, but these people who are leaders in our church realize for the first time, wow, my actions matter.

Like how I act and love towards others matter. And I don't have to get on a soapbox in the middle of my workplace and have an altar call. One guy said I wanted to flip the script 'cause this, we had clients in town that usually treat us, and celebrate us and appreciate us. And I'm gonna flip the script and I'm gonna appreciate them. And like just that intentionality and making time for people. And we had a woman who was a waitress at a local restaurant, and she shared how she was really, she recognized that some of the stressful parts of her day when, like the lunch rush came in, she was very mindful on how she approached people.

And she, was very intentional with how she interacted with her coworkers. And she just saw God building connections in that way because her actions were speaking so much louder than her words could.

Martha: So beautiful and so exciting to hear a group of people that you are intimately involved with or connected to through your church that now, on a whole different level and even the ability to help each other stay accountable to that mission. I've been to the Dominican with a bunch of women and like every time you see those women, it's like that's my connection point with them.

The same is true of the Marketplace Mission Trip. And Jim and I are very excited to go on another one and actually participate with the iWork4Him community with one for that very reason, because we were blown away by the relationships, Jim, that we built during those evening Zoom calls.

Following up, hearing the testimony, hearing what God was doing. Taking our ordinary days and making them extraordinary for the kingdom. We do learn from hearing other people's experiences and our actions do speak loudly for the gospel. So thanks for sharing that, and thank you for taking taking that step of faith and inviting your church along on the journey.

Jim: I got one more question for you. I just wanted to wait for Martha to get done.

All right, so you've taken 10 of you now have gone from your church on a Marketplace Mission Trip. Do you have another one planned? Did the pastor get to go? What's next?

Jane Doerman: What's next? I'm glad you asked. We actually just had our sermon series retreat for 2024 and one of the sermon series is very evangelism focused. And I said, guys, we were in the middle of the Marketplace Mission Trip during this time. I said, you guys, everything we are talking about that we want our people to do, we're doing it, like we are doing it in this mission trip. And so what's next is, I don't think I told Mike this, but in September I believe this particular sermon series is happening and we are going to be using that sermon series as a catalyst to say, sign up at the end of September, we're gonna be doing another mission trip.

And we have collected all the testimonies from every single person that went on this last one. I gotta tell you, these people are excited to do it again and they wanna bring more people with them. So I'm really excited.

Jim: Mike, it's gotta be fun to hear that. You're sitting there nodding your head and smiling and I just, I know that this has been a journey, but one of your dreams is to have Marketplace Mission Trips in churches around the country, because this is for the everyday worker. This is for the Rank-and-file people who don't see their workplace as a mission field, but to help them understand it and help shift that paradigm so that as believers, their faith can just vibrantly live out within them. Mike, it's so much fun and we're so excited to be partnering with you on our trip coming up on November 5th. Where can people go to get signed up, Mike, for our trip coming up in November 5th?

Mike Henry: Marketplacemissiontrip.com, it actually says, request an invitation and you'll get an email with a link that will take you right into our online community and into the special space that we have just for the mission trip. So you can get familiar with the resources and everything and get ready to go. Marketplacemissiontrip.com.

Martha: And we will have that link in our show notes as well. And you said another one of our favorite words, Mike, and that is resources. We love providing resources to our listeners. And this mission trip coming up is just one of those many examples.

So listeners, if you are not yet connected to us, in order to stay connected to the many different resources that we provide through iWork4Him, remember to find us on your favorite social media platform: Facebook, Instagram, X, I feel that's, so I'm not used to that yet. So YouTube, Spotify, and we're now even on Rumble.

So if you've been listening, you may not realize that we are on video format as well, so you're missing a lot of facial expressions, especially from Mike during our conversation. So you might wanna go back and watch the video version, but just look for us on iWork4Him and we'll have all those links in the show notes as well.

Jim: Mike Henry with FollowerOfOne.org and MarketplaceMissionTrip.com, thanks for being on iWork4Him today. And Jane Doerman with PolishedNetwork.org, thanks for being with us today, sharing your story, sharing how, really how your organization, how your own life, and how your organization's been impacted and how your church has been impacted. Thanks, Jane for being here today.

Jane Doerman: Thank you so much for having me.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your host, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately, iWork4Him.

Outro: Did you know that God has a calling on your life? It's true. He's called you to bring Jesus to the world. For some that may look like a pulpit or a foreign mission field, but for most of us, it looks like a construction site, a cubicle, a hospital, or a classroom, wherever it is that you work, live, volunteer and invest. That is your mission field. To learn more about integrating your faith into your work and retirement, check out our books. iWork4Him, sheWorks4Him, and iRetire4Him by going to iWork4Him.com / bookstore.

Thanks for listening to the iWork4Him podcast with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg please visit iWork4Him.com to learn more about connecting your faith and work To join the iWork4Him Nation or subscribe to our weekly blog. You can also follow us on social media at iWork4Him to stay up to date and meet our guests.

If today's message spoke to you, please subscribe, rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. Your review will launch more workplace missionaries across America. That's at iWork4Him and online at iWork4Him.com. I work the number four him.com.