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Mission Drift

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Our training group in Barcelona What do you do to fight ‘mission drift’ in your life? Whether it’s at work where you want to protect certain aspects of the culture of your office, or at home where you want your kids to value certain aspects of your family’s culture, mission drift is something we all have to think about and fight against because if we don’t, unfortunately it naturally just happens. Just as ships at sea don’t stay in the same place unless they are anchored to something solid, people and organizations will shift in time unless they have been secured against the cultural tides. Here at EMI, as leaders we talk about the potential for mission drift almost as much as any other single topic. We see it as one of the biggest future threats to our organization, which is why a couple of years ago we applied for and were granted a big chunk of money to carry out leadership training for 32 of our up and coming leaders from each of our 12 offices around the world. In late April
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Summer 2020 update

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Brodie's High School graduation ceremony! With the near complete shutdown of interna tional travel in March due to the Covid pandemic around the world, the work in EMI's 11 offices has been significantly impacted. However, the stoppage of our normal project work has opened the door for our overseas offices to reach out to the local mission hospitals and  medical ministries  to provide assistance in their plans to combat the virus in their country. As a result, we have been able to partner with hospitals in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa to help them repurpose their patient care wards into Covid response facilities that are better equipped to deal with virus-stricken patients. Asha Kiran Hospital in southern Odisha, India, is converting a training centre into a 20-bed COVID isolation unit. EMI India helped design the layout and circulation to reduce the likelihood of virus transmission. Image courtesy of EMI India. In addition, many of our ministry clients had already raise
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Finishing off 2019

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The boys at Christmas It was a busy travel season at the end of 2019, so I wanted to catch you all up... Cambodia trip (September 2019) In late September, I traveled to Phnom Penh, Cambodia to attend our annual EMI Directors Conference. This conference is the only time the leaders of all 11 EMI offices gather each year to discuss our ministry - the mission and vision, the challenges, the successes, and everything in between. We also typically hold the conference in the host country of one of the EMI offices so we're able to get a closer look at the office and meet all the local staff and major stakeholders in the country. The EMI Directors in Phnom Penh, Cambodia EMI's office in Cambodia is actually setup as a business since registering a non-profit is very difficult in Cambodia and can take many years to achieve. As such, we have had to learn how to run a business in Cambodia according to all the laws governing businesses both in Cambodia as well as from th
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Happy Hallothanksmas

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Walking to an EMI Construction site in Phnom Penh, Cambodia during my recent trip in September (more on that trip in the next blog!) It’s that time of year again…the tinsel and lights on the trees have already overpowered the scant remaining turkeys in the shopping malls, and in our mailboxes, ‘secret’ deals granting early access to Black Friday sales have been trickling in for days (I give it 3 years before we’re just calling it ‘Black November’), and are only kept from completely monopolizing our mailboxes by the also steadily increasing number of year-end-appeals from mission and non-profit groups. Yep, it’s the Hallo-Thanks-Mas holiday season! The world that missions groups operate it is changing fast, maybe faster than ever before, so if we in missions don’t see the changes coming and adapt our approach and messaging style, then we too may find ourselves in a similar place as the turkeys in the mall - smack dab in the middle of the purgatory of irrelevance. Why do I
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September 2019 update

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An EMI Staff architect and engineer consult with  the construction site manager during a routine inspection on a project in Cambodia The Jordan at Jericho ministry plans to be a sustainable  organic farm whose profits will be fed back into the Cambodia church. (photo cred. Anna Seeley, EMI) An EMI team in the Tunduru province of Tanzania last month working at the KIUMA ministry center – the only resource for education and medical care in this remote and underserved part of the country. (photo cred. Jenni Keiter, EMI) For the first time in our 37 year history, EMI sent a team of  engineers  into the country of Iraq  last month to begin designing a new community to permanently house a group of Yazidi refugees whose homes and communities were devastated by the recent war in N. Iraq & Syria. Please  pray for the Iraqi church, which was hit especially hard. (photo cred. Randy Larsen, EMI) Things slow down a bit over the summer at EMI si
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