Hello Reader,

Surprising. Fruitful. Challenging. That’s how I’d summarize this year for our family. Kriss successfully defended her PhD dissertation on missionary resiliency and supported the transition of the new OCMC missionary director before accepting a job in the Advanced Research Program at Asbury Seminary – it’s a perfect fit for her giftings. Patrick transitioned to Middle School – he’s in band and learning to code in oracle. Over the summer we moved to a simple home on a quiet street full of old trees and Leia (a beagle) joined us. It all adds up to a lot of change for this season of family life.

This was also the first full year of my serving the member care community through my role as Valeo Research Institute Director and volunteering as the MissioNexus People Care and Development track co-leader.

The result was a beautiful synergy of listening deeply to our community in multiple contexts. For God’s glory and by God’s grace we witnessed significant progress I wasn't anticipating for years toward our vision to help member care professionals offer their best care to missionaries so that they can continue to persevere with joy as ministers of the Gospel.

1. The Needs Assessment Study listened to the sentiment and perspective of 175 member care professionals about the state of our discipline to help craft our research agenda (to my knowledge the first of its kind). The 1,400+ comments confirms what I’ve been hearing: we face significant challenges and have good reasons for realistic hope (access the full report and webinar at valeo.global/research).
2. Prototyped a flourishing and culture of care assessment for mission workers that will help this organization focus their care resources to meet the needs of their workers while also providing access to VALEO’s clinical team through a partnership. In the future, we could offer this service to multiple organizations annually as a type of benchmarking.
3. Facilitated professional development in a welcoming atmosphere of pastoral care and co-edited a book through MissioNexus: Mission Leader Conference People Care and Development Track. Essentials for People Care and Development is being well received by the member care community (Kriss’ chapter summarizes her dissertation on stories of resilience and mine seeks Jesus’ stillness in the chaos of caring for others – more about this in my final email).

Glory to God for all!

What a privilege to begin this work by listening deeply to our membercare community through multiple contexts and to get to publish precisely what’s most on my heart if it’s the last thing I ever get to offer my colleagues. That this coincided with bringing the study of missional resilience to completion 7 years after launching that research was an especially meaningful gift from our Heavenly Father.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes, blessed be the name of the Lord! Valeo was anticipating sharing the financial burden of this new initiative with other ministry partners – but none were able to say yes and Valeo concluded that this venture isn’t financially viable before they got to see it succeed. I was shocked when I learned this in the middle of September the day our book went live on Amazon.

In my next email, I’ll share more details about this surprising change in plans. But for today, if you’d like to make a year-end donation you can give at: valeo.global/donate (then click on Geoff).

With expectant hope,

​ ​Geoff Whiteman, ThM, LMFT​ ​🎁 access free resources I promised to share. 💌 Read and share my latest updates. 🤝 Let me know how can I help you or your community?​ “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (excerpt from Ephesians 3:14-21)

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