Different presentations every time

So, one of our most obvious jobs these six-months is the up-front speaking. We spoke at two churches in July, and three Sunday morning church services plus one mid-week church meeting and three other groups in August. September is not too much different.

For our sanity we're using the same basic presentation every time. One that we mostly prepared before we came to Australia. However, it also gets tweaked every time according to what we've been asked to provide, the audience, the time we've been given. We add bits in, or take them out, and now, ⅓ of the way through our time here, getting quite adept at this. Tweaking also means altering the power point presentation as needed. 

For example, here are some of the requirements we've been asked to meet:

Church A: 
1.     Share during the service for 5-10 minutes with maybe a summary of what’s been happening in your family and in Japan
2.     After morning tea, to do a 45 minute more detailed summary/presentation of your ministry and OMF’s ministry in Japan (and able to take questions at the end)

Church B:
He (pastor) concurs and you have all the time from 10.00am to present your story and finishing with David preaching. We will need to finish at 10.45

Church C:
Would you be interested in attending a church breakfast? You would have the floor after we had all eaten.

Meeting at a theological college:

[Speaking] from 0930-1020 followed by morning tea 1020-1050 where there is time to chat with the students in a more relaxed setting. . . it will be great for them to hear directly from you of your own experiences, positive and negative, your learned priorities and how you have changed or had to adapt during your time away from Australia. Plus whatever else you deem appropriate. 

Church D:

MLT will try and organise you to visit Bible study groups between those dates and speak at the Mission spot on the Sunday. The Mission spot is 10 mins long and if you have any visuals if you please contact this person...

Mid-week church meeting:

We would like to invite you to one of our Wednesday mission nights to share with us. You have been once before and always appreciated.  I remember you had an activity on sorting garbage in Japan. We start at 7pm and finish at 9pm, with a coffee break at 7.40pm.

Another mid-week church meeting:

Our group can be anything from 12 – 26 people, and yes seniors. All able to drive them selves to the church. We don’t know anything about you or your mission. The group loves hearing from those working in Gods field and you would be warmly welcomed.

We start at 9.30am with morning tea, followed by a devotion – I can get someone from our group to do it or you can do it – about 15 minutes. Then our guest speaker for about 30 minutes with a question time if possible. We can provide a computer and screen if you want to show photos etc.

As you can see our "brief" varies significantly between groups. Sometimes this is written clearly in an email, sometimes it is nutted out over a number of emails or instant messages, or even on the phone (shock! Yes, it still does happen!)

It keeps us on our toes. We enjoy the more formal, small group times where we can interact with our listeners more, but understand the value of getting some precious minutes in front of the captive audience on a Sunday morning.

Our theme of Support and Mobilisation is helping to keep our presentations focused. We're telling people how important it is to have support personnel in mission and putting faces on what that looks like.

Of course this whole thing comes unravelled if we ever have to face the same audience twice, but thankfully that doesn't happen very often.

Ah, but now I need to get back to actually doing that: editing work for the magazine. Thankfully our two meetings for Sunday are pretty well organised, thanks to our method above, plus a little bit of experience under our belts (more than four years experience over the last 20 years) and I can spend time doing other things!