The Beginning:
Before November 1, 1998
Brochures and Database
Bonnie and I joined New Hope International Ministries as Mental Health Consultants in 1997. Later that year we submitted a “Proposal for a series of pamphlets pertaining to mental health and missions.” After our rationale, Ron proposed the following format:
Write them in the style found in Evangelical Missions quarterly so that they would fit on the 8 “pages” of an 8.5X14 piece of paper folded twice. These could be distributed free of charge to mission societies who requested them. Give permission to duplicate, if done in entirety, such as Dobson does on his monthly letter. Also make available on a web page along side of our “missionary care” database. That way, missionaries around the world who really do not want to be identified can download them anonymously. At the end of the article give our address, our e-mail address, and request feedback and other topics they would like to find out about.
In a report to New Hope International Ministries dated August 1998, four of the items were about what became missionarycare.com five years later.
We have more than 400 articles and books about missionary care in the database from which queries can be made on more than 100 topics. We continue to add to the database as we read new articles and books relevant to missionary care. This database can be shared with anyone who has Microsoft Access.
We have the brochures in final form, meaning that they have been written, commented on by members of the psychology department who will give comments, and edited by someone from the English department.
The “Mental Health and Missionary Care” web page is nearly operational. Although it does not have all the “bugs” out of it, you can see it at (URL). At this point, you can download the database, but not use it on-line to do searches, and only the “conflict” brochure is fully correct, but the time should soon come when it is all working.
I told the organizers of the Mental Health and Missions Conference about what I was doing, and offered to share it with people who attended the 19th annual conference this fall—thinking I would give them computer disks. They asked me to make a complete presentation of what is available as well as giving the attendees the material.
Brochures
In March 1998 I gave a copy of the proposed brochure titled “What Missionaries Ought to know about Depression” to six missionary couples on furlough or living “permanently” in Wilmore. I did not really know what issues I should write about, but I knew I could not miss with depression. With that first brochure I included a self-addressed stamped envelope and the following paragraph on a slip of paper.
“This is just a first draft of a series of brochures we are considering producing for distribution to interested missionaries. Please give me any feedback you can. I am particularly interested in your reaction to the style of writing, the reading level, and the relevance to missionaries you have known in your experiences overseas. I am also very interested in what other topics you would suggest—what other mental health issues do you know of that it would be good for missionaries to know about, but they are not likely to ask their agency about. I appreciate your comments. After you have read it, please send it back to me. Thanks. Ron Koteskey”
All six couples replied saying that missionaries would read them, suggested changes in format, and suggested other topics. Their lists of other topics varied with some repetition, but the only topic on all six lists was “conflict between missionaries.” By April 22, 1998, I had a list of publications about conflict and had written a first draft of “What Missionaries Ought to Know about Conflict,” so I sent copies of the conflict brochure to all members of the psychology department. During the months that followed, I continued that process until by the end of October, I had ten brochures completed.
All of these brochures, and all written since, have had the following two statements at the end of the brochure.
This brochure is one of a series, and you are invited to suggest other topics you would like to know about to the following: (my name and contact information including USPS address, telephone number, and email address)
This brochure may be reproduced without change and in its entirety for non-commercial purposes without permission.
Brady Nasfell was webmaster of the Asbury College website, and he was interested in missions as well. By the end of October he had posted these ten brochures on a page in the Psychology Department section of the college website. We posted them in both .html and .pdf formats, the pdf formats so that people could print them as the four-fold brochures to be printed and distributed. Counseling centers printed them as brochures and made them available to clients. Agencies printed them as books and gave them to their missionaries. Agencies burned them onto CDs and gave them to their member care workers.
Database
While talking with Brady about the brochures I mentioned that I had an Access database of information about published (printed) resources about missionary member care. These resources were very valuable to me in writing the brochures. He encouraged me to post the database as well. I did not even know that the database could be posted and that he could post it so that people could search it online or download the database into their own computers.
I was changing from teaching experimental psychology to providing missionary member care, so I needed to read a whole new body of literature. As I prepared to read the literature related to Mental Health and Missions, I pondered what to do to remember what I was reading and being able to find information I wanted. I was now in my 50s, and I knew I could not remember things like I did when I was in my 20s.
Annotated bibliographies are helpful to those who want an introduction to the literature in a given area, but they soon become outdated, and they are unwieldy if they contain too many references. I remembered the boxes of cards that I used in graduate school with each card giving several (at least 6) cross-references to other topics. I finally settled on creating a database of material related to missionary care. Rather than creating an elegant database, I decided to create a simple one, so all the data is in one large table rather than in several linked tables.
The evolving product became a large matrix with over 400 references, each making up one horizontal record in the database. Each record (reference) consisted of authors, editors, date of publication, titles, publication data, type of publication, number of pages, an outline of the article, a brief summary of the article, and “gems” (particular parts of the article I found intriguing and wanted to remember). Then each article had “yes” or a “no” as to whether or not the reference was relevant to one or more of more than 100 topics ranging from accountability to women’s roles. Thus, it became a large annotated bibliography in an electronic format.
However, it was not just a general annotated bibliography about mental health and missions. It could also be used to create over 100 annotated bibliographies on specific topics. These topics range from accountability to women’s roles, and include all of the topics in the titles of the brochures above as well as 90 others. Thus, the database had a great deal of flexibility. Furthermore, each time I read a new book or article and entered it into the database, any new annotated bibliography generated on any topic contained the new publication, so it was continually updated, rather than becoming out of date. Finally, since it was in electronic format, it could be made available to anyone, anywhere, anytime to either search on his or her own—or to download and take personal charge of the content of the database.
As Brady talked with me about the database, I realized that I could share the notes I took about these resources, and they could be shared with any others that might be interested. They did not even have to learn Access, but could search the database on-line to create annotated bibliographies on more than 100 topics in member care. The only thing I had to delete were the columns I had used to give verbal evaluations and ratings of 1-10 of each article, chapter, or book. I did not want to share my opinion of each publication!
Website summary at the end of October, 1998
No Websites
10 Brochures
No Books
Database with 400 records
No statistics available describing activity on these pages of the Asbury College website.