The First Five Years:
November 1998—October 2003
Website and Books
I presented a paper, “Available Anytime, Anywhere: Information for Missionary Personnel and Mental Health Professionals,” at the 19th Conference on Mental Health and Missions in Angola, Indiana, in November 1998. The paper included much of the information at the end of Chapter 1 as well as more specific information about the website. One section of the paper was titled “Principles of Production:”
Wanting to “scratch where missionaries itched,” rather than producing something irrelevant to needs, I wrote one brochure (on depression) and gave copies to half a dozen missionaries from several agencies. Asked whether or not a series on various topics related to mental health and missions would be useful, everyone a resounding “Yes.” Asked for additional topics, missionaries responded with several (on everyone’s list was something about “conflict”). That original brochure was modeled after typical Evangelical Missions Quarterly articles and the missionaries responded very positively to that. We then adopted the KISS principle—Keep It Short & Simple. Although there is always the temptation to “tell all you know,” we agreed that no brochure could be longer than what could fit on an 8.5 X 14 sheet of paper in a four-fold format. If the content became longer than that, something had to go, or the information had to become two brochures. Furthermore, missionaries wanted something practical, something they could use, and they liked a question-answer, bulleted format which allowed them to scan the content to see if it was relevant as well as quickly pick out needed information.
In addition to making the presentation, I handed out, free of charge, 100 floppy disks containing the ten brochures available on the website as well as the database as it was at that time. I had enough disks to give every couple and every single attending the conference one.
I also presented “WWW.hope.God/on/the/web: Information Available: Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime,” at the annual conference of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in March 2000.
I was teaching full time for the first four years, and we were getting personally involved in doing 3-4 reentry retreats and about as many orientations per year as well as visiting missionaries overseas occasionally. However, I did continue writing brochures and reading published material on a regular basis—each brochure or database entry was a small enough task to be done in “spare time” while still working full-time.
Brochures
Additional brochures for the “What Missionaries Ought to Know… series.1998-2003:
I also co-authored a new series of brochures, “Stewardship Of Self,” with Marty Seitz.
In summary, the total number of brochures available by October 2003 included 36 brochures including 27 in the “Ought to Know” series and 9 in the “Stewardship of Self” series.
Database
As I continued reading everything I could find, I added another 337 references to the database. By this time I had most of the material available in the database consisting of a total of 737 records.
In the January 2001 issue of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Scott Moreau and Mike O’Rear had an article titled “Virtual missionary care?” In it they said:
The Psychology Department of Asbury College has developed perhaps the best site on missionary member care: “Mental Health and Missionary Care…The site includes three primary features.
A collection of brochures written for missionaries. These deal with practical mental health topics (stress, culture stress, anxiety, expectations, grief, leadership, etc.) and can be printed from the site, copied, and distributed. In a day when copyright issues are sensitive and intellectual property rights are closely guarded, it is refreshing to find an institution committed to providing practical advice without charge to the missions public.
MissionaryCare.com
I retired from Asbury College in June 2002. The college said I could keep the brochures and database posted there; however, because I no longer worked at the college and Brady Nasfell was working elsewhere, the member care material was given a much lower priority, sometimes taking months to post new material.
For several years, a former student of mine, John Muehleisen, had told me repeatedly that my brochures were really good, but they were just too deeply buried in the Asbury College website. He continued to tell me that and encouraged me to get my own website. About that time he said that he was willing to build the website for me and got missionarycare.com (.org was not available). He was interested in Member Care, and he offered to do the website free of charge. So in 2003 www.missionarycare.com came into being.
Having our own website gave us more flexibility and control of when things were posted. It also gave us something very important, feedback in the form of statistics. We now knew what was being downloaded, how many of each item were viewed or downloaded, where in the world things were being downloaded, etc. This gave us not only information, but motivation.
I had always known that things were being downloaded from email, phone calls, and snail-mail. However, now I could follow daily what was happening relative to the resources, and I did follow it daily as I continued to write.
Books
Member care workers in several countries requested permission to translate the brochures into other languages, and they did so, distributing them to missionaries individually or publishing them in periodicals. Friedhilde Stricker translated 25 of them (all that were available) into German, and Verlan fur Kultur and Wissenschaft published Was Missionare wissen sollten… Ein Handbuch fur Leben und Dienst in 2003.
Bonnie and I began doing reentry retreats for several different agencies. We had used several different reentry books as part of those retreats, but most of them gave primarily facts about reentry. We wanted something that would help the participants process their own experiences during the time they had served in their passport countries. We wrote a brief (50-page) book, Coming “Home”: The Reentry Transition, which could be used in a group, as a guide when being debriefed by someone else, or for a person to just process their own experiences.
As John Muehleisen was building missonarycare.com in 2003, he suggested gathering many of the brochures together as chapters in a book. I did so, and titled the book What Missionaries Ought to Know…: A handbook for Life and Service, the English translation of the German book published that year. This first edition of the book contained 32 chapters from both series of brochures, “What Missionaries ought to know” and “Stewardship of Self.”
Each book contained the following on the copyright page:
“Permission is granted to copy and distribute
this book without charge and in its entirety.
Send it to anyone you believe may benefit
from reading it.
Please do NOT post this book anywhere else on the Internet.”
We wanted the member care resources to reach as many people as possible, so we encouraged those who downloaded books to print them and distribute them to anyone or to forward it in digital format to others who needed it.
We posted them in several formats so people could download them in whatever one they preferred. The compressed .zip files were especially for missionaries who lived in areas where they did not have good Internet connections and paid by the minute or by the kb for downloads (Here is a note from a decade later: Only 2% of the books downloaded during the next 10 years were compressed .zip files, so that does not seem like very much. However, that was 5275 books, and that sounds quite important, especially when the missionaries downloading them were probably the ones most in need.)
The total number of books available was 2.
People
One other thing I came to fully realize during this first five years was that I could do very little without the help of many other people. I have mentioned some of them earlier as groups of people. Faculty members in three departments at Asbury University were very helpful to me. Of course, members of the psychology department were of great help in making suggestions about rough drafts of the brochures. I also asked professors in the Bible department and the English department for suggestions as well.
However, two specific people gradually became people who commented on everything I wrote for many years. One is a colleague in the Psychology Department, Art Nonneman. Art came to Asbury after nearly two decades on the psychology faculty at the University of Kentucky. He made invaluable comments on psychological issues as well as just great suggestions on a wide variety of topics. The other is Yvonne Moulton who taught English Composition for decades at Asbury College, and is the wife of my department chairman. Yvonne was always the final one to edit brochures and books. Of course, most of her comments were related to wording, punctuation, etc. but she also made content comments as well.
John Muehleisen, former student, missionary for three decades, great talent in website design, encourager, and heart for member care, was the one who convinced me that missionarcare.com was the best way to go. Not only that, he did everything to get the websites going and maintain them for years.
Summary at the end of October 2003
1 Website (on-line at end of October)
· Missionarycare.com
36 Brochures
2 Books
Database with 737 records
No statistics relative to page views or downloads were available during these five years when the resources were posted on the Asbury College website.