Welcome to the official blog site for 2008 summer missions at the Gateway in Matamoros, 
Mexico. This site should become your primary point of contact for information on your trip and the ministries you will be participating in this summer. Please visit the site often as you prepare for your trip. Post your questions here—ranging from travel arrangements to ministry opportunities—and check back regularly for the answers. Once the summer begins we will post regular ministry updates so you can see how each week forms a chapter of the story God is writing for us this summer. The ministry your group engages in will be shaped by what happens before you come and after you leave.
The Gateway is a place of transformation. Summers here are a simmering concoction of challenges, growth, ministry, mosquitoes, brokenness, restoration, and sweat. We build structures, but more importantly we build relationships. We minister to people who speak a language we do not understand and we seek to recognize the language God uses to speak to our hearts and direct our lives. Before I arrived in 2005 to spend my first summer here as the Work Crew leader, I announced to the director that I was so done with week-long mission trips. I thought they were pointless and ineffective and they always left me unsatisfied. Now, as a part of the Gateway’s full-time staff, I am posed to enter my fourth summer of ministry here and I marvel at the change in my perspective.
I have witnessed week after week of transforming ministry here. I have heard the testimonies of college students who still mark a week at the Gateway in middle school as a watershed moment in their spiritual life. I really do see long-term fruit from these short-term trips, and to me that is a miracle. Last summer I facilitated projects for four weeks working alongside local pastor Jesus Blanco Martinez and his small church plant, praying often that God would grant them land on which to build a church. This weekend, I will celebrate with Pastor Jesus, his family, and his church over the recent purchase of the land we prayed for.
I once posed the question, “What can happen in a week, anyway?” Another staff member’s immediate thought was “Creation.” When she shared that with me weeks later that summer, I was deeply humbled. I have come to realize that the dissatisfaction I feel after week-long mission experiences may actually be the point. They are supposed to leave me dissatisfied…hungering for something more…looking for purposeful ministry opportunities and relationships to invest in long-term. So we welcome you here for a taste of what God will do with the little we give Him, and we pray that your group will leave here dissatisfied—with a craving that won’t let them settle back into life as they know it now.
Every summer I have been a part of here at the Gateway has exceeded the one before it. Our prayer is that the summer of 2007 will be the base for the summer of 2008 and that God will continue to build on what He has already started. The next series of blogs you will find here will cover the various ministry opportunities that we are setting up for the summer—both casting vision and covering the practical details. The Kingdom is expanding here, if we but have eyes to see it. In the midst of our brokenness, our lack of understanding and our flawed attempts at ministry, God has chosen to meet with us here. He graces us with His Presence and He fills the voids. We welcome you to join the battle for the hearts of the Mexican people, the hearts in your group, for our hearts, and above all for His glory!
