How to Share Your Experience

Your mission trip isn’t complete until you’ve had the chance to share your experiences with others. The opportunities to tell your story will vary, but most volunteers are asked to share about their trip either as part of a team or as an individual. You will want to be prepared for such opportunities so that when they do come along, you are ready. Of course, planning ahead will help make your presentaion easier to prepare and better documented with sights, sounds, and memoirs. Here are some tips to help you prepare your presentation.

• Keep a journal during the trip.
  • Develop “verbal snapshots” of how you saw God working and answering prayer.
  • Chronicle experiences with the special people you met.
• Focus your stories on people and their response to the gospel.
  • People can look up facts and figures about your host country on their own.
  • Tell them things about people they can’t “Google.”
• Use photographs and videos to enhance your stories, but don’t over use them.
  • Don’t do the old slide show routine with ten minute monologues about each picture.
  • Use photos to illustrate and help visualize your story, not to take your audience on a “virtual tour.”
• Emphasize the positive; avoid critical comments about other cultures.
  • Talk about what you found interesting and different in the host culture.
  • Address some areas where their culture clashed with the Bible and how that effected witnessing.
• Encourage your listeners to pray for people you met and for on-going follow-up ministries.
  • Your efforts can have a long term effect through prayer.
  • Give them specifics about people and their needs.
• Avoid rambling on and long tedious descriptions.
  • Plan what you are going to say and present so you can stay within the time you’ve been given.
  • Prioritize what you are going to talk about and for how long.
• Provide information about future volunteer trips.
  • Perhaps you can’t go back, but you can inspire others to go and continue the work.
  • Prolong your impact by becoming an advocate for the people you ministered to.
• Don’t expect everyone to embrace your story.
  • Those who stayed at home have been going through their same routine and did not experience what you did.
  • Therefore, they may not share your enthusiasm, so avoid judging their lack of excitement.