One of SydAng's favourite motor mission bloggers has "passed the keyboard' to a group of fellow writers as his church's mission team heads over to India for ten days.
Nathan Brown, who spent almost a year overseas from late 2005 with his friend Julian Price blogging details of their journeys, will hand blogging duties over to a small group on the mission team.
Nathan and his team from Glenbrook Anglican Church left last week to spend 10 days over the Christmas period in Hyderabad, partnering with "Vadu Sangham' (Bride of Christ) church.
"We have a team of 23, many who are probably much more talented with a pen than me and we needed to divide up the tasks according to people's talents," Nathan says.
"With 10 days on the ground in Hyderabad over Christmas there is a real focus on informed, daily prayer in the homeland " the blog will be a key part of this so we thought it would be important to have people who had a definite focus on this task."
Nathan says the team putting together the blog will aim to capture the experiences of the whole team.
"They will interview different people for their stories and reflections. The blog crew will collate the "team' blog rather than simply share their thoughts," Nathan says.
One of the new bloggers is Lachlan Coleman who travelled on an aeroplane for the first time when he left for India last weekend.
"When one of our friends was unable to travel overseas for the mission, Nathan asked me to help write the blog, so two others and I stepped up to do it."
Lachlan says his interest in going overseas for a short-term mission started around one year ago.
"I was at a stage in my Christian walk where I really wanted to make my relationship with God real," Lachlan says.
"Nathan was talking about going back to the church in Hyderabad that he visited and I thought it would be good to see how God is working in another part of the world."
Lachlan says doing the Mission Interlink Perspectives course encouraged him to "put my money where my mouth is'.
"It forced me to put my faith into action which I was struggling with that year," Lachlan says.
A large commissioning service held two weeks ago saw over 100 people gather at Glenbrook Anglican Church to give their blessing to the travelling team.
"It was great seeing the non-Christian family members and friends of some of the team members seeing what people in our church praying about and are involved in," Lachlan says.
Nathan says the motor mission blog that ran on the sydneyanglicans.net website in 2005 and 2006 played a significant role in his journeys as he rode through places like India, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt.
"They helped in keeping people's prayers informed. We were kept pretty safe on that motor mission trip and to come home and find just how many had been praying specifically for us was pretty out there," Nathan says.
"It was also helpful for us to take the time every two weeks or so to summarise and make sense of what we were seeing."
