Dear Praying Friends,

It is 100% true to view life with the well-known adage - "It's not a sprint, but a marathon." We certainly embrace that at our site when it comes to many, many things.

But - we are relooking at how we are breaking our goals down into tasks - and the cycle we use to accomplish tasks. Some of you are already familiar with the language of AGILE and Design Thinking. For others, those are foreign concepts - and that's ok! The easiest way to describe it is that we are promoting the idea of falling in love with the problem (not the solution) and reevaluating at regular intervals. Another part of our process is breaking significant goals down into bite-sized intervals. We had been using a month as our interval but have recently started using 2-week intervals instead. Why? The easiest answer is that we had so much to do in a month that sometimes the tasks felt overwhelming. If we break them down into smaller bites, we can have a better sense of who is available to help with the individual tasks. Will it work? We will see!

Some might ask, "What on earth does that have to do with training the next generation of missional leader?" or "Is this really a way to reach people for Jesus?"

We believe that learning how to work together as a team to accomplish goals helps us accomplish both objectives! So many teams fall apart because of internal conflict, learning how to talk about goals, set them together, evaluate together, and display to people watching us what good teams look like is a huge win!

I have some prayer requests:

1. Please keep praying for Elissa's health. Her back has been really acting up this week. Physical therapy has been helping, but she had her last appointment yesterday. She had a doctor's appointment, and started on some extra treatment.
2. We are putting together a home assignment plan for September - December.
3. We have a commissioning service for the Siemen family - who will be heading on home assignment and then launching Envision Manchester!
4. Our new intern, Anna, arrived yesterday! She will be staying with us (both at Envision Berlin and in the Picconatto home) for the next 6 months.

Thanks for praying!

mike