Steve Windsor, Missions Director for Scripture Union NSW says that each team will “set up a temporary community, live in and love that community, and minister to that community by telling them about the love of Jesus.

“They will display the love of Jesus in what they do and how they care for that community,” he said.

They are there to make disciples of Jesus, and they’re not shy about it. Eternity asked Steve to tell us some of his stories from Scripture Union missions over the years.

“The way people convert at mission is really organic. They don’t go ‘hey I want to become a Christian!’ They go, ‘there’s something about you guys’. And then they go back home and they go ‘there’s something about those guys…’ And then next year they go, ‘there’s something about them…’ and the next year they come up to us and say, ‘we started going to church!’”

Often families are converted over several years, and this almost always starts with the children. Steve says, “Years ago a child came and joined our Mini Mite section (the SU program for under 5s), and learnt songs like ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know’ and would read the Scriptures with us and then we’d take him back to his parents. One day I walked past the caravan and the child was saying ‘I love Jesus’. His parents said ‘oh that’s great, good for you’. Seven years later, the whole family is converted and going to church. They couldn’t stop their son loving Jesus, so they had to love Jesus too”.

But the Scripture Union Mission teams have their fair share of disasters too. “Last year we had a huge electrical storm on the far north coast. We were walking up from the beach and I prayed to the Lord, ‘please keep it away from us’. God answered us and the storm swept around us, but it moved on to Lennox Head and the lightening strikes lit the ground on fire. The whole team had to be evacuated”.

More than the storms and the sweltering heat, Steve says the heaviest burden is the stories beach mission volunteers hear from those they’re seeking to serve.

“People confess emotional abuse, rape, teenage pregnancy to us. It’s all very confronting for us, because it’s a broken world, and it’s very sad,” Steve said.

“All of these hard situations present us with a wonderful opportunity of helping campers out through a crisis”, Steve said. In this, the teams really are displaying the love of Jesus.

In South Australia there are only five missions this summer, but they have plans to launch a new mission on Kangaroo Island in the near future.

Les Dennis, the new South Australian Missions Director came to faith in Jesus on a Beach Mission when he was only 22. Now in his 70s, Les shares that Scripture Union missions are “a good place for kids to come because they know they’re safe and are strengthened in their faith”.

Image: Flickr, used under CC License