frequently asked questions:

why “do” mission trips?

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:39:36 -0500

After leading his second mission trip to India in the summer of 2005, Shawn Smith felt very strongly called by God to try to make a mission trip to a developing country an annual part of his ministry. Shawn does not profit from these trips in any financial way whatsoever. In fact, they are generally a great sacrifice to his business and family. Shawn believes that these mission trips are unique in the way they serve the poor: Not only do these trips serve the physical poverty of the developing world, but they also serve the spiritual poverty of people of prosperity and affluence, like most who live in the USA today...people like himself. Shawn feels committed to do all he can to serve the poor through these trips, and to invite as many people as possible to join him in his sacrifice, and share in these transformational experiences.

who paid for this website?

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:06:45 -0500

Believe it or not, this website and the time it took to create it has been completely donated. This mission, including this website, is a passion of Shawn Smith’s. (more about Shawn’s passion for missions in the faq entry, “why do mission trips?”) This site was proudly “Made on a Mac” by Shawn using a revolutionary, simple, and amazingly inexpensive new program by Apple called, “iWeb”.

how did this mission begin?

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:09:49 -0500

During the summer of 2005, Shawn Smith led a team of 17 team members from across the US on a four week mission trip to serve orphans at the REACH Home in Bapatla, India. (more about this mission found at indiasidebyside.com, and here.) Upon their return from India, the team joined Shawn for a 7 day national tour to share their experiences, and to secure child sponsorships for children at the REACH Home. After one of these concerts in eastern Pennsylvania, Jennifer Crist approached Shawn and asked if him if he would consider helping her put together a mission trip to serve orphans and disadvantaged children in Guatemala. This exchange was literally an “answered prayer” to Shawn. Earlier that year, many potential team members that Shawn invited to join him in India could not join him for various reasons: India was too far and too intense for a first-time mission experience, 4 weeks was too long to take off of work, 5 months of notice was not enough lead time to take that much time off, many parents expressed they would like to share a mission experience with their children but this would be too costly and too lengthy for children, the climate was too hot, anti-malarial medication was too risky, work projects in intense heat & humidity would be too physically demanding, living & working with perfect strangers for four weeks might be a bit too intense, etc. Shawn had been praying for a mission opportunity to present itself that would remove these obstacles to potential team members of the India trip. Jennifer and her husband George had adopted a child from Guatemala, Jonathan, two years earlier. She and her family had taken several trips over the past two years to serve the needs of disadvantaged children, and increasingly felt a need to do more with each trip. (read more about Jennifer’s testimony in the blog.) Jennifer spent four hours in the Assembly Hall of Camp Nawakwa in Arendtsville, PA that day in August, describing her vision for this mission. As she did, Shawn realized that nearly all of these former obstacles would be removed with a trip like this: Only one week, less time, less expensive, less intense, less heat, no malaria medication needed, more variety of mission opportunities, more families could participate, etc . This meant more people could go, more could be served, and more could be done for the Kingdom of God. Shawn and Jennifer kept in touch, and in early December of ‘05, Jennifer & George invited Shawn to join their family on a trip to Guatemala to investigate the possibility of a future mission trip. At the conclusion of those five days together, and after much prayer and discussion, Shawn and the Crists felt God calling them very strongly to make this vision and dream of this mission a reality.

what is “rss feed”, and how does it work?

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 18:37:24 -0500

Most popularly used with news websites, RSS Feed is a format that new versions of web browsers use to automatically pull newly updated information from a website, and collect it in a bookmark on your browser. If your browser is “RSS enabled”, when you click on “subscribe”, it will create a bookmark for you of the RSS feed for that page. Then, anytime a new entry is made on that website, your browser will automatically be updated and let you know without needing to click on the site itself. It generally will list a number in parentheses next to the bookmark named site [ie shawnsmith.com (3)] This number represents the number of new articles posted since the last time you visited the site. If you click on that bookmark, it will bring up a headline and by-line of each article. Clicking on one of those links will take you directly to the page. It’s a great new technology to give you a quick way to see if anything has been updated on a site, and see headlines & by-lines of articles, without having to actually visit the site itself.