Many tired missionaries working in East Asia are delighted to have discovered Bethany.  This is a rest and retreat complex on Cheung Chau Island off Hong Kong. It is specifically funded and staffed to offer member care to those working cross-culturally in Asia and beyond offering good quality, inexpensive accommodation. Bethany is set in gardens of trees and flowers on the quiet, traffic free island of Cheung Chau with good beaches and scenic walks, so is an ideal place to relax and recuperate from a demanding ministry.

Despite feeling remote, it is conveniently accessible from Hong Kong, so it’s not hard to get to despite feeling away from it all.  Set on a hill in attractive grounds overlooking the South China Sea, Bethany’s location is idyllic – five minutes to sandy beaches, peaceful walks around rocky coves and yet the town with its restaurants and shops is just nearby. The Bethany team includes those who have understanding and long experience of the demands on people, for example adjusting to new cultures, difficulties with co-workers, frustrations with sponsors, parenting and educational decision-making, family and marriage needs cross-culturally.

The Bethany mission is to keep people resilient, working in their God-given field for longer. At a basic level, they provide a home from home with familiar food, language and culture allowing people to recover in holiday mode from tiredness and stress. In association with this they have experienced pastoral couples available for prayer and with a listening and sympathetic ear.

More information is available on the Bethany website: www.bethanyministries.com

A friend of mine recently suggested that we should use missionarysavingexpert.com as our web address.  Not a bad idea: it’s witty, nobody else is using it, and it does what it says on the tin.

That’s what we’re about.  Good member care can mean the difference between missionaries continuing being effective in their calling for years, or giving up and going home.  We’re resolved to do all we can to prevent them doing the latter.  Our three stage strategy is:

1) where we find missionaries who have critical needs, use our network of contacts to try and meet them;

2) work together with their churches and sending organisations to try and help them develop a vision and strategy for meeting those needs themselves;

3) work within the missions community to help raise standards of member care across the sector.

And in the longer term, we’re hoping to build this website into a complete web-based resource for providing people in the field with tools to do the job, so keep coming back for updates and new pages.

In recent weeks I’ve talked to a lot of people who are really excited about what we’re doing.  We’ve got a growing number of Facebook fans.  I’ve received a lot of positive response to our new website.  But mainly not from the people we’re aiming to help – struggling missionaries.

That’s why we need your help.  If you know any missionaries, please send them a link to this site.  If you know anyone who is active in the world of overseas missions, let them know about us.  The more people who know, the more chance we have of finding the people we’re here to serve.

And then maybe we really can be missionarysavingexpert.com!

Welcome to the revamped Syzygy website and blog!  I’m Tim, and I’m one of the directors of Syzygy.  One way or another, I’ve been involved in supporting missionaries for 15 years, since I realised that too many of them are either coming home for entirely avoidable reasons, or heroically labouring on under difficult circumstances.  Syzygy is resolved to do what we can to  support such people, help them continue in their mission, and become more effective.  And more importantly, we hope to encourage their sending churches and organisations to get behind them to do in the long term what Syzygy’s doing in the short term.

I hope that through this blog we will be able to stimulate discussion around various issues concerning cross-cultural workers, and draw more people into our ever-expanding network of volunteer supporters.  Whether you go, pray, encourage, finance, or support, I hope you’ll find something here for you.

Syzygy’s directors all have first-hand missions experience, between us having served short-, medium- and long-term in four continents, and although we’re all now based in England, we all continue to be involved in our own ministries to support missions overseas.  Our mission draws its name from our belief that global mission is a task whose burden should not fall exclusively on those who go, but should be shared by the whole church.  The word Syzygy – Greek for “yoked together” – conveys the image of oxen ploughing together, and the more oxen there are in a team, the easier it gets.

Join us!

For information on how to get involved with us, go to the CONTACT US page.