Last week, the January DTS finished their three-month Lecture Phase, and today, two teams of seven (six students and one staff each) are leaving for two months of outreach: one team to India, and one around Ireland. They will return at the beginning of July for a week of debrief before their DTS officially ends.

The Ireland team is lead by Sharayah Prowse (of Canada) who will also be working closely with some YWAM staff in Belfast. For a majority of their outreach, the team will be in Belfast, living on the Shankill in the YWAM Belfast offices, working across sectarian divides in largely working class communities. During the weeks, they will be working with the Forgiveness Programme, bringing workshops on forgiveness to youth of all ages in segregated neighborhoods and schools, and helping out in a YWAM outreach cafe on the Shankill Road. The team will also be doing youth outreach in Kesh, Co. Fermanagh, as well as outreach in conjunction with Summer Madness (Ireland’s biggest Christian youth festival) in Belfast and the Urban Soul street outreach in Dublin.

The India team is lead by Francis Khamanra (of Sierra Leone), who will be teaming up with a variety of YWAM and non-YWAM ministry contacts across India. They will arrive tomorrow in New Delhi, where they will meet up with a DTS team from Belfast for a week and orient themselves to a new environment, before heading off to Calcutta for two weeks. In Calcutta, the team are ministering in local churches, as well as participating in outreaches to homeless, widows, and orphans. Similarly, they will also work in local churches in Varanasi, where they will be for three weeks, also offering practical assistance to local missionaries and helping with evangelism in surrounding villages. The team will also be working with colleagues in Greater Norda.

Our desire for these next two months is not only that these teams, through partnership with long-term contacts, will be able to impact their nations for Jesus, but furthermore, that the participants in these outreaches will be changed to live long-term missional lives. The purpose of a DTS is not a one-off fulfill-my-commitment-to-Jesus time of missions service, but rather a time to lay foundations for a life of dedication to the Great Commission. Having spent three months in lectures and Christian community, only applying that time of learning to the needs of a world that ‘groans’ for a new existence (Rom. 8:22) will make it more than just personal theory. We pray that this experience will be transformational for all that are involved.

Related blog content:

• Renee and I will be visiting the team for two weeks while they are in Varanasi. Read about our pastoral visit plans.
• Pictures from the final days of this DTS’s Lecture Phase are available in our photo gallery.

Some of our community will be aware that both Renee and myself will be traveling to India in the last few days of May, staying for two weeks with an outreach team we’re sending out from Closkelt. The outreach team is leaving in less than two weeks for a two month DTS outreach all around India – six students and one staff. We will join them in Varanasi (and possibly Calcutta), primarily in a pastoral role to see how staff and students are interacting with each other, India, their ministries and their responsibilities.

Related links

The Closkelt DTS team will be piggy-backing a team from the Belfast DTS that left in April. That team is on the ground right now, and you can read about their adventures via a couple blogs. Two colleagues from the Leadership Teams of YWAM Closkelt and YWAM Belfast (respectively) have been them for a couple weeks on a pastoral visit and have particularly good stories about the haps.

• Heather Clark is director of communications for YWAM NI, and writes about some of her mishaps and joys in India on her blog.
• Erin Seibel has been leading DTSs in Belfast for the past couple years and is visiting her outreach teams with Heather in India and Burundi.