SQJ Taipei

Home service (or furlough) is a regular part of most missionaries’ lives.

For us, it comes about every 2-3 years and consists of us visiting various people and churches in the USA. Our next home service is scheduled for November 2008 to March 2008.

It seems like this experience used to be called furlough and that most mission organizations use a different term, like home service or home assignment. It is a welcome change because the word furlough indicates a “leave of absence or vacation” and for most missionaries, their time away from the field and in their home/sending country is anything but a vacation.

That isn’t to say that we don’t like home service or that there aren’t parts of it that are spent like a vacation… but I’d guess that most missionary families are like ours in that they actually try to take a vacation when they return to their country of service after home service.

In the August 2008 issue of Horizons, my friend (and missionary to Italy) Matt Crosser wrote an article about home service titled “An Old Country Perspective”.

Here’s a direct link to the August 2008 issue in PDF format (2.4MB)

Here’s part of Matt’s answer to the question, “How have your goals and expectations for the future changed
as you are now an experienced expatriate?”

Well, we have defnitely seen how important it is to keep taking regular days off.  Once we were introduced at a church as “Matt and Angie Crosser, who are on vacation here in the states and will tell us about the work they do in Italy.”  I think there is a major misnomer about furloughs for the average church goer. When we are in the states, we work at least as much as when we are on the field, it’s just now we get to be nearer to family, friends, and a comfortable culture.  We didn’t have family members who were missionaries or ministers before us, so our learning curve for insider language was vast.  It was on our second home assignment (furlough) that a close relative of ours finally realized himself that we weren’t on vacation while we were in the states.  He just didn’t know.  It was outside his personal experience.

Lots more in Matt’s article. Good job Matt!