OMF International's IT needs

Article by an IT professional serving with OMF in Singapore

Well connected?

Mei-Mei’s family left behind all they had known in the fertile green valleys of Indo-China.

As war swept through their peaceful mountain village, they carried Mei-Mei on a hazardous journey to a refugee camp. There her uncle met a foreigner who told him a strange story of a God who died and lived again. Her uncle found himself believing the story, and he shared it with his brother’s family.

Today, Mei-Mei is still grateful to that foreigner. Inspired by his example, she joined OMF, determined to carry the good news where it had never been heard.

That Christian worker who had served so faithfully hadn’t gone on his own. Behind him were supporters who had prayed, loved and funded him. In mission, we rarely forget this partnership between those who send and those who are sent.

But there is a third group of people we often do forget: professionals in support roles who work hard within mission agencies to help the senders and the sent.

I know, because I’m one of these people. My journey into missions began in 1998 on holiday in China. With time to reflect, I realized that life was passing, but I wasn’t really living my Christianity. So I prayed, "Lord, help me by bringing people who can show me how to live an authentic life of faith."

God answered my prayer through Christians in New York and London, and he led me to become an expert in project management and IT delivery for personnel. When I later moved to Singapore to build IT teams, I became friends with some OMF workers. They asked me if I would be interested in helping OMF deliver an International Personnel System (IPS).

By this time, I had spent 11 successful years in technology with an investment bank delivering human resource and finance solutions internationally. I struggled with the invitation. Why would a business professional join a missionary organization? Was it a cop-out from the real world? What about my own spiritually needy workplace?

Eventually, I realized that my expertise in supporting and serving a team could really help OMF. I accepted the challenge to lead the ‘IPS – Connecting People’ project.

We are looking to see more people declaring God’s glory in East Asia and are therefore praying for 900 new workers to join us by 2011. But we also need to ensure that we are building the structures we need to keep people serving well.

OMF frequently struggles to find "willing skilful workers" in the field of information technology. Historically, we haven’t invested much strategically in IT and our existing structures are beginning to creak. We therefore need to use IT to help OMF to:

• Understand today – To care for our personnel, we need timely information about each individual. With dozens of small, unconnected databases across the fellowship, we currently waste time entering the same data in different places and dealing with confusion when data in one database isn’t the same as another! Information about children and their educational needs has been found to be out of date, leading to a significant gap between the number of children in OMF and the number of TCK (Third Culture Kids) workers available.
• Facilitate future growth – We invest a tremendous amount of work into helping people discern a calling and join OMF. At present we spend about 20 hours per candidate not in discussion or prayer, but in administrative work. IPS aims to reduce this work, allowing our support staff to effectively handle growth while having more contact with people.
• Develop the membership – We want to ensure that the rich heritage of OMF is passed on to our new members through training and informal apprenticeship. This is particularly important during periods of growth. Currently we have a five-person team which spends months every year travelling and training OMF personnel. By using online learning tools this could be carried out more quickly and economically.

We covet your prayers and support: if this project is to succeed, the team will need wisdom, stamina and resources. Through "IPS – Connecting People" professional and business skills can help strengthen mission practice, linking us together more closely and making our efforts more effective.

Some may serve in refugee camps, villages and cities. Others serve anonymously in surgeries and classrooms and IT teams. But we are all serving with a passion to know Jesus and make him known.

Jon Watts

OMF IHQ Singapore