| abstract | While many Christians desire to devote their time fully to missionary work, responsibilities prevent them from pursuing
their goals right away. They often wonder when will be a perfect time to serve God without hindrance. In my opinion, the time period after retirement may be
perfect, but at the same time, it may be the last chance for some of us to seek full-time missionary service. It is my position that mature missionaries
have several advantages over young missionaries and the Scripture is replete with information that assures senior adults' place in God's plan for the entire
world. Most importantly, I hope that seniors would not choose to waste their lives both before and after retirement. Instead, I hope seniors will focus on a
meaningful and useful life that is beyond fulfillment of a successful career. This paper demonstrates my hope, that is, to challenge myself and other
Korean-American Christian nurses to be used by God as missionaries in the future while continuing to work in the present time as nurses and also to help
nurses ponder more deeply about the possibility of engaging in ministry in retirement. I have limited the scope of the project to ten Korean-American
Christian nurses in New Jersey. I conducted individual pre and post interviews with the participants, two field work experiences, and four main teaching
sessions. In keeping with the purpose of the project, we asked several questions about how the project challenged the participants. Further, we used two
parts of our notion of evaluation: observing change and discerning transformation. In addition, the LAC members and I utilized the functional approach for
project evaluation. I have evaluated my leadership by identifying benchmarks of progress as we move from one phase to the other, by assessing the nurse
participants' end commitment to overseas missionary work, and by the outcome of what we learned. |
