Fiona’s Story
13 Aug 2020
Fiona served with her family in Island South East Asia for close to 15 years. She and her husband gave themselves to church planting among unreached peoples and to the development of others. Fiona is a Registered Nurse married to Mike, and has four growing kids!
Why Pioneers?
We chose Pioneers because they are a very relational organisation and they are not top-heavy! Pioneers leadership style is servant leadership, so the leaders were always listening to us and respecting our input. We loved the fact that it isn’t a bureaucratic organisation with management telling you what you need to be doing and how you need to be doing it. We love that decisions for the field are made by the field and not the home office. We love the core values, particularly servant leadership, ethos of grace, flexibility, and the church planting focus. We love the way finances are “managed” and “treated” in Pioneers – the philosophy behind finances is great. We love the way budgets are set and managed. We love the model that Pioneers uses with the sending church, mission mentors, and field structures.
We have no hesitations in recommending Pioneers as an organisation, particularly for people who are creative thinkers, who don’t like to be “put into a box”, who don’t like to be told what to do all the time, and for people who are very relational. But in saying this, Pioneers also works for those who like to live and work within structures and systems. There is a lovely balance in Pioneers between structures and systems, and then free-flow.
What are the highlights of your missionary journey and the lessons you learned?
Could not possibly put the last 14 years of highlights and lessons learned into words! Today I have been remembering that God is faithful, He has walked us through many “fires and floods”, that the “fires and floods” don’t always go away, but that through them all He is by our side, He has allowed them to happen, and we grow in our selves and in our relationship with God through these situations. That God does truly move mountains. We have been through many situations where we thought it was impossible or impossible to see a way out, and God came through in miraculous ways. That God surprises us when we least expect it.
How did Pioneers enable you do your work?
Pioneers has great structures in place to give excellent field support – we have watched many workers from other orgs crash and burn on the field and to have minimal field support, either this happened because of a lack of support or had a lack of support and so they crashed and burnt. On the field Pioneers is seen to be a very supportive org. Pioneers also offers a lot of training. We loved the launch team concept and the modules that we did for the first year on the field. Our area leaders were also awesome at equipping us or empowering us to be equipped to do our job.
-Fiona Webb.
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