"You speak posh like."

We were walking by the River Liffey near the North Wall Quay (pronounced "key") in Dublin when we met the two young ladies. We were on a 14-day fact finding trip, doing preliminary research for our mission project.

The two girls were riding their bicycles where they weren’t supposed to be and stopped to check out these two foreigners, drawn by our strange accent. As we drew them into conversation, we began to get some valuable information about how life looks through the eyes of the Irish, a very different picture than in America.

The Irish are a people group numbering about four million where our message has never taken root, traditional methods of evangelism have not been well received in this Catholic culture.

By God’s providence, we were able to worship with the entire Irish Adventist membership (about 350) at a Sabbath convocation. We noted that most of the members are non-Irish, many there temporarily working or getting education. There are more Adventists per capita in China, India or New Guinea than in Ireland (about one in every 16,000). As a Church, we have little representation in the Irish culture.

Our plan of action involves first living among the Irish and doing an in-depth study of their culture while bonding and making friends. The object is to understand the Irish people deeply, to enable us to move into the evangelistic phase of the project with programs, methods and materials that will communicate to the Irish heart in a deep way.

The goal is to start an indigenous church-planting movement among the Irish people that will be self-perpetuating and self-sustaining. This is a long term project. The first stages involving the anthropological study will most likely take about three years, but this phase is critical to the formation of the evangelistic phase that will follow. Please bathe Ireland in prayer as we finish with the fundraising and training phase of this project and prepare to launch.

Our thoughts often go to the young ladies we met that day on the Quay, along with the other friends we left behind when we left. What are their current chances of finding salvation in Jesus?

Brad, Sheri and Sharon Bushey are currently members of the Upper Lake, Calif., church. They have accepted a call to a long term church planting project to the Republic of Ireland with Adventist Frontier Missions. AFM is a supporting ministry that develops mission projects among unreached people groups. For more information about this project, contact the Bushey family at babushey1@juno.com or visit http://www.afmonline.org/missionaries/mit.php?id=94.