Archive.fm

Pure247Radio

Live from The Gathering - Mike, Oscar

It was great to speak with Mike from Oscar at The Gathering 2024. Find out more about Oscar here: oscar.org.uk Get In TouchSupport the Show.Pure247Radio.org is The Pure Choice, and Everyone's cup of tea even if yours is coffee! Facebookfacebook.com/Pure247Radio Instagraminstagram.com/Pure247Radio X (Twitter)twitter.com/Pure247Radio YouTubeyoutube.com/@Pure247Radio

Duration:
8m
Broadcast on:
19 Jul 2024
Audio Format:
mp3

It was great to speak with Mike from Oscar at The Gathering 2024.
 
Find out more about Oscar here: oscar.org.uk 

Get In Touch

Support the Show.

Pure247Radio.org is The Pure Choice, and Everyone's cup of tea even if yours is coffee!

Facebook
facebook.com/Pure247Radio

Instagram
instagram.com/Pure247Radio

X (Twitter)
twitter.com/Pure247Radio

YouTube
youtube.com/@Pure247Radio

And now we're chatting to an organisation called OSCA and a man named Mike. Hello, Mike. Hello. Now, OSCA, it doesn't necessarily immediately make me think anything, which is great. So what's it all about? Well, yeah, probably most people think about the award ceremony, and we often get emails every year when the award ceremony is on. But we're actually a charity, we've been going 25 years, we're set up basically as a mission support service. So anybody doing anything in Christian work, anywhere, for whatever they need, we help them find it. So we've gradually collated a huge database of all sorts of resources to help people in that line of work. I think most people when they first meet us, see our job boards, and we advertise online all through the year for a large number of Christian organisations and churches and mission organisations. So that's what folks that have met us usually think that's what we do mostly, but it's just part of what we do. So you've got job boards here, which I've seen, and your support in ministry and stuff. So have you got a few examples just to help us understand this better? I mean, you're seeing your support and I can think of a hundred things off the top of my head. Maybe you've got some real case stories. Where have you, I suppose, linked person A with person B to achieve something? Yeah, well, some of the things we deal with regularly, I mean, it's often things that people can't find anywhere else. One of the things that comes to mind, just because I was dealing with an email yesterday, is if folks come back from overseas, either for a short time or for good, they have some practical challenges, finding a house, finding a car. So one of the things we do is we do list houses that are available for them to rent by the temporarily or longer, short term or longer term. So that's one of the things that people use for us. And I often at events, in fact, the last event we did just over a month ago, I had somebody come up and say, we've got our furlough housing through you guys, and they were stuck otherwise. Not everybody wants to live with relatives because there's not space or whatever. So it's really good to see that practical help. Yeah, so the housing is one thing. The jobs is another. I get an increasing number of people come up and say, I've got my latest job through you, and so I'm sort of eternally grateful because I didn't think I was going to find the right thing for what I thought God was doing and what my gifts hold, because people have a set of gifts or skills that they think is only useful in the secular world. They don't quite realise that they can use those things in full-time Christian work. So yeah, that's just some of the very practical things that we coordinate. We've all got transferable skills, which we can use in different ways. And I get exactly that thing of, well, I know how to do this, how can that possibly help? But actually, do you know what, when God gets involved in something, all that stuff that how we're going to use that, all of a sudden comes for the thought. I just reminded of a chat I had with a lady called Alison from Christians Against Poverty. She worked for Mars for years and years, loads of skill about commerce and industry and how to be doing all these different things. She now works at Christians Against Poverty, but her transferable skills, I was mind-blaming listening to it because all the stuff that she thought, how am I ever going to use that? Christians Against Poverty saying, we want this and it just matches it perfectly. Yeah, yeah, and that's my story too, really. Very briefly, I was at university and I was doing a mechanical engineering degree. I was learning to fly with the university S squadron, part of the RAF, and then God got a hold of me. I became a Christian on a weekend away, and I started to, I felt from that moment that God wanted me to use my working life for him, and I thought, well, where does the aviation thing come into it? Surely, there's no Christian aviation organizations, and then somebody else a bit later on introduced me to Mission Aviation Fellowship, and it was like it was the big missing piece of the jigsaw. So that's where I started. I actually trained for and flew with the RAF for 10 years overseas. That's my mission experience, I trained in the States and then flew in Madagascar and Uganda to determine each. So it is just interesting, if you think the skills and the gifts that you've got can't be useful in God's service, I'll challenge you about that, come and speak to me, and I'll find something that will surprise you. I was going to ask about your background, because if you're helping people who are coming off mission and they need a break, I'm reminded of a friend of mine who was a Chinese missionary, and she actually lived in the UK for her job, but she was living rented in a house that belonged to missionaries who were overseas long-term. So she had their house, and of course, when they came home from mission, they said, we're really sorry she's been there quite a few years. Now you need to leave and move on, and it's quite hard, it's quite a challenge because you've made a home here, as much as she knew, it was effectively only refined out in a period of time, that got extended. It's still quite a shock when you think, where am I going to live? Yeah, there's a lot of hidden challenges for people who go into mission work, I'd say they're all part of the sacrifice, and some of them you don't realise at the time, and the whole accommodation thing, if you've got a house that you leave, you just aim for somebody to live in it, then you've got to work that so that it works for everybody and isn't such a shock and all of that, but yeah, I've seen some of those challenges too. So how do people find out about your website, do they get into it with you, is it a website, is it a Facebook page, how do people best get hold of you? Yeah, most of what we do in our service is through the website, pretty much everything's online, apart from these occasions where we come to events and have a jobs board. So yeah, if you just googled OSCA mission, or OSCA Christian, you'd probably find us, but our website address is osca.org.uk, that's it. So yeah, I say most people leave you search for Christian jobs, or Christian opportunities, you'd probably find us anyway, we're going to be on that first page, because we're the largest people that do this in the UK, advertise opportunities and Christian work. Thank you. I love meeting people and finding out about things, and one of my privileges is things I hadn't thought of, like you said that this existed, this is really awesome, and I love finding out about new things that I had no concept of, but I think there should be somebody doing this, and then I'll certainly meet someone I think, fantastic, but I'm also really encouraged by your thing about well, this is what I was doing, but then God got hold of me, because when we're working for God, none of us can be unemployed. Yeah, that's right, yeah, I love people's stories too, and the privilege of doing what I do is I sort of help people in a crucial step in their journey towards finding out what God's doing in their lives, and that's the great privilege of this, that's why I've been doing it for 25 years, and I love it. It never ceases to amaze me, because everybody's different, and the way that God works is, he's got something very particular to do through each person, and unlocking that is just amazing. Yeah. We are all made on purpose and with purpose, God has a plan for your life, absolutely. If you don't believe that, you're wrong, he does, he loves you. Right, and thank you, Mike, if you want to go to that website against oscar.org.uk, you can find out more about that and all that's going on there. Did you know, Pure 24/7 Radio has a shop? Well, we do. You can buy merchandise while supporting the work that we do here. Simply head over to www.pure247radio.org/shop, that's www.pure247radio.org/shop. [music]