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Within
the burgeoning population of the world, the Kingdom of God is being
established around the world at a speed that makes our minds spin.
According to the best research available, Christianity is expanding
at the rate of 6.9% per year. There are an estimated 178,000 new
followers of Christ every day!
This
awesome growth of the church has produced a difficult shortage of
pastors and church leaders. It is estimated that the growth of the
church around the world is creating a demand for 7,000 new
pastors/leaders each day to care for the needs of the new believers!
If every Christian training institute in the world were operating at
120% of capacity it would not touch 10% of the need for leadership
development. Further, the majority of the new leaders cannot be
released from their ministry roles for the length of time necessary
to receive traditional seminary training.
As the
Global Outreach Ministry of ***** prepares for and enters the 21st
century, these are two challenges we are facing:
1. Evangelization of the 4.2 billion people of the world.
2. Training pastors, elders and church leaders. Of these two, what
is ***** most qualified, competent and equipped to do? And is
there a way ***** can enable the other task to be accomplished
more effectively than "doing" it ourselves?
1,739 "unreached
people groups" have been identified which do not have a Gospel
witness, nor is there a church or agency targeting them. However,
there are Christians and churches from other cultures and nations
that can do the work of evangelization more effectively than a
western church such as *****, because of closer cultural,
linguistic and ethnic affinities.
This
does not exempt the western Church from being involved in
evangelizing the unreached, but the completion of the task cannot
depend solely on manpower from the western world, as has been the
case in the past 200 years of the modern missionary movement. The
2/3rds world must be mobilized. We propose that this become the
primary mandate for *****'s involvement in evangelization of "unreached
people groups".
At the
same time, one of *****'s strengths is its commitment to equip
leaders. This covers the spectrum from the elders and deacons,
Neighborhood Congregation Pastors, and Discipleship Team Leaders to
the people "in the pew" who are exposed to solid Biblical teaching,
equipping seminars, events, and discipleship who have not exercised
formal leadership in the church. What ***** people have "absorbed"
through this training is greater than the training received by more
than 1.7 million leaders/pastors of churches in many countries.
Therefore, our people are a valuable resource from ***** to the
Kingdom. ***** can effectively equip, enable and facilitate the
expansion of the Kingdom by strengthening existing church leaders in
other countries, and mobilize them so that evangelistic gifts of
national brothers and sisters are used for planting new churches in
unreached areas of the world.
*****'s
strategy abroad is the same as our home strategy - facilitating
saturation church multiplication movements through partnerships with
strategic nationals and ministries. We want to run alongside men and
women that have a vision and strategy for impacting their own
countries with the Gospel through planting healthy, multiplying
churches.
[Used
with permission of Perimeter Church, pending approval] |
