Last January I preached the CIMA youth congress in Antofagasta, Chile. (I partner every year with this organization and preach their missions call message at their youth congresses in South America). While I was there I was asked to speak about how Global Focus is impacting the missional movement of local churches in Latin America. A group of independent baptist churches asked me to launch Global Focus with them. After finishing in Bolivia I was able to fly to Santiago, Chile, to launch Global Focus with this group of baptist, evangelical, and one Assembly of God pastor. I wish you could have personally heard the testimonies of the church leaders after going through our initial seminar.
They said, “Global Focus has challenged us like nothing ever before, it has opened our eyes to why our church exists and what our responsibility is to the nations.” The leaders and pastors were so palpably excited to participate in this transformational process. The main church we are mentoring now wants to send one of their families to China to serve the Lord. Pray that Global Focus can help these churches to maximize their Global Impact.
I personally mentor 2 churches in Bolivia, Karos La Paz, and Kairos Santa Cruz. We just finished our personalization module with over 150 leaders from both churches, teaching a total of nearly 20 hours. The purpose of this module is to help everyone in the church to find their unique missional purpose in God’s Kingdom. After teaching the leaders how to use our material, they in turn will teach the same personalization module in small groups, so that each person in the church is able to find where they fit into God’s Global Mission. Why do we do this? Because missions in not just about missionaries, missions is the purpose for the life of each follower of Christ.
How are they implementing this in their church and their lives? Kairos has started missional projects with laypeople that are reaching marginalized street children, prostitutes, marginalized areas, not only that, they are taking the Gospel to indigenous areas of their own country, they have engaged the Mennonite population with the Gospel, and they just returned with us last month from a Bible distribution project in Central Asia. Another team returned last month from Angola, Africa, they also have teams working in the Middle East and in totally closed countries of Asia.
Not only was I able to teach their leaders, but also a group of 12 young professionals that feel a special call of God on their lives to cross cultural missions. These young professionals are passionate about taking God’s glory to the nations and becoming future missionaries.
On Thursday evening when I finished up in Guatemala, I was able to fly to Panama where we launched Global Focus with Iglesia La Fe. I met pastor Jorge in the COMIBAM meeting in Colombia last year, and he expressed his desire for his church to become a Globally Focused church.
We were able to meet for 6 hours with 50 of his top leaders and take them through the initial seminar. On Sunday I was able to preach in both am services, and we had 5 people publicly profess Christ as their Savior!
At the end of the service pastor Jorge called an emergency leadership meeting for Tuesday evening, and said we are going to start making some intentional changes in our church to focus on the reason we are a church; For His Mission! Then the entire church said a loud AMEN! Pastor Jorge then said, Global Focus will help us achieve our dream of sending Panamanians to the nations. We believe that this will be just the first church in Panama that we are able to help.
So during the month of March this is what God did: Argentines, Bolivians, Venezuelans and Hispanics from the U.S. were able to minister in Central Asia; Salvadorians and Brazilians in another Central Asian country; Bolivians and Venezuelans in a totally closed Central Asian country, a Salvadorian and Mexican couple in the Middle East with refuge’s; Salvadorians in the Amazon Jungle of Peru; and Guatemalans in Cambodia.
So what are the 2 things that all of these teams have in common?
1. They are all from a Latin America, proving that the mission field is becoming the missions force.
2. They are all from churches that are being mentored or have been mentored by Global Focus in Latin America.
God is doing something unique in Latin America, and Global Focus is one of the tools that He is using to engage Latin American churches and christians to personally participate in His mission.
We started mentoring the Amigos Denomination a year ago, and have seen dramatic changes in their churches. The Global Focus process does not just teach missions lessons, but it literally helps mobilize the entire church to missions. That is what is happening in the Amigos churches we are mentoring.
Not only are they learning about missions but they are developing missional projects reaching marginalized areas in their own city and country, and now they are personally participating in Global Missions. This last week I was in Guatemala mentoring their churches, part of the leadership team we are mentoring presented their report from their first ever global missions trip.
This team of 9 Guatemalans where able to go to Cambodia and help establish a medical/dental clinic and also a bakery. These Guatemalan believers raised their funds in their local churches, they were commissioned, and participated in a 2 week missions project. Part of the team will remain until August to work in the newly established clinic. As they gave their reports, they all said how that this trip had forever changed their lives. They also said how grateful they were to be part of a missional process that not only helped them learn of God’s mission, but helped them develop relevant strategies to personally engage in what God is doing.
The same week our teams were in Central Asia and the Middle East, Luis Marti was mentoring churches in Mexico. He was able to start the process with 2 new churches, one in Mexico City and the other in Irapuato. He started the process with pastor Ramiro Martinez, who is one of the best missions mobilizers in Mexico. The leaders of his church were very excited as Luis took them through the first and second module. We are so excited to have Luis Marti on our team, he is already proving to be invaluable.
This past week I was able to preach the opening service of the Global Impact Celebration for Highland Park B.C. in Muscle Shoals, AL with pastor Brett Pitman. We praise God for churches that have implemented many of the principals of GF and are engaging their church members to the nations. Pastor John Russel is the missions pastor (former VP of Global Focus) and at the end of the week, we saw hundreds respond to engage in missions, and several surrender their lives to full time missions!
La Gran Comision B.C. is not a large church, they are a church of about 100 members. We have been mentoring them for nearly a year now, and have helped them to make several paradigm shifts. Not only are they now engaging locally in mission but they are now participating globally in missions. They are now preparing for their first every Global Celebration this fall, in which they will bring missionaries from around the world to help mobilize their church even more.
Pastor Luis Marti is now mentoring several churches in Latin America. This past week he was able to continue mentoring Maranatha Church of San Salvador.
This is a church that is learning that the reason they exist is not just to have weekend services, and build buildings, but to fulfill Christ’s mission to the nations.
Luis helped them develop their missional purpose statement, integrate missions into every ministry of the church, and develop a prayer strategy of praying every week for missionaries and unreached people groups.
