Come and Celebrate, Come and Participate

Winter 2013 - Come and Celebrate, Come and Participate Fifty years ago, in obedience to the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 to “go into all the world and preach the gospel,…baptizing and…teaching,” as well as in fulfillment of Acts 1:8 “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem…Judea…Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” Fellowship International was birthed as the cross-cultural arm of the Fellowship of Evangelical Churches in Canada.

This anniversary year Fellowship International will be hosting celebration events across the country. We will be remembering our proud past and the hundreds of missionaries, both career and short-term, sent by God into the harvest field. We will praise God together for the thousands of people won to Christ, baptized, for the churches planted on five continents, for the communities and prisons transformed, and the alleviation of human suffering in dozens of countries through FAIR (Fellowship Agency for International Relief). These are lives forever changed! As I have seen our personnel in action around the world, I have repeated to anyone who would listen, “We have every reason to be very proud of our missionaries” I hear it from our partner mission agencies and confess it makes me feel like a proud papa.

Much has changed in the fifty years since Fellowship International was birthed. In the Western world, the doctrine of the lostness of man has been diminished or ignored. This has resulted in a loss of missionary fervor in some churches. As well, there has been a significant rise in pluralism, the idea that all paths will eventually lead people to salvation. Rise in ideological fundamentalism Globalization has shrunk the world. Travel is fast, communication is instant, technology breaks down barriers. I carry a smart phone with a computer chip that contains the Bible in the host language, along with commentaries on the Bible that I take with me on my travel to our fields of service We are faced with a massive migration of peoples to the major cities of the world. This urbanization has led us to a new level of poverty never before experienced. Nations are shaking off colonialism and asserting their sovereignty and independence. The persecution of the Christian church is on the rise. The face of our own country has changed radically. We are a nation of immigrants from the far-flung corners of the world. Fellowship International’s milestone year is an excellent time to seek God and to process what His future for us would look like in the light of these dramatic changes. In spite of these massive challenges, it is still the same gospel, the harvest is still white, and our God is the same yesterday, today and forever!

Unprecedented Challenges – Unlimited Opportunities To meet these new challenges, and to grasp the opportunities before us, Fellowship International undertook an extensive process in the last few years to ensure that our efforts will be strategic and effective. This process, this “vision-casting” included extensive consultation with our International home staff, missionaries, pastors, focus groups, National Office Senior Ministry team, and a Canada-wide Fellowship survey and led to a document approved by our National Council last August.

Here are the highlights: Our mission is to: Establish Churches Cross-Culturally The central focus of our mission is establishing churches. The church is what Christ gave His life for, and what He is committed to and that which the gates of hell will not be able to stand against. Because of that, all of our activities, including our humanitarian efforts, must have as their central focus planting, strengthening, or linking with a local church.

Our mission is to: Develop Healthy Reproducing Churches Right from the beginning we want our churches to have the DNA of reproduction, to have an informed understanding of cross-cultural church planting. We expect each church to eventually multiply itself. As well, we want to see our churches birth church-planting movements.

Our mission is to: Strategic Populations. We are called to pioneering and strengthening the church where the indigenous church is not strong enough to evangelize and train. A minority of the world’s missions resources goes into the least-reached people groups of the world, and we want to focus on where the gospel is not. As John Piper says “Missions exist where worship does not”. So our focus is on reaching the unreached where less than 2% of the population is evangelical.

Our mission is to: Partner With Our Churches We are grateful to our churches that intercede for the work of the Lord. If the Lord does not “build His spiritual house,” we labour in vain. We are thankful for ongoing support of the churches of our Fellowship and the people across this land who enabling our personnel to spread the seed of the Gospel. We want to see a whole new level of relationship and partnership between the missionary and our churches so that our churches increasingly participate in missionary activity. We want our churches to take more ownership of the mission and not just of the missionaries they support. We want greater collaboration in, sharing of, and creating of, joint projects so that together we can more effectively reach the world for Christ.

Our strategy to accomplish the mission is threefold: Connexion Ministries: Disciple-making that evangelizes, equips and empowers people towards gospel-centered living. This includes all kinds of outreach, medical care, ESL, short-term missions, creative arts ministry, tent-making as mission. Multiplication Ministries: Leadership Development that equips and empowers people to be leaders of strategic, indigenous, reproducing missionary-sending churches, is vital. This includes ministries such as LeadersFor, Kairos, Church-planting and coaching, College and Seminary training. Holistic / Integrated Ministries: Christ’s love is expressed through Fellowship International personnel and partner organizations under the umbrella of FAIR. We want our humanitarian assistance to be increasingly linked with our own personnel and their proclamation of the gospel.

The Bible is the inspired Word of God. Jesus’ words are true for all time. There is a heaven and there is a literal hell. God has both brought the mission field to our doorstep in Canada. There is accessibility overseas as never before. There is a great need for the creative arts, business as mission, and pioneer church planters and teachers to penetrate the 10/40 window. Because these things are true, I ask you to partner together with YOUR Fellowship International to see workers commissioned for ministry in cross-cultural settings and to become an active part of accomplishing the goal of preaching the Gospel to every nation.