God Call

I just had the opportunity to have lunch today with Ryan Martin, the Mission Pastor at University Baptist Church in Fayetteville. We talked about how both of our churches could partner together to reach the indigenous tribes in the Amazon River basin in Colombia. We are currently partnered with First Baptist Church of Jenny Lind to reach the Northern Arapaho Tribe for Christ. We have gone to Alaska with FBC Van Buren. We are about to send a team to Central Asia with a church in Louisiana. When my family and I served in Tanzania, we had a number of churches that were partnered with us in our work. Two weeks ago I had lunch with my good friend, Greg Ford, who is the Mission Pastor at FBC Fort Smith. We are looking at potential partnerships.

Church partnerships are healthy. I believe that we need to do more of it. There are many churches out there that are much smaller than we are and can probably not do their own full-blown partnership with a team on the field, but they can partner together with another church. I believe that this idea of churches partnering together to reach the world for Christ is a great way and maybe the best way for the body of Christ to come together. I have tried many other things in the past locally, like doing community-wide concerts or Disciple Now’s or revival services, but these usually never amount to anything, because of all the competition locally. But multiple churches could come together to reach an unreached people group for Christ. That sounds exciting and is an incredible experience to be apart of.

Churches coming together to do missions also breaks down the stereotype that churches do not really cooperate. Jesus says that when people see our love for one another, they will see Him. Jesus’ love is best shared not only by simply doing missions, but by also doing it together with other believers from other churches.

A very exciting thing that is about to take place in our church is that we will be hosting a mission team from Venezuela. They are coming to Fort Smith in order to do mission work among our Hispanic population and to help us begin a ministry to the Latinos in our community. This is taking partnership to a whole new level. We are also extremely excited to be working together with a team in Brazil to reach a city in Italy. Now this is body of Christ stuff! I desire to be apart of something that is big like this, and only God can fulfill that dream. He is allowing that to happen today in unprecedented ways and invites all of us along for the ride. My encouragement to you is to get involved. Don’t stand and watch on the sidelines. Life is too short.