Is Your Church Part of the Movement?

There is a free tool for local churches at the bottom. Don’t miss it!

There is a growing movement concerning local missions in North America, and I saw evidence of it this past weekend.

The Reaching the Nations in North America summit was a high-water mark for me, because it demonstrated a swell of concern for what can only be seen as the providence of God providing Great Commission opportunities to our churches. The nations are in North America. People from all over the world are moving into our communities, approximately 45 million of them. So many of these people are coming from places where there is little-to-no access to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It is no coincidence that God is plucking up millions from the hardest-to-reach places and placing them in the shadow of your church steeple.

This weekend, I saw hundreds of people from local churches and missions agencies across the country who see this new opportunity and are doing something about it. When we began planning this summit, we thought we had ambitious goals for attendance, but we underestimated. Many more people, more churches, desired equipping than we imagined, and we shut down registration early because we ran out of space. I am thankful to God that churches are beginning to see the importance of reaching the many peoples that find themselves next door.

But I want to ask you, is your church a part of this growing movement to see the nations reached right here in our own cities? Has your church considered how it can discover and engage people groups in your community? If not, why not? As JD Payne noted in his keynote at the summit, something is missiologically malignant about crossing oceans with the gospel to reach a people group and refusing to cross the street to reach those same people here.

As part of the summit, I co-hosted a seminar for local churches on the process of people group discovery and engagement. Our goal was to walk people through the process of getting their local church involved in this kind of work. If you are interested, I am including a link to the teaching outline from those sessions. It is free, and it is laid out in a way that should make it easy to understand and teach others. Consider getting your church involved. Click on the training outline link below in order to start using it.

*The outline is built in an online application called Workflowy. I love Workflowy, and if you check out this outline, you’ll see why. It is very easy to use when developing materials for teaching and sharing. You can share with anyone, even people who do not have an account. However, if you like the tool, you can sign up for a free account here. Use that link in order to bank some more storage in the account. I have plenty already but am happy to share the link so you can get more space!