Tony Webb, executive director of Vision USA, a Charis Fellowship church planting ministry, recently sent their September update. A portion of his report appears below. Click here for the complete report, including some prayer requests.
A book I read last month and keep thumbing through has an interesting and important quote.
“Movements don’t spread if paid professionals are solely responsible for the work of missions.” (Addison, The Rise and Fall of Movements, p. 55)
That encourages my heart as I look across our network and see so many engaging GSE who are not paid professionals!
Another book I am reading says, “Just 28 percent of the roughly fifty thousand nonprofits that obtained tax-exempt status in the United States in 2005 reported financial activity a decade later. In just ten years, roughly three out of four nonprofits ceased to exist.” (Greer and Horst, Rooting for Rivals, p. 19)
We live in such interesting and exciting days! The need to release the church family into the mission world is critical. The need to build sustainable systems is critical to focused mission effort.
These two quotes are from two differing directions. On the one had it must be the church family that leads the way on mission engagement. We must have tools they can use to start churches everywhere (Any person, Any place, Any time)! On the other hand, we need a sustainable culture and system driven networks (nonprofits) to engage mission. As I have been praying and contemplating these thoughts, three questions arise (among many):
Do we live in a world of scarcity or abundance?
Am I, are we, focused on our clan or Jesus’ Kingdom?
Are 5 loaves and 2 fishes enough?
VUSA Next steps: I appreciate prayer as we continue to work at positioning ourselves as a mission network that has a long lifecycle! Our board met this week and we thank God for all the growth He has given to us, but we have a lot of work to do in 2020!
Pray for our board expansion. We expanded our board size by two more seats. Pray for those who are prayerfully considering filling those new seats. I’ll keep you informed.
Pray for our Field Team as they process our key next steps for 2020 and how we move ahead in those steps. We are working on our 2027 Future Story that we are close to finishing up. This document is our vision document to lead us forward.
Mexico: We enjoyed a very effective time in Ensenada, Mexico over Labor Day! Our goal was to share GSE Multiply, a second level, regional training exploring how to move ahead on a regional basis. The heart of this training is very simply: Movemental things move at the speed of trust!
Since this is true, how am I a person of trust and how to I help invest in and help form people of trust?
We spent most of Saturday telling stories – there are so many stories of people coming to Christ! Reuben told of a 9-year-old girl just proclaiming to all how she had to receive Christ as Savior! There were not many dry eyes in the place!
Click here for the complete report, including some prayer requests.