Last week I returned from Brazil, where I continued to mentor the Evangelical Free Church of Sao Paulo. Pastor Frithold Kruger and his congregation were able to share all of their new missional projects. Not only are their people involved in local missional projects are reaching the lost locally, but also in difficult and remote areas of Brazil, and around the world. They were able to send a young lady to work in Haiti with their denomination, and now she is going to go to the Logos Hope ship of OM and their plan is to send her to the mission field.
The members of the church are very excited about what God is doing in their church and now their denomination. I spent 7 hours helping them to begin to prepare for their first ever Global Celebration. I wish you could have seen their faces when the 30 leaders that were at the training realized that in the Global Focus paradigm, it is the members that organize, help prepare, and even execute the Global Celebration!
In most churches, the only way that the members participate is by attending the services, but not so in the Global Focus paradigm. Why is this?
Because of some of our core values in Global Focus:
1. The main purpose of the church is missions
2. Missions is not just for missionaries, but for every single church member
3. Missions is both local and global at the same time.
The Evangelical Free church of Brazil is a German denomination. Now other churches and missionaries are noticing what is happening in Sao Paulo. I have been contacted by other German missionaries from their denomination that are interested in learning more about Global Focus in order to teach the rest of their churches in Brazil. Our prayer is that the Evangelical Free Church of Brazil, becomes a major sending force to the nations!
Last year I spent almost an entire week training the OM (Operation Mobilization) staff in Brazil in our missional process. I also had our new Global Focus material translated into Portuguese so that we could begin to mentor churches in Brazil. Fabio Torres, who is the director of OM Brazil, has started to mentor Baptist and Nazarene churches in Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro.
We are very excited to be partnering with OM Brazil and pray that God will continue to mobilize His church in Brazil, and call even more missionaries to the unreached.
