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Last week I told you how Global Focus in Latin America is helping to facilitate a movement of God to the nations. We have now grown to 14 facilitators that are mentoring over 300 churches in 12 different countries.
We believe that the next great movement of God in missions is emerging from Latin America towards the unreached. Please prayerfully consider helping raise the $7,500.00 for our facilitators training events and train even more facilitators to engage and mentor even more churches in Latin America.

Last week was a great week participating in COMIBAM (The Latin American Missions Congress). Several of the GF facilitators participated and we were able to engage hundreds of leaders throughout Latin America. We were also able to lead Centro de Fe y Esperanza church of Bogota (Faith and Hope Center) start the GF process this weekend. We were able to train about 70 of the church’s leadership and preach Sunday, the alter was full of people committing to become an “Antioch Church” to reach the nations from Colombia. This week, Xochitl and I are with our pastor at his Timothy Barnabas ministry school in California, and this weekend will be able to connect with Matthew and Nayeli and debrief about their vision trip to Southeast Asia.

Thank you for holding the ropes in prayer and financially for our ministry!

Global Focus Latin America is now mobilizing hundreds of churches with that same exact process, and the result have been astounding. Churches in Latin America, even in Venezuela, which is now a country in chaos, and crisis, are not only starting new churches in their own country, they are reaching different indigenous groups in the amazon jungle.

Global Focus churches are now reaching different ethnic groups like the Chinese population, the Syrian population, Central Asian mlsms that are living in Latin America. Before, these churches were only reaching the Spanish speaking population, but now, they are leaning other languages in order to cross cultural and linguistic barriers in order to make disciples of “all peoples”.

All over Latin America, Global Focus churches are personally participating in the Great Commission by going on short term missions trips, justice past summer churches in Latin America went to minister in Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and in the Amazon jungle. All of them , lay members of churches, paying their own expense in order to personally fulfill the purpose of the church by taking the Gospel to the nations.

Not only that, but these churches are now also sending out their own missionary units to the unreached; Connect Global has helped to send out now more than 50 missionary units from churches that have implemented GF in Latin America.

These units are in some of the most difficult areas for the Gospel, there they are winning mslms to faith in Christ, discipling them, and planting the church, where there was no church. So we see that through the Global Focus missional process, the mission field, is becoming a mission force.

It is not often I personally ask for your help in our ministry, but this time we absolutely do need you to pray about a special project. If we are going to continue helping create a Missional Movement of God in Latin America, we need to train even more facilitators. Obviously it is imposible for me to mentor hundreds or thousands of churches personally. We now have 14 Global Focus facilitators in Latin America, all of who are pastors that have implemented Global Focus in their own churches, and seen first hand the transformation that it brings, also all of these pastors have sent missionaries to the field. Our goal is by next year to have at least 25 facilitators mentoring even more churches.

This year we are going to have a couple of Global Focus Facilitator Training events in which we teach the transformation principals to mobilize churches. We need to help several of the facilitators with their airfare to the training event, and with some of the housing costs. We do not pay any of our facilitators, they are all mentoring churches because it is their firm conviction that Global Focus will help create the God sized missional movement, but we do need to help them with the training cost’s which is about $7,500.00. Please prayerfully consider this helping us with this project and continue to create a missional movement of God in Latin America towards the nations. If you are able to help with this special project please send your love offering to Connect Global; P.O. Box 1028; Woodstock, GA 30188. Or you can send via Paypal on our new website; www.enfoqueglobal.org.

“If you mobilize a candidate, you have a missionary to send to the field, if you mobilize their church, you will have an entire church on mission with God, locally and globally, capable of sending many candidates, if you mobilize hundreds of churches, you will create a movement of God.” Right now in Global Focus Latin America we are mobilizing hundreds of churches in Latin America, and God is creating a missions movement, especially to the unreached. This week we are participating in the Latin American Missions Congress (COMIBAM; Latin American Missions Cooperation) with nearly 2,000 missions leaders, and pastors from all over Latin America, Brazil, and Spain.

I was able to teach on how the Global Focus missional process is transforming churches all over Latin America, and how they are sending out their own missionaries, even to some of the hardest areas of the unreached world. We have had hundreds of people come by our stand, and engage us saying “This is exactly what we need and been looking for.” As a result of this one meeting we will begin to mentor many more churches, and now 2 more major denominations in Latin America have asked us to mentor their entire denominations, one has 2,000 churches, the other had 3,000 churches. The doors of opportunity in Latin America are wide open, churches are now realizing that this is “our time” this is the time to step up to the plate and send out our own people to take the Gospel to every tribe, tongue and nation.

Our natural focus is always inward, we are by our own sinful nature self-centered. So inevitably churches tend after time tend to focus inwardly and not outwardly. Their focus becomes how many people they can get to come into their buildings on Sunday’s, so they have to develop relevant, innovative services to draw people to their buildings.

They have to maintain and upgrade the buildings so people want to come in, etc….. and slowly our focus becomes inward towards ourselves, and not as Jesus intended the focus of His church to be, which would be out side the walls of the church. That is why mobilization is necessary, because it is more natural to focus on ourselves (our church, our people, our city) than it is to focus on the world.

Because I travel almost every week, sometimes I need to go to my chiropractor and he applies pressure to align my back.
That is what Global Focus does, it helps a church to align around the true reason that it exits, to be God’s instrument to extend His Kingdom to every people group in the planet.

That is why Global Focus is not a seminar or a teaching course, but a process of implementing paradigm changes. Just as my chiropractor applies pressure each visit, so GF each mentoring session helps align each local church and apply changes that result in mobilizing the entire church around God’s global mission.

Guatemala is the most evangelical country in all of Latin America. One hundred and twenty years ago the Quakers sent missionaries to Guatemala and started a denomination of churches called “La Iglesia de los Amigos” (The church of friends). Even though their denomination is smaller, they want to be able to make an impact in the world. Pastor Maudiel came to one our our Global Focus intensive training’s at Miramonte in El Salvador a few years ago, and saw that the focus and excitement of the entire church was on fulfilling God’s mission. He said, that is what I want for my church, and what I want for our denomination.

Luis Marti and I had the privilege of teaching the initial Global Focus seminar to about 70 of their leaders. We started Friday evening and taught and preached all day Saturday. It was amazing to see the people, many of whom had been in church most all of their lives, and the lights started coming on, that the purpose of the church if to fulfill His mission!

Then the pastor got excited as he saw his leaders do the case studies in our seminar, and in group discuss how their church could be more strategically involved in missions both locally and globally. It was evident that God was igniting a passion for them to take the same Gospel to the unreached that Quaker missionaries had brought to them 120 years ago.

That evening Pastor Luis preached a tremendous word from the Lord on how to reach unreached people groups, and on Sunday am, they invited me to preach their anniversary service. God did an incredible work, and 8 people publicly confessed Christ as their Savior and several dozens surrendered their lives to a missionary call.

Last week I was able to preach for my good friend Steve Flockhart at New Season Church in Metro Atlanta. This is one of the first churches to partner with our ministry when we started. We had one young woman confess publicly her faith in Christ and many decisions to live missional.

This weekend I was in Morristown, TN at a Hispanic church; Iglesia Bautista de la Gran Comision (Great Commission Baptist) and take their leadership through the Global Focus seminar for 6 hours on Saturday, and then preach on Sunday were we had 3 come to faith in Christ, and dozens surrender their lives to missions.

This small Hispanic church is now sending their first cross cultural worker to the unreached!

This week my wife and I are in Mexico, and this weekend we will continue to mentor Getsemani Baptist Church of Puebla, with pastor missionary Bruce Bell (who is the founder of Miramonte Baptist in San Salvador 45 years ago).

Next year our goal is to respond to the request of missionaries to launch Global Focus in Romania. We already have Latin American facilitators who want to take GF to the churches of Romania to see the same explosion of missions as we have seen in Latin America.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the new partnership with Global Focus and OM Brazil, and how we are expanding into the largest country in Latin America, but that does not speak Spanish.