Missions Catalyst News Briefs

In This Issue: The Church in Indonesia, Ukraine, and beyond

INDONESIA: AirAsia Crash Kills 41 Members of an Indonesian Church

Source: The Gospel Coalition, January 5, 2015

One of the largest church networks in Indonesia, Mawar Sharon Church, lost 46 members in the recent crash of AirAsia Flight QZ8501.

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, and only seven percent of the population is Christian. Yet almost one-third of the victims in the crash were Indonesian Christians.

According to CNN, the church members weren’t heading to one event and didn’t all necessarily know one another, having attended services at different churches mostly around Surabaya.

Philip Mantofa, pastor of the Mawar Sharon Church in Surabaya, was shocked when he found out that 41 of the victims were from his church. Another congregation, Bethany Church, lost five members of the same family.

Another church, Gereja Kristen Indonesia Ngagel, a Presbyterian congregation of around 2,000, also lost members in the crash. Florida Rambu Bangi Roni said three members of her church—two adults and their child—died on the flight.

“The tragedy of AirAsia is a reminder,” she said. “We don’t know what time we will die.”

» Read full story (also reported in other sources).

WORLD: Status of Global Mission

Source: The Long View, January 6, 2015

Every year in the January issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, the Status of Global Mission is published. This table is particularly important for succinctly laying out the global trends over 150 years (1900-2050) and locating our current position among them.

Christians (of all kinds) presently number 2.4 billion; Muslims, second, number 1.7 billion. Christianity is growing at 1.35% per annum—good news, in that it is faster than the population. But Islam is growing at 1.88% per annum—faster than Christianity. The trend line does not envision a point when Islam becomes the largest religion—even by 2050, Christians will likely number 3.4 billion vs. Islam’s 2.0 billion.

The number of missionaries dropped from an estimated 420,000 in 2000 to an estimated 400,000 today. What is more disturbing is a new line added to the Status this year—the percentage of non-Christians who know a Christian: 14%. This means that 86% of all non-believers do not personally know a believer from whom they can receive good news.

The percentage of the world that is unevangelized dropped from 54% in 1900 to 29.3% today, and is projected to continue to drop. This is good news. Unfortunately, due to population growth, the absolute number of unevangelized individuals has grown: from 880 million in 1900 to 2.1 billion today. And it is continuing to rise: to 2.3 billion by 2025, and 2.6 billion by 2050. The end of the task continues to recede away from us.

» Read full article from The Long View. The article and table to which it refers (which includes all kinds of useful statistics with up-to-date numbers) is also online and free, but you’ll have to register with the IBMR for access.

UKRAINE: Churches Launch Yearlong Campaign for Evangelism and Discipleship

Source: Crossfield News, December 21, 2014

As snow falls outside, most of the people milling inside Central Baptist Church [in Kiev] keep their winter coats on. The parkas testify to the financial crunch that Ukraine has suffered with its recent civil strife and the concurrent economic slump. As tensions with Russian-backed separatists in two eastern provinces have heated up, churches like Central Baptist have turned the heat down to save money.

Today’s crowd of about 120 people has come to help kick off Mission Ukraine, a yearlong evangelism training effort organized by leaders of several Ukrainian Protestant denominations and Minneapolis-based GoodWORD Partnership. The goal: Train leaders across Ukraine in evangelism and discipleship. Those leaders then will teach people in their churches how to share their faith and, in turn, help the anticipated new believers to follow Christ and share their faith.

Mission Ukraine organizers hope to train people in as many of Ukraine’s 10,600 Protestant churches as possible before next fall. This in a country that began 2014 in relative peace but ends it mourning more than 4,700 deaths and more than 500,000 internally displaced people, the result of fighting in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

» Read full story, which includes pictures and interviews with church leaders. Does this story sound familiar? We included an earlier report about the campaign in one of our November editions.

» See also another story from Ukraine, Now Is the Time for the Church to Shine (Operation Mobilization). And thanks for praying for Ukraine, a nation standing at the crossroads.

MIDDLE EAST: A Change of Hearts

Source: Wycliffe Associates, January 2015

“Paul” lives in one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian, a place so volatile that it cannot be named. He has survived multiple assassination attempts since turning to Christ more than a decade ago. But this time, it appeared that his attackers would surely succeed.

There were three of them—men armed with lead pipes and rods—and they meant business. In a flash they unleashed a furious beating not meant to harm, but to kill. As their weapons delivered blow after blow, Paul was not filled with hate for his attackers. Instead, Paul was saddened by the fact that these men were lost and without Jesus. So he began praying and urging them to turn from their sin toward Jesus. Imagine that! With the shadow of death looming over him, Paul was inviting his would-be assassins to experience a life of freedom in Christ.

What happened next is difficult for us to fathom—but not for Paul. He has seen God’s faithful intervention too many times to count. One dropped his pipe and fled. The other two, with tears in their eyes and hope on their faces, dropped their weapons as they dropped to their knees and began pleading with Paul to tell them about Jesus Christ.

God is clearly at work in this highly dangerous region of the Middle East, and He is using people like Paul to help bring His message of love and redemption to men, women, and children who are looking for the answer to their emptiness.

» Read full story. See also another inspiring article from this issue, Why Would This Jesus Come to Me?

WORLD: Praying for the Nations

Source: Missions Catalyst

Want some fuel to feed your prayers for the world as a new year unfolds? Prayercast calls prayer “the number one way to reach people.” We hope you’ll pray in response to what you hear from news sources like Missions Catalyst, missionary prayer letters, and of course the topics, places, and people God has put on your heart and brings to mind. But if you want to pray more systematically, here are a few other tried-and-true tools to help.

Prayercast: Videos invite you to pray along with Christians from every nation and are supported by additional materials, including current news feeds and “quick facts.”

Operation World: A research-based prayer guide to every nation; also available as a book and helpful as a reference.

Global Prayer Digest: A daily dose of stories and information about the world’s peoples, especially the least reached; read online or subscribe to emails or a paper edition.

World in Prayer: Prayers of petition and thanks in response to changing global situations.

» Your favorite site left off this list? Share it with other readers by commenting below.

2015 Calendar of Events

Happy New Year!

As a service to readers, Missions Catalyst compiles and maintains an online calendar of mission-related events across the US and around the world. It includes a list of 2015 conferences, seminars, classes, retreats, and more.

Maybe you would like to attend some of these events or tell a friend about them. Or perhaps you are planning an event of your own and wonder what else might be going on those days. If you know about an event that would interest our readers and should be added to the calendar, let us know. We will post and send out updates as the year goes on.

» View the 2015 Calendar of Events.

blessings,

Practical Mobilization

In This Issue:

About Shane Bennett

Shane has been loving Muslims and connecting people who love Jesus with Muslims for more than 20 years. He speaks like he writes – in a practical, humorous, and easy-to-relate-to way – about God’s passion to bring all peoples into his kingdom.

» Contact him to speak to your people.

Waiting for the Kingdom: A Brief Advent Meditation

By Shane Bennett

Life includes a whole lot of waiting. We wait for the first snow, and then we wait for spring. We wait for someone to reply to our email, respond to our text, answer our question, or return our gaze. We wait for the baby to be born, roll over, say a word, take a step, tie its shoes, go to school, learn to drive, graduate, get married, and give us grandkids so we can watch the whole agonizingly beautiful process all over again. We wait for the doctor’s report. We wait for that breath that will be our last.

We also wait for a progress report, report card, yellow card, yellow light, and for the people with 13 items in the ten-item checkout lane who are paying with a check. I don’t know about you, but I wait for stuff to arrive from Amazon and say, “OK, Bezos, where are the delivery drones you promised?” I wait for people to take their turn in Words with Friends, for Mumford and Sons to release another album, and for 99% Invisible to drop in my podcast queue.

Those of us who love Jesus wait for his return and for the fullness of his kingdom on earth. We wait for God to keep his “blessing all families” promise to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12:3 and to answer the prayer Jesus prayed in Matthew 6:10 that his Father’s will would be done and his kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven. We wait for the fulfillment of the promise of Matthew 24:14, where Jesus says the gospel of the kingdom will be preached among all peoples as a witness to all nations before the end comes.

Do you, like me, sometimes get tired of waiting for the kingdom? Even though Jesus launched his ministry by saying, “Repent, believe, for the kingdom of Heaven is here,” if you look around, you see lots of non-kingdom stuff going on. Sometimes I need look no farther than my own heart. Other effects are more distant, but no less gut-wrenching, as when kingdom workers in Kabul perish in the midst of their work and others in Aden are killed after months of captivity.

I hear Peter’s words in my head: “They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation’” (2 Peter 3:3-4).

Can I say to you (while I’m saying it to me): Don’t give up waiting for his kingdom. Even as we look forward to celebrating the birth of Jesus, may God renew our faith and hope for the fullness of the kingdom which the babe was born to bring. Stay strong, the kingdom will come. God’s purposes will not be thwarted.

What to Do While We Wait

We have a couple of dogs, and we let them live in the house. That makes “going outside” just about the most amazing experience they can imagine. When someone opens a door, pretty much any door in the house, the dogs are instantly there. Since they’re not allowed to go out before the humans do, they’re given one of two commands: “Wait” means hang on until I get through the door, and then you can leap into your joy. “Stay,” on the other hand, means you don’t get to go outside this time. I imagine something like this goes through their little canine brains: “Oh man, we can’t go outside. Now all we can do is lie here and wait for him to come back. Our main challenge is to try to keep from eating out of the trash can.”

Our waiting is more like the first command: an anticipation of joy. In his book With Open Hands, Henri Nouwen describes the work we have while waiting:

“You are Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, so long as you in no way let yourself become established in the situation of the world, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come. You are Christian only when you believe you have a role to play in the realization of the new kingdom, and when you urge everyone you meet with holy unrest to make haste so that the promise might soon be fulfilled. So long as you live as a Christian you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life.”

Wait well, my friends. Ask for the kingdom. Battle apathy and despair. Ardently follow your kingdom passion. Love your enemies.

Enjoy Christmas for all you’re worth. And from time to time, pause to gaze at the wee babe in the nativity scene and remind yourself, “My, but that boy is going to change the world.”

A Year of Practical Mobilization

Did you miss any of our 2014 Practical Mobilization articles? Check them out through the links below or browse all the Missions Catalyst archives.

January:

Three Models for Connecting with Like-minded People in the New Year
Subversive Mobilization: Help Tell the Story

February:

The Jonah Juxtaposition: Why People Gravitate towards God’s Global Purposes and Why They Run Away
Subversive Mobilization: Best Practices with Megachurches

March: