New Partnership for Mobilizing Churches in Brazil
Brasil is pivotal in many aspects; it is South America's largest country; one third of all Latin American Christians live in Brazil. God has done a tremendous work in this country in the last 100 years. Today they have more than 50 million evangelical believers, and many of their churches are already sending out missionaries. The difficulty we have had in Global Focus was the language. Last year I had the Spanish version of Global Focus mobilization process translated into Portuguese, so now we are able to work in this great country using the same process that is mobilizing hundreds of churches in the Spanish speaking world.
Since I do not feel that I am able to mentor churches in Brazil, because of the language and frankly time restraints. We have decided to from the beginning it is best to train facilitators that want to be able to mentor churches in Brazil in the Global Focus missional process. For that reason I was able to make a strategic alliance with OM, and train their staff. This past week I was able to spend an entire week training the OM (Operation Mobilization) team in Sao Jose dos Campos in the process we use to mobilize churches all over Latin America
Since Portuguese is similar enough to Spanish, and I had the material in front of me in Portuguese, and even though I had a translator next to me, I did not have to use him very often.
(Either the people of Brazil are very smart, and used to listening to Portuguese spoken badly, or God gave me the gift of tongues….. I think it was the first.) I am very excited not only about the possibility of helping the Brazilian churches mobilize even more their own people on mission with God, but very excited about this new partnership. I realize the only way to grow our ministry is to continue to train even more facilitators and work through partnerships like this one.
I was also able to spend half a day teaching future workers that are going out from OM to the nations. It was a joy to spend this time with these young people that have dedicated their lives to work in missions. I was able to share with them what God is doing, and a little on how to work in the mslm world, and how God could use them there.
rom the offices of OM in Sao Jose dos Campos, we were able to go to Sao Paulo, and there I was able to start the mentoring process (with the entire OM staff present as well) with the Redeemers Chapel of Sao Paulo, an Evangelical Free church.I will continue to mentor this church and teach the OM team at the same time on how to mentor churches.
This past Sunday I was able to preach at this great church as well, and challenge them on becoming an Antioch church. Pray for them as they are starting this missional process, and their interest in taking it to the rest of their denomination.