Vision Purpose History and Philosophy Course Description The Materials
Vision – Every local church in the world doing its part to send missionaries to the unreached ethnic groups within their own country and in the 10/40 Window, in cooperation and coordination with the global church of Jesus Christ.
Purpose – The purpose of Your Church Can Change the World (Your Church) is to provide the local church with the necesary information, resources, tools, teaching activities, and motivation for establishing a cross-cultural missions program which reaches ethnic groups through the sustained sending of missionaries, who are supported morally, spiritually, and economically. The self-teaching and illustrated format of this course, along with the suggestions for its printing, has the purpose of raising up a multitude of missions mobilizers equipped with a material adapted to their particular country or denomination.
History and Philosophy- This curriculum has been years in the making. It all started with the “Missionary Saturdays” that were organized around Mexico City in the beginning of the ´90’s. As time passed, we realized that we needed a compilation of these missions teachings, so each teacher put his or her favorite theme into written form. Juan Carlos Gómez and Elizabeth López edited the compilation in time to present it to the Mexican delegation to the Second COMIBAM (Missionary Cooperation of Ibero-America) Congress of World Missions in Acapulco in 1997. I was named director of the Department of Missions Education and assumed the responsibility for promoting Your Church in Mexico.
For the annual meeting of COMIMEX in Guadalajara in 2003 a first revision was prepared by Martha Cortez, containing the same text but including new resources, maps, statistics, and images, all in a new format.
After 10 years it became increasingly difficult to train new mobilizers with material that was becoming obsolete. A complete revision was needed to reflect a new teaching philosophy:
The second revision of Your Church was designed so that any mature Christian could find it lying in the street, pick it up, read it, open the CD, and start a ministry of missions mobilization with all the knowledge, resources, information, contacts, tools, and teaching activities that had been developed in the Department of Missions Education of COMIMEX.
This new revision was presented at the annual COMIMEX meeting of 2007 in Ensenada, Baja California. Upon seeing Your Church, Carlos Scott, then president of COMIBAM, recommended that it be used in every country in Latin America. The third revision was necessary to prepare the book for this wider distribution and it was presented at the COMIBAM meeting of October, 2009 in Colombia. It was then translated into English and 200 digital copies were distributed at the Tokyo 2010 Global Mission Consultation in May, 2010. The fourth and fifth revisiones reflect minor updates.
The distribution strategy for the future is:
- Formally publish this fifth revision in Mexico.
- Create a customized version of Your Church for each country in Ibero-America using the COMIBAM network.
- Create a version of Your Church for each of the large denominations.
- Promote Your Church globally via this website.
Our hope is that Your Church Can Change the World, with its simple, reproducible, self-teaching format, will facilitate a missionary movement from every ethnic group where the church of Jesus Christ has been established. That’s how it should be! Where the church already exists, there should also be a missionary movement to those unreached ethnic groups that are still waiting for the beautiful feet of a Christian messenger. Together we can do it!
Course Descripción – Your Church is a basic orientation that helps a church or denomination take its first steps towards cross-cultural missions work. The themes and activities are organized in a way that challenges the inadequate paradigms that exist in our churches and leads the participants through the following process:
A. Catch the Vision – We have learned that in order to catch a missionary vision, you have to understand three things simultaneously:
- the biblical plan of missions in the Old and New Testaments,
- definitions of new words and concepts that describe the world and missionary work, and
- statistics which describe the current situation regarding the ethnic groups in Mexico and the world, and the degree of penetration of the gospel among them.
B. Get Motivated – By studying the history of missions, hearing the testimonies of Mexican missionaries, watching missions videos, and participating in some fun activities, the participants receive that sense of excitement that motivates them to go or support missions.
C. Get to Work! – After catching the vision and getting motivated, the Holy Spirit moves the participants to ask, “What can I do?” The following themes address that desire:
- Praying for the World,
- Financing Missions,
- The Local Church and Missions,
- The Missions Committee in the Local Church,
- Adopt-A-People, and
- The Ministry of Missions Movilization
The participants leave this short process with the vision, the motivation, and the tools to form a program in their local church.
The Materials in the Your Church package were designed to facilitate your ministry in missions mobilization. All the maps, charts, and images will help your teaching have more impact. There are also many didactic activities to help emphasize the teachings. Our friend, Johnny Mobilizer, seen throughout the teacher’s book, will be teaching you these activities. Besides the Teacher’s Book, described above, the package contains:
- The student manual – which follows the outline of the teacher’s book, point by point. The participants can take notes in their manuals and take home some of the important images.
- The Power Point Presentations – which directly follow the teach’s book and the student manual.
- The youth manual – The Great Commission, contains fun, effective studies on basic missions concepts in a question and answer format, with crossword puzzles, word finds, and unscramble-the-word games. The youth manual does not follow the same outline as the other resources.
- The Your Church promotion triptych.
- The 100 Christians Said triptych – a fun proposal for missions fund raising.
You can download the course today and start mobilizing this weekend!