September 01, 1995 by Rick Wood

A Church That Is Doing "the Impossible"

Conventional wisdom, which isn't always very wise, tells us that if you want your church to grow, don't emphasize missions too much. It's not very popular and it's a drain on the funds needed for ministry at home. Based on the low level of missions emphasis in most churches it would seem that many pastors have adopted this conventional wisdom.

But wait just a minute! There are a growing number of churches that are very strong on frontier missions and they are growing like crazy. One that is breaking all the molds and doing the impossible is Bethany World Prayer Center. Even their name gives you a clue as to their strong emphasis on missions and outreach.

Bethany is an integrated church in Louisiana that has grown to over 6,000 members and has given over $7,000,000 to missions in just the last seven years. And now they have taken on the awesome task of producing 2,000 people profiles on the unreached peoples.

Their pastor has made missions a central part of the life of his church with amazing results. This church sent their youth pastor out to start another missions focused church and now that church has over 4,000 members and a very strong missions emphasis. These churches are models for every church to follow, even the smaller ones. Bethany's model of church leadership in missions must be communicated to pastors. They need to understand that if they want their church to be a powerful influence for Jesus Christ, then they must make frontier missions a top priority. On page 10, Luis Bush of the AD2000 and Beyond Movement gives the amazing story behind this incredible church. Give a copy of this article to your pastor and ask him why your church cannot make frontier missions a top priority also.

South Africa With a New Vision for the Nations We have a second article in this issue by Luis Bush on the exciting developments in missions in South Africa. They are wanting to host GCOWE '97 in South Africa in conjunction with many other conferences. The story of this growing movement starts on page 14.

Mission Frontiers Online: A World of Possibilities In the July-August issue of Mission Frontiers we announced that MF was now available in electronic form on a new missions oriented e- mail network called Brigada. In the first two weeks after the announcement we added over 60 new subscribers.

But this is not the only thing we have added. In addition to the articles from Mission Frontiers we now have a weekly missions update that is only available to the online subscribers. Now you can be on the cutting edge of missions information more than ever before. The wonderful thing is that we can now send out this important mission information almost instantaneously at virtually no cost to anyone in the world who has e-mail. I encourage you to subscribe today. See the box at right for more details.