Seven Things I Know about American Missionary Fellowship

I’ve just completed two months of visiting as many area fellowships (small group gatherings for our mission) as possible – sometimes two a weekend. I’ve seen a lot of people, talked to them, heard their stories, and heard about their ministries. I’ve spent some time listening to their hurts and their dreams and also their frustrations. After meeting these people, there are seven things I know about our mission:

One: There is no doubt about it – our people love God. They want to serve Him, and they want to see revival come in America. They want to know that they are part of what God is doing to restore the spiritual vitality of the people in our nation.

Two: They are faithful. I have spent time with missionaries who have been in ministry with AMF for over forty years. They have seen good times and bad times, strong financial times and weak financial times, and they clearly say to me, “God is faithful. He will take care of us, as He’s always taken care of the mission. What we need is strong spiritual leadership to help us understand what God wants us to do.”

Three: We as a mission need to provide more value to our missionaries. It’s been clear to me that over the past years, the value that an individual missionary receives from the Home Office has been eroded. I’m not just talking benefit packages or increased resources that are required; I’m talking about spiritual leadership – fellowship, a sense of common purpose. We need to provide more value.

Four: Everyone in our mission wants our mission to grow. We understand that our mission is older with a lot of mature Christians, but everyone I come in contact with desperately wants us to reach the next generation. That’s high on our agenda.

Five: We are stuck. We’re stuck not because of our lack of ability or our desire to grow, but something has mired us in the mud. It might be not knowing what our common purpose is, or struggling with territorialism, or not staying up with the current ministry trends. We need to get unstuck and begin to move forward again.

Six: Our strength is our diversity, and our weakness is also our diversity. Because we are a unique collection of individuals strongly committed to doing what God has called us to do, we embrace – in fact, we enjoy – our diversity. Rural and urban ministry, ministry to the rich and ministry to the very poor, ministry to children and ministry to older people, ministry to the incarcerated and ministry to the free – we have strength in our diversity. That diversity is also our weakness because our reason for being is a little out of focus.

Seven: We are committed to change. We are committed to the idea that we need to think through why and how God has called us to do ministry. I know of no one in our mission who is resistant to change. How we do that is going to be the real challenge.

It’s been a great few months. I’ve met a lot of great people. I look forward to what God’s going to do in the future.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Wisconsin Area Fellowship

I spent this past Saturday in Wisconsin at an area fellowship with Brett and Cindy Belleque and some of their people in Region One. What a ball! What a fun group of people to be around!

I was particularly drawn by two people. One of the first couples to connect with me was Bob and Gale Romig. Bob has been around the mission for a while – twenty years or so – and had a lot of good insight. I enjoyed listening to him. But what intrigued me was his ministry. He’s a clown! And he uses the clown and the activities of this clown to present the Gospel in a creative and powerful way to children.

If that wasn’t wild enough and crazy enough, Gale looks like a soccer mom! She looks like anything but a clown. And then I found out that the two of them clown around together. And then I began to think about how creative and wild it is that God can use any talent we have to accomplish His good and perfect will – even clowning. It was great.

I was even more impressed with Cindy Belleque. She played the piano, and she cooked, but she’s a great mom. I was watching her with her children. I watched how she interacted with them, the balance between being a mom and being a help to her husband. The Belleques have a special-needs child, and I was blown away by how well they care for their son. They’re good people.

I then began to think about all of the spouses in our mission who serve the Lord without a lot of flash and without a lot of public exposure. There are a lot of Cindys around. They may be the backbone of our mission. They keep the ministry going because of their organizational skills and their service.

Hats off to clowns and spouses who serve in the background!

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Culture

I spent last Friday and Saturday at Camp Galilee, one of our AMF camps, with our missionaries who serve in the Southeast Region. What a diverse collection of ministers! What a unique way that God has brought people together under the banner of American Missionary Fellowship!

There are the Lowders. They live in a little rural town in Kentucky, where they present the Gospel to public-school children.

Then there’s Betty Glover. She’s retired, but for forty years she worked in the “hollers.” She talks like she worked in the hollers. For someone from southern California, I found it kind of refreshing.

There are Joey and Darlena Ferguson, who live in West Virginia. They led the singing. We sang songs in a way that I’d never sung them before, but God was just as much there as in our worship services in California.

There was also Bob Carvajal from New Orleans, whose house was flooded out in Katrina. He has a call-in radio program where he answers questions about the Gospel. He loves children, and he wants to take kids from the inner city of New Orleans on foreign missions trips. He works in a different culture from the Lowders and Fergusons, but he fits there.

There was Brian Efferding. He and his wife, Lucia, live near Boca Raton, Florida. Their son, Jeremy, just got invited to play on the Junior Davis Cup team. The Efferdings work with inner-city kids, and at the same time they use Jeremy’s incredible talent and ability in tennis to reach a very wealthy group of people in Boca Raton, Florida.

All of these missionaries and their area fellowship are led by Mike and Mary Pinkerton. They just love everyone. Culture doesn’t matter to them.

With all this diversity and almost contradictory cultural baggage, we’re all about Jesus. Jesus is the common denominator. Whether it’s playing tennis, or broadcasting a radio program, or working in a public school, or pastoring a church, or running Camp Galilee (an oasis!), AMF embraces different cultures as part of what we do.

I spent an hour and a half answering questions on Saturday morning. Then I asked the missionaries, “What do you want to tell me? What do I need to know to be a good leader for you in AMF?” Almost in unison, they said, “Embrace our diversity. Don’t make us into something we’re not. We’re doing what God has called us to do with our giftedness, with our culture, and with who we are.”

You bet that’s what I want to do! I believe that AMF is one of the few missions that embraces people’s individual giftedness and allows them to express it in a way that’s powerful.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/