Standing in front of his small congregation Rajah looks like most people. He wears a pressed button-up blue shirt and dark pants. He moves his hands as he speaks with conviction and energy. But Rajah isn’t ordinary. He’s taking the gospel to an unreached part of the world, where his neighbors don’t understand him and don’t always welcome his efforts.
He is telling the world about Christ in Sri Lanka’s central hill country. His congregation is made up of men and women who work this region’s tea plantations during the day and crowd into a small concreteblock room with open wooden-frame windows several evenings a week. They sit in sea-foam green chairs with brown wicker backs. Children gather on the floor at the front of the room eagerly listening to Rajah’s message of hope.
Rajah is just one of some 2,500 Global Mission pioneers around the world. These lay church members typically spend at least two years working to establish a new congregation within their culture. Pioneers understand the community, speak the local language, and blend with local people. Rajah has spent the past four years helping to establish two different congregations.
Global Mission’s frontline pioneers share the gospel through a holistic ministry that many include caring for the sick, running literacy programs, holding evangelistic meetings, and giving Bible studies. In a previously unreached North Asian city that can’t be named, a group of Global Mission pioneers started a health evangelism program to help the community with chronic health problems. The result is six house churches and some 30 new church members. Law student Jacob is grateful that an Adventist English language school in Bangkok, Thailand, showed him the purpose and meaning in life for which he was seeking. In Lesotho—a country in Southern Africa—Futho went door-to-door asking people if they’d like to take Bible studies until he found enough people for an evangelism seminar. Now he has a congregation of 12 people.
Global Mission is the frontline mission arm of Adventist Mission, an office of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s world headquarters. Since 1990 Global Mission has established some 11,000 congregations in previously unreached areas of the world. This can vary from a North American suburb with no Adventist presence to an entire country in the 10/40 Window— a region stretching from West Africa to the Far East, which is home to many of the world’s major religions, relatively fewest Christians, and fastest growing cities.
In 1997, nearly 100 years after the first Adventist arrived in Sri Lanka, only 28 churches were established. Over the past 10 years Global Mission has made a concerted effort to work with established churches in Sri Lanka to send pioneers into new communities. The result is 22 new congregations, a growth rate of nearly two-thirds.
Last year Global Mission supported nearly 1,500 church planting projects in unentered areas at a cost of nearly US $18 million. One hundred percent of your financial support of the Annual Sacrifice Offering in your church on November 8, 2008 goes to Global Mission’s ongoing frontline mission work. This vital offering will allow the Seventh-day Adventist Church to continue reaching the world’s unreached with hope at home and around the world.
WHERE CAN I FIND OUT MORE?
• Go to www.Global-Mission.org/annualoffering/ to download this year’s Annual Sacrifice Offering program.
• This quarter’s Adventist Mission DVD has a specific video to show during the offering call.
• For questions and to learn more visit www.Global-Mission.org or call 1-800- 648-5824.
