RevWrites - Feb 25

A new Mission Big Picture is evolving at NAC.

At this time in history, God seems to be doing an amazing thing in Africa. (In fact, he seems to be doing it across the Global South, including South America and India.) Africa alone covers over 30 million sq km. It’s almost a quarter of the surface area of all the countries in the world!

Millions of Africans are coming to know Christ. Evangelists are planting new churches all the time. In some Anglican dioceses, bishops are opening numerous church buildings every week.

The Africans are good at planting churches. They don’t seem to need any help with this. But they do need help. When God does something this spectacular it stretches human resources. The new African churches struggle to provide ministers for all the new congregations. They are being forced to appoint ministers who have very little biblical knowledge.

And that’s where we come in! We have resources that we can use them to help.

Moore College and CMS and African Enterprise and Sydney Diocese and various individual churches like NAC are all involved together to focus on Africa.

NAC has a new Mission Big Picture. NAC has always supported mission. In the past, 10% of our general, non-specified collections went to mission. This has changed over the years but so has our involvement with mission.

The Parish Mission Team and your Congregational Mission Teams will be bringing you more and more up-to-date with the various aspects of our mission. I want to talk about just one.

You are all aware that the Mays and the Sinclairs are going to Africa on a short-term mission in just a few weeks time. It would be easy to see this as an isolated event. But it’s not. It’s part of the Big Picture. These short-term missions will become more frequent. And will cost us more, of course.

Why? Why do we want to be involved in mission in this new and additional way? Because the African church has a longer-term plan to evangelise the world, including Australia. Those of you who went to CMS Summer School might have heard Dennis Tongoi, Director of CMS Africa, tell of the growth in Africa. The population there is growing whereas in the first world the population is shrinking. Along with population growth, general growth and economic growth are slowing in the first world but growing in Africa.

The African church is planning for gospel growth worldwide. If we could see ahead ten or twenty years, we might see that we’re at the beginning of world-wide evangelism. That’s their plan!

Only God sees that far ahead with any certainty. But from what we already can see we’d be crazy to miss out on being involved at the beginning. So our plan for the next 10-20 years is to help train African pastors as much as we can.

Neil