“Mr. Kevin, as the Director of Resonate Global Mission, please continue to support our work here in our villages.” I heard this refrain over and over again as I sat with about eight Kenyan facilitators in a rural church about an hour outside of Nairobi. These women and men were sharing stories of the impact of Timothy Leadership Training (TLT) in their own lives and in the communities where they were serving. They gave numerous examples of how vital this training was for pastors and church leaders who had minimal access to theological and pastoral resources. A younger woman shared how one of the training modules had made such a difference in her own life that her kids told her, “Mom, whatever it is that you're learning, keep doing it. We like you way better as our Mom!”   

For five days, I saw the fruit of our Kenyan Resonate team in and around Nairobi. I toured schools transformed by our Educational Care facilitation. I spent the better part of a day in Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Africa where one of our team members gave a presentation to about 30 ministry leaders in Kibera of his PhD thesis. He offered a vibrant missiology developed “from the ground up” rooted in his own experience of living and ministering in Kibera itself. Powerful.   

My short time in Kenya with my new Kenyan friends was a small window into the massive shifts taking place in the world of global mission. The old paradigm of “from the West to the rest of the world” no longer holds true. God is turning the world of mission on its head. Today, the Church is thriving throughout Africa, in parts of Asia, South and Central America, and beyond. Meanwhile, the Church in North America by every metric, is in a state of decline. Choked by the powers of wealth, politics, and consumerism, ravaged by in-fighting and public scandals, we face a significant crisis.   

But every crisis is an opportunity for self-examination and a new beginning. In the western Church, we must acknowledge that God is at work powerfully around the world and that a major shift is underway. No longer can we pretend that the West is the geographical centre of the Christian faith. Instead, we speak today of a “from everywhere to everyone” paradigm. A polycentric movement of the gospel that reflects the massive movement of people around the globe, including the USA and Canada. Across North America, in our largest cities and smallest towns, as we welcome immigrants and migrants from across the world, we are discovering that the gospel is also coming to us in fresh ways—accompanied by fresh opportunities to learn and to serve.   

Joyce Suh, who oversees Resonate’s international work, describes our approach like this:   

• Where there is a local church or local Christian presence we seek to work with partners
• We try to recognize the stage of the local church and listen to the needs expressed by local leaders 
• We strive to use good methodology like coaching and mentoring. These methods are relational and draw out people’s own strengths and lead to their own solutions. In training or teaching, we use interactive learning methods (adult dialogue learning) that leverage the knowledge and experience of our participants and lead to self determined action plans that suit the needs of the context.
• We engage in reflection about where God is at work and how we, together with our partners, can join his movement in gospel witness.

Our vision in Resonate is that every church in North America would see itself as part of this big story that God is unfolding around the world—both contributing to and receiving from the global church. Our Resonate leaders consistently hear from our brothers and sisters around the world that they still desire for us in North America to partner with them—as long as we listen first. How powerful it would be if we would humble ourselves to open our hearts, our homes, and our churches to the gifts of the global Church and the new friends that God is bringing to our local neighborhoods and communities.      

This is the first blog in our (International) Mission Postures series.  Read and subscribe for each piece in the series.

Photo provided by Kevin from his visit with TLT leaders.