On the Great Commission and joy, the West as a Mission Field, missionary zeal, Church planting and African Pentecostals

After a long hiatus, we are back!

Here are your bullets: thoughts, concepts, and questions to guide your leadership in mission, discipleship, and renewal. If you’re new, click here to subscribe.

Personal Update

I couldn’t be more grateful for Q1 and all that God has done in and through our ministry over the past three months.

Some highlights include:

• Speaking at the annual FPCE conference (the Spanish Charismatic and Pentecostal fellowship)

• Preaching and teaching in the Democratic Republic of Congo

• Speaking at a 3-day retreat in Normandy with Firebase—a prayer and revival ministry—alongside one of my dearest friends

• Speaking at the Missions Conference of the Spanish Assemblies of God theological seminary

• Connecting with friends and ministry partners at our national Assemblies of God conference

• Mobilizing leaders from across Europe with PEM at the annual Pentecostal European Fellowship conference in Moldova

Please pray with me for continued clarity, strength, and fruitfulness as we step into the next quarter. Especially, as we transition to a family of four in the next few weeks!

We couldn’t be more excited and look forward to taking some time off from international ministry during this new season.

Bullets

On the Great Commission and joy:

One of the most thought-provoking questions I’ve been wrestling with in recent months:

“How can we present the Great Commission as a joy—not a burden—for the next generation?”

Leslie Newbigin once observed that conversations around mission and evangelism are too often clouded by anxiety and guilt:

“I find it strange that conferences about mission and evangelism are often pervaded… by a kind of anxiety and guilt—as though it were a program that we have a responsibility to carry out and about which we’ve not been very successful. Isn’t it remarkable that according to the New Testament the whole thing begins with an enormous explosion of joy? The disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple praising God! It seems to me, the resurrection of Jesus was a kind of nuclear explosion which sent out a radioactive cloud, not lethal, but life-giving, and the mission of the church is simply the continuing communication of that joy—joy in the Lord.”

A powerful question for preachers, mobilizers and leaders:

Are we discipling the next generation to carry a burden, or to carry joy?

John R.W. Stott on our guilty silence:

“But is not this the cause of our guilty silence? We do not speak for Christ because we do not so love His name that we cannot bear to see Him unacknowledged and unadored. If only our eyes were opened to see His glory, and if only we felt wounded by the shame of His public humiliation among men, we should not be able to remain silent. Rather would we echo the apostles’ words: ‘we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard’ (Acts 4:20)”

***

We don't go.
We don’t preach.
We don’t lay down our lives.
Because we have not truly seen.

A.W. Tozer called it a “crisis of encounter.” 

What the church needs is not more strategies, but more sight—a fresh vision of Jesus.

Isaiah saw the Lord—high and lifted up. Glorious. Holy. Gracious. And in that moment of awe and unworthiness, he was undone… and then commissioned.

“Here am I. Send me.”

It is always vision that fuels mission.
We speak because we have seen and heard.
We go because we know His glory must be known.

May we encounter Jesus again.
And may that encounter burn away our silence.

Lesslie Newbigin on The West as a Mission Field:

“There is no higher priority for the research work of missiologists than to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture”

Roland Allen on missionary zeal:

“Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, not out of theological arguments, but out of love.”

Resources I’m enjoying:

On Church planting and African Pentecostals:

1 million churches by 2033. This is the mission of the MM33 initiative of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship (WAGF). To reach this goal over 600,000 churches have to be planted in the next 8 years. According to Pentecostal missiologist Todd Korpi, nearly half of these churches are planned to being planted by African Pentecostals.

In light of this, he lists six characteristics of African Pentecostal church planting that are helpful for the Church in the West.

I was inspired by all six characteristics but two of them stood out to me :

a)African Pentecostals Constantly and Regularly Reinforce the Great Commission Responsibility of Every Christian.

“[..] any Christian is a potential church planter, not simply those within an educated clergy class. Some of the most aggressive church planting strategies in use worldwide today are those that engage the entire priesthood of all believers while providing training and education on the job (as opposed to an objective to be completed before a planter enters ministry).”

Related to this are Harvey’s Kwiyani’s broader observations on evangelism in African Christianity:

“To various extents, the work of evangelising in African Christianity is the duty and responsibility of all believers. There is a thing I have come to call the evangelisthood of all believers that has often made it possible for entire congregations to commit to sharing the good news as part of their general day-to-day living.”

b) African Pentecostals Place Church Planting at the Heart of Their Missiology.

“One of the things I’ve appreciated most about working with African Pentecostals in their church planting strategies is how, for those who are most rapidly growing, church planting isn’t an add-on department to their denominational structure. It’s not a ministry offering. It is woven into the very DNA of why many African Pentecostals believe the church exists. Church planting is at the core of their missiology.”

Read more: Church Planting Lessons Westerners Can Learn From African Pentecostals

People Vision: Reimagining Mission to Least Reached Peoples
Editor: Leonard N. Bartlotti

From the introduction:

“The concept of seeing the world as people groups is arguably the most significant thought innovation in twentieth-century missiology. Yet almost fifty years after the launch of the frontier mission movement, fewer than 4 percent of global missionaries work among “unreached people groups” (UPGs). Does the people group paradigm have relevance for the twenty-first-century church? In a fractured world with myriad, sometimes contested, mission priorities, why should cross-cultural disciple making and church planting among least reached peoples still be the highest priority of the global church?”

Partner with us

If you’d like to support our ministry and learn more about how we’re serving the church through preaching and mobilization, let’s connect. Reply to schedule a Zoom meeting—I’d love to share our vision with you!

Thank you for reading!

Timo Anzalone