At the start of the year, Pastor Rob announced a new vision work recently begun by the leadership of our church. A team of our elders is now meeting regularly with plans to engage members of the congregation in the months to come in a discernment process together as a church.
The Reach 2024 campaign launched on January 7th is just a first step in this larger vision work. By reducing our debt, we will have greater flexibility in taking further steps in the year ahead. This effort also helps us launch what we believe will be a key component of our next season of growth as a church: missions and outreach partnerships. We have committed to use a portion of the one million dollars for this purpose.
We as a church believe that intentionally engaging in local and global outreach is one of the best ways to stretch and strengthen our discipleship as followers of Jesus. I experienced this recently firsthand, as my oldest son and I had the opportunity this past summer to be a part of an intergenerational team from Browncroft. Partnering with local churches and ministries in Belize, we shared Christ’s hope by providing clean drinking water and sharing the message of the gospel.
We as a church believe that intentionally engaging in local and global outreach is one of the best ways to stretch and strengthen our discipleship as followers of Jesus.
We hope to see these missions and outreach partnerships, both existing and new, both local and global, be vehicles for this kind of greater engagement and discipleship for many in our congregation.
The first of these is continuing our commitment and relationship with the Wolof people of Senegal, West Africa. Over our twenty-five-year partnership with the Wolof people, we have sent over thirty teams to minister in a multitude of ways – from teaching the gospel, to assisting with women’s training and working with street children, to working with the Deaf community in Senegal, to spending time learning from and supporting our many missionaries on the field. Now we have the opportunity to spread access to God’s Word in this region– to reach even further, and, for the very first time, provide accessible Bible translation, publication, and audio recordings in Wolof.
In addition, next week Pastor Rob, Kelly Fasoldt (our Outreach Director), and Nate Yoder (our Video Producer) will be headed back to Kosovo in Eastern Europe to investigate and discern a new potential partnership with the small but growing church in this region. Soon after we will also be welcoming a pastor from Kosovo to meet with our church in March. We are excited to discover how God might be leading us here in the year ahead.
This is an incredibly exciting time in the life of our church!
This upcoming Sunday, January 21st, as announced, we will be collecting our Reach 2024 goal cards. We are so grateful to the many of you who are praying with us and have already given a gift or submitted your goal for this campaign.
We have already received over $500,000 committed to this project, nearly half of our goal. Praise God!
This is an incredibly exciting time in the life of our church, and we look forward to celebrating the work that God is doing and wants to do in the near future in our Browncroft community.
