Fellowships and others use Well Connected

The partnership handbook “Well Connected: Releasing Power, Restoring Hope Through Kingdom Partnerships” continues to have valuable impact. The book has recently gone into a revised edition, 2nd printing.

Nearly 600 books were ordered by the Nigerian Evangelical Missions Fellowship for use with mission and church leaders throughout the country.

One Well Connected reader wrote from Africa:

“I work for African Enterprise as a Pan-African Missions Director. I plan to use all the principles which are well articulated by Phill Butler who got the mind of Christ to write this most valuable book. It will definitely help me to build lasting partnerships in our mission to evangelize the cities of Africa through Word and Deed in partnership with the Church. This book will be my most valuable resource as I develop partnerships in the cities of Africa.”

Winning American Cities

visionSynergy continues to work with the Mission America Coalition to develop a “cadre” of partnership specialists who will continue to widen the core value of collaboration within the city-reaching movement of American churches, denominations and para-church ministries.

Monthly reinforcement calls were held in 2008 and were met with a high level of acceptance. visionSynergy staff Phill Butler and Bill Sunderland delivered another eleven hours of class during the City Impact Roundtable in Boston in the Spring of 2008.

A second tier of training is being developed for delivery in later months.

Partnership training for network reaching Japanese

The Reaching Japanese for Christ This Network met in late February 2008, drawing heavily from visionSynergy as it transforms itself into a well-functioning network of ministries across North America focused on evangelism among Japanese.

Attending were indigenous leaders from Japan, leaders of ministries based in the US, and others interested in evangelism aimed at the Japanese population.

visionSynergy Associate Dave Hackett gave presentations to this large conference on collaboration and on the potential to reach the Japanese through Internet and mobile evangelism.

Orality and the Global Church

The International Orality Network (ION) assisted ministries in India and Africa this year by conducting multiple Orality consultations. visionSynergy Associate Bill Sunderland says, “The local leaders are taking ownership of this movement and are moving ahead with or without us.”

This is a welcomed development as this new but centuries-old method of sharing Christ’s message is gaining recognition by the Global Church. On the North American front, ION has taken a huge step forward in its development as more task forces have been formed to take on critical projects.

The research task force will be looking at the impact of Orality on Church Growth. A new task force, Music and Arts, will explore the impact of all culturally-appropriate arts in Oral-based cultures.

Network growth in Muslim regions

Efforts to use the Internet for evangelism among followers of one of the world’s largest unreached religions have been rising almost unnoticed in recent years across a huge swath of ministries.

Initially, very little collaboration among these ministries was taking place until an enterprising group of internet evangelism ministries formed an alliance to bring together in a neutral atmosphere many of these practitioners.

This Muslim Internet Evangelism Alliance (which goes by a different name we won’t list here for security reasons), now in its fifth year with continuous visionSynergy counsel, is a glowing success. It has practical work groups moving forward strategic but commonly-shared concerns, such as media-to-ground follow-up and security.

Many partnerships have flowed out of the alliance-advancing the gospel in powerful ways.

Turkish Internet evangelism

An ambitious group of mission workers and nationals in Turkey has caught a vision of the potential for Internet evangelism in Turkey to reach Turks with the gospel.

The group and a foundation called on visionSynergy Associate Director Rev. Dave Hackett to facilitate the convening gathering of about 50 practitioners, which was held in Istanbul in April 2009.

Notes that warm our hearts

NextGen Korean mission leader Mark Kim wrote us on how visionSynergy interacted with his church planting network:

“You didn’t take part in the decision-making process, yet you empowered all of us to think the right way and proceed in a reasonable way.”

European Alliances in training

visionSynergy continues to develop the core partnership training sector with the leadership of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA).

Associate Director Bill Sunderland represented our vS team at a pre-meeting of the European Evangelical Alliance, where the seven global regional secretaries and some 30 general secretaries of European Alliances will gather with the WEA design team.

The gathering discussed elements of the training package being developed for all the alliances within the WEA.

India oral partnership strategy

Working with our long-time partner agency Scriptures In Use, visionSynergy Director Phill Butler facilitated formation of a national resource and training network powering oral strategies for evangelism and church planting.

Seventeen indigenous Indian mission agencies deeply committed to the vision are already seeing remarkable response among the country’s 200+ million non-literates. In the last three years alone these agencies have trained over 25,000 grassroots church planters!

Partnership education in colleges

At a national U.S. conference of seminaries and Bible schools visionSynergy was invited to present a vision for incorporating courses and other curriculum materials about Partnership in Christian colleges. Fifteen schools expressed immediate interest in either a three-unit college-level course or inclusion of a significant module on the “how and why” of a Partnership approach to Kingdom ministry.

We expect to see a number of these schools begin to use the collaboration materials later in 2009.