Partnerships for Global Cities

In February 2008 visionSynergy Director Phill Butler provided practical training on the why and how of ministry partnership for the Impact World Teams initiative of Youth With a Mission in Kona, Hawaii.

More than thirty leaders from six countries are in training to lead year-long, city-wide evangelism and discipleship initiatives in cooperation with the local churches in key international cities.

visionSynergy Trustee Seph Barnard video taped segments of the training plus other special segments for use on the Powerofconnecting.net partnership resource web site.  See the videos on YouTube.com and GodTube.com video sites by searching for “Phill Butler.”

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.

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.

Younger Leader Focus leadership

In March 2009 visionSynergy held working meetings in India with the leadership of the Evangelical Fellowship of India and the Indian Missions Association (more than 230 indigenous Indian mission agencies!) regarding the visionSynergy Younger Leader Initiative, our effort to train emerging leaders in collaboration.

Phill Butler was very encouraged to find that this issue is a very high priority for them. We have agreed to meet later this year to map specific plans for India as a “test region” for this vital initiative.

visionSynergy Associate Director Michael McGill heads up visionSynergy’s Younger Leader Initiative.

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.