And How We Can Respond Together

Last September, our regional team leaders from around the world met together to pray and reflect on what God is doing in each of our regions as well as discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by a changing landscape of global mission. We are continuing to learn and grow in how we respond to what God is doing. Here are three changes we are seeing:

Rapid Growth of Regional Fruitfulness, Capacity, and Vision

A significant change that has been building for a long time, in the regions we serve, is the growing maturity, capacity and fruitfulness within the global church, as evidenced in this global mission report. This is revealing the weakness and limitations of an approach where North American perspectives shape decisions and strategies within other regions. While Multiply as a North American agency has sought to empower local leaders for many decades, we recognize the need for us to release more decision-making authority regarding mission strategy, vision and resourcing to regional teams and local church leadership. 

We continue to move toward more mutual peer-to-peer relationships within a global network, each region participating as both contributors and beneficiaries in mission. This approach requires greater collaboration and mutual learning. We are convinced that these adjustments will not only nurture greater unity in the body of Christ worldwide but also enhance fruitfulness in our shared mission.

The World Has Come to North America

With growing immigrant and refugee populations and greater cultural diversity than ever, the North American Church has the opportunity to learn from our global MB family. God is also bringing many leaders from around the world to North America, equipped with a vision to share the Gospel among North Americans and immigrants alike. We are seeing North American churches grow in mission as they engage in unique international and cross-cultural partnerships.

God calls us to be his witness both locally and globally. We can learn how to reach people in our own local mission fields, while still playing our part in sending and funding global workers. Churches have the opportunity to release a missionary on every street, engaging with diverse cultures right in our own backyard. Multiply is eager to support and resource local churches working together in this common mission.

A Primary and United Focus on Disciple-Making

While disciple-making, church planting, and global mission go hand in hand, we are celebrating and joining the USMB Conference and Canadian Conference of MB Churches in their primary emphasis on discipleship and creating disciple-making cultures within our churches, growing as ‘sent ones’ living in obedience to the word of God. Healthy, diverse expressions of discipleship are the seedbed of church planting, leadership development, and developing global workers (see “A Rich Ecosystem of Discipleship” article). We want to support our North American churches in this strategic emphasis.

What Remains the Same

Multiply is not changing our commitment to live into our three key mission strategies: sending missionaries, partnering with nationals, and helping disciples multiply. Our mission continues to be sending disciples to make disciples who make disciples, that the world may know Jesus.

The New Testament illustrates the significance of Gospel partnerships between missionaries and local churches, as seen in the Apostle Paul’s ministry. Paul’s relationships with churches like the Philippians exemplify a long-term, reciprocal partnership, where churches provided financial and material support, and missionaries served and encouraged church leaders. Paul’s emphasis on strengthening churches through personal visits, mentoring, and training leaders highlights the mutual benefits of such partnerships. This approach fosters church health, multiplication, and sustainability.

Multiply embraces this collaborative model, a posture of partnering in mutuality, and empowering the missional vision of local churches wherever possible. While partnerships can be challenging due to cultural barriers and language differences, these challenges are worthwhile. Healthy partnership requires the humility to listen well, learn from each other, and respect the local strategies and expertise of national leaders.

God has blessed the MB family with dynamic national leaders around the world, with which the North American church has the privilege of partnering. As regional fruitfulness and capacity multiplies, our North American agency needs to adjust our approach in order to better reflect some of our core values:

• Serving the Church on God’s Mission
• Partnering in Mutuality

We are coming to understand that this will require changes in financial models, organizational structures, and outdated language. Our current financial model was created to meet North American needs and requirements, and we are moving more decision-making responsibility to the regional teams. Our structures have historically placed Multiply NA at the top of all global MB mission work, and we are now creating structures that enable us to participate more as a peer within a larger mission network. Our language can reinforce these older paradigms and therefore language that we use needs to be reviewed and adapted to help us live into our values together. 

Ultimately, we believe in the power of global church collaboration to fulfill the Great Commission. The mission is not just for one group of churches but for all who are committed to the Gospel. We want to live globally as a healthy family, loving each other and working together in humility and sincerity for the glory of God, so that together the world may know Jesus.

Jesus continually used metaphors and stories to teach and disciple people about the kingdom of God, and how it grows and multiplies. These images captured people’s imaginations and helped them think beyond the usual, and to see the remarkable ways of the kingdom. He talked about mustard seeds, soil, bread, water, pearls, lost sheep, gardeners, and business owners.

A modern metaphor that can help us gain a deeper understanding of discipleship is an ecosystem. If you think about a farm, or a vineyard, or a pond, you get a sense of the interplay between all of the various components. An ecosystem is a complex, diverse, interconnected environment where living and nonliving components interact with each other. The diversity helps to maintain stability and health within the environment, and allows the diverse components to thrive and support one another in producing much fruit. An ecosystem is never stagnant, but is constantly changing, growing, pruning, and dying to produce new life. This is the life of discipleship.

Isaiah, the prophet, spoke about the Lord’s vineyard (Isaiah 5:1-7) and about plowing the land, fertile soil, clearing the stones, a watchtower and walls, wild animals, briars and thorns, clouds and rain, and the patience to wait for a harvest of sweet grapes. The apostle Paul wrote about planting seeds and watering, alongside building and foundations (1 Corinthians 3:5-15). We need both builders and gardeners to create structures and frameworks that allow the tending to soil and seed, so that God can produce the growth. Paul also prayed that the roots of our lives would grow deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love (Ephesians 3:17), in order to produce kingdom fruitfulness in our lives. Finally, Jesus instructed us that the condition of our souls, i.e., the soil of our lives, is critical to produce a thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold harvest of fruitfulness (Matthew 13).

Jesus’ mission is carried out, not only by missionaries and church leaders, but mostly by ordinary disciples engaged in practical acts of faith, love and obedience. As followers of Jesus, each one of us can bear fruit through simple, everyday practices like:

• recognizing that God is always with us and is speaking to us,
• engaging together in God’s Word
• sharing meals and stories with our neighbors.

Grassroot discipleship movements, often unburdened by hierarchical structures, grow organically and are guided by the Holy Spirit. Today, all around the world, such movements are flourishing in parts of Asia, as well as North Africa and the Middle East, where believers multiply through relational practices, laying down their lives in love and obedience.

At Multiply, we are committed to prayer and obedience to the Scriptures, tending to the soil of our lives so that the seed of the Gospel can take root. We have mission strategies embedded in a framework called the Mission Strategy Map that functions like a trellis for growing fruitfulness and vision. This is helping regional teams support the local church and national leaders move through stages of initial disciple-making, to church planting, to developing leaders, and then to reaching people of all nations.

Thank you for joining together to plant seeds, tend to the soil, pull the weeds, and build appropriate structures, as God causes much growth in his kingdom. May we together, experience much fruit that will last.