Community Transformations
One thing leads to another and another in Spirit-led missions movements. The explosive growth of Schools for Christ in public schools in Central America has brought the gospel movement into close cooperation with school districts and municipal governments. Through the Church on the March in Central America, it is currently happening in four different countries with governments that range from conservative to Marxist. It will be enough to say that Christian professionals now have many doors open to give conferences on subjects that are useful to government leaders and employees, educators, business people, pastors and Christian leaders and parents. The audiences are gathered in cooperation with municipal governments and local leaders of different kinds. The professional-level conferences are given from the perspective of the Biblical value system. The Bible is freely used but the efforts are not narrowly sectarian. They widen and re-enforce the movement to teach Bible in the public schools and minister to the parents of the children in their moral and spiritual leadership of their families in a culture that is under heavy attack by criminal forces. American Christian leaders in many fields are needed and invited to inquire. The same is true for Christian educators and experienced pastors.
The Church on the March has secured a beautiful scenic plot of land in a hidden mountain valley just above Guatemala City and within a short drive of Antigua, the former Spanish colonial capital of Central America and southern Mexico. There, it will build the first “Institute of Transformational Leadership” in Latin America. When finished, it will have 64 hotel quality rooms, two auditoriums, two cafeterias, a coffee shop, swimming pool, recreational areas and gardens. These will be used to provide year-round conference-training to public servants of every kind—government leaders and workers, educational leaders and teachers, business people, etc. along with Christian leaders, pastors and pastor-trainers. It will also provide delightful housing for Christian mission teams at greatly discounted cost. It is outside the traffic deadlock of Guatemala City, permitting teams to leave for and return from their fields of ministry at any time of the day. It is also within a mile of one of Central America’s most beautiful modern malls.
To Every Nation and People Now
Twenty years ago, Baptists in the eastern third of Romania were first introduced to the disciple-making materials written and developed in Guatemala by Lindwall. Under the leadership of CSI’s founder, Rev. Bill Davis, Romanian Baptist churches started nearly 100 new churches in a five year period. During the latter part of this time, Davis and Lindwall went to neighboring Moldova to work with Baptists in the northern third of that nation, and training approximately 200 missionaries. The disciple-making strategy and methodology proved to be simple, easily grasped and quickly used in both countries. Early in 2018, national leaders from both countries have written to say that Baptist work in those parts of the two countries has since tripled in the number of churches, long after the departure of CSI from those fields. They both attributed the disciple-making strategy and tools received as the primary reason for this growth. The Moldovans wrote that until these conferences, they did not have any practical literature to use. We are not aware of any other area of Baptist work in Eastern Europe that matches this growth.
A participant in this history testifies, “In both European nations, Baptists were discouraged by the lack of growth. Their strategies were traditional but largely ineffective. The change-over to the Great Commission strategy and the use of the simple tools were the two things that made the greatest difference–both immediately and in the years that have followed.”
The human originators of this movement realize how much this strategy and its enabling disciple-making tools are needed in every country of the world. This is true especially in countries where Christians have practically no tools to work with and where older traditional ways of reaching the lost are not working. Through both organizations, they propose to translate and put on the web, for free usage, a large set of their basic literature in many languages. The two organizations will work together in this effort and the primary target is to place translations of the literature in the 25 most-commonly-spoken languages in the world along with numerous other languages. The first 25 languages are spoken as a first or second language by 80% of the world’s population.
This is an effort that needs church sponsorship of the materials in each language. If volunteers are found to translate the materials and other volunteers will mount the materials on the web, costs will be almost nothing. Otherwise, it will cost about $100 per booklet to technically install them on the web and perhaps another $100 to translate it. The 25 most-used languages in the world have, roughly, from 25 million to 1.5 billion speakers each! The materials will be placed on web pages given different names to make them more easily found by Christians and others. The booklets will include disciple-making materials for children as well as adults and youth. Also included will be several training booklets for disciple-making workers and churches. The initial materials for children will include enough lessons for two years of weekly Bible study. In most languages of the world, children’s Bible lessons are simply not available. Therefore, this offers hope for hundreds of millions of children who live in lands of spiritual and Biblical ignorance. The same web pages can be used to make available any other helpful literature that is well-translated and installed on each web page. In many countries and languages, we believe this will be the most helpful source of Christian literature available. And it will be possibly the greatest opportunity given to any church to plant and prosper gospel work among vast numbers of the world’s people. Each such church will become known for the assigned language group it is transforming through this powerful gospel outreach.
