Mission and Outreach Update | Northpoint Church

This week, Pastor John hands over the TAGD keyboard to Pastor Brent Whitefield, Northpoint’s Pastor of Missions and Outreach.

Missions and Outreach Update

The next two months promise to be exciting and productive ones for our mission and outreach efforts here at Northpoint. I thought that this would be a good time to give you an update, so that you can pray more specifically and get involved:

We have a small team led by Ray and Jill Roth traveling to Tuba City from February 6-8 to encourage our brothers and sisters on the Navajo reservation. The body there has seen both gains and setbacks in their efforts to be a light in a very dark place. Pray that the team will be a source of encouragement and a voice of wisdom to native American believers.

In early March, we will have two teams of four leaving for Ethiopia to minister with partners there. Pastor Scott Williams, Lee and Suzanne Graber, and Mike Russell will be training leaders in the TCCP program outside of Addis Ababa. Four others (Jane Gropp, Brandon Arnett, Bill Fresquez, and Tom Jefferson) will travel with Rick Eisemann and E3 Partners to take advantage of the recently opened door to do evangelism among unreached peoples in northern Ethiopia.

Our Carranza team will be in Mexico from March 20-22 and hopes to branch out to a new ministry site this year. More information and signups for that trip will be coming soon.

We have seen much fruit borne from the Mission Week back in October. Then, we had the opportunity to get to know Peter Morris and hear about his plans to minister in San Jose, Costa Rica as the city director for the ReachGlobal team there. We have begun financially supporting Peter and his wife Melanie as a church and they have nearly completed raising support in anticipation of getting to the field in late spring. You will be hearing more about Costa Rica in the future as we begin to explore other ways to partner with the ministry there.

Also at Mission Week, we became acquainted with the pioneering church planting efforts of Oscar Muriu and Nairobi Chapel in Kenya. They intend, by God’s grace, to plant 300 churches over the next decade across the globe. They represent a great case study in how the energy of the modern mission movement is shifting to the global South. The way they do church planting constitutes a new and exciting model for partnership between churches in the First and Third worlds. This Sunday, Tim Douglass and I (Brent) will travel to Kenya to meet with church planting teams and see how we might partner with their work on the African continent and beyond. You will hear more about this strategic partnership in the months ahead.

After Kenya, I will travel on to northeast India where I will be joined by Craig Hawkins and Brad Glassick. Together we will continue teaching in the Training of Trainers (TOT) program. This time, in addition to the four-day conference for church planters, we will teach a two-day seminar for urban professionals who want to see greater Kingdom profit in their work. We have seen considerable fruit from this ministry since we launched it a little over a year ago. The goal of the program is multiplication of trained church leadership, and we have already seen the multiplication process in action. After the conferences, Craig and Brad will travel to a remote state in one of the most unreached places in India (which I will not name here, as it is not an open-access region), to visit one of the ministry sites and report on the replication of the TOT program there.

That is only a synopsis of some of the things that we are doing in the area of mission. In a later article, I will update you on what is happening in the realm of local outreach this year. A healthy church is one that is reaching out, near and far, to be a blessing to the nations, a light to those who languish in darkness, and an encouragement to the saints. Pray that we will continue to grow healthier in this work and that the Lord will grant us the privilege of seeing with our own eyes the fruit of our labors, for His glory.

Pastor Brent