A Mission Church With A Missionary Vision Series

Our church has always been a missions minded church. In fact, the last time I preached from this text in Acts, it was for David and Suzie Snyder and their send –off as our first living link missionaries. They had been training in Kenya and were about to go full time to work with the Maasai tribal people in western Kenya.

Not only did our church support them as their largest missions donors, but we sent people to Kenya to visit their mission on at least 2 occasions. Phil Adams and I went there for two weeks, and the Longfields took their boys to visit the mission and work with the mission on a missionary trip.

Right now we are actively connecting with a mission family in the Dominican Republic. The Christian Dominican Medical Mission was started 30 years ago by Gary and Cindy Cline. They are both registered nurses in the military who took their medical skills with them into missions work among the poor people outside Santa Domingo, the capital city.

Their sons, David and Joseph are working with the same mission. David has established a ministry training program to educate bi-vocational ministers, and Joe has started a new church in the outskirts of Santa Domingo. Richard, our youth minister, has visited this mission twice and last spring he took a group of high school and college students to work there with the mission. David Cline visited our church just recently to present the work of the mission.

We also support a mission in Japan where Andy Rodriguez and his wife Jenny, are working with a church called Mustard Seed Christian Church in Nagoya, one of the large cities in Japan. Andy was in Ronnie’s youth group at the Hill Country Chapel. Then he went to Ozark Christian College, and while there developed a passion to follow the example of the Apostle Paul who started churches in large cities in faraway places. He has been working with the church in Nagoya for about 5 years.

Andy was warned that it would be so hard to reach people in Japan that he would have to be there for 20 years before he ever saw his first convert. But God blessed this ministry so much that they are in a growing congregation of about 125 having baptized quite a few Japanese young people. They have recently moved to a larger facility because they outgrew the other place they were renting. Ronnie has visited the church in Japan twice, and Andy and his family have been with us on several occasions.

I mention these two examples of our mission connections because they illustrate the way a mission minded church connects with its missionaries.

A portion of the money you give in your offerings supports these and other missionaries. And we do more than send money overseas. We become partners with our missionaries and share with them in their work through our interest and our prayers.

3. The Road-Trip begins

We look back at these first two missionaries, Paul and Barnabas, and we read how that first Road-Trip began.

The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the Jewish synagogues. John Mark was with them as their helper. Acts 13:4-5