Afghanistan: Crisis and Opportunity – How Your Church Can Repond

by | Oct 12, 2021 | Biblical/Missional, Church Partnership

Dear friends,

Last week, we were able to host a webinar around the current situation in Afghanistan and how we can respond as followers of Jesus. A big thank you to everyone who was able to register and attend. We’re so grateful for the care and concern shown for our Afghan neighbors, here and abroad, and appreciate your desire to help – both in action and in showing the love of Christ. We have heard from many of you who weren’t able to attend asking about ways to help and pray. To that end, we wanted to make both the webinar and the resources discussed available to our broader World Outreach family. To request the webinar, simply click below to email us. 

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Psalm 121 reminds us that our God is in control and calls the church to respond in love. Below are resources listing different ways to serve, learn, pray, and give to aid those most impacted by the crisis. We encourage you to prayerfully consider the ways in which you can respond in love.

Resettlement Agencies – There are nine national resettlement agencies and additional local ones. Look up the resettlement agencies in your town or state at the following link. Here is a wonderful video that helps show the power of being part of the Welcome Team that welcomes new refugees. Remember that using google translate can be helpful once serving among new neighbors or using the tarjimly app. 

World Relief Sacramento Area Host Homes –  If you live in Sacramento, you have the valuable opportunity to become a host home and offer a safe place for newly arrived refugees. Click here for more information and to apply.

Advocacy – Advocate for refugees and asylum-seekers, including vulnerable Afghans, by getting in touch with your elected officials. Document Templates are available here! 

WO Connecting with Your Muslim Neighbor Workshop – WO offers a 6-week course for individuals interested in learning how to foster and create meaningful, ongoing relationships with Muslims in your communities or in nearby communities. To learn more about this workshop, and how to register online, click here. 

Seminary Course – A 15-week class titled Perceiving God in Islam and Christianity. The course will be offered online through the Lillias Trotter Center and Wesley Biblical Seminary. We will be considering how vital God’s relational (Trinitarian) nature is to every aspect of our faith. We’ll also compare that with the Islamic view of Allah as a mono-personal god. Please join us in prayer that we will be strengthened and encouraged to share Christ’s gospel with Muslims more effectively.

View and share World Relief’s slides from the webinar. If you have more questions, please feel free to email Heather, with World Relief.

Read Loving Your Muslim Neighbor, a book by EPC WO global workers on how to become compassionate and courageous witnesses to Muslims in your community.

Care for our Afghan neighbors financially by giving to these funds: 

Use the 7 Areas of Prayer for Afghanistan pdf, detailing the many ways we can be praying for our Afghan neighbors, global workers, and the country as a whole, in this time of immense conflict. We encourage you to use this in your individual prayers, with your family, and in your congregations.

2 Corinthians 5:14 reminds us that the love of Christ compels us – in all things – and most assuredly in the care and support we show to our Afghan neighbors. Watch this video to see a loving testament to that call, and consider the ways in which you can show the love of Christ to Afghan refugees through the resources listed above. 

EPC WO Director’s Reflection on Ministry | the Reach May 2021

by | Jul 27, 2021 | Biblical/Missional, Church Partnership, Field Story

Dear friends,

In one month, I will step down after seven years as Director of World Outreach. I want to reflect here on four developments I’ve seen in our work during that time.
 
Internationalized Church-planting Teams. The EPC World Outreach global workers we send out from North America almost always end up teaming with spiritual brothers and sisters sent out from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. These relationships are rarely orchestrated from denominational or mission agency headquarters, but rather are organic partnerships that grow as disciple-makers from very different cultures discover each other working on the same task directed by the same Spirit.
 
Second Generation EPC WO Global Workers. By Presbyterian standards EPC World Outreach is relatively young, having sent out its first workers in 1985. But in recent years we have seen adult children (Jackie, Peter, and Josh) from three different EPC WO families return with the EPC into full-cycle church-planting among people with least access to the gospel. With these folks we build on the foundation of decades of the very best preparation for cross-cultural ministry.
 
Repatriated Immigrant Global Workers. The dream of escape to America, the Land of Opportunity, is still very much alive throughout much of the world. Few who have achieved that dream give it up and return to the lands of their birth, but we in EPC World Outreach have several families where at least one spouse fits that description. These families have unusual credibility with neighbors who recognize they are animated by a power greater than material success. Coupling that credibility with a deep understanding of local culture to share the gospel has had a major impact in many cases.
 
National Church Missional Leaders. As World Outreach Director, I receive several requests each week from Christians around the world, asking for “partnership”. Of course, partnership may have many different meanings, but usually these appeals are for funds to carry out ministry in their communities. As important as these ministries are, I routinely turn down such requests to focus our resources and energies on a different kind of partnership. World Outreach has developed close relationships with church leaders in Asia and Africa whose eyes are always on the frontiers of their communities. They look beyond where their churches are, to the neighborhoods, villages, and towns where no churches are. They pray for those places; they go to those places; they train and send people to those places; and EPC WO comes alongside to help them. Our efforts here become magnified and multiplied for a hundred-fold effect.
 
One final note – these developments in World Outreach have been gifts from God through the labors of people other than me. It has been the labors of loving missionary parents which have borne sweet fruit in the lives of our World Outreach MKsa. It has been the faithful service of elders in our presbyteries who nurtured relationships with national church missional leaders in places like Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Albania, and Russia. It has been EPC pastors who welcomed and befriended immigrant Christians in their congregations, and then encouraged and guided them to be sent back by EPC World Outreach. And it has been our WO global workers who have recognized “God’s team” in the faces of El Salvadoran, Brazilian, Singaporean, Indonesian, Albanian, etc. brothers and sisters and reached out hands to work together.  To all of you, I say thank you for your service to Christ, and for making my work as WO Director a joy.
 
Grace and peace,
Phil Linton, World Outreach Director

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Annual Report

Click here to read EPC WO’s Annual Report for 2020 for more information on what we were up to this past year: stories from the field, WO by the Numbers, and information on the communities we’re serving overseas. 

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WO Workshop

If you’re interested in learning how to foster meaningful relationships with Muslims in your community, we encourage you to take part in EPC WO’s six-week Connecting with Your Muslim Neighbors workshop. Visit our website for more information!

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The Reach | Exec. Director Announcement

by | Jul 27, 2021 | Biblical/Missional, Church Partnership

Dear friends,

On behalf of the World Outreach Executive Director Search Committee, I am pleased to introduce Gabriel de Guia to you as the new Executive Director of EPC World Outreach. Following much prayer and discussion, our nine-member committee unanimously believes Gabriel is who God would have lead World Outreach into the second quarter of this century as its Executive Director.

I hope you will take a few minutes to read the official announcement on the EPC’s news and information channel, www.EPConnection.org. The announcement includes comments from Gabriel and his wife, Rachel, as well as several members of the search committee.

Gabriel comes to World Outreach from Cru, where he has served for the past 26 years. His most recent role was Senior Aid of Development to the Executive Director for the Jesus Film Project, which he has held since 2012. In addition to a variety of other responsibilities at Cru’s headquarters, he served in campus ministry at both Indiana University and Indiana State University from 1996-2002.

As you may know, Cru—formerly Campus Crusade for Christ—is an international ministry founded by Bill and Vonette Bright in 1951 and based in Orlando, where Gabriel and his family are members of the EPC’s First Presbyterian Church of Orlando.

As you have opportunity in the coming weeks and months, please welcome Gabriel to EPC World Outreach. He will be at our 41st General Assembly in June and is excited to meet those of you who will be in Memphis.

Please pray for Gabriel and Rachel as they make the transition to World Outreach in the coming weeks and months!

Rob Liddon
Chairman, World Outreach Executive Director Search Committee
Ruling Elder, Second Presbyterian Church (Memphis, Tennessee)
Moderator, 30th EPC General Assembly

Praise & Prayer Directory | December 2020

by | Mar 31, 2021 | Biblical/Missional

Dear friends,

 
 
 

Most of what we in EPC World Outreach planned to do in 2020, we didn’t. But everything God planned to do, he did.

After an initial period of postponing events and waiting for things to return to normal, we started scrapping our plans and trying things we had previously dismissed as impossible.  When Covid prevented WO workers in Asia and the Middle East from carrying out vital ministries, they rejoiced to find young Christian brothers and sisters stepping into the void and organizing themselves to deliver food and medicine. The WO candidate assessment and orientation program we were convinced could only be done face-to-face turned out to work pretty well (and in some ways even better) via Zoom. And for the first time candidates from outside the US were able to participate.

When WO trainers could not travel to a Southeast Asian country, they retooled their course to teach remotely with less lecture time and more student-driven learning and application. Within the following month, a third of the participants had already passed on what they had learned to 185 other leaders in their regions. Some of our workers feared a sharp drop-off when small group Bible studies were forced onto video platforms.  Instead, they were thrilled to find that members who had previously been timid and quiet (many of whom were brand-new Christians) seemed liberated by the new format and blossomed into very active and growing participants.

Looking back on 2020, we have so much to thank God for.  We’ve seen in many ways how his plans were better than ours.  Covid distancing forced many of us into more solitude, more quiet reflection, more listening to and enjoying our families.  It wasn’t what we were aiming for in our goals, but God aimed us there anyway, and we discovered how badly we needed it. Our thanks also go out to the financial supporters of our global workers.  Many prognosticators predicted that mission agencies’ contribution income would drop by 25% in 2020.  That was not our experience, as contributions remained steady.

Almost 30 years ago, Janet and I spent our first Christmas overseas, far from familiar surroundings and family. The OM ship, Logos, docked near the town where we were living, and invited us aboard.  There we met Akira, a Japanese Christian who told us about a young countryman of his who had come to know Christ after a childhood fever had left him totally paralyzed.  Limited to communicating by a system of blinks, he dictated poetry to his mother.  Akira paraphrased one of those poems for us, and my Christmas closing to you is his poem of praise to the One whose gifts to us are so often not what we would have chosen, but exactly what we need.

I’ve never sent a Christmas card,
   never said the Name
Of my Lord who gave up heaven
   and to a barnyard came

Yet my heart is filled with praise,
  on the Spirit’s wings it flies.
I have written, “Merry Christmas”
  on the inside of my eyes.

Written by Phil Linton, EPC WO Director

EPC World Outreach’s Response to COVID-19 | March 2020

by | Jun 17, 2020 | Biblical/Missional, Uncategorized

Dear friends,

As WWII drew to a close, a young Russian soldier-mathematician was arrested and condemned to imprisonment and permanent exile for privately criticizing Stalin. Imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp, later suffering from cancer and given just weeks to live, it seemed that all the plans, hopes and dreams of his life were shattered. But what Stalin meant for evil, God used for good, and the arrest changed the course of Aleksankr Solzhenitsyn’s life so that the soldier-mathematician became one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century.  

The COVID-19 pandemic is shattering many of our plans and dreams, but how is it affecting EPC World Outreach? It is causing us, like you, to be on heightened alert. We are talking with and listening to government sources, other mission agencies, and our own colleagues around the world to try to keep up with changing situations. But, above all else, we keep in mind that God is in control, and there is no virus that can do anything without God using it for His good purposes.

The EPC World Outreach staff in Orlando is doing the same things that many of you are — working from our homes, canceling all but essential travel, postponing events and changing meetings to video conferences. We have stepped up text, audio, and video calls to stay in even closer communication with our global workers to pray with them and help them think through their responses.  

World Outreach is neither requiring, nor forbidding any of our workers to return to the States. We believe these decisions are best made at a team level by those most aware of local situations. Two of our workers, in exceptional circumstances, have returned to the States in the past week. The rest are heeding local medical advice, postponing travel and adopting social practices to inhibit spreading the disease. As they have long prayed for spiritual breakthroughs in their communities, they are now waiting in hope for opportunities to be God’s ambassadors to neighbors in need.  

The message that our global workers tell their neighbors is the same message they tell themselves: in a global pandemic the only safe place to flee to is the arms of God.  

Thank you for remembering our missionaries even as you face your own challenges. Thank you for praying for them as you pray for your own families; thank you for giving to support them, even as you deal with your own financial reverses. Please continue to pray. 

  • Pray for our missionaries’ health and stamina, especially for those working with the poor, and providing health care in difficult settings.
  • Pray for World Outreach leaders to be full of grace and truth as we respond to our colleagues’ questions and needs.
  • Pray for all of us to be radiant ambassadors of the kingdom of God, sharing the good news that brings life to the dying.

Looking back at the surprising course of his life, Solzhenitsyn wrote this prayer:

How easy for me to live with you, Lord!
How easy to believe in you!
When my mind casts about
or flags in bewilderment,
when the cleverest among us
cannot see past the present evening,
not knowing what to do tomorrow –
you send me the clarity to know
that you exist
and will take care
that not all paths of goodness should be barred.
At the crest of earthly fame
I look back in wonderment
at the journey beyond hope — to this place,
from which I was able to send mankind
a reflection of your rays.
And however long the time
that I must yet reflect them
you will give it me.
And whatever I fail to accomplish
you surely have allotted unto others.

Let us live these days of the COVID-19 pandemic so that, when it has passed, you and I will look back at it in wonderment as a time where God’s glory was most radiant.  

Grace and peace,

Phil Linton
Director, EPC World Outreach

The Great Commission in Old Testament Law | February 2020

by | Feb 21, 2020 | Biblical/Missional

Dear friends,

Where do we find the Great Commission in the Bible? Most of us probably think first of Matt 28:19, ‘Go and make disciples of all nations.’ Or maybe ‘You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). We’d probably have to scroll way down our playlist of favorite Bible verses before it occurred to us to look for the Great Commission in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, those long lists of Old Testament laws.

But as Chris Wright reminds us, “The mission of Israel was to be a light and blessing to the nations. The ‘mission’ of the law was to shape Israel for that task.”* What does this look like? First, we see God’s mission in the relational context of the law. We also see God’s mission in the purpose of the law. And in the Old Testament law God reveals his own character.

The RELATIONAL context of the Old Testament law
Read Exodus 6:6-8. “I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians… I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.”

The Old Testament law isn’t an abstract set of moral principles. Instead it forms the contract, or covenant, God made between himself and the nation of Israel. These laws concretely lay out how they will live as ‘my own people.’ This relationship is based on God’s promise to their ancestor Abraham that “I will make you into a great nation… and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen 12:1-3), and on God’s rescue of the Israelites from hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt. The primary requirement in this covenant relationship is single-hearted commitment to God: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut 6:4-5). God’s mission is to bring people from all nations into a restored relationship with himself. The most important thing Israel is to demonstrate to the nations around them living as God’s people? Absolute relational faithfulness.

 

The PURPOSE of the Old Testament law
Read Exodus 19:3-6. “Out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

God didn’t choose the Israelites because they somehow deserved it, or because he didn’t care about the rest of the world. He chose this group of people to be a ‘kingdom of priests,’ that is, to represent him to the rest of the world. They were ‘holy’ not in the sense that they were perfect or super-spiritual but in the sense that God set them apart for his own special use. The nation of Israel was to serve as a sort of planned community showing the other nations what it looks like to live in close relationship with God. The laws God gave them through Moses were their instructions for how to model that relationship in every aspect of life.

God’s CHARACTER in the Old Testament law
Read Exodus 34:4-7. “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.”

Many of the specific instructions in the Old Testament law seem strange to our 21st-century ears. But in these details not only do we see God’s love and willingness to forgive sins, we also see his compassion for the poor, for women, for the marginalized, for migrants – especially when contrasted with other ancient laws like the Code of Hammurabi or Code of Ur-nammu.

Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of prescriptions to guarantee the just distribution of land, to assure that slaves will be treated well, to protect women through marriage and dowry rights, and to welcome the stranger. The Israelites also receive the protection and benefits (‘blessings’) of being in a contractual relationship with an all-powerful deity – the one who claims to rule over the entire earth. This is the God they are to represent to the nations.

So how does this work out? Do the Israelites remain 100% faithful to God? Do they teach the nations around them to know God? Is God’s true character demonstrated in the ways the Israelites treat each other and their neighbors?

Sadly, no. In the end Israel’s failure to keep the Old Testament law merely proves people’s need for a different way to live in relationship with God. (Spoiler alert: Jesus!) In the Bible’s unfolding story it will take a new rescue operation and a new covenant to reconstitute God’s people as a new community – the church – called in new ways to represent him to the world. But as we look at God’s relationship with the people of Israel, spelled out in the Old Testament law, it becomes clear that from the very beginning God’s people are commissioned to take their place in his mission to the nations.

*Christopher J. H. Wright, “Mission and Old Testament Interpretation,” in Craig G. Bartholomew and David J. H. Beldman, eds., Hearing the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2012), 185.

Image – Les Dix Commandements by Marc Chagall

By Rev. Dr. Stephanie Black, World Outreach Co-op Worker with Serge

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Theology on Safari

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World Outreach Report

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Perspectives

Learn about God’s mission, how the global Church has responded, and what the greatest needs in the world of evangelization are today – and how YOU can be a part of God’s story as he redeems people from the nations to himself. 

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