'New degrees of unity'

In August of 1806, a group of students from Williams College met outside to pray for foreign missions. A sudden rainstorm forced them to take cover under a nearby haystack. This makeshift shelter lent its name to their ongoing Haystack Prayer Meetings, which are credited as launching the modern missions era.

In July of 2016, SEND missionaries quietly bowed their heads to pray about a new opportunity. SEND had been invited to launch a deep and generous collaboration with two other missions organizations: TEAM and SAM (South America Mission). As we prayed, we wondered with excitement if this was the start of another great missions movement.

While SEND has worked closely with other organizations in the past, this will be a new level of collaboration. The vision is to find ways to share our services, pool our resources, and blend our efforts to make us all more effective at making disciples among the unreached. Currently, groups from our fields and offices are meeting with their counterparts for discussion and planning.

Warren Janzen, SEND’s International Director, said of the association, “Based upon the belief that united we can do more, a year of talks have prompted TEAM, SAM and SEND to launch a Great Commission association that affirms our unique contributions and promotes generous collaboration for God’s glory and the rejoicing of the nations. We believe that through deep and generous collaboration we can share leadership, systems and resources so as to increase our collective ability to make disciples among the nations. We want to demonstrate new degrees of unity between organizations and achieve better stewardship of Kingdom resources.”

Mobilizing North Americans into missions is presenting new and complex challenges. But we’ve seen historically that waves of missionaries have been catalyzed by special events. Could this new association be a catalyst for God’s next movement of people into missions? We don’t know yet.

But we do believe that this is a breakthrough in SEND’s missions efforts.

Thank you, Lord, for this exciting new association. May it increase our ability to make disciples among the nations.

Reprinted from SEND International's 2016 Annual Report.

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