Missions
15 He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.
Mark 16:15
Mission Objective: To participate in the global work of spreading the Good News by encouraging TMEC members to get involved directly through short-term missions to different countries of the world, and to plant local churches therein when feasible.
Meaning
As I was musing about the reason why our church has Missions Ministry, it dawned on me to find out first what the word “mission” means and know also its origin. Based on my research, after surfing the Internet and searching the word, I finally came up to an article which I believed shed light to my quandary.
The literal word mission was derived from Latin “missio”, from missus, past participle of mittere which means to send off. Thus the meaning of mission is the authority and command to go to foreign countries and/or places for the purpose of evangelism and humanitarian work , especially among the poor and the disadvantaged.
Change of Direction
Since 1991, I have not known any mission work our church has participated in other than giving financial supports to the denomination we are affiliated to, and to other mission organizations. We did not have any direct involvement at all in the actual mission work. Under this scenario, all we get is second-hand mission report as reported by the denomination or by the mission organizations. We just relied on the information reported and never verified whether the report was indeed factual.
In 2009, our church called a pastor-missionary. This changed the church mission perspective from a mission financial supporter to a member-mission-send-oriented one. Our church will now send willing members-missionaries to foreign countries to do mission work themselves. And to start the new mission direction, members-missionaries will personally go back to their home country of origin and engage in short-term mission that will last for a month. They will contact evangelical churches in the locality where they came from and discuss with the church leaders our church mission objective. If the church pastors/leaders are willing, we will support them financially to train their members how to share the Gospel. TMEC recommends Evangelism Explosion as the tool, although other evangelism tools maybe utilized also to train local church members . The financial support will continue for three years, subject to the progress reports to be submitted by the local churches.
Ministry Leader: Pastor Lorenz Sallong II