Strengthening International Churches for Missional Impact

The first week in November was a long but good week with three days of meetings with the Missional International Church Network’s (MICN) International Leadership Team (ILT) in Dubai. MICN exists to “Strengthen the International Church Movement for Missional Impact“.

Missional is the idea of churches doing things that directly affect, build up, bless, or in other ways engage their local communities.

Sometimes international churches (ICs) struggle to know how to best interact with and reach out to their local communities due to language, cultural, and other barriers. MICN is focused on helping ICs do this effectively, especially in the 10/40 Window where evangelism can be both difficult and dangerous.

The ILT made a lot of progress as we defined MICN’s goals for 2018, which all fall under MICN’s four purposes:

• * Formation – building up IC leaders
• * Collaboration – networking with churches and other organizations to help each other be more effective
• * Innovation – coming up with new and effective means for ICs to impact their communities, especially in difficult places like the 10/40 window
• * Implementation – making sure that all the good ideas above actually get put in place!

 MICN is young and is taking on more formal structure, so one of the assets I bring to the team is my experience helping lead the International Baptist Convention over the past decade and seeing what ideas are transferable.

We also ran into Bill Hybels while in Dubai and had a couple talks with him as well as others with the Global Leadership Summit (GLS). MICN hopes to create a partnership to grow the leadership capacity of IC leaders and our meetings with Bill, Gary (former GLS president), and Tom (new GLS president) helped move that idea forward.

Thank you so much for your ongoing support; it really is making a difference around the world!