When Dan and Angie Rude decided to form The Flow Foundation they asked me to be the executive director. As we began, the three of us knew one important fact: I didn’t know enough about the world of missions. In fact, we agreed that I needed to get informed on currently effective mission practices as soon as possible. I was fortunate to have several people who work successfully in the world of missions share their experience, knowledge, and wisdom with me. Of the many, two people stand out as extremely gracious and helpful in sharing their time, learnings, and expertise. One of those people is Doug Lucas. He is the founder and President of Team Expansion. (I will introduce the other person next week).
Doug, and other leaders of Team Expansion, have spent dozens of hours with me and with other leaders of The FLOW, to help us learn how God is moving to lead people to Jesus around the world. Doug has shared with us the primary importance of prayer in mission work, ways to encourage mission workers, the principles of the Disciple Making Movement, and trained us on how to lead a Discovery Bible Study (DBS). DBS is the method of Bible study that is currently more effective in making disciples who make disciples, across varying cultures and faiths, than any other form of outreach.
While a sophomore in college, Doug had a dream to start a mission foundation to share the good news of Jesus with people worldwide who had never heard about Jesus. In the mission world, people who have never heard of Jesus are called Unreached People Groups, or simply, UGPs.
Here is a mission definition of Unreached People Groups:
An unreached people are a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group without outside assistance.
Currently the world’s population is 7.6 billion people. Among those 7.6 billion there are 17,016 people groups. And of those groups, 7,082 are Unreached People Groups. Over 40 percent of the world’s people's groups have never heard the story of Jesus.
As of today, Team Expansion oversees 379 mission workers who are dedicating their lives to taking the good news of Jesus to the world’s UPGs and to developing Christians who are members of these UPGs to effectively make new disciples. (As of this week, they will begin finding mission workers to go and share Jesus with 20 new UPGs in Southeast Asia.)
The Flow Foundation is deeply invested in working with Team Expansion to help provide support and encouragement to nine East African mission workers as they share the message of Jesus, at great risk to their personal safety. These nine mission workers comprise three teams that are sharing Jesus in three East African countries, named “Wellspring” for our purposes. The population of these countries is almost entirely UPGs. Due to the danger of their work, I am not at liberty to share the countries where they work. Praise God that He is working dramatically through their faithful service. People are being taught about Jesus and becoming disciples at a rate that can only be attributed to God’s power. Growth has been so significant that recently government authorities have seen Christianity as a threat to their status quo and have arrested some new Christians. Despite this looming threat, many are still choosing to become disciples of Jesus. We serve an amazing God!
Here is how you can become a part of this great work!
1. Pray for quick release for those who have been jailed because of their faith.
2. Pray that God will protect and embolden these mission workers and other disciples to continue to share the eternal truth about Jesus.
3. Give! While we cannot travel to these unnamed countries, we can do something! The mothers, fathers, children, uncles, and aunts living in these countries so far away are real people who need God’s grace, mercy, and hope. Your giving will allow The Flow to send other teams into these countries with the liberating message of Jesus.
The Flow Foundation has been greatly blessed by the knowledge and experience shared by Doug Lucas and Team Expansion, but the greatest blessing has been our opportunity to support and encourage the spread of the good news of Jesus to UPGs and to see God’s transforming power at work.
Please join us in this great work.
Bruce
Check out Team Expansion at teamexpansion.org