Finding new workers for the harvest

How did you get involved with the work of Pioneers?

In 2020, I received a call from someone I used to work with at a
previous ministry who was invited to be a board member in this Pioneers office that was about to start, and he told me they needed a director for this office. He told me that he and his wife were praying, and they both had my name in their minds. At the time I was completely exhausted by numerous challenges within my family and my work earlier in that year, and I didn’t feel ready to work for Pioneers. But every time I tried to do anything else, God said ‘you will not touch anything else’ and asked me to trust Him and take this journey with Him. So, later that year I started working for Pioneers as the director of this new office.

The goal of a mobilisation office is to prepare and send out workers into the harvest. How do you find and prepare workers for mission?

Our goal is to mobilise people inside our country and send people from our country to other nations. Since we began in 2020, we have mobilised 26 people to share the gospel and plant churches in our country as well as neighbouring countries.

One of the main methods of preparing our workers for mission is our 10-month training course based on Mark 3:14: ‘He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach.’ This course equips and encourages people in cross-cultural experiences and teaches them how to serve others and stimulate Church-Planting Movements, a core value of Pioneers.

We are also currently seeking to spend a year training seven mobilisers at our office. Their goal is to identify 8 to 10 people from their network who have a heart to serve among Muslims. Those people will then be trained to serve in different cities, and once they have been trained, they will form a field team. Each of the 8 to 10 people who have been trained in mission will also be asked to identify and mobilise a further 8 to 10 people to serve among Muslims.

As a mobilisation office you are able to decide who is sent out to serve among Muslims. What do you think makes a good mission worker? And how do you discern who should become a mission worker sent by your office?

Important qualities of mission workers are a Biblical foundation, strategic thinking, and an understanding of their call to serve. They need to be called and able to discern where the Lord wants them to serve. They need to be someone who has the ability to show love for others, build relations, and have a focused mind to see things moving on and progressing. Mission is all about love, being available for the people you are serving, and spending enough time with them.

To discern who should be sent, we interview people who come to us to become mission workers, whether by one of our mobilisation strategies or those who approach us directly. We have met so many people recently, but we rejected the majority of them. We did not feel comfortable that they were the people who would really match with our vision and make a difference.

We are looking for quality people. We go through various stages to ensure that they are called and have the potential to really make an impact. We are focused on not compromising on the quality of our workers. We are hiring for the Lord, so we need to have people who have passion and vision.

What opportunities do workers have to share the gospel within your country?

One of the opportunities our workers have is through a football academy. Our dream was to use it as an access to share the gospel with others. We connected with a Brazilian who was already in our country and could speak Arabic fluently. He had previously been a coach in Brazil at a professional level.

This is exactly the type of worker we were looking for. We started this academy with around 10 to 15 children, and now we have around 70. The academy serves three groups. The first one is Muslim children. Their coaches come from the local church who were sent for six months of training with the Brazilian coach to be professional coaches. So, from their coaches, the children learn the game and they learn about Christian values. The children enrolled in the academy come twice a week and we tell them about Christian values while investing in their lives.

This is also great training for the coaches who are Christians but have never served others, especially Muslims, outside the church. So, we are trying to equip, train, and change their mindset.

The third part is the children’s mums. The first thing we do is to engage with them, have open discussion, and use this as an access point to talk about Christian values. Our mobiliser is trying to find Christian mums whose children are the same age as those at the academy to train them in sharing the gospel.

*Name changed to protect identities.