Global Frontier Missions: Christian Missions, Training, and Discipleship
Until All Have Heard
“Missionary Training” is what Global Frontier Missions is focused on doing with excellence. We have trained over 365 missionaries in the last 20 years and want to position ourselves to train hundreds, if not thousands, more!
Our five month missionary training school has been our “bread and butter” training program for equipping people’s head, heart, and hands for cross-cultural service. We plan on continuing to improve that program every semester and are open to expanding to new locations to get our MTS started in other places as well. In faith, we envision a substantial training hub in Atlanta where students may specialize in medical missions, Business as Mission (BAM), community development, social justice, or church planting multiplication. We plan to develop a night version of our training program for those unable to raise the necessary support for the intensive, full-time training. We look forward to launching new teams to start GFM hubs in other multi-ethnic cities like Jacksonville, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York.
Our South Asia “field hub” launched its SLICE program focused on helping new missionaries learn Strategy, Language, Identity, Culture, and Exalting Jesus. Many missions organizations see newly deployed missionaries returning home before completing their first four-year term. Quality pre-field training helps reduce those attrition rates, but some agencies realize an additional need for just-in-time, on-the-job training. We are praying about starting new “field hubs” and more SLICE programs in global cities throughout the world like Dubai, Istanbul, and Bangkok to help equip long-term, fruitful, discipling-making missionaries. We will continue moving towards our THUMBs Up Vision by establishing mobilization, training, and sending “field hubs” in the Tribal, Hindu, Unreligious/Chinese, Muslim, and Buddhist worlds.
GFM receives a steady flow of inquiries from around the world asking for ministry training. Some want to grow in Bible knowledge or to learn evangelism, discipleship and church planting strategies. Others want to become missionaries who serve among unreached people groups. We have started short-term training trips into the Global South (Latin America, Africa, Asia), seeking to equip and empower local indigenous leadership to reach their own people, to be grounded in Scripture, and to catch a missions vision to take the Gospel to the remaining unreached people groups in their country, region, and throughout the world. Missiologists expect that 70% of the mission force, by the year 2050, will be from outside the West; thus, we want to help prepare our brothers and sisters around the world for missions. Our ultimate goal is to train Global South disciples to initiate church planting movements. GFM also focuses on connecting with immigrant and ethnic churches in the US to mobilize and train them for local and global cross-cultural ministry.
Increasingly more people around the world are accessing the internet. Our preferred way to train missionaries is face-to-face, experiencing life-on-life ministry together. However, because not everyone is able to attend one of our existing “hubs,” we have developed our online missionary training to equip people to serve cross-culturally. Following the same well-rounded curriculum as our in-person training, the online program is accessible to people in the Global South as well as missionaries on the field who desire additional training. We also encourage local churches to implement our online training as they develop missionaries to send to the fields. We will continue to expand online training options that will serve missionaries who are life-long learners.
If any of these areas sounds exciting to you, please contact us. We need a lot more GFM full-time staff to fulfill the vision God has laid on our hearts, and we also need an army or pray-ers and givers, so please consider whether God would have you join our movement.