Silver Spring, Maryland, United States …. [Wendi Rogers/ANN]
Sending missionaries from North America to areas within their own home country is not a traditional method of communicating the gospel message for the Adventist Church, but for Global Mission’s Total Employment program, this is the focus.
Total Employment, a developing ministry, encourages Adventist colleges and universities in North America to train students to be missionaries in their home country after they graduate. “Our goal is for young people to receive an invitation … to be involved in church,” says Marti Schneider, director for programs for Global Mission.
“The goal is two-fold: one is to reach the world … this [North America] is a major mission field. The other is to help our young people [get involved in] a ministry, to help them sense that they have a place to work and that we need them, and they can be a very valuable asset in God’s work,” Schneider says.
She explains that Total Employment is not to provide a graduate with a job. However, helping graduates find jobs in the area they would like to live and begin new churches is a goal for the Total Employment program. “It’s about being totally employed for God–not just going to a 9 to 5 job, not just going to whatever you’re trained for. But also being an employee for God,” says Schneider.
Global Mission is working not only with Adventist colleges and universities on this initiative, but with local church offices and Adventist-Laymen’s Services and Industries (ASI), a group of lay people whose goal is to share Christ in their various marketplaces. The organization is invited to be involved in mentoring young people to be successful in finding employment and in their church planting endeavors.
Regional church offices across North America are analyzing their regions to determine where churches are most needed. They are intentional about reaching the unchurched and developing long-range goals for their target sites, Schneider says. Several church regions are currently looking for leaders to move to specific areas they have identified as “target” areas; other areas already have a church started and are looking for people with specific ministry skills to build on the foundation.
Schneider encourages young people who are interested in church planting to go to a SEEDS church planting training conference, also a Global Mission program that involves local churches. SEEDS provides networking opportunities as well as coaching on the process of beginning a new church.
“What we want to see happen is for peoples lives, their whole life, not just a part of their life–whether they’re a doctor, social worker, or a nurse-geared to doing ministry,” says Jose Bourget, a second-year theology student and on-site Total Employment coordinator at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, United States.
“That’s essentially what we’re doing. That’s what Total Employment is about. It’s giving a more wholistic view of how we should live our lives, and that’s serving God. We encourage people to make ministry their priority,” he added.
Bourget explains that several students at Andrews University are dedicated to the Crystal Lake area in Illinois, a town of 40,000 with no Protestant church. Gavriel Bardan, a young pastor working to build Bible study interest in the town, has a dream to plant an Adventist Church there.
Andrews University, where the program was launched, has a prayer group that “will support each other as they’re looking for jobs,” Schneider says. “And perhaps people in Chicago [not far from Andrews University], knowing what their training is, can be on the lookout. … I think that’s what we want for anyplace,” she says.
“When I talk to schools I challenge them not to consider themselves done when they send theology students out into ministry, and the rest of the people they just send out to be good citizens. But the schools were created in the first place to produce workers. … It’s the responsibility of our schools to send out missionaries, no matter what their degree is in. … I just want to catch the graduates … as they’re sending them out the door.”
Other schools that are getting involved include Southern Adventist University in Tennessee and Southwestern Adventist University in Texas.
“Often after graduation our young people go to church, sit in the back pew, feel uninvolved, and eventually just disappear,” says Michael L.
Ryan, a general vice president of the church and director of Global Mission. “Total Employment is a call to the front pews. It puts them where they belong-making decisions and plans, and running their own outreach ministry.”
“If they have been student missionaries and are not committed to going back overseas, they are prime people for wanting to do this. If they have a mission heart, then they are really looking for a place to do this,” Schneider says.
Total Employment participants plan the churches they will begin by looking at the demographics of the area and deciding what would reach the people there. “What will speak [to them], what is the language they speak?” Schneider says. “Not necessarily a foreign language, but what is it they’re interested in, what are their needs? And they’ll plant a church that will reach these people for their needs. It could be a contemporary, a traditional, a café church, a cell church–there’s so many different ways to plant a church.”
Copyright © 2004 by Adventist News Network.
