By Randy Schmor
NAB Gateway Director
If you read Drew Steinhart’s article a few weeks ago, I hope you have been thinking, “How could my church be a part of a sister-church partnership?” In a number of ways, Drew laid out the beautiful things that characterize the opportunity a sister-church partnership can provide in close, cross-cultural relationships with brothers and sisters you get to know, serve alongside, and discover global mission together with.
Gateway officially introduced the idea of sister-church partnership to the NAB family at the 2012 Triennial in Orlando, Florida, though we had introduced them to churches in the years prior as opportunities for leaders and pastors of churches to investigate long-term, cross-cultural, mutual relationships with a church/ministry internationally. It starts with hosting and inviting NAB Gateway to facilitate a four-hour Sister-Church Partnership Orientation. There your church leadership will discover sister-church partnerships to be a process of seeing how missional/Kingdom theology, global church identity, mutual relationship building toward partnership, and collaborative mission are designed to come together in partnerships that have the chance to endure for many years.
You’ll also discover that NAB Gateway has sister-church partnerships in a variety of countries and settings, with many different ministry and missional objectives that each sister-church partnership has agreed to collaborate on. Take short-term mission teams, for example. We have found these are best done within a sister-church partnership context where a long-term relationship influences what the teams will do. It is within these long-term relationships where both partners discover that mission trips are but one aspect, among many, of a thriving partnership.
Whether it’s in Europe, South America, North America, Africa, or Asia, a sister-church partnership can provide new vitality, focus, and purpose to your local church’s involvement and support of global missions. And as is being discovered more and more with each sister-church partnership, God is using these church relationships to call more and more career missionaries from both sides of the partnership to serve in their own contexts and around the world.
Get started today by hosting or attending a Sister-Church Partnership Orientation! Find out more at the link below.
Sister-Church Partnership Orientation
We hope you’ll one day say as Drew Steinhart did, “It’s one thing to know that in Christ we have brothers and sisters spread throughout the world. It’s an even greater gift to get to know some of these brothers and sisters, to learn their names, to serve alongside them, and to be enriched by entering into their unique and beautiful culture of worship and devotion to the Lord.”
“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” (Ephesians 4:4–6 NRSV)