Passing The Torch

PERSPECTIVES
In recent decades global Christianity has grown at an unprecedented rate, especially in the developing nations of the southern hemisphere. Churches in these areas are facing an enormous influx of new converts from nominally Christian to non-Christian backgrounds. The discipleship and spiritual formation of a whole generation is a unique oportunity and an enormous challange.

Christians in North America often acknowledge that the key to healthy churches is healthy families. Yet Christian churches and families in Asia, Africa, and Latin America face special challenges to the well-being of the family. Like their North American counterparts, Christians in the developing world face militant secularism, empty materialism, and pop-culture hedonism. In addition to these global trends, they must often contend with their own cultures that are saturated in paganism and occult practices, social hostility and persecution, government corruption, widespread violence and serious poverty. Churches and families in the developintg world must struggle against these currents to pass their new-found faith on to their children.

Northern hemisphere churches with a long and rich Christian heritage can be a tremendous blessing to these recent Christian families in the global south. Like all families, southern Christians love their children and see their future as the key to the future of their faith and people. Their most frequent request is, “teach us to raise our children to follow Christ.” The greatest investment the Church of the global north can make in the Church of the global south is to invest its treasures of Christian thought and practice to the newest generation of the kingdom.

Our ministry seeks to pass on the riches of a Christian worldview to the next generation through education. Our goal is not merely to provide a Christian schooling but to provide the tools of a new Christian culture. The church has grown phenomenally wide. Now our aim is, by the grace of God, to equip families to provide a strong, healthy, deep, multi-generational faith.