GracePoint’s Role in a New Beginning
As a team of seven missionaries begin a new work in Kethra, the newest field in Global Partners’ Turkic-Arabic Area, they aren’t going alone. Journeying with them are hundreds of prayer and financial partners who are committed to helping bring the Gospel to a place where less than 1% of people know Jesus.
Among those partners is GracePoint Church in South Dakota, a church that has made the commitment to help send and support the entire Kethra team. While members of the Kethra team aren’t members of GracePoint, the church values “equipping people for new works,” even if that means equipping leaders and ministries beyond their own congregation.
Supporting the team in its goal of seeing unreached people come to Christ just felt like a natural fit in the church’s mission.
This partnership is especially meaningful to Jacob, the Missions and Care Pastor at GracePoint who previously served with his wife in the Turkic-Arabic Area. As missionaries, their team was also blanketed by support from a church, so they have experienced firsthand just how significant that kind of partnership can be. Now, they get to be “senders.”
When Jacob and the church’s leadership spent time prayerfully considering various partnership opportunities, they were united in feeling led to partner with Kethra.
“We believe in the mission and work of Kethra, it wasn’t necessarily the specific country itself, it’s more that the type of work feels like something we – as the North American Church and as GracePoint – should and want to be a part of,” Jacob said. “I feel like our sending role in helping reach the unreached is equipping people who are going, and making it sustainable.”
In addition to a financial commitment to the Kethra team, GracePoint wants to provide relational support as well. Jacob said they want people at GracePoint to recognize and know the Kethra team members, and to be inspired to pray for them. The church plans to keep updated Kethra prayer requests in their church’s newsletter where other ministry partnerships are also featured, and eventually hopes to visit the team once they’re more settled. Overall, they see the Kethra team as an extension of GracePoint, and they want to be an ongoing encouragement to them, much like Barnabas in the book of Acts.
For GracePoint, the partnership is also more than supporting ministry overseas. Jacob mentioned that they hope becoming connected to the Kethra team could inspire local mission engagement as well.
Located just down the road from GracePoint is South Dakota State University, where out of the 12,000 students nearly 1,000 of them are international students, predominantly from unreached nations.
“Our hope is that as we communicate what we’re partnering with globally and what our partners are doing … that can become an influence for our people to realize they can do some of that work in their own context,” Jacob explained. “We care about …unreached people groups who are far away, but we have some of those people right in our backyard, so through what we do in global missions, we’re asking, ‘how can we disciple our people to see the mission field or unreached people groups right in their backyard.’ So we can have that consistency afar and close by.”
Before departing for Kethra, the team members worshiped with GracePoint, introduced themselves to the congregation, were prayed for and sent out. Today, while the team settles into a new culture, studies language and begins building relationships, GracePoint continues to stand with them through prayer, encouragement and support. Together, they’re demonstrating that God’s mission advances through both those who go and those who send.