Karin created a colorful map of our recent training in Kenya. These are the countries with staff who now have been trained and equipped with the Mobile ConneXion toolkit.
Pamoja Africa participants:
Rob & Patricia have a complete listing of countries and participants.
I’m looking for great improvements in communication and collaboration to come out of this training.
Pamoja Africa (“Together Africa”) is a wake up call to prepare African students for leadership and Christian missions.
The vision for Pamoja Africa Conference is to accelerate the building of a new generation of spiritual leaders for a new Africa and beyond.
Africa is significant in God’s plan for world transformation and that plan invites young leaders to join hands across the continent to learn and share in leading the transformation of Africa. This is a call that every student and professional needs to respond to — it is a call to impact the nations.
Kay and Keith will participate in Pamoja Africa December 24 through January 5. We will celebrate Christmas early with our family in Dallas, then fly to Nairobi Kenya on Christmas eve.
Part of our involvement will be to help train 250 African Campus staff in using the Mobile Office tool our team has developed.
This will be our first time back in the African ministry since leaving Nigeria in 1992. We’re looking forward to the opportunity to minister in Africa again.
Most of the international staff of Campus Crusade for Christ do not have their own computer. Of those who own a personal computer, most do not have internet access in their homes. Most use shared computers in internet cafés.
In an effort to improve communications and collaboration between staff, our team developed a Mobile Office. The mobile office allows staff to use internet cafes, without worry about the programs available on the computers, plug in their MOP drive, and work from it as if the computer they are renting is a terminal. [Photo courtesy of Rob.]
Kay and Keith will participate in Pamoja Africa to help train the 250 Campus Staff from around Africa in the use of the Mobile Office. We expect over the next 12 months to see a significant increase in collaboration across the continent as our staff work together to develop movements.
Note: For more information on the Mobile Office Project, visit the website.
Kay and I have returned to Florida. On our flight from Dallas to Atlanta, we sat next to a recent college graduate who was so excited that his University of Florida Gators made the BCS bowl. He graduated last May. He likes his new company, likes his salary, but doesn’t like the attitudes of the people he works with. He was deeply concerned about ethics issues, particularly interpersonal relationships. We didn’t make much headway talking about spiritual things. He is Jewish but not spiritual. He is thoughtful, but not open. He is concerned about treating others right, but not able to sort through his own spiritual journey very well. He said other Christians were always leaving him with a pamphlet or tract.
So we just talked with him. And prayed for him.
Today we meet with our global operations team. It’s all day, and all good. We’re praying and planning how to build greater capacity for sustaining the Great Commission around the world.
Tomorrow, I travel to Vancouver, Canada via Seattle. We’re calling the conference iStrategy. It’s a small, highly-select group of the top practitioners of internet ministry in Campus Crusade for Christ (at least the ones that I know about!). God is blessing us abundantly in internet evangelism. Over the past year, we have seen a 100% increase in the number of indicated decisions for Christ and a 30% increase in email conversations with seekers. And we have not really increased the number of visitors to our websites significantly. This is increasing fruitfulness.
But I also feel that we can do better in internet discipleship. The number who continue into basic follow-up and discipleship are too few.
We can do better.
This is the focus of our iStrategy conference. The top practitioners of internet ministry will meet to pray, to share, and to seek ways to do better discipleship in our internet ministries.
Please pray for the iStrategy conference. Pray for a rich time of fellowship at the foot of the throne. Pray for new wisdom and relevation from God about how to increase our effectiveness in discipleship. Pray that we’ll understand how to be more effective in building movements everywhere. We want everyone to know someone who truly follows Jesus.
Want to read the story of a pioneer in internet ministry? How the ‘Light’ came into John Edmiston’s life and sent him into cyberspace is an interesting story.
A friend wrote today:
You have mentioned several times a place were seekers can go to enter dialogue. Can you tell me the link to that site?
Perhaps this will be useful you also. I responded that there are two types of dialogue that we use in our evangelistic outreaches: email conversations and live chat.
Most of our major evangelistic sites have a form as the last page on a site that a site visitor (seeker, questioner, new believer) can indicate they would like someone to contact them for dialogue. This will lead to email conversations with a trained mentor. Some examples:
Click Yes on any of these and you’ll see the form. (Don’t click YES too many times as each YES indicates an initial decision to receive Christ. But since we’ve received 475,000 through the end of Sept, a click or two won’t mess with our statistics!!!)
Some of our evangelistic sites also offer chat opportunites (as different from email questions/answers). These chat opportunities are organized by topic and time. Some examples (chat calendar on left side of page):
Send your friends who don’t yet know Jesus to some of these sites. They will be well cared for!