After twenty years of cross-cultural ministry, Accelerating International Mission Strategies (AIMS) is refocusing its international mobilization efforts on six key regions. Churches within Africa and Asia are growing faster than ever before and more people have come to Christ in the past twenty-five years than in the entire history of missions. The Church is finally in a position to see the Great Commission realized in this generation, and through focusing resources on six epicenters (China, the Horn of Africa, India, the Malay World, Tanzania and the United States) AIMS hopes to create an international harvest force.
“We believe that these epicenters will be focal points through which the earth will be shaken and the unreached will be reached with the gospel of Jesus Christ,” said Daniel Crosby, president of AIMS.
The epicenter focus is built upon the idea that reaching the heart of a region will enable AIMS to make a bigger impact in the area as a whole. AIMS’staff believe that these six areas are key regions out of which God will raise up the resources needed to complete the task at hand. As AIMS trains pastors and leaders in the focal centers, the word of God will spread throughout each region and claim hearts throughout the world in the name of Jesus Christ.
During the past twenty years AIMS has developed lasting partnerships with key leaders and organizations throughout these six regions that have the potential to greatly increase the kingdom of God. Throughout the next five years leaders trained through each epicenter will become strategically involved in advancing the gospel throughout their respective region. Leaders in Tanzania plan to initially focus on reaching the thirty-one remaining unreached people groups within the country and then begin reaching other groups throughout Central Africa. In China the growing house church movement has expressed a passion to take the gospel to the 456 unreached people groups within China and along the Silk Road.
AIMS will continue to use Equipping for the Harvest conferences to train key leaders and church networks within each region, but each epicenter will have its own unique strategy. Some of these regions have already seen great results on the mission field. In 2001 AIMS equipped one hundred top Ethiopian leaders to train others around the country to mobilize churches within their district. Since that time Ethiopian churches have sent missionaries to all sixty unreached people groups within their country and established a growing church in thirty-five of those groups. AIMS will focus eighty percent of its global mobilization efforts on developing these six epicenters, leaving time to develop partnerships and conferences in other regions around the world.
Since its beginnings, AIMS has: equipped more than seventy-five thousand national pastors and business leaders to minister more effectively; produced dozens of seminars; and launched Compassion Aid Network, a humanitarian outreach. As a result, twenty-nine million people have heard the gospel (many for the very first time), fourteen thousand churches have been planted in partnership with national denominations and church movements and more than 2.2 million people have received Jesus Christ.
(This article was edited from an Accelerating International Mission Strategies news release.)