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Dear Partners in Ministry,
Ron and Jeannie just spent two weeks in Hungary and Albania watching a vision from the Lord become a wonderful and significant reality.
Jeannie teaches CHE Albania team how to write good prayer updates at the Developing Sustainable Partnerships conference.
As NAB Hungary Field Leader and Community Health Evangelism (CHE) Central Europe Coordinator, one of Ron’s key goals is to develop long-term sustainability for the national workers and community develop teams Jeannie and he are raising up around Central Europe. This includes our own NAB teams in Hungary, Romania and Serbia.
Although CHE and wholistic community development are not aid programs requiring a great deal of money and people, they still need some sustainable resources of volunteers, short-term special project teams and finances to do their work. These important resources must come through sustainable partnerships with churches, businesses, and individuals within the country and abroad.
However, many of our national team members in Central Europe do not know how to develop these important sustainable partnerships. So, Ron teamed up with Mark Bennett, California businessman and CHE leader in projects in Uganda and head of his local NAB church’s mission board, to produce a new course that trains CHE Teams, Boards, and workers in how to develop essential, sustainable partnerships.
Mark and Ron came to realize that individual and church partnerships do not always endure, but Christians workers, who know how to make sustainable partnerships, do.
They set about to create a course that would teach national workers Biblical principles of raising up individuals and churches that would partner with them to transform communities and plant new churches among the poor and marginalized. In the process, Mark and Ron wanted to help participants learn how western churches think and operate; how to communicate with them effectively; how to utilize webpages, social media, email and video to develop deeper relationships and how to follow the examples of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, both of whom needed partnerships to do their ministries.
Together, they pooled Ron’s 45 years in church and missions ministry and Mark’s extensive experience as a businessman, CHE worker and church missions board member as they created lessons plans.
Jeannie, Ron, Mark, and Ken Dean do a panel discussion on “How Western Churches Work” in Albania.
After six months of collaboration, Mark, Ron, and Jeannie launched the week-long course for the first time to 24 eager members of our teams from Romania, Hungary and Serbia April 15-20 at Balatonföldvár. Then they flew to Tirana, Albania, to present it to 15 members of our partner Christian community development teams working there April 22-27.
The training struck a deep chord with many of the participants, who confessed that they often feel like orphans as they persevere in reaching out in Jesus’ love to the poorest communities of the old Soviet satellite countries. Most of their home churches and denominations do not yet have a missionary-sending mindset and do not cooperate in their wholistic work with the Roma and the poor.
During the week of training and visioning, they all learned new ways to approach potential partners both in their own countries and abroad. This created new hope and encouragement plus many ideas that are now being put into action.
Ron will be introducing this new course on Developing Sustainable Support Partnerships at the International Wholistic Missions Conference on May 4. We pray that it will be an effective new tool in the CHE toolbox for reaching a million new villages for Jesus Christ by 2020. We praise the Lord and pray for our recent students to find faithful partners like you.
For more news on our ministry, please go to our webpage at www.justaseck.wordpress.com.
For His Kingdom,
Ron and Jeannie Seck