We aren’t expert missiologists.
We did not grow up dreaming of starting a missions organization. We are not professionals in all things missions related. Nor are we professional fundraisers (you’ve probably already figured that out).
We are administrators, and administrators who care about God’s glory among the nations and the lost. Therefore, we are employing our administrative skills to raise funds for training national pastors overseas. This work wasn’t something we dreamed up. By God’s design, we stumbled into it.
The roots of this effort
Good Churches came to life through time, providential opportunities, and meeting the right people. More and more we found ourselves asking, “Why don’t we do this?”
More specifically, I worked at or out of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC for the past 25 years, and have been intimately involved in founding and operating affiliated ministries like 9Marks, T4G, and CROSS. I had the privilege of seeing hundreds of young men come through the church as pastoral interns and 9Marks Weekenders for training pastors. Most of these men serve in the United States, but some returned to their home countries, parts of the world with little to no gospel access.
As we visited these international pastors, we discovered they were doing the same type of pastor-training, church-multiplying work we did at CHBC. They were both pastoring their own congregations toward health while also training national (indigenous) men to plant other faithful churches.
Could this scale?
We were especially impressed with one man and his team who work in an area where nearly thirty percent of all identified unreached people groups in the world are located. The team was laser focused on making disciples and training pastors. Their budget was tiny, their conditions atrocious (by American standards), their task enormous, and their godly ambitions inspiring. We couldn’t help but ask, “Could this training program scale?” If we were able to raise funding, could they train eighty nationals instead of twenty five? These brothers already had their hands full. So how could we help? The most obvious way was to raise American dollars to support this fruitful program.
Efficiency and effectiveness are important to us.
After a year of conversations we began working to help this particular program grow. Our initial thought was to place a giving portal on a website. But observing the work of missions agencies, we recognized that more structure was necessary, beginning with providing accountability and efficiency for donor dollars. We also wanted to take the vagueness out of missions giving, so that churches or donors could know exactly where their dollars were going and who they were supporting on the field. And we wanted partners with a biblical understanding of the centrality of the local church in fulfilling the Great Commission.
So we started Good Churches, an effort aimed at efficiently and effectively planting good churches among the unreached.
It's just a start.
We’re told in Zechariah “not to despise the day of small beginnings.” So we won’t. We are modest in size, but ambitious, like this little program we support. We will never publish the outlandish numbers, like this little program we support. Yet we will work to be faithful before the Lord.
