Sometimes people ask, “What exactly do you do?” One way to explain is that we connect ministries together; we are like pipe connectors. We find what a ministry needs and connect them to create a win-win situation. For example, this month Cathy helped Crossroads prison ministry figure out how to plug TUMI’s ministry training curriculum into their international network of correspondence courses. On another occasion, our friend Brian asked Cathy how to start a TUMI class in a nearby California prison. She contacted Prison Fellowship who said, “we were just praying for someone to start TUMI in that prison!” Last week, we introduced Paul Chan’s “We Are Church” movement to Global Gates so they can work together to reach people groups in the Bay Area. A NJ church planting movement asked Cathy to find former prisoners to work in his ministry. Cathy introduced him to six people across America, generating a flurry of enthusiastic emails, culminating in a group videoconference next week to next steps. Stories like these are happening nearly every day. And when they do, we have accomplished our task—we’ve moved from potential to effective implementation; we can say, “our job is done here.”
Sometimes we connect whole systems of pipes. We conducted our second meeting of what we are now calling the Houston Diaspora Coalition; a growing number of ministries seeking how to reach the diaspora in their diverse city. The participants said, “We’ve tried to collaborate over the decades, but your leadership is forming something that can actually happen this time.” As this system of pipes comes together, others are asking us to do something similar in their city.
We are connecting pipes all over America, and we will not stop until every people unengaged people group on earth receives Living Water. We are making progress: the number of unengaged groups has dropped from 3206 in July to 3171 in December. But until that number reaches zero, we keep on connecting pipes.
Commenti