from July 18, 2010 prayer email

ACMC is a 35 year old missions mobilization organization. We were an independent organization until we came under Pioneers umbrella three years ago. This is the 5th and final reflection designed to better familiarize you with Pioneers.


Our mission statement reads “Pioneers mobilizes teams to glorify God among unreached peoples by initiating church planting movements in partnership with local churches.”

Pioneers eight core values are:
1. passion for God
2. unreached peoples
3. church planting movements
4. ethos of grace
5. the local church
6. team centered
7. innovation and flexibility
8. participatory servant leadership

In this reflections I will focus on our seventh and eighth core values: “innovation and flexibility” and “participatory servant leadership”.

INNOVATION AND FLEXIBILITY. These are values that I aspire to, but they don’t come naturally for me. I prefer well defined processes and structures. However, in the rapidly changing world we live in, innovation and flexibility are important values for any organization that seeks to stay on the cutting edge. There is such remarkable diversity encountered in any cross culture work, making these practices essential to being effective. Additionally these values are highly regarded by many from the emerging generations in our own culture.

PARTICIPATORY SERVANT LEADERSHIP. This is one of the striking distinctives of Pioneers and a big part of what won my heart over to this organization back in 2007. Our leaders are humble, servant hearted men, who are truly men of God. Their leadership style is participatory, not autocratic. Every person on our team has a meaningful voice at the table. This creates participation in and ownership of important decisions. I find this value to be a rarity in both secular and Christian organizations. It is in stark contrast to many of our larger local churches who have chosen to embrace a pastor as CEO model of leadership. It is a leadership style that I highly value and thrive under, and it is a leadership style that I seek to practice.

from June 19, 2010 prayer email

ACMC is a 35 year old missions mobilization organization. We were an independent organization until we came under Pioneers umbrella three years ago. This reflection is part 4 in an effort to better familiarize you with Pioneers.


Our mission statement reads “Pioneers mobilizes teams to glorify God among unreached peoples by initiating church planting movements in partnership with local churches.”

Pioneers eight core values are:
1. passion for God
2. unreached peoples
3. church planting movements
4. ethos of grace
5. the local church
6. team centered
7. innovation and flexibility
8. participatory servant leadership

In this reflections I will focus on the fifth and sixth core values: the local church and team centered.

THE LOCAL CHURCH. Pioneers holds a high view of the local church. We are not only a church planting organization, we see the local church as an essential partner in the work of world evangelization. My work through ACMC is an excellent example of Pioneers commitment to partnership with the local church. “ACMC helps churches mobilize their resources for effective involvement in world evangelization.” By serving the mission leaders in local churches with the practical issues they grapple with, ACMC helps local churches meaningfully involve their congregations with the least reached around the globe.

TEAM CENTERED. In an age in which so many churches and organizations have become enamored with corporate models, Pioneers has not. We are not a top down organization, with a command center in Orlando from which everything is controlled and managed. Pioneers has a decentralized leadership structure built around empowered teams. Those higher up on the organizational chart on the field and in Orlando see themselves as servants to those who are laboring at a grass roots level. Our field teams operate with high levels of autonomy, guided by the mission and core values of Pioneers. Everyone in Pioneers is part of a team, with no lone rangers.

from June 6, 2010 prayer email

ACMC is a 35 year old missions mobilization organization. We were an independent organization until three years ago when we came under Pioneers umbrella. This reflection is part 3 in an effort to better familiarize you with Pioneers.


Our mission statement reads “Pioneers mobilizes teams to glorify God among unreached peoples by initiating church planting movements in partnership with local churches.”

Pioneers eight core values are:
1. passion for God
2. unreached peoples
3. church planting movements
4. ethos of grace
5. the local church
6. team centered
7. innovation and flexibility
8. participatory servant leadership

In this reflections I will focus on the third and fourth core values: church planting movements and ethos of grace.

CHURCH PLANTING MOVEMENTS. Many evangelical leaders are convinced that church planting is the single most effective vehicle for engagement in the Great Commission (evangelism and discipleship). “… on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:18-19). Church planting movements trace their roots back to the work of the apostle Paul in the book of Acts, but they have received renewed and needed attention in recent decades. Not simply planting individual churches, but employing Biblical principles and methodologies that lend themselves well to the rapid reproduction of simple, missionally focused, Biblically based local churches.

ETHOS OF GRACE. Paul’s exhortation to his young protégé Timothy, “You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” (II Timothy 2:1). Regularly practicing an ethos of grace is an aspirational value for me. Although accountability is a good and needed thing, I am often out of balance. My natural tendency is to hold myself and others to a very high standard. And my life in years past was often characterized by a performance orientation, which sadly is a mark of many evangelical leaders today. We do not have anything we need to prove to God or to others. This core value of Pioneers has been a much needed breath of fresh air for me and for ACMC. I am learning to embrace the fact that God loves each of His children fully and accepts us unconditionally in Christ, with all our warts and wrinkles. And that my response to this truth should be to extend this same grace (unmerited favor) to others, even when I may feel they don’t deserve it.

from May 16, 2010 prayer email

ACMC is a 35 year old missions mobilization organization. We were an independent organization until three years ago when we came under Pioneers umbrella. This reflection is part 2 in an effort to better familiarize you with Pioneers.


Our mission statement reads “Pioneers mobilizes teams to glorify God among unreached peoples by initiating church planting movements in partnership with local churches.”

In my last reflections, I listed Pioneers eight core values. Today I will focus in on the first two: passion for God and unreached peoples.

PASSION FOR GOD. This should be the foundation for all Christian service. Sadly, I regularly meet good people who have a passion for ministry, but lack a passion for God. Unfortunately, this was my personal experience for many years. These individuals’ service is sincere, but self energized, hollow, and lacking power. It is only as the life of Jesus Christ is lived out through us that we are supernaturally empowered to truly serve His Church and the lost of this world. As consumed as the apostle Paul was with his missionary work, he had a greater passion. That passion was to know Christ. “I consider everything a lost compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ … I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death.” (Philippians 3:8, 10). I seek to keep this as the consuming passion of my life as well.

UNREACHED PEOPLES. Missiologists define an unreached people group as a people group that is less than 2% evangelical Christian (in many cases a fraction of 1%). Years of missionary work have repeatedly demonstrated this to be a threshold that must be broken through before the Church of Jesus Christ within that people group has the capacity to complete the job of evangelizing the rest of the group without dependence on outside missionary involvement. This is the work of frontier missions. The apostle Paul was deeply committed to missionary work among unreached peoples. “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.” (Romans 20:15). 97% of the world’s unreached people groups lie within a geographic area called the 10-40 window (north Africa, Middle East, central / south / east Asia). Joshua project has identified 639 unreached people groups of 100,000 plus people. From a strategic vantage point, these people groups should be the top priority of our missionary efforts today.

from May 3, 2010 prayer email

Although ACMC is a 35 year old missions mobilization organization, we were an independent organization until three years ago when we came under Pioneers umbrella. I intend to devote several of my upcoming twice-a-month updates to helping you get more familiar with Pioneers.


Our mission statement reads “Pioneers mobilizes teams to glorify God among unreached peoples by initiating church planting movements in partnership with local churches.” I resonate with every word of Pioneers’ mission statement.

Pioneers has eight core values that direct much of the organization’s day-to-day behavior and decision making.
1. passion for God
2. unreached peoples
3. church planting movements
4. ethos of grace
5. the local church
6. team centered
7. innovation and flexibility
8. participatory servant leadership

As I have looked at the core values of different churches and organizations, I have encountered two kinds of core values (aspirational values and actual values). All eight of Pioneers core values are actual. And you may notice that four of our eight core values overlap with key phrases in our mission statement – teams, unreached peoples, church planting movements, local church.

The mission statement, core values, and the quality of the U.S. leadership of Pioneers are the things that drew me to the organization when I came on board three years ago. And they are what keep me with Pioneers today.

Pioneers recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. We work exclusively among unreached peoples (less than 2% evangelical Christian) in six regions of the world (East Asia, Eurasia & Americas, Mid Asia, North Africa & Middle East, Southeast Asia & Pacific, and Sub-Saharan Africa). We have 1958 workers on 191 church planting teams in 84 countries serving 130 people groups in 65 languages. Our U.S. headquarters is in Orlando, FL, with 62% of our world-wide workers coming from the U.S. There are 7 other mobilization bases around the globe (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ghana, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Singapore).