“Good News Productions, International’s goal of helping missionaries on the field provides the foundation for one of the most essential, dynamic, and complementary partnerships possible today.”
—Shawn Tyler, Missionary to Uganda
Why Africa?
The global AIDS pandemic is the most horrific, Africa-impacting medical reality ever known to man. The Church needs to help. Some of the poorest of the poor (living on less than a dollar a day) live in Africa, and the Church needs to partner. There are many refugees, many youth (50% of entire African nations are under the age of 18), many illiterate, many poor, and many unemployed who exist in Africa––for which the global Church is responsible.
At the same time, the African Church is the emerging younger spiritual brother to China, Korea, and the USA in terms of the global Christian family. With countries like Nigeria and Kenya sending out missionaries around the globe, with tremendous spiritual growth being recorded in many nations in central and southern Africa, and with the dawn of the largest global prayer initiative in the history of the world emanating from South Africa, this continent’s Church is a force to partner with today. It is a Church that sees the falsehood of materialism, the empty promises of post modernity, and the slippery slopes of secular and sexual non-biblical norms. Africa is ready to grow and help.
Why Partner?
Africans are relational; Americans are technical. Africans are resource poor; Americans are rich in assets. Africa has manpower; America has funds. Africans understand struggle and sacrifice, and Americans have creativity and knowledge. Together, the synergy could be awesome for His honor and glory.
A new day of dialog is emerging between the Christian Churches and the Churches of Christ. The Holy Spirit is preparing men and women who are more interested than ever before in glorifying God as they work at completing the task of world evangelism. These people notice that there is more in common to glean through partnership than differences to accentuate and separate. People, who like Paul, want to use “all means possible…to win people to Christ.”
Why Now?
Missionaries and African church leaders met June 13 – 17, 2006 in Mbale, Uganda for the first ever Africa Summit. It was a meeting of African and American Christian leaders who are forming a 30-year vision today for tomorrow’s needs. What is the context?
- Uganda is the only nation in the world to begin slowing the infection rates of the HIV/AIDS virus.
- The Mbale Mission Team serves as the nucleus of a church planting movement that reaches from Uganda to Kenya, Sudan, and Tanzania.
- Three of seven countries in the region have been traumatized by war in the past 30 years.
- Three of seven countries are seeing Muslims converting to Christianity (Sudan, Kenya and Uganda)
- Sudan is the seventh largest Arabic speaking nation in the world (many of them are Arabic-speaking Africans) that is now open to Christianity.
The Result – The Harmony Project
The goal is to create a new type of Christian university, whose students will be practically trained and physically poised to take the Gospel to Muslim friends as well as to the infected and downtrodden, to the poor and disenfranchised. These brothers and sisters in Christ will be the best health workers, farmers, educators, businesswomen, computer repairmen, and missionaries ever.
What will it take?
- Days of prayer and fasting to perfect the vision.
- Weeks of planning the goals and objectives.
- Months of travel to communicate the vision.
- Years of construction and equipping.
- Decades of patiently educating and training hundreds of students.
- Millions of dollars to invest in one of the timeliest partnerships of this century.