Impact of the First World Missions Summit

The World Mis­sions Sum­mit is com­ing up at the end of this year, and so I asked E. Scott Mar­tin (czar of the sum­mit) what the long-term fruit of the first sum­mit has been. His answer floored me and I share it with his per­mis­sion.

He uses a lot of acronyms (he was writ­ing an email to me off the top of his head, not expect­ing me to post it for the world to see), so let me give you a glos­sary:

• AGUSM/USM — Assem­blies of God Unit­ed States Mis­sions
• AGWM/WM — Assem­blies of God World Mis­sions
• CMA — Cam­pus Mis­sion­ary Asso­ciate (peo­ple serv­ing in Chi Alpha as asso­ciate staff, usu­al­ly on a short-term basis [a few years])
• MA — Mis­sion­ary Asso­ciate (peo­ple serv­ing one to two years)
• MAPS — Mis­sion­ary Abroad Place­ment Ser­vice (peo­ple serv­ing 1–11 months, often in con­struc­tion projects)
• MENA — Mid­dle East/North Africa
• TWMS — The World Mis­sions Sum­mit
• XA — Chi Alpha Cam­pus Min­istries

You’ll prob­a­bly need to refer back to that list sev­er­al times as you read his email unless you’re very famil­iar with Assem­blies of God in-house lin­go.

…here are the hard stats. 661 stu­dents filled out com­mit­ment cards at TWMS. Nei­ther AGWM, USM, or XA were real­ly pre­pared to track those who came from TWMS and joined them in mis­sion through MAPS, MA, or ful­ly appoint­ed mis­sion­ar­ies. I inquired this past sum­mer with Fam­i­ly Life and Per­son­nel in AGWM about the num­ber of stu­dents who had already gone to ful­fill their com­mit­ment. To the best of their abil­i­ty they sent me a spread sheet of 78 peo­ple who they relat­ed to TWMS due to the fact that their appli­ca­tions had the TWMS logo on them. How­ev­er, of my 13 MAs and MAP­pers serv­ing with us in Kyr­gyzs­tan at that time, only 2 of them were on that list and all of them made com­mit­ments at the Mis­sions Sum­mit.

I sent this obser­va­tion back to AGWM and that is when they informed me they only went by the logo. I then began to cor­re­late their list with those Crys­tal and I per­son­al­ly knew had gone AGWM from TWMS (We had 22 MAs and MAPers in our AGWM Area MENA and Cen­tral Eura­sia with only 3 of them on the AGWM list being from TWMS) and we came up with 221 stu­dents who had gone so far since TWMS. This was the sum­mer of 2007. And believe me, this is not com­pre­hen­sive. There are more we don’t know about and I know of 3 who fol­lowed up their com­mit­ments with oth­er agen­cies and actu­al­ly informed AGWM of that so that AGWM knew they did not renege on their com­mit­ment to go. USM has absolute­ly no idea what so ever on who has con­nect­ed in their var­i­ous min­istries after TWMS. We know of 2 who have con­tact­ed us who went USM out­side of XA.

Here is the oth­er big news. The num­ber of CMAs in XA accel­er­at­ed dra­mat­i­cal­ly after TWMS. I will ask Bob what the num­ber was pri­or to TWMS but today we have 168 MAs in the field which is far beyond what we have ever had. Bob and NLT sug­gest it is the direct result of TWMS, but that judg­ment is based only on the fact that the num­bers leapt fol­low­ing TWMS and on con­ver­sa­tions with cam­pus pas­tors and those MAs.

At this past AGWM Mis­sion­ary Inter­view and ori­en­ta­tion 10 days ago which is only ful­ly appoint­ed and MAs, not MAPS (which most Chi Alphans go as now) there were 14 who had signed com­mit­ments at TWMS. 4 of those were ful­ly appoint­ed AGWM mis­sion­ary can­di­dates. Every PFO and inter­view there are more and more from TWMS. They asked who “signed cards” and not “who was at TWMS” so again I don’t think it is an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion but close. Some have gone who made deci­sions at TWMS but didn’t sign the card. So, we could add these 14 to the 221 in AGWM. And I don’t have the list from Octo­ber either which would add even more.

Based on this infor­ma­tion I can safe­ly and accu­rate­ly say that at least half of those who signed the card at TWMS have ful­filled their com­mit­ments and we still have many in the pipeline right now from the first TWMS.

Wow. Two stats stand out to me.

1) Rough­ly 15% (661 out of around 4,000) of those at The World Mis­sions Sum­mit com­mit­ted to give a year and pray about a life­time of mis­sion­ary ser­vice. That’s impres­sive but not unprece­dent­ed. Lots of peo­ple get caught up in emo­tion­al moments at con­fer­ences and say things that they lat­er recon­sid­er.
2) Over half of those peo­ple have already deliv­ered and more are on the way (pre­sum­ably fin­ish­ing col­lege first). That’s amaz­ing. I hard­ly know what to do with a num­ber like that except praise God. For com­par­i­son pur­pos­es, I would guess that at a youth camp or some­thing the equiv­a­lent ful­fill­ment rate is clos­er to 10%.

Bot­tom line — the first World Mis­sions Sum­mit rocked. God real­ly used it to advance His plan on earth. I expect great things from the sec­ond one as well. Reg­is­ter now

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