Institute for Global Opportunities

What a blessing it has been to become acquainted with our second semester students who are now one week into their IGo experience. Four of our first semester students remained to be joined by seventeen newly arrived trainees. In addition, we have five second year students who are either already involved in mission work or anticipate it after the term is finished. There is a keen level of anticipation and hunger for what God is going to do.

Asia is reeling after two shattering disasters have hit our neighboring countries! The physical needs that were great before are magnified in the aftermath of the Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and the earthquake in Sichuan, China. God is allowing these events for the purpose of inviting Asians to seek Him as Lord. This is God’s call for action! How can we mobilize to share the love of God to these devastated regions?

As we close our first year, our hearts are overflowing with a sense of God’s direct involvement in opening doors for IGo in Asia. Our first year students have been valiant participants in helping us tweak the training program and ministry tracks. This has brought us to adjust two things in our schedule for 2009.

Over the years of working with young people, occasionally someone will condescendingly refer to the “Mennonite thing.” I find that to be a curious expression! What is the “Mennonite thing”? How does that differ from the “Baptist thing”, the “Pentecostal thing” or the “Lutheran thing”? What is it about the “Mennonite thing” that distinguishes it from any other “thing”?

Many hands have made light work as the IGo building is now remodeled and in the final stages of preparation for the coming students. The Thai construction workers, who resided in the building while working there, have all moved out. We are now preparing for the final painting before we purchase the equipment needed to begin classes. We have enjoyed several Sunday morning services at the facility already, and with the absence of carpeting and padded seats to deaden the sound, the singing was euphoric.

As my son and I recently traveled with members of the IGo Board, we had two primary, corporate goals. The first was to explore the potentialities for ministry in Asia that would be available for IGo students to exercise their faith while involved in Bible, missions, personal development and theological studies. Several other articles in this issue of I Witness News highlight the vision-implanting results of those experiences by board members.

In this article I’d like to consider two sets of questions and their answers regarding the foundational motive for IGo’s existence.

1. Is the Institute for Global Opportunities attempting to start a new denomination in Asia? Are we envisioning a Mennonite conference developing as the result of IGo’s presence there? Will the teaching and ministry of IGo drive wedges or build bridges between the evangelical groups that are currently in Asia?

Within six months after our family’s visit to Asia in 2000; a missionary, a missionary’s mother, a mission board member, and a mission director all inquired whether we would be willing to move to Asia. Our enjoyment of administrating and teaching at the Sharon Mennonite Bible Institute and the dilemma of Krystal’s health made the inquiries seem implausible, but it did strike a chord within us.

The potential for ministering to non-American Christians in a structured setting is the fourth tract of ministry that IGo foresees developing in Asia. In past issues we have looked at three diverse, yet integrated, tracts of ministry which we are prayerfully anticipating. The first tract is to establish a Bible Institute in which North American Christians can train for ministry in a foreign culture.

The earth-shattering commitment of the early believers was to follow Christ recklessly! Their abandonment to Christ is what made them uncontrollable in the eyes of most civil leaders! While God’s moral law was held in high esteem by these spiritual “renegades,” they had little respect for rules and theologies that took the individual’s focus off the Lord Jesus Christ. If principles and practices in any way obscured Him, they were seen as not only unnecessary, but downright dangerous; heretical!