Sister Church Partnerships
Philippians 1:3-6
“I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
"Quite possibly, the answer to who are we as the Western church was never meant to be found in ourselves alone but rather in the global church. Once we’ve made a commitment to our collective identity as a global church, perhaps then we can collaboratively discover how to serve together in mission and how to do this within the worldwide body of Christ as equal partners. It’s this very source of identity that should result in partnership and mission with our brothers and sisters in the Global South, who stand ready to speak to us if we’ll be open to intentional, integral, mutual relationships."
-Randy Schmor Director NAB’s Gateway Ministries
A foundation to missions is our shared identity as God's one people, and as time marches on this identity has had shifting contours. In the first thousand years of church history the center of global Christianity was in the Middle East and Asia. For much of the next thousand years that center shifted west and north to Europe and North America. And during the last fifty years the center of both global population and Christianity has shifted southward to Africa and Latin America.
Randy Schmor, the director of NAB's Gateway Teams argues that this shifting center has given Christians in North America a wonderful opportunity to enter into a new relationship with the worldwide body of Christ:
"Quite possibly, the answer to who are we as the Western church was never meant to be found in ourselves alone but rather in the global church.
Once we’ve made a commitment to our collective identity as a global church, perhaps then we can collaboratively discover how to serve together in mission and how to do this within the worldwide body of Christ as equal partners. It’s this very source of identity that should result in partnership and mission with our brothers and sisters in the Global South, who stand ready to speak to us if we’ll be open to intentional, integral, mutual relationships.
Building on this new identity, the NAB in Brazil gladly partners with Gateway Teams to foster sister church partnerships between churches in Rio Grande do Sul and North America. These partnerships are long-term and reciprocal in that there is a relationship between both churches where teams travel both to and from Brazil and North America.
We already have two such partnerships in Rio Grande so Sul and would love to foster more. If you feel this is something your church would like to be involved in, Gateway teams would be happy to connect with you.