Church Mobilization

Mission Mobilization Program

Roughly one-third of the world's population is in the category of Unreached People Groups (UPGs) having too small indigenous churches to reach their people adequately. Some studies show that for the most part, the proportion of UPGs has not significantly changed over the past 30 years. Different studies point to many reasons as to why the global church has failed to reach the UPGs with a generally accepted challenge to be low engagement of the global church in the mission work leaving the task of reaching the UPGs mainly to ministries and Para-church organizations. Rather than mobilizing their congregation and being active participants in mission work many denominations are still side-viewers of the mission work being done across the world.

The same goes true when we look at our continent Africa. Africa has more than 600 million Christians constituting 62% of the total population of the continent. Back in 2010 E.C., there were 300 million Protestants in Africa, currently, it is estimated that this number has significantly increased and there are now more than 450 million Protestants. It is astounding to think that once considered a dark continent now is a tower of Christianity. This indeed shows that hundreds of years of missionary endeavor was not in vain.

This is also the case for the church in Ethiopia. Protestant Christianity is barely a hundred and twenty years old in Ethiopia, yet, the rise in the number of converts particularly in the last half a century, after the fall of the communist Derg regime, is staggering. The church in Ethiopia is in fact one of the fastest growing churches in Africa with estimated rise in the number of protestants from 10.3% in 1994 to 18.6 in 2007 and with an estimated 27% in 2022 in a country of 120 million inhabitants. Indeed, Protestantism is growing fast in the urban and rural Ethiopia.

It’s our strong conviction and belief that engaging in mission mobilization among churches and campuses is going to spark and accelerate the mission to reach the UPGs elsewhere in the world. A key factor needed to mobilize local churches in Africa and Ethiopia particularly is hidden in the word “mobilize”. Church and student mobilizations were and are still the best way to complete the Great Commission.

Our Mission mobilization program aims to raise 1000 church mobilizers who can mobilize their churches to send cross-cultural missionaries. The Program envisions to engage major denominations and selected churches in Ethiopia through Structured mobilization in the next 5 years.