Majority of Norwegians are involved in secular Christianity, with less than 3 percent being born again Christians.
Mark and Janie have served as missionaries in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, since 1994, where they have been involved in university campus ministry, leadership development, and church planting. Through their “Churches for Churches” program, the Durenes are helping with new church plants in 5 cities, including Teung, where River Valley Church partnered to launch the church. Currently, they are helping to train several other potential church planters, and also serve as mentors to many other pastors throughout the northern Thailand area. In addition, they are the directors of the Global University Thai’s second Bachelor’s program, where they are training current and future Thai ministers. Mark serves as the AGMF Thailand Country Moderator, as well as on several national boards, including Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand (Northern region); Every Home for Christ, Thailand; Thailand AG Northern Region Board of Presbyters; and others. Janie writes Sunday school curriculum for several churches and directs the children’s program at a church in Chiang Mai.
River Valley 500. Amada is full time staff in the health care ministry at Youth With A Mission in Perth, Australia. She leads the Birth Attendant School, an 11 month training program that trains missionaries to be birth attendants in developing nations. Part of this school is an 8 month field assignment, where Amada leads teams of students and trains them in vital areas of mother and child health in pregnancy, birth and postpartum, working in low resourced hospitals throughout Africa and Asia.
Lila Farmer’s mission field is located in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, South Sudan). The ministry is to provide leadership seminars to indigenous churches and humanitarian aid to rural communities. The organizations she serves are platforms to share the lifesaving truth of salvation in Jesus Christ.
The Portuguese speaking nations of Africa are home to some of the largest and fastest growing churches in Africa. The growth has greatly out-paced Biblically trained leadership needed to conserve help establish new believers in the faith and preserve established believers in that faith. The Assemblies of God in Angola with its 2.5 million members, is the second largest AG church in Africa, followed closely by Mozambique with nearly 2 million. The Bible college we began in Angola in 2012, since December, 2023, under complete Angolan leadership and we continue serving in a mentoring/consultant ministry. We have been asked to help in the same manner in Mozambique and will spend a part of February in that country.
85-95 percent of Thai people are Buddhist while maybe 5-10 percent are practicing Islam. Thai Christ followers make up only 1%. Missionaries in the area have started a prayer movement called Change The Map in hopes of gaining a more defined prayer audience that will make a significant impact on the number of converts in Southeast Asia.
Almost 18 million people, .2% evangelical, over 90% Muslim, 26 unreached people groups, 6 UPGs with over 1 million people each
Discipleship, Church planting, relationship building, evangelism, living among the UPG, partnering with local churches and missionaries, teaching and preaching. There are about 18 unreached people groups of 111 with a population of 1,658,000 and the total population is about 31,639,000. The southern part of Ghana is predominantly Christian and the northern, muslim. The largest religion is Christianity with about 60%.
Tod and Andrea Chapin are pioneering a ministry in the capital city of Edinburgh in Scotland. They minsiter to university students and young families seeing lives transformed by the power of Jesus and giving the spiritually hungry an encounter with the living God.
The Gruetzmachers work directly with Hispanics here in the United States and within several countries in Latin America. Their main focus is to develop leaders, and their schedule is filled with ministry to Hispanic churches; coaching pastors and leaders; leading mission trips with Hispanic students; holding retreats for men, women, and youth; leadership training; and working with 2 Institutes for Church Planters.
The town of Garissa, Kenya is not too far from the Somali border and although a small town, there are a number of unreached people groups in and around the area. Most of the unreached tribes adhere to some form of Islam, but there is a definite stratification of class and religion within the town between the ethnic Kenyan's and the ethnic Somali's. Our site leader and his family have been in the town for 17 years working on building a small farm in the desert out side of town with modern desert farming techniques alongside an unreached tribe. Through the farm work and bringing medical doctors to this unreached tribe he has built up trust and respect in the community and has been teaching bible studies for the past 17 plus years. We would be joining his team but not necessarily the farm work as there are other unreached people groups in the area that also need to hear the gospel and can be reached through different methods that we plan to join/create.
98% unreached - There are more '7-11 convenient stores' than churches. Most people have never been in a church building, or spoken with another Christian . . .BUT the past 3 years have seen unprecedented growth, with thousands of people being baptized in a day multiple different times in Central Thailand! God is on the move and we get to be a part of it!
We are planting a church in West Java. West Java is home to the Sundanese people group, the largest Muslim UPG in the world. We are focused on reaching the Sundanese specifically, but Indonesian muslims generally. We will do this by planting a church in 2019. Indonesia is the 4th largest country in the world, it is made up of 17,000 islands, its the largest Muslim country in the world, there are 227 UPG's in Indonesia.