From All Nations

There before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb.
—Revelation 7:9 (NIV)

Missions is no longer the “West to the rest” but is now “everywhere to everywhere.”
—Nate Wilson

What a sight! I looked around the room and felt as if I were at the United Nations with people to my right and left from many nations, languages and tribes. This wasn’t a U.N. meeting, however. It was the Pioneers International Summit, and the men and women at the table were leaders of emerging Pioneers bases all over the world—Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Latin America, Singapore and the United States.

That historic meeting was held in Chicago in September 1997. It was an amazing moment to realize that in just 18 years the Lord had expanded our “tent pegs” from one family working around its dining room table to an international body of believers strategizing around a board room table.

From our early days as a mission, God gave us the vision to reach the unreached wherever they are. We continually reminded ourselves that God didn’t say, “Go into all the world where you can get a missionary visa.” He just said, “Go into all the world.”

“To all the world” has certainly been our call. But there was another call as well: “from all the world.” We didn’t want Pioneers to be just a U.S.-based ministry. To reach the entire world effectively, we had to represent the entire world—to find workers who were from all the world and send them to all the world. We felt it would honor our Lord if our missionaries came from many different countries, cultures and backgrounds—to reach the unreached within their own borders and to join international teams going to other parts of the world.

That foundational belief led us to a process we call “internationalization,” as we worked to make Pioneers as international as possible. It didn’t happen overnight. We started small and grew through relationships that God sovereignly gave us. Each base focuses on recruiting laborers from its country to join Pioneers teams all over the world. We also have a number of mobilization initiatives underway in strategic locations, helping to send workers from China, East Africa, the Arab world and the South Pacific islands.

Pioneers-Africa is a good example of this process of internationalization. Although this mobilization base is now sending Africans all over the continent and eventually the world, you could say that it all started under a tree. That’s where Dr. Solomon Aryeetey, director of Pioneers-Africa, used to conduct his medical clinics—under a tree in front of his house in the desert of Mali, West Africa.

Solomon grew up in Ghana as the son of a polygamist who had five wives. His mother was the fourth wife, and Solomon likes to say, “If my dad were not a polygamist, I would not have been born, and that would have been very sad for the world!” His family lived in harsh, poverty-stricken conditions, but Solomon was determined to become a doctor and pull himself out of poverty. He accepted Christ as a teenager. When he graduated from medical school in 1979, he made plans to move to the United States so that he could, in his words, make “big bucks.” God had other plans for him.

In 1986, when Solomon was getting ready to settle in the U.S., a Pioneers representative challenged him to use his medical skills in a new outreach to the Muslim Fulani people of Mali, West Africa. He and his wife, Letitia, an attorney, sensed the invitation was from God. They gave up their practices, joined Pioneers, bought a four-wheel drive vehicle and moved to the desert in Mali, 700 miles away from their home. When they weren’t holding medical clinics under the tree in their front yard, they’d drive into the desert and look for nomadic groups of Fulani. During the day, they would treat physical needs with medicine, and during the evening, they would minister to the Fulani’s spiritual needs by sharing the gospel and showing the Jesus film. For the first 18 months, Solomon and Letitia had only a few converts to show for all their labor, but they kept on working for the Lord. Then something extraordinary happened, which I’ll let Solomon tell in his own words:

<p class="long-quote">When we went to visit our Fulani friends and converts one evening, their leader called us into a meeting. He explained that he and his elders had had a meeting the previous day to discuss what they were going to do with us and our ministry among them. They were eager to hear my answer to a very important question before they made up their mind. “Are you loving us the way you do and showing us all this kindness purely out of love because of your Book from which you have been reading to us? We give you nothing for all your services. You help evacuate our sick to the hospital. You give us transportation freely. You take care of our sick women and children. Are you this way because of your Book?”</p>

<p class="long-quote">When I answered, “Yes,” this is what they replied: “In that case, we too want the message of your Book! From now on, you are one of us. You are free to come among us and show our people the ways of Isa [Jesus]!”</p>

<p class="long-quote">From that day on, I wondered what we were going to do with such a wide open door! The more I prayed to the Lord about more laborers, the more He convinced me that it was time for more Africans to get involved with reaching the lost on our continent for Christ.</p>

Solomon and Letitia spent the next nine years reaching the nomadic Fulani for Christ. Two churches were planted, and local leaders carry on the work to this day.

While their children were young, they lived with relatives in Ghana, but as the children got older and needed more of their parents’ attention, Solomon and Letitia sought the Lord on what to do. The Lord was fine-tuning the “bigger picture” vision that He had given them for all of Africa: They had the potential to do much more for world evangelism than they were currently doing, particularly raising up other missionaries like themselves.

One night in 1992 while the couple was on a ministry trip to the U.S., the Lord put a strong message on Solomon’s heart. It was so compelling that he woke up Letitia and told her to write down what the Lord was saying to him: “The Lord is telling me that tomorrow, when the two of us go to Orlando, John Fletcher is going to call us into his office and share something important with us. This is going to confirm to us that it is God’s new direction, and we should say yes to John.”

So the next day as they sat in John’s office, Solomon and Letitia were prepared to hear from God. John asked them a simple question: “Is it possible for you to start a mission to send more African missionaries like you to the field?” That’s all Solomon needed to hear, because he had the very same idea. Solomon had his marching orders, and he and Letitia eventually moved from Mali back to Ghana, where they established Pioneers-Africa, with Solomon as director.

What began as a small enterprise of two missionaries among the Fulani in Mali has rapidly grown to involve four African countries with Pioneers directors and boards in Ghana, Mali, Benin and Togo. Each raises up Christian workers within those countries to evangelize not only on Pioneers teams in Africa, but eventually on teams in other parts of the world. Today Pioneers-Africa numbers more than 100 missionaries, with the potential for many more. Solomon says there is a growing awareness in the African church that the remaining task of evangelization of their continent is primarily their responsibility. He describes the potential as a “volcano that is begging to explode.”

The stories of the wonderful move of the Lord through Pioneers-Africa can also be told about our mobilization bases in other parts of the world. Pioneers-Canada, for example, which was born from a merger in 1994 between Pioneers and World Outreach Fellowship, opened up our first fields in Latin America. Teams are now touching unreached fishermen in coastal Brazil and preparing to reach the Mascho of Peru. Radio broadcasts jointly sponsored by Pioneers and other mission agencies reach two to three million Quechua in Bolivia living in villages and towns in some of the most inaccessible terrain imaginable.

In India, hundreds of churches have been planted through the ministry of Sam and Rachel Paulson and more than 150 Indian evangelists associated with Pioneers-India. Pioneers-Europe has a thriving ministry among the unreached peoples of former Soviet satellites. Pioneers of Australia and Pioneers-New Zealand (formed as a result of mergers between South Sea Evangelical Mission and Asia Pacific Christian Mission) opened new harvest fields for us in Irian Jaya, Fiji, Cambodia and the Solomon Islands. Pioneers in Asia (based in Singapore), one of our newest bases, is part of a move of God in this tiny city-state, which many have called the “Antioch of Asia,” referring to the Antioch church in the Book of Acts that had a heart for missions and the harvest. And we recently launched a new mobilization office in Brazil. Over the next 25 years, mission experts believe that Brazil will emerge as one of the strongest missionary-sending countries in world evangelization.

Pioneers-USA is a mobilization base, and also serves as the hub of the global operations of Pioneers-USA. The U.S. staff now numbers more than 175—a far cry from the volunteer staff we began with back in 1979. When I served in Korea, I knew that for every Marine on the front lines, ten others backed them up. For Pioneers, the reverse is true: For every ten missionaries on the front lines, there is one Orlando Team member behind them.

The Apostle Paul asked, “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent?” (Romans 10:14-15 NIV). Paul knew that the starting point to reach the lost is sending missionaries to the unreached. In order to have go-ers, there must be senders, and that is the role of the Orlando Team: to partner with churches to mobilize, prepare and support missionaries among unreached peoples. As we began the process of internationalization, there was still one missing piece. We needed a structure that would provide servant-leadership to all the Pioneers bases. In February 1998, the U.S. board authorized formation of an International Council to provide oversight and accountability worldwide.

A month later, the Council held its first meeting in Auckland, New Zealand, embracing the new global structure of the mission and appointing Pioneers’ first international director, Dr. C. Douglas McConnell. We first met Doug back in the 1980s when he was a missionary to Papua New Guinea serving with Asia Pacific Christian Mission (APCM) and in partnership with our team. Doug later became APCM’s general director and then chair of the Department of Missions/Intercultural Studies and Evangelism at Wheaton Graduate School in Illinois. He also served as chair of our U.S. board, so it was a natural fit to see him become our first international director.

Like our friendship with Doug, many of the countries now represented around the Pioneers table go back to relationships formed years earlier. Some were missionaries whom Peggy and I supported four decades ago; others were young students from Bible colleges, or national leaders we first met at conferences. These people and many others like them were the key players in the growth of Pioneers, and we’re so grateful that the Lord brought us together with them. They helped us to expand our borders and reach many more needy people around the world. “He gave them the lands of the nations, and they fell heir to what others had toiled for” (Psalm 105:44 NIV).