In the late 1990s, my wife and I helped a group of people to organize a regular meeting focused on unreached peoples and frontier missions. The purpose of this meeting was both to help maintain the vision of people who were interested in frontier missions, and to get new people interested. It’s not that difficult to host this kind of event: here’s how we got started.
Meeting 1. The first meeting was drawn together by a my friend Michael Jaffarian, who hosted it at his family’s home and invited several of us to consider the idea. The group was drawn from a variety of people: our agency, YWAM, and local churches. During this first meeting we mainly got to know each other, talked about the format of a meeting, and decided on a date for our first meeting. We decided to hold the meetings on a regular basis. We identified some potential places to hold the meeting and designated some of us to put together a list of people to send invitations to, and some of us to get in touch with the potential meeting places.
Meeting 2. This was our first ‘working’ meeting. In future times we would have a working meeting in the first half of the month, and the public meeting in the second half. At the working meeting we would plan out the topic, talk about speakers for upcoming meetings, and work on the other logistical requirements of hosting the meeting.
After the meeting, we first had to confirm the speaker. Sometimes that was the most difficult part, but we lived in a city that was home to a major denominational mission agency as well as a YWAM base and other organizations, so there was usually someone coming through who was willing to come speak.
Then, we put together a letter that went out to everyone in the area we knew that was interested—or might be interested—in frontier missions. This was in the early days of e-mail, so the letter was sent via postal mail and, cheap as it was (we didn’t have a very big mailing list), it was one of our biggest expenses. The letter gave the date, time, and place of the meeting as well as the topic that our speaker would be covering.
After that, there wasn’t much to do until the night of the meeting when we would get to the location early, arrange some snacks and a coffee table, and wait for everyone to arrive.
Meeting format. Each meeting began fairly promptly, opening with prayer and some brief announcements. We took up an offering to help pay for the expenses of the meeting (which were minimal), and then someone from the steering committee would introduce the speaker for the evening, who was given a fairly good length of time. Occasionally we had more than one speaker, and so we divided the time up between them. After the speaker was finished, we would have a time of prayer for specific unreached peoples and prayer points. Finally, there would be a time of fellowship at the end.
The meetings were made easier by our ability to meet in a location that was made available to us for free by a local agency. Our costs were kept as minimal as possible. Out of the offering we usually gave an honorarium to the speaker.
Holding a regular meeting of this kind is a great way to lift peoples’ awareness of unreached peoples. If you hold a regular meeting like this, write and let us know so we can make others aware of it!
