The Missions Philosophy of the Living Faith Fellowship

“Local churches starting local churches, all over the world.”

 The Missions Philosophy of the Living Faith Fellowship is simply to obey the Lord’s command in the Great Commission: to go into all the world and make disciples.  In the general sense, that defines our mandate as believers in Jesus Christ regardless of location, and thus describes our ‘mission’.  While the general commands of scripture apply to all believers everywhere, in a more specific sense, we want to clearly articulate the biblical focus of international ministry.   

Missions, whether foreign or domestic, is simply church planting. The Living Faith Fellowship is a fellowship of local churches, not of individual Christians.  As such, all ministry is derived from local churches and focused on making disciples who will propagate local churches.  Any ministry endeavor that is disconnected from the authority of a New Testament local church, for example a para-church ministry, is outside the scope of this missions philosophy for the LFF.  

Our focus and calling, therefore, is to identify and train faithful men (2Tim 2:2) who will one day desire the office of a bishop (1Tim 3:1), who have proven themselves (1Tim 3:6) through ministry responsibility in the church and sense God’s call on their lives to separate and be sent by their local church (Acts 13:2-3) to reproduce the life of Christ in new places by starting new local churches for the glory of God (Eph 3:21).  

A foreign missionary, then, must adapt to his new environment (1Cor 9:20-23) by learning his new language and culture well, so as to be able to communicate the gospel effectively in the context to his target audience in a way they can understand and receive it.The tangible goal is to start local churches that will mature into indigenous churches which are independent of outside assistance.These mature churches will then, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, be equipped to continue the work of taking the gospel to all nations.In this sense, the work of the foreign missionary is to work himself out of a job in any particular location he is working, so he can move on to reproduce new churches in new locations.