OMS Outreach Outreach Online January-April 2020 | Seite 3

Office of the President
Reaping and Reapers
In 1943, One Mission Society missionaries arrived in Colombia. They began reaping:
preaching and teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ in an extremely challenging context.
(Brazil, Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Peru
came in following years.) In 1944, OMS established the Biblical Seminary of Colombia to
train Colombians to reach their own. God, by his Spirit, enabled the reaping of an abundant
harvest and guided OMS missionaries to invest in Colombian reapers to help with and lead
the work among their people.
The great opportunity before us now in Latin America is to continue reaping and, at the
same time, to prepare more and more reapers. The time has come for the mission field to
increasingly become a mission force as Latin American and Caribbean missionaries are
sent to people around the globe!
In the past 30 years, approximately 75 percent of all Christian vocational workers serv-
ing around the world have come from outside Europe and North America. This southward
shift of global Christianity from the northern hemisphere to the southern one has huge
implications. One of them is a growing number of missionaries being sent from the Latin
world.
Recently, at the 75 th anniversary of the Biblical Seminary of Colombia, I issued this
challenge: “How is this seminary going to prepare effective Latino missionaries? May you
become a preferred place of training for cross-cultural mission. Now is the time to act in-
tentionally in response to this great opportunity!”
OMS missionaries will continue reaping throughout Latin America. And we will increas-
ingly work with our Latin church partners as they prepare and send forth cross-cultural
reapers to the nations!
Bob Fetherlin
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