A foundation of ministry

One of the regular observations and laments of those doing gospel work in developing countries is the chronic shortage of helpful ministry resources. By which they don’t mean a shortage of people—they have plenty of people keen to serve the Lord Jesus—but books.

The Gospel Coalition International Outreach is one organization that seeks to address this issue. They describe their work as “theological famine relief for the global church”, distributing over 850,000 free theological books and resources since 2006. This is a great ministry worth learning about and supporting.

The emphasis of the TGC IO’s work is firmly on providing theological resources to pastors to help them build a strong, biblical framework for their ministry and combat theological error. We are delighted to say that some Matthias Media books have made their way into pastors’ hands via this route, including The Trellis and the Vine.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that there is an additional way we can support the global church—a way that has been Matthias Media’s goal for the last 31 years—by providing theologically sound resources for use in day-to-day ministry: expository Bible study material, training courses, evangelistic resources, and so on. In other words, what we might call ministry ‘consumables’, rather than just pastoral textbooks.

However, one of the great challenges of getting any such resources to the global church is the cost: printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution, etc. For a ministry like Matthias Media, which struggles even to make publishing work financially in the affluent west (Australia, UK, USA), funding physical distribution into Cameroon or India or the Philippines or other similar countries is not only logistically complex, it is cost prohibitive.

But over the last few years we have built an online platform called GoThereFor.com to distribute resources in a digital form. And one of the ideas our Board of Directors and our staff team have been particularly keen on pursuing is using that platform to provide cost-effective access to under-resourced parts of the global church.

We are aiming to partner with other overseas ministries to ensure we can find and offer resources to people who are well-positioned to make best use of them. That means, among other things, gospel workers who:

• are basically theologically aligned
• have access to the necessary technology
• have sufficient English to be able to make use of the resources.

It’s an exciting new dimension to our work. So please pray that the Lord would use this initiative to build his church and grow many disciples across lots of different countries. Pray that many of the resources will be highly useful all over the world.