Missionaries - Ron & Mikel Ann Pritz
June 2009
Dear Friends,
We wanted to share with you portions from an email Ron sent to the worldwide MAF family.
Dear Co-laborers,
These past few weeks have been a very challenging time for me. I appreciate all of you who are praying for me and for this exciting change we are walking through together! As the Lord allows the challenges to help mold us into what He wants to make of us, He also gives moments of wonderful inspiration and beautiful glimpses of our potential future.
A few weeks ago, Mikel Ann and I were in an ‘expat’ church in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, UAE (where our son, Kevin and his family are). The congregation was a lovely patchwork of skin colors and national identities. In one group I overheard the familiar Tagalog language of the Philippine Island of Luzon. The Philippines is now sending over 3,000 missionaries off their shores. But these folks were not a part of that mission movement. These people are a part of a more hidden movement, one of the movements of the future. They are a portion of the nearly 100,000 Filipino Christians who are part of an overseas Filipino workers force of over 1 million. They have a ‘normal’ job in the UAE but they are also becoming more aware of the potential part they can play in the Great Commission. We are getting a glimpse of the Global South missions movement in action.
The changes to the Church and to missions around the world are staggering. Today 74% of the world’s evangelicals live outside of Europe and North America. This is the source for the Global South missions movement which is now well past half of the global mission force and is expanding quickly toward 70% of the whole. They are “taking the Gospel into very difficult places and communicating Jesus through the colorful prism of their cultures” as my good friend Greg Gripentrog, President of OC International, says.
We are in the exciting position of being a part of this modern day missions movement-“From the whole world to the whole world.” And that is exactly why we, as an organization, are going through all this uncomfortable change of uniting all of the MAFs, worldwide. The world’s mission force is changing dramatically and rapidly. As it changes, MAF’s role is also changing dramatically and rapidly in many places. I believe that is why the Lord clearly led us several years ago to begin this change process, although at the time we did not fully understand. I believe that the Lord understood, while we my not have, that we will be “better together” to face and adjust to the change we are seeing.
Please join me in praying for this exciting worldwide change in the global mission force. Please pray with me that our Lord will give us His wisdom to know how we should be engaging this new Global South movement. We need and can expect His Spirit to lead us, if we will look to Him. Join me in this exciting new future together.
In Him,
Ron Pritz
