Midwest Year Review

As the year wraps up, we want to highlight what God has done in each region of World Impact, particularly in the realm of our new Focus Areas. Here's a summary of 2014 from the Midwest.

Plant Healthy Urban Churches
Our church plants across the Midwest have appointed new pastors, commissioned leadership teams, baptized new believers, discipled and walked alongside many this past year. We all gathered at Morning Star Ranch (MSR) for Family Camp this summer, often the only time all year an urban family gets out of the city to laugh, fish, swim, and be a family together. MSR also hosted summer camps, women's and men's retreats, leadership retreats, and “Christmas in the Country” – all for our churches!  Our primary focus is to empower leaders to help these churches become church planting movements that reproduce themselves and, more importantly, spread the hope of Christ to communities under the oppression of the evil one.

Develop Missional Partnerships
We are excited to be working with Christian-based prisoner re-entry homes and ministries for the purpose of developing a clear, realistic, and Christ-centered path for released inmates to follow. We are particularly interested in helping former inmates that were TUMI students behind bars to continue their training in the Word once they are released. Helping them find homes to live in, jobs to be employed at, and local churches to be incorporated into is key in their spiritual development and also their transformational effect on the hurting communities they come from and often return to.

Resource Urban Leaders
Where do you find the working poor, an ex-mob hit man, an ex-drug dealer/gang member, a suburban couple, a few World Impact missionaries and a mission committee chairman (from one of the largest churches in Wichita) on level ground, studying together, being equipped for ministry in the Kingdom of God, and caring for each other?  This is the reality every week in one of our TUMI satellites in Wichita! Throughout the Midwest we also have classes meeting behind prison bars, in urban and suburban churches and at halfway houses. What a glorious example of the body of Christ! Through relationships in the Midwest, we have expanded our TUMI sites to India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Africa and are looking forward to other internationally sites soon.

Demonstrate Compassion and Justice
A variety of people with a complex web of needs come through our Mobile Medical Clinics, to our thrift store, or talk with volunteer attorneys at our legal clinic each week. Each comes with a tangible need, but often they most need to be shown love, respect and kindness. Darryl was one of those people. He came to a Wichita Mobile Medical clinic with a limp, unkempt hair, and dirty clothes. As he met with the volunteer medical provider, he was not short of words; he seemed hungry for the conversation. After discussing various health concerns, the provider determined the reason for Darryl's visit this day: a sprained ankle. She bent down in front of this man, carefully removed an old, cracked shoe, tenderly removed a dirty, stinky sock and then lovingly wrapped his foot and ankle with a bandage. She didn't flinch or cough; she loved him. She showed the love of Christ through a servant's heart – this is how we want to be a light in our communities throughout the Midwest.