World Impact East 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 East Coast.

Planting Healthy Urban Churches
As eternal optimists, we are excited to say that we are well on our way to accomplish our goal of 100 church plant engagements in the poorest cities in the East Region by 2021. By January 1, 2015, we will have four charter church plants in process. Only 96 to go in six years – we are certain it can be done with our God and the tireless energy of the Eastern Front staff. Our four church planting efforts are: Pastor Elwood and Betty Jones, Landmark Church in Alexandria, VA; Rashad Gibson, Mizpah Gospel Mission in Wilmington, DE; Rev. Ricky Orellano in Patterson – Newark – Passaic, NJ (8 cells); and Lorenzo Lazo in Ironbound, NJ.

Developing Missional Partnerships
There are so many partnerships we are thankful for, but we want to share about the growing partnership with Transformation Churches. This is a group of 26 urban churches under the leadership of Rev. Bernard Wilks. After prayer and discussion, he has felt led to be in missional partnership with us to expand and advance God’s Kingdom through church planting leading to transformation of our communities. This partnership will become the Urban Transformation Association that we believe will be the movement of church planting in our region. We are looking forward to the new year as we begin this partnership.

Resourcing Urban Leaders
We believe that if we are going to accomplish our goal of 100 churches in the poorest cities in the East Region, then the Hub has to be a center of evangelistic life. The Evangelistic Committee of Newark has been re-instituted. To-date we have trained five urban churches in our 10-week evangelistic training with many more wanting to be equipped. Luke Raughley has accepted the call to give leadership direction to TUMI-Newark. TUMI-Newark has a class in a DOC location called The Harbor and a class at the Christian Transformation Center. Our World Impact TUMI-Chester site continues to shine under the leadership of Rick Horne. They have over 50 students in the Capstone Program.

Demonstrating Compassion and Justice
We are excited to announce the first official Eastern Front SIAFU Chapter, which resides out of World Impact Community Church in Newark. Raj Lewis has taken on the Director position of our SIAFU Leadership Home in Chester. We have one student right now who was incarcerated for murder, came to faith in Christ, and the Spirit of the Lord has called him to leadership in the urban church. Our Awareness and Modeling Ministries – Thrift Store and NCS – are thriving.  Both these ministries are integrated into our mission and vision.