The School of Missions
An update from Leo Parris, US Global Missions Coordinator for Sovereign Grace Churches, and Pastor at Covenant Fellowship Church in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania…
Four years ago, my senior pastor, Jared Mellinger, approached me about spearheading our global missions initiatives at Covenant Fellowship Church. Desiring to be a good hire, I enthusiastically agreed to his proposal, but I was actually masking my inner doubts about my suitability for this role.
Me? The delco-boi who has lived his entire life in the same town, never been outside the US except to dip my toes in the water of a Caribbean resort, and has exactly 1 week of education on the topic? Yikes! But mercifully, global missions is not dependent on any of our brilliance, experience, or expertise; it rests on the faithfulness of God to continue and complete his mission. We are merely tools in the Almighty’s hands to magnify his glory among the nations, and he loves to use the weakest of people to show his power!
As I read God’s Word and a treasury of great books on Global Missions, my heart awakened to the amazing opportunity that lay before me. Now, leading global missions for my church is one of my absolute favorite things that I get to do. One particular aspect of this that I love is helping others catch a vision for God’s global work in Sovereign Grace Churches, and even consider whether God is calling them to become a missionary.
To help our people learn more about this, I invited them to participate in a 9-month class I called The School of Missions. Using Nathan Sloan’s You Are Sent curriculum as a basis, my hopes were to instill a global conscience into our people, identify leaders for our global efforts as a church, and missionaries that God wants us to send from our midst. By God’s grace, 13 people with a broad range of age and experience signed up for this class.
In the School of Missions, we walked through a Biblical theology of Missions, Church History, the Necessity of Missions, Cultural Challenges and the Priority of the Unreached, and Missionary Calling. Each time we gathered we video-called with missionaries or watched missions updates from around the world to increase our awareness of the progress of the gospel. As we learned together, we processed through the material in community, asking God to reveal how he wanted to use us in his global mission. At the end of the course the class participated in two separate missions trips: one to a Sovereign Grace Candidate church in Playa Azul, Costa Rica, and another to partner with a Sovereign Grace family working in Eurasia.
I was thrilled as I witnessed the joy of our people building new global friendships and outreaching to the lost. Putting into practice what they had learned throughout the year was a powerful experience for them. Many communicated a deep desire to return or follow closely in prayer and support the work that we had engaged with.
As we graduate our first School of Missions class, I’m grateful that several of these folks are earnestly pursuing a missionary calling, and many more are eagerly joining our church’s global missions committee to lead our church in its global endeavors. It’s my prayer that God would continue to use this School of Missions for years to come to help to train our people to live as global Christians, and identify the missionaries that God plans for us to send.
If you want access to any of the School of Missions resources mentioned in this report, please contact me, Leo Parris at lparris@covfel.org. With so many lost around the world, in need of people to go to them with the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ, I’d love to help!
