First, you must witness Him

SIM Stories writer Tohru Inoue offers his perspective of the Faithful Witness initiative.

Back to our roots

What compels us to care about the more than 3 billion people who have no opportunity to make even one Christian friend?

The Faithful Witness teams are not unlike SIM’s founders, who believed God had called them to make disciples of Jesus in the Nigerian bush, the unknown interior of the continent. There were no mission offices where they were going. That is where Jesus was least known. They encountered hardship, sickness and death. But now, over 130 years later, there are millions of believers in Nigeria.

SIM’s Faithful Witness initiative aims “to share the gospel with people who have never heard of Jesus Christ.” They place teams globally in communities where there is no church and virtually no Christian witness. They send multi-ethnic, multi-skilled teams from anywhere the church already is, to everywhere that it isn’t yet. This global initiative pushes SIM back to its roots, bringing the founders’ DNA to life again.

What compelled the founders? What would compel us?

SIM worker David Osborne talks to a chief and his elders in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), 1930.

Photo by Dr. Rowland Bingham.

The early witnesses saw something

Simply put, the disciples witnessed something. More precisely, they witnessed Him,

Jesus Christ. He is the Faithful Witness… the first to rise from the dead and the ruler of all the kings of the world. (Rev. 1:5a NLT)”

They witnessed Jesus’s resurrection and it transformed them from a fearful, directionless group into one with unwavering devotion and purpose. A group with guts. A group who could be told to go to Jerusalem, Judea and the ends of the earth, and they would go. To witness the risen Lord was enough for them. And we’ve also witnessed him in transformative ways that compel us more than any statistical need ever could.

We see him pull out fish from an empty sea; we’re convinced to be fishers of people. We see his bloodied cross; we’re convinced of his love. We witness the risen Christ; we count everything else as loss. We see the Faithful Witness himself in action. We’re convinced that he’s as potent today as he was when he walked the earth.

I want to show you something

Barth* from Burkina Faso has planted churches in his home country, but he’s moved his family of five to Chad. They’re learning Chadian Arabic to plant Arabic-speaking churches. And together, we believe they’ll go all the way!

There are five families who have traded the Ethiopian highlands for a Nigerian desert. They believe God has called them to make disciples among the Fulani communities there.

There’s Esther* – for such a time as this – who planted a small church at the crossroads of some of the least reached nations of the world in Central Asia.

They have seen Jesus, the Faithful Witness. They have seen the one with the scars who went ahead of them. They have seen him and are convinced that everything he said and did is true. They’ve witnessed what he’s capable of.

They see something

Faithful witness workers are like farmers who look at an uneven field, strewn with rocks, and already see the harvest. “When a gardener plants good seed, she already sees the fruit,” says Dr. Jo, Ministry Lead for the Faithful Witness initiative.

We expect to see and to be flourishing new creation garden plots in forgotten communities throughout the earth.”

Like SIM’s founders, Faithful Witness teams go where there is no gospel work yet.

As Dr. Jo affirms,

Faithful Witness teams open gaps in barriers to the gospel so many more workers can follow. They’re cutting new paths.”

What if…

What if for the next 100 years, Nigerian and Indian believers plant churches in Mali that disciple millions? What if Koreans, Ukrainians and Singaporeans make Jesus known across Central Asia? What if God raised workers from across the Global South to broadcast good seed in Turkey? It may take another 100 years, and it will be costly for some, but we see the harvest.

SIM’s Faithful Witness initiative is compelled by Christ himself. He is Lord and will be known in all the world.