European missionaries first brought the gospel to Namibia back in the mid-1800s. Conversion rates took off so that Christianity has become widely imbedded in traditional life. Today we regularly hear statistics boasting that Namibia is considered 90% Christian (although JoshuaProject.net suggests only about 12.5% of those are Bible-believing, followers of Christ). Regardless of the accuracy of those statistics, the reality is that Namibia is strategically positioned to become a key source for sending out future mission workers.
Therefore, SIM Namibia recently helped host a National Missions Conference to inspire and promote a missional mindset among local church pastors and leaders. We invited the president of a Ghanaian mission board to come as our main speaker, and had workshops by the regional directors for SIM and AIM. We also had a panel of local Namibian mission workers who shared about their experiences and challenges. Some of the main themes included how Namibians can be mobilized to be part of God's mission force, how we can financially support mission from Namibia, and how we can encourage the local church to be involved in missions. Overall we gathered about 55 attendees over two-day conference, some traveling as far as 8-hrs away to attend. The feedback was very positive and all those who attended were very encouraged and suggested we make this an annual event!
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The diversity in the audience helped show
how we need to all work together in mission. |
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| A huge prayer circle to close off the conference |
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| All our conference attendees |
