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        <title>Christian Daily International | Church & Missions</title>
        <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/church-missions</link>
        <description><![CDATA[Stay updated on global church and mission news, including evangelical outreach, church planting, discipleship, digital evangelism, and cross-cultural missions. Explore how Christians worldwide share the gospel and build the global body of Christ.]]></description>
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                <title><![CDATA[Willy Rice elected Southern Baptist Convention president on first ballot]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/willy-rice-elected-southern-baptist-convention-president-on-first-ballot</link>
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                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[The Christian Post]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Willy Rice elected Southern Baptist Convention president on first ballot]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ live.sbcannualmeeting.net ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Willy Rice delivers a sermon at the Southern Baptist Convention Pastors' Conference on Monday, June 8, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:34:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Florida Pastor Willy Rice was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday, succeeding Pastor Clint Pressley as leader of the nation's largest Protestant denomination.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Florida Pastor Willy Rice was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday, succeeding Pastor Clint Pressley as leader of the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
Messengers to the SBC Annual Meeting elected Rice on the first ballot, giving him 5,217 votes, or 57.56% of the total cast.
Rice, senior pastor of Calvary Church in Clearwater, Florida, defeated Josh Powell, lead pastor of Taylors First Baptist Church in Taylors, South Carolina, who received 3,821 votes, or 42.16%.
The election came during the SBC Annual Meeting in Orlando, where thousands of Southern Baptists gathered to vote on leadership positions and debate issues ranging from women's roles in ministry to denominational priorities.
Rice, 62, announced his candidacy last October, framing his campaign around the need for spiritual renewal within the convention, referencing the Protestant Reformation.
“The Church is always reforming,” Rice said in his announcement last year. “We receive correction, adjust course and embrace renewal. And it is to that end today that I want to share with my Southern Baptist family my desire for renewal in our time.”
Powell was nominated earlier this year by Tennessee Pastor Jay Hardwick, who described him as “a man of integrity” who is “humble, approachable and wise.”
Although the two candidates differed in style and emphasis, they largely agreed on many of the major issues facing the denomination. Both men expressed support for a proposed constitutional amendment that would strengthen the SBC's ban on women serving as pastors, elders or overseers.
On Monday, Rice preached a sermon at the SBC Pastors’ Conference, stressing that “it is not enough to affirm right doctrine,” warning that “if we seek the favor of the world more than the approval of Heaven, if we fear the rejection of men more than we fear the judgment of God, we are already on a dangerous slide.”
“It is not enough for us to engage in religious ritual,” Rice said. “Saul had lost sight of what mattered most: to obey is better than sacrifice, to pay attention is better than the fat of rams.”
“I want a Southern Baptist Convention that is successful, but I want one that is faithful even more … Faithfulness today will bring fruitfulness tomorrow.”
Originally published by The Christian Post.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[ACCM2026 panel calls for shift from church programs to disciple-making cultures at church, denominational and national Alliance levels]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/accm2026-panel-calls-for-shift-from-church-programs-to-disciple-making-cultures</link>
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                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[From left, Dr. John M. Chandra, Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, and Rev. Edmund Chan with Asia Evangelical Alliance General Secretary Dr. Bambang Budijanto as moderator during the morning panel on the third day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11,]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ From left, Dr. John M. Chandra, Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, and Rev. Edmund Chan with Asia Evangelical Alliance General Secretary Dr. Bambang Budijanto as moderator during the morning panel on the third day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, Executive Chairman of the Philippines National Disciplemaking Campaign Committee, addresses delegates during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, Executive Chairman of the Philippines' National Disciplemaking Campaign Committee, addresses delegates during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. John M. Chandra, Senior Pastor and Synod Chairman of Gereja Pantekosta Kharismatika di Indonesia, speaks during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. John M. Chandra, Senior Pastor and Synod Chairman of Gereja Pantekosta Kharismatika di Indonesia, speaks during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Rev. Edmund Chan, Founder of the Global Alliance of International Disciple Making Churches, addresses delegates during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Rev. Edmund Chan, Founder of the Global Alliance of International Disciple Making Churches, addresses delegates during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:52:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[On the third and final day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, three church leaders from across Asia called evangelical congregations and denominational networks to stop measuring ministry success by attendance figures and program activity, arguing that the global church's failure to prioritize discipleship has produced a generation of spiritually shallow Christians — and that only a deliberate, relational, and intergenerational approach to disciple-making can reverse it.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
On the third and final day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, three church leaders from across Asia called evangelical congregations and denominational networks to stop measuring ministry success by attendance figures and program activity, arguing that the global church's failure to prioritize discipleship has produced a generation of spiritually shallow Christians — and that only a deliberate, relational, and intergenerational approach to disciple-making can reverse it.
The morning panel, held Thursday, June 11, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, featured Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, Senior Pastor of GCF South Metro and Executive Chairman of the Philippines' National Disciple-making Campaign Committee; Dr. John M. Chandra, Senior Pastor and Synod Chairman of Gereja Pantekosta Kharismatika di Indonesia (GPKDI); and Rev. Edmund Chan, Founder of the Global Alliance of International Disciple Making Churches and Leadership Mentor at Covenant Evangelical Free Church in Singapore. The session focused on how churches, denominations, and national alliances can move from event-based ministry to intentional, measurable disciple-making.
ACCM 2026, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC), has gathered 210 delegates from 25 nations under the theme "Disciple or Die 3.0" — the third in a series of gatherings since the AEA's 2024 general assembly in Mongolia first sounded the alarm over the state of discipleship across the continent.
Providing a pathway to transition to disciple-making

Villoria, who is part of the leadership of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) representing 92 denominations, opened by naming what he described as the central challenge with national alliances: talking about disciple-making without giving churches a workable path to practice it.
"Many churches, even denominations and leaders, are talking about disciple making and discipleship, but it is not really getting traction at the church level," he said. "So that is the challenge."
He outlined four practices a national alliance must stop if it is serious about change. The first is treating disciple-making as a conference activity and “just do the same conferences of inspiring the churches, but not really providing them a pathway on how they can be disciple-making churches," he said. Second, success can no longer be measured only in attendance and events. "We need to ask ourselves: are disciples being formed? Are disciples discipling others? Are they growing toward spiritual maturity?"
Third, Villoria argued, alliances must stop assuming pastors already know how to lead this kind of transition. And fourth, national alliances cannot function only as coordination platforms. "Coordination is helpful, but coordination alone will not produce disciple-making churches." Agreement that discipleship matters is not enough, he said — what is needed is alignment, which he defined as actually restructuring the life of a congregation around the mandate to make disciples. "It's difficult. It requires culture change and it will take time."
For the PCEC specifically, Villoria described four commitments. The first is maintaining a clear biblical vision — consistently communicating that multiplying disciples is not one agenda item among many but the central one. The second is aligning national strategy with measurable outcomes: tracking how many denominations are taking concrete steps, how many churches have a defined discipleship pathway, how many individuals are in a small group and actively discipling others. The third is working through the alliance's 92 member denominations, regional networks, and theological institutions. The fourth, he said, is the most foundational: the whole movement must be sustained by prayer.
"A disciple-making movement cannot be manufactured by strategy alone," Villoria said. "Strategies are needed, structures are helpful, training is necessary — but only the Holy Spirit can revive the church, transform the hearts, and empower ordinary believers to make disciples."
New metrics to keep community “on fire for discipleship”

Chandra, who has served as a pastor in Indonesia for 36 years, offered an honest account of his own journey toward recognizing what he called the shallowness of information-heavy ministry.
"I'm just teaching them — informing them," he said of his earlier approach. "But I would like to go deeper." After three decades of preaching, he came to see that equipping disciples requires more than classroom time or biblical content transferred at scale. Discipleship, he argued, must be understood as the purpose of the church's existence — not one program among many.
Chandra named five habits he believes churches must abandon. The first is focusing solely on evangelism without discipleship. "We have to make sure we just want to reach, but also make disciples of God." The second is associating discipleship with information transfer alone. The third is treating discipleship as a program rather than the defining purpose of church life. The fourth — and what he described as the hardest — is failing to build genuine relationships. "If you ask me what is the hard thing I have to learn when transforming my church and denomination, it is how to build relationships." The fifth is accumulating disciples without deploying them.
Three years into the transition at his own congregation, Chandra described removing the traditional weekly attendance count from the board. "We count the offering that comes in from the service — but let's count how many people we can serve to become disciples," he said. The new metric, he explained, keeps the community "on fire for discipleship."
At the denominational level, Chandra said he began by discipling six pastors personally — deliberately small, deliberately slow. "I learned from Jesus: he discipled 12," he said. "I started with six." Each of those pastors now disciples others, and the pattern is beginning to multiply through GPKDI's network of churches across nine provinces in Indonesia. By May 2029, he said, the denomination has set a goal of seeing 50 percent of its local churches become disciple-making churches — defined as congregations where at least 30 percent of members are actively discipling others.
The framework guiding the movement, he said, is built around four values he described with the acronym REAL: Relationship first, Empowered by the Word, Authentic and accountable, and Life transformation as the expected result.
Hope for the global Church is not in the masses

Chan closed the panel with what he described as a view from the broader horizon — data on the condition of the global church that he said demands a response.
Citing figures from a Pew Report, Chan said there are approximately seven million churches worldwide. Of those, four million are stagnant — neither growing nor making disciples. Two million are in decline, with Europe as a particular example, where former church buildings are being repurposed for other uses. Only one million, he said, are growing — and not all of them in healthy ways. Annual growth of Christianity globally stands at approximately 1.8 percent, he noted — a figure he called very low.
"This is the state of the globe," he said.
Chan described a gathering of approximately 400 Christian leaders in Louisiana late last year, convened to pray and deliberate over how to reverse those trends. The initiative broke into 30 working groups. One conclusion surfaced consistently across all of them: discipleship is the key.
"If we are committed to this focus, we need discipleship — healthy discipleship for healthy churches," Chan said.
He argued that the core deficit is not resources or strategy but a specific kind of leadership. He distinguished between what he called weak leaders, who lack both knowledge and skill; good leaders, who have those but lack resilience when tested; and strong leaders, who persevere through opposition. The greatest need in the church today, he said, is not strong leaders — it is wise leaders. "For wisdom-based leadership, we must come back to the sacred Scriptures and the foundations of the church so that there are healthy, godly leaders who lead wisely."
Chan offered three anchors for that kind of leadership: reestablishing the Lordship of Jesus Christ, refocusing on spiritual maturity as the goal rather than programs or growth metrics, and committing to spiritual multiplication — investing deeply in a few rather than broadcasting to many.
He illustrated the point with an account from a bishop he has been mentoring, who entered a discipleship journey in 2019 after years of fruitful public ministry but, by his own account, a private experience of spiritual emptiness. "People viewed me as doing well — having vision, having a lot of spiritual gifts," the bishop said, according to Chan. "What people did not realize was that I was feeling spiritually empty." After going through a discipleship program, the bishop recruited four senior pastors, then 12 lay pastors, organizing them into small groups of no more than five pastoral couples. The pattern spread. Eventually, he was mentoring five cohorts of seven bishops each — 35 bishops in total — and the approach had been adopted as the diocesan standard through 2030, spreading to all 165 dioceses in the country.
"One man, changed by the Lord, came under the authority and lordship of Jesus, passed it on — and God lodged a movement," Chan said.
His closing word to the assembled delegates echoed the conference's emphasis on depth over scale. "Hope for the global church is not in the masses," he said. "Jesus did not invest himself in the masses. He invested in a few. Continue to minister to the masses — but invest."
ACCM 2026 concludes Friday, June 12, with a joint session bringing together the conference delegates and an estimated 1,000 Filipino pastors for a focused intensive on intentional disciple-making.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Free evangelical church in Leipzig closes its café after suffering 26 attacks by radicals]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/free-evangelical-church-in-leipzig-closes-its-cafe-after-suffering-26-attacks-by-radicals</link>
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                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Evangelical Focus]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Stay Cafe]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Photos: Stay Cafe ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Stones thrown at the windows of Stay Cafe and graffiti calling for a boycott. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Official answer of the City of Leipzig government]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Photo: Ratsinformation Leipzig ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Official answer of the City of Leipzig government to questions about attacks against Stay Cafe. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 05:53:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[‘Stay’, a café opened in 2024 by an evangelical church in the city of Leipzig (population of 630,000), will close at the end of June. The reason is the ongoing attacks and acts of sabotage by extremist groups, explained René Wagne, the pastor of Zeal Church.]]></description>
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‘Stay’, a café opened in 2024 by an evangelical church in the city of Leipzig (population of 630,000), will close at the end of June. The reason is the ongoing attacks and acts of sabotage by extremist groups, explained René Wagne, the pastor of Zeal Church.
Up to 26 attacks have been carried out against the small business linked to this evangelical church, which is conservative in its theology yet postmodern in its forms. A report in 2025 already mentioned more than a dozen incidents allegedly caused by far-left groups who, on social media, called for action against the Christian congregation for its supposed “queerphobia” in preaching the Christian view of human sexuality.
The attacks include smashed windows, threatening graffiti and the use of toxic substances against the premises. At Christmas, an attack on the café with butyric acid cost around €20,000 in repairs.
The pastor to the congregation: ‘Extremists cannot our mission’
During the service on 31 May, Pastor René Wagner explained that responding to this constant hostility had posed a financial challenge that was difficult to bear. Following discussions with the team, it had been decided to bring the project to an end, despite the “sadness” this entailed after a period of “sleepless nights” and jobs that would be lost.
However, he emphasised on several occasions that the decision to close the project does not change the mission of a church. “The far-left extremists in Leipzig have not won. I want to emphasise this once again. The far-left extremists in Leipzig have not won”, Wagner insisted before the congregation.
“They have not shut down a single church; they have not stopped a single congregation. They have not prevented a single revival. They have not deterred a single soul from encountering Jesus. What is coming to an end is a business operation, our coffee shop. What remains is this church”.

The fact that the café has been a constant target of hate messages on social media and physical attacks is part of a broader context of increased visibility for evangelical churches in Germany. This, Zeal Church believes, is not bad news.
“Churches in Germany are back in the spotlight. For decades, nobody talked about conservative Christians in Germany; we were irrelevant. We posed no threat to certain groups”, said the church’s pastor. “Last year, there were over six documentaries on all sorts of TV channels about conservative Christians. And I could get absolutely livid that something like that is even funded by my TV licence fee. But can I tell you something? We’re back in the public eye. Now, we are noticed, we are heard, we are seen”.
“We do not look back with bitterness or hatred”
In his seven-minute reflection, the leader of the local church—which, like many others, holds Sunday services, weekday Bible study groups, discipleship programmes and other ministries—emphasised the need to respond to attacks with an attitude that reflects the gospel.
“Our future lies in God’s hands, in the hands of the Holy Spirit. And that is why we do not look back with bitterness, unforgiveness, or hatred. We do not respond with hatred; we do not strike back”, said Pastor René.
“Yes, we insist on our rights, rights that the state also grants us”, he continued. “And we do everything we can to ensure that people who do such things in our country are held to account. Because things like this must not be allowed to happen. And the good news is, politicians are taking notice”.
Bad publicity? “Jesus is building his house”
But Christians in Leipzig should “not strike back”, he emphasised.
“Instead, we look forward with faith and hope, because our Lord Jesus will return and judge the living and the dead. And one of the greatest preachers of all time, Billy Graham, said there is no such thing as bad publicity for the Gospel”.
“If you are shocked by negative newspaper articles about us, brace yourselves. These will not be the last”.
Conversions to the Christian faith like those happening at Zeal Church and other free churches, the pastor said, “shake the spiritual world”, and attacks should not be unexpected.
He concluded: “Jesus is building his house, his church, and that won’t change”.
In recent months, dozens of people have supported a fundraising campaign for the ‘Stay’ café, raising over 31,000 euros.
Local authorities: Not a religious freedom attack
In January 2026, the local government of the city of Leipzig received questions about the attack occurred on Christmas against the café run by Zeal Church, urging the authorities to protect constitutional rights and freedoms.
In its response, the local government, said: “The attack – at least according to the claim of responsibility – does not constitute an attack on religious freedom. The target was a commercially run café used to fund a religious community. The attack is further motivated by the attitude of the operating association towards homosexuality”.

The official position of the City of Leipzig is that “regardless of the reasoning given in the statement of responsibility, the attack constitutes a criminal offence which must be condemned accordingly and for which there can be no justification. The City of Leipzig condemns violence and damage to property in all its forms, particularly against establishments that offer people a space for meeting, exchange and community. Such attacks are directed against the safety and peaceful coexistence of all people who work or spend time there. Accordingly, the City has a preventive interest in clearly condemning such incidents, ensuring they are investigated by the police and strengthening the protection of all religious communities”.
Originally published by Evangelical Focus]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[The delivery system is you: Singapore pastor challenges Asian Church to embody discipleship, not just teach it]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/the-delivery-system-is-you-singapore-pastor-challenges-asian-church-to-embody-discipleship-not-just-teach-it</link>
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                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Rev. Edmund Chan addresses evangelical leaders at the Asia Conference on Church and Mission in Manila. Chan called on church leaders to become the delivery system for discipleship rather than relying on programs or curriculum.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Rev. Edmund Chan addresses evangelical leaders at the Asia Conference on Church and Mission in Manila. Chan called on church leaders to become "the delivery system" for discipleship rather than relying on programs or curriculum. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:09:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[A Singapore-based pastor told evangelical leaders gathered in the Philippines that the church's core problem is not organizational but spiritual — tracing most failures in ministry back to a breakdown in discipleship and obedience, and calling on church leaders across Asia and beyond to become intentional disciple makers rather than program managers.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
A Singapore-based pastor told evangelical leaders gathered in the Philippines that the church's core problem is not organizational but spiritual — tracing most failures in ministry back to a breakdown in discipleship and obedience, and calling on church leaders across Asia and beyond to become intentional disciple makers rather than program managers.
Rev. Edmund Chan, founder of the Global Alliance of International Disciple Making Churches and leadership mentor at Covenant Evangelical Free Church in Singapore, delivered the opening keynote on the third day of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM), which brought together over 200 evangelical leaders from 25 countries in Manila. Chan has served as a guest lecturer in doctoral programs at five seminaries across four countries, and his address drew on that teaching experience to frame discipleship as the foundational issue facing the global church today.
He opened with a simple analogy: a shoe factory produces shoes, a paper factory produces paper, so what does the church produce? "The church is to produce disciples," Chan said. "The crisis of discipleship today is a crisis of product — not just are you producing disciples, but what kind are we producing?"
Chan framed his address around five diagnostic questions: why discipleship is so important, why it is so neglected, what it actually is, what makes it so difficult, and how it can best be accomplished. The questions, he said, provide a framework for understanding what genuine disciple-making looks like — and where most churches fall short.
A chain of consequences
"There are no church problems," Chan told attendees. "All we have are people problems. And what we have in people problems is actually a heart problem." He traced that chain further — from heart problems to obedience problems, from obedience to faith, and from faith to spiritual maturity. "If there's discipleship, there's great maturity. If there's great maturity, there's great faith. If there's faith, there's obedience. If there's obedience, there's a transformation of heart," he said. "That is why discipleship is so critical in the life of the church."
The same logical chain, Chan argued, explains why neglecting discipleship has such wide consequences. A church that fails to produce mature disciples does not simply have a programming gap — it has a people problem, which is at root a heart problem, which flows directly from the absence of genuine formation.
Misunderstanding as neglect
Chan argued that discipleship is commonly neglected not simply through inaction, but through misunderstanding. There are three ways to neglect something, he said: by not doing it, by starting and then stopping, or by doing it wrongly. The third, he suggested, is the most common failure in churches today.
Many churches, he said, treat discipleship as a program rather than a way of life, and confuse knowledge transfer with genuine formation. "Truth doesn't change lives," he said. "It is truth of life that changes lives." He drew a contrast between a Western philosophical understanding of truth as content — shaped, he said, by Enlightenment thinking — and an ancient Jewish conception of truth as connection: with God, with one another, and with the lost. When that relational dimension is stripped away, he said, truth becomes mere recitation rather than transformation.
Alignment and the call to follow
Asked to define discipleship in a single word, Chan offered "alignment" — a life oriented entirely around following Jesus. He described discipleship as five interlocking commitments: to know Jesus, to love him, to serve him, to proclaim him, and to become increasingly like him. Disciple-making, he said, is reproducing that same orientation in others.
He cited Luke 9:23, noting that Jesus' call to take up the cross is explicitly daily — a detail he said many churches have quietly dropped. "We have lost the dailiness in discipleship," Chan said. "In a lot of churches, the discipleship program is weekly, and we miss the call to live out our discipleship daily." He referenced an ancient Jewish blessing, also refered to by an earlier speaker, in which a disciple is wished to be so close to his master that the dust from the master's feet settles on him. That image of proximity, Chan said, captures what discipleship is meant to feel like — not distant admiration but intimate, daily pursuit.
Chan spoke with candor about his own spiritual history, describing himself as a third-generation Christian who backslid for four years before returning to faith. The experience shaped a conviction he said has served as a guiding compass since 1975. "If Jesus is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all," he told the gathering. "I told myself — if I come back to Jesus, I must be all in. He must be all in all."
He also drew a direct line between discipleship and holiness, warning that the two cannot be separated. "We cannot walk with God by holding hands with the devil," he said. "There is a call to separation." The theology of repentance, forgiveness and a redeemed life lived in freedom, Chan said, must be central to any serious disciple-making effort.
The obedience problem
On the question of why discipleship is difficult, Chan pointed to obedience. He said the Great Commission is frequently misread: Jesus did not simply instruct his followers to baptize and teach, but specifically to "teach them to obey — teach them to submit to all things whatsoever I have commanded you." The word "observe," he said, is the hinge the church has missed.
When believers face a conflict between the word of God and personal experience — pain, pleasure, competing desires — three responses are available, Chan said. The first is backsliding. The second is repentance, returning to God's word. But he identified a third, which he described as widespread in the global church today: remaining in the pew while refusing the cost of obedience. "They don't backslide — they're still in church. They don't repent because it's too costly to obey. They pay lip service to God," he said. That posture, he warned, produces what he called "lukewarmness," and a lukewarm church cannot be an intentional disciple-making church.
Discipleship as a lived relationship
To illustrate his point, Chan played a short video in which a senior pastor described how Chan's investment in him — regular meetings over lunch during a sabbatical period — had provided practical and spiritual counsel through a demanding season of ministry. What the pastor said he valued most was not strategy or teaching, but simply feeling cared for and loved.
That detail, Chan said, captures the essence of disciple-making. "It's not about building a large movement or a megachurch," he told the gathering. "It's about helping the redemptive community of disciples of Jesus to journey together, to pilgrimage together, to share lives together."
The delivery system
Chan closed with a conversation from earlier in his ministry, in which a leader from Navigators observed that while most ministries rely on curriculum as their delivery system, Chan had made himself the delivery system. Chan said he owed that instinct entirely to his own mentors, who had shaped him not through materials but through the investment of their lives. "Their lives were the delivery system," he said, "and therefore I'm simply passing on that which I have learned."
He urged church leaders to do the same: to follow Jesus as disciples, make disciples, multiply disciples and mobilize them for the purposes of God — one soul, one disciple, one small group at a time. The goal is not a passion for discipleship as a ministry model, he said, but a passion for Jesus himself. "You and I," Chan told the room, "we are the delivery system."
The Asia Conference on Church and Mission brought together evangelical leaders from across Asia and beyond calling on participants to embrace intentional disciple-making as the defining task of the church in the present generation.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA['Discipling is not a technique': Indian theologian calls Asian church leaders to radical accountability at ACCM2026]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/discipling-is-not-a-technique-indian-theologian-calls-asian-church-leaders-to-radical-accountability-at-accm2026</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/discipling-is-not-a-technique-indian-theologian-calls-asian-church-leaders-to-radical-accountability-at-accm2026</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
                                                                                                                            <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4755.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[Rev. CB Samuel, honorary theological adviser for Micah Global and EFICOR, challenged Asian evangelical leaders to name at least five people they are actively discipling — and to ask honestly whether they could.]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Rev. CB Samuel, honorary theological adviser for Micah Global and EFICOR, challenged Asian evangelical leaders to name at least five people they are actively discipling — and to ask honestly whether they could. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:27:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[A veteran Indian Bible teacher challenged evangelical leaders gathered at a major Asian missions conference to confront what he called a pervasive failure of personal discipleship, pressing them to name at least five individuals they are actively discipling — and to ask themselves honestly whether they could.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
A veteran Indian Bible teacher challenged evangelical leaders gathered at a major Asian missions conference to confront what he called a pervasive failure of personal discipleship, pressing them to name at least five individuals they are actively discipling — and to ask themselves honestly whether they could.
Rev. CB Samuel, honorary theological adviser for Micah Global and EFICOR, delivered the closing keynote address on the second evening of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM) on June 10, drawing on Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians to lay out what he described as the essential character of a disciple maker.
"Discipling is not a technique," Samuel told participants. "You pour your life into other people."
He opened with a personal reflection, describing a difficult season in his own life during which he had turned to the Psalms of lament — noting that more than a third of the 150 psalms fall into that category. He suggested that contemporary Christian music, particularly in Asia, often fails to reflect the pain of ordinary people. "Our songs should capture the pain of our people and the cry to God," he said. "Otherwise, we are totally disconnected."
The majority of his address focused on practical accountability in discipleship. Samuel recalled a staff conference model used by a Sri Lankan Christian leader, who required everyone on his leadership team to write the names of five people they were discipling on the back of their name badges and could be questioned about any one of them at any time. Leaders who lacked current knowledge of those individuals' lives were removed from organizational leadership, Samuel said. "If you can't even name one person you're discipling, what right do you have to talk?" he recounted the leader as saying.
He also described asking a prominent Christian leader to recommend someone from among his disciples for a ministry program. The leader reportedly told Samuel he had no one to recommend, saying his organizational responsibilities had left him no time to disciple anyone. Samuel credited him for his candor but used the exchange to press his point: "If you don't have time to disciple, you are in the wrong position."
Working through 1 Thessalonians 2, Samuel identified six characteristics he said define a genuine disciple maker. The first is courage. Paul had been beaten and mistreated, yet continued to proclaim the gospel, Samuel noted. "You cannot be a disciple maker without taking risks," he said, arguing that 21st-century Christians are often too committed to personal comfort to follow that example.
The second characteristic, he said, is integrity — freedom from flattery, self-promotion and hidden motives. Samuel was pointed in his critique of Christian leaders who use their platforms for personal enrichment. "If you don't have a reputation as a person of integrity, don't disciple," he warned. "The one you disciple will not be Christlike. He will be like you."
The third quality Paul models, Samuel said, is the tender care of a nursing mother. He highlighted Paul's willingness to use maternal language — "we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well" — as evidence that discipleship requires the discipler's life to be genuinely accessible. "You can't be a discipler if your home is not open to the people you're discipling," he said.
Fourth is hard work. Samuel recalled his own father, a health professional, expressing disappointment when Samuel entered Protestant ministry — not for theological reasons, but because Protestant pastors in his experience were slow to respond to needs, unlike Catholic priests. His conclusion was that "if you're a discipler, 24 hours, seven days a week is for the person you're discipling."
Character — holiness, righteousness and blamelessness — was the fifth quality, with Samuel drawing a distinction between the three terms: holiness as a person's relationship with God, righteousness as conduct within the community of faith, and blamelessness as one's reputation before the wider world. All three, he argued, are required.
The sixth characteristic is a father's heart — encouraging, comforting and urging those being discipled toward lives worthy of God. "That is the heart of a disciple maker," Samuel said.
He closed with an appeal, asking participants to pray silently and honestly over whether they could name five people currently in their care — and, if not, to commit before God to rebuilding that foundation. "I want to be known for discipling people," he said, framing it as the question by which Christian leaders will ultimately be judged. "God is not going to ask any of us how good a director of our organization we were. He's going to ask you how good a disciple maker you were."
ACCM drew evangelical leaders from across Asia and beyond to Manila, convening under the theme "Disciple or Die." Samuel's address was the final plenary session of the conference's second day.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[AI, marketplace and youth emerge as major fronts for disciple-making movement at ACCM2026]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/ai-marketplace-and-youth-emerge-as-major-fronts-for-disciple-making-movement-at-accm2026</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/ai-marketplace-and-youth-emerge-as-major-fronts-for-disciple-making-movement-at-accm2026</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
                                                                                                                            <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4749.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[Mark McClendon said AI is the churchs sharpest tool for global harvest—already built, already in place, waiting for leaders to formally commission it for mission.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Mark McClendon said AI is the church's sharpest tool for global harvest—already built, already in place, waiting for leaders to formally commission it for mission. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Decades of patient relationship-building taught Dr. Andrew Liuson that reaching kings—presidents, mayors, and executives—is central to the Great Commission, not peripheral to it.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Decades of patient relationship-building taught Dr. Andrew Liuson that reaching "kings"—presidents, mayors, and executives—is central to the Great Commission, not peripheral to it. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Ps. Keith Cote said young leaders across the globe arent disengaged—theyre bored, gifted, and waiting for a senior leader to trust them with something that truly matters.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Ps. Keith Cote said young leaders across the globe aren't disengaged—they're bored, gifted, and waiting for a senior leader to trust them with something that truly matters. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:25:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Three major thrusts for accelerating disciple-making across Asia — artificial intelligence, marketplace outreach and the empowerment of young leaders — took center stage during an afternoon panel discussion on the second day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026, held June 10 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Three major thrusts for accelerating disciple-making across Asia — artificial intelligence, marketplace outreach and the empowerment of young leaders — took center stage during an afternoon panel discussion on the second day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026, held June 10 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.
The panel, which drew on presentations by Mark McClendon, Regional Director of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) for Southeast Asia and South Korea; Dr. Andrew I. Liuson, Chairman Emeritus of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) and Chairman of Cityland Development Corporation; and Ps. Keith Cote, Next Gen Summit Lead of the Global Leadership Network, addressed how evangelical churches across Asia can move from strategic conversation into measurable action — the stated ambition of this third edition of the "Disciple or Die" gathering.
The conference, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance (AEA) with the PCEC and hosted by Greenhills Christian Fellowship South Metro, brings together 210 delegates from 25 nations around a seven-year vision: to see a movement of disciple-making churches across the continent by 2033.
AI as the sickle, the internet as the cloud
McClendon opened the panel with a case for artificial intelligence as a strategic tool for completing the Great Commission, framing his argument through Revelation 14:14-16 — the image of one seated on a cloud, sickle in hand, reaping a ripe harvest.
Drawing on that passage, McClendon argued that the internet functions as the cloud on which the church is already seated, that tens of thousands of satellites now in orbit and rapidly multiplying form a global transmission network reaching every corner of the earth, and that artificial intelligence is the sharp, precise instrument placed in the church's hands at this exact moment in history.
"The entire harvest infrastructure — internet, satellites, artificial intelligence — is not being built," McClendon said. "It's already in place."
He acknowledged the hesitation he sensed among delegates. "I'm not saying AI is holy. It's not holy. I'm not saying that it's not dangerous. It could be." But he pressed the point that in every generation — from the printing press to radio to television to the internet — God had taken tools built for commerce, entertainment and power and placed them in the hands of his church for the sake of the gospel. AI, he said, was next in that line.
McClendon pointed to three concrete applications any congregation could pursue immediately: using AI as a 24-hour discipleship companion for new believers; deploying AI to train members in how to share their faith, study Scripture and mentor others; and using AI to multiply outreach across multiple languages and platforms. He noted that across Southeast Asia alone, AI can now handle seven to ten major languages, with capability expanding every few weeks.
His sharpest challenge was directed at leaders. He said churches had a long history of letting promising tools quietly die on the shelf once initial energy faded, and called on those with authority to formally commission AI for mission, the same way they would commission a missionary. "The greatest enemy is the slow, comfortable drift of good intentions that never become decisions," he said.
McClendon closed with a three-step challenge: gather leadership within the next two weeks to spend one hour exploring an AI discipleship tool together; identify one discipleship or outreach process currently limited by capacity; then make a formal leadership decision to run a 90-day pilot, assigning a leader, setting a goal and measuring results.
Discipleship in the marketplace: reaching the kings
Liuson, speaking from decades of business and church leadership experience in the Philippines, framed the second major thrust around a single word drawn from the apostle Paul's commissioning in Acts 9: kings.

Liuson said he had long focused on the more accessible, the poor, the farmer, those at his own social level, and had largely overlooked the people positioned higher in society. He argued that the Lord's specific mention of "kings" alongside Gentiles and Jews in Paul's mandate was deliberate. "Kings are people who are around us who are more knowledgeable, more influential, more powerful, more educated," he said. "The president of a company is the king in the company. The little mayor in the small town is the king of that small town."
He traced biblical examples, such as Philip and the Ethiopian treasurer, Joseph in Egypt, Daniel and his friends before four successive kings, to show that God had consistently used ordinary people to reach those in positions of power. He then drew from his own story of joining a Manila rotary club in his thirties, deliberately and patiently building relationships with senior businessmen over years through small gestures, meals and eventually the sharing of the gospel through Evangelism Explosion.
Liuson described how that patient consistency eventually opened doors to share with mayors, senators, a vice president and several Philippine presidents. He acknowledged the intimidation that many church members feel at the prospect of approaching influential people and urged leaders to equip their congregations with confidence in their identity as ambassadors for Christ.
"Successful witnessing is taking the initiative to share Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God," he said.
Young leaders: bored, gifted and waiting to be trusted
Cote addressed the third major thrust: the next generation. He opened by asking delegates to name someone they were currently building into, calling that question a diagnostic for whether churches were genuinely committed to what they professed.
"I truly believe that the church is the hope of the world," Cote said, "but the hope of the local church is its young leaders."
He described a pattern he encountered among young leaders across the globe: they reported feeling frustrated, tired, stressed and anxious, but the word he heard most often was "bored." Not because they lacked activity, but because no one was calling them to do something significant for God. They wanted to be challenged, entrusted with real responsibility and coached, not managed, entertained or kept waiting until they were deemed old enough to matter.

Cote offered seven questions he said every senior leader needed to sit with: Are you modeling discipleship? Are you calling young leaders out by name and letting them know they are needed? Are you releasing them to do things their way rather than requiring your own approach? Are you teaching them in the moment rather than waiting weeks for a formal debrief? Are you functioning as a "wow leader" — one who engages with a young person's idea and helps them work through it — rather than a "how leader" who reflexively explains why an idea will not work? Are you genuinely asking young leaders for their perspective on how to reach their own generation? And are you regularly reminding them of who God says they are — because many, he said, will preach those truths to others while privately dismissing them as inapplicable to themselves?
Cote cited a 23-year-old who now runs global operations for his organization and a 23-year-old from Brazil who leads all Latin American and Caribbean ministry in three languages. Both had been identified and invested in years earlier. He also described an 18-year-old worship leader who had been on the verge of quitting her local church before someone recognized her gifts and gave her real responsibility.
"They don't want to remove you from ministry," he told senior leaders. "They want to be empowered by leaders like you that says, 'Go do it. I trust you. I want to coach you.'"
He closed by pushing back against a consumer model of ministry development. Real investment in young leaders, he said, is not quick or formulaic. "Don't take the easy way. Don't get the McDonald's drive-through version."
From conversation to commitment
The session moderator noted that the three presentations — on AI, the marketplace and youth — together represented what God has placed in the church's hands: a tool, a platform and a generation. The closing question put to delegates was what they intended to do with all three.
The ACCM continues through June 12, with a final day bringing visiting delegates together with an estimated 1,000 Filipino pastors for a joint intensive day on intentional disciple-making.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Study finds parental faith practices linked to adult church attendance]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/study-finds-parental-faith-practices-linked-to-adult-church-attendance</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/study-finds-parental-faith-practices-linked-to-adult-church-attendance</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[family]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Photo by Luemen Rutkowski / unsplash ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:36:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Children raised in homes where religion is regularly discussed are more than twice as likely to attend church and to say faith is very important in adulthood, according to a new study of more than 60,000 Americans.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Children raised in homes where religion is regularly discussed are more than twice as likely to attend church and to say faith is very important in adulthood, according to a new study of more than 60,000 Americans.
The report, released this week by Communio and the Institute for Family Studies, found that parental religious practice and family relationships strongly predict whether faith is retained into adulthood.
Among key findings, 41% of children whose parents both attended church weekly went on to attend weekly as adults. That compared with 29% of children with only one parent attending church regularly.
The study also found that children reporting strong relationships with both parents were 97% more likely to believe in God as adults than those with weaker parental relationships.
The report, titled Passing the Torch: How Faith Moves Across Generations, draws on four national datasets, including the Global Flourishing Study and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Researchers said it is among the most comprehensive analyses to date of how faith is transmitted across generations.
“Faith isn’t something kids are going to get from the culture,” said Jesse Smith, a co-author of the report and assistant professor at The Ohio State University. “Our study shows that parents are the most important figures for their children's spiritual formation. They're the key role models, teachers, and tone-setters.”
Researchers found that regular faith conversations at home, active parental involvement, strong marriages and close parent-child relationships were among the strongest predictors of continued religious practice.
The report also highlighted the particular influence of fathers. Children who experienced faith discussions involving their fathers were more likely to continue those conversations with their own children in adulthood.
Parents who reported high marital satisfaction also reported more frequent faith-related discussions with their children compared with those who reported lower satisfaction.
J.P. De Gance, founder and CEO of Communio, said the findings underscore the importance of the family environment in shaping religious belief. “The married home is the most impactful small group,” he said.
The report includes 10 recommendations for parents and church leaders, including encouraging parental role modeling, strengthening marriages, and making faith a regular topic of family life. It also urges churches to expand youth ministry efforts, involve parents more directly in religious education and engage fathers more intentionally.
Communio is a nonprofit ministry that equips churches to strengthen relationships, marriages and family life. The Institute for Family Studies is a nonprofit organization focused on research and public education related to marriage and family.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[At ACCM2026, panel warns Asia's churches risk raising consumers, not disciples]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-panel-warns-asia-s-churches-risk-raising-consumers-not-disciples</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-panel-warns-asia-s-churches-risk-raising-consumers-not-disciples</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
                                                                                                                            <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4744.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[The panels central argument, shared across all three speakers despite their different institutional vantage points, was that the Asian church has drifted into measuring success by the wrong indicators — attendance, budgets, events, academic credentials, ]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ The panel's central argument, shared across all three panelists with their different institutional vantage points, was that the Asian church has drifted into measuring success by the wrong indicators — attendance, budgets, events, academic credentials, institutional reach — while the one thing Jesus actually commanded, making disciples, has quietly been sidelined. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. Theresa Lua, General Secretary of the Asia Theological Association, called on seminaries to move beyond training professional clergy, arguing that theological education must equip the whole people of God — lawyers, doctors, artists and business people]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. Theresa Lua, General Secretary of the Asia Theological Association, called on seminaries to move beyond training professional clergy, arguing that theological education must equip the whole people of God — lawyers, doctors, artists and business people — to live as disciples in every sector of society. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. Gustavo Crocker, General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, warned that success in one generation can produce spiritual amnesia in the next when intentional discipleship is neglected — a pattern he called the Joshua syndrome.]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. Gustavo Crocker, General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, warned that success in one generation can produce spiritual amnesia in the next when intentional discipleship is neglected — a pattern he called the "Joshua syndrome." ]]>
                                </media:description>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Sharon Croos, Vice President of Asia Region of Compassion International, told conference delegates that externally thriving ministries can mask a deeper failure when leaders prioritize platform over spiritual formation.]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
                                </media:credit>
                                                                                        <media:description type="plain">
                                    <![CDATA[ Sharon Croos, Vice President of Asia Region of Compassion International, told conference delegates that externally thriving ministries can mask a deeper failure when leaders prioritize platform over spiritual formation. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:01:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Theological institutions are producing graduates ill-equipped for real-world ministry, denominational structures risk fossilizing into gatekeeping institutions, and Christian leaders across Asia are growing more exhausted than fruitful — these were among the pointed assessments delivered during the second-day morning panel of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM), held in Manila.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Theological institutions are producing graduates ill-equipped for real-world ministry, denominational structures risk fossilizing into gatekeeping institutions, and Christian leaders across Asia are growing more exhausted than fruitful — these were among the pointed assessments delivered during the second-day morning panel of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM), held in Manila.
The panel, moderated as an interactive session rather than a traditional forum, brought together three voices from distinct streams of Christian life and work: Dr. Theresa Lua, General Secretary of the Asia Theological Association; Dr. Gustavo Crocker, General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene; and Sharon Croos, Vice President of Asia Region for Compassion International. Each panelist addressed the conference theme of leadership as discipleship, and after each presentation, delegates broke into table discussions to process and respond to what they had heard.
Seminaries serving academics rather than mission
Lua opened with a challenge directed at theological institutions, including the one she leads. The core problem, she said, is that seminaries have narrowed their focus to training professional clergy — pastors, missionaries, and church workers — while largely neglecting the broader people of God.
"There has been a call for decades to provide theological education for all those people in order to empower them to serve in a wide spectrum of ministries in the church and beyond," Lua said. She described this narrowing as the "academization" of theological education — a drift toward intellectual credentialing that widens the gap between academic institutions and grassroots Christian communities.

Lua argued that the strongest seminaries worldwide are those closely connected to local congregations, designing curriculum around the actual questions and pressures people in those churches face. She cited what she called "whole life discipleship" as the necessary corrective: equipping believers to follow Christ not only in church activities but in every area of their working and public lives — as lawyers, doctors, government servants, artists and business people.
"The call is to see the whole of the people of God live out the whole of their lives under the lordship of Christ for the sake of the wholeness of God's mission for the whole world," Lua said. She added that theological education must become missiological in its orientation, with curriculum shaped by the real challenges churches face in their specific cultural contexts rather than inherited Western frameworks.
Following her presentation, delegates discussed at their tables what practical changes their seminaries or church contexts could implement within the week.
The Joshua syndrome and generational succession
Crocker, speaking from his experience leading what he described as the world's largest Wesleyan denomination, present in 166 nations, reached back to the book of Judges to diagnose what he called the "Joshua syndrome."
He drew from Judges 2:10, where a generation arose that neither knew the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Joshua and the elders had witnessed God's acts firsthand, Crocker said, but they failed to ensure the next generation knew the Lord personally. The result was idolatry, compromise, and cycles of oppression.

"Success in one generation can lead to spiritual amnesia in the next if we neglect intentional discipleship," Crocker said. He argued this pattern threatens every denomination, movement, and local church today — and is not a relic of ancient history.
He contrasted the Joshua model with Paul's approach in 2 Timothy 2:2, where the apostle charged Timothy to entrust what he had received to reliable people who would in turn teach others. Crocker called this a "seven-generation chain" — from Jesus through the apostles to Paul, Timothy, faithful men, and beyond — and described it as the antidote to the syndrome. He pointed to the ruins of the seven early churches in Turkey as a cautionary illustration: physical structures did not survive, but the principle of generational transmission meant the church of Jesus Christ continued to flourish.
Crocker pressed the assembled leaders on their own accountability, noting that many in the room had been in leadership for more than 30 years. He estimated that the average age of Jesus' disciples was 26 — the same demographic as participants in the Arab Spring and various revolutionary movements — yet many current leaders withhold trust from younger generations until they are middle-aged.
"We went from being groundskeepers to gatekeepers," Crocker said. He drew a distinction between the two: a groundskeeper understands that Jesus builds the church and that the leader's role is to care for it, while a gatekeeper acts as though the church belongs to them. "If I am building the church, it's my church," he warned, "and hell is going to break loose."
Following his remarks, delegates returned to their tables to discuss what would need to change — within their denomination, local church, or sphere of influence — to move from the current state toward genuine generational discipleship.
Activity without intimacy
Croos, the final panelist, challenged leaders to examine not the metrics of their ministries but the spiritual condition of the people those ministries produce. Drawing on his years working across Asia with Compassion International, he identified a pattern he described as movements that remain externally successful while quietly losing their soul.
"The moment can become successful while slowly losing its soul," Croos said. "Performers may attract crowds, but only disciples can transform communities or nations."

He described a scenario familiar to many in the room: growing churches, rising budgets, packed events and strong social media engagement — alongside leaders who are physically active but spiritually depleted. The problem, he argued, is that modern leadership training has taught people how to build platforms without attending to their inner life in Christ.
Croos outlined five dimensions he considers essential to leadership understood as discipleship. The first is abiding — remaining in Christ as the foundation of everything else. "If leaders are not abiding in Christ, leadership eventually becomes performance," he said. The second is character, which he placed above competency as the primary leadership challenge. "The world celebrates gifting, but God develops character," he said, noting that many ministry collapses occur not because of lacking skill but because character failed to grow alongside influence.
The remaining three dimensions he named were multiplication — producing disciple-makers rather than followers; vulnerability — leading from honesty about weakness rather than protecting an image; and sacrifice — choosing others above self as the servant ethic of kingdom leadership. He acknowledged the particular pressure Asian cultural norms place on leaders to project strength and hide struggle, including a conversation he had heard about a senior denominational leader who felt unable to be transparent even with his wife.
Croos closed with a direct question to the room: "Who are people becoming because of your leadership? More dependent on Christ or more dependent on you? More like Jesus or more like the culture around them?"
After his presentation, delegates engaged in a final round of table discussion, identifying one concrete change they would carry back to their national, denominational, or church context.
The Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 runs June 9–12 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches. The conference carries the theme "Disciple or Die 3.0" and is oriented toward a concrete goal: that by 2033, 20 percent of evangelical churches represented by AEA member alliances across Asia will become disciple-making churches.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[At ACCM2026, Asia Evangelical Alliance leader warns: Two centuries of evangelism without discipleship have 'cost us a lot']]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-asia-evangelical-alliance-leader-warns-two-centuries-of-evangelism-without-discipleship-have-cost-us-a-lot</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-asia-evangelical-alliance-leader-warns-two-centuries-of-evangelism-without-discipleship-have-cost-us-a-lot</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, addresses delegates from 25 nations at ACCM 2026 in Manila, arguing that two centuries of evangelism without discipleship have left the Asian church in crisis, June 10, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, addresses delegates from 25 nations at ACCM 2026 in Manila, arguing that two centuries of evangelism without discipleship have left the Asian church in crisis, June 10, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Godfrey Yogarajah (right), Chair of the Asia Evangelical Alliance and the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. Botrus Mansour (left), Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, pray for Bishop Joel Montes as he recei]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Godfrey Yogarajah (right), Chair of the Asia Evangelical Alliance and the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. Botrus Mansour (left), Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, pray for Bishop Joel Montes as he receives the first DCAR certificate on behalf of his late father's denomination at ACCM 2026 in Alabang, Metro Manila, June 10, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:21:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[The General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance pressed evangelical leaders Tuesday to confront what he called three deep internal fractures keeping the church trapped in an event-driven model, and introduced a continent-wide tracking system to hold congregations accountable for the shift toward intentional disciple-making.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
The General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance pressed evangelical leaders Tuesday to confront what he called three deep internal fractures keeping the church trapped in an event-driven model, and introduced a continent-wide tracking system to hold congregations accountable for the shift toward intentional disciple-making.
Dr. Bambang Budijanto opened the second day of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM) 2026 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, with a keynote that moved from diagnosis to action. He unveiled a set of cascading numerical targets, from the continental level down to the individual congregation, and launched a new digital registration and certification platform, which he called DCAR (Disciple-making Church Advancement Record), to track progress against those goals.
The conference, organized by the AEA in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, has gathered 210 delegates from 25 nations under the banner "Disciple or Die 3.0." Building on two prior gatherings — in Mongolia in 2024 and South Korea in 2025 — organizers have framed Manila as the moment for measurable commitment, not just further discussion.
The three fractures
Budijanto told delegates that despite growing consensus on the importance of discipleship, three internal problems have kept most churches from making the transition.
The first, he said, is a long-standing confusion between urgency and emergency — and he argued it is the most consequential misreading of the Great Commission in the history of the modern Church.
Budijanto's starting point was not a critique of zeal, but a distinction within it. Every genuine revival, every season of spiritual awakening, he observed, carries with it an acute sense of urgency. People encounter Christ and feel, rightly, that there is no time to waste. The problem, he argued, is what churches have done with that urgency over the past two centuries: they have converted it into emergency thinking, and emergency thinking produces a fundamentally different — and far more limited — response.
He illustrated the difference with a medical analogy. When a patient arrives at an emergency room with multiple problems, doctors do not treat everything at once. They perform triage — identifying the single most pressing threat to survival and addressing that, setting everything else aside for later. The goal in an emergency is not restoration; it is stabilization. Keep the patient alive today, and deal with the rest when there is more time.
That logic, Budijanto argued, is exactly what has shaped the dominant model of mission across Asia and much of the world. Faced with billions of people outside the faith, the church looked at the scale of the task, felt the weight of eternity, and made a triage decision: get people to heaven first. Move them from lostness to salvation. Evangelism above all else. Discipleship can come later.
The consequence, he said, has been an approach that stops at the threshold rather than walking people through the door. Converts are made but not formed. Decisions are recorded but not nurtured into durable, reproducing faith. The church fills its pews with people who have prayed a prayer but were never apprenticed to a way of life.
True urgency, Budijanto told the room, does not cut corners — it insists on doing the whole thing now. The Great Commission, he said, is not a triage protocol. It is a comprehensive mandate: go, make disciples, baptize, teach obedience. None of those elements is optional. None is deferred to a second stage. The urgency of the commission should accelerate discipleship, not replace it with something shallower.
"Evangelism without discipleship has cost us a lot," he said.
He was careful not to dismiss evangelism itself — the problem is not sharing the gospel but treating that moment as the finish line. A church consumed by getting people in the door, he suggested, while investing almost nothing in what happens to them afterward, has mistaken the beginning of the journey for its end. After two centuries of emergency-mode mission, the visible result is churches across Asia filled with nominal Christians who have never discipled anyone and are not expected to.
The second fracture is what he called the domestication of discipleship. Based on his own survey, Budijanto said more than 90 percent of discipleship activity takes place inside church buildings and is directed at existing Christians. That, he argued, directly contradicts the scope of the Great Commission. "If discipleship was just for Christians in the church building, the Great Commission should say, 'go to all churches,'" he told the room. "My Bible says go to all people, go to all nations."
The third fracture is the displacement of disciple-making from the church to parachurch organizations. While expressing appreciation for such organizations, Budijanto was clear that the mandate belongs to the local church. "Great Commission is for the church," he said. "Bring it back to the church and strengthen the church."
He drew on the Greek structure of Matthew 28 to reinforce the point, noting that "make disciples" is the sole imperative in the passage — "go," "baptize," and "teach" are all participles subordinate to it. He estimated that fewer than 5 percent of Christians globally are actively discipling others, which means the vast majority are disobeying what he described as the last command Jesus issued before his ascension.
From movement to metrics
Budijanto then introduced a tiered definition of what a disciple-making church, and alliance, would actually look like in practice, offering concrete thresholds at every level of the evangelical ecosystem.
At the congregational level, he proposed that a local church qualifies as a disciple-making church when at least 20 percent of its members are personally discipling others. The figure, he explained, draws on the Pareto principle: 20 percent of a group typically drives 80 percent of its outcomes, meaning that if one in five members is actively discipling, the effect ripples through the rest of the congregation.
He was specific, however, that small group participation does not meet the bar. Citing research from the United States, he noted that 90 percent of small groups produced no disciples at all.
Moving up the structure: a denomination becomes a disciple-making denomination when 30 percent of its local churches meet that 20 percent threshold. A national evangelical alliance becomes a disciple-making alliance when 40 percent of its member denominations achieve that status. And by 2033, the AEA's continental goal is for 50 percent of its national alliance members to qualify as disciple-making alliances.
For the Philippines specifically, Budijanto pointed to the PCEC's 92 member denominations as a baseline for what achieving those thresholds would require. For Indonesia, the figure is 103 denominations.
He also reframed the purpose of the church in terms that pushed back against institutional measures of success. "I'm grateful if your national alliance has a big building," he said. "How many staff, how many members — but the question is how many of them are obeying Christ and discipling others? How many churches in your alliance are discipling others?"
A platform for accountability
To support the movement toward those targets, Budijanto introduced the DCAR platform, an AI-assisted digital registration system available in multiple languages. Pastors attending the conference were encouraged to scan a QR code on cards distributed at the tables, register their congregation, and — if their church already meets the 20 percent threshold — submit a declaration for certification.
Declarations require endorsement from a recognized authority: a national alliance leader or a denominational head who can verify the claim. Once endorsed and approved by AEA, a signed certificate, bearing the signatures of both Budijanto and Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, is issued to the church.
Budijanto said the first certificate, numbered 0001, would be awarded at the conference. He expressed hope that by the next edition of the gathering, certificate number 5,000 would be awarded, and by 2030 or 2033, the number would reach 100,000.
The platform is also designed to give national alliances a geographic view of where disciple-making churches are concentrated and where gaps remain, allowing organizations with discipleship resources to identify areas of greatest need.
A testimony of transition
Budijanto closed his keynote by describing the story of a Filipino church leader — the late Bishop Herley Montes — whose church had stalled at around 200 to 300 members across multiple church plants. When a mentor asked him how many disciples he had, Montes initially answered with his attendance figure. The mentor pressed him: not attenders — disciples.
"He could not answer," Budijanto said.
After being mentored in disciple-making principles and implementing the transition from an event-based to a disciple-making model, Montes's mother church grew to approximately 4,000 members, with around 500 daughter churches. The first six months of that transition, according to Budijanto's account, saw roughly half the congregation leave — members who wanted to attend services but were unwilling to disciple others. Montes, however, remained committed and ultimately saw abundant fruit as a result.
Montes died in early May 2026, weeks before the conference. His son, Bishop Joel Montes, attended the Manila gathering in his place and received the first DCAR certificate on behalf of the denomination — an organization of 520 local churches, most of which Budijanto described as disciple-making congregations.

The ACCM 2026 conference continues through Thursday, concluding on Friday with a joint session expected to bring together the visiting international delegates and an estimated 1,000 Filipino pastors for a day of intensive engagement on disciple-making practice.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[At ACCM2026, head of global discipleship movement calls Asian Church to repent, resolve, and realign]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-head-of-global-discipleship-movement-calls-asian-church-to-repent-resolve-and-realign</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-head-of-global-discipleship-movement-calls-asian-church-to-repent-resolve-and-realign</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Bishop Efraim Tendero, WEA Global Ambassador and Executive Director of the Galilean Movement, delivers the second keynote address at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Bishop Efraim Tendero, WEA Global Ambassador and Executive Director of the Galilean Movement, delivers the second keynote address at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:06:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[On the evening of June 9, 2026, as 210 evangelical leaders from 25 nations gathered in Manila, the second keynote address of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026 opened with challenging pictures illustrating church decline and moving towards a call for revival by returning to the Church’s key task of disciple making.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
On the evening of June 9, 2026, as 210 evangelical leaders from 25 nations gathered in Manila, the second keynote address of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026 opened with challenging pictures illustrating church decline and moving towards a call for revival by returning to the Church’s key task of disciple making.
Bishop Efraim Tendero, former Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance and now WEA Global Ambassador and Executive Director of the Galilean Movement, followed the evening session’s theme "Revive Us Again, O Lord," drawn from the prayer of the prophet Habakkuk in chapter 3, verse 2.
He opened with images of six historic churches that were converted to mosques or residential houses. Six buildings, six congregations that had once proclaimed the gospel, now repurposed because the churches died.
"Why did they die?" he asked the room. "Because they did not disciple."
Churches full of leaves, but where is the fruit?
Citing Lifeway Research data from 2024, he noted that in that year alone, 3,800 new churches were planted across the United States — but in the same year, 4,000 closed their doors. More churches were dying than being born. Across two decades of data, the pattern held. And globally, a study by the Joshua Project had found that only 11 percent of the world's population could be counted as committed followers of Christ, with nearly two-thirds still having no personal relationship with Jesus.
"After almost 2,000 years, we have fallen behind and still have much more to do," he said. "Do we say we need a revival today? I think we need a revival today."
Tendero turned to John 15 where Jesus says that true disciples will bear fruit and then compared the passage to the image of the barren fig tree from Matthew 21: Jesus approaching it hungry, finding nothing but leaves, and pronouncing judgment. "Our churches today are full of leaves, full of activities, full of many events, full of many programs," Tendero said. "But Jesus is asking: where's the fruit? Where are the disciples?"
The early church had what today's church has lost
Against that diagnosis, Tendero pointed to the explosive missionary vitality of the first-century church. In Acts 8, when persecution scattered believers from Jerusalem throughout Judea and Samaria, those who were scattered went everywhere preaching the word.
In Acts 19, the apostle Paul, rejected at the synagogue in Ephesus, moved his daily teaching to the Hall of Tyrannus, and kept at it for two years. Some manuscripts of the text note that he taught from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon each day. The result: the whole province of Asia heard the word of the Lord, and seven churches took root.
"Despite persecution," Tendero said, "the early church spread out rapidly."
He also quoted Tertullian's second-century declaration that Christians had penetrated every level of Roman society: the army, the navy, the marketplace, the palace. They were, in his words, everywhere. "After almost 200 years, they were able to reach almost the entire Roman Empire. In fact, even the persecution of the churches during that time never stopped the Christian church to spread."
It was the early church's fire, Tendero argued, its commitment to making disciples, not merely making attenders, that generated that kind of movement. And it is precisely that fire which today's church, burdened by programs and events, has lost.
Three movements toward revival
Tendero went on to offer a three-part framework for what revival would require of church leaders gathered in Manila.
First: repent of the great omission. Tendero reached into Ephesians 4:11–12, where Paul describes apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers given to the church — and names their primary purpose: to equip the believers for the work of ministry. That equipping, he argued, has been systematically neglected. The result is a church that functions like an army where only two percent of the soldiers know how to shoot, while the rest are spectators.
"We neglect the equipping of believers for the work of the ministry," he said. "Let us repent of this great omission."
Second: resolve to fulfill the Great Commission. Tendero returned to the text of Matthew 28:19–20, building on the grammatical observation Godfrey Yogarajah had made earlier in the evening — that among the verbs in the passage, only one carries the weight of a command. Not "go." Not "baptize." Not "teach." The imperative is "make disciples." Going, baptizing, and teaching are the means; disciple-making is the mandate.
He recalled a statement he had heard from another Asian leader at a gathering two years earlier: that disciple-making is not one of the strategies given by Jesus. It is, rather, the only strategy given by Jesus.
"Let us fulfill the only strategy given by Jesus to his disciples," he said.
Third: realign with the Holy Spirit. Citing Acts 1:8, Tendero pressed on the connection between the Spirit's power and the church's witness. Churches today, he observed, often have power — the power of amplification, production, and institutional momentum — but lack the power to become witnesses for Christ. That boldness, he argued, is the fruit of discipleship, not of organizational capacity alone.
He pointed to Acts 4, where Peter and John, threatened by the authorities and forbidden to preach, returned to the gathered community of believers. The response of that community was not strategic deliberation. It was immediate, instinctive prayer — and the room was shaken, the believers filled with the Holy Spirit, and they continued to speak the word with boldness. When difficulties come, Tendero asked the delegates, what is the church's first instinct? Strategy, or prayer?
Both the World Evangelical Alliance and the Lausanne Movement, he noted, had in recent years identified the greatest gap in global mission as discipleship. "The Holy Spirit is calling the church today to go back to the main thing that Jesus wanted us to do."
Divine authority, divine presence
Tendero closed by returning to Matthew 28, beginning at verse 16. Eleven disciples stood on a mountain in Galilee. They saw the risen Jesus, and some worshiped but others doubted.
Those who choose to worship, to submit to the Lordship of Christ, receive both a command and a promise. The command is singular and non-negotiable: make disciples of all nations. The promise is double: all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Christ, and he will be with his people to the end of the age.
"With the divine authority and the presence of Jesus," he said, "we can fulfill the only plan of Jesus — and that is to make disciples of all nations."
The Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 runs June 9–12 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches. The conference carries the theme "Disciple or Die 3.0" and is oriented toward a concrete goal: that by 2033, 20 percent of evangelical churches represented by AEA member alliances across Asia will become disciple-making churches.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[‘Covered in the dust of the rabbi’: at ACCM2026, WEA head emphasizes discipleship happens in community]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/covered-in-the-dust-of-the-rabbi-at-accm2026-wea-head-emphasizes-discipleship-happens-in-community</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/covered-in-the-dust-of-the-rabbi-at-accm2026-wea-head-emphasizes-discipleship-happens-in-community</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[If we lose discipleship, we lose the center of our mission. Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivers the keynote address at the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026, Manila, June 9, 20]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ "If we lose discipleship, we lose the center of our mission." Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivers the keynote address at the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026, Manila, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:20:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[On the evening of June 9, 2026, 210 evangelical leaders from 25 nations gathered in Manila for the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026. Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivered the first keynote address of the conference. His message was primarily a pastoral argument, grounded in ancient Jewish practice, for why discipleship must be done in community — and what the Church loses when it forgets this.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
On the evening of June 9, 2026, 210 evangelical leaders from 25 nations gathered in Manila for the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026. Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, a global fellowship of some 650 million believers in more than 160 countries, delivered the first keynote address of the conference.
His message was primarily a pastoral argument, grounded in ancient Jewish practice, for why discipleship must be done in community — and what the Church loses when it forgets this.
The risk of losing the center
Mansour opened by highlighting the many pressures bearing down on the Church across Asia and the world: rapid social change, the disruption of AI, rising secularism, nationalistic and religious tensions, economic uncertainty.
What is the Church’s response to these challenges? Reading the Bible, dependence on the Holy Spirit, drawing closer to God in prayer — all of these are right answers, he said. But discipleship integrates all of them. It is the center. "If we lose discipleship, we lose the center of our mission."
He noted that churches that stop intentionally making disciples don't collapse overnight. Programs continue, buildings stay full for a while, activities may multiply — but without discipleship, the church slowly loses its transformative power. Echoing earlier remarks from AEA leaders that evening, he underlined the urgency of disciple making: the church's mandate from Christ is non-negotiable.
“Discipleship is done in community”
Rather than giving a comprehensive theology of discipleship, Mansour said he wanted to make just one important point — an element he believes the evangelical world, shaped by individualism and consumerism, is in danger of missing: "Discipleship is done in a community."
Coming to faith is individual, he acknowledged. No one inherits it. No one comes to Jesus as a group. But the tendency to make discipleship itself a purely individual pursuit — a personal Bible plan, a private spiritual formation program — is where the model breaks down. Western consumerism reinforces this, shaping church attenders who come because they like the worship or the preaching, relating to the church as consumers rather than as covenant community.
"We sometimes think that discipleship is only individual," he said. "But it is done as a group of people."
The dust of the Rabbi
To illustrate this point, Mansour reached back into the first-century Jewish world in which Jesus himself was formed.
Every Jewish child began learning the Scriptures by heart from a young age. The most gifted might aspire to become a talmid (תַּלְמִיד), a disciple, of a distinguished rabbi. If accepted, the talmid didn't simply attend the rabbi's lectures. He lived with the teacher. He traveled with him. He followed closely.
The goal wasn't merely to learn the rabbi's teaching. It was to become like the rabbi — to imitate his character, his way of responding to people, his manner of prayer and problem-solving and conflict resolution. "They observed his habits," Mansour said. "They saw how the rabbi prayed. How he treated people. How he responded to challenges. They lived life with him — all of its parts."
There was a blessing that captured this aspiration. People would say to a talmid: May you be covered with the dust of your rabbi. The roads of first-century Judea were unpaved. To be covered in your rabbi's dust meant you had walked so close to him, for so long, that his journey had become yours.
"Maybe today," Mansour said, "we should tell each other: may you be filled with the dust of discipleship — with the dust of the Lord."
Formation of this kind cannot happen at a distance. It requires proximity. It requires presence, Mansour argued.
The goal of discipleship is to be transformed into Christ’s image
Mansour went on to offer three dimensions of what this looks like in practice.
First: the desire to become like Jesus. Access to teaching has never been easier — any sermon, any passage, any preacher, available on demand. But discipleship is not primarily about information.
"It's not that I want only to know what Jesus taught me," Mansour said. "We need to be transformed to be like him." The question for every believer is not what they have learned, but whether they love like him, serve like him, forgive like him, obey like him. Citing Romans 8:29, he named the goal of discipleship as being conformed to the image of Christ.
Second: every disciple needs another disciple. Scripture is full of this pattern — Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Paul and Timothy. Paul's instruction in 2 Timothy 2:2 is explicit: what you have heard, entrust to faithful people who will teach others also. "Discipleship is life shared from one believer to another," Mansour said.
He described his own practice when he returns home from his heavy travel schedule: gathering the men of his church for coffee or a meal. "We're not sitting there telling each other, 'Let's open the Bible and you teach me.' But at least when we share fellowship, we hear each one's challenges. We laugh a little bit." That shared presence, that mutual knowing, is essential to discipleship.
We need, he argued, someone who can encourage us when we are discouraged, challenge us when we are drifting, and walk alongside us through the ordinary stretch of life.
Third: disciples grow in circles of fellowship. "Schools have three things: a teacher, a student, and a curriculum," Mansour noted. "New Testament discipleship is different. It has a teacher, a way of life, and resemblance."
The first disciples didn't just attend Jesus' lectures. They watched him pray, watched him minister, watched him respond to the Pharisees' traps, watched how he treated women and the poor and the outcast. "They learned not only from what he taught, but from what he lived."
That kind of formation happens in relationship — in face-to-face circles where you can see one another's expressions, share one another's tears, and actually know each other. He pointed to the first church in Acts, devoted to both teaching and fellowship, as the model.
"You live the life together. This is discipleship. We carry one another's burdens. We become a spiritual family," he said.
Jesus reversed the selection model by going and calling his disciples
Mansour closed with an observation about how Jesus’ approach to making disciples was decisively different. In the ancient system he described, students applied to rabbis. The distinguished teacher accepted the most gifted candidates. The model was selective and hierarchical.
Jesus reversed it entirely. He did not wait for candidates to apply. He went himself. And he did not choose the distinguished, the excellent, or the highly qualified. He chose fishermen. A despised tax collector. Rough people from Galilee.
"If I wanted to start a team for leadership," Mansour said, "I would not go to those types of people." But Jesus did. "The Lord wants everyone. He goes and gets a team. He works through ordinary people."
Discipleship in the way of Jesus is not a program for the gifted or the spiritually advanced, Mansour said. It is the mode in which the whole church — ordinary people — grows together into the likeness of Christ.
"Iron sharpens iron," he said near the close, "and one man sharpens another. That is the life of the community of discipleship. Not at a distance. But in a relationship."
The church flourishes, he argued, when people walk together toward a common goal: when they are becoming, all of them, slowly and in community, like the rabbi they follow. Covered, in the end, in his dust.
The Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 runs June 9–12 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches. The conference carries the theme "Disciple or Die 3.0" and is oriented toward a concrete goal: that by 2033, 20 percent of evangelical churches represented by AEA member alliances across Asia will become disciple-making churches.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Asia Conference on Church & Mission opens in Manila, calling evangelical leaders to 'Disciple or Die 3.0']]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/asia-conference-on-church-mission-opens-in-manila-calling-evangelical-leaders-to-disciple-or-die-30</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/asia-conference-on-church-mission-opens-in-manila-calling-evangelical-leaders-to-disciple-or-die-30</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
                                                                                                                            <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4730.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[Delegates from 25 nations gather at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, for the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Delegates from 25 nations gather at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, for the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Filipino performers lead delegates in worship during the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Filipino performers lead delegates in worship during the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Godfrey Yogarajah, Chairman of the Asia Evangelical Alliance and Chairman of the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivers the opening remarks at ACCM 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Godfrey Yogarajah, Chairman of the Asia Evangelical Alliance and Chairman of the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivers the opening remarks at ACCM 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, addresses delegates at the opening session of ACCM 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, addresses delegates at the opening session of ACCM 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Bishop Dr. Noel Pantoja, National Director and CEO of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, welcomes participants to the Philippines at the opening session of ACCM 2026 in Manila, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Bishop Dr. Noel Pantoja, National Director and CEO of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, welcomes participants to the Philippines at the opening session of ACCM 2026 in Manila, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:27:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[With 210 delegates gathered from 25 nations across Asia and beyond, the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026 officially kicked off on Monday evening, June 9, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
With 210 delegates gathered from 25 nations across Asia and beyond, the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026 officially kicked off on Monday evening, June 9, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.
Organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance (AEA) in collaboration with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) and hosted by Greenhills Christian Fellowship South Metro, the four-day gathering carries a bold theme alongside a concrete seven-year vision: to usher in a movement of dynamic disciple-making churches across the continent by the year 2033.
The conference follows two previous milestone gatherings convened by the Asia Evangelical Alliance: the AEA's 11th General Assembly in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in August 2024, held under the banner "Disciple or Die," where Christian leaders from across the region sounded an alarm about the state of discipleship on the continent; and the Asian Evangelical Leadership Forum near Seoul, South Korea in June 2025, convened under the theme "Disciple or Die 2.0," which deepened the strategic conversation around mobilizing leaders for intentional disciple-making.
Manila's gathering marks what organizers are calling "Disciple or Die 3.0" — no longer a time for discussion alone, but for committed, measurable action.

The state of the Church in Asia requires provocation
The opening session, themed "Revive Us Again O Lord" from Habakkuk 3:2, started with an address by Godfrey Yogarajah, Chair of both the Asia Evangelical Alliance and the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance.
Speaking about the striking theme of the gatherings, Yogarajah acknowledged that the phrase "Disciple or Die" might unsettle some — and argued that it should. The state of the Church in Asia, he said, demands nothing less than provocation. Asia is home to over four billion people, he noted, with vast portions of the continent never having heard the name of Jesus Christ — not for lack of resources, but because the church had drifted from its central mandate.
"Somewhere along the way," he said, "the church stopped making disciples and started making attenders. We filled pews, we built buildings, we ran programs and events, but we forgot the Great Commission."
Yogarajah turned to the text of the Great Commission as recorded in Matthew 28:19, underscoring that the Greek imperative at the sentence's heart is not "go" or "baptize" or "teach" — those are participles, the means — but "disciple." The command is non-negotiable. "We have no right to call ourselves the church of Jesus Christ, if we are not doing the one thing he commanded us to do above all else," he argued.

Referring to the theme "Disciple or Die," Yogarajah said that a church where 80 percent of adult members are consuming rather than reproducing is a church one generation away from decline. A denomination most of whose churches have stopped multiplying disciples is a denomination in crisis, whatever its budget or prayer activity. And a national evangelical alliance with no strategy or accountability for disciple-making has confused coordination with commission.
Set against that diagnosis, Yogarajah spoke about the 2033 Dream: a vision for 50 percent of national evangelical alliances across Asia to become disciple-making alliances — defined as those where 40 percent or more of their member denominations are actively pursuing the mandate; where 30 percent or more of local churches are disciple-making churches; and where, at the congregational level, at least 20 percent of adult members are personally discipling others.
"This is not an impossible number," he said. "It is simply enough yeast to leaven the whole batch."
In practice that would mean one in five church members not merely attending services, but investing: sitting with someone over a meal or a cup of tea, opening Scripture together, walking through life, refusing to let that person stay where they are until they too are walking alongside someone else.
He closed with a prayer echoing the prophet Habakkuk, that God would revive His work through the Church today, so that this generation might not pass without a movement of disciples shaping the continent for Jesus Christ.
From event-based church to disciple-making church
Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary and CEO of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, reminded delegates about the longer arc of the movement — a ten-year journey that has now reached a decisive inflection point.

Budijanto pointed to 2016, when the AEA's general assembly in Bandung, Indonesia first turned its focused attention to the discipleship crisis. Around that time, research by the Barna Group had been published examining the state of the Great Commission in American churches. The findings were stark: only 20 percent of American Christians were engaged in any kind of discipleship activity.
Budijanto recalled speaking with a researcher afterward who suggested that globally, the figure of those genuinely obeying the Great Commission and making disciples might be even lower — perhaps below 5 percent.
What troubled him most was not the statistic itself, but the institutional non-response. "Four out of five Christians were disregarding the last command of Jesus Christ," he said. "But what was worse was that leaders knew about this and carried on with business as usual — as if nothing had happened. We celebrated Easter, we celebrated Christmas, we celebrated anniversaries, as if everything was fine."
That wake-up moment in 2016 set the AEA on its present course. The Mongolia gathering and the South Korea forum, he noted, addressed definition, concept, and theory. "Disciple or Die 1.0 and 2.0 — they're finished, they're done," he said. Manila is for action.
The concrete goal Budijanto set before the room: by 2033, 20 percent of all evangelical churches represented by AEA member alliances across Asia will become disciple-making churches — defined as congregations where at least 20 percent of members are actively discipling others, not merely attending small groups or seeking their own spiritual formation, but investing in others.
Budijanto noted that the prevailing model of church in most Asian cities is what he calls the "weekly event-based church" — where congregations spend as much as 70 percent of their resources and energy preparing for Sunday services. "How to move from event-based into a movement of disciple-making community," he said, "that's the task." He used the image of a bridge displayed throughout the conference's materials: churches on one side are slowly decaying; the other side is dynamic disciple-making. The responsibility of every leader present, he said, is to help their church cross it.
The final day of the conference, he noted, would bring together the visiting delegates alongside an estimated 1,000 Filipino pastors for a joint intensive day on intentional disciple-making.
The role of the Church as instruments of the gospel
The welcome address on behalf of the hosts was delivered by Bishop Dr. Noel Pantoja, National Director and CEO of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC). While expressing his appreciation for the privilege of hosting the event in the Philippines, he first highlighted the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the country the previous day.

Pantoja asked delegates to pause and pray — noting that as of the opening session, more than 40 people had been confirmed dead, with hundreds still missing. He reported that the PCEC's Philippine Relief and Development Services was already on the ground conducting rapid assessments, and he called on churches, denominations, and international partners to mobilize in response.
Against that backdrop, Pantoja then pointed to the broader issues the Church faces in the nation.
"As we come together amidst the challenges we are experiencing in the Philippines — not only the disasters, but the social, economic, political, and cultural difficulties — we are reminded of our role as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Asia: as instruments of the gospel, advancing God's mission through faithful obedience to our Lord's mandate to make disciples of all nations," he said.
Pantoja spoke to the urgency embedded in the conference's theme. In the PCEC's own journey, he noted, 2025 had brought a deliberate declaration: "This is not business as usual for the church." It requires what they came to call a "discipleship revolution." Now, in Manila, that urgency intensifies under the banner "Disciple or Die."
"If we miss the Lord's design and purpose for the Church," he warned, "we risk losing hope for the world."]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Nations United prepares churches for evangelism during 2026 FIFA men's World Cup]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/nations-united-prepares-churches-for-evangelism-during-2026-fifa-men-s-world-cup</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/nations-united-prepares-churches-for-evangelism-during-2026-fifa-men-s-world-cup</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Chris Eyte]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI - MAY 05: World Cup signage is displayed at the Kansas City airport ahead of the 2026 World Cup on May 05, 2026 in Kansas City, Missouri.]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Jamie Squire/Getty Images ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI - MAY 05: World Cup signage is displayed at the Kansas City airport ahead of the 2026 World Cup on May 05, 2026 in Kansas City, Missouri. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:50:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Soccer teams and supporters from across the globe are descending on 16 cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico as the expanded 48-team FIFA men's World Cup is set to begin June 11. While millions focus on the pitch, a massive coalition of churches and evangelical organizations views the tournament as a historic opportunity to share the gospel.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Soccer teams and supporters from across the globe are descending on 16 cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico as the expanded 48-team FIFA men's World Cup is set to begin June 11.
While millions focus on the pitch, a large coalition of churches and evangelical organizations views the tournament as a historic opportunity to share the gospel. Operating under the banner Nations United, an initiative launched through the North American Sport Movement in 2020, the coalition is mobilizing local congregations to use the tournament as an opportunity for evangelism.
The organization's website offers custom resources to help local churches launch sports-centered community outreach, hospitality initiatives and local viewing parties.
Dan Williams, a leader and mentor with Nations United, anticipates a highly coordinated evangelistic strategy as churches and mission organizations unite for the monthlong event.
“We are collaborating with several cities across North America that are launching their initiatives,” Williams said, noting that the next two weeks will be critical as local teams activate their plans.
In Georgia, an outreach team will soon travel statewide to assist local congregations. The Georgia Baptist Mission Board, which represents 5,000 Southern Baptist churches, adapted the coalition's materials to launch its own "Mission Georgia World Cup Outreach" with full backing from Nations United.
“Nations United exists to unite and equip the Church across North America to make disciples among the nations through sport, play, hospitality and community outreach,” Williams said.
“With the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics coming to our region, we believe God has placed a historic opportunity at our door. The nations are no longer only across the world; they are across the street.”
Williams explained that the long-term vision requires churches, ministries and local leaders to build sustainable "disciple-making teams" across all three host nations.
“These teams will use major sports events as a bridge to build relationships, proclaim the Gospel, serve communities and create ongoing pathways for people to follow Jesus,” Williams said. “The World Cup is a moment. Disciple-making is the mission.”
Early results are already emerging. Last weekend, a citywide initiative called Winning Houston launched a "Cup of Nations" tournament, an outreach event influenced by Nations United that featured what organizers described as the world's largest soccer goal.
The movement’s footprint also extends far beyond North America. Williams is also supporting two Christian radio stations in South Africa by developing a 39-day World Cup content plan featuring athlete testimonies, ministry stories and outreach resources.
Other organizations, such as the ministry Victory: Beyond the Cup, drew inspiration from the Nations United framework but chose to operate independently rather than formally aligning with the coalition. Williams welcomes the widespread, organic adoption of the strategy.
“We consider it a privilege to have helped them move forward,” Williams said. “We are not looking for recognition; we are seeking disciple-making multiplication. We believe that all these experiences in 2026 are preparing us for 2028 as we seek to accomplish our vision as Nations United.”]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Young Christians want guidance, not just freedom, Dutch churches hear at landmark youth ministry summit]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/young-christians-want-guidance-not-just-freedom-dutch-churches-hear-at-landmark-youth-ministry-summit</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/young-christians-want-guidance-not-just-freedom-dutch-churches-hear-at-landmark-youth-ministry-summit</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Chris Eyte]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dutch youth report smartphones hinder personal faith growth, even as many say online content gave them their first connection to Christianity, according to the Youth Trends 2026 report.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Unsplash / Julie Ricard ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dutch youth report smartphones hinder personal faith growth, even as many say online content gave them their first connection to Christianity, according to the Youth Trends 2026 report. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:56:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Dutch youth say smartphones are hurting their faith — but also credit social media with their first encounter with Christianity, according to a new report presented Friday at the inaugural "Young Generations Day" in the Netherlands.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Dutch youth say smartphones are hurting their faith — but also credit social media with their first encounter with Christianity, according to a new report presented at the inaugural "Young Generations Day" in the Netherlands.
The Youth Trends 2026 report, based on research with more than 700 young Christians aged 12 to 30, identified five currents reshaping how young believers engage with faith: a desire for clear spiritual direction over personal freedom; growing curiosity about the supernatural; a hunger for authentic community; unease about smartphones as a barrier to spiritual growth; and a view of the digital world as a legitimate mission field. The findings prompted more than 80 youth ministry professionals from over 15 church traditions to gather in Veenendaal to discuss how local congregations can respond.
MissieNederland (the Dutch Evangelical Alliance) organized the May 29 event at De Verbinding Baptist Church in Veenendaal, where participants from local churches, youth ministry organizations and research institutions discussed what those trends mean in practice — and what churches should do about them.
Martine Versteeg-ter Veen, director of MissieNederland, told Christian Daily International that the day examined how churches and youth ministries can better serve young people following Christ.
“Following a research report presentation about the five trends, the event’s participants—including local churches, youth ministry organizations, and researchers—discussed what the outcomes meant and explored solutions within different contexts,” Versteeg-ter Veen said.
A follow-up research report detailing the data “behind the trends” is anticipated in the coming week, and organizers are planning a practical toolkit to help churches engage with the findings.
Regarding the trends, Versteeg-ter Veen noted that a prior emphasis on giving young people space to discover what faith means has been superseded. “Now we see that, much more than before, this generation longs for direction and guidance. And that's what they are looking for in Christianity and in following Christ,” she explained.
She also remarked that the trend concerning digital life is particularly striking, given that young people themselves expressed concern over the negative effects of mobile phone use on their spiritual lives.
“What I found interesting in the research was that a high percentage of young people say mobile phones are not helpful in growing their faith,” Versteeg-ter Veen said. “Yet, on the other hand, we do see that it is very much a digital mission field, because many searching young people have their first connection with Christ through online contact and content.”
Versteeg-ter Veen added that the data led participants to discuss how children’s and youth ministries can directly address these concerns.
The Young Generations Day 2026 is the first iteration of an ongoing initiative, with the next event tentatively planned for Fall 2027.
The May event builds upon the February launch of a two-part resource titled “Samen Jong in de Praktijk” (“Young Together in Practice”), as previously reported by Christian Daily International. The workbook was created to help Dutch churches cultivate intergenerational communities.
The resource was officially introduced by Sabine van der Heijden, a researcher at the Christelijke Hogeschool Ede (CHE); Saskia de Graaf-Bakker of MissieNederland; and Rozamaryn Orsel, 24, who was recently named the “Young Theologian of the Netherlands” for 2025–2026.
A launch event for the book drew 200 participants on Feb. 13 at the CHE campus in Ede, Netherlands. The symposium was organized through a collaboration between MissieNederland, the Christelijke Hogeschool Ede (serving as venue and academic partner), Kerkpunt, and the Theologische Universiteit Utrecht.
At the time, Versteeg-ter Veen told Christian Daily International that the Samen Jong book was published because Dutch churches frequently struggle to build communities where all generations truly belong, resulting in many young people leaving the faith.
“The book is based on the Growing Young research from the United States but contextualized for the Dutch church,” she said. “It is unique because it focuses not on youth ministry in the traditional sense... but on church community development. The core question is: How can we become a church where all generations flourish and grow as followers of Christ?”
According to Versteeg-ter Veen, this approach establishes intergenerational ministry as a distinct discipline within practical theology rather than a mere expansion of youth ministry.
“Since its launch, hundreds of churches have taken up the challenge of cultivating the core values that help churches welcome younger generations and enable all generations to flourish.”
Versteeg-ter Veen listed these core values as: taking Jesus and his gospel seriously; prioritizing younger generations and their families; loving young people; being a warm community; giving meaningful responsibility within the church; and being a church that is good news for the world.]]></content:encoded>
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