Worldview training hones Native Americans’ disciple making
By Don Graham
RICHMOND, Va.—Native American Baptists are playing a greater role in sending missionaries to evangelize the world’s native peoples, and a recent IMB-led training event is helping maximize those missionaries’ effectiveness.
More than 50 Native American pastors and lay leaders gathered at Alameda Baptist Church in Albuquerque, N.M., Oct. 3-4, for the New Mexico Native American Mobilization Conference. Hosted by the Baptist Convention of New Mexico, attendees represented the Navajo Nation, multiple Pueblo tribes as well as the Apache. The participants came to learn about people group engagement and the role worldview plays in sharing Christ cross-culturally.
Daniel Clymer, Native American strategist for the Baptist Convention of New Mexico, said the conference is part of an effort to mobilize Native American Baptists by building what he calls “Mission Response Team” churches, congregations that are prepared for local and global missions through training in four key areas: prayer, evangelism and discipleship, leadership development, and missions and multiplying. Clymer said understanding concepts such as worldview are critical for ministry in New Mexico. That’s because he believes New Mexico isn’t a stereotypical North American mission field.
“I tell people who come here to New Mexico that we are international missions,” Clymer said. “We have so many different cultures and peoples, and they don’t think like mainstream America thinks; they think like their people group. To be able to effectively reach them, we’ve got to have a whole new set of tools on board.”
Those new tools will prove helpful as Native American believers increasingly travel outside the United States.
“There are requests coming in for Native American Baptist mission teams to come and help with other people groups elsewhere in the world,” Clymer said, noting their ethnicity makes them uniquely effective at reaching other native tribes.
“Native American people have very much in common with other aboriginal peoples around the world. There is an instant connection,” he explained.
Terry Sharp, director of urban mobilization strategies on IMB’s missional church strategists team, said the worldview and people group training with Native Americans is a first for IMB. Sharp co-lead the event, and said that such training is critical to be an effective cross-cultural witness.
“We have to let Christ supersede culture,” Sharp explained. “Without it, we may unintentionally be offensive, we may stereotype, and those things can get in the way of someone hearing the Gospel.”
The training was the brainchild of Randy Carruth, who partnered with Clymer and IMB to organize the conference. Carruth leads “I Am Able Ministries” in Forrest Hill, La., and has championed a vision for Native American Christians to take a greater role in fulfilling the Great Commission.
“All the way from Northwest Territories, Canada, to the Mayans in Chan Chen, Mexico, God is opening up the hearts of native people everywhere,” Carruth said. “Our vision is this: If we can get our native people trained, they are the one people group that is accepted almost anywhere in the world. And if we can encourage churches to get behind them and send them into the world, they’ll go.”
For Edna Romero of Taos, N.M., the training was a confirmation of the new direction she’s taking Native American Baptists in New Mexico. Romero is the missions leader for the Native American Baptist Partnership of New Mexico; her husband, Bennie, pastors First Indian Baptist Church in Taos.
“Many times we’ve been taught, ‘Bring the people into the church.’ But the training emphasized ‘Go and tell,’” Romero said.
She explained that many Native Americans simply don’t feel comfortable going to church. It’s evident at her congregation’s annual vacation Bible school, which draws many children but few parents. Statistics show that as many as 95 percent of Native Americans in the U.S. don’t have a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Romero added that being equipped to share the Gospel at home is the first step to sharing overseas.
“We’re emphasizing to go beyond our own Jerusalem,” she said. “If you can’t go the first 12 miles, how can you go 12,000?
“I’ve been trying to encourage our churches to do local missions so that they get hands on experience, and when the opportunity presents itself, they’re better equipped in reaching out to another community, another state or even outside of the United States.”
In 2011, Romero and her husband took their first international mission trip, sharing Christ among isolated native villages in Canada’s vast Northwest Territories. She learned firsthand that sharing the Gospel with unreached, unengaged people groups (UUPGs) usually means getting out of your “comfort zone.” Temperatures of minus 30 Fahrenheit were a shock for the Romeros, who were used to New Mexico’s Southwestern climate. But despite some discomfort, Romero said God opened many doors among villages that were previously closed to non-native missionaries. They shared the Gospel many times, often over traditional meals of dried fish or caribou stew.
Romero was particularly touched by the words of a village chief she met who lived next door to a Catholic church. “I see my people coming and going,” he told her, “but they aren’t changed. What can I do to make a difference in their lives?” It was a perfect opportunity for the Romeros to tell him about Jesus.
“We need to lift our horizons and look beyond our own local community,” Romero said. “The Lord loves all people of all races and colors. Someone reached out to us, and we need to return the love.”
Don Graham is a senior writer at IMB
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