The workbook entitled, Your Focus on the World, by Ellen Livingood of Catalyst Services calls the various types of focus “your focus gateway”. These practical categories help you understand at least some of the major categories of target ministry goals for developing a strategic missions focus.
Here is a short list of four primary strategic focus types:
Project focus
- completion and dedication of a New Testament translation
- development of an indigenous Bible school
- development of clean water, electrical power, or agricultural improvement to a needy area
- building a town or regional primary care clinic or community resource center
Missionary-centered focus
- providing needed resources and or infrastructure improvement for a particular missionary or missions team on the field
- supplying short-term teams with some regularity and frequency for VBS, English tutoring, sports clinic, literature distribution, business
- development, or similar outreach ministry activities
- providing MK education resources and/or teachers
- funding the most visionary ministry goals of a particular supported missionary and/or their team
People group or place focus
- committing to whoever or whatever advances the evangelistic entry and pioneering church planting efforts among a specific people group or place
- brokering the cooperation among any number of groups interested in reaching a particular unreached people group or place with gospel centered ministry
- providing training and/or scholarships for first-generation Christians of a particular people group or place with the intent of going back to reach that indigenous group
- recruiting, training, and sending out of your own people for the sake of pioneer church planting among a strategic unreached people group
Sister church focus
- consistently sending short-term teams of various sizes and skills to assist in development, discipleship, and training of a selected sister church in a cross-cultural context on the mission field
- developing strong ties and relationships between the chosen sister church leadership and your church, including the possibility of the pastors speaking in each other’s pulpits
- “adoption” of key leader candidates in the sister church for additional training
- utilizing personnel from a sister church on the mission field to provide specialized cross-cultural training for people in your church, especially those planning to go and minister in that mission field context