UK Director Paul Cooke is looking for potential volunteers
Have you ever heard of Global Connections? My sense is that a lot of Christians haven’t, even though GC provides a valuable service to the UK Church by offering an umbrella organisation for various mission agencies, training institutions, and churches. You could think of it as the equivalent of the Evangelical Alliance for world mission. Their strapline is “Better Together: Seeing the Whole Church take the Whole Gospel to the Whole World”.
I’ve been serving as part of GC Council for the last six years and have found it a very valuable space for keeping abreast of key issues in world mission and also for developing relationships with the leaders of other mission organisations – especially those with a focus on Europe.
One of the services that GC provides is to host a number of Regional Groups, as follows:
· MAP: for those in Northern Ireland
· GC Eastern Partners: for those based in and around Peterborough, Ipswich, Norwich, down to Watford
· GC London and South-East: covers Oxford, Milton Keynes, Portsmouth, and Reading
· GC Midlands: for those based anywhere in the west or east Midlands
· GC Scotland: for mission agencies based in Scotland
· NEMAP: for anyone based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Sheffield or anywhere in between
There is also SWAN for south Wales and southwest England, not formally affiliated to GC, but fulfilling the same purpose as other Regional Groups.
One of the great advantages of these Regional Groups is that they enable mission organisations to have a presence at events to which they wouldn’t otherwise have access, such as mission fairs organised by university Christian Unions or by various church groupings.
France Mission is currently only represented in MAP (by Northern Ireland Area Rep Jill Kennedy) and in SWAN (by me). If you’d be interested in the possibility of joining a Regional Group to help extend FM’s reach, do please let me know – I’d love to hear from you! Thank you.
