 | |
| Founded | 1978 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Doug & Penny Lucas |
| Type | Christian Missions Agency |
| Focus | Church planting, missionary work |
| Location | |
Key people | Doug Lucas |
| Website | www |
Team Expansion is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) charitable organization that establishes churches around the world in places not well served by the Christian faith. Many Team Expansion workers are associated with the Restoration Movement of churches, but as an agency, Team Expansion is non-denominational.
Team Expansion began as a prayer movement on the campus of what was Kentucky Christian University in 1978. In 1982, five missionaries headed to Montevideo, Uruguay to start the very first Team Expansion work. In 1983, International Services – the stateside support team for all international workers – was launched and headquartered first in the basement of Doug and Penny Lucas' home in Covington, then later in the home rented by John and Becky Bliffen in Cincinnati, Ohio and then in 1984 on the campus of Cincinnati Bible College, now known as Cincinnati Christian University.
Between 1985 and 1996, Team Expansion launched multiple new teams, including Venezuela, Ukraine, Ireland, and Tanzania. In 1997, the leadership of Southeast Christian Church invited Team Expansion to move its headquarters to Louisville. In June 1997, there were 120 full-time missionaries working around the world with 22 different people groups. Teams continued to go into some of the most difficult places, including Bosnia and Kosovo.
In 2001, there were 199 full-time missionaries, including three brand new works in Italy, Japan, and Louisville, Kentucky, where the workers are focused on a sizable Hispanic population. By 2002, more than 8,000 people had been baptized and more than 110 churches had been established around the world. [1]
In 2019, Team Expansion reported 6,673 new baptisms and a total attendance of 48,538 around the world. [2] With 20-25% of the reports available for 2020, Team Expansion had seen 5,584 new baptisms, 1,628 new “simple churches,” and 29,892 total average worship attendance. [3]
Team Expansion participates with the International Conference on Missions (formerly National Missionary Convention) especially with the Unleashed for the Unreached exhibit. [4] Several Team Expansion leaders were involved in the decision to create the Restoration Revolution 10-year movement toward missions. [5] Team Expansion participated in Light the Fire, a missional prayer initiative born out of the Restoration Revolution movement. [6]
Team Expansion works extensively with the Kairos Course, [7] a course designed to see the whole Church mobilized for cross-cultural mission to the world's least-reached peoples. Team Expansion also works with the "Jonathan Project," which seeks and trains men and women who have characteristics like the biblical character, Jonathan, as evidenced in 1 Samuel 14. [8] Many people from Team Expansion are using the tools and resources from the Zúme Disciple Making Movement. [9]
Emerald Hills is Team Expansion's campus for prayer, retreat and learning. The campus' 61 acres outside of Louisville house Team Expansion's Prayer Center and Atrium facility. Discovery School of the Outdoors (DSOTO), [10] an experiential outdoor learning program, is conducted in the low- and high-ropes course at Emerald Hills. Also staged at Emerald Hills is Brigada Online, [11] a growing collection of web- and email-based resources. Nearly 10,000 individuals have subscribed to the service, which publishes a weekly newsletter, "Brigada Today," as well as a website. [12]
The Restoration Movement is a Christian movement that began on the United States frontier during the Second Great Awakening (1790–1840) of the early 19th century. The pioneers of this movement were seeking to reform the church from within and sought "the unification of all Christians in a single body patterned after the church of the New Testament."
The International Churches of Christ (ICOC) is a body of decentralized, co-operating, religiously conservative and racially integrated Christian congregations. In June 2022, the ICOC numbered their members at 118,094. A formal break was made from the Churches of Christ in 1993 with the organization of the International Churches of Christ.
The group of churches known as the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ is a fellowship of congregations within the Restoration Movement that have no formal denominational affiliation with other congregations, but still share many characteristics of belief and worship. Churches in this tradition are strongly congregationalist and have no formal denominational ties, and thus there is no proper name that is agreed to apply to the movement as a whole. Most congregations in this tradition include the words "Christian Church" or "Church of Christ" in their congregational name. Due to the lack of formal organization between congregations, there is a lack of official statistical data, but the 2016 Directory of the Ministry documents some 5000 congregations in the US and Canada; some estimate the number to be over 6,000 since this directory is unofficial.
A Christian mission is an organized effort to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as educational or hospital work, in the name of the Christian faith. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries. Sometimes individuals are sent and are called missionaries, and historically may have been based in mission stations. When groups are sent, they are often called mission teams and they undertake mission trips. There are a few different kinds of mission trips: short-term, long-term, relational and those that simply help people in need. Some people choose to dedicate their whole lives to mission.
OMF International is an international and interdenominational Evangelical Christian missionary society with an international centre in Singapore. It was founded in Britain by Hudson Taylor on 25 June 1865.
The U.S. Center for World Mission, later known as the Venture Center, was a collaborative Christian mission base in Pasadena, California from 1976 until 2019. The center sought to connect other like-minded organizations around prayer, research, innovation, media, education, strategy, and mobilization with a continued focus on unreached people groups.
Ralph Dana Winter was an American missiologist and Presbyterian missionary who helped pioneer Theological Education by Extension, raised the debate about the role of the church and mission structures and became well known as the advocate for pioneer outreach among unreached people groups. He was the founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission, William Carey International University, and the International Society for Frontier Missiology.
Emmanuel Christian Seminary is the graduate theological seminary of Milligan University. The school is located near Johnson City, Tennessee, United States in Elizabethton, Tennessee city limits and in the community of Milligan. The seminary was founded in 1965 as an freestanding institution, though closely related to Milligan University, but became one of the graduate schools of the university in July 2015. It was founded by church leaders and scholars within the Christian churches and churches of Christ and the Christian Church who recognized the need for a seminary rooted in the heritage of the Stone-Campbell wing of the Reformed tradition while still engaging in theological preparation for ministers. The seminary's campus is located on a hill overlooking the Appalachian Mountains of northeast Tennessee.
The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, more commonly known as the Lausanne Movement, is a global movement that mobilizes Christian leaders to collaborate for world evangelization. The movement's fourfold vision is to see 'the gospel for every person, disciple-making churches for every people and place, Christ-like leaders for every church and sector, and kingdom impact in every sphere of society'.
Christianity in the 20th century was characterized by an accelerating secularization of Western society, which had begun in the 19th century, and by the spread of Christianity to non-Western regions of the world.
World Gospel Mission (WGM) is an interdenominational Christian holiness missionary agency headquartered in Marion, Indiana, United States. Aligned with the Wesleyan Holiness tradition of Protestantism, WGM was founded on 10 June 1910 in University Park, Iowa as the Missionary Department of the National Association for the Promotion of Holiness. As of 2018, WGM operates in 23 countries and supports 236 full-time missionaries, in addition to short-term team members and volunteers.
The Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century had to respond to the challenge of increasing secularization of Western society and persecution resulting from great social unrest and revolutions in several countries. It instituted many reforms, particularly in the 1970s under the Vatican II Council, in order to modernize practices and positions. In this period, Catholic missionaries in the Far East worked to improve education and health care, while evangelizing peoples and attracting numerous followers in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.
The Joshua Project is an evangelical Christian organization based in Colorado Springs, United States, which seeks to coordinate the work of missionary organizations to track the ethnic groups of the world with the fewest followers of evangelical Christianity. To do so, it maintains ethnologic data to support Christian missions. It also tracks the evangelism efforts among 17,446 people groups worldwide—a people group being "the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement," according to the project's website—to identify people groups as of yet unreached by Christian evangelism.
Anglican Frontier Missions is an American-based Christian mission organization that "To plant biblically-based, indigenous churches where the church is not, among the 2 billion people and 6,000+ unreached people groups still waiting to hear the Gospel for the very first time."
John William McGarvey was a minister, author, and religious educator in the American Restoration Movement. He was particularly associated with the College of the Bible in Lexington, Kentucky where he taught for 46 years, serving as president from 1895 to 1911. He was noted for his opposition to theological liberalism and higher criticism. His writings are still influential among the heirs of the conservative wing of the Restoration Movement, the Churches of Christ and Christian churches and churches of Christ.
John Robb is the former Chairman for the International Prayer Council, and formerly led the prayer ministries of World Vision. The IPC is a network of regional and national prayer ministries and networks around the world. He and the IPC provided leadership for the World Prayer Assembly that was held in Jakarta, Indonesia, May 14–18, 2012.
Jesus Youth(JY) is an International Catholic Movement, approved by the Holy See.
In Christianity, an unreached people group refers to an ethnic group without an indigenous, self-propagating Christian church movement. Any ethnic or ethnolinguistic nation without enough Christians to evangelize the rest of the nation is an "unreached people group". It is a missiological term used by Evangelical Protestants. The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization defines a people group as "the largest group within which the gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance." "Nation" is sometimes used interchangeably for "people group". The term is sometimes applied to ethnic groups in which less than 2% of the population is Evangelical Protestant Christian, Including nations where other forms of Christianity are prevalent such as Western Catholicism, Eastern Christianity or Lutheranism.
The Sword of the Spirit is an international, ecumenical association of Christian communities within the charismatic movement. As of 2017, the Sword of the Spirit is composed of 82 communities, 45 of which are Catholic. The member communities are composed predominantly of laypersons. The Sword of the Spirit is one of the largest federated networks of communities to come out of the Catholic charismatic renewal.
Saint Paul's Outreach (SPO) is a Catholic missionary organization in the United States which serves college students and young adults. It is a private association of the faithful established in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. SPO describes its mission as follows: "to build transformational communities that form missionary disciples for life."
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