TRAINING LEADERS: Building Resiliency To Face Christian Persecution

W- w- who are you? What do you do? Uh, talk about your work.

Yeah, A3 was, uh, begun in Japan, uh, 59 years ago as an English teaching ministry, but we have always been at the front edge of innovation.

And over time, we've adapted and twisted and turned to be who we are today.

Uh, what we recognize as one of the greatest needs in the world today is building capacity of local leaders.

As the Church has grown rapidly in the majority world, the biggest need has been coming alongside, empowering and equipping, and so that's what we do in essence.

We say our vision is to equip and unify visionary leaders to accelerate gospel movements around the world.

Amen.

And we have had so many guests on Voice of the Martyrs Radio from hostile areas and restricted nations who talk about the great need for leaders.

"Hey, the church in my country is growing.

Now we have to figure out how to find leaders for all those churches." Um, so you are stepping in and helping with that need.

I'm very interested by the 59 years old, so 1967?

Exactly.

The same year Voice of the Martyrs was founded.

Wow.

Wow.

We also will be 60 years old next year.

Whoa.

Talk a little bit about how our two ministries work hand-in-hand because obviously you're training leaders in places where VOM is helping persecuted Christians.

[laughs] Um, so it seems like the, the synergy there is pretty natural.

Yeah, the synergy, uh, started because one of our leaders in Bangladesh actually came to me saying, "Joe, we love what all these groups like VOM are doing, but we'd like to see A3 kind of get involved with that." And so that catalyzed us to a conversation that really started the synergy of the work we do.

Now, the reason we do that, let me take you further back in time to our founder.

Our founder has a famous story in our history where he was sitting in a train in Tokyo with a Japanese pastor and he said, "Tell me your vision for the country." And this Japanese pastor, uncharacteristically for Japanese, shared his vision and just went on and on and on, and finally said, "[gasps] Forgive me.

You are the apostle God sent to Japan.

What is your vision?" And our founder said this, "My vision is to empower your vision."

Amen.