Greetings from the General Secretary, CWM

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ Jesus:

Warm greetings to you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ from the general secretariat of the Council for World Mission (CWM).

I am delighted to bring my greetings to you through the CWM’s Partner in Mission (PIM) bi-monthly newsletter, Connected. The CWM Partners in Mission (PIMs) are vital for the mission of the CWM. They embrace the missionary vision and vocation of the CWM as a community of churches in mission, as well as sharing their gifts, experiences and insights cross-contextually. A PIM does not operate by the old dichotomy of missionary exchange of sending and receiving churches but in the new missional model of partnership and mutual engagement being facilitated by the CWM.

As the new General Secretary of the CWM, I am fully aware of the great missional journeys that our PIMs have been undertaking. I will continue to strengthen the PIM programme and increase the number of mission partners to affirm the identity of CWM as a mission organization aiming at all the member churches to receive and send at least one PIM by 2027, the Jubilee of CWM. PIM will be one of the key methods to support the mission development and programmes of the member churches. The PIMs will be strengthened to pave paths for ecumenical mission engagements carrying the CWM’s commitment to mission in a more dynamic way sharing their rich cultures and diverse traditions, crossing the social, ethnic, regional, and denominational boundaries, and expressing our common witness in diversity. One of the primary roles of the mission is to reclaim the face of God’s people.

The PIMs, through their missional engagement, will continue to share the powerful and transformative stories of God’s people in their face-to-face encounters and invoke hope for life. The CWM will faithfully and actively accompany all the PIMs as well as member churches in walking towards such a dynamic and life flourishing mission.

Connected is a newsletter meant for connecting the PIMs to share their enduring faith, diverse contexts, and transformative stories of challenges and accomplishments in the frontier of world mission. This common platform brings those unheard stories and challenging journeys of our PIMs into the light, which may otherwise go unnoticed. This way, the missional engagement of the CWM through PIM will continue to make its transformative impact on the missional formation of our member churches and bring them into an ongoing missionary commitment.

I would like to thank all our PIMs for their dedication, commitment, and willingness to serve and contribute to the mission and ministries of our member churches with their special gifts bestowed by God. The CWM is always proud of them as they are frontiers of our mission.

I would also like to congratulate and appreciate Mrs. Vickeisha King Burke, Coordinator for the PIM programme, for her relentless services to our PIMs and commitment to help to produce this bimonthly newsletter. May this newsletter be an instrument of bringing new awareness among the member churches in considering the PIM programme as a channel of doing the transformative mission.

May the blessings of our triune God be with us all.