Dear FAI Friends & Family,
At every year’s end, we reflect on our journey since the Lord founded Frontier Alliance International in December 2011. We mark a birthday, an anniversary. We place a new memorial stone on the proverbial stack, flag the start of a new year, and move into it with all the clarity and vision we can muster for the work ahead.
As we write this letter approaching 2024, we find ourselves grieving. Most directions we look in find us staring at bad news, searching for any silver lining, grasping to grip the Good News.
When we reflect on our inception in 2011, we remember the Lord directing us to the Muslim world, and to walk through doors only crises could open for an incarnate witness of the Gospel of the Kingdom. The Arab Spring was only then fomenting. The Syrian Civil War was in its inception. ISIS had not yet scourged the Levant. Yemen was not yet embroiled. Darker days were yet ahead for the Kurdish people. Afghanistan had not yet collapsed back into the hands of the Taliban. Hamas had not yet breached the Gaza border for the Oct. 7th massacre of 2023.
What we’re trying to say is, “exalting the worth of Jesus Christ among the unreached and unengaged at the end of the age” preaches good. It lives hard. This vision statement has been and will remain the thing that put and keeps us on the field. The worth of Jesus compels us to lay foundations for the Gospel where there are none (as Paul put it in Romans 15:20).
But we’re just really beginning to feel the brutality of a world without the Gospel. The reality of a world without the One who will crush the head of the serpent and save us all from going the way of Cain forever is visceral. We feel it. Our friends in our adopted lands live in it every day. They don’t know anything else.
All our films, field documentaries, songs, articles, books, podcasts and Bible studies are meant to anchor us and anyone who sees or hears them in the “blessed hope” Paul described to Titus: the One like a Son of Man will in fact come on the clouds in power and glory, resurrect the saints, reign in righteousness, and judge the living and the dead. All our media messaging is merely to throw weight behind international recruitment and advocacy for regional training and mobilization for, ultimately, exponential local evangelism and discipleship to the ultimate aim: an incarnate witness and verbal proclamation of the Good News among the grieving.
Thank you for joining us in this work, for sacrificially giving hard-earned finances and precious time to fund and pray for laborers and pioneering initiatives to bear witness to the Day our King will make wars cease from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. We cannot wait to melt down our swords, make some plowshares, and get to work on literal fields. We hate war. We despise death. We cannot wait for the great reign of our Great King, who will lead us back into the Garden with God our Father.
Truly truly: Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.
