Vineyard Global Missions Team

Dave and Colleen Pedersen are pastors in Elizabethton, South Africa, national directors for the Association of South African Vineyards, and the leaders of the Global Mission Team. Dave’s leadership style is inclusive and collaborative, and I feel extremely grateful that he is leading this team.

We LOVED these meetings! Each day was excellent, even when conversations veered unexpectedly. When you have a safe environment, people are free to speak their hearts, which is often different than you hoped. It is easier when the people you work with simply try to please you. But long-term power and unity are available on the other side of real conversations.

• The Global Vineyard church-planting movement is heroically working to spread the gospel around the world.
• The themes from this conference included the desire for relationships, collaboration, and the necessity of information sharing.
• Another theme was the variety of expectations, especially expectations based on the “obvious” implications of keywords like “partnership” and “family.”
• Fourteen Associations of Vineyard Churches were represented at these meetings. The variety of diverse cultural assumptions is almost infinite and, in many cases, unexpected because we often don’t even realize the meanings we attach to words and situations. Normal and obvious varies wildly among and within cultures.
• We heard amazing stories of how God is on the move! One of the men in the following photo was a rebel warrior, captured and sentenced to execution. When the captain came to execute him, God spoke to the captain and said, “Not this one. I have plans for him.” The captain stopped the execution, and the man is a church planter now. In another case, a man’s great-grandfather was a holy man in a village. Jesus appeared to him. He went outside, got a sledgehammer, knocked the nose off an idol, shared his testimony in the village, and started a church. God is on the move. How can we get in sync and move with Him?

Five leaders from five vastly different regions. Thailand, Australia, Zambia, the Old City, and Brazil/Canada.