Mere Missions

96 • M ere M issions : M oving F orward to M ultiply

could not get paid leave from his job and he could not afford to lose the income since he needed it to support his family. He was so passionate about learning how to reach his community, that he was ready to quit his job to attend the training. I encouraged Oliver to trust the Lord and take unpaid leave from his job rather than quit. Through a partnership with Stadia, God provided. We were able to compensate Oliver for his time away so that his family was provided for, and we covered the training and travel costs for the Evangel Dean Training. In October, Pastor Joseph, Oliver, and other leaders from the Evangelical Bengali Church went to Wichita for the Evangel Dean School. (The Evangel Dean School is built on biblical principles and World Impact’s fifty years of experience in urban ministry. We offer this training to equip churches, ministry networks, denominations, or movements to train church plant teams for their context. Evangel Dean Coaches walk with Dean Candidates through the Dean School and coach them for one year after the school as the Evangel Dean Team works toward hosting their first Evangel School of Urban Church Planting.) Months later, in February 2018, another Evangel School of Urban Church Planting was hosted in Newark. Seven planters attended, and at the end of the school they were commissioned to go out and plant churches targeting the over 100,000 Bengali Muslims in the New York Metropolitan area. That March, Pastor Joseph returned to Bangladesh with a simplified “field manual” version of Ripe for Harvest (Our primary church planting manual) and hosted an Evangel School of Urban Church Planting for twenty-seven Christian leaders there. Pastor Joseph’s vision of a church planting movement in Bangladesh by no means slowed things back in America. In May, the Bengali Evangel Deans that had gone to Wichita hosted an Evangel School for their leaders. That August, two teams went