International (MNN) — A recent experiment with Internet streaming was a huge success for Sammy Tippit Ministries. Eighty-five pastors and leaders in Uganda received live training via the internet. Projected onto a large screen, the time of training became interactive as the audience would then send “instant messages” via the Internet and Tippit could respond.
“So we were able actually to do leadership training from right here in our office all the way over to Uganda,” says Tippit.
That kind of evangelism and discipleship training is desperately needed in many parts of the world, and Sammy Tippit believes this is a wide open door that will thrust them into the future of ministry: “The Internet is exploding in these areas, so it gives us tremendous opportunities of ministry. And our desire is simply to meet a need, not to do anything radical or anything. We just want to meet a need. And we can cross borders electronically and meet those needs.”
It’s an amazing opportunity to provide addition training that, previously, would have been costly and time-consuming, and even not possible. Tippit says, “What that does it that opens doors now for us, in addition we’ve been doing pastors conferences and leadership conferences all over the world. We’ll continue traveling and doing that. But with the relationships that we have, we can begin to do that with various countries all over the world from right here in San Antonio. It’s just opened up a whole new avenue of video, audio transmission with live interaction. And so we’re super excited about that.”
The Internet has become a tool for evangelism, communication, ministry, and now training. It has the capabilities to reach where Christian leaders have not been allowed to come and provide training.
In the Farsi-speaking world, Tippit says there’s an emerging ministry opportunity: “What we discovered is that there are scores of brand new people coming to Christ. They’re so new from backgrounds that are Islamic, that it would be very difficult for them to even get into house churches, because it’s so dangerous. So all of these people we will be able to do some discipleship training for them over the Internet.”
The potential impact is great. With more than 2-1/2 billion people in closed countries like China, India and the Farsi-speaking world, leaders need ministry training, and Tippit says they are in the planning and production stages for making that happen: “We’re super excited. This opens the whole world to us, and the opportunity to minister around the world from right here in our offices as well as what we’re doing overseas.”
Pray for God to work through this emerging outreach tool to provide inroads to reach many for Christ.
