Paul Smith
East-West Ministries International
Where We Serve
Our country is a nation of 85 million people and almost entirely Muslim. Originally the birthplace of Christianity, ironically now only 0.2% of the population is Christian with about 10,000 evangelical believers in the entire country. Most people here have still never heard the Gospel, leaving it about 99% unreached.
*Note: For security reasons, specific country details and names won't be written here
About Us
My wife and I deeply love the people of this country. It's where our home and family is. My wife, being a native, is one of the few local believers in the country and very gifted at discipling women. Both of us deeply love Jesus and share a strong passion for discipleship and evangelism. Ever since Jesus changed my life 20 years ago he set my life on a new course, eventually calling me out of my engineering job to go to Seminary and later to move to the unreached country where we now live.
I have a deep passion for going where the need is largest. Of all the missionaries in the world only 3.3% are working among unreached people groups (A UPG means less than 2% Christian and without an established multiplying local church). Thus, serving where missionaries are most desperately needed was a priority for me as God ultimately led me to where we are now. Seeing people discover Jesus for the first time and seeing him transform lives like he did mine is what I live for and one of the greatest joys of my life.
Currently, my wife and I serve as church planters here and are looking for financial partners to join with us so we can devote ourselves more fully to sharing the Gospel, discipling believers and helping start a church planting movement.
Our Vision: A Reproducible Church Planting Movement
We see our primary role as church planting catalysts - that is, being the sparks that help catalyze a local-led church planting movement. This entails helping local believers:
1) Learn how to effectively share the Gospel and start seeker Bible studies among their non-believing family, co-workers and neighbors.
2) Learn to faithfully disciple new believers through living and teaching the Gospel lifestyle.
The aim is for these seeker Bible studies to turn into churches, which then reproduce into more seeker Bible studies and more churches. The goal is to test what works in our particular context, start, scale and reproduce this model to be led by others.
Our Current Ministry
We currently serve in a city of 2 million people. My wife and I are both involved with discipling new believers, hosting weekly small group meetings, leading worship, and coordinating outreach events through our church.
English Club & Seeker Study
For the past 2 years I've been hosting a weekly English club that's grown into a sizable gathering of friends. We usually meet at cafes or parks on the weekend and have also hosted some camping trips, movie nights and game nights. Through this club we've been able to have dozens of spiritual conversations, build great friendships, and begin a Life Topic Discussion style seeker Bible study where non-believer friends have been encountering Jesus in the Gospels for the first time. Our desire is to keep expanding this growing club, host more events to reach more people, as well as scale and replicate the seeker study we're doing.
Gospel Fluency Groups
My wife and I have also begun developing something called "Gospel fluency" groups. These are small intimate groups of 3-4 men or women, who meet weekly to memorize Scripture, confess sins and struggles, and speak the Gospel into each others' lives. We strongly believe intimate groups like these where people can regularly be vulnerable, expose sin to the light, pray for each other and be reminded of God's forgiveness for them are critical to a healthy, thriving faith. Our ultimate desire is to see these Gospel fluency groups reproduce and become the norm throughout the churches here.
Teaching E-Commerce to Local Believers
Our country has a very hurting economy right now, and one huge problem is that many local believers, after coming to faith, move away from their hometowns to the larger cities to find work. This unfortunately, leaves a Gospel presence gap in many areas of the country. Thus, a huge need is to find a way to provide sustainable work to local believers so they can work from home, earn dollars, and continue living and serving as a Gospel presence in their hometowns. In the past few years I've developed skills specifically in the area of Amazon e-commerce and have been doing part-time work, managing client's Amazon stores. Additionally, I've been leading a team of local believers here, teaching them how to write effective Amazon listings and design listing images for clients, allowing them to earn dollars and have a more sustainable source of income. My longterm desire is to keep scaling this business and train more local believers in this skill set who are outreach-focused, thus helping them to live and church plant in their hometowns.
Core Values
Investing In The Local Church
We believe in investing in things that last. Since God is the ultimate builder of the church, unlike man-made businesses or organizations, God's church will never fail. Therefore, we're committed to investing in ministry initiatives that ultimately build up the local church for long term impact. This means working alongside and through the local church to help it grow and produce fruitful, faithful believers.
Holistic Discipleship
We believe in quality rather than just quantity. Unfortunately at the present moment roughly 80% of people here who make a decision for Christ quickly fall away due to societal, family pressure or sin problems. Rather than simply sharing the Gospel, counting decisions, patting ourselves on the back and walking away, we're passionate about investing in people for the long term and helping new believers build their faith on a rock solid foundation. This, however, requires uncomfortable costly love toward one another on the part of believers. It means getting involved in peoples' messy lives and sin struggles, being patient, sacrificing for them, getting hurt and forgiving again and again. The Christian life should not be superficial, but follow after the gritty, sacrificial love of Christ. The only way to do this, however, is to live and breathe the cross of Christ into your life so that it changes every aspect of you; daily exposing sin to the light, running to the cross, receiving forgiveness, forgiving others, and walking by the Spirit. We believe this kind of holistic discipleship is ultimately fleshed out in loving community, and we're committed to helping build this kind of community within the local church.
Empowering Local Leaders
We believe in empowering local believers for ministry so as to set a spark for a local mission movement to the rest of the country. This involves teaching local believers how to share their faith, make disciples and plant churches through simple, reproducible methods. Our church planting methodology is to begin with seeker Bible studies consisting of mostly non-believer friends. As people come to faith in the study, these small seeker groups turn into churches, which in turn reproduce into more seeker studies and more churches. Our goal is to test what works in our particular context, start, scale and reproduce this model to be led by local believers.
Join With Us
These are the current ministry endeavors the Lord has us in (with more to come) and we absolutely love doing what we do. Seeing the lights come in a friend's eyes when they finally believe the Gospel or when a believer makes a breakthrough in their life into a deeper walk with God is what me and my wife live for. However, to be able to keep doing what we do, we rely on financial supporters and individuals like you to partner with us so we can devote ourselves to this work.
Would you consider becoming a monthly financial partner with us for $25, $50 or $100 per month? Currently, we're looking for the following financial partners:
$25/month - 20 Partners
$50/month - 20 Partners
$100/month - 10 Partners