NEWS: Reaching & Teaching Announces The Institute for Church-Centered Missions

Reaching & Teaching is excited to announce the launch of The Institute for Church-Centered Missions (“The Institute.”) in partnership with 9Marks. The Institute aims to offer resources and training opportunities for current global workers, sending church pastors, church members, and aspiring missionaries. Through cohort-style learning opportunities, the redesigned Global Internship, and events such as The Sending-Church Summit and The Missiology Summit, The Institute for Church-Centered Missions exists to equip local churches and the individuals they send as they seek to be faithful to the Great Commission across the globe.

Speaking on the need for the Institute, Reaching & Teaching President Ryan Robertson remarked, “As we’ve spoken to local churches, we’ve heard a resounding ‘Amen’ to the centrality of the local church in Great Commission efforts. Often, that ‘Amen’ is quickly followed up with ‘How do we do this?’” The Institute will seek to answer that question for Reaching & Teaching’s constituents, and we hope to share our work with others from different ecclesiological persuasions as they seek to center the church in their own missiology.”

The Institute will provide 6 to 8-week-long cohorts led by subject-matter experts such as Institute Fellows Jonathan Leeman, Nathan Knight, Matt Boswell, and Mack Stiles, with other Fellows to be announced in the coming weeks. Cohorts will cover practical theological and missiological topics and address issues related to building and supporting a church-centered missions strategy. The cohorts will function alongside the redesigned RTIM Global Internship, a 16-month program intended to train a new generation of global workers through local church investment and through serving overseas to see the local church as both the means and the end of the Great Commission.

The recently announced Sending-Church Summit, a biannual event designed to assist local churches in sending out qualified missionaries, will also be folded into the work of the Institute. The first Summit will be held July 8-9, 2024, in Louisville, KY, featuring sessions from Jonathan Leeman, Aaron Menikoff, and a host of local church pastors currently partnering with Reaching & Teaching.     

Additionally, RTIM is announcing the Missiology Summit as a component of the Institute, with the first biannual event planned for July 2025 in Central Asia. The Missiology Summit will address essential questions about what it looks like to be faithful to the Great Commission in our day.The Summit will bring together global workers from around the world to engage with missiological topics and methods to address the broader mission world. The Summit will produce the RTIM Missiological Journal, a peer-reviewed academic publication, and resource for conversations in missions.

As RTIM looks to the future, Robertson shared, “I’m thankful that every single global worker and staff member at Reaching & Teaching is committed to church-centered missions. The Institute will simultaneously give our team an opportunity to sharpen our skills by learning from subject-matter experts and give local churches a set of tools that we hope will serve them as they seek to be biblically faithful to the Great Commission. I’m looking forward to all of us learning together in the years ahead. The goal is healthy churches everywhere and there’s no one better for us to partner with than our friends at 9Marks who are working tirelessly to define healthy church-centered missiology.”