Investing in Effective Urban Ministry and Missionaries

Servant Partners’ Barnabas Ventures initiative plays a critical role in taking the gospel to unreached urban poor communities by investing in indigenous leaders and organizations working at the national and international level. We help build the capacity of existing indigenous ministries dedicated to urban poor church planting and transformation, and we help mobilize believers from the developing world onto the urban poor mission field.

East Africa- Life In Abundance, International

Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Egypt are home to huge urban poor communities. Over 70% of the capitals of these East African countries are urban slums: over-crowded areas with poverty, high unemployment, disease, and violence. While local churches are burdened with the daily care of AIDS victims and their families, few have the knowledge or resources to respond effectively. Barnabas Ventures partners with Life in Abundance to mobilize and empower African churches to pilot creative urban community-based interventions to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, alleviate poverty, and care for orphans.

India- Ministry Partner

In North India, thousands are migrating from the villages every week, creating a huge labor market and a rapidly escalating cost of living. Overcrowding in slums, poor nutrition, and a poor health infrastructure means that the urban poor are frequently sick and unable to work. Limited access to a quality education means few gain the skills to advance themselves, their families or communities. Our ministry partner in North India is addressing these issues by establishing house churches that are models of sustainable community development and advocates for social, economic, and political justice. We want to see these churches become servants of the whole community, beacons of hope for new life with God, and change agents in society.

Sao Paolo, Brazil- Missão Servos

Brazil, the largest country in South America, may be best known for its beaches, samba, and the famous Carnaval, but Brazil is also home to great extremes of wealth and poverty and 25 million evangelicals. Along with Missão Servos, a Brazilian missions agency, we are working to capture the passion of an explosively growing Brazilian church to train and send workers around the world and into local urban poor areas. Barnabas Ventures and Missão Servos co-sponsor the Global Urban Training School in Portuguese. Missão Servos workers are establishing dynamic new models of holistic urban ministry. They are working together with local churches and community members to rebuild the community and people of Buraco Quente, an urban poor neighborhood that burned to the ground in 2004.

Tegucigalpa, Honduras- Puerta Al Mundo

Built on the city dump after Hurricane Fifi in 1974, the Nueva Suyapa community is a maze of steep rutted roads and small tin roof shacks – and one of the most violent slums in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Here, we partnered with Honduran leaders to establish Puerta al Mundo, an international Honduran missions agency. In collaboration with the local church in Nueva Suyapa, we help the agency recruit, train, and send Hondurans to the urban poor of the world. To support their work and become financially independent, Puerta al Mundo has partnered with Barnabas Ventures to train new local small business owners, and has started a commercial center which hosts a pizza restaurant, internet café, copy center, dry goods store, and athletic complex.

Barnabas Ventures Partnership Application

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