A Church Partnership Story

Grace Community Church is a multi-campus, contemporary, informal church located in Tyler, Texas and known for its emphasis on the big "I" - involvement. Our beginnings were humble as we worked hard to reconfigure an existing congregation into a community of faith that would be focused on ways to reach Tyler and the world. What we found was God leading us through stages of change that would incrementally challenge us to give and grow from impacting Tyler to driving a stake someplace in the world and seeing significant change take place.

But how and where do we start? Our initial contact with United World Mission began by them serving us. They listened to one of our leader's dreams. By walking a road with them we were able to assemble a team to investigate options. Our first inclination was to drill down into a West African country where we had some experience. Though United World Mission was not there they were willing to resource us and help us every step of the way.

But, then things started happening. God started moving in the hearts of our leadership. This leading led us to India where most of the unreached people of the world live. But how do we do it? We turned to United World Mission for help. They were able to introduce us to a large group of leaders whose vision to plant churches among unreached groups excited us. Our initial contact turned to radical commitment and our leadership vision trip resulted in multiple trips which lead to us fielding our own people. This partnership continued to develop and led to Grace Community and United World Mission building a multi-church partnership and team whose focus is to assist a large group of India’s national leaders as they work to reach both Muslims and Hindus in North India.

So where do we go from here? Grace Community Church been able to be involved by partnering together with United World Mission and a large group of Indian leaders and believers so that together we can make an impact by training them for new church plants among many unreached people groups.  Not only that, but our people in Tyler began to realize their giftedness and passions could advance the cause of Christ right in Tyler. In addition, through our partnership we are fielding better prepared long-term, well trained, cross-cultural workers so that this country and others will have many more unreached peoples sitting around the throne celebrating God's goodness. In short, Grace Community Church, United World Mission and a movement of national leaders in India are involved in a partnership to see a church in every town, village and neighborhood of North India.