What do the Bible and a company employee manual have in common? For some, they both collect dust. For Waypoint Church, Durham, N.C., they’re both important tools for taking the gospel to the nations.
Waypoint wants Christians to put the gospel to work in the professional world; they believe doing so in a city with a swelling immigrant population is an effective missionary strategy for impacting the nations.
Waypoint Church began September 2014 as a church plant from The Summit Church, Durham. Josh Benfield, associate pastor for formation at Waypoint, said the motivation to start a new church came from the high number of people immigrating to the area near Research Triangle Park (RTP), a commercial district between Raleigh and Durham.
They want to be a church “comprised of many nations.” It’s a vision shared by Benfield, who is a former international missionary, and Waypoint’s pastor, Lawrence Yoo, a Korean-American.
“Being from an immigrant family, I have experienced firsthand the struggle of finding my own cultural identity. … It is my desire to awaken people to their true identity that is found in the gospel,” Yoo said on the church’s website.
Benfield sees lots of opportunities for reaching internationals with the gospel in Durham — and, by extension, their friends and relatives overseas. “If you can reach Durham, you can reach the nations,” he said.
Political asylum
Many immigrants come to the area for political asylum. There are entire communities in Durham comprised of refugees. They often face cultural, linguistic and citizenship obstacles and are not able to find employment. Waypoint ministers to these groups. There are others working high-level jobs at technology companies or in the large health care system across RTP; still more are studying at one of the 15 major colleges and universities. Waypoint church members work and do business with many of these immigrants.
By integrating the gospel into their vocational settings, Waypoint church members can express their faith in everyday life and reach the nations at the same time.
Benfield said engaging the workplace as a missions field is both a part of Waypoint’s identity and a part of their evangelistic strategy. “Whatever your station in life … you are a missionary in that place.
“You wake up every day on the missions field.Going to work should not feel like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get to work so I can get my job done … so that I can get to the church and do something significant for the Kingdom,’” he said.
“If you’re at RTP, if you work at Chick-Fil-A or Panera Bread — no matter what you do, you are a missionary to that place and (in) that context.”
Benfield said Waypoint values this vision for everyday missions and wanted to know more about practical, ethical ways to share the gospel in the workplace. So they reached out to Marketplace Advance, a ministry of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, to conduct a training session at Waypoint.
On Feb. 21, Waypoint invited the Marketplace Advance team to lead a portion of a weekend “Missions Marathon” at the church.
The Marketplace Advance team gave practical advice and helpful training on starting gospel conversations and Bible studies. They also talked about ethical questions related to sharing the gospel at work.
Jayson Georges, a missionary to Central Asia for nine years and the writer behind honorshame.com, was the keynote speaker of the weekend.
Participants left the training with homework, Benfield said. The task was to find their company’s employee manual and determine what kinds of discussion topics are acceptable at their workplace.
“Satan sometimes uses [uncertainty] as a strategy to put fear in our hearts,” Benfield said.
Participants will gather again in the near future to discuss what they’ve discovered about restrictions in their work environment.
Benfield said they’ve seen results from the training already. A software engineer in the church began meeting with junior colleagues regularly to pray, fellowship and talk about faith. There also are others in the church that are using the strategies they learned to share the gospel with their co-workers.
“Evangelism was at the heart of our people but maybe it wasn’t necessarily coming through their lips,” Benfield said. “Some of the training taught them some easier practical strategies which has helped them say, ‘Hey, I can share my faith. This has given me a way to do it that is easier than what I’ve done before.’”
(Biblical Recorder)
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