You transformed one million lives

Afghanistan. Bangladesh. Cambodia. Ecuador. France. Guinea… Zimbabwe. Your gifts to BMS World Mission have spanned the alphabet and the planet, bringing vital relief, access to food, clean water, and sanitation, medical care, education, justice, gospel truth and the love of Jesus to more than one million people in some of the world’s most fragile, most marginalised and least evangelised places.

From fighting the Coronavirus pandemic and providing a lifeline for people devastated by natural disasters, to enabling displaced children to access education and saving mothers and babies from dying in childbirth, you have stood alongside hundreds of thousands of people over the last five years. You have helped to write one million new stories.

You have followed Jesus’ command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, locally and globally, and we are so grateful to you. Thank you for partnering with BMS over the last five years, serving God and bringing hope and help to one million people across our hurting world.

Thank you for supporting BMS in our faith-filled mission from 2016 to 2020. You did it! From the BMS team across the world: thank you!

You’ll see our desire hasn’t changed to work amongst the most marginalised and least evangelised people in our world. We want to build on the amazing work that has been done in the past five years, so we’ll continue enabling you to participate in God’s work of mercy and gospel proclamation where the need is greatest. With your help, we’ll send mission workers to build capacity, provide crucial support to our longstanding partner organisations and encourage local Christians in their own ministries of discipleship, evangelism and outreach.

But we can’t ignore that the mission landscape is changing, and we must respond to the changes we see.

We know that the most marginalised and least evangelised are often those displaced from their home nations. Whether that’s because of conflict or unrest, environmental changes and ensuing natural disasters or the imminent threat of violence because of someone’s ethnicity, gender or faith, the impetus to escape finds many millions of vulnerable people crossing national and regional borders, often into Europe. And that’s why in the next five years, BMS plans to work alongside groups of ‘people on the move’, whether that’s helping people under pressure to migrate find rest and security in the place they call home, or meeting them where they are at on a journey towards peace and opportunity.

Enabled by our incredible supporters and stepping out in faith, it is by working dynamically and intentionally across each of these areas that we believe we’ll see life-transforming outcomes for people that continue to bear fruit for years to come!

In short, the needs of our world are changing and BMS wants to change with them, with sensitivity and insight. Our plans aren’t a complete reset of what’s gone before, but they do mean we’ll have to operate differently to how we did even 50 years ago. Part of creating change that is sustainable from generation to generation is a commitment to join with the work that faithful Christians are already doing across the world. We’ll do that by working primarily through equitable partnerships with Christians around the globe, resourcing and supporting self-reliant ministries and encouraging new centres of leadership with their own indigenous expressions of mission.

And another part is acknowledging that lasting change touches on all areas of a community’s life, and that all our work should look similarly multi-faceted, building up church communities and strengthening disciples alongside addressing issues of greater gender equality and creation care.