From the Children's Global Forum 2009

The Global Children’s Forum (‘GCF’) is an emerging and growing partnering network of children’s ministry agencies and leaders that operate with a global or major regional focus.

In June 2008, Gospel Light Worldwide attended GCF 08, where GCF started to identify some of the gaps and dreams for this journey and formed Action Groups to commit to a range of actions together.

In May 2009, Gosepl Light Worldwide was unable to attend.  GCF furthered their thinking in three focused areas in order to generate momentum and action:

• Empowering children
• Equipping those who serve children
• Envisioning and Inspiring on behalf of children to the body of Christ and beyond.

Here are the action items that came out of the 2009 annual meeting:

Advocacy – shaping the message and resources to help the global church serve children more effectively in evangelism and discipleship. First steps include continuing to pursue participation in the Lausanne Congress in 2010 and developing a position paper about children to the global church on behalf of GCF and Viva jointly.

Discipling (and empowering) children as agents of mission – serving the local church and families to help children identify and release their God-given potential through leaders modeling and mentoring a biblical worldview so that they become God’s ambassadors to their generation and beyond. First steps include initiating local and global consultations with children.

1 for 50 Initiative – initiating and developing a strategy to train and equip enough leaders to see 1 leader trained for every 50 children on earth. Consultations continue, today in Philadelphia, to further consider this big vision.

Open Source – a truly historic group gathering to discuss across agencies the development of an open-source vision to make resources more freely available to the church AND see that resources are developed and shared from across the whole world. The starting point is a globally-created DVD of shared Bible resources to assist in evangelism and discipleship in around 40 languages to be made available (and distributed to) as many of the world’s 2.6 million churches as possible.