TIMO, or Training In Ministry Outreach is a two year program designed to train future missionaries in the area of cross cultural ministry while actually working with an unchurched people group. The ultimate goal is to actually plant and establish a working and ministering church.
This is accomplished by using a study curriculum written, designed, and worked through by seasoned missionaries that follows a logical progression for church planting. The training takes place in the context of ministry and involves language learning, cultural adaptation, appropriate evangelism, spiritual warfare, and many other subjects through lectures, readings, written reports, discussion, and on the spot experience.
A TIMO team consists of a group of 6 to 10 new missionaries led by a veteran missionary or missionary couple for the purpose of LEARNING and DOING missionary outreach. The teams lives among an unreached or partially unreached people group, learning their language and culture and allowing God to provide ways of sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with them. Each team is unique in how they approach their outreach, but all hold to 12 Core Values » that define the TIMO program.
Since the program is “live” and many of the tribal group’s nuances are unknown, pitfalls are experienced during the two year study. But the strength of TIMO is that together, leaders and members, approach these pitfalls from a team perspective, pooling their combined knowledge and backgrounds, and through the various theories presented in their classes, to zero in and discover how the core of the problem can be brought to a successful conclusion.
Established in the mid 1980’s, Africa Inland Mission began the TIMO program out of a desire to see more and more unreached peoples come to faith in Jesus Christ and to provide a quality hands-on training program for new missionaries. TIMO has already graduated about 20 two year teams and more are in progress. These teams have operated in over 13 different locations in six African countries.
The organizers of TIMO are constantly breaking new ground by seeking out new thirsty lands and areas, where teams can be placed and churches established. Realizing a diaspora of Africans living in Europe and North America, TIMO will present its program in these countries as well. With the AIDS pandemic spreading so rapidly south of the Sahara Desert, the TIMO program may establish a medical team. Also, since most of our programs are geared to unreached tribes in rural settings, perhaps it’s time to channel some TIMO programs to urban inhabitants.
If God is calling you to cross cultural ministry but you’re not sure where to begin, TIMO just may be the perfect fit.
The bottom line is all about new ground and thirsty lands….you might be an important link in exciting ministry outreach.
– Adapted from New Ground, Thirsty Land by Dr. Ted Barnett, AIM’s US Director