Dear Friends in Christ,

Welcome in His Name! I have been asked by the COALA leadership to bring a word of greeting to all who are joining us in our conference. One way to do so is to explain why COALA is meeting and why it is needed. It is not possible to cover all the important reasons for COALA’s emergence two years ago, but I will briefly touch on two here.

First, COALA came into being because some leaders from the Majority World (MW) increasingly felt the need to take ownership of the mission that Christ gave His church. In the last 125 years, from 1900 to 2025, more than 1.5 billion people have been added to the churches in the MW. With some 65% of the world’s Christians now in our churches, these MW mission leaders felt that it was time for them to come together and act.

We in the MW churches are deeply grateful to the missionaries from the West who courageously and sacrificially brought the gospel to us in the past. But the time has come for us in the MW to step up and take our share of responsibility for global mission. It should be clearly stated that COALA is not intended as a tool to displace Western missions. Rather, the goal is that it would be a means by which churches in both the West and the MW can come together in genuine mutuality and true partnership to advance the gospel!

Second, for genuine partnership to come about, there must be some serious mindset changes on both sides. Most Christians in the West are still ignorant of the massive growth of the churches in the MW and the resultant impact globally. A simple example is that most Western seminaries and training colleges today still lack any serious study courses on the growth of MW churches over the past 125 years. On the other hand, many Christians in the MW continue to find their identity in some form of Western Christianity because they lack the confidence to develop Christian identities of their own that are firmly rooted in both the gospel and their own context. Added to that, many are still locked into a dependency mentality wherein they continue to look to the West, not just for their theological identity, but also for support and money! These and other examples of mindset change must take place before there can be true mutuality and real partnership in the global church in mission.

If you identify with these and other similar concerns, we warmly welcome you to this conference so that together we can develop genuine partnership across the global church built on mutual respect and trust. We foresee obstacles aplenty and much hard work ahead. But we journey with the Lord of the harvest who informed us that, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33b). May the Lord richly bless our time of worship and prayer, as well as fellowship and discussion together!