Bob Travis: GlobalFingerprints Helped Us Start a Cross-Cultural Partnership

In 2019, several leaders at Lancaster Evangelical Free Church, including senior pastor Tony Hunt, designated Southeast Asia as an area of strategic focus. I came on board [as the pastor of mobilization] in 2022, and we decided to go ahead and do a real push for child sponsorship with GlobalFingerprints.

For two weeks, we got the word out. We set up a table in our church lobby for people to come, learn about child sponsorship, consider the opportunity and pray. In those two weeks, the church sponsored 170 children from Southeast Asia. Since then, I've traveled twice to Southeast Asia to participate in the GlobalFingerprints ministry there. I will likely be going back with GlobalFingerprints’ staff this fall.  

We align with GlobalFingerprints’ passion for multiplying churches—knowing sponsorship helps children, which also helps families, which is then a means of seeing new churches planted. The way they use sponsorship as a catalyst for church planting is a great fit. We want relationships with our ministry partners, but it’s difficult to build relationships so far apart. So, our church sends teams to Southeast Asia to do leadership development. One of our administrative staff is going to Southeast Asia with her family this summer. We’ve also sent five families from our church to do full-time missions there.  

In November 2023, a Southeast Asian pastor who serves as the leader of a network that works with GlobalFingerprints spent five days at our church. That relational connection was wonderful. After the service, I gathered all the elders, mobilization team leaders, staff and their spouses, and we had lunch together. The pastor shared about the ministry, and he and I interviewed each other, which helped our leadership and church family feel personally connected to what we're doing there.  

We also want this long-term relationship to be reciprocal, where we're mutually building one another up. I was training pastors with GlobalFingerprints staff last October, and I asked them what we could learn from their ministry. One example was prayer. They can help teach our church the meaning and value of prayer because of their struggles—the trials of planting churches and carrying out gospel ministry in a place that's often closed to the Word of God.