News and Notes about Brigada, Your Gateway to Missions Networking!
Compiled by DLucas@TeamExpansion.org

[Note: Please forward or pass this Brigada Today to as many people as you think might be able to see a future in it! To subscribe, email hub@xc.org with only the following line in the body of the message: subscribe brigada

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In this issue….

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STILL GROWING!

305 have subscribed to this top level conference, Brigada

You can be a member of more than one conference, but to do so, you must subscribe to each conference individually. Subscribing to the top level Brigada conference does not automatically get you mail from each of the subgroups. (If it did, you’d go crazy with mail!!! :-)) To subscribe to any of the conferences, just send email to hub@xc.org with the word “subscribe” followed by the conference name (include the hyphens in the conference name, but lose the quotes in “subscribe”). For example, to subscribe to the albania-durres subconference listed, your message to hub@xc.org would read,
subscribe brigada-albania-durres

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SEVEN NEW PROJECTS READY FOR ACTION!

  • brigada-cities — is like brigada-peoples, a depository for profiles and networking information. You need not “subscribe” to the service to do a “filelist” or “get” files. Note that the area is brand new. We’ll be posting announcements here as it gets off the ground. Viv Grigg and others will be helping make this file area a virtual shopping mall for information on the world’s least evangelized cities. Stay tuned here for more info as this project develops.
  • brigada-india — features regular updates on major projects and people group info on this amazing and complex subcontinent. Out of this conference, we hope to spawn many new “sub-conferences” as cities and people groups become the focus of specific partnerships and projects.
  • brigada-orgs-uscwm-robby — is unique, in that it is a kind of ongoing publication, the thoughts and reflections of Robby Butler, who serves as Special Assistant to Ralph Winter and head of Research and Development at the US Center for World Mission. It was his staff that was entrusted with launching the Global Prayer Digest Online, now a favorite of several Brigada participants.
  • brigada-peoples-makua — will serve as a rallying post for those involved in reaching the Makua tribe in northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania. Subscribe now if you like, but be patient as this conference gets off the ground.
  • brigada-projects-envision96 — will give progress reports on a major missions convention/expo, Envision ’96, planned for Oct. 31-Nov. 3, 1996, in Lexington, KY, specifically designed for Christian churches and churches of Christ, but guests welcome. This Brigada conference was formerly known as brigada-projects-lex96.
  • brigada-ukraine-crimea — will report on events and partnerships forming up to reach out to the Muslim Crimean Tatar in southern Ukraine and on efforts to reach their ukrainian neighbors also living on the peninsula. What a complex order! With nearly 300,000 Muslim Tatars having moved back home after 50 years in exile, the peninsula becomes a more complicated landscape with each passing day!
  • brigada-us-prayertrack — will, among other things, provide a means of receiving the AD2000 & Beyond’s US Prayer Track newsletter, the Prayer Alert (Watchman), edited by Eddie Smith in Houston, TX — online! From this “channel”, Brigada viewers will be able to tune in to prayer mobilization efforts specifically gearing up here in the USA… but with global ramifications.

Again, for newcomers, to subscribe to any of the above conferences, just send email to hub@xc.org (not brigada@brigada.org — a common mistake) with only the words
subscribe brigada-us-prayertrack

in the body of the message text. Replace the conference name used in the example above with the one(s) of your choice.

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WANT A FREE “PRIMER” ON HOW TO GET HOOKED UP ON EMAIL OVERSEAS???

David Hatch has prepared a “Frequently Asked Questions” file that just might take care of your query! Get it on the WorldWide Web by pointing your browser to http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/stn/stn-home.html or, if you’re not on the web, write David at dhatch@netnet.net to get a copy emailed to you. Thanks for the work, David!
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A SYMPHONY OF CONCERTS OF PRAYER

On the evening of Saturday Oct. 21,1995, there are scheduled roughly 500 Concerts of Prayer around the USA. With October being the month set aside for “Praying through the Window II — Praying for the 100 Gateway Cities”, these concerts could be monumental in their effect for unreached people worldwide! (News about these concerts overheard on a Brigada conference…)
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BRIGADA WORLDWIDE WEB PAGE EXPANDED AND REVISED

If you haven’t visited Brigada‘s worldwide web page this past week, then you haven’t seen the latest. Added are a complete set of archives for the Brigada Today bulletins, making it possible for you to “point and click” at the particular issue for which you’re searching… and lots more. In the works are plans for a feature that will let you “point and click” to subscribe to the distribution list or email conference of your choosing — one of the requests we’re hearing most often. This would signal a new day for users who don’t want to have to learn to send command lines to the hub. But remember, we’ll continue to keep Brigada email-based, since many do not have access to the worldwide web yet, especially among majority world peoples. Thanks again to Jonathan Marsden and Bob Sutterfield of CrossConnect for help in posting these new html markup pages.
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HAVE YOU HEARD THE LATEST?
MAF DOES FELLOW MISSIONS A BIG FAVOR!

Thanks loads to Mission Aviation Fellowship, who recently chose to pick up sponsorship for CrossConnect. (Remember that CrossConnect is the agency that services the infrastructure that makes it possible to bring you Brigada.) Rather than pelt their email boxes with tons of form letters (they’ve got better things to do than read the same thank you note from over 300 of us!), let’s all just chime in on this one big note of appreciation to the folks at MAF with “sky-high dreams”! It goes without saying that, if it weren’t for your sacrificial generosity to help make CrossConnect possible, we here at Brigada just wouldn’t be here this morning online together!!!! So 305 times over this morning……………… THANKS MAF!!!!!!!!!!!
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STAY TUNED HERE FOR UP-TO-THE-MINUTE NEWS ON GCOWE!

Not everyone was able to plan to take off work (from actually doing missions! :-) ) or put together funds to go to the Global Consultation on World Evangelization (GCOWE) in Seoul, May 16-26. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get the exclusive news as it happens! We’re already at work preparing several ways for you to get the same kinds of daily bulletins that we will be getting right on site! For example, the 4000 or so delegates at GCOWE will receive a “daily newspaper” each evening, filling them in on events at the various tracks and country delegation meetings (even those of us who are attending will want to know what’s going on in other venues!!!). This newspaper is being edited by none other than Rick Wood, Exec. Ed. of Missions Frontiers, the news organ of the US Center for World Missions. Rick is a Brigada participant and has agreed to work with us to “post” it online to you each and every day right here on the Brigada family of networks. Those wishing to get the daily “latest” from Korea will only need to subscribe to
brigada-projects-gcowe

(to be launched this coming week) to get a daily digest sheet which will contain an index to larger “full size article” files out on the brigada-projects-gcowe conference area. In this way, you’ll get via email a sampling of “tidbit news” that can serve as a gateway to getting just the news you want, no more, no less. So if Rick does a focus one day on a special plenary presentation by John Robb and Ron Rowl and, for instance, you’ll be able to see a one or two sentence summary of the presentation on the sheet that’s emailed to you. At the end of this blip will be the file name that you can “get” from the conference area if you want to get the “whole story”. (Note: Are you new to the Brigada family of networks??? No problem. Just send email to hub@xc.org with only the words
get help-detailed

in the body of the message to get a four page help file so you can practice downloading files before GCOWE.) Granted, those with WorldWide Web access have it just a bit easier! Simply point your browser to http://www.AD2000.org/gcowe95/gcowe95.html and start reading!!! That’s it! (Note that unix servers are all case-sensitive so be sure and type the address exactly as it appears above.) Bob Sutterfield, serving as a volunteer with CrossConnect, has already posted a homepage there for users to work on today. This area will be expanded each and every day as the conference transpires in Korea. Thanks to Pete Holzmann, Bob and Jonathan, again, for making this possible. COMPUSERVE USERS, don’t forget that you now get 3 hours of worldwide web access free each month! Download the new tool by using the go command, “go netlauncher”. After 3 hours, Cserve will be charging $2.50/hour… still a bargain if you’re not a heavy www user. Do get the launcher in April and practice on it in advance… check out the AD2000 page and set a “Favorite Places” bookmark there while you can work on April’s allotment of time. (By the way, last week we reported that the service seemed very slow.. but this must have been due to the fact that the tool had just been introduced that very morning. Now it appears to have picked back up to fairly standard rates. But don’t forget that some www pages are loaded with graphics and they download slowly on anyone’s service, if your access is via a modem. The faster your connection (e.g., 14.4 versus 2400), the better off you are. (Those with 2400 baud modems will find the www a real yawn :-o.)

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NEWS FLASH – PIN

Ron Rowland the Peoples Information Network (PIN) has just sent Brigada a copy of the 2400 Least Evangelized People Groups of the world. We’ll now be studying this data to figure out the best way to make it available to the widest audience… but in the meantime, here’s an intro. by Ron and the folks at PIN:

“What: Another List… and a list of what?

Yes, but this one is different. This is the next step of a process to build a meaningful, understandable listing of peoples. It is a list of lists! Tightly locked into a unique “people code” it reflects the various approaches to the listing of ethnolinguistic peoples most in need of a broad cross section of churches.

In fact, it contains all the known peoples (about 4,900) that either:

  1. Are deemed to be most needing a church planting movement in their midst, or
  2. Have insufficient access to the Gospel, or
  3. Are less than 2% Christian, or
  4. Are identified as unreached and/or adoptable peoples for prayer and mission.

It contains a list of every known “least evangelized” ethnolinguistic people within every country of the world.

It is more than just one list: There are three groupings of lists … [which will all be compiled into a book to be made available to all next month].

  • The first group (Section One: pages 13 to 112) is organized by affinity bloc and contains two lists under each of the twelve affinity blocs:
    1. Peoples with a population of 100,000 or more listed by country and language,
    2. The summary list of all the least evangelized peoples.
    3. The second group is the complete integrated list of least evangelized peoples sorted by country and language.
    4. The third group (Section Four) contains the Priority List of least evangelized peoples with 10,000 or more individuals each, sorted by country and language.

This is the target list of the AD 2000 & Beyond Movement that serves the procedural goal of a church for every people by the year 2000, which means: to make a priority of establishing, as a minimum, a pioneer church planting movement within every significant ethnolinguistic people within every country of the world by December 31, 2000.

This is the list upon which the goal of a church for every people by the year 2000 will be evaluated.

It is, of course, only a beginning. It is imperfect. It will be refined/updated as it is used.”

Thanks to Ron, and all who cooperated to make this possible, including the USCWM, Wycliffe, SIL, the Southern Baptists, Operation World, the Adopt-A-People Clearinghouse, PIN, and many others! We’re all in your debt as we set about trying to seek God’s will in reaching the groups you’ve quantified for us!

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