Every church has the potential to end poverty in its community—and they could use a friend like you to help. We invite you to partner with ENLACE to take your church on a journey of learning, discipleship, and service.
ENLACE partner churches tend to stay involved for years, and even decades. That’s because churches with a global vision generate excitement, energy, and involvement. Their impact inspires and makes their churches visible to their community as we work together to develop more fully devoted disciples of Christ.
Check out the four steps of an ENLACE church partnership below and reach out to us as soon as you’re ready to discuss linking arms with ENLACE to change the world.
Schedule a meeting with an ENLACE representative. We’ll discuss opportunities and consider a vision trip to Central America or Nepal to meet pastors, churches, community leaders, visit projects, and dream about all the fun and exciting possibilities for your church.
Equipping churches to end poverty is at the heart of what we do, so every church partner invests in the coaching and leadership development of at least one church in Central America or Nepal.
$5,000 sponsors one church for one year. Want to sponsor more than one? Even better.
Send a group from your church on a Short-Term Service Trip. They’ll travel to Central America or Nepal to work alongside church partners on projects the churches themselves have identified and organized. It’s a profound experience every time. Participants will come home excited about the work God is doing through their church. Trust us, this is an energy you want buzzing around in your congregation.
Engage your church in an ongoing relationship with churches in Central America and Nepal.
Prayer, learning, education, child advocacy, Team ENLACE, project sponsorship, and following us on social media are just a few ways to stay engaged and cultivate a more fun and exciting church community.
What Churches in El Salvador Teach Us About Creating Thriving Communities
Every $5k enables us to assign an ENLACE church coach to a new church within one of our areas of operation. How that coach engages a given church will depend on how far along it is on its journey of addressing multidimensional poverty within its community. A first step is often to engage the church in a process of discovering the biblical basis for engaging in the social, physical, and spiritual development of its community. Later, churches may need project management training, small-business coaching, or consulting advice from a civil or agricultural engineer. ENLACE meets each community where it’s at in its particular process of becoming an agent of gospel-driven change within its community.
ENLACE offers two kinds of short-term trips: the Vision Trip and the Service Trip. The Vision Trip is for pastors, missions pastors, or other church leaders who are considering partnering with ENLACE. It’s a chance to visit Central America or Nepal with us, learn about our work, and dream together about engaging your congregation in helping churches end poverty in their communities. Service trips are for churches that are engaged in an Enlace partnership, wish to sponsor a project, then work alongside our Central American or Nepali sisters and brothers to implement it for purposes of encouragement, learning, and Christian fellowship.
ENLACE’s Service Trips are about three things: Encouragement, Learning, & Fellowship. You will work alongside a church that is already engaged in transforming its community. Your accompaniment is an encouraging reminder that our partners are part of a global Body of Christ that transcends borders to participate in God’s redemptive work. Trip participants from the U.S. participate in order to learn from the church members who host them as they become experts in sustainably transforming their community. Both visitors and hosts enjoy one another in Christian fellowship as we participate together in God’s work redeeming and restoring the world.
A Vision Trip is a chance to meet pastors in the communities we serve, talk leader-to-leader, and dream about working together to develop your respective congregations. While some mission trips run the risk of giving people the disempowering impression that change comes from the outside, we want you to see what makes ENLACE different. We want you to witness our approach for yourself so you can come home confident about engaging your congregation in life-changing learning experiences that create lasting change through empowering and sustainable community-led programs that demonstrate as well as proclaim the gospel.
ENLACE’s church partners often find that having an international impact gives new life to church here at home. ENLACE’s service trips are eye-opening learning experiences. People often come home from them with a new vision for how they could minister to their own communities. Participants come home excited to know they support sustainable, community-led solutions to multidimensional poverty. They come home with a new vision of themselves and their church as part of a global Body of Christ, and how God is at work in and through his people.
Perhaps you’ve been on one of those outdated mission trips where you fly across the world to paint a church only to find yourself among hard workers who would have been happy to do it themselves. That’s not how ENLACE works. We’ll have been working with our local church partners, often for years, before a foreign church comes alongside them to encourage their efforts. All ENLACE-supported programs and projects are community-led. They involve training in project management, monitoring and evaluation, and mobilizing local resources to ensure their long-term sustainability. But the long-term impact of a Service Trip does not end there. Participants on both sides of the border tell us that crossing cultural, linguistic, and national borders to work together as agents of gospel-driven change has a long-term impact on their spiritual development and their vision of, and participation in, the Kingdom of God announced by Jesus. And ultimately the service trip can play a crucial role in the local church’s long-term goal of ending poverty in its community.
