EPC leaders say the vision of the program is to see each of its 11 presbyteries build partnerships of five to eight churches that will launch church-planting teams that can in turn establish enough churches to form presbyteries in Muslim nations.  

One of the fastest growing Presbyterian denominations in the U.S. has committed to spread the Gospel to Muslim nations.

The goal of Engage 2025, an initiative of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church’s (EPC) World Outreach, is to deploy 10 church-planting teams to 10 different Muslim-majority nations among 220 unengaged people groups by 2025.

“From its early years, the EPC has consistently committed an unusually high percentage of its world mission resources to the Muslim world,”said EPC assistant stated clerk Ed McCallum in a recent interview. McCallum adds that the program allows the denomination to change the methodology of traditional missionary efforts by “going where the church isn’t.”

The EPC, a denomination that has grown by 70 percent since 2007, hopes to reach Muslim nations using small networks of local churches banding together to send out teams composed of both lay people and ministers.

The initiative’s value statement reads: “We go together to hard places where others are not. We build Biblical community in culturally relevant ways. We meet needs. We strive for growth. We pledge transparency. And we do it to reach people with the message of Jesus.”

“Engage 2025 is the ‘shot in the arm’ for the EPC ‘for such a time as this,’” EPC World Outreach director George R. Carey said.

“Doubling the size of our denomination in the past five years, with all the new churches — mostly on fire for missions — has given the EPC the momentum needed to reach our goals of planting 10 churches among unengaged Muslim people groups at the ends of the earth,” he added.

The initiative draws a distinction between unreached and unengaged peoples – unreached being “those who have very few or no indigenous followers of Christ, but there are currently efforts underway to bring the Gospel to them.” Unengaged, by contrast comprises people groups “with no believers and no sustained Gospel witness among them.”

Currently, the EPC has Engage teams in Malaysia, Indonesia and Siberia and has made inroads into Kazakhstan (where the denomination has already established a presbytery), Muslim portions of India, Sumatra and Pakistan.

In March, World Outreach approved Sierra Leone as an Engage 2025 church-planting location.

“Sierra Leone is a place of opportunity and blessing and represents an open door from God to go to a place where He is working,” former EPC Moderator Doug Klein said of the announcement in March.

He added that, while there are many Christian organizations in the African nation currently, most are located around the largest city of Freetown.

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