AFM has one all-consuming focus: to seek out unreached people groups and introduce them for the first time to their Savior, Jesus Christ. However, though we have been sending missionaries to the farthest corners of the earth for more than 30 years, we have found that truly unreached people don’t actually exist. There is always Someone working among them before we arrive.

God works hand-in-hand with our missionaries, but He is also hard at work where they are not. His Spirit parachutes deep into enemy-held territory and secures beachheads far in advance of their arrival. Instead of following their own plans to begin laying a foundation for ministry, missionaries often find themselves joining work that the Spirit has already set in motion, building on foundations that He has already laid.

God’s hand is constantly steering our missionaries to people whom His Spirit has brought to a point of openness—a crossroads of decision in which great weights of relationship, worldview and circumstance are suddenly balanced on a knife edge, ready to respond to a redemptive nudge. Divine appointments, God moments, tipping points—whatever you want to call them, they are at the heart of AFM’s work, and God supplies every one of them.

“I will go before you and will level the mountains; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name” (Isa. 45:2, 3).

• Twitter