About Us
Our Mission
To empower the church and the people of God to serve the mission of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God in the nations of the world with the view in mind of fulfilling the Great Commission in Matthew 28:16-20.
Our Vision
To evangelize and disciple people in the nations of the world for the glory of God through the changeless gospel of Jesus Christ by preaching and teaching the Holy Scriptures. The purpose and goal of Reach the Nations Ministries is to establish Christ centered churches under biblical leadership working with ministries which preach the word of God, administer the sacraments, and practice discipline.
Our U.S. Ministry Team
The following people serve on the various boards of RTN and have a particular focus related to the mission in South Asia.
Gary Finkbeiner
Gary is the founder of Reach the Nations Ministries, and the founder, director and president of the Thornapple Center for Biblical Studies. He is also the founder of New Life Ministries and established the New Life Christian Church in the Grand Rapids area where he was the senior pastor for more than 25 years. All of these ministries are devoted to supporting leaders and planting churches with a strong biblical foundation. Gary holds Masters in Theological Studies and Masters in Theology degrees from Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Timothy Peng
Timothy received a master’s degree in theological studies from Calvin Theological Seminary located in Grand Rapids, Michigan and is the senior pastor of the Lansing Chinese Christian Church and is involved in work in Pakistan and in China.
Peter Negron
Peter is the founding leader of Pure in Heart Ministries and has pastored Pure in Heart Church for over 30 years. Besides serving churches and helping to plant churches in the Chicago region Peter works with church planters in the US and in Pakistan and leads a rebuilding ministry in Puerto Rico.
Vic Davis
Vic is the founding pastor of Spirit of God Church in Gary, Indiana and Spirit of God Christian School. He currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona where he is involved in assisting emerging church leaders. He has been involved consistently in mission work in Africa over many years.
Warren Van Kampen
Warren is a retired physician who has been involved in various aspects of medical and educational ministry in local churches, in evangelism outreaches, and in mission organizations, and he oversees the medical outreach program for Reach the Nations.
Daniel Finkbeiner
Daniel serves as the pastor of Kingsway Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and is affiliated with the Acts 15 network of ministries and church leaders in the north central region of the United States.
Kyle Fennell
Kyle is a paramedic in Kent County, Michigan and serves as an elder of Kingsway Community Church where he preaches regularly. Kyle is also part of the Acts 15 network of ministries and leaders in the north central region of the United States.
Andrew Finkbeiner
Andrew is a business consultant for companies in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area. He has a passion for leadership development in corporations and ministry and provides consultation in the development of micro-businesses related to the mission in South Asia.
Our Pakistan Ministry Team
The following people comprise the RTN team working in various roles in fulfilling the vision and mission of RTN in the country of Pakistan.
Manzoor Masih
Manzoor serves as the General Secretary/Administrator for Reach the Nations Pakistan. Now retired, he served in the Pakistani government for more than 40
years and now holds various other leadership positions including the Chairman of United Christian Fellowship in Pakistan.
Rashid Manzoor
Rashid is Assistant Administrator for Reach the Nations Pakistan and serves as a minister at Christ Church Rawalpindi, Lahore Diocese, Church of Pakistan (Anglican).
Shakeel Rehmat
Since 2016, Shakeel has served as a lead church planter, pastor, and evangelist for RTN with his ministry centered in the Province of Sindh, primarily in small, mostly Hindu-background, villages surrounding Hyderabad.
Rustam Masih
Rustam, with a unique understanding of local dialects, works with Shakeel as an associate church planter, pastor, and evangelist in Sindh Province.
Mehboob Naz
Mehboob serves as a lead church planter, pastor, and evangelist among Christian-background villages surrounding Sialkot in Punjab Province. He felt God’s call to serve in these villages in 2000 and began a ministry at that time. He joined the RTN team in 2018.
Adnan Khokhar
Adnan works side-by-side with Mehboob in ministering to communities in Punjab Province – teaching, providing humanitarian aid, and praying with the people who come.
Irfan Naz
Irfan is a brother to Mehboob and has worked with him in village ministry since
2005. He, too, joined the RTN team nearly two years ago.
Statement of Faith
The Holy Scriptures
God has graciously disclosed his existence and power in the created order, and has supremely revealed himself to fallen human beings in the person of his Son, the incarnate Word. Moreover, this God is a speaking God who by his Spirit has graciously disclosed himself in human words: we believe that God has inspired the words preserved in the Scriptures, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, which are both record and means of His saving work in the world. These writings alone constitute the verbally inspired Word of God, which is utterly authoritative and without error in the original writings, complete in its revelation of his will for salvation, sufficient for all that God requires us to believe and do, and final in its authority over every domain of knowledge to which it speaks. The Bible is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it teaches; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; and trusted, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises. As God’s people hear, believe, and do the Word, they are equipped as disciples of Christ and witnesses to the gospel.
The Trinity
We believe in one God, eternally existing in three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who know, love, and glorify one another. This one true and living God is infinitely perfect both in his love and in his holiness. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory and adoration. Immortal and eternal, he perfectly and exhaustively knows the end from the beginning, sustains and sovereignly rules over all things, and providentially brings about his eternal good purposes to redeem a people for himself and restore his fallen creation, to the praise of his glorious grace.
Jesus Christ
We believe that, moved by love and in obedience to his Father, the eternal Son became human: the Word became flesh, fully God and fully human being, one Person in two natures. The man Jesus, the promised Messiah of Israel, was conceived through the miraculous agency of the Holy Spirit, and was born of the virgin Mary. He perfectly obeyed his heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, performed miraculous signs, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, arose bodily from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven.
As the mediatorial King, he is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of God’s sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate. We believe that by his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute. He did this so that in him we might become the righteousness of God: on the cross he canceled sin, propitiated God, and, by bearing the full penalty of our sins, reconciled to God all those who believe. By his resurrection Christ Jesus was vindicated by his Father, broke the power of death and defeated Satan who once had power over it, and brought everlasting life to all his people; by his ascension he has been forever exalted as Lord and has prepared a place for us to be with him.
The Holy Spirit
Sent by the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus Christ, and, as the other Paraclete, is present with and in believers. He convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and by his powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance and faith, and in him they are baptized into union with the Lord Jesus, such that they are justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. By the Spirit's agency, believers are renewed, sanctified, and adopted into God's family; they participate in the divine nature and receive his sovereignly distributed gifts. The Holy Spirit is himself the down payment of the promised inheritance, and in this age indwells, guides, instructs, equips, revives, and empowers believers for Christ-like living and service.
Salvation
We believe that from all eternity God determined in grace to save a great multitude of guilty sinners from every tribe and language and people and nation, and to this end foreknew them and chose them. We believe that God justifies and sanctifies those who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that he will one day glorify them—all to the praise of his glorious grace. In love God commands and implores all people to repent and believe, having set his saving love on those he has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer.
We believe that Christ, by his obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified. By his sacrifice, he bore in our stead the punishment due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice on our behalf. By his perfect obedience he satisfied the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God. Inasmuch as Christ was given by the Father for us, and his obedience and punishment were accepted in place of our own, freely and not for anything in us, this justification is solely of free grace, in order that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners. We believe that a zeal for personal and public obedience flows from this free justification.
The Church
We believe that God’s new covenant people have already come to the heavenly Jerusalem; they are already seated with Christ in the heavenlies. This universal church is manifest in local churches of which Christ is the only Head; thus each “local church” is, in fact, the church, the household of God, the assembly of the living God, and the pillar and foundation of the truth. The church is the body of Christ, the apple of his eye, graven on his hands, and he has pledged himself to her forever. The church is distinguished by her gospel message, her sacred ordinances, her discipline, her great mission, and, above all, by her love for God, and by her members’ love for one another and for the world. Crucially, this gospel we cherish has both personal and corporate dimensions, neither of which may properly be overlooked. Christ Jesus is our peace: he has not only brought about peace with God, but also peace between alienated peoples. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both Jew and Gentile to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. The church serves as a sign of God’s future new world when its members live for the service of one another and their neighbors, rather than for self-focus. The church is the corporate dwelling place of God’s Spirit, and the continuing witness to God in the world.
The Sacraments
We believe that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordained by the Lord Jesus himself. The former is connected with entrance into the new covenant community, the latter with ongoing covenant renewal. Together they are simultaneously God’s pledge to us, divinely ordained means of grace, our public vows of submission to the once crucified and now resurrected Christ, and anticipations of his return and of the consummation of all things.
The Kingdom of God
We believe that those who have been saved by the grace of God through union with Christ by faith and through regeneration by the Holy Spirit enter the kingdom of God and delight in the blessings of the new covenant: the forgiveness of sins, the inward transformation that awakens a desire to glorify, trust, and obey God, and the prospect of the glory yet to be revealed. Good works constitute indispensable evidence of saving grace. Living as salt in a world that is decaying and light in a world that is dark, believers should neither withdraw into seclusion from the world, nor become indistinguishable from it: rather, we are to do good to the city, for all the glory and honor of the nations is to be offered up to the living God. Recognizing whose created order this is, and because we are citizens of God’s kingdom, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, doing good to all, especially to those who belong to the household of God. The kingdom of God, already present but not fully realized, is the exercise of God’s sovereignty in the world toward the eventual redemption of all creation. The kingdom of God is an invasive power that plunders Satan’s dark kingdom and regenerates and renovates through repentance and faith the lives of individuals rescued from that kingdom. It therefore inevitably establishes a new community of human life together under God.
The Gospel to the Nations
We believe that the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ—God’s very wisdom. Utter folly to the world, even though it is the power of God to those who are being saved, this good news is Christological, centering on the cross and resurrection: the gospel is not proclaimed if Christ is not proclaimed, and the authentic Christ has not been proclaimed if his death and resurrection are not central (the message is: "Christ died for our sins . . . [and] was raised”). This good news is biblical (his death and resurrection are according to the Scriptures), theological and salvific (Christ died for our sins, to reconcile us to God), historical (if the saving events did not happen, our faith is worthless, we are still in our sins, and we are to be pitied more than all others), apostolic (the message was entrusted to and transmitted by the apostles, who were witnesses of these saving events), and intensely personal (where it is received, believed, and held firmly, individual persons are saved).
Consummation
We believe in the personal, glorious, and bodily return of our Lord Jesus Christ with his holy angels, when he will exercise his role as final Judge, and his kingdom will be consummated. We believe in the bodily resurrection of both the just and the unjust—the unjust to judgment and eternal conscious punishment in hell, as our Lord himself taught, and the just to eternal blessedness in the presence of him who sits on the throne and of the Lamb, in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. On that day the church will be presented faultless before God by the obedience, suffering and triumph of Christ, all sin purged and its wretched effects forever banished. God will be all in all and his people will be enthralled by the immediacy of his ineffable holiness, and everything will be to the praise of his glorious grace. *
* The Confession and Statement of Faith provided by The Gospel Coalition and used by permission.