KENT KUSEL: TAKING THE GREAT COMMISSION LITERALLY - 8,500 MILES TO ANOTHER PART OF THE WORLD
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hen considering Jesus Christ’s Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), we understand this doesn’t necessarily mean having to travel thousands of miles away. A potential disciple might live next door or work in the next office. However, sometimes going to another part of the world is exactly what the Lord has in mind for us. This has been the case in recent years for Kent Kusel. In January, he completed his seventh trip to Bangladesh, helping to take CBMC’s vision and strategies to aspiring business and professional people in that densely populated South Asian nation. Kusel, who served for seven years as CBMC’s Director of Trusted Advisor Forums and Area Director in Boston, took five other businessmen with him on the journey of 8,500 miles to Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka. Part of their mission was to present Building Spiritual Reproducers (BSR), CBMC’s video training series on making disciples. Response to the training was “fantastic,” he said, with a dozen men and women participating. Kusel and his companions spent seven days in the city of more than 23 million people, also building relationships and identifying individuals to begin discipling through Operation Timothy. The national language is Bengali, but since many of the citizens speak English, language did not present a significant obstacle for Kusel and his team. Having a major developing market economy – including being one of the largest textile manufacturers in the world – Bangladesh is very much pro-business. Marketplace training is welcomed.
“Lots of people in Bangladesh want to get involved in business, but have no idea how to get started,” he said. “Even though the nation is predominantly Muslim, it’s open to any religion and as we presented business principles, it was acceptable for us to talk about God.” This adventure had its beginnings in 2013, when Kusel’s church sponsored a missionary couple to go to Dhaka. Then in 2016, he was one of three businessmen traveling there with the goal of establishing marketplace connections. “Not long after we arrived, I received a phone call from the pastor of a church in Dhaka, saying he had heard I was with CBMC. He told me a CBMC group had been there at one time and asked for help in getting it started again." “When I went back in 2017, the pastor brought a couple of business guys to meet with me and we got CBMC relaunched. We began discipling men and women in 2018, and my first Timothy was a man with the interesting name of Roderick ‘King Kong’ Roy, an official middle name he had received while still in the womb. At one time he had served on the staff of Campus Crusade in Bangladesh.” When he finished OT, he then began discipling Titu, the first local Timothy to be discipled by a local Paul. With the availability of video communication resources like Skype and Zoom, being separated by thousands of miles did not presented a problem as they continued through OT.
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