Harold Kurtz & The Power of Partnership

BY THE REV. BILL YOUNG, FORMER FRONTIER FELLOWSHIP EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Harold Kurtz had a passion for partnership. This is one of many lenses through which I can reflect on his impact on the vision of Frontier Fellowship: for every people, an indigenous church; for every church, a mission vision. And how appropriate it is that my reflection should be part of an issue of The Frontier Journal with news from Ethiopia. It was while Harold was a missionary in Ethiopia that he had the opportunity to study at Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission in its earliest days.

Harold went back to Ethiopia a changed missiologist, building a frontier mission vision into the missionaries there as well as their partner church, the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus. Over the ensuing years, Mekane Yesus has been an example of what God can do when you reach out with the Good News of Jesus to the many people groups who are “different” from your own and allow them to reflect their culture in their local churches.

It was from that background that Ralph Winter tapped Harold as the first director of Frontier Fellowship. Harold then implemented his understanding of partnership in three different spheres. He worked for many years with the US Presbyterian structures to bring acceptance of the need to return to where their global mission started—in frontier areas! He worked with local churches here to promote this vision. And he worked with partner churches in other countries.

One of the earliest partners was the Berliner Missionswerk in Berlin, Germany. Harold collaborated with Mort Taylor in the Presbyterian Church USA’s (PCUSA) Office of International Evangelism. The PCUSA signed an agreement in 1988 to send a worker for outreach to the Kurdish refugees in Berlin. She also connected to local churches there to help them develop a vision for reaching out to the Kurds. That work in Berlin continued under others several years later, while she and her husband moved on to the Kurdish area in Iraq, where early Presbyterian missionaries had served in the 1800s.

I remember another example from a trip I took with Harold to Hungary in 2001. We visited with officials and some pastors from the Reformed Church. One pastor in particular was involved in outreach to the Roma people in Hungary and Ukraine. Our visit’s purpose was to encourage the Reformed Church officials to go beyond their minimal support for that ministry, and to encourage the pastor and see how we could bring US believers alongside her ministry. As the “old man,” Harold could speak frankly to church officials, but he did it in a winsome manner—typically with stories from other places.

The world is too complicated for all insights to be contained in any one social framework. And the human race is too 'fearfully and wonderfully made' for all essential insights to be contained within one ethnic group. This should be part of our theology and our modus operandi. This is the way God created the world. We need one another to become all that God wants us to be. We need other faces of the Gospel.

—Harold Kurtz, Mission Matters! (2000)

One of Harold’s efforts I especially appreciated when I served in the PCUSA’s Office of International Evangelism was his push to help us expand the definition of partnership. At the time, when engaging in an outreach effort overseas, it was our practice to partner with the local church in that nation. But when you consider an ethnic group of a few million people with no local church, who is our church partner? Denominations in other parts of geographic countries typically won’t reach out. Harold’s position was that we needed to find groups working in such places—like NGOs—who shared our values, then join with them in ministry. We were able to begin applying that thinking, especially in Central Asia and later in Turkey, as we expanded our sending of missionaries into those regions, beginning around 1999. Light of Hope Ministry Ethiopia is another example of a local group Harold connected Frontier Fellowship to in my early days as its Executive Director.

I could say so much more about Harold’s travels, about his speaking in churches and conferences, and about the many other ways he pursued his vision. In all of these, Harold’s goal was multifaceted. The overarching goal was to reach with the Gospel those who would never hear it from anyone in their culture. He wanted US believers to see God’s vision, which flows all through the Bible, to bring believers from every tongue, tribe, people and nation to worship Jesus. But in the process of doing that, he wanted the Church to grow in its mission vision—that we would be changed through contact with others whom God was using in other places as we came alongside them.