ISSACHAR INTERNATIONAL: CHANGE NEEDED TO BRING IMPACT

Traditional Missions to Innovative Impact

For the past century or two, churches have followed a traditional missions model that has primarily focused on spreading the gospel. This model is familiar, culturally comfortable, well funded and has all the necessary support systems in place.

To implement the myriad of biblical injunctions on pursuing justice, however, requires new vision, new hearts, new workers, and new techniques. A younger generation of justice workers and a new breed of nonprofit organizations (NPO’s) are being raised up with focus, energy, and specific equipping to directly impact various justice causes.

By finding, developing, and deploying these new workers and nonprofits, we can see an effective implementing of the Lord's mandate of Seeking Justice, Defending the Orphans, Pleading the Cause of the Widows, Correcting Oppression, Delivering the One who has been robbed through the power of his oppressors and Loosening the Chains of Injustice. We can with purpose and intention move beyond our comfortably guarded culture and join the ranks of Job by Investigating the causes of the ones we do not know and Opening our mouths for all the unfortunate and all those who have no voice.

Job 29:16, Isaiah 1:17; Jeremiah 22:3,16; James 1:27

DAVID & PEGGY FITZPATRICK ISSACHAR INTERNATIONAL FOUNDERS

From the beginning of our marriage, our dinner table has created an ongoing forum for thoughts and ideas from each member of our family as well as others joining us. Any of us who are parents understand well that through the lives of our children our own worlds are enriched, challenged and expanded. Our lives have been no exception.

As our energies were poured into the well-being of the church and into the defining and refining of a fresh and current church model, our children were on a journey of their own. Our second-born announced at the age of eight that she would be adopting orphans and possibly running an orphanage. She never wavered from this vision. Our first, always one to ponder and sift through the status quo, began early to ask, “If the church is about Jesus, and Jesus is about the poor, why is the church not about the poor more than about all these other subjects of church life?” Hmm, good question. What to do, and how?

Of course we had this person or that over the years spending a season with us in our home, from new believers to those with significant trauma that left them mentally unstable or even homeless. We did short term trips to less fortunate places to help with a construction project or visit the poor. But this was not enough to satisfy him, and he sought out the people living under Nashville’s bridges, and then with nothing but the clothes on his back and his backpack, the villagers left in the wake of the Serbian war, eventually on to the laborers of India, and always in those teen years, our dinner table was the gathering place for our children’s friends, who were together forging their own version of what it meant to follow Jesus.

They had a passion and a quest; we had a roof and a table, and so began the early dawning of what is now Issachar International. Some of the individuals featured on this site were among those around our Shabbat dinner table, and others are more recent friends, but born out of these days was the warmth and support that has culminated in the vision statement of Issachar International.

PLEASE DIRECT INQUIRES TO:
Select Here to Email

CHANGE NEEDED TO BRING IMPACT

ISSACHAR LOGO GREEN

DAVID & PEGGY FITZPATRICK ISSACHAR INTERNATIONAL FOUNDERS

WRITINGS AND MUSINGS