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Who We Are

At COSC, we want to carry out effective humanitarian and evangelical action. We want to have this vibrant component of our whole church life to be strong and transparent, and we are working to increase this aspect of our community’s life.

The Antioch Group is a nonprofit organization that serves as the international outreach of Christ Our Shepherd Church (COSC). It is a response to the needs for our missions and missioners to be characterized by caring and supporting relationships and by increasing returns on all investments in people and projects. 

Though we are not exclusively like any of the following, we have components of all of them.

  • A Missions Society: We send missioners to various assignments; support a wide variety of individuals and organizations engaged in evangelistic and entrepreneurial projects that focus on relief and development and the recovery of creational justice for the poor;  we provide a pastoral community for a wide variety of practitioners and missioners whose work excludes them from normal church relationships.
  • A Grant Foundation: We request, apply for, receive and distribute available funds to approved and proven projects, but the evidence of our success is not the quantity of donations, but the measurable long-term changes, and increase in value, in the quality of the lives and services that are engaged and supported.
  • Managers: We facilitate and oversee approved projects, ensuring they remain sustainable, accountable and profitable.
  • Brokers: We advise people about contribution placements that will produce a high yield in their chosen area of concern and interest; we seek to encourage relationships between agencies, ministries and individuals that have common goals and share a common high return on invested resources; we connect congregants with common passions and concerns to each other, and then connect them together with effective expressions of their missions’ interests.
Hopefully, you are already beginning to get an idea. We have already described some of our functions but you can also understand what we do if we describe ourselves to you as:
  • Advocates: We want to argue in a biblically principled way for an expectation of righteous, high returns on all missional and philanthropic contributions; we wish to discourage and deny whatever is wasteful and ineffectual; we wish to uphold biblical teaching about spiritual and material stewardship and productivity.
  • Analysts: We evaluate and engage missional endeavors that have highly effective life-changing interventions with the intention of helping them to achieve an even greater return on invested contributions.
  • Advisors: We offer help to both donors and suppliers to develop and execute results-based strategies; we help steward resources; we identify opportunities to help donors do this themselves.
  • Activists: We are committed to share and apply our methodology, pro-actively and persuasively, in order to initiate new ways of assessing and implementing missions-projects, and in order to increase productivity in all missions enterprises.
  • Adventurers: We will be obedient and faithful to Christ’s call to ask whatever (Jn.15:16), do whatever (Jn.2:5), go wherever (Mt.28:19), and for and with whoever (Jn.3:16) in a manner that is both pioneering and planned, both daring and dutiful, both innovatory and methodical, both trusting and tested.
In summary, we are committed to:
  • Present biblical truth about individual and institutional stewardship and about missions to the nations
  • Promote the missions-interests and involvements of all congregants, as well as the opportunities for investment of available resources
  • Provoke everyone to increase expectations and outcomes of all missions’ endeavors with passion and productivity
  • Pioneer and develop new models and tools of assessment and sustainability that create and preserve high-yield projects
  • Provide appropriate contexts for learning and engaging, and for applying the teaching and tools that are thus acquired
  • Prevent ignorance, passivity, complacency and uninvolvement in relation to the gospel’s missions-mandate, and prevent waste and unwise and improper allocation and use of resources
  • Practice what we teach in our personal and corporate lives and in all tasks and projects that we engage
  • Pray that all of our obedient practical applications of biblical truth be in the power of the Holy Spirit with a high expectation of the transforming presence of God in all situations and communities that we engage, bringing deepening relationships and increasing returns.