AIM International

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Full Name: Africa Inland Mission International
Founded: 1895

Website: http://www.aimint.org

Email / Contact Form: http://www.aimint.org/usa/contact_aim.html

Phone: 1-800-254-0010
Address: PO Box 178, Pearl River, NY  10965, USA

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MinistryWatch Profile for
AIM International

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Purpose Statement:

Africa Inland Mission exists to declare the Glory of God to the peoples of Africa. While our ministries are many and varied, our goal is to establish maturing churches through the evangelization of unreached peoples, and through the effective preparation of church leaders.

Description:

Africa Inland Mission exists to declare the Glory of God to the peoples of Africa. We exist to introduce those who have never heard to the One who died to save them – Jesus Christ. We exist to help new believers grow strong and healthy in their faith. We exist to see new believers enfolded into a maturing church. We exist to invest in the lives of current and future church leaders, so they can effectively build into the lives of others and reach out in turn to the vast populations of Africa and beyond.

While our ministries are many and varied, our goal is to establish maturing churches through the evangelization of unreached peoples, and through the effective preparation of church leaders.

Whether they repair Land Rovers, perform appendectomies, or teach better farming methods all our missionaries contribute in some way to these objectives. AIM’s ministries meet people’s needs, validate their worth and declare God’s glory.

Regions Served:

Times have changed since five men headed inland from the coast of Kenya in 1895. Travelling on foot and accompanied by camels and local porters, they journeyed almost 300 miles inland to set up the first AIM ‘station’. After one year, Peter Cameron Scott, the groups leader, died of blackwater fever and the number of missionaries soon fell to one (read more...). Since then it has grown to almost eight hundred, working in fourteen countries. AIM continues to grow and now has more long-term missionaries than ever before. Over four million people worship in the churches founded through the mission.

In 2005 the Mission began to move towards a regional structure. The map below shows most of our current countries of ministry.

Northern Region

Working in the 10/40 window is tough, yet full of excitement.  AIM has experienced God’s blessing in opening new and creative ministry opportunities among the nations of Northern Africa.

Eastern Region

AIM’s Eastern Region is rich in heritage and contains a wealth of vital ministries today. Countries of ministry include: Kenya and Tanzania.

Central Region

Central Africa has suffered much pain through the ravages of war, tribalism and genocide.  AIM seeks to be a healing presence among the peoples.  Countries of ministry include: Chad, Central African Republic (CAR), Southern Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda, and Rwanda.

Southern Region

AIM’s Southern Region contains complex geograhical challenges from cascading mountain peaks to arrid deserts to remote island locations.  Countries of ministry include: Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Lesotho and the Islands of the Indian Ocean.

Outside Africa

Our ministries are not limited to the continent of Africa.  We desire to work with Africans wherever they are in the world.  These countries of ministry include: USA, Canada and UK. 

Statement of Faith:

The members of this Mission declare their belief in:

• The unity and trinity of God, eternally existing in three co-equal Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.


• God the Creator and Preserver of all things, who created man, male and female, in his own image, and gave them dominion over the earthly creation.


• The deity and humanity of God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being very God, also became man, being begotten by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, dead and buried, was raised bodily from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of the Father; whose two natures continue eternally and inseparably joined together in one Person.


• The deity and personality of God the Holy Spirit, and the necessity of his work to make the death of Christ effective to the individual sinner, leading him to repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; and in his ministry, dwelling permanently within and working through the believer for godly life and service.


• The divine, verbal inspiration and infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as originally given, and their absolute and final authority in all matters of faith and conduct.
  
  The universal sinfulness and guilt of human nature since the fall, rendering man subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.


• The sacrificial death of our Representative and Substitute, the Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, by the shedding of whose blood atonement was made for the sins of the whole world and whereby alone men are redeemed from the guilt, penalty and power of sin.


• The necessity of the new birth as the work of God the Holy Spirit, to be obtained only by receiving the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour; that men are saved by grace through faith, not by works.


• The eternal blessedness of the saved, and the eternal punishment of the lost.


• The security of the believer, based entirely on the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ, whereby, as a born-again child of God, he has assurance of salvation and has the right to all the privileges of the sons of God.


• The responsibility of the believer to maintain good works, and to obey the revealed will of God in life and service, through which eternal rewards shall be received.


• The True Church, whose Head is the Lord Jesus Christ, and whose members are all regenerate persons united to Christ and to one another by the Holy Spirit.


• The observance of the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ.


• The supreme mission of the Church as being to glorify God and to preach the gospel to every creature.


• The personal and visible return of the Lord Jesus Christ.


• The resurrection of the body. 

History:

Africa Inland Mission (AIM) had its beginning in the work of Peter Cameron Scott (1867-1896), a Scottish-American missionary of the International Missionary Alliance who served two years in the Congo before he was sent to Scotland in 1892 because of a near-fatal illness. While recuperating, he developed his idea of establishing a network of mission stations which would stretch from the southeast coast of the continent to the interior’s Lake Chad. He was unable to interest any denomination in this idea (including his own Presbyterian Church), but he was able to interest several of his friends in Philadelphia in the work and in subscribing some funds. This group formed itself in 1895 into the Philadelphia Missionary Council.

Beginnings

Scott quickly recruited several men and women who were willing to return with him to Africa to start work. The emphasis on accepting these and other early recruits was on their Christian commitment and personal uprightness rather than on any special training. The mission was to be composed of the workers in the field and would be entirely self-governing and independent of the Philadelphia Missionary Council. The Council, headed by Rev. Charles Hurlburt, agreed “. . . to spread the knowledge of the work and forward means and workers as God may supply them. They are under no pledge to the mission to supply these, but merely forward them as supplied.”

Hurlburt was also president of the Pennsylvania Bible Institute, which provided most of the mission’s workers in its very early years.

First Missionaries

On August 17, 1895, AIM’s first mission party set off. The group consisted of Scott, his sister Margaret, Frederick W. Krieger, Willis Hotchkiss, Minnie Lindberg, Miss Reckling and Lester Severn. Walter M. Wilson joined the party in Scotland. They arrived off the east African coast in October and Peter Scott started making arrangements in the Kenyan seaport of Mombasa. In little over a year, the mission had four stations--at Nzawi, Sakai, Kilungu, and Kangundo, all in Kenya. More workers came from America, including Scott’s parents, and the small group expanded to fifteen.

Scott’s Death

In December 1896, Peter Scott died, partly because of the extremely hard pace at which he had been driving himself. The mission almost dissolved in the next year when most of the workers either died or resigned. The Council began to take more responsibility for the work and appointed Hurlburt director of the mission. After a survey trip to Africa, he returned to that continent to work and he eventually brought his entire family over. For the next two decades, he provided strong, if not undisputed, leadership for the headquarters, established in 1903 at Kijabe, Kenya.

Expansion of Ministry

From Kenya, the mission expanded its work to neighboring areas. In 1909, a station was set up in what was then German East Africa and later became Tanganyika, and still later, Tanzania. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt intervened for his friend Hurlburt to persuade the Belgian government to permit the mission to establish a station in the Congo, now called Zaire. Work was begun in Uganda in 1918; in French Equatorial Africa (Central African Republic) in 1924; Sudan, briefly, in 1949; and the Islands of the Indian Ocean in 1975. Besides evangelization, workers of the mission ran clinics, hospitals, leprosariums, schools, publishing operations, and radio programs. Rift Valley Academy was built at Kijabe for missionary children. Scott Theological College in Kenya helped train African Church leaders. The churches founded by the mission in each of its fields were eventually formed into branches of the Africa Inland Church which, however, continued to work closely with the mission.