Mission Global

I love our Fellowship! As I conclude my service as the executive director of Mission Global and reflect on my 44 years of credentialed service with the PAOC, I am filled with gratitude for the stability, accountability, community, missional DNA and the many inspirational leaders and colleagues with whom I have served. The missionary family has been my unique place in the larger PAOC community. I grew up listening to stories of what God had done globally. Eventually, my wife, Cindy, and I found our place in this special family, people committed to crossing cultural boundaries so that everyone, everywhere can hear the good news about Jesus.

The local church has played a central role in both our stories. I was born in Kenya, East Africa, and lived there until I left to attend university. The years I spent at Nairobi Pentecostal Church (now Christ is The Answer Ministries) grounded my spiritual journey. Cindy grew up in Ottawa, Ont., where Bethel Pentecostal Church provided the spiritual foundation for her life. During my undergraduate degree, Bethel Pentecostal Church became my home church for five years, followed by eight years where Cindy and I served at Broadway Church in Vancouver, B.C., some of the best years of our lives. We married in a PAOC church and were mentored by PAOC pastors such as Gordon Upton, James MacKnight and Allon Hornby. God used colleagues in missions like Garry and Marg Foreman, Wilbur and Ruby Morrison, and Jack and Edna Lynn as guides, ministry partners and caregivers.

I never intended to become a pastor, let alone an executive officer in the PAOC. My service to God, what I thought was my calling, was to care for and steward His creation in all its beauty and wonder. Yet, God had other plans. On a journey across Canada to attend Simon Fraser University in British Columbia for a master’s degree in natural resource management, I felt God calling me into a pastoral vocation. So, Cindy and I shifted gears. I attended Regent College and graduated with a master’s degree in Christian Studies. We then entered the ministry, serving for five years on staff at Broadway Church, followed by 20 years of missionary service in Zimbabwe and Zambia, and now 20 years as executive director of Mission Global. We are sons and daughters of the PAOC, mentored and grounded in local churches and the wider PAOC family.

When one finds their calling, it is seldom boring. Ours has been a God-directed adventure with relational connections and friends all over the world. We look back on our service with joy and gratitude, knowing that we have lived in the goodness of God. We acknowledge times when relational challenges, differences of opinion, hardships and disappointments have tried to steal our joy and commitment. But through it all, we are grateful that God placed us in community—in the PAOC family that has sustained and strengthened us.

The PAOC enhanced our story, which is part of a larger story ultimately shaped by God. Our story echoes PAOC’s engagement in God’s mission and His own story of reconciling the world to Himself. It has not been a random or accidental journey, for God wonderfully works out the details of our lives. Without rootedness and stability in this larger PAOC story, we may not have made it, and that’s why we love this Fellowship.

Let me say it again. We love this Fellowship, and here are a few reasons why.

PAOC is Passionately Missional

First, the PAOC has always prioritized evangelism, church planting, mission to the whole world, and compassion for the marginalized and vulnerable. Growing up in Kenya, I witnessed thousands come to Jesus, hundreds of churches planted, education provided through mission schools, leaders trained to conserve and pastor the work, and compassionate care shown to the least of the least. Empowered by the Spirit, our Fellowship is replete with stories of God’s power at work to advance the kingdom of God. I love being a member of a growing, powerful movement of God that is touching lives not only in Canada but around the world. We, the PAOC, were only a few hundred people when we began just over 100 years ago. Now we are over a quarter million in Canada,[1] and 88 million in the World Assemblies of God Fellowship,[2] our wider international Fellowship. Generations of humble believers planted and watered the seeds of the gospel, and God has given the increase.

PAOC is a Relational Network

Second, I love the relational network of people who have intersected our paths over the years. People who visited our homes in Ottawa, Vancouver, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Milton, and now back in Ottawa, where Cindy and I first met. We have been privileged to sit and dine with people from many different nations and cultures, hearing many stories of God at work. It is fashionable these days to speak of denominations in negative terms. I see it differently. We should be amazed and perhaps a little proud that 1,200 churches across our nation can agree to work together in mission, leadership development, and church planting.[3] We should also be amazed that together, we have touched numerous countries with the gospel message and now work with choice women and men from many tribes, nations and languages. Our relational network, this family we call the PAOC, fulfils the words of Jesus that say, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35).

PAOC Provides Accountability

Third, the PAOC provides accountability in an empowering and flexible manner. As a Spirit-empowered Fellowship, we do not dictate what churches and pastors must do to the minute detail. We make room for people to fulfil their unique calling. Nowhere has this been more evident than in our global mission expression. Pioneer, entrepreneurial missionaries have worked together with God and each other to advance the kingdom in amazing ways. We value mutual accountability and encouragement. Our collective commitment to our “Statement of Essential Truths” provides guardrails and ensures our faithfulness to God’s Word. Individuals and churches need accountability, and the PAOC provides foundation stones and building blocks on which people can fulfil their dreams and visions.

PAOC Practises Compassion

Finally, we have historically practised care for the marginalized and vulnerable. Our PAOC story is replete with Spirit-led intuitive responses that naturally and spontaneously combine evangelism and social engagement to alleviate human suffering. Justice means speaking up, stepping up, and doing right by those who are needy, hurting, poor and mistreated. Justice means genuine care and compassionate action. Our Fellowship has stepped up with kind, righteous deeds that reflect God’s just and loving heart. Other-oriented justice flows from our Lord’s core character. While God’s justice includes holy judgment with serious consequences for sin, His prevailing, natural disposition is to express gracious hesed, His loyal, unfailing love to all of humanity. The PAOC story is one of compassionate action combined with the good news of the gospel. God impressed Micah 6:8 on my heart when I was a young man in university, and it has been a guiding principle for my life: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

I thank God for the incredible heritage and blessing that the PAOC has been to my family. Cindy and I pray that we have given back to this Fellowship a small part of the great blessing it has been to us. We count it a privilege to play a part in God’s mission, and in PAOC’s incredible story. We are ordinary people who offered our lives as “a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” (Romans 12:1). We are so thankful we said “Yes” to Jesus and that He gave us an incredible church family to shape us, guide us, and share in our story.

With All My Heart

For all the links in the chain,
Oh, Lord my God,
That brought me to the story of the gospel;
I thank you, Father, with all my heart.

For Christ Himself, Author and Finisher of our faith;
For Christ, who is Himself
The good news for all mankind;
I thank you, Father, with all my heart.

For saints and martyrs, teachers and evangelists,
For that apostolic company, and for Paul
Whose words I read today;
I thank you, Father, with all my heart.

And so it goes on; and always at a price.
In toil and labor, in pain and blood:
The good news spreads from place to place,
Generation to generation.

For all who shared the missionary task;
I thank you, Father, with all my heart.
And for my chance to be myself
A link in this great chain,

A bearer of the good news of Christ to other men and women;
I thank you, Father, with all my heart.
And may it be a heart of love, of joy and praise;
For Jesus sake.
Amen[4]

Author unknown

This article appeared in the April/May/June 2026 issue of testimony/Enrich, a quarterly publication of The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. © 2026 The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Photo at the top: Murray and Cindy Cornelius speaking at General Conference 2022 after re-election. Second photo by Leslie Ghag Photography.