SIM — Serving In Mission

SIM is one of the oldest missions still working, and its beginning is a hard story. In 1893 two Canadians, Walter Gowans and Rowland Bingham, and an American, Thomas Kent, sailed for West Africa to reach the people of the interior. Within a year Gowans and Kent were dead of illness and Bingham had gone home to Canada. He tried again, was stopped by malaria, and then sent a third team, which stayed.

The letters stand for Sudan Interior Mission, the name it carried for most of its history. Today the organisation reads them as Serving In Mission, because the work long ago spread past Africa: more than seventy countries now, on every inhabited continent, with about 4,000 workers of roughly seventy nationalities.

It is evangelical and interdenominational — it belongs to no single church — and it groups its work under four headings: making disciples and planting churches, outreach, equipping churches to send, and leadership and support services. Workers raise their own prayer and financial support.

• Founded
  1893
• Founders
  Walter Gowans and Rowland Bingham of Canada and Thomas Kent of the United States. Gowans and Kent died in 1894
• Led by
  Phil Bauman, International Director since 1 March 2024. Canadian, joined SIM in 2000 and spent nearly two decades in Ghana
• Behind it
  An evangelical, interdenominational mission agency governed internationally, with national offices in each sending country
• The name
  Originally Sudan Interior Mission. Today the letters are read as Serving In Mission
• Based in
  The United States office is at 14830 Choate Circle, Charlotte, North Carolina 28273
• Reach
  More than 70 countries on every inhabited continent, with about 4,000 workers of some 70 nationalities
• Languages
  Each national office publishes in its own language
• Cost
  Workers raise their own prayer and financial support from churches, friends and family
• You get
  Four areas of work: making disciples and planting churches; outreach; serving and equipping churches for mission; leadership and support services
• Who can go
  Anyone who shares the aim, belongs to a local church, and has a skill the teams can use. SIM sets no single qualification
• How to join
  Contact your nearest SIM office, which then works with the other offices to match you to a place
• Polish
  SIM does not list Poland among its fields or its offices. The nearest offices in Europe are Czechia, Germany, Switzerland, France-Belgium and the United Kingdom
• What we checked
  We found the named international director, the founding account and the field list on SIM pages. SIM publishes no single international street address
• Contact
  sim.org — each national office has its own address

SIM — Serving In Mission does not sponsor or endorse Embassy of the Kingdom, and we are not affiliated with them. We list them because we checked them and would put them in a friend’s hands. If you lead a ministry and would like to be considered, or believe something here should be corrected, write to us — we read every message ourselves.