There is a global family of churches that most of its own members do not know exists. Ask a pastor in a free evangelical congregation in Germany whether she knows what her counterparts in the Philippines are working on, and the honest answer is usually no. Ask a church planter in Kenya who came out of the EFCA’s mission work whether he has ever spoken with someone from the Evangelical Free Church of India, and the answer is probably the same. The free evangelical family is real, theologically coherent, and globally distributed — and largely invisible to itself.
That is the problem this publication exists to solve.
The reason is structural. The free evangelical movement’s polity is, by design, decentralised: national federations govern themselves, local congregations govern themselves within the federations. This produces resilient, locally adapted Christianity — and it produces an information problem. There is no central hub that aggregates what the movement is doing. No Vatican press office, no Canterbury communications team. Each national federation publishes what it publishes, in its own language, for its own audience. The result is that a movement with thirty-one IFFEC member federations and mission engagement in more than sixty countries has almost no common information infrastructure.
The Free Evangelical Connexion is an attempt to build one.
What it is
The Connexion is a global news and information service for the free evangelical and free church world, published by Worldwide Evangelical Seminary (WWES). It scans sources across the movement — federation websites, denominational papers, mission reports, theological journals — in multiple languages, translates and synthesises what it finds, and publishes daily. The editorial voice is warm, intelligent, and irenic. The scope is the whole family: Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, wherever free evangelical and free church life is happening.
The tag taxonomy on the site — organised by category, continent, country, and federation — reflects the movement’s actual structure and makes it possible to follow a particular national federation, a particular region, or a particular topic without reading everything.
Why WWES runs it
WWES is a global theological seminary operating on a zero-tuition model, serving thousands of students across more than seventy countries. It is deliberately non-denominational, serving anyone who shares the core evangelical commitments regardless of what ecclesiastical tradition, if any, they come from.
When WWES launched online programming, 91% of applicants were already serving as church leaders or teachers in contexts across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They were not seeking entry-level preparation. They were people for whom accessible theological education represented, in their own words, “practically their only chance for quality theological training.”1
WWES did not set out to plant free evangelical churches. What happened is that when you train people in evangelical theology and biblical ecclesiology — and when those people have no prior denominational affiliation — they do what the theology says. They teach, they evangelise, they plant churches. Those churches become networks. And eventually someone asks: what kind of church are we?
WWES graduates built communities that look, structurally and theologically, very much like free evangelical churches — because the ecclesiology they absorbed is the believers’ church ecclesiology, and the ethos they were formed in is the alliance ethos. They arrived at free evangelical conclusions from first principles, without the name, and built accordingly.
When these graduates encounter the free evangelical tradition for the first time, the most common response is recognition, not discovery. They are not finding something foreign. They are finding a name for something they have already built.
Kennedy Maganiko’s story from the WWES network captures this dynamic: his theological formation shifted his understanding of church development from dependence on external financial support to the conviction that the indigenous church is self-propagating, self-supporting, and self-governing — the three-self model that has been a cornerstone of free evangelical mission thinking for over a century.2 He did not learn this from the free evangelical tradition. He learned it from Scripture, and arrived at the same place.
The Free Evangelical Connexion exists because of this convergence. WWES’s emerging graduate networks need to know that a global free evangelical family exists. And the established family needs to know that the network is larger than its current institutional boundaries suggest.
What it covers
The editorial scope is the free evangelical and free church world broadly: movement news, church planting, mission, theology, and identity. The free church angle governs framing and selection — this is not a general evangelical aggregator — but the scope includes the wider evangelical world where it intersects with free church concerns. A Lausanne consultation on urban mission is in scope. A WEA statement on religious freedom is in scope. A prosperity gospel controversy affecting free church congregations in West Africa is in scope. A theological debate that only concerns confessional Lutherans is not.
The publication is evangelical before it is free evangelical. The Connexion covers the whole genus where it speaks to the species, and covers the species in full.
Our editorial commitments
The Connexion is a volunteer-run ministry project and a lean service. We carry no advertising, no paywalls, no pop-ups, and no user data harvesting. We do not sell user information to third parties. We are happy to keep this running with minimal expenses and no attempt to monetize the readership.
The Free Evangelical Connexion is published by Worldwide Evangelical Seminary (WWES). About WWES | What is a free evangelical church? | What is the free evangelical movement?
- WWES student intake data reported in Understanding the Missional Model of Theological Education (WWES: 2025), chap. 1.↩︎
- The three-self model — self-propagating, self-supporting, self-governing — was developed by Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson in the mid-nineteenth century and given its classic missiological form by Melvin Hodges, The Indigenous Church (Springfield: Gospel Publishing House, 1953). Paul G. Hiebert later added a fourth self — self-theologizing — as the hermeneutical dimension of indigenous church formation; see Hiebert, Anthropological Insights for Missionaries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985).↩︎