The SIAFU Guidebook

30 The SIAFU Network Guidebook

The mission of the SIAFU Network is to establish a viable, effective network of urban Christian men and women whose goal is to inspire each other to take full responsibility for one another’s lives and well-being, for their marriages and families, for their churches and congregations, and for their communities to advance the Kingdom of Christ in the city. Our desire is to empower urban Christians to both befriend and mentor one another in order to equip each other to evangelize our unchurched family members and friends, to follow up and disciple new Christians to live the Christian life, and to serve as faithful stewards and servants in our respective Christian churches as outposts of the Kingdom where God has placed them. We also hope to collaborate together in order to identify, train, and release godly, spiritually qualified laborers who can plant churches and help spawn church planting movements which will target the unreached urban neighborhoods of America. A Brief Overview of the Siafu Ant The name for this new and exciting collaboration of urban Christians is taken from the example of the African siafu ant community, hailed by the Discovery Channel as the world’s fiercest and mightiest social community. A powerful example of community builders, their nests can hold up to twenty-two million members, making them the world’s largest social community and easily one of the most productive, inventive, and remarkable groups ever. Siafu are small, vulnerable, and pesky, easily overcome if you attack or seek to destroy one of them isolated and alone, as a mere individual. However, when banded together in common unity for the single purpose of the survival and strengthening of the community, they are virtually invincible, taking down all kinds of different animals, from goats to buffalo, and (as has sometimes been reported) even elephants in their wake. Their ingenuity and industry (and absolute fierceness) are well known among those who study all the creatures of the insect kingdoms. They are a fitting symbol of the potential that urban Christian men and women possess if they only can unite for the sake of mutual inspiration, edification, equipping, and empowerment. The advancement