Platt: Opposition reveals our beliefs

                                                            

 

(NOTE: This is the last of three articles featuring new IMB President David Platt’s views on various missions issues. Read the first article here. Read the second here.)

Pressure reveals character, we all learn sooner or later. And opposition reveals what we really believe.

Do we believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ enough to lose friends, social status, a scholarship or a job over it? Do we believe it enough to suffer for it? These are questions followers of Christ in many places have to answer on a daily basis. In America, the land of the free, not so much. We still enjoy the religious liberty embedded in the founding ideals of our nation.

But the rise of militant secularism — and increasing efforts to make the practice of biblical faith socially and legally unacceptable — are slowly raising the cost of discipleship in the United States. That’s probably one of the factors behind the decline of “cultural Christianity” devoid of real commitment. 

Maybe that’s a good thing, observes new IMB President David Platt.

“In one sense, I’m thankful for the trends in our culture, and even in the church, that are causing us to ask, ‘OK, do we really believe the Bible?’” said Platt, who discussed a range of missions-related issues during an interview following his Aug. 27 election to lead Southern Baptists’ global mission enterprise.

“Do we really believe this Gospel that we claim to believe?” Platt asked. “Because more and more, cultural Christianity is just kind of fading to the background. People are realizing if you actually believe in the Gospel then that’s not as accepted as it once was. It’s actually looked down upon as narrow-minded, arrogant, bigoted and offensive. Obviously, we want to be humble in our embracing of the Gospel, but it’s becoming more costly in our culture in a way that’s good — in the sense that this better prepares us [for] what we’re going to be a part of around the world.”

Paying a higher cost to live and declare the Gospel here, in other words, will make us better and more effective servants among the nations — where the cost may be far greater. The reward will be greater still.

“We’re not going to shrink back in light of the resistance that’s there,” Platt said. “We’re going to step up, rise up and say we want to see His glory proclaimed no matter what it costs us, because we believe He is our reward.” 

American Christians have enjoyed the blessings of religious liberty and freedom of expression for a long time. Perhaps those freedoms, coupled with the material prosperity of the richest economy in human history, have lulled us into expecting things will always be as they have been. That is a naïve complacency that flies in the face not only of history but the Bible itself.

“We need to realize the clear New Testament teaching that it is costly to follow Christ, that the more your life is identified with Christ, the harder it will get for you in this world,” said Platt. “We need our eyes opened to that reality. I think we’ve been almost seduced by the spirit of cultural Christianity that says, ‘Oh, come to Christ and you can keep your life as you know it.’ No, you come to Christ, and you lose your life as you know it. The more you’re active in sharing the Gospel, the more unpopular you’ll be in many ways, the more resistance you’ll face. …

“[But] it helps you realize this is what our brothers and sisters around the world are facing in different places. If we’re going to join with them in spreading the Gospel, then we need to be ready to embrace that ‘everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,’” he added, quoting the Apostle Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 3:12. 

During months of praying about leading IMB, Platt said God had instilled in him a “deeper, narrowing, Romans 15 kind of ambition, where [the Apostle] Paul said, ‘I want to see Christ preached where He has not been named.’” The whole concept of unreached peoples, “of nearly 2 billion people who have never heard the Gospel, is just totally intolerable.”

The reality, however, is that most unreached people live in places where religions, cultures, governments and extremists oppose — sometimes violently — the transmission of the Gospel and the making of disciples. Western missionaries and churches, accustomed to relative freedom, continue to struggle with that fact and all that it entails. But there’s nothing new about it if you read church history. What’s more, God continues to use what the world intends for evil for His good purposes. Just as it did in the Book of Acts, persecution today tends to strengthen, unify and embolden believers, even as it multiplies churches.

“Making disciples of all nations will not be easy, and the more we give ourselves to reaching unreached peoples with the Gospel, the harder it will get for us,” Platt said. “But the beauty is the more we identify with Christ [in America], the more we’ll be ready to identify with the sufferings of Christ [overseas] as we go. And we’ll realize, whether here or there, the more we give ourselves to this mission, [the more we’ll] believe in the depth of our heart that He is our reward and that the reward of seeing people come to Christ is worth it. This is just basic theology of suffering in mission. How has God chosen to show His love most clearly to the world? Through the suffering of His Son, a suffering Savior.

“So how is God going to show His love most to the world today? Through suffering saints, through brothers and sisters who identify with the suffering Savior.”

(Watch related video clip: Opposition clarifies mission task)

Platt: Bible still the best mission plan

                                                      

(NOTE TO READERS: This is the second of three articles featuring new IMB President David Platt’s views on various missions issues. Read the first article here. The third article will post Sept. 11.)

David Platt sat down for a wide-ranging interview the morning after his Aug. 27 election as IMB president — and offered a number of insights into the way he hopes to lead Southern Baptists’ global mission enterprise.

Platt, 36, who succeeds Tom Elliff, is the youngest leader in the history of the 169-year-old Southern Baptist mission organization. In the first part of the discussion, he touched on the value of mission institutions and structures — sometimes questioned by younger evangelicals — if they help nurture Spirit-led movements. He also talked about the “massive” potential of IMB to mobilize local Southern Baptist churches, cooperating with each other, to plant churches around the world.

“That’s the beauty in what God has created, even in the Southern Baptist Convention on a large scale — 40,000-plus churches working together, and the IMB keeping that coalition focused on reaching unreached peoples with the Gospel,” he said.

(Read the full story, “Platt looks ahead to mission challenges.”)

During the conversation, Platt also emphasized the necessity of looking to the Word of God— not only for guidance and power, but also for mission strategies.

“God’s Word doesn’t just tell us the content of mission; God’s Word informs in very practical ways the strategy for mission,” he said. “How can we most effectively multiply churches and make disciples? This is what we see in the Book of Acts: local churches sending out missionaries who are making disciples that form into churches that are then multiplying churches. That’s what we’re after. Let’s put everything on the table — no question out of bounds — and ask, ‘How can we most effectively mobilize churches who are making disciples and planting churches among unreached peoples?’”

(Watch the video clip, “God’s Word as mission strategy.”)

The New Testament pattern of missions offers many approaches to missions that still work, Platt observed, including:

§  Bottom-up, not top-down

“There’s a fundamental paradigm that we want to operate out of that sees mission and the role of the IMB not from a top-down, but as a bottom-up perspective,” he stressed. “The temptation is to view a denominational entity as the agent for mission: ‘We [IMB] send missionaries, and we do strategy, and we support missionaries. So churches, we need you to send us people and money, and we’ll carry out mission for you’ — as opposed to flipping that and saying it’s actually the local church that is the agent that God has promised to use for accomplishing the Great Commission.

“How can we as the IMB come alongside the local church and equip and empower and encourage the local church to send and shepherd missionaries? That’s how I want us to posture ourselves, saying to the local church, ‘You can do this, and here’s how we can help.’”

(Watch the video clip, “Bottom-up, not top-down.”)

§  Mission teams

“We want to send people who are making disciples together here overseas to make disciples there,” Platt said. “Again, this is a picture we see in Scripture: Jesus was always sending people out in twos, at least. Paul and Barnabas went out together. You don’t see people going out, with rare exceptions, alone in mission. How [can we adapt] what we’re doing here somewhere else strategically in the world, for the spread of the Gospel there?

“I think about some missionaries from our church who were appointed [Aug. 27]. They’re going to join an IMB team overseas that’s comprised of brothers and sisters they were with in a small group here. They were making disciples in Birmingham, Alabama, and now they’ll be serving together for the spread of the Gospel in the Middle East.”

(Watch the video clip, “Mission teams.”)

§   Multiplying resources

Not everyone is a church planter in the mold of the Apostle Paul, Platt acknowledged. Paul himself relied on a wide network of Christ followers in the cities and regions where he preached and made disciples. The same is true today.

“I remember the time a guy came to me and said, ‘Hey, I’m an engineer. My wife’s a teacher, and we just figured out we could get a job doing engineering and teaching in (a part of East Asia) where there’s not a lot of Gospel presence. Can we just go there? We don’t know if we count as missionaries or not. We could actually be self-sustaining there.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you count. You will be crossing cultures for the spread of the Gospel. You’re moving to be a part of making disciples there.’

“When people begin to get that kind of vision for the gifts and skills and education God has given us here, it may not just be for us to stay here, but we can use these gifts in strategic ways in parts of the world that are unreached with the Gospel,” Platt said. “If we can connect that couple with what God is doing through church planters who work specifically with the IMB and come alongside them, that’s just a win-win.

“When we begin to think like that, we can blow the lid off the number of people who can go overseas.”

(Watch the video clip, “Multiplying resources.”)

In the third and final installment, Platt will talk about missions in hostile cultures — at home and abroad.

Somebody's got it harder than you do

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/140/14054/14054-78538.mp3

Checked my retirement fund the other day. Nearly choked. Guess I’ll be working a little longer than I had anticipated — like, forever.

I’m not complaining, though. I’ve still got a job. I know plenty of people who’ve lost their jobs and their homes, who can’t find work anywhere, who wonder how long they’ll be able to provide for their families. You know some, too, I’m sure. You might be one of them.

The great economic recovery-that-wasn’t seems to be settling in for the long haul. Maybe years. It’s global in scale, and even a coordinated international response — which world leaders seem to be stumbling toward in agonizingly slow motion — will take time to produce results.

One thing is for sure: No matter how bad you’ve got it, somebody else has it worse. While many struggle to pay bills, others are fighting to stave off hunger. In places where hunger was already a daily reality, the ongoing global economic crisis has made survival even more tenuous.

A national survey a few years ago revealed that lower-income folks give more generously to help the needy than the rich do. Maybe they give more because they know what it’s like to need a helping hand themselves. It reminded me of the Apostle Paul’s tribute to the selfless givers of the early Macedonian churches. They looked past their own struggles with poverty and anti-Christian persecution to give a sacrificial offering for the desperately needy Jewish followers of Christ in Jerusalem:

“In the midst of a very severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. For I testify that they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability. Entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the Lord’s people. And they exceeded our expectations: They gave themselves first of all to the Lord, and then by the will of God also to us” (2 Corinthians 8:2-5).

Paul shared that motivational nudge with the relatively affluent believers in the church at Corinth, whom he also hoped would contribute to the offering for the poor in Jerusalem. It’s a timely message for us, too, as Southern Baptists observe World Hunger Day Oct. 9. (For more information, visit http://www.worldhungerfund.com/ or http://www.imb.org/worldhunger.) Regardless of the harder times Americans now face, this is no time for us to forget people in far greater need.

People such as Najia Khatun,* age 17. Najia and her 14-year-old sister, Amila,* began studying at the Light of Hope Center in Bangladesh when it opened in 2006. Today the Southern Baptist World Hunger Fund helps support the center. Najia, Amila and the other 12 girls who come to the center live in slum shacks, but the landlords expect rent. Najia’s father comes and goes; her mother doesn’t work. One older sister is sick. Najia and Amila are expected to bring home money, however they can get it.

Some of the girls at the center were raised by beggars to become beggars. Others have mothers who work as prostitutes. But inside the center, they eat a healthy breakfast, take showers, put on clean school uniforms, hear Bible teaching and sing Christian songs, then begin their studies. Before they go to their places of work as paid apprentices or trainees in jobs arranged by the center, the girls eat a lunch of rice and lentils with vegetables, eggs, fish or meat.

“Before there were a lot of problems in my family. There was no money for food,” Najia said. “Now I have a job, and I am able to help my family. I am the main breadwinner in my family.” (Read Najia’s story at http://asiastories.com/features/ starting Oct. 10).

She also loves and serves Christ. That’s effective ministry. Southern Baptist world hunger giving helped fund such projects in some 70 countries in 2008. Yet Southern Baptists donated just $4.3 million to the World Hunger Fund in 2010 — less than half of what they gave during a 12-month span a decade earlier.

“We are now at a ‘red alert’ time for our human needs funding,” said Jeff Palmer, executive director of Baptist Global Response, an international relief and development organization, in July. “The overseas hunger relief fund is down to $4.1 million — enough to meet the needs of Southern Baptist international hunger projects for six months. These projects help the poorest of the poor, the most neglected and marginalized and some of the most lost people groups in the world. We are approaching a baseline where we are going to have to start denying funds to critical projects.

“Last year was the lowest donations to the World Hunger Fund have been in 20 years. This is very disturbing, seeing the huge need of the crisis looming in the Horn of Africa [where millions face famine]. Our Southern Baptist avenue of seeing the lost, last and least be helped both physically and spiritually is about to dry up.”

Hunger and malnutrition remain the top risks to health worldwide, according to the World Food Programme. Every day, nearly 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. Right here in America, 49 million people struggle with chronic hunger and malnutrition, including 17 million children, reports the Feeding America relief agency. An estimated 35 percent of poor American families are forced to choose between buying food and paying their rent or mortgage.

Twenty cents of every dollar given to the Southern Baptist World Hunger Fund goes to the North American Mission Board to support hunger projects in the United States. Eighty cents of every dollar goes to the International Mission Board to support direct hunger ministry, well drilling, agricultural education, water purification and other efforts that help create independence from reliance on food aid. Every cent goes toward ministry. Mission personnel are already in place; administrative and promotional costs are paid by other budgets.

The Good News of salvation through Christ is shared whenever possible.

The Macedonian believers in Paul’s day had it a lot harder than we do. Yet in “their extreme poverty … they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability” for the hungry brethren in Jerusalem. Let’s do the same for hungry people all over the world today.

(Watch a short video about global hunger and the ministries made possible by the World Hunger Fund: http://vimeo.com/30022908)

*Names changed

Japan: a fourth Gospel opening?

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/127/12700/12700-71816.mp3

Throughout their long history, the Japanese people have opened themselves to the Christian Gospel three times.

Each time they eventually rejected it or decided to hold it at arm’s length. Today, Christians comprise barely 1 percent of Japan’s population of 127 million people, despite decades of religious freedom — and powerful Christian movements in neighboring China and South Korea.

Could the national soul-searching resulting from the March earthquake/tsunami and its devastating aftermath — called Japan’s worst crisis since World War II by the nation’s leaders — become a time for the Japanese to reconsider the new life offered by Jesus Christ?

Yes, says Atsuyoshi Fujiwara, a Japanese Christian scholar who has carefully examined the history of the Gospel in his native land. But it will happen, he cautions, only if Christians work together “humbly and lovingly, nationally and internationally” to serve the Japanese during their time of suffering and recovery.

“The disaster has been terrible,” says Fujiwara, professor of theology at Japan’s Seigakuin University and founding pastor of Covenant of Grace Church in Tokyo. “We are talking about more than 25,000 people killed in Japan. Every day we are hearing new, heartbreaking stories of suffering people.

“Yet I deeply believe that God can bring good even from a painful experience like this. … I think that this post-disaster recovery has a chance to become the fourth encounter of Japan with Christianity.”

The first three “encounters,” according to Fujiwara, were the introduction of Christianity to Japan by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 1500s, the opening of Japan to Western powers in the 1850s and the nation’s defeat and rebuilding at the end of World War II. Each time, Japan faced wrenching social and political change: civil war in the 16th century, the end of the shogun era in the 19th, near destruction and despair in the 20th.

“On these three occasions, Japanese people were very open to Christianity in the beginning, yet eventually they rejected it, particularly in the first two periods,” Fujiwara notes. “Postwar Japan accepted full religious freedom and did not clearly say ‘no’ to Christianity. It appeared to be a promising solution to their problems. It also came with Western wealth and civilization, which were attractive to many people.”

As a faith personally embraced by large numbers of people, however, the Gospel of Christ has failed to spread widely in Japan, despite generations of prayers and ministry by missionaries and Japanese believers. Why? Church and mission leaders have been trying to find answers to that question for a long time.

The Japanese are religious people, Fujiwara stresses. They have a millennium-long tradition of Shintoism, Buddhism and Confucianism as their “spiritual backbone.” Christianity initially appealed to many Japanese, but they eventually decided it didn’t fit their psyche or tradition. The pattern of “initial acceptance and gradual rejection” was repeated several times.

“I think that rejection largely came as a nationalistic reaction to the West,” Fujiwara observes. “There was a slogan in the 19th century: ‘Japanese soul and Western technology.’ While accepting Western civilization, they wanted to keep the Japanese soul untouched. They certainly did not want to accept the Western soul — i.e., Christianity.”

People crowded into churches again as Japan boomed after World War II. “But they left like an ocean tide, saying, ‘We graduated Christianity,’ or ‘Christianity was good, but we are done with it,’” says Fujiwara. “They have to be touched by God. Their hearts must be penetrated by the Gospel so that they may start living as disciples.”

Christian institutions are still respected in modern Japan, particularly the many schools and colleges begun by missionaries. But the number of believers remains low as modern Japan has become increasingly secular.

“They really believe that in themselves they have what they need, which makes it very difficult to share the Gospel,” says International Mission Board missionary Gary Fujino. “What we need is for people to be shaken and realize that you need something outside of yourself — God.”

The triple trauma of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis may have accomplished that, according to Fujiwara:

“The foundation of the earth was shaken; the houses we lived in were washed out by the tsunami. The atomic power stations that we were told were safe exploded. Something we trusted was broken down. People are asking, ‘Why has this happened?’ ‘Can we still go on?’ If this could not open people’s hearts, what else could?”

Some cracks in the façade already were appearing before the quake. Japan, an aging society, has struggled for years with economic and social stagnation.

Books and periodicals about Christ have been hot sellers since last year, according to Japanese publishers. One of the top bookstores in Tokyo’s business district dedicated a special section to the topic. Two issues of a national magazine with cover stories headlined “What is Christianity?” and “What is Christianity II” sold out within weeks.

In the quake zone, meanwhile, more than 170,000 displaced people remain in shelters. Thousands more are living in their cars or in damaged homes with no electricity or water. As more of the neediest areas become accessible, Southern Baptist disaster relief teams are working with Japanese Baptist partners and IMB missionaries to provide such services as food and water distribution, blankets and warm clothing for the elderly and grief counseling.

As they join hands with other Christians to serve the hurting, Fujiwara prays their ministry will change Japan forever.

“My father, who died 20 years ago, was baptized by a Southern Baptist missionary in the postwar period,” he recalls. “I am deeply and forever grateful for that. I want you to imagine with me that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will hear stories like this: ‘The 2011 disaster was terrible, yet God brought good even through that. I remember your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents sacrificed, loved and cared for us at that time. The Gospel was brought to my family then.’”

Not later -- now

Listen to an audio version of this post at
http://media1.imbresources.org/files/126/12619/12619-71205.mp3

A missionary struck up a conversation with a businessman seated next to him on a plane flying over Southeast Asia.

The plane was heading toward an area where the missionary hoped to make new contacts with a people group yet to be reached with the Gospel. He asked in a general way if the businessman knew anything about the group and how to develop relationships with them.

“No problem,” the man replied. “I could introduce you to them. We’ve already been in their villages. We know how to get to their children. I can give you prices.”

Horrified, the missionary realized his seatmate’s business was sex trafficking. The businessman assumed the curious American questioning him was either a customer or wholesaler involved in the same trade.

After all, who else would care about the remote villagers they were discussing?

That missionary is the son-in-law of Tom Elliff, newly elected International Mission Board president. Elliff tells of the encounter to make a point about the mission terms “unreached” and “unengaged” — often used to describe the thousands of people groups with little or no Gospel witness.

“We’re actually deluding ourselves to say that they are unengaged or unreached,” Elliff says. “What we should say is that they are unengaged by us and unreached by the Gospel, because other people already have engaged them.”

Those others include not only criminals but legitimate corporations, humanitarian groups, governments — anyone who is serious enough about connecting with a group of people to “pay the price to get there,” Elliff explains. Their motivation may be to help or to exploit, but seldom to share the love of Jesus Christ.

“If it’s worth the price, we must go to the uttermost now,” Elliff says. Not in the next generation. Not after Christians solve all their church problems. Not after they get local and national politics straightened out. Now.

That’s why he seized the opportunity of his acceptance speech — immediately following his March 16 election by IMB trustees — to issue a bold challenge to Southern Baptists: Engage all of the estimated 3,800 people groups worldwide that have yet to be touched by the Gospel.

“I intend to introduce at the [June] 2011 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention a very simple plan by which each one of these 3,800 unengaged people groups can be embraced by a Southern Baptist congregation,” Elliff told trustees.

“I believe we can accomplish this in one year. Just think about that for a moment. Should Jesus grant us the days, by the 2012 Southern Baptist Convention meeting, we would be able to say that, to our knowledge, every people group on this globe has some church committed to take specific steps to strategize, to pray over, to learn about and discover some way that the Gospel witness can be shared with those people.”

Can it be done?

Local churches have many God-given ministries: worship, preaching and teaching, discipleship, caring for the needs of believers, evangelizing lost people close at hand, feeding the poor, visiting the sick. These days, they’re carrying out those tasks in a tough environment of increasing secularism, rapidly changing communities and social norms, conflicting demands from members and a still-struggling economy.

Effective international mission work, meanwhile, has become an enormously complex and expensive task — often conducted in hostile conditions — requiring in-depth cultural knowledge, detailed logistics and careful cooperation with like-minded partners. It calls for well-trained workers with a high degree of commitment — good missionaries, in other words.

But missionaries can’t get the job done alone. And they aren’t sent by mission boards and agencies; they are sent by local churches.

Missionaries are “your boots on the ground,” Elliff said. But fulfilling the Great Commission is “going to require local churches … becoming burdened for the unengaged and the unreached of this world, signing on, creating vital partnerships. This is not a new way of doing missions. This is a biblical way of doing missions — and your missionaries are eager for you to step up to the plate.”

If a time ever required boldness, “it is this day,” he said. “[You] can’t simply be content to say you’re for church … and the Rotary and good government and low taxes and oh, by the way, you’re for missions. It is something that is going to have to consume us.”

For all its challenge and complexity in our day, taking the Gospel to all peoples remains primarily a matter of the will. Will we pay the price of obedience to God’s command, or not?

Still answering "the call"

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/120/12078/12078-66968.mp3

A friend from high school days contacted me last week with some exciting news — and a question.

“My 14-year-old daughter believes God is calling her to be a missionary,” he said. “Where does she need to go to learn about what she needs to do to prepare for this calling?”

This young woman doesn’t just have some vague sense of leading toward mission work. She feels specifically called to go to a large country in Asia where millions of people have yet to hear the Gospel of Christ.

With all the ways churches, volunteers and Christian groups can now do international missions in a globalized world, you might think the old-fashioned, individual “call” to missionary service has gone out of style. Some folks have even said as much.

Maybe God didn’t get that e-mail. He still seems to call certain people to follow Him into the world — not for a week, a month or a year, but for life.

“A 13-year-old called me earlier this week” with that kind of aspiration, says Joye Russell, who counsels potential future missionaries contacting the International Mission Board for the first time. She hears from three or four teens a month, sometimes more. You can call her or her colleague, Pat Thorpe, toll free at (888) 422-6461.

“We talk to people from ages 8 to 80,” adds Russell, herself a former missionary to Africa. But guiding young people, she says, “is especially close to my heart because I felt the call to missions at age 12 and my pastor didn’t help me at all.” She loves helping kids, teens and young adults seek their place in God’s purpose. The IMB Student Mobilization Team helps many more (visit thetask.org).

Missionary calling is a mysterious thing. Some people can tell you about a single, life-changing moment when God spoke to them clearly. Others talk about a growing sense of leading and purpose over many years. Despite the subjective nature of “the call,” few evangelical mission agencies will send someone as a long-term missionary who lacks a clear sense that God is telling them to go. And when the going gets tough overseas, few missionaries will make it without such a sense of call.

An IMB guide for prospective missionaries describes it this way:

“Those who are called to a special task [have] a specific sense of God’s leadership in their lives. That may come in a dramatic spiritual experience or in reflecting on how God has led you through a series of circumstances. Many experience this personal leadership to overseas missions service when they are involved in a short-term missions project. God may affirm that they are doing exactly what He has called them to do. Everyone experiences this call in a different way. How has God spoken to your heart?”

Regarding preparation for a young person sensing “the call” to eventual missionary service, here are some suggestions I gave to my friend’s daughter:

-- Pray. Love the Lord. Worship Him. Spend time alone with Him just as Jesus did. Seek Him, not for any of His gifts, but for Himself alone. Learn His Word. Worship is the purpose of missions because God wants all peoples to worship Him.

-- Pray for the area of the world toward which you feel called. Learn about the peoples, history and current events there, as well as other places in the world where God is working.

-- Read the biographies of great missionaries through the ages. And learn about some of today’s mission heroes.

-- Become a pen pal or Facebook friend with a young missionary on the field. Learn about how his or her life is being used for God, about the victories, defeats and realities of living in another culture.

-- Get to know the world at your doorstep. Make friends with and minister to immigrants, international students and refugees. Learn a second language and use it in ministry.

-- Go on a mission trip overseas. This is the great opportunity today’s Christians have that previous generations didn’t. Most current long-term missionaries started as volunteers or short-term workers.

-- Pray about a gap year between high school and college when you could serve in missions in the United States or abroad. Serving after college is great, too. But in the meantime, don’t become so committed to a relationship, a career, a mortgage or other obligations that they make you less available to God.

Russell also shares these essentials with young people she counsels:

-- Develop your God-given gifts and skills through vital involvement in your church and your community.

-- Become an active Gospel sharer (if you aren’t one already). Get evangelism training if you need it.

-- Stay healthy. Take care of yourself.

-- Stay as debt-free as possible. Debt keeps people off the mission field.

I’m praying for my friend’s daughter — and for all the other young people still being called by God to missionary service.

They came. They saw. They left ....

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/111/11144/11144-60650.mp3

At least 40 years into the “age of the volunteer” in world missions, debate still rages about whether short termers are a blessing or a curse.

Peruse mission journals or blogs, and you will find articles celebrating or questioning the ongoing volunteer phenomenon, which has seen tens of thousands of lay church members travel abroad to preach the Gospel.

At one end of the philosophical spectrum are those who believe volunteers have transformed and revitalized missions, returned the global mission task to its proper owner — the local church — and mobilized several generations of believers to take the Gospel to the nations. At the other extreme are critics who warn that “amateur missionaries” on vacation with good intentions and poor preparation make little positive impact for the kingdom of God abroad — and do actual harm in some instances.

I don’t pretend to be objective in the debate: I’m pro-volunteer. I’ve been making the case for mission volunteerism since the late 1970s. A week after finishing college, I signed on with Southern Baptists’ new Mission Service Corps program for long-term volunteers and started writing feature stories about other volunteers working throughout America. A few years later I joined the Foreign (now International) Mission Board news staff and began to see volunteers in action overseas.

In those days, some missionaries grumbled about having to take time from their ministries to “baby-sit” visiting volunteers, find something productive for them to do, keep them from causing an international incident, etc. Time passed, however, and more and more lay volunteers came to serve. Open-minded missionaries — and even some of the grouches — began to discover how valuable volunteers could be in evangelism, relief work, launching new ministries, even penetrating new regions and people groups with the Gospel. When they went home, excited volunteers told about their spiritual adventures and got their churches involved in supporting and participating in missions.

Today, most new missionaries point back to experiences they had as volunteers or shorter-term workers as key moments in their journey to a life commitment to missions.

Still, the critics make some valid points about volunteering. There’s a right way — and many wrong ways — to do volunteer missions. Church teams that “parachute” into an overseas location, make no attempt to work with or even contact missionaries and local believers and proceed to do their own thing seldom produce real results. They often claim hundreds or thousands of “converts,” few of whom can be found a week after the volunteer team goes home.

A missionary friend in Southeast Asia has worked for many years in a land that gets many such visitors. They come. They look around. They leave. Few return.

“People come and go by the planeload with great intentions to ‘save’” the nation, he says. “Nearly every plane that lands has one or two mission teams on it. Many mission trips are little more than ‘Christian tourism,’ where you hit a few key sites and bypass thousands of less-prominent locations.”

He calls it “hit-and-run evangelism.”

“I know there are tons of great people who love [this country] and are doing all they can to see change,” he stresses. However, “to see change in culture, to see change in community, requires one very important element. It is not church permits, national strategies, education, money, buildings, infrastructure, good governance, electricity, high-speed Internet, systematic training, dedicated locals, training materials, pioneering missionaries, more mission teams, more preachers, more Bible schools, more NGOs, more parachurch organizations, more churches, more pastors. Nope. All those are good and eventually will be developed, but what is needed is far more mundane: time to exert influence.

“To really see [this nation] changed, we need people who are called of God and willing to commit their lives here. To gain the trust of the people requires time. To build relationships requires time. To learn a language requires time. To develop key strategies requires time. To have influence requires time.”

Besides the love of Christ, time is the most important thing missionaries can give to the people they serve. Day after day, month after month, year after year — but, ideally, not one hour longer than it takes to prepare local believers to take over the work.

Volunteers who want to make a difference are wise if they seek such servants.

“The local church is waking up to its role in the Great Commission, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need God-called, culturally trained, long-term missionaries who passionately love and deeply understand the people groups they are assigned to,” writes Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt in his new book, Get Connected: Mobilizing Your Church for God’s Mission (order at imb.org/GetConnectedBook).

Hunt, pastor since 1987 at First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Ga., led a church that hadn’t produced a missionary in 150 years to be one of the most strategic mission mobilization centers in America. It sends out hundreds of volunteers each year and partners with missionaries in some of the most challenging places on earth. But Woodstock never does “Lone Ranger” missions, if Hunt has anything to do with it.

“I see a lot of churches led by enthusiastic young pastors who ride off to the mission field with no vision, no strategic relationship, no plan,” he observes. “They ‘fire a shot’ here and there and come home with some great stories, but it often ends there. Don’t try to be Indiana Jones, the solo hero who barely makes it back alive. Be a team player, a coach and a mobilizer. … Work with a knowledgeable mission partner who knows his field. You’ll make a much more lasting impact.”

Amen to that.

The Word and the word

Listen to an audio version of this post at
http://media1.imbresources.org/files/109/10955/10955-58545.mp3

Words are so last-millennium, dude.

Children of the digital age are growing up with a different kind of literacy, we are told. They learn to understand the world not through complete sentences, paragraphs and books, but through ever-changing sounds, images and micro-bursts of text delivered via their digital devices and social media of choice.

“Zits,” a comic strip that should be required reading for parents, captured the ambivalence of this new reality in a recent panel. Clueless Mom, who never quits trying to connect with her monosyllabic teen son, approaches him at the fridge:

“And how was your day?” Mom asks.

“Joyous,” son Jeremy replies while downloading an armful of snacks. “Tragic. Intense. Deadly boring. There was victory, defeat, suspense, pathos, gluttony, conflict and passion.”

“Wow,” says Mom, stunned by his sudden eloquence.

“And that was just the text messages,” Jeremy adds. LOL (that’s textspeak for “laugh out loud”).

Yes, the digital revolution seems to be moving many people toward non-print communication — or in the case of texters, forms of print that few readers of past generations would recognize.

It’s a place where much of the world already lives. Four billion people, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population, are oral learners, according to mission researchers. They communicate, learn, perceive reality and embrace core beliefs through orally expressed stories, narratives, songs and proverbs, not through books, magazines, newspapers and other forms of print communication traditionally preferred by literate cultures.

Some oral learners are non-literate because of lack of education. Many others, however, belong to the thousands of oral cultures of the globe. Even if they have a formal, written language (many don’t), it isn’t the way they prefer to interact with the world. Millions of Americans belong to that group.

Bible “storying” — accurately communicating the Word of God and the stories of the Bible to oral people through oral means — has revolutionized missions in recent years. It’s not really a new mission strategy, however. Rather, it’s the rediscovery of a very old one.

“Stories about Jesus and His teachings circulated widely by oral means for decades before they were written in the Gospels,” says Grant Lovejoy, director of Orality Strategies at the International Mission Board. “Those who believed what they heard were genuinely saved and they formed authentic Christian churches without the benefit of reading a copy of the New Testament. Churches were well-established around the Mediterranean basin before the books of the New Testament were written.”

The Israelites before them, likewise, learned the Word of God primarily through oral means: public reading, passing on stories within families from generation to generation. Yet “God was able to raise up a distinctive and holy people for His own, despite their very limited literacy and infrequent (or nonexistent) opportunity to read His written revelation,” Lovejoy observes. “We need creative strategies to communicate God’s message in non-print methods such as face-to-face witness, Bible storytelling, radio broadcasts and distribution of audio and video.”

None of this undermines the primacy of the written Word of God. It is alive and active, the source and fountainhead of our faith. The challenge in an oral world is communicating Bible truth to people who are unable or unwilling to read it.

Nor should we underestimate the power of words themselves in communicating the Gospel. Words don’t get a lot of respect in the age of multimedia, but they are the building blocks of stories, sermons, songs, drama — and of personal evangelism, the most powerful form of Christian witness. Yes, you have to “walk the talk.” Yes, actions speak louder than words. But words speak.

“Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words,” said St. Francis of Assisi. In a time of massive ignorance about the basics of the Gospel, even in churches, words are necessary.

The country preacher’s recipe for a good three-point sermon still works: “I tell ‘em what I’m gonna tell ‘em. Then I tell ‘em. Then I tell ‘em what I done told ‘em.”

So does Newsweek editor Jon Meacham’s advice to politicians, which also applies to anyone interested in leading others to follow Christ: “First, explain relentlessly. Second, tell us how what you are explaining will lead us to a better place, and describe that place. Assume nothing; repeat yourself until you are numb. Only then will the message begin to sink in.”
If your words match your walk, the message will find its mark. “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” (Proverbs 25:11, KJV).

Note to the boss: Thank you

Dear Jerry Rankin: I knew this day would come, but I wasn’t looking forward to it.

You’re retiring next summer as president of IMB (International Mission Board). When you made the announcement to our trustees, I thought back to the days leading up to your election 16 years ago.

At the time, you were a missionary and mission administrator who’d been in Asia for 23 years. By your own admission, you were quite happy on the field where God had called you — and you weren’t all that excited about dealing with Southern Baptist bureaucracy and politics back home.

You said you felt “inadequate to the task.” You were reluctant to take on the gargantuan job of leading the largest evangelical missionary-sending agency during “a peak of controversy regarding control of leadership roles among Southern Baptist Convention entities.”

You weren’t the only one with doubts. The convention was still reeling from years of painful struggle over its theology and identity. Your distinguished predecessor, R. Keith Parks, had crossed swords with multiple critics while leading the mission board toward new strategies to reach the world with the Gospel.

I can’t speak for other folks, but some of us grizzled reporter types in the old IMB newsroom thought you were going to get taken apart limb from limb in the first year.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. I think we all underestimated you.

You’ve led us through some tough times, to be sure. You’ve taken your share of criticism — some of it fair, some of it misguided and wrong. I’ve grumbled myself a few times.

Today, though, I want to thank you for stepping up and taking the heat, even when it hurt. For spending countless nights away from home in dodgy airplanes and dingy Third World airports. For attending innumerable meetings. For preaching thousands of mission messages to churches at home. And for walking beside thousands of missionaries and Christian servants in some of the darkest places on earth.

More than that, thank you for being a disciplined and visionary leader from day one.

I’ve never heard you speak to an audience or congregation without using these three words: “a lost world.” Not once. I got tired of hearing it — until I realized it wasn’t a phrase but a consuming passion within you. The fact that so many millions of people have yet to hear the name of Jesus Christ actually breaks your heart. I want it to break mine.

By far the biggest challenges IMB missionaries and staff have faced during your tenure have involved not convention politics or economic difficulties but the “main thing”: How do we reach a lost world with the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ? As a leader, you have never taken your eye off that all-important task, given to us by the Lord Himself in Matthew 28:19: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations …”

All nations, not just the ones that are open, friendly or willing to grant missionary visas. And not just all “nations” as we understand them in the political sense, but all peoples — in all their staggering cultural, ethnic and linguistic variety. That is how God sees the world, and He wants all the peoples of the world to worship Him in spirit and truth.

The magnitude of that command led you to become not a denominational bureaucrat but a revolutionary. As a field missionary who started out in an earlier era, you first had to revolutionize your own thinking about missions. You embraced new strategies you once questioned and aggressively spread them throughout a global enterprise.
You declared that the International Mission Board would no longer talk about reaching the whole world while sending missionaries only to part of it. Rather, we would mobilize Southern Baptists and other Great Commission-minded Christians to do whatever it takes to plant churches among every unreached, unevangelized and unengaged people group.

In a day when people demand hands-on involvement, you declared we would move beyond simply sending missionaries. Instead, we would make local Southern Baptist churches — regardless of their size — full strategic partners in the task of global missions. That is their biblical role, after all, something often forgotten in the age of professional missions.

It’s not always easy working with a revolutionary — especially one who advocates continuous revolution in pursuit of a grand vision. You have initiated two major IMB reorganizations (the latest is still unfolding) and many smaller ones during your tenure. Missionary and staff assignments have changed and changed again. Strongly held beliefs about mission methods have been repeatedly challenged. Comfort zones have been abolished.

And you’re still pushing and prodding us to take the next step.

Has it been worth all the blood, sweat and tears? As an occasionally queasy rider on the “Rankin Express” for the past 16 years, I say yes.

A large, traditional mission board now embraces new and even experimental strategies to impact lostness. An organization once known for going it alone now aggressively pursues mission partners overseas and church partners at home. I’m not exactly objective, but in an era suspicious of all institutions, I honestly believe IMB is more relevant than ever to people who seriously want to reach the nations.

You helped get us to this point, Jerry. Where your continuous energy comes from, I don’t know. Deep prayer, I suspect, and powerful coffee.

Thank you for being passionate and not just talking about it. Thank you for taking spiritual warfare seriously. Thank you for being obsessed — in a holy way — with a lost world.

When a reporter asked about your legacy a few years back, you responded: “I would like to be able to say, ‘We can no longer identify a people group that doesn’t have access to the Gospel.’ To me, that’s the essence of what we’re about.”

We’re not there yet, Jerry. But we’re a lot closer than we were 16 years ago.

Fatima's story

Listen to an audio version of this post at
http://media1.imbresources.org/files/67/6726/6726-37950.mp3

I still think about Fatima, a 15-year-old girl who almost became a perishable product.

She ran to greet us five years ago at a Christian shelter in north India — a safe place for women and children rescued from slavery, forced prostitution and human traffickers.

Her smile shone as brightly as her yellow sari. She was learning to read and sew, to sing and laugh. She recited the Lord’s Prayer by heart and was getting to know the One who taught it. She didn’t go to bed hungry anymore. She knew someone cared whether she lived or died.

Fatima’s father pulled a rickshaw in Kolkata (Calcutta). She never went to school. When she reached age 6, her abusive stepmother forced her to start cooking and cleaning for the rest of the family. She also worked cutting rubber to make sandals — one rupee (about 2 cents) for 12 straps.

When Fatima was 14, her stepmother took her to a “youth hostel” and left her there. It turned out to be a brothel.

When her first customer came to her room, Fatima hit him on the head with a hard-soled shoe and fled. She walked 20 kilometers to the main train station in Kolkata. A child protective agency found her there and sent her by train to the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. On arrival she was taken to the Christian shelter.

“She was very tense and afraid,” recalled the shelter director. “She shouted, ‘Leave me alone!’ She thought she was being brought to another brothel.” But Fatima was among friends at last.

If only every child in her position could find such a sanctuary.

Human trafficking is a business. More to the point in these brutal economic times, it’s a very profitable business. Like any other business, it has employers and employees, buyers and sellers, supply and demand.

The only difference: The products of this business are people — like Fatima, who was about to be consumed when she jumped off the shelf and escaped.

These human products are bought and sold, used and abused via prostitution, pornography, “entertainment,” slavery, forced labor and other forms of exploitation. When they reach their “use-by” date, the industry tosses them aside and goes after new inventory.

That’s the case in north India, one of the biggest crossroads of human trafficking. Beset by too many mouths to feed, poor villagers often sell young daughters outright to sex traffickers, who turn a profit by selling them to urban brothels.

When I visited the region in 2003, traffickers could buy a village girl from neighboring Nepal for 10,000 rupees (about $200 at the time) and sell her in Delhi for up to 60,000 rupees ($1,200) — “depending on her color, texture and size,” according to a local observer.

Sometimes, parents “mortgage” a daughter for a few years. By the time they save enough to redeem her, “she has suffered a lot,” said a local Christian leader who fights the sex trade.

“These girls usually start around age 14,” he said. “By the time they are 18 or 19, they’re finished” — exhausted, brutalized, infected with AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, turned out on the street to beg or starve.

Between 12 million and 27 million people worldwide are involved in some type of forced servitude, according to various estimates.
Up to 800,000 are trafficked across international borders each year – the majority being women and children swept up into the sex trade.

Lest we think it’s all “over there” somewhere, more than 14,000 foreign nationals are imported annually into sexual or domestic/sweatshop slavery in our own land of the free, according to U.S. government statistics. An estimated 200,000 American children, meanwhile, are “at risk for trafficking into the sex industry,” reports the U.S. Department of Justice.

Recent investigations of the growth of globe-spanning organized crime syndicates miss the true magnitude of “how far people themselves have become merchandise, as indentured laborers, domestic slaves, child thieves, child soldiers, child prostitutes, babies for sale … and organ suppliers,” writes Peter Robb in The New York Times. “All move around the world with the collusion of customs, immigration, police, social services, charities and aid agencies.”

Bear in mind, also, that human trafficking is only the third-largest criminal enterprise on a global scale. Drug dealing and illegal arms trafficking are even bigger operations. And the United States is the world’s largest recreational drug market, with Mexico being one of its largest suppliers.

That’s why civilians reportedly ran a higher risk — more than three times higher, per capita — of being killed last year in the Mexican border city of Juarez than in Baghdad, Iraq. Out of a population of 1.6 million, some 1,800 people were gunned down in 2008 in Juarez, where heavily armed drug gangs battle police and government forces in broad-daylight shootouts for access to key entry points to the United States.

Many evangelical Christians have become passionately involved in fighting human trafficking and other global evils through education, social action and legislation. That is in the best tradition of biblical justice.

But it’s not enough.

Laws, no matter how aggressively enforced, cannot change hearts. Nations that tolerate or participate in the buying and selling of human beings need something more fundamental. They need spiritual transformation — and we must seek it on their behalf through the transforming power of the Gospel.

That’s what William Wilberforce preached as a follower of Christ and an impassioned supporter both of missions and social change, even as he fought successfully as a member of Parliament to end the slave trade in the British Empire.

“Evil and injustice are rampant in our world today; carnal values and immorality are pervasive in our own society and throughout the world,” writes International Mission Board President Jerry Rankin in his new book, Spiritual Warfare: the Battle for God’s Glory (B&H Books, 2009; order at http://imbresources.org/).

However, the notion that human evil has somehow grown beyond God’s power to defeat it, Rankin warns, “is not biblical and clearly demeans who God is and His power. It also dismisses the victory Christ has won on the cross and God’s redemptive activity as irrelevant.”

If the Lord’s declaration in Psalm 46:10 is true, He promises: “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

That includes India, the United States, Mexico and every other nation that is robbing Him of His glory today.

Location, location, location (expanded)

(Listen to an audio version of this post at
http://media1.imbresources.org/files/62/6230/6230-33955.mp3)

The lightning speed with which the global economic crisis has spread from one financial capital to another — heedless of national borders — seems to confirm a basic tenet of globalization: The world is flat.

Writer Thomas Friedman made that proposition famous with his influential book of the same name (The World Is Flat: Expanded Edition Thomas L. Friedman). The basic idea: Interconnected technology, trade, communication and mobility have tied us all together so tightly that national and cultural barriers are becoming increasingly porous, even irrelevant.

Not so fast.

In a new book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape, Michigan State University professor Harm de Blij argues that location still matters — a lot.

“Earth may be a planet of shrinking functional differences, but it remains a world of staggering situational differences,” de Blij writes. “From the uneven distribution of natural resources to the unequal availability of opportunity, place remains a powerful arbitrator. Many hundreds of millions of farmers in river basins of Asia and Africa live their lives much as their distant ancestors did, still remote from the forces of globalization. …

“In their lifetimes, this vast majority will have worn the garb, spoken the language, professed the faith, shared the health conditions, absorbed the education, acquired the attitudes, and inherited the legacy that constitutes the power of place: the accumulated geography whose formative imprint still dominates the planet.”

“Global playing fields” are leveling for many, de Blij acknowledges. But he warns that assuming a homogenized, borderless, “flat” world is now the rule — just because you can find identical high-rises, malls and office parks “from Minneapolis to Mumbai” — is a mistake. The urban economic boom of China and high-tech industries of India get plenty of publicity. Out in the rural vastness of both Asian giants, however, countless millions continue to struggle for existence — seemingly a universe away from the growth centers of their own nations.

Despite modern mobility and massive migrations, fewer than 3 percent of human beings are “mobals” who live in a country where they were not born. An even smaller minority make up the “globals” who have access to all the advantages of modern technology and travel. The rest of us are “locals” — still tied, for better or worse, to the cultures that spawned us.

So why has the International Mission Board begun to move away from dividing its missionaries by location or region — South Asia, West Africa, etc. — and toward “global affinity groups” that focus on peoples sharing the same language, culture or ethnicity?

Because “place” is a state of mind and heart as much as a physical location. The most powerful “place” is culture.

Even though the vast majority of humans still are “locals,” their migrating “mobal” cousins often hold the key to reaching them. The new “global affinity groups” will be designed so missionaries can more effectively engage unreached peoples regardless of their location.

“This move recognizes the mobility of populations,” explains Gordon Fort, IMB vice president of overseas operations. “(It) allows us to focus on peoples wherever they are in the world.”

Missionaries will still focus on peoples living in specific locations — most unreached South Asians still live in South Asia, after all. But they won’t be “artificially limited by geopolitical considerations,” as Fort puts it. Millions of South Asians have migrated to other parts of the world and often are more accessible in their new homes.

Christians must continue to traverse both literal and figurative back roads, dirt tracks, mountains and valleys to take the Gospel to every people — even in the chaotic cultural environment of megacities. There is no “flat” superhighway to world evangelization.

“In our current rush to embrace the rewards of global ‘flattening,’ it is worth reminding ourselves that point of entry continues to matter when it comes to opportunities in reach,” de Blij writes.

For transmitting the love of Christ to all peoples, our key points of entry are language, culture and ethnicity. That means mobilizing churches, missionaries and local believers to take the Gospel to every part of the globe’s “rough landscape” — whether the “place” is a physical location or a cultural/spiritual stronghold.