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.

‘Pray for my friends,’ 8-year-old asks

                                                
                                                    

Jacob,* age 8, probably isn’t up to speed on the cultural and spiritual struggles going on in America.

He’s a kid, for one thing. He doesn’t live in the United States most of the time, for another. His parents are Southern Baptist workers in North Africa and the Middle East.

He doesn’t understand why far more violent conflicts are exploding around him and his family, either. He just knows that he misses his friends.

See, Jacob is sort of a refugee. His family had to leave the country where they were serving because of potential threats. They’re serving in another place for now, but leaving the home and people they love has been hard on all of them — especially Jacob.

“This past year I have had to move around a lot,” Jacob wrote in a recent prayer message to American kids. “I love playing sports and meet lots of friends by playing sports at clubs. I have lived in three different countries in [North Africa and the Middle East]. In each of those countries I have friends that I have made by playing sports. 

 “These friends are just like me,” Jacob said. “But they don’t know about Jesus. Please pray that these friends of mine would come to know Jesus. Also pray for them to be safe, as they all live in very unsafe countries where there are wars and bombs and really bad people. Pray that these bad people would come to know Jesus, too. Pray that it would be safer in these countries, so I can go back to them and see my friends.”

I could leave it there, since Jacob’s words are more powerful than anything I might add. But I read his simple plea for prayer as Southern Baptists, at their 2014 annual meeting in Baltimore June 10-11, were doing some soul-searching about struggling churches, declining baptism rates and the lack of evangelism in an increasingly secular culture.

 “God, please forgive us for not being obedient and sharing the Good News of the Gospel with those in our community,” outgoing Southern Baptist Convention President Fred Luter prayed during the meeting, after noting that 80 percent of Southern Baptist churches baptize only one person per year between the ages of 18 and 29.

“America is rapidly … turning into a pagan nation,” Luter said, and the cure — the only cure — is the name of Jesus.

But do we really believe that? Do we really believe that Jesus is the only way to reconciliation and personal relationship with God? Beyond all the debate about the best evangelism tools and strategies and approaches to employ in a rapidly changing culture, that is the fundamental question: Do we still believe it ourselves?

In an aggressively “inclusive” environment, perhaps the most countercultural words in the Bible come from Jesus Himself, shortly before His death and resurrection:

“Thomas said to Him, ‘Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.  If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him’” (John 14:5-7, NASB).

This is the heart of the Gospel of Christ, according to the New Testament. There are any number of ways to communicate it and demonstrate it effectively, lovingly and redemptively. You can accept it, reject it or ignore it. But there is no way around it. Jesus is the way to the Father.

Several years ago, R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, observed that the American evangelical church was “losing its voice” just as the opportunity to declare the Gospel worldwide is greater than ever. The issue, he said, is a “failure of theological nerve — a devastating loss of biblical and doctrinal conviction. Put bluntly, many who claim to be Christians simply do not believe that anyone is actually lost.”

The death of missions inevitably follows such a loss of nerve and conviction, since there is no reason to preach the Gospel among all nations if preaching it and hearing it aren’t life-or-death matters.

That brings me back to young Jacob in North Africa and the Middle East. He might not have all the theological arguments and explanations worked out, but he loves his friends. He’s also concerned about the “bad people” setting off bombs and hurting others, even though he’s been forced to move because of the havoc they are causing in the region. He knows they are lost, friends and enemies alike, and that it is indeed a life-or-death matter.

He knows Jesus is Lord and wants them to know it, too. That’s all the theology Jacob needs to obey Christ’s command.

*(Name changed)

It's the size of your heart, not your church

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/156/15602/15602-86086.mp3

Watch a video about Unity Baptist Church and its embrace of a people group in the Sahara:
http://www.imb.org/main/downloads/flashvideos.asp?mvid=13449&mvidext=mp4

Chris Jenkins wants fellow pastors to know something up front: It’s not easy to get your church strategically involved in global missions.

In fact, it might be the hardest thing you ever do.

“I hear the International Mission Board giving us these steps, you do this and you do that, and it sounds easy,” says Jenkins, pastor of Unity Baptist Church, a congregation of about 200 people in semi-rural Prince George, Va. Four years ago, the church called IMB’s prayer office and committed to pray for a nomadic group in the Sahara Desert with more than 300,000 people and only one known Christian.

“We wanted somebody that nobody else wanted,” Jenkins told messengers to the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting in New Orleans during IMB’s convention presentation June 19. “Of course, we just wanted to pray for them and didn’t have a clue what we were getting into.”

They were getting into something that is revolutionizing their church — and might just revolutionize the people group they began visiting in 2010. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Jenkins insists he’s like most pastors: so busy he can barely carve out enough time to handle garden-variety ministry and family life — much less a major commitment to an unknown group thousands of miles away.

“When you’re dealing with a couple hundred people in your congregation and they all have a different idea of what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s hard to put rubber to the road,” he admits. “You’re dealing with hospital visits and marriages falling apart and teenagers getting in trouble at school. You’ve got single moms trying to pay the bills and they need help with their kids. Then you’re trying to have a family of your own. [Jenkins and his wife have three foster children in addition to their own two children.]

“You want the church to be missional, but it’s overwhelming.”

Yet Jenkins and his flock couldn’t ignore God’s call to the nations. Unity has become one of hundreds of churches and entities to act on their commitment to embrace an unengaged, unreached people group.

Before, “We liked to talk like we were a church on mission, but we really knew it was just a show,” he told listeners during the IMB program. “We were more concerned with what was going on inside the four walls [of the church] instead of out.” After Unity’s first trip to the Sahara in 2010, their whole outlook began to change — beginning with Jenkins himself.

“God kind of slapped me around a little bit” on that trip, he reflects. “I was getting comfortable as a pastor. I was getting comfortable doing American ministry. … I saw people, thousands of miles away, that are going through things I could never imagine going through, and they have no one in their life sharing with them that God cares. … How in the world are they going to know it unless we’re out there with our hearts, pouring ’em out, with our hands, getting ’em dirty, and with our voices telling people about the Good News of Jesus Christ?”

That first journey — and three more since — have changed priorities at Unity. Some members are selling cars and taking second jobs, even planning for early retirement, to get involved in the Sahara mission, according to Jenkins. “And what we’ve learned on the global side certainly has helped us on the local side” — whether it’s reaching out to public schools in Prince George or other ministries.

During his time at the SBC meeting, Jenkins had the chance to share his experience with other pastors, both as a participant in the IMB presentation and in one-on-one conversations around IMB’s “prayer tent” exhibit.

“To be mobilizing others when we’re just getting mobilized, it helps you see the work that God is doing,” he says. “But I feel like a cat in water, too. I dove in and here I am trying to help other people. Sure, we’ve sent four teams, but I’m not ignorant enough to think that we’re an engaging church just because we’ve sent four teams. We’re still learning about our people, what our platform is and how we’re going to raise money for the next 10 or 20 years to do this thing.

“But I want to help churches see that this is not just for mega-churches. You don’t have to have a thousand people in your sanctuary on Sunday morning to be able to adopt an unengaged, unreached people group. If you’ve got 80 people in your church, adopt that people group, be as loud about ’em as you can, find other churches of 80 members to team up with, and you might have a thousand people reaching out to that group one day. It’s for all of us. It doesn’t matter our size; it doesn’t matter our race. … That’s who God has called — the local church.”

The first step, he adds, is to take a first step:

“Start praying for a people group. Start researching and learning about them. It’s amazing what God does in your heart as a pastor and the heart of your congregation as they start to literally embrace a people group, not just on paper. Their heart starts to get wrapped around these people and they start seeing a God-sized call and a God-sized task in reaching them. I came [to the SBC meeting] to talk to pastors and see churches get fired up.”

As IMB President Tom Elliff says, it’s not the size of a church that matters in embracing lost peoples; it’s the size of the heart of a church.

And its pastor’s heart.

Be there

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/154/15420/15420-84831.mp3


Don’t just do something; stand there.

Better yet, kneel there. Be there.

It’s easy to switch the verbs in the old, accusatory challenge to do something — anything — rather than stand around. Lots of preachers, speakers and writers invert the familiar phrase to encourage us to slow down and be still. But it’s hard for us action-oriented Americans to stop and just be. Inaction, even for a moment, seems lazy, unproductive, even weird. We should be multitasking.

Stillness? It’s a little scary.

Yet stillness is where we meet God. To be His heart, His hands and His voice — the International Mission Board’s overarching theme for 2012 — we must lay aside the sound and fury of our ceaseless activities, our personal priorities and our very selves to encounter Him. We need His heart to make a difference in the world; not our divided, selfish hearts. His hands do the healing, not our powerless hands. His voice cuts to the core of searching souls, not our meaningless chatter.

“… If anyone wants to come with Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me,” Jesus says. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of Me will find it” (Matthew 16:24, 25, HCSB).

There’s plenty of positive action cited in that statement: come, take up, follow, save. Before any of that can happen, however, first there’s a negative action, an “inaction,” so to speak: deny self.

If you’re planning to attend the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting in New Orleans June 19-20, I recommend a visit to the IMB exhibit. This year it won’t be a media extravaganza or a place to socialize and pick up lots of free stuff. It will be, in essence, a tent — a place of prayer. There, you will find four stations where you will have the opportunity to deny yourself, to take up your cross, to follow Jesus and to lose your life for Him.

When you emerge, you’ll find visual representations of the thousands of people groups throughout the world who have yet to hear the name of Jesus, much less His loving offer of salvation. They wait for someone with God’s heart, hands and voice to come to them with the joyful news. He longs to send someone. Maybe you are that someone.

But you need to spend time in the tent first — whether it be a physical place or an inner one — to become one with God.

Psalm 46:10 is my favorite mission verse: “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”

Stop. Listen. Know. Be. Only then can you act in obedience — no matter the cost. Only then will you know His power.

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?

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.