Inspiration and perspiration

                                               

                                                  (Bill Koehn at Jibla Baptist Hospital)

Inspiration only gets you so far.

It’s great for starting a major task. As for finishing one — not so much. That’s where commitment comes in.

Winston Churchill, one of the greatest inspirational speakers of the modern age, understood this truth: There’s a time for words and a time for action.

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” Churchill told the British people 75 years ago in May. It was his first address to the House of Commons as prime minister. A fight to the death with the mighty Nazi war machine loomed. Years of suffering lay ahead. America’s entrance into World War II was in doubt, as was the continued existence of Great Britain itself. Many who heard Churchill’s stark words wouldn’t survive the struggle.

He knew what was coming, had no illusions about it. He’d been issuing warnings about it for years from the back benches of Parliament. So he didn’t try to sugarcoat it. His speech, less than four minutes from start to finish, is a stern call to victory at any cost (listen for a bracing lesson in leadership). He knew that solemn day was not a time for soaring rhetoric. It was a time for getting on with the task at hand.

The same applies to servants of a greater cause: God’s global mission.

Don’t get me wrong: As followers of Christ, we need His inspiration every day, every hour, every moment. We need the constant nourishment of His Word and the power of His Spirit to accomplish anything worth doing. We need to encourage and challenge one another.

But then we need to act. Obedience is the truest sign of faith.

Sometimes obedience is hard — especially after the glorious music fades away and the exciting speakers move on. Sometimes the people who raised their hands with you in those high moments of worship and inspiration change their minds when things got hard. They were willing to go anywhere, do anything, until they weren’t. What about you? That’s when you find out if you are serious.

Paul, the first great Christian missionary, didn’t sugarcoat the task for his young friend Timothy:  “You therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. … Suffer hardship with me as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1,3 NASB). And Timothy knew Paul was enduring great hardship.

Many centuries later, another great missionary had similar words. Writing to her friend Annie Armstrong in 1889, Lottie Moon had this to say about daily life in North China:

“Please say to the new missionaries that they are coming to a life of hardship, responsibility and constant self-denial. ... They will be alone in the interior and will need to be strong and courageous. If ‘the joy of the Lord’ be ‘their strength,’ the blessedness of the work will more than compensate for its hardships. Let them come ‘rejoicing to suffer’ for the sake of that Lord and Master who freely gave His life for them.”

Sometimes serving Jesus isn’t particularly hard or dangerous. Sometimes it’s just mundane. Boring, even. Blessed are the plodders who do boring stuff faithfully.

One of the most faithful plodders in Southern Baptist mission history was Bill Koehn. He died in 2002 after being shot point-blank, along with medical missionary colleagues Martha Myers and Kathy Gariety, by a Muslim militant in Yemen. Until then, Koehn, age 60, had spent 28 uneventful years running the Jibla Baptist Hospital as administrator. Relatively uneventful, that is.

The hospital faced the daily challenge of ministering to an endless stream of patients from all over the impoverished Middle Eastern nation. At its peak, the 77-bed mission facility employed several hundred workers, treated some 40,000 people a year, performed more than 400 surgeries a month and operated a busy outpatient clinic. Koehn and his staff also endured extended civil war in Yemen, occasional kidnappings, a disastrous fire, numerous financial crises, ongoing personnel shortages, political pressures and legal battles that threatened to shut down the hospital.

Other than that, it was pretty normal.

How did Koehn cope? The former supermarket manager from Kansas was quiet, predictable, a creature of habit. He operated on a strict daily schedule, starting with prayer and Bible study before dawn and proceeding with clockwork precision until nightfall. Unfinished projects, whether at the hospital or in his woodworking shop, irked him.

“You never called Bill after 9, because he was in bed,” said a longtime colleague.

Koehn’s highly structured style enabled him to handle the countless details and headaches involved in running the hospital. Yet he somehow found the time to make wooden toys for the orphanage he loved to visit, to assist needy widows in the community, to drink tea with Yemenis and listen to their struggles and needs.

Plodders get things done, even on the mission field.

The Apostle James said our lives are but a mist that will soon disappear (James 4:14), IMB President David Platt reminded listeners June 17 during a “Sending Celebration” to recognize 59 new missionaries and their sending churches at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Columbus, Ohio. None of us is guaranteed tomorrow, so we should make our lives count for God now — even in seemingly small things.

“May the urgency of this mission mark us,” Platt said. “May our light shine amidst the darkness, and may our mist count while we’ve still got time.”

Roger Cohen of The New York Times warns about using that precious time to “follow your passion,” as the cliché goes.

“Life is a succession of tasks rather than a cascade of inspiration, an experience that is more repetitive than revelatory, at least on a day-to-day basis,” Cohen writes. “The thing is to perform the task well and find reward even in the mundane. … I’ve grown suspicious of the inspirational. It’s overrated. I suspect duty — that half-forgotten word — may be more related to happiness than we think. Want to be happy? Mow the lawn. Collect the dead leaves. Paint the room. Do the dishes. Get a job. Labor until fatigue is in your very bones. Persist day after day.”

Following your passion is great, as long as your passion is following God. Day by day. One foot in front of another, faithfully. God will multiply every step you give to Him.

(Explore ways to follow God in His global mission.)

Hope, by the numbers

                                                    

Hope is one of the most powerful forces in the world. The absence of hope is like death.

I’ve written in the past about my friend George. He was sincere, thoughtful, funny — and deeply depressed. He eventually hanged himself.

On the last morning of his life, George lay motionless. According to his father (who later found his body), the only words George managed to force through gritted teeth that day were: “No hope. No hope. No hope.”

Hopelessness afflicts many more people than the clinically depressed. It torments millions who think that they have nothing to live for, that the miseries of the present will never go away, that the future holds nothing but more despair.

Hope, on the other hand, leads people in even the most difficult conditions to reach up, to believe in possibilities.

That may seem obvious, but there’s new statistical support for it. A major trial study, involving more than 20,000 people in six countries, has demonstrated that targeted aid aimed at getting extremely poor families out of poverty produces big results with small investments — maybe as small as a single cow or a few goats.

“Why would a cow have such an impact?” asks Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, who wrote recently about the trial. “There’s some indication that one mechanism is hope. Whether in America or India, families that are stressed and impoverished — trapped in cycles of poverty — can feel a hopelessness that becomes self-fulfilling. Give people reason to hope that they can achieve a better life, and that, too, can be self-fulfilling.”

The aid, minimal as it was, motivated recipients to work harder, save more and show more optimism.

“Could hopelessness and stress create a ‘poverty trap’ — abroad or here in the U.S. — in which people surrender to a kind of whirlpool of despair?” Kristof asks. “Some economists and psychologists are finding evidence to support that theory, and experiments are underway to see if raising spirits can lift economic outcomes. Researchers are now studying whether exposure to religion might have a similar effect, improving economic outcomes. If so, Marx had the wrong drug in mind: Religion would not be an opiate of the masses but an amphetamine.”

Kristof, a widely traveled journalist who has praised evangelical humanitarian work in the past, notes the similarity between the program studied in the trial and the models used by Christian development organizations overseas. He adds, “Much of the news about global poverty is depressing, but this is fabulous: a large-scale experiment showing, with rigorous evidence, what works to lift people out of the most extreme poverty. And it’s exhilarating that one of the lessons may be so simple and human: the power of hope.”

These findings also complement the groundbreaking research of sociologist Robert Woodberry, director of the Project on Religion and Economic Change at the National University of Singapore. In country after country, Woodberry began to find a direct correlation between the historical presence and mission activity of “conversionary Protestants” and the advance of freedom, social progress and economic well-being.

In 2005, a $500,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation enabled Woodberry to hire a platoon of research assistants and launch a major database to gather more information. Armed with those results, he was able to assert: “Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in nongovernmental associations.”

By and large, those earlier missionaries weren’t radical social reformers or political revolutionaries. They were bringers of hope. Their gospel ministry connected them to the common people and the poor, whom they sought to serve in the love of Christ. Yes, they started schools, hospitals and various engines of social progress. But most of all, they preached the hope of Christ, started churches and made disciples who carried on the work in subsequent generations.

That work goes on today, as missionaries and their partners find new ways to heal bodies, educate minds, transform cultures and bring the good news to starving souls. One example among many: South Asian women often despair of finding a decent life. Many face domestic abuse. Many more are abandoned to care for their children alone but have no skills to find good work.

With an investment of $3,550 provided by IMB’s Global Hunger Relief, 15 women were trained to create quality jewelry that met market demands better than other jewelry produced by local artisans. An export license was obtained to ship the products out of the country to “fair trade” sales partners.

A year later, the new micro-business is generating enough revenue to stand on its own and even expand to help more at-risk women in rural areas.

“We have employed many ladies who were left by their husbands or divorced,” the project director reported. “[One] lady was abused by her husband and went back to her parents and is going through a divorce. She had a desire to go back to school in order to support herself, but her parents didn’t have the money to send her. Our micro-enterprise provides her with an income that can fund her school ambition. We are gaining a reputation in the community for caring for those who cannot care for themselves and have had many opportunities to share.”

Hope. People need it, crave it, search for it. They will risk their lives to find it, and having found it, will risk their lives to share it with others. That’s why the gospel of Jesus Christ is so powerful — and why it is spreading so rapidly outside the secularized West.

By comparison, all the substitutes offered in its place grow strangely dim. 

Home for Christmas

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/144/14478/14478-80565.mp3

Mom died 10 years ago.

Can it be that long? I still hear her voice, smell her perfume, smile at her throaty laugh. Surely we talked just the other day.

I would give almost anything to talk to her again.

“Don’t forget to call your momma; I wish I could call mine,” counseled the late, great Southern writer and humorist Lewis Grizzard when his mother was long gone. I never understood the ache behind those words until I couldn’t call Mom anymore.

Home is what I’m talking about. Rick Bragg, another Southern writer, put it this way: “You wake up in your momma’s house and you smell the best bacon you’ve ever had. But more than anything you hear her footsteps. You hear her moving around. And you know that everything’s all right … as long as you can hear that sound.”

At Christmas, thoughts turn homeward, even if the home you once knew no longer exists. It lives on in a place beyond time.

“Christmas Eve will find me where the love light beams,” goes the song. “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”

Home. Even folks who never had a happy one long for it. No matter how far we may have wandered, we search for home like the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).

How amazing, then, that Jesus left His home at Christmas, quietly entering this dark world. While we search for home, He searches for us.

Missionaries — or anyone who leaves the comforts of home and crosses cultures to seek wandering souls — follow in His footsteps. They give up the light and warmth of the familiar to share something eternal with those in search of God. They leave home to remind people where they came from.

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” William Wordsworth wrote. “The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home. …”

In recent years, the impact of ongoing violence, political turmoil and family breakdown has driven many young people in India’s Kashmir region to drugs in any form they can find them: over-the-counter medicines, glue, pills — or for the wealthier, LSD or heroin. More than a third of Kashmiris ages 15 to 35 have become drug addicts, according to unofficial estimates. But a few Muslim-background followers of Christ are reminding them of what they really need.

“I used to drink bottles of codeine every night in order to go to sleep,” said a tall, clean-shaven student in the traditional woolen cloak worn to beat back Kashmiri winters. “I was causing so much pain to my family and living the life of an addict, until I found Christ and was taken in by a group of believers.”

In East Asia, a team of believers traveled five hours on a winding, rocky road before reaching a village overshadowed by a huge monastery. They met a shop owner and one of the team members began sharing Christ with her. She looked stunned as she said, “You are in a village of monks. We are all Buddhists.”

The Christian smiled and said, “We know. That is why we came.” He introduced another team member who had lived as a Buddhist monk in a monastery for 18 years. The former monk said, “I prayed, chanted and meditated for hours every single day, but I did not have peace.” Then he asked the shop owner, “Do you have peace?”

Elsewhere in Asia, a man filled with resentment and hatred over past hurts prepared to buy a gun on the black market to murder his father and stepmother. His sister — unaware of his plan — invited him for a visit. He was amazed to observe how his sister had changed since she had accepted Christ a few years earlier. He abandoned his plan for vengeance, embraced Christ and was baptized.

Soon after, he received a call from his father, who was seriously ill. The new believer forgave his father, told him about Jesus and prayed for him. He used the money he had saved for a gun to help pay for his father’s medical treatment. His father recovered and now attends a church, seeking to learn the ways of God.

Our true home is with God, and Christ is the way to get there. Let’s go home for Christmas.

Thankful for small things

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God works through big events that shake the world. He also works through little, life-changing moments that transform individual lives.

There’s been plenty of big stuff this year: global economic turmoil, revolutions reshaping the Arab world, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and fires. It’s some of the “small” stories that return to my mind, though, as Thanksgiving approaches. Here are a few from my annual thankful list, as told by International Mission Board writers around the world:

* Kiyoshi Sugioka entered a busy Tokyo train station with a single purpose in mind — to end his life by jumping in front of a train. The former high-powered investment manager had lost his job, his money, his family, his home and his honor in a financial scandal. “It wasn’t that I wanted to die,” Sugioka recalled. “It was that I didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to erase my existence.”

He stood at the edge of the platform, looking left and right for approaching trains. Then he remembered a man he had met a year before — IMB missionary Josh Park. He fished Park’s phone number out of his pocket and called him. They met. “I just listened to him talk,” Park said. “I remembered that he wasn’t interested in hearing the Gospel. Then he said, ‘Tell me about God.’” After Park shared the message of salvation, Sugioka prayed to receive Christ.

Today, he works as an accountant, a job he found through a church friend. But he has higher priorities than money. “The people of Japan are very affluent, but their hearts are in poverty,” he says. “The people of Japan need restructuring of their hearts.” (See his story in this video: http://media1.imbresources.org/files/137/13728/13728-77173.mpg.)

* April marked a time of annual remembrance in Rwanda as the nation reflected on the 1994 Hutu-led genocide, when more than 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were slaughtered. While unity is slowly returning, genuine forgiveness is difficult. Many still suffer from the emotional trauma of seeing their families killed.

Georgina Nkubito lost several relatives during the genocide and often sees the Hutu extremists who killed her family. “During April it is hard because of what we have experienced,” she said. “However, we try to be patient when we meet those who wanted to kill us. We remember that the Bible says if you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven.” (See the story of Nkubito and her husband at http://www.africastories.org/unthinkable-forgiveness/video-surviving-genocide/.)

* On a night like so many others in this South Asian country, multiple sirens blared — ambulances taking the ill and the injured to local hospitals. But no siren sounded for Solomon.

A frail bundle of infected wounds, Solomon lay covered by a white tarp, left on the street next to a trash heap to die. Few noticed him. Such bundles are a common sight in a place where dying on the street is a way of life. But a missionary passing by saw Solomon and wept. She called her husband, who discovered the young man was still alive. He called a missionary doctor friend who spent the afternoon trying to convince a local hospital to admit the broken, emaciated man.
Solomon, perhaps 18, still had the strength to raise his head and look at the strangers. He smiled as he gripped a missionary’s hand. Probably for the first time, he heard the name of Isa (Jesus). He heard that Isa loves him, that he could call upon Isa. He died the next day in the hospital. “Though Solomon has passed from this life, we can praise the Lord that he heard His name before death,” the missionary said. “We hope that Solomon called upon Isa, the One who cares for every overlooked bundle in this world.”

* IMB missionaries Abbey Hammond and Jessica Burke sat on the floor of the Roma grandmother’s house in Macedonia, sipping juice while their hostess explained to relatives on a Skype video call why Americans were in the background.

It’s intriguing to them. Puzzling, even. Roma gypsies — about 200,000 strong in Macedonia — tend to be a cast-off people in Europe. They’re known in Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, for driving horse or pedal carts in traffic and rummaging through trash bins for plastic, metal and cardboard to sell.

But several times a week, Hammond and Burke walk the dirt roads of Roma neighborhoods in Skopje, greeting people by name, drinking coffee in their homes, talking about life and about Jesus Christ.

It’s not easy; Roma in Macedonia are, for the most part, nominally Muslim. They may not know much about their religion, but they know Jesus isn’t part of it. Still, a Bible study begun by missionaries has slowly grown into a church of Roma believers. It surprises Roma when they meet other Roma who are Christians — it doesn’t add up with what they know.

God is surprising like that, Hammond said. Recently, while visiting a Roma family in their home, she gave them a Bible. The father made the women of the family give it back to her. But when a family member was sick soon after, Hammond wrote a card to the wife saying she was praying for them and penned Scripture verses on the card.

“She was so touched she cried — she said it meant a lot to her, and she kept it,” Hammond said. “God got His Word into their home anyway, in a different way than I expected.”

What am I most thankful for? A surprising, unexpected, creative Lord, who brings hope to those in despair, who brings mercy in the midst of unthinkable evil, who reaches out to touch the forgotten, who seeks the cast-offs. And I’m thankful for the people He uses to deliver His love.

Not later -- now

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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?

What Christmas is all about

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As night follows day, the annual blitzkrieg of Christmas advertising is followed by lots of hand-wringing about how we’ve lost the “true meaning of Christmas.”

This year even the hand-wringers are probably praying (quietly) for huge holiday sales to jump-start the economy. Still, we hear Charlie Brown’s poignant cry cutting through the commercialization: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”

Sure, Charlie Brown. They may be getting harder to find in America, but you can locate people all over the world who know what Christmas is all about. They’re in some surprising places, as these recent reports from missionaries illustrate:

-- A young woman in a communist country began tutoring the children of Christian workers. When the mother of the children presented her with a Bible, she expressed tearful thanks. As the tutor left their home and started down the road, the mother watched her from a window. She saw the tutor pull out the Bible, hold it to her heart and kiss it.

-- A woman in Taiwan joined 90 people participating in a Thanksgiving meal at a local church. But she wasn’t there primarily for the turkey and trimmings. Rather, she had a pressing question: “Why has no one ever told me about God before?” Stunned by the question, a missionary led her to salvation in Christ on the spot.

-- A Christian worker among Muslims in Eastern Europe sent this request: “Please be in prayer for our Christmas outreach. We will be assembling Christmas gift bags and distributing them to all the students of a local school. Thank God with us that the school administrator, once very skeptical of us and our work, has once again given us the ‘green light’ to present these gift bags any way we choose and to put on a program that includes Christmas hymns and other evangelism. Pray [that] the whole village will be radically transformed by the Lord.”

-- Many Tibetans live in high-altitude areas where snow has been falling since November. In December, people come down to the cities to stay with friends and extended family members until the snow clears in March — enabling Christ followers to talk to Tibetan Buddhists about Christmas and the Gospel. Pray they will have opportunities to share with Tibetans who have come from distant and hard-to-reach places.

-- Believers are partnering in a Christmas distribution project that has the potential to reach tens of thousands of people in a major Asian city. Pray that each person who receives a Gospel packet will read the literature and watch the corresponding video. Ask the Holy Spirit to open hearts, and pray that many will make decisions this year to follow Jesus.

And in South Asia, a Muslim-background follower of Jesus recently posed this question to a Christian worker who serves as his spiritual mentor: “If a brother or sister is having a problem with something in their lives, would this be a good time to fast and pray?”

“Definitely!” the mentor answered quickly, a little impatient with the simplicity of the question.

“Should fasting always be done individually or can it be done in a group?” the believer asked.

Either way, the mentor responded, as long as it is a time of humble submission and drawing close to God.

The believer — who leads a fast-growing, house-based movement of Muslim-background Christ followers — became excited.

“We have already been talking about fasting and praying on Dec. 24th, especially for the [evangelistic] outreach this year,” he announced. “Then we will break the fast on the 25th and have a celebration and meal together.”

No Christmas tree, no candlelight service, no presents or lights, the mentor thought to himself. Just brothers and sisters coming together to fast and pray for the lost — and then to rejoice together on Christmas Day, confident that their prayers will be heard by their Savior, Jesus Christ.

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Thank it forward

(Volunteer Tim Dortch, center, carries relief supplies to survivors of the devastating January earthquake in Haiti.)

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/120/12056/12056-66753.mp3

Gratitude is the memory of the heart, says a proverb.

If that is true, my heart will gratefully remember some of God’s servants as Thanksgiving 2010 approaches:

-- The Christian workers and volunteers who ministered — and continue to minister — to the survivors of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the flooding in Pakistan and other disasters this year. Volunteers like Tim Dortch, a bivocational pastor from Mississippi. He contacted the International Mission Board the morning after the devastating Haiti quake and offered his help. He was on the ground there within days, helping distribute water, food and medicine. “God’s given me a heart for Haiti,” Dortch said.

-- The Southern Baptists who dug deep in tough economic times to give nearly $149 million to the 2009 Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions — and who will faithfully give again this year.

-- Student missionary Jeremiah Johnson, 21, and mission volunteer Bob Finck, 51, who gave their lives in God’s service this year. Johnson, from Arizona, was killed April 12 in a motorcycle accident in Mozambique while devoting a college semester to work in the African nation. “We’re very proud of Jeremiah,” said his pastor. “He was serving the Lord to reach people who were unreached with the Gospel.” Finck, from Virginia, died Aug. 9 in a car accident during his third trip to Zambia, where he was working with other volunteers to lead a Bible conference and minister to young people. “He was very passionate about Zambia,” said the director of missions at Finck’s church.

-- The 60 retiring IMB missionaries honored in May for 1,730 combined years of mission service. Don and Edith Kennedy, for example, worked among university students in Mexico for 31 years. Hundreds of young Christians they mentored now serve as church leaders in Mexico and missionaries around the world. “Change the university and you change the world,” Don said.

-- The more than 200 new IMB missionaries appointed this year, including Michael Kim,* who grew up in South Korea. As the eldest son, he held the role of family priest, responsible for leading ancestor worship rituals. But he became a Christian believer at age 16, the first in 38 generations of his family. His enraged parents beat him, threatened to disown him and threw his Bibles into the fire. Kim eventually smuggled a Bible into his bedroom and read it while hiding under the sheets. Now an American, he plans to return to Asia to tell other hungry souls about Christ. “In order for me to hear the Gospel, there was a long flow of blood, sweat and tears of Western missionaries to Korea,” Kim said when he was appointed earlier this year. “As a debtor of the Gospel, I am … heading to Southeast Asia to share the Good News of Jesus.”

-- Doris Kelley, colleague, friend and substitute mom to IMB communication staff members for the past 48 — count ’em, 48 — years. In the days before personal computers and e-mail, she typed our edited news and feature stories into a hulking teletype machine to send to Baptist Press in Nashville. Many reporters got to know her during her more than 25 years of service in the newsrooms of annual Southern Baptist Convention meetings. She rarely missed a day of work, always greeted people with a smile, watched over her co-workers with love and took care of business without complaint. She retires in December. Without servants like Doris, many churches and ministries would quickly collapse. I hope we can make it without her; I’m not looking forward to trying.

Someone reminded me recently that God’s grace is His unmerited favor toward us. We sinners deserve judgment, but we receive the riches of His goodness and mercy at Christ’s expense. We also receive the great gift of people who model for us what it means to live in gratitude to God by loving and serving Him. Examples are all around us.

We, too, can live in gratitude to Him — by modeling that kind of love for others.

* (Name changed)

The 'First Globals'

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A father who lives down the street from me turned his small backyard into a state-of-the-art batting cage, complete with a high-velocity pitching machine, when his son was in elementary school.

The son practiced hitting for hours every day. He played high school baseball. Now he’s playing college ball. Just what Pop wanted.

I hope it’s what his son wanted.

We’ve all seen sports dads, stage moms and other victims of a condition I call “Hyperactive Parent Syndrome” living out their dreams through their kids. Maybe we’ve even been one of them.

We do it because we love our children, right? We’re involved in their lives because we care. We want to encourage them to develop their gifts and talents.

Involvement and encouragement are great. Manipulation isn’t.

I’m thinking about the difference a lot these days while trying to help my senior-high kids find the right college.

What is the point of going to college in the first place? To study the best our civilization has to offer, according to the classical ideal? To gain the knowledge and skills to launch a career? To earn more money?

Or to serve God with all one’s mind?

“What are your goals?” asks C.J. Mahaney, editor of Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World (Crossway, 2008). “Do they move you forward — to financial security, more friends, successful kids, a certain position at work, learning a craft or trade? Or do they drive you upward — to obeying and glorifying God above all else?”

There’s nothing wrong with helping a young person prepare to earn a living. But there’s more to life than earning a living, even in hard economic times. That’s what Jesus meant when He said we do not live by bread alone, but by the words of God.

We cannot force our children to serve the Lord. Neither should we unwittingly push them toward worldliness and materialism with the best intentions of helping them achieve “success” as defined by the world. Rather, we should model lives of love and service — and invite our children to join us in the great task of sharing the Gospel with lost and suffering people everywhere.

There’s plenty of data indicating they’re open to the invitation.

Pollster John Zogby has renamed the so-called Millennials (18- to 29-year-old Americans) the “First Globals.” They are “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history,” Zogby reports. “First Globals are also the most cosmopolitan age group in America, the most international, and the one most concerned about the environment and human rights.”

By and large, they’re comfortable with the different skin colors, cultures and languages they encounter every day. A fourth of them expect to live outside America at some point in their lives.

They sound like potential missionaries to me.

If your children fall into this age group or mindset, why not show them the unprecedented opportunities they have — not just to pursue a career, but to pursue the glory of God among the nations?

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.

An atheist praises Christian missions in Africa

(Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/72/7268/7268-40896.mp3)

If you think evangelical Christianity is unfairly caricatured by American opinion makers, you might want to avoid Europe.

There, cultural commissars in some circles compare evangelicals with the Taliban — unfavorably. By their lights, we’re medieval, superstitious enemies of enlightenment and progress who should be silenced for good.

So it was noteworthy when an article praising Christian missions in Africa appeared in The Times of London a few months ago. Even more remarkable: It was written by Matthew Parris, a self-professed atheist (read it at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece).

Parris, a Times columnist and former Member of Parliament, spent his boyhood in what is now Malawi. He returned there last year with a secular charity that assists villages lacking clean water.

“It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities,” Parris writes of the journey. “But traveling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my worldview, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

“Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa, Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.”

Parris has applauded such efforts before, but he used to qualify the praise with a caveat:

“It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write,” he acknowledges. “[O]nly the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

“But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.”

African followers of Christ, Parris says, have a different look in their eyes. And they look you in the eye, not down or away. The “most impressive” African members of the secular aid agency he worked with in Malawi “were, privately, strong Christians.”

They worked diligently and optimistically, he believes, because they have a different view of the universe and their place in it. They and other African Christians he has encountered over the years don’t fear ancestors, evil spirits or spells. They are curious, engaged with the world. They take action, because they don’t believe they are victims of irresistible fate. They don’t buy into the traditional tribal pressure that keeps villages under the thumbs of chiefs and nations under the thumbs of “big man” gangsters.

Parris rejects the notion, fashionable among many academics, that tribal culture is off-limits to criticism just because it is indigenous to Africa. Tribal values have many strengths, but they tend to “grind down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.”

In stark contrast, “Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective … smashes straight through the philosophical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold onto to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.”

Contrarians will say Parris is a prisoner of his own culture, an intellectual imperialist trying to re-colonize Africa with a Western individualism that doesn’t work all that well in the West. If Christianity is so great, they may ask, why hasn’t Parris himself become a believer?

True, Parris is much more interested in the cultural benefits of Christian faith than the faith itself. But as a nonbeliever, he recognizes an undeniable fact: The Gospel changes hearts and minds, transforms societies and liberates people from the cultural chains that bind them. In African and Asian cultures that stifle the individual will, Christ shines the light of spiritual freedom. In Western cultures dying from individualism and materialism, He points toward a community — the church — where people love one another as He loves us. His Spirit works within every human culture, but He confronts and transcends cultures when they contradict His truth.

Africa — like the rest of the globe — hungers for such truth.

“Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation,” Parris says, would “leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.”

(Gordon Fort, IMB vice president for global strategy, also grew up in Africa and served there for many years as a missionary. Read his reaction to Parris’ article in this Baptist Press story: “ATHEISM: Both agree, Africa needs God”)