Deep and Wide tagged: , ,

Deep and Wide

Posted by in Church & Missions

I leave today for Paraguay. I am going, together with my brother Steve, and my friend and ministry partner David Ripley, to participate in conferences in which we will present the Adrian Rogers Pastor Training materials (DVDs and workbooks) to two different groups of pastors there. The first weekend, we will be with a projected group of 300 pastors from the Baptist Convention of Paraguay at the Baptist campground in Itacurubi, and then, the following 3 days, with a projected group of even more interdenominational pastors in the capital city of Asunción.

As we seek to make disciples of all nations, I believe we, as the Body of Christ at large, must take both a deep and a wide approach. We must also make every effort to see to it that we reach as many people as possible, not with only a superficial gospel presentation, but with, rather, the biblical end-vision of Ephesians 4:12–16:

“…building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

But, at the same time, we must make every effort to see to it that the gospel makes it, in a way that can be understood linguistically and culturally, to every single people group in the world.

There are many different ways in which each of us, as members of the Body of Christ around the world, can play a part in the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

I am grateful, for example, to participate as a fellow collaborator here with Strider and Rastis, who both are living and ministering fulltime among Muslim people groups, in areas of the world, which, for security reasons, it is best not to specify here. I am grateful for Andrew, who, in addition to ministering in the context of his local church, is studying, and preparing himself for missionary service, if the Lord continues to lead in that direction, somewhere in the Spanish-speaking world. I am grateful for Chris, Dave, and Rob, who are each serving as pastors/elders of local churches in various places around the country, making disciples where they are, and doing their best to further the Lord’s work around the world from their local sending base. Among our readers and commenters, there is a broad representation of many more strategic positions of Great Commission ministry, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Jerry Rankin, upon announcing his retirement from the IMB, mentioned the plans to transfer primary responsibility for missionary work in places like Latin America to the churches of the SBC rather than to career IMB missionaries. As I understand it, that doesn’t mean abandoning places like Paraguay, where, according to the 2002, the evangelical population was 6.1% (and, with the good rate of church growth they are experiencing, is probably today, a good bit more than that). In recent days, I have been with friends from Nicaragua, where last spring, I was able to do a pastor training seminar with a group of national pastors and leaders. The percentage of evangelicals there is 21.6%. Wow! Praise the Lord! But, even there, they still have not reached the end-vision.

For 18 years, I lived and ministered in Spain, an area of relatively slow church growth, and less than 1% evangelical. There are other places in the world (among them, the areas in which Strider and Rastis work) with an even lower percent of evangelicals.

In some places of the world, that have traditionally been regarded as “unreached,” I have heard recent reports of tremendous growth. Reggie McNeal, for example, has reported the following about the work in India: “Recently I was with Steve Douglas, head of Campus Crusade for Christ International. He told me that their research indicates that India is approaching 10 percent Christian. That is up eight percentage points in the last decade. Translated into real people, that is 80 million new followers of Jesus in India.” See here: http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/201001/201001_038_McNeal_interview.cfm

My brother Steve recently talked with an evangelical house church leader in Iran who said that, despite official government statistics of only 20 to 30 thousand evangelical Christians, there are now over 1 million believers in the house churches there.

In addition to India and Iran, we have had requests to translate the Adrian Rogers Pastor Training materials into a total of 20 different languages in 100 different countries around the world.

As I have written here before, I believe while we seek to carry this vision out, we need to work smart, and not just hard. Having spent 18 years as a career missionary, I am sensitive to concerns for an indigenous approach, and to not working in such a way as to create unhealthy dependency. Sometimes I wonder what I, as a North American, with a resource created in North America for North American pastors, have to contribute to the spiritual and numerical growth of churches and believers around the world.

And yet, as I have gone in the past couple of years to India, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, I have been blown away by the overwhelmingly positive reception to the pastor training materials. When I first went to Venezuela, about one year ago, together with David Ripley, I was moved by the enthusiasm of the pastors there. It was at this time I met Pastor Iván Martínez, current president of both the Venezuelan Baptist Convention, and of UBLA, the Union of Latin American Baptists, the umbrella organization for the majority of the various Baptist unions and conventions scattered throughout Central and South America. This godly and visionary Christian statesman caught the vision for presenting the pastor training materials to the leaders of the other Baptist unions, and, accordingly, secured us a place on the program at the UBLA leadership consultation in Costa Rica last April to give a short presentation to the convention presidents and general secretaries present there.

The response was very encouraging, with many leaders expressing their interest in the materials and the possibility of using them for the advance of the work in their respective countries. It was at this meeting that I met Jorge Rochaix, current president of the Baptist Convention of Paraguay, who invited us for the upcoming meetings there. He says they are praying and trusting God for revival there, and he believes our pastor training events this week and the Adrian Rogers Pastor Training materials are going to play an important part.

The point of this post (as I am running out the door, and don’t have time to fine tune what I am trying to say) is to tell a little bit about what God is doing, in different ways, in different places around the world. Indeed Great Commission work is both deep and wide. But, in whatever aspect of the work, and in what particular place in God’s field, we are currently busy, the truth is, we are all in this together.

I am excited about the days ahead in Paraguay, and ask that, if God lays it on your heart, you would remember me, and my ministry partners, in prayer.