Q&A: Joel Beeke, Conrad Mbewe, Abner Chou, Paul Washer, with Mark Tatlock
00:00:00.000 | >> All right, good afternoon. We've had a tremendous day already and looking forward
00:00:17.000 | to what the Lord has in store for us the rest of this afternoon and evening. I want to welcome
00:00:21.800 | you to our Q&A with our keynote speakers. My name is Mark Tatlock. I serve here at Grace
00:00:26.840 | Church with the ministry of the Master's Academy International. It's my joy to facilitate our
00:00:32.440 | discussion today. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. Before we get started, I do have
00:00:38.280 | an announcement. It's a very practical announcement. One of our brothers, one of our international
00:00:43.240 | attendees who's with us, someone picked up his backpack by mistake. Now, that may not
00:00:50.640 | be a great concern, a backpack, but this one has his passport and all of his other paperwork
00:00:54.600 | in it, so we need you to check that you have your backpack and not this brother's. If you
00:00:58.760 | find it, take it to the concierge desk, and they'll work to exchange that for you, and
00:01:04.240 | we'll make sure that brother finds his way home safely, okay? All right, thank you for
00:01:09.040 | that. Well, our theme of proclaiming Christ to the nations, I think we all feel honored
00:01:14.280 | that this is what our focus is this week. I know it is a conviction and a passion of
00:01:19.480 | your men to see the church faithful in the participation of the Great Commission, and
00:01:24.640 | you've already benefited us greatly through your preaching ministry. As we talk today,
00:01:29.920 | I want to go back to the theme that we heard so clearly yesterday on the love of Christ
00:01:35.800 | being the motive for missions. I think we all recognize we live in a day and age where
00:01:41.960 | the motive for missions often comes across to people in the pew as one of duty, implying
00:01:49.000 | almost a sense of guilt or responsibility there, or we're taught all kinds of pragmatic
00:01:56.120 | methods and things like that, but we're trying to get to the heart of what really drives
00:02:00.080 | the Great Commission. So in the discussion of the love of Christ as being the motive,
00:02:06.440 | it made me think of Ephesians chapter 3 and Paul's prayer there, beginning in verse 9,
00:02:11.480 | speaking of the love of Christ, which is beyond comprehension, but his prayer is that God
00:02:17.760 | would strengthen us to comprehend and to know the love of Christ, and the context of that
00:02:23.200 | is his call to ministry to proclaim the mystery of Christ to the Gentiles.
00:02:28.000 | So I wanted to ask you the question and consider, in your own life, growing in your love for
00:02:34.760 | Christ, how has that really become a pursuit in your own life in ministry, and what encouragement
00:02:40.880 | would you give to these ministers in that regard? And if it's okay, Joel, I'm going
00:02:45.880 | to start with you. I want to ask you, as our resident expert on the Puritans, which of
00:02:52.000 | the Puritans do you feel really just has such a strong emphasis in their own preaching and
00:02:57.920 | writing ministry, and that you might make some recommendations to us and what you've
00:03:01.400 | learned from your study of them?
00:03:05.960 | Okay. Puritans were, of course, very mission minded. I have a sectional tomorrow talking
00:03:16.520 | about that, and they didn't write so many books on exactly how to do missions, but they
00:03:28.000 | lived a missional life, and they believed that every minister should be an evangelist.
00:03:37.040 | So some of them wrote great evangelistic tracts. Their tract was not 250 words long. It was
00:03:46.120 | not, even like Paul Washer's wonderful Gospel of Jesus Christ, 25 pages long, but they were
00:03:53.700 | like 150 pages long. Joseph Align, "Alarm to the Unconverted," Richard Baxter, "Call
00:04:01.280 | to the Unconverted," were both used for thousands and thousands of conversions. And I think
00:04:07.680 | what I learned from the Puritans, most of all, about evangelism and missions is how
00:04:16.640 | far short I come, for one thing, but also that that whole idea, which my dad also inbred
00:04:26.760 | in me as a child, is that your whole life is to be missional. So every conversation
00:04:35.520 | you engage in, every person you meet, the goal is to have, say something, say something
00:04:42.660 | that leaves behind a good word for the Lord, say something that makes Christ attractive,
00:04:48.420 | and try to get an opportunity to pray with people. That's a really big thing in my life.
00:04:54.480 | I always teach my theological students that praying with people is the most important
00:05:01.560 | thing you can do when you pour out your heart for their spiritual welfare, whether they're
00:05:07.380 | believer or unbeliever. And that's very meaningful. That's doing mission work in intimacy with
00:05:14.160 | God as you draw them in. So I've had a principle in my study of all the visitors. If anyone
00:05:26.800 | wants to talk to me about something more than one or two minutes, I'll say, "Sit down.
00:05:30.920 | We're going to pray first." And I say, "You pray at the beginning. I'll pray at the end."
00:05:35.560 | And I want to not just bookend everything with prayer, but to me prayer is of the essence
00:05:40.820 | of doing missions, because we can't convert anyone. And I think the Puritans would say
00:05:45.300 | the same thing. Thomas Watson, for example, says, "We proclaim Christ, but it's the Holy
00:05:53.880 | Spirit that takes the key of preaching and unlocks the heart of man, which we cannot
00:06:02.100 | do." So I think the passion for souls comes when we understand, as we've been hearing
00:06:09.620 | all conference long, what a wonder it is that we are saved. And it's like those men, I forget,
00:06:16.180 | from Samaria or whatever, who went out and, you know, the enemy was completely gone and
00:06:20.940 | they found all these spoils and they started feasting, gorging themselves. And then they
00:06:25.380 | said, "Wait a minute. We can't feast on all these things and not go back and tell Israel
00:06:31.500 | that the enemy is defeated." And that's what we need to do with our lives. We just need
00:06:38.540 | to...if we really believe that we have the one truth that the whole world needs, we got
00:06:45.220 | to share it with the whole world as much as possible. So that's why I get up every morning
00:06:50.900 | and one of my secret prayers every morning is, "Lord, help me to be in connection with
00:06:55.780 | someone today that needs to hear the gospel. Open some door with someone somewhere." So
00:07:01.100 | living with that consciousness that every conversation is an opportunity to speak a
00:07:08.260 | good word for the Lord. That's what I learned from my dad even more than the Puritans. My
00:07:12.980 | dad was an elder for 40 years and he would...if you just watch him walk out after church,
00:07:19.620 | you know, on the parking lot, he'd stop by the little boys and girls and say, "What did
00:07:23.500 | you learn from the sermon today?" Or if a six-year-old was walking by him, he'd stop
00:07:29.300 | him and say, "Do you know how important it is to hate sin and love the Lord Jesus Christ?"
00:07:35.580 | So and for example, when you greet people at the door as a pastor, do you pay attention
00:07:43.460 | to the little children? Do you say something meaningful to them? Or do you say like, "I've
00:07:49.460 | got a sermon today that's a story and you can listen to it and you can talk with your
00:07:55.960 | dad about it later, but I've got something to say to you too today." And the kid looks
00:08:00.540 | at you like, "Oh, wow." And they'll listen better. So I mean, there's just a thousand
00:08:05.820 | ways. It's a way of life. You don't let opportunities go by and you ask the Lord for more opportunities
00:08:13.500 | every day to speak a good word for the Lord. Bring the gospel, death in Adam, life in Christ,
00:08:19.020 | wherever you go.
00:08:22.620 | Thank you. Paul, I'll stay with that same theme and direct it to you. I know in your
00:08:29.120 | missionary career in Peru, you've been threatened at gunpoint, but I've also heard you speak
00:08:35.600 | of just the humblest, most faithful village pastors and those who are itinerant men going
00:08:42.560 | from village to village sharing Christ in very difficult circumstances facing many trials.
00:08:49.000 | Can you speak to how the love of Christ frees a man to face those kinds of risks and hardship
00:08:55.540 | in missionary service?
00:08:59.440 | For me, there are two different aspects. One is the love of a regenerate soul for the lost.
00:09:09.200 | That will be there and it should be powerful. But when you're out there preaching, usually
00:09:15.600 | what happens is people gather around you. They listen for a while. Then all of a sudden
00:09:21.360 | someone sent by the enemy starts screaming out heretic or this or that. And they take
00:09:29.600 | your little pulpit and your tracks and you and throw you out in the street. Or like they
00:09:40.160 | did two of my brothers while they preached in the plaza, just continued to pour goat
00:09:45.880 | urine on their heads and beat them with canes. It takes more than love for men at that point
00:09:54.880 | to keep you preaching. And you would expect me to say now a love for Christ. And that
00:10:02.800 | is true. But I find my own love for Christ to be so fickle and unstable. And I believe
00:10:09.600 | that the genitive there in 1 Corinthians 5 when Paul talks about the love of Christ controls
00:10:16.360 | us that it's not his love for Christ but Christ's love for him. That's the one in my very broken
00:10:29.760 | weak life. That is the iron foundation for him. You know, I can tell you how many times
00:10:40.920 | we jump in the back of a cattle truck or whatever and hide and go up into the mountains and
00:10:46.400 | look at my brothers. For him. For him. And you know, men seek for courage. And I don't
00:10:57.680 | think that's wise because courage also can turn into pride. To delve into how much Christ
00:11:07.560 | loves you and how beautiful that love. The older I get, I realize that it's that unconditional
00:11:18.640 | ongoing continuous love of Christ that will drive a man more severely than any whip of
00:11:26.840 | the law. But what you've got to understand, I'm speaking not just in propositional truth,
00:11:35.720 | but I'm speaking experimentally, as the old man would say, and that is born out of prayer.
00:11:44.000 | In prayer, the beauty of Christ can become such a reality that that you have to say,
00:11:51.600 | Lord, take your hand off me, lest I perish. To know him as a person, to seek him, to have
00:12:00.240 | a tryst with him. As I've been saying many times now that I travel, I'm seeing so many
00:12:07.360 | young men that I'm seeing so often before men that I wonder if they have enough time
00:12:14.840 | to be before Christ in prayer. My life, I've never. If there's anything in my life that's
00:12:23.360 | been out of any worth, it's. Anyone can pray anyone. Everyone's weak enough. To Terry.
00:12:36.240 | To come out of bed at night when he calls your name. And it's that that drives even
00:12:42.380 | the weakest man to do things that seem to be courageous. The love of Christ.
00:12:49.760 | After, do you have any thoughts on that in your own life and ministry?
00:12:57.640 | What these men have said is so wise, insightful. I think from a different angle. As you study
00:13:09.480 | the word, there has to be a discipline. That truth. And you love the Lord more because
00:13:23.460 | of that truth. I think often we treat or we are tempted to treat the preparation for preaching
00:13:32.780 | or teaching like an assignment. You just have to get it done. And so we can intellectually
00:13:41.560 | finish the job. But if that's all we've done, we failed. And there is the need. It's even
00:13:53.100 | Ezra 710 that he not only studied, but then he did and then he preached and he taught.
00:13:59.740 | That's what we have to do. We cannot leave any doctrine, any verse, any word until we
00:14:07.540 | love it and love him more for it. And then, then the love of Christ that he has for you,
00:14:18.100 | like our brother Paul mentioned from 2 Corinthians 5, will compel us.
00:14:22.620 | Tremendous. Do you add anything, brother?
00:14:27.660 | Yeah. I think first of all, the point that's been made about the love of Christ in terms
00:14:35.700 | of Christ's love for us, I think is a vital point because it is out of that love that
00:14:42.940 | our own love is ignited. Paul's statement in the famous Galatians 2.20 about the fact
00:14:52.980 | that the life he lives, he lives by faith in the Son of God, and then he adds that phrase,
00:14:59.020 | "who loved me and gave himself for me." It looks like that was the furnace from which
00:15:12.340 | a lot of his energy for ministry was being derived. "Who loved me and gave himself
00:15:21.820 | for me." It is said of the missionary, David Livingstone, that on one occasion he made
00:15:31.980 | his way back to England. His arm was in a sling because a lion had jumped on him after
00:15:40.980 | he had already shot it and was pulling him apart, or trying to do so, tearing away at
00:15:49.260 | him. But because he was losing blood, it finally just collapsed in front of him and died.
00:15:54.820 | But anyway, so he made his way to England, and he had his arm in a sling, and somebody
00:16:00.740 | asked him the question about the sacrifice that he is giving to the cause of missions,
00:16:13.700 | and his answer was classic. He said, "Sacrifice? Sacrifice? No one should use that word about
00:16:26.180 | himself in the light of the sacrifice of God's own Son."
00:16:34.940 | And I think really that's the addition that I'd like to make to that.
00:16:41.100 | Tremendous. Thank you.
00:16:45.180 | Just turning to another subject that we have to consider, many of us have had conversations
00:16:50.260 | about the emphasis on the social sciences in the field of missions, missiology, and
00:16:58.300 | the desperate need for a return to the authority of Scripture in the missions endeavor. And,
00:17:03.220 | Abner, I'm going to start with you. In the new missions textbook, Biblical Missions,
00:17:10.500 | your chapter is the first chapter, and it's entitled Fidelity to the Word of God in Missions,
00:17:16.660 | Scripture as the Launch, Life, and Legacy of the First Missionaries. Can you unpack
00:17:21.700 | for us the highlights of your argument for a return to the authority of Scripture in
00:17:26.400 | missions?
00:17:27.400 | Yeah, I think the way you could put it as simply as this way, who's defining, who gets
00:17:33.200 | to define mission? If the world or society or an academic discipline defines mission,
00:17:41.400 | it's no longer the mission of God. God's mission means He owns it. God's mission means
00:17:48.680 | He defines it. God's mission means He commissioned it. That's what it means of God's mission,
00:17:56.600 | Christ's commission. And so, because God defines it, He defines it in His Word. And there were
00:18:05.160 | the first, shall we say, missionaries. They were the apostles. They were the first missionaries.
00:18:13.480 | They were the ones who held the Scripture high. They were the ones who set the pattern.
00:18:18.680 | And all of the other stuff that now has hijacked the missiological world, that is a foreign
00:18:28.280 | entity that has intruded into the biblical purity that has been set forth not by man,
00:18:36.080 | but by God. And so, we need to go back to what the Scriptures have established if we
00:18:43.400 | are to do the mission. Now, if you're not here to do the mission of Christ, well, get
00:18:49.880 | out. No, in all seriousness, if you're not here to do the mission of Christ, then yeah,
00:18:57.160 | all of those other sociological things, of course they make sense to people. But if you're
00:19:02.520 | actually here to do the work of the ministry and to take and preach Christ to the ends
00:19:07.720 | of the earth, then there is the one who gave us the mission defines it. And we do not have
00:19:15.080 | the right to define it on our own terms.
00:19:18.440 | - Excellent. Thank you. Conrad, I'm sure in your context, you've seen the outworking of
00:19:24.200 | those influences in missiology. Would you just share maybe your observations and comments?
00:19:30.040 | - Yeah, well, perhaps let me begin with a very brief story. Towards the end of 1999
00:19:41.400 | and beginning of the year 2000, I got a phone call from somebody I didn't know. And he said
00:19:49.360 | on the other side, "Hello, my name is Paul Washer." And the short of that conversation
00:20:03.080 | was that he wanted to partner with us in our mission's work. It was out of fear for exactly
00:20:11.520 | what Abner just said here, that we took a bit of time. I think Paul thought it was a
00:20:21.080 | very long time, but we took a bit of time to come up with a mission's policy, which
00:20:28.200 | was dipped in Scripture from beginning to end. And then we gave it to him and said,
00:20:38.320 | "Are you willing to sign this before we can work together?" Do you remember, Paul? Yeah.
00:20:46.920 | And it was because we knew that the Western world had all kinds of views about missions.
00:20:55.520 | We did not want to hold hands in the darkness. And we've worked now together for about 25
00:21:02.800 | years in the work of missions because we are working on the foundation of Scripture. And
00:21:13.420 | as has just been said, you have the founder of the church laying the foundation in the
00:21:22.480 | Gospels. You have the book of Acts giving you something of the initial outworking. You've
00:21:28.640 | got the Gospels wrestling with the issues that were coming up in the context of these
00:21:35.360 | churches. And it was about churches being established, places where the Gospel would
00:21:42.880 | go forth, God's people would be nurtured, watched after, and so on.
00:21:47.720 | Yeah, I can't imagine why we should now be looking for tricks to achieve what God Himself
00:21:58.400 | has given a manual for us to use. Thank you.
00:22:04.360 | It's likely the case a lot of North American pastors aren't aware of really what's happening
00:22:12.400 | as a result of those influences and missions and missions training over the years. And
00:22:17.920 | it'd be helpful if maybe Paul and Joel, if you have observations about that, could just
00:22:23.520 | comment on the need for pastors to be informed so that they can shepherd their people in
00:22:28.720 | this regard.
00:22:31.160 | For years there have been what, it's almost like a Gnosticism. It's an esoteric missionary
00:22:37.520 | knowledge that has been invented, and I believe it's been invented by men who did not have
00:22:43.960 | the Scriptures nor the Spirit of God. And it is rank. How do you plant a church in the
00:22:52.400 | most exotic people group in the world the same way you plant a church in Kansas? You
00:23:01.960 | preach the Scriptures, you obey the Scriptures, you pray, and you live with piety, with virtue.
00:23:12.280 | There is no secret key. There's not all this stuff. Another thing you've got to realize
00:23:17.040 | is just look for a moment at what we supposedly believe about the radical depravity of the
00:23:22.080 | human heart. It is like Jericho. It is tightly shut up. No one comes out. No one comes in.
00:23:28.640 | There's nothing that's going to break into that heart but the Holy Spirit through the
00:23:33.680 | preaching of the gospel. Then look at our enemy. You wrestle not with flesh and blood.
00:23:39.120 | We wrestle with powers and principalities and mites and dominions. All your little strategies
00:23:45.680 | are nothing. The only way we can overcome is to submit ourselves entirely to the Scriptures.
00:23:54.720 | Paul told Timothy, "In case I delay, I write so that one may know how to conduct himself
00:24:00.320 | in the household of God." How do you know how to conduct yourself in the household of
00:24:04.520 | God? Only through what is written. And the men who lash themselves down to Scripture,
00:24:10.200 | the men who throw away Saul's armor and take up the smooth stones of the gospel, they're
00:24:16.840 | the men that are going to plant churches. Another thing about missions that you have
00:24:20.480 | to understand. Missions is just one biblical church sending out a like-minded, elder-qualified
00:24:27.080 | man to plant another biblical church. That's what it is. For example, if Conrad, we've
00:24:35.400 | known each other for years. I know of his elders. I know the decisions they've made.
00:24:40.120 | All these things. So if Conrad calls me tomorrow, or the church in Leon, it's one of your churches.
00:24:48.880 | If they call us tomorrow, those elders, and say, "We have four graduates. They're elder-qualified
00:24:54.560 | and they're ready to go out." We don't even have to investigate. Why? Because they're
00:25:00.320 | being sent out by biblical local churches with biblical elders who will make sure they're
00:25:06.840 | elder-qualified and pull them off the field if they're not. Missions is extraordinarily
00:25:13.200 | difficult, but it's not complex. It's not complex at all.
00:25:19.040 | I want to press into this a little bit more. One of the other things that we've seen with
00:25:26.280 | regard to contemporary missions has been the loss of the local church as central to the
00:25:30.960 | missions enterprise. I'd just like to hear your thoughts. How did we lose sight of this?
00:25:36.680 | And what is the role of the pastor in leading the mission strategy or effort of his church?
00:25:45.400 | Just real quickly, look at the book of Acts. It's quite amazing. Someone smarter than me
00:25:53.000 | ought to do a study on this. You start off, and it's apostles, apostles, apostles, and
00:25:58.720 | then apostles, elders, apostles, elders. By the time you get to Acts 15, what do you see?
00:26:05.360 | You see elders. Because they should have their finger on the pulse of what's going on in
00:26:14.040 | the world. They should be the ones. 2 Timothy 2.2, you can use seminaries, and they can
00:26:19.440 | be a tremendous blessing, but ultimately, 2 Timothy 2.2, that's part of the elder's
00:26:26.160 | job to oversee that those young men are elder qualified and that they're able and qualified
00:26:33.000 | to send them out. There is no mission apart from the local church. There is none.
00:26:40.320 | Perhaps the only addition that I'd like to make there is to answer the question, why
00:26:48.680 | has the local church been replaced by other institutions? I think part of it, especially
00:26:59.120 | where I'm coming from, that is, in the context of Africa, is the fact that you rightly had
00:27:07.960 | missionaries coming, evangelizing, and helping, in that sense, churches to be established.
00:27:15.520 | And then, as they began to train evangelists and other pastors, instead of allowing these
00:27:30.680 | young churches, with their elders, to then send these individuals, they, as the missionaries,
00:27:42.600 | institutional missionaries, remained in charge of the process. So they are the ones who are
00:27:50.280 | now sending their graduates all over the place to establish churches. I suppose it helps
00:27:57.320 | with their reports back to where they were sent from, that we've now done this, we're
00:28:04.560 | sending more of this, we're planting more churches. But in the process, they are sending
00:28:09.880 | a message to the indigenous churches that this is not your business. And we lost a lot
00:28:19.960 | of ground, and it's been quite difficult to reverse the process so that the churches can
00:28:27.960 | take their place as the ones that are to identify individuals, nurture them, ensure that they
00:28:38.640 | are properly trained, commission them, watch over them, support them, counsel them, and
00:28:46.660 | all that happens in the process of maturing church plants. So I would give that as a historical
00:28:54.480 | way in which the churches, especially in the mission field, lost the place, the biblical
00:29:01.080 | place.
00:29:02.080 | I'd like to supplement that. That is so insightful. Thank you, because that helps, I think, us
00:29:08.160 | think through missions better. I think in the West, with the high degree of individualism
00:29:15.520 | that has pervaded our culture, what has, and let's be charitable, inadvertently happened
00:29:23.020 | is a low, low view of the church, has infiltrated, ironically, the church. And so when somebody
00:29:33.640 | says, with the best of intentions, "I want to go overseas. I want to do something for
00:29:39.040 | the Lord," we just say, "Great, go," and we send them. And we never instruct them that
00:29:45.520 | you do know that ministry happens in the body of Christ. You do know that ministry is part
00:29:53.760 | and parcel of the work of the church. You can't just go by yourself in that way, be
00:30:00.440 | completely lone ranger, independent in that way.
00:30:04.120 | We have not instructed, perhaps, our churches well in understanding the value and the institution
00:30:12.200 | that Christ Himself established for this age that is the church. And as a result, then
00:30:19.960 | the missions that we have engaged in has separated from the church. But as you all have mentioned,
00:30:25.360 | you can't have that apart from the church. And so we've actually dismembered our own
00:30:30.680 | mission in that regard.
00:30:32.640 | Yeah, so the low view of church here, and yet the fervor of a young missions movement
00:30:40.320 | in our generation has resulted in a lot of young people being sent out who aren't committed
00:30:46.480 | to the church overseas. So a lot of work being done in the name of missions that is not focused
00:30:52.920 | on the church itself. And you've helped us appreciate that. Thank you very much.
00:30:58.240 | Let me ask this question, three of you here, a chancellor and two presidents of Bible colleges
00:31:03.680 | and seminaries. I'd like you to share your perspective on how do you inspire and equip
00:31:08.880 | your students to engage in evangelism and missions, not just when they're sent out,
00:31:14.320 | but in their own lives as students?
00:31:19.120 | So we, obviously we have our seminary in Grand Rapids, and we're training about 500 students
00:31:34.800 | right now from 40 some countries around the world. And a lot of them are embedded in their
00:31:41.480 | own culture, and we have connections of oversight and work with all these 28 different seminaries.
00:31:52.540 | But in terms of our own students and our own denomination, and in our own seminary in Grand
00:31:58.280 | Rapids, there's a number of things that we do. First of all, Dr. Brian DeVries, who just
00:32:08.200 | published his first book, which is published by Crossway, which has done really well, he's
00:32:14.720 | the president of McConnell Theological College in South Africa. And he's established a mission
00:32:21.840 | network over there in which they're training about 1,500 men for the ministry all around
00:32:28.640 | Africa by getting other ministers to shepherd a group of men around himself and around the
00:32:37.560 | elders, maybe five or 10 men. And they take courses long distance, they do internships,
00:32:43.440 | three-year internships with the minister and so on. He just came out with his first book
00:32:48.800 | called You Will Be My Witnesses. It's birthed out of Acts 1, verse 8, and it looks at the
00:32:57.380 | whole concept of missions being rooted in the word martyrdom, sacrificing for the gospel's
00:33:05.720 | sake. Christian witness as gospel presence, Christian witness as gospel message, by gospel
00:33:12.040 | response, by gospel community. So Brian, Dr. DeVries, got his MDiv and THM at our seminary,
00:33:21.000 | then went to Southern for his PhD, and he's been immersed in missions now for about 20
00:33:26.280 | years. He comes back, actually, and teaches our five mission courses in our seminary,
00:33:32.760 | and does very well. But then we also have other men come in and do a variety of things.
00:33:40.280 | For one thing, a couple very solid, reformed, biblical street preachers come to our seminary
00:33:46.680 | every year. They take all the students out and do street preaching in Grand Rapids. Every
00:33:54.400 | student is also connected with a local minister, and that minister is his overseer who reports
00:34:01.840 | to our two spiritual deans, and they talk about missions in that own local church, and
00:34:10.040 | the goal is that the student is involved in at least one mission work in the local church
00:34:15.180 | over which that minister oversees the work, and then gives us regular reports on how the
00:34:20.640 | student is doing. And so that local minister will then take the student to homeless shelters,
00:34:29.200 | he'll take him to nursing homes, he'll take him to different places to do mission work,
00:34:33.640 | jails, prisons in the community, and the student gets the experience of speaking in a number
00:34:40.760 | of different venues and goes with the pastor, the local pastor, who we only take pastors
00:34:46.960 | we really trust, are biblical, and have a heart for missions, and he takes him out on
00:34:53.840 | various mission endeavors. And so we kind of cobbled together a program by getting a
00:35:00.320 | lot of people to help us among the elderships of churches and ministers and local churches,
00:35:07.000 | as well as in-house training.
00:35:10.760 | Thank you. And so you're intentional in that, making sure that's part of the experience
00:35:15.080 | of the preparation.
00:35:16.720 | Yeah, well, from our end, a number of our students are actually pastors, even now, so
00:35:26.040 | that they are immediately applying as they are learning. We are on the starting end of
00:35:35.520 | our master's program, our sort of seminary end of the university. And so I think for
00:35:46.320 | us at the moment, it's just making sure that as we begin to grow, we don't lose the aspect
00:35:56.160 | of the practical side of ministry, so that we don't just have people getting their degree
00:36:03.760 | qualifications through written assignments and class discussions, but that we ensure
00:36:11.660 | that even those who are not in actual ministry are very involved in their local churches,
00:36:20.920 | because it is really through that, that under their elders and pastors, they will then gain
00:36:28.160 | the experience as they are then sent out elsewhere. But we're really at the beginning.
00:36:33.800 | Yeah, I think they're so helpful, because I'm new, so I'm just learning from them. But
00:36:44.360 | I think in addition to the practical side, which is putting into action the activity
00:36:52.420 | of evangelism, the love for that can only be gained as you do it. And I remember as
00:37:00.140 | a freshman in college, an older student taking me under his wing and saying, "We're going
00:37:06.540 | to go to Third Street, Santa Monica, and we're going to do open-air evangelism." And I said,
00:37:11.460 | "I don't even know where that is. I don't even know what any of that means." And he
00:37:16.220 | just said, "I'll buy you a hamburger." I said, "Okay, that's all I need." And then we just
00:37:20.740 | did it. But that's what allowed me to understand what that was and to love it. And so it is
00:37:34.940 | older taking younger. It is providing those opportunities to get people's feet wet so
00:37:40.700 | that they love what they never knew they could love, and to not be scared, to not be intimidated
00:37:49.300 | by it, to think that the Lord can use me this way. And you know what? Getting shamed in
00:37:56.460 | public is not bad for the Lord Jesus. I'm no longer scared. I love the practical aspect
00:38:03.900 | of this. At the same time, I think as institutions, we need to help give our students perspective.
00:38:12.940 | Sometimes a student's whole world is a two inch by five inch screen. They think that's
00:38:21.740 | the world. That's all that exists. That's why they run into walls on accident and things
00:38:27.900 | of this nature, because they think that's all there is. And you have to remind them
00:38:33.760 | you're not in college or seminary just for you. You're not here just for you. If you
00:38:40.580 | think you're just here to get a job or to just do your own thing, that's not why God
00:38:46.160 | has you here. There is a greater plan that goes beyond you. And I think we need to energize
00:38:54.220 | our young people who are sorely tempted by this world to just focus on themselves, that
00:39:02.580 | there is a bigger commission, a global noble endeavor. There's a reason why Paul was never
00:39:09.960 | ashamed of the gospel. And that is because the gospel is full of honor. There is no more
00:39:15.820 | noble and epic enterprise than the work of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And whether
00:39:22.420 | it be that they are those who will go and leave their homes and home countries, that's
00:39:29.580 | wonderful. But we need to remind every student in all of their disciplines, as Conrad was
00:39:36.260 | just alluding to, that we are all in this together. One way or another, we are going
00:39:42.900 | to unite to advance the mission. And it doesn't matter if you're an accountant, a physical
00:39:48.220 | therapist, a medical doctor, or a barista. We do discourage the barista part. But we
00:39:54.980 | want them to be involved. They have to. And they all have a vital role. We would never
00:40:01.020 | have the English Bible if the business people surrounding Tyndale did not support him and
00:40:06.180 | facilitate its distribution and supply him protection. You know, the people who reached
00:40:11.540 | Asia, like C.T. Studd and the Cambridge Six, they all came from college. They all came
00:40:17.300 | from college. This is a vital opportunity to remind our young people, whatever the Lord
00:40:22.500 | has for you, there is a bigger picture because the Lord has it for you. So we need to walk
00:40:27.960 | worthy of that. And then with that, introduce them to the practical things that instill
00:40:33.700 | the habits for the rest of their life.
00:40:36.540 | >> Tremendous. Thoughts, Paul?
00:40:38.940 | >> You know, I would just ask each and every one of you, how often each week do you pray
00:40:43.580 | for laborers? You know, Jesus never said pray for money because to be honest with you, good
00:40:49.580 | men are more difficult to find than money. To pray, start off praying. But then there's
00:40:55.540 | another thing. If you go to 2 Corinthians chapter 8, which is a marvelous text all the
00:41:00.420 | way around, we see that there was a public appeal made with regard to Corinth. So it
00:41:07.500 | was made known. It was made known. And then it says God put an earnestness on Titus's
00:41:13.460 | heart and he went voluntarily. I think that when we go back to some of these missionary
00:41:19.080 | movements that gave us people like Amy Carmichael, I think the church was more in a proper way,
00:41:29.020 | not political, not militant politically, but the church was militant to take the gospel.
00:41:36.500 | It was reflected also in its worship. I've noticed that a lot of worship today is more
00:41:42.860 | about me, where a lot in the great missionary movements, the hymns reflected let's go, let's
00:41:49.580 | go. And I think that pastors need to really work at putting this battle before young men,
00:42:01.020 | to put it before them and tell them, you know, we can live and die for something. We can
00:42:07.740 | serve a king incorruptible. We can build a kingdom that is eternal and will never fall.
00:42:15.100 | There's a reason to be alive. You know, the Peruvians sometimes say, "Tu vives porque
00:42:20.660 | el aire es gratis," which means the only reason you're alive is because air is free. That's
00:42:25.100 | the way a lot of people live. And we need to constantly have this mindset of warfare,
00:42:33.340 | of warfare. There's great deeds to be done. And men were made to fight. You know, I think
00:42:42.780 | it's very appropriate to say, you know, a soldier wants to die by the last bullet in
00:42:49.020 | the last battle because that's what soldiers do. Men were made to fight, but it's the preaching
00:42:56.980 | in the pulpit of there's a greater thing out there to live for that's going to inspire
00:43:03.580 | young men to get off their phones and to get to the field. Also, I think it would be a
00:43:09.100 | great ministry that could be promoted is just people going out and making documentaries
00:43:18.460 | about the need. Sometimes I'll see documentaries about the need and I mean, I'm 63 and I'm
00:43:24.140 | like wanting to saddle my horse one more time. We need to put that in front of the people.
00:43:30.460 | I knew a missionary who came back to the States, Carlton Allen, independent fundamentalist
00:43:37.980 | Baptist, one of the finest missionaries I ever knew. You couldn't go three feet anywhere
00:43:44.140 | in his church without seeing a picture of a missionary, a verse about missions. The
00:43:50.020 | man, there's no telling the legacy of his life just because he constantly reminded men
00:43:58.500 | and women. One last thing, borrowing from William Carey at heart cry, we say you're
00:44:03.740 | either called to go down in the mine or you're called to hold the rope for those who go down.
00:44:09.180 | People need to realize that it doesn't matter what station of life you're in. You're part
00:44:14.700 | of the church militant. You know, heart cry exists not just because we have missionaries
00:44:20.220 | who are willing to die. It exists because of businessmen who want to use their money
00:44:25.780 | for something eternal. My own life, every man here, I think will be shocked when we
00:44:32.700 | get to glory and find out that it wasn't so much about us as the fact that the Holy Spirit
00:44:38.180 | raised up little old ladies to pray for us. And the grace that flowed from Christ because
00:44:46.420 | every person is a part of this great endeavor. And I believe that it is this great endeavor
00:44:52.100 | that everyone needs to learn is the very thing that they're looking for. A reason to live
00:44:57.940 | and die for Him. If I ever go out as a martyr, the last thing I want to say is long live
00:45:05.900 | the King. Long live the King. And we need to have that spirit in every one of us.
00:45:13.460 | >> You know, I love that idea, Paul, of praying regularly from the pulpit. And we do try to
00:45:21.740 | do that in our church every Sunday. We're remembering the need for men to be called
00:45:28.920 | to ministry, called to missions. That's critical. And in addition to that, I think we also need
00:45:37.780 | to really strive to model for the younger men, ourselves, and Paul, you're a really
00:45:43.300 | good example of that. You get young men surrounding you all the time. But to model for them what
00:45:48.740 | it's like to be a godly minister in the service of God so that young men look at your life
00:45:54.100 | and say, there's something really I want to emulate there. There's something that's gripping
00:45:59.420 | me when I watch that man and hear him talk and interact with him. So that you become
00:46:06.280 | a mentor for young men that you don't even realize you're becoming a mentor for. That's
00:46:10.860 | really critical. Spurgeon said something really interesting, and maybe he exaggerated it because
00:46:16.220 | I don't want to make people feel guilty unnecessarily here. But he said, when he talked to ministers,
00:46:22.860 | he said, how many young men, how many young men under your ministry have gone into ministry
00:46:29.780 | or missions because of your example? Because they've heard you preach, they've watched
00:46:37.400 | your life. And he said, that's usually the sign of a godly man. And that convicted me
00:46:44.740 | at the time because I was a young minister and nobody had come forward yet. But I think
00:46:51.100 | you need to be conscious of that and seek to also, when you see young men in your church
00:46:57.460 | that are godly, I'll go to them. I'll have a special visit. I'll take them out to lunch
00:47:02.060 | and say, could it be that God might be calling you to full-time service in his vineyard one
00:47:08.080 | way or another? And just having the minister come alongside them. Sometimes they say no,
00:47:14.980 | but sometimes they say, well, I'm struggling with it, but I don't know how to proceed.
00:47:19.260 | I don't know where to go with it. And I say, well, tell me about what you're feeling. And
00:47:23.720 | talk to them and befriend them. So I think the local minister's involvement is very important
00:47:29.420 | in this whole area.
00:47:30.420 | >> It's such an important point for all of us as pastors. Speaking, again, kind of historic
00:47:36.080 | approach to missions, we've taken a very passive approach. We wait until people approach us,
00:47:40.960 | express their interest in the mission field. What you're saying, Joel, is we need to shift
00:47:44.480 | into a pursuant mode. We need to be prayerful and looking for those that we would challenge
00:47:50.600 | to go to the field.
00:47:52.360 | >> And William Perkins, the father of Puritanism, actually had the reverse role. He said to
00:47:56.840 | a young man who was godly, or to all young men who are godly, he said, the first thing
00:48:01.280 | you need to ask yourself is, is God calling me to full-time service in His kingdom? Only
00:48:07.600 | then do you have the right to consider another occupation. Isn't that interesting? We say,
00:48:15.600 | the way I grew up was you do it in reverse. Only if God really overwhelms you with a call
00:48:22.080 | are you to even consider a call, otherwise you're considered to be too presumptuous and
00:48:26.380 | too bold.
00:48:28.240 | >> Brother, just one thing I think that the men should know here. In my interaction with
00:48:36.320 | a lot of the TMAI centers, whether it was, I don't want to leave anybody out of it, but
00:48:43.040 | when I look at, when I've been to Samara, you look at the guys in Germany, you look
00:48:47.920 | at the guys in Spain, and several other places, I've noticed they're like incubators. More
00:48:56.120 | than what I see here in the U.S. I see in all those different places, you know, there's
00:49:02.700 | these young men that are chomping at the bit. So maybe we could bring them back here to
00:49:07.460 | teach us. I don't know, but do you know what I mean? It seems like there's an unusual incubation
00:49:15.960 | of men, young men that want to give their life.
00:49:18.760 | >> Well, and I think they're in context where the church is so weak, and these young men
00:49:24.680 | are so desperate to see God's Word transform lives in the church, and so there's that interest
00:49:34.520 | and that eagerness. I agree with you, we see that as well. Well, listen, we're all students
00:49:39.920 | of God's Word and we're called to preach God's Word. We attempt to do that faithfully in
00:49:44.280 | our own calling. We know that the overarching narrative or theme of Scripture is the unfolding
00:49:50.680 | of God's redemptive plan from Genesis to Revelation. It's interesting though, in most churches,
00:49:56.880 | most pastors take a very topical approach to missions. Maybe it's one Sunday a year
00:50:03.840 | or even just one week a year, but those of us who are called to exposit the Scriptures,
00:50:09.920 | how can we faithfully in our expositional, approach to expositional preaching, mature
00:50:15.160 | the church with regard to their understanding of missions, let it coming out of the text
00:50:19.480 | on a more consistent basis. Thoughts?
00:50:23.980 | >> For me, if you're just giving these snapshots, they can't see this, I don't even know how
00:50:36.280 | to, this glorious scarlet river, this magnificent, complex, flowing in perfect harmony, tapestry
00:50:48.160 | of redemption. And the more they understand the brilliance of God's mind there, the more
00:50:54.800 | they see the power of it and then culminating in the person of Christ and culminating in
00:51:01.480 | what he did and then what it's going to bring about in the future. One of the things that
00:51:05.320 | I think that we're losing also is the idea of the eschaton, the glory of it, the joy
00:51:11.720 | of it. I've lived long enough to know that life is hard and ministry is long and the
00:51:19.920 | older I get, the more I go into the text and I'm thinking about what will the new heaven
00:51:25.640 | and the new earth be like? What will it be when Jesus comes back? Don't I want to fight
00:51:30.240 | now because this is my last chance to fight against sin, to fight for him? And I think
00:51:35.600 | we need this, we need preachers who are going to be able to lay out this magnificent tapestry
00:51:44.720 | before people and the more they see it, the more they'll get involved in missions.
00:51:49.800 | >> Yeah, I use a consecutive expository approach to my own ministry and I honestly don't see
00:52:01.080 | the difficulty between that and the link with missions because as we already were saying
00:52:11.480 | here, the entire Bible, the grand narrative of the Bible is in the direction of missions.
00:52:22.480 | When we're talking about the Old Testament, Christ being in the Old Testament, again it's
00:52:28.920 | not so much that he's just popping up here and there if you search hard enough. It's
00:52:33.960 | the fact that that Old Testament is building towards preparing for his coming, pointing
00:52:44.360 | towards him. And so if you are expounding the Scriptures, even in the Old Testament,
00:52:52.640 | with a kind of biblical theology undergirding what you are teaching, you still will find
00:53:02.960 | that you are awaiting the appetites of your people for the work that Christ has given
00:53:10.240 | us working towards his coming. Of course, the New Testament plays in that direction
00:53:19.720 | itself. So I think the problem is if you are simply dealing with texts in a devotional
00:53:28.680 | way, you know, so David brings down Goliath, you can bring down your big problems kind
00:53:34.960 | of thing. Then yes, they won't think in terms of the grand purpose of God across history.
00:53:46.960 | And then if I can just throw in one more, and it's, if God's people can see what has
00:53:54.520 | been said in this conference from the beginning, that the Bible is about God. It's about his
00:54:04.760 | glory, his honor, his grand purposes. Once, it doesn't matter where they are in the Bible,
00:54:16.120 | when they are saturated, to borrow the phrase of the Apostle Paul, being filled with all
00:54:23.500 | the fullness of God, then again you find that, yes, there may be accountants, there may be
00:54:31.920 | doctors and so on, but somehow they will still want God to be glorified in what they are
00:54:39.400 | doing, and then also whatever they earn, they want to put it where the emphasis is in the
00:54:47.320 | grand purpose of God. So yeah, we shouldn't limit it to topics. I think there is the overall
00:54:57.760 | trajectory in the Bible, and wherever we dip in Scripture, we don't lose sight of it. Thank
00:55:06.920 | you.
00:55:07.920 | You know, the Spirit-anointed preaching with passion, whether it's going straight through
00:55:13.440 | Bible books or other methods, the people are going to catch it, and the minister is going
00:55:20.160 | to naturally speak about missions and evangelism often, because he loves the church, because
00:55:28.200 | Christ loves the church. And so when you love the bride of Christ so much, you're passionate
00:55:33.760 | about all these things, it will just come out. You'll bring it out of your text here
00:55:37.880 | and there where maybe other people don't even see it, because you're breathing, you're praying,
00:55:45.800 | you're living for the expansion of God's kingdom. "Thy kingdom come" is huge in the life of
00:55:53.400 | every Spirit-anointed preacher, and I think it will just come naturally in the preaching,
00:55:58.320 | and people will catch the flavor of it.
00:56:00.840 | Yeah, just to build a little bit off of what Conrad said about, you don't preach David
00:56:08.440 | and Goliath and say you can kill your own Goliaths and all this kind of stuff. It really
00:56:13.280 | is about going back to seeing texts, to seeing the Scripture the way God wanted us to see
00:56:20.480 | it, not about us, but about Him. And it doesn't take very long to get a global perspective
00:56:29.640 | in Genesis 1. It's in the first verse. God created the heavens and the earth. He didn't
00:56:38.880 | create Israel, didn't say that there, and it doesn't say He created Abner, because I
00:56:45.440 | don't matter. But He did create the world. And so the "I" must be to the world. This
00:56:53.040 | is our Father's world. And with that, everything He is doing and everything He is revealing
00:57:00.560 | is to that end. It isn't just so that we can have a nicer life, even though there are blessings
00:57:06.280 | of following the Lord Jesus. We understand that. But it is to glorify Himself and His
00:57:12.920 | Son through the work of the Spirit in His people who proclaim Him. And that is what
00:57:22.280 | expositional preaching uncovers, every passage by passage by passage, when it is done according
00:57:28.680 | to God's intent, united with the writer's intent, because they all thought that way.
00:57:34.040 | All of them thought that way. And with that, a consistent exposition gives the motivations
00:57:40.820 | for missions. It gives the methodology for missions, because now we have the rich theology
00:57:46.620 | that we need to understand what does it mean to instruct and disciple others. And it gives
00:57:52.280 | us the message of missions, because it reveals the gospel that we proclaim. And it gives
00:57:58.120 | us the message of missions, because every text has a point. There is a reason why Paul
00:58:04.680 | wrote those epistles. It was to ensure that the church, Jew and Gentile, would be the
00:58:10.500 | witness that Christ commissioned. We understand that. And so every text has a purpose. Every
00:58:18.140 | revealed truth has a purpose. And its purpose inherently by definition is missions. And
00:58:24.180 | so therefore, the faithful preaching of the Word of God, not the kind of preaching that
00:58:31.060 | just wants to tickle the ears or to satisfy some superficial desire, but really uncovering
00:58:38.840 | the truth of the Word of God, will take people's eyes off of themselves and on to the purposes
00:58:47.180 | of God in Christ and the truth unto Him and unto living for Him. And missions will always
00:58:53.780 | be supported in every sermon.
00:58:56.260 | Tremendous, thank you. Well, as one who has benefited from Pastor John's faithful preaching
00:59:02.480 | of the Word and seeing a church that is just completely committed to the cause of Christ,
00:59:09.060 | the glory of Christ, motivated by the love of Christ, has such a mission's heart and
00:59:16.500 | reach, it has come as a result of that commitment to preaching the Word just as you've said.
00:59:23.380 | Well, I have a lot more questions, so this isn't quite fair, but our time's up. I do
00:59:28.940 | want to just make a couple observations. Today in our gathering, as we mentioned, we have
00:59:35.820 | 750 international pastors and guests with us. And I know, Conrad, as you've alluded
00:59:42.780 | to, Paul, your own ministry of HeartCry, Joel, you travel and are working with the church
00:59:47.140 | around the world as well as your ministry, Abner. We are seeing God at work through His
00:59:53.860 | church moving in the lives of what we would term, what we think is going to be a global
01:00:01.500 | missions movement, a movement that is anchored and flows out of the authority and sufficiency
01:00:09.380 | of Scripture. We like to say mature churches become sending churches. And so we're beginning
01:00:15.860 | to witness that in our generation. It's very exciting. It's not just the Western church,
01:00:19.420 | but it's the global church. And so we're excited. We want to do our part. Joel, you mentioned
01:00:24.860 | a great new book that came out to equip others. There's other ministries that are publishing
01:00:30.300 | good sound resources to kind of stem the tide and provide alternatives for what's out there
01:00:36.060 | with regard to missions and missiology. It's been a joy for us to be involved in that endeavor.
01:00:42.180 | These men have participated in this project with us, the biblical missions book that you've
01:00:48.380 | all received in your box of books. If you haven't picked that up, just know it's there
01:00:52.380 | as well as the workbook that goes along with us. I mention it here because what we want
01:00:59.060 | you to know is this labor of love born out of these very convictions that we've talked
01:01:04.260 | about, both a theological foundation for missions, the role of the local church in missions,
01:01:11.940 | and then a biblical approach to every practice of evangelism, outreach, church planting,
01:01:17.180 | Bible translation, mercy ministry, whatever it might be to bring it back to the scriptures.
01:01:23.700 | And this book was written for your church. This was a resource written for you as pastors.
01:01:30.140 | Yes, it's large. It's three volumes in one, but it's designed to use through the workbook
01:01:35.940 | in your local church. A small group can use it. You can use it in one of your equipping
01:01:41.400 | classes or Sunday school class. It's also designed to be employed for those of us involved
01:01:46.620 | in higher education, Bible colleges, or seminaries. And so we want you to know about this project
01:01:54.100 | because—and it was released this week. You're the first ones to have it in your hands. It
01:01:58.380 | just came out. And we wanted to release it at Shepherds Conference to put it in the hands
01:02:02.740 | of pastors who are gonna be committed to the very thing that we're discussing this week.
01:02:07.580 | And so there's gonna be future resources made available to you through our ministry called
01:02:13.900 | the Center for Biblical Missions, which will be coming out in September of this year. The
01:02:19.580 | book is available. You can begin to use it this year. We have almost a hundred churches
01:02:23.820 | that have signed up to teach a missions course in their local church using this resource.
01:02:29.040 | If you'd like more information about the QR code in your program, you can scan it. You
01:02:34.100 | can contact us. We'll coach you through that, exactly how to implement that. We'd love to
01:02:39.220 | have you be a part of this first pilot group of churches that are employing it. And then
01:02:43.700 | through the center, good biblical resources that we can share with those who are looking
01:02:48.620 | to engage in missions. But in addition to that, there's gonna be a feature of that center
01:02:54.460 | which does consulting with pastors and local churches about how to assess, realign your
01:03:00.220 | mission strategy in accord with clear biblical principles, and then using those in our network
01:03:06.460 | who've done that in their churches to be a resource as a consultant with you so that
01:03:11.460 | you can call them, ask them questions, and be encouraged in that process of helping your
01:03:16.180 | church make sure that its missions ministry is aligned with the principles that we see
01:03:21.340 | in scripture. So be encouraged. We hope this will be a blessing to you and that together
01:03:26.520 | in our generation we'll be part of what we think is a reformation in missions back to
01:03:32.060 | the authority and sufficiency of scripture. And so we're grateful for your partnership
01:03:36.240 | in that. All of you here obviously are good friends of our ministries. I know speaking
01:03:42.500 | for TMA, I just want to say thank you for your support of the missionaries, the training
01:03:47.180 | centers, and all that you do. We're grateful that this is a shared labor of love, and we
01:03:52.260 | are seeing God bless that and bearing fruit to the glory of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ.
01:03:58.660 | Amen. Alright, well thank you for joining us for our Q&A today, and we'll let you go
01:04:04.020 | at this point. Guys, thank you.
01:04:05.380 | [applause]
01:04:12.380 | [silence]