>> All right, good afternoon. We've had a tremendous day already and looking forward to what the Lord has in store for us the rest of this afternoon and evening. I want to welcome you to our Q&A with our keynote speakers. My name is Mark Tatlock. I serve here at Grace Church with the ministry of the Master's Academy International.

It's my joy to facilitate our discussion today. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. Before we get started, I do have an announcement. It's a very practical announcement. One of our brothers, one of our international attendees who's with us, someone picked up his backpack by mistake. Now, that may not be a great concern, a backpack, but this one has his passport and all of his other paperwork in it, so we need you to check that you have your backpack and not this brother's.

If you find it, take it to the concierge desk, and they'll work to exchange that for you, and we'll make sure that brother finds his way home safely, okay? All right, thank you for that. Well, our theme of proclaiming Christ to the nations, I think we all feel honored that this is what our focus is this week.

I know it is a conviction and a passion of your men to see the church faithful in the participation of the Great Commission, and you've already benefited us greatly through your preaching ministry. As we talk today, I want to go back to the theme that we heard so clearly yesterday on the love of Christ being the motive for missions.

I think we all recognize we live in a day and age where the motive for missions often comes across to people in the pew as one of duty, implying almost a sense of guilt or responsibility there, or we're taught all kinds of pragmatic methods and things like that, but we're trying to get to the heart of what really drives the Great Commission.

So in the discussion of the love of Christ as being the motive, it made me think of Ephesians chapter 3 and Paul's prayer there, beginning in verse 9, speaking of the love of Christ, which is beyond comprehension, but his prayer is that God would strengthen us to comprehend and to know the love of Christ, and the context of that is his call to ministry to proclaim the mystery of Christ to the Gentiles.

So I wanted to ask you the question and consider, in your own life, growing in your love for Christ, how has that really become a pursuit in your own life in ministry, and what encouragement would you give to these ministers in that regard? And if it's okay, Joel, I'm going to start with you.

I want to ask you, as our resident expert on the Puritans, which of the Puritans do you feel really just has such a strong emphasis in their own preaching and writing ministry, and that you might make some recommendations to us and what you've learned from your study of them?

Okay. Puritans were, of course, very mission minded. I have a sectional tomorrow talking about that, and they didn't write so many books on exactly how to do missions, but they lived a missional life, and they believed that every minister should be an evangelist. So some of them wrote great evangelistic tracts.

Their tract was not 250 words long. It was not, even like Paul Washer's wonderful Gospel of Jesus Christ, 25 pages long, but they were like 150 pages long. Joseph Align, "Alarm to the Unconverted," Richard Baxter, "Call to the Unconverted," were both used for thousands and thousands of conversions. And I think what I learned from the Puritans, most of all, about evangelism and missions is how far short I come, for one thing, but also that that whole idea, which my dad also inbred in me as a child, is that your whole life is to be missional.

So every conversation you engage in, every person you meet, the goal is to have, say something, say something that leaves behind a good word for the Lord, say something that makes Christ attractive, and try to get an opportunity to pray with people. That's a really big thing in my life.

I always teach my theological students that praying with people is the most important thing you can do when you pour out your heart for their spiritual welfare, whether they're believer or unbeliever. And that's very meaningful. That's doing mission work in intimacy with God as you draw them in. So I've had a principle in my study of all the visitors.

If anyone wants to talk to me about something more than one or two minutes, I'll say, "Sit down. We're going to pray first." And I say, "You pray at the beginning. I'll pray at the end." And I want to not just bookend everything with prayer, but to me prayer is of the essence of doing missions, because we can't convert anyone.

And I think the Puritans would say the same thing. Thomas Watson, for example, says, "We proclaim Christ, but it's the Holy Spirit that takes the key of preaching and unlocks the heart of man, which we cannot do." So I think the passion for souls comes when we understand, as we've been hearing all conference long, what a wonder it is that we are saved.

And it's like those men, I forget, from Samaria or whatever, who went out and, you know, the enemy was completely gone and they found all these spoils and they started feasting, gorging themselves. And then they said, "Wait a minute. We can't feast on all these things and not go back and tell Israel that the enemy is defeated." And that's what we need to do with our lives.

We just need to...if we really believe that we have the one truth that the whole world needs, we got to share it with the whole world as much as possible. So that's why I get up every morning and one of my secret prayers every morning is, "Lord, help me to be in connection with someone today that needs to hear the gospel.

Open some door with someone somewhere." So living with that consciousness that every conversation is an opportunity to speak a good word for the Lord. That's what I learned from my dad even more than the Puritans. My dad was an elder for 40 years and he would...if you just watch him walk out after church, you know, on the parking lot, he'd stop by the little boys and girls and say, "What did you learn from the sermon today?" Or if a six-year-old was walking by him, he'd stop him and say, "Do you know how important it is to hate sin and love the Lord Jesus Christ?" So and for example, when you greet people at the door as a pastor, do you pay attention to the little children?

Do you say something meaningful to them? Or do you say like, "I've got a sermon today that's a story and you can listen to it and you can talk with your dad about it later, but I've got something to say to you too today." And the kid looks at you like, "Oh, wow." And they'll listen better.

So I mean, there's just a thousand ways. It's a way of life. You don't let opportunities go by and you ask the Lord for more opportunities every day to speak a good word for the Lord. Bring the gospel, death in Adam, life in Christ, wherever you go. Thank you.

Paul, I'll stay with that same theme and direct it to you. I know in your missionary career in Peru, you've been threatened at gunpoint, but I've also heard you speak of just the humblest, most faithful village pastors and those who are itinerant men going from village to village sharing Christ in very difficult circumstances facing many trials.

Can you speak to how the love of Christ frees a man to face those kinds of risks and hardship in missionary service? For me, there are two different aspects. One is the love of a regenerate soul for the lost. That will be there and it should be powerful. But when you're out there preaching, usually what happens is people gather around you.

They listen for a while. Then all of a sudden someone sent by the enemy starts screaming out heretic or this or that. And they take your little pulpit and your tracks and you and throw you out in the street. Or like they did two of my brothers while they preached in the plaza, just continued to pour goat urine on their heads and beat them with canes.

It takes more than love for men at that point to keep you preaching. And you would expect me to say now a love for Christ. And that is true. But I find my own love for Christ to be so fickle and unstable. And I believe that the genitive there in 1 Corinthians 5 when Paul talks about the love of Christ controls us that it's not his love for Christ but Christ's love for him.

That's the one in my very broken weak life. That is the iron foundation for him. You know, I can tell you how many times we jump in the back of a cattle truck or whatever and hide and go up into the mountains and look at my brothers. For him.

For him. And you know, men seek for courage. And I don't think that's wise because courage also can turn into pride. To delve into how much Christ loves you and how beautiful that love. The older I get, I realize that it's that unconditional ongoing continuous love of Christ that will drive a man more severely than any whip of the law.

But what you've got to understand, I'm speaking not just in propositional truth, but I'm speaking experimentally, as the old man would say, and that is born out of prayer. In prayer, the beauty of Christ can become such a reality that that you have to say, Lord, take your hand off me, lest I perish.

To know him as a person, to seek him, to have a tryst with him. As I've been saying many times now that I travel, I'm seeing so many young men that I'm seeing so often before men that I wonder if they have enough time to be before Christ in prayer.

My life, I've never. If there's anything in my life that's been out of any worth, it's. Anyone can pray anyone. Everyone's weak enough. To Terry. To come out of bed at night when he calls your name. And it's that that drives even the weakest man to do things that seem to be courageous.

The love of Christ. After, do you have any thoughts on that in your own life and ministry? What these men have said is so wise, insightful. I think from a different angle. As you study the word, there has to be a discipline. That truth. And you love the Lord more because of that truth.

I think often we treat or we are tempted to treat the preparation for preaching or teaching like an assignment. You just have to get it done. And so we can intellectually finish the job. But if that's all we've done, we failed. And there is the need. It's even Ezra 710 that he not only studied, but then he did and then he preached and he taught.

That's what we have to do. We cannot leave any doctrine, any verse, any word until we love it and love him more for it. And then, then the love of Christ that he has for you, like our brother Paul mentioned from 2 Corinthians 5, will compel us. Tremendous. Do you add anything, brother?

Yeah. I think first of all, the point that's been made about the love of Christ in terms of Christ's love for us, I think is a vital point because it is out of that love that our own love is ignited. Paul's statement in the famous Galatians 2.20 about the fact that the life he lives, he lives by faith in the Son of God, and then he adds that phrase, "who loved me and gave himself for me." It looks like that was the furnace from which a lot of his energy for ministry was being derived.

"Who loved me and gave himself for me." It is said of the missionary, David Livingstone, that on one occasion he made his way back to England. His arm was in a sling because a lion had jumped on him after he had already shot it and was pulling him apart, or trying to do so, tearing away at him.

But because he was losing blood, it finally just collapsed in front of him and died. But anyway, so he made his way to England, and he had his arm in a sling, and somebody asked him the question about the sacrifice that he is giving to the cause of missions, and his answer was classic.

He said, "Sacrifice? Sacrifice? No one should use that word about himself in the light of the sacrifice of God's own Son." And I think really that's the addition that I'd like to make to that. Tremendous. Thank you. Just turning to another subject that we have to consider, many of us have had conversations about the emphasis on the social sciences in the field of missions, missiology, and the desperate need for a return to the authority of Scripture in the missions endeavor.

And, Abner, I'm going to start with you. In the new missions textbook, Biblical Missions, your chapter is the first chapter, and it's entitled Fidelity to the Word of God in Missions, Scripture as the Launch, Life, and Legacy of the First Missionaries. Can you unpack for us the highlights of your argument for a return to the authority of Scripture in missions?

Yeah, I think the way you could put it as simply as this way, who's defining, who gets to define mission? If the world or society or an academic discipline defines mission, it's no longer the mission of God. God's mission means He owns it. God's mission means He defines it.

God's mission means He commissioned it. That's what it means of God's mission, Christ's commission. And so, because God defines it, He defines it in His Word. And there were the first, shall we say, missionaries. They were the apostles. They were the first missionaries. They were the ones who held the Scripture high.

They were the ones who set the pattern. And all of the other stuff that now has hijacked the missiological world, that is a foreign entity that has intruded into the biblical purity that has been set forth not by man, but by God. And so, we need to go back to what the Scriptures have established if we are to do the mission.

Now, if you're not here to do the mission of Christ, well, get out. No, in all seriousness, if you're not here to do the mission of Christ, then yeah, all of those other sociological things, of course they make sense to people. But if you're actually here to do the work of the ministry and to take and preach Christ to the ends of the earth, then there is the one who gave us the mission defines it.

And we do not have the right to define it on our own terms. - Excellent. Thank you. Conrad, I'm sure in your context, you've seen the outworking of those influences in missiology. Would you just share maybe your observations and comments? - Yeah, well, perhaps let me begin with a very brief story.

Towards the end of 1999 and beginning of the year 2000, I got a phone call from somebody I didn't know. And he said on the other side, "Hello, my name is Paul Washer." And the short of that conversation was that he wanted to partner with us in our mission's work.

It was out of fear for exactly what Abner just said here, that we took a bit of time. I think Paul thought it was a very long time, but we took a bit of time to come up with a mission's policy, which was dipped in Scripture from beginning to end.

And then we gave it to him and said, "Are you willing to sign this before we can work together?" Do you remember, Paul? Yeah. And it was because we knew that the Western world had all kinds of views about missions. We did not want to hold hands in the darkness.

And we've worked now together for about 25 years in the work of missions because we are working on the foundation of Scripture. And as has just been said, you have the founder of the church laying the foundation in the Gospels. You have the book of Acts giving you something of the initial outworking.

You've got the Gospels wrestling with the issues that were coming up in the context of these churches. And it was about churches being established, places where the Gospel would go forth, God's people would be nurtured, watched after, and so on. Yeah, I can't imagine why we should now be looking for tricks to achieve what God Himself has given a manual for us to use.

Thank you. It's likely the case a lot of North American pastors aren't aware of really what's happening as a result of those influences and missions and missions training over the years. And it'd be helpful if maybe Paul and Joel, if you have observations about that, could just comment on the need for pastors to be informed so that they can shepherd their people in this regard.

For years there have been what, it's almost like a Gnosticism. It's an esoteric missionary knowledge that has been invented, and I believe it's been invented by men who did not have the Scriptures nor the Spirit of God. And it is rank. How do you plant a church in the most exotic people group in the world the same way you plant a church in Kansas?

You preach the Scriptures, you obey the Scriptures, you pray, and you live with piety, with virtue. There is no secret key. There's not all this stuff. Another thing you've got to realize is just look for a moment at what we supposedly believe about the radical depravity of the human heart.

It is like Jericho. It is tightly shut up. No one comes out. No one comes in. There's nothing that's going to break into that heart but the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the gospel. Then look at our enemy. You wrestle not with flesh and blood. We wrestle with powers and principalities and mites and dominions.

All your little strategies are nothing. The only way we can overcome is to submit ourselves entirely to the Scriptures. Paul told Timothy, "In case I delay, I write so that one may know how to conduct himself in the household of God." How do you know how to conduct yourself in the household of God?

Only through what is written. And the men who lash themselves down to Scripture, the men who throw away Saul's armor and take up the smooth stones of the gospel, they're the men that are going to plant churches. Another thing about missions that you have to understand. Missions is just one biblical church sending out a like-minded, elder-qualified man to plant another biblical church.

That's what it is. For example, if Conrad, we've known each other for years. I know of his elders. I know the decisions they've made. All these things. So if Conrad calls me tomorrow, or the church in Leon, it's one of your churches. If they call us tomorrow, those elders, and say, "We have four graduates.

They're elder-qualified and they're ready to go out." We don't even have to investigate. Why? Because they're being sent out by biblical local churches with biblical elders who will make sure they're elder-qualified and pull them off the field if they're not. Missions is extraordinarily difficult, but it's not complex. It's not complex at all.

I want to press into this a little bit more. One of the other things that we've seen with regard to contemporary missions has been the loss of the local church as central to the missions enterprise. I'd just like to hear your thoughts. How did we lose sight of this?

And what is the role of the pastor in leading the mission strategy or effort of his church? Just real quickly, look at the book of Acts. It's quite amazing. Someone smarter than me ought to do a study on this. You start off, and it's apostles, apostles, apostles, and then apostles, elders, apostles, elders.

By the time you get to Acts 15, what do you see? You see elders. Because they should have their finger on the pulse of what's going on in the world. They should be the ones. 2 Timothy 2.2, you can use seminaries, and they can be a tremendous blessing, but ultimately, 2 Timothy 2.2, that's part of the elder's job to oversee that those young men are elder qualified and that they're able and qualified to send them out.

There is no mission apart from the local church. There is none. Perhaps the only addition that I'd like to make there is to answer the question, why has the local church been replaced by other institutions? I think part of it, especially where I'm coming from, that is, in the context of Africa, is the fact that you rightly had missionaries coming, evangelizing, and helping, in that sense, churches to be established.

And then, as they began to train evangelists and other pastors, instead of allowing these young churches, with their elders, to then send these individuals, they, as the missionaries, institutional missionaries, remained in charge of the process. So they are the ones who are now sending their graduates all over the place to establish churches.

I suppose it helps with their reports back to where they were sent from, that we've now done this, we're sending more of this, we're planting more churches. But in the process, they are sending a message to the indigenous churches that this is not your business. And we lost a lot of ground, and it's been quite difficult to reverse the process so that the churches can take their place as the ones that are to identify individuals, nurture them, ensure that they are properly trained, commission them, watch over them, support them, counsel them, and all that happens in the process of maturing church plants.

So I would give that as a historical way in which the churches, especially in the mission field, lost the place, the biblical place. I'd like to supplement that. That is so insightful. Thank you, because that helps, I think, us think through missions better. I think in the West, with the high degree of individualism that has pervaded our culture, what has, and let's be charitable, inadvertently happened is a low, low view of the church, has infiltrated, ironically, the church.

And so when somebody says, with the best of intentions, "I want to go overseas. I want to do something for the Lord," we just say, "Great, go," and we send them. And we never instruct them that you do know that ministry happens in the body of Christ. You do know that ministry is part and parcel of the work of the church.

You can't just go by yourself in that way, be completely lone ranger, independent in that way. We have not instructed, perhaps, our churches well in understanding the value and the institution that Christ Himself established for this age that is the church. And as a result, then the missions that we have engaged in has separated from the church.

But as you all have mentioned, you can't have that apart from the church. And so we've actually dismembered our own mission in that regard. Yeah, so the low view of church here, and yet the fervor of a young missions movement in our generation has resulted in a lot of young people being sent out who aren't committed to the church overseas.

So a lot of work being done in the name of missions that is not focused on the church itself. And you've helped us appreciate that. Thank you very much. Let me ask this question, three of you here, a chancellor and two presidents of Bible colleges and seminaries. I'd like you to share your perspective on how do you inspire and equip your students to engage in evangelism and missions, not just when they're sent out, but in their own lives as students?

So we, obviously we have our seminary in Grand Rapids, and we're training about 500 students right now from 40 some countries around the world. And a lot of them are embedded in their own culture, and we have connections of oversight and work with all these 28 different seminaries. But in terms of our own students and our own denomination, and in our own seminary in Grand Rapids, there's a number of things that we do.

First of all, Dr. Brian DeVries, who just published his first book, which is published by Crossway, which has done really well, he's the president of McConnell Theological College in South Africa. And he's established a mission network over there in which they're training about 1,500 men for the ministry all around Africa by getting other ministers to shepherd a group of men around himself and around the elders, maybe five or 10 men.

And they take courses long distance, they do internships, three-year internships with the minister and so on. He just came out with his first book called You Will Be My Witnesses. It's birthed out of Acts 1, verse 8, and it looks at the whole concept of missions being rooted in the word martyrdom, sacrificing for the gospel's sake.

Christian witness as gospel presence, Christian witness as gospel message, by gospel response, by gospel community. So Brian, Dr. DeVries, got his MDiv and THM at our seminary, then went to Southern for his PhD, and he's been immersed in missions now for about 20 years. He comes back, actually, and teaches our five mission courses in our seminary, and does very well.

But then we also have other men come in and do a variety of things. For one thing, a couple very solid, reformed, biblical street preachers come to our seminary every year. They take all the students out and do street preaching in Grand Rapids. Every student is also connected with a local minister, and that minister is his overseer who reports to our two spiritual deans, and they talk about missions in that own local church, and the goal is that the student is involved in at least one mission work in the local church over which that minister oversees the work, and then gives us regular reports on how the student is doing.

And so that local minister will then take the student to homeless shelters, he'll take him to nursing homes, he'll take him to different places to do mission work, jails, prisons in the community, and the student gets the experience of speaking in a number of different venues and goes with the pastor, the local pastor, who we only take pastors we really trust, are biblical, and have a heart for missions, and he takes him out on various mission endeavors.

And so we kind of cobbled together a program by getting a lot of people to help us among the elderships of churches and ministers and local churches, as well as in-house training. Thank you. And so you're intentional in that, making sure that's part of the experience of the preparation.

Yeah, well, from our end, a number of our students are actually pastors, even now, so that they are immediately applying as they are learning. We are on the starting end of our master's program, our sort of seminary end of the university. And so I think for us at the moment, it's just making sure that as we begin to grow, we don't lose the aspect of the practical side of ministry, so that we don't just have people getting their degree qualifications through written assignments and class discussions, but that we ensure that even those who are not in actual ministry are very involved in their local churches, because it is really through that, that under their elders and pastors, they will then gain the experience as they are then sent out elsewhere.

But we're really at the beginning. Yeah, I think they're so helpful, because I'm new, so I'm just learning from them. But I think in addition to the practical side, which is putting into action the activity of evangelism, the love for that can only be gained as you do it.

And I remember as a freshman in college, an older student taking me under his wing and saying, "We're going to go to Third Street, Santa Monica, and we're going to do open-air evangelism." And I said, "I don't even know where that is. I don't even know what any of that means." And he just said, "I'll buy you a hamburger." I said, "Okay, that's all I need." And then we just did it.

But that's what allowed me to understand what that was and to love it. And so it is older taking younger. It is providing those opportunities to get people's feet wet so that they love what they never knew they could love, and to not be scared, to not be intimidated by it, to think that the Lord can use me this way.

And you know what? Getting shamed in public is not bad for the Lord Jesus. I'm no longer scared. I love the practical aspect of this. At the same time, I think as institutions, we need to help give our students perspective. Sometimes a student's whole world is a two inch by five inch screen.

They think that's the world. That's all that exists. That's why they run into walls on accident and things of this nature, because they think that's all there is. And you have to remind them you're not in college or seminary just for you. You're not here just for you. If you think you're just here to get a job or to just do your own thing, that's not why God has you here.

There is a greater plan that goes beyond you. And I think we need to energize our young people who are sorely tempted by this world to just focus on themselves, that there is a bigger commission, a global noble endeavor. There's a reason why Paul was never ashamed of the gospel.

And that is because the gospel is full of honor. There is no more noble and epic enterprise than the work of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And whether it be that they are those who will go and leave their homes and home countries, that's wonderful. But we need to remind every student in all of their disciplines, as Conrad was just alluding to, that we are all in this together.

One way or another, we are going to unite to advance the mission. And it doesn't matter if you're an accountant, a physical therapist, a medical doctor, or a barista. We do discourage the barista part. But we want them to be involved. They have to. And they all have a vital role.

We would never have the English Bible if the business people surrounding Tyndale did not support him and facilitate its distribution and supply him protection. You know, the people who reached Asia, like C.T. Studd and the Cambridge Six, they all came from college. They all came from college. This is a vital opportunity to remind our young people, whatever the Lord has for you, there is a bigger picture because the Lord has it for you.

So we need to walk worthy of that. And then with that, introduce them to the practical things that instill the habits for the rest of their life. >> Tremendous. Thoughts, Paul? >> You know, I would just ask each and every one of you, how often each week do you pray for laborers?

You know, Jesus never said pray for money because to be honest with you, good men are more difficult to find than money. To pray, start off praying. But then there's another thing. If you go to 2 Corinthians chapter 8, which is a marvelous text all the way around, we see that there was a public appeal made with regard to Corinth.

So it was made known. It was made known. And then it says God put an earnestness on Titus's heart and he went voluntarily. I think that when we go back to some of these missionary movements that gave us people like Amy Carmichael, I think the church was more in a proper way, not political, not militant politically, but the church was militant to take the gospel.

It was reflected also in its worship. I've noticed that a lot of worship today is more about me, where a lot in the great missionary movements, the hymns reflected let's go, let's go. And I think that pastors need to really work at putting this battle before young men, to put it before them and tell them, you know, we can live and die for something.

We can serve a king incorruptible. We can build a kingdom that is eternal and will never fall. There's a reason to be alive. You know, the Peruvians sometimes say, "Tu vives porque el aire es gratis," which means the only reason you're alive is because air is free. That's the way a lot of people live.

And we need to constantly have this mindset of warfare, of warfare. There's great deeds to be done. And men were made to fight. You know, I think it's very appropriate to say, you know, a soldier wants to die by the last bullet in the last battle because that's what soldiers do.

Men were made to fight, but it's the preaching in the pulpit of there's a greater thing out there to live for that's going to inspire young men to get off their phones and to get to the field. Also, I think it would be a great ministry that could be promoted is just people going out and making documentaries about the need.

Sometimes I'll see documentaries about the need and I mean, I'm 63 and I'm like wanting to saddle my horse one more time. We need to put that in front of the people. I knew a missionary who came back to the States, Carlton Allen, independent fundamentalist Baptist, one of the finest missionaries I ever knew.

You couldn't go three feet anywhere in his church without seeing a picture of a missionary, a verse about missions. The man, there's no telling the legacy of his life just because he constantly reminded men and women. One last thing, borrowing from William Carey at heart cry, we say you're either called to go down in the mine or you're called to hold the rope for those who go down.

People need to realize that it doesn't matter what station of life you're in. You're part of the church militant. You know, heart cry exists not just because we have missionaries who are willing to die. It exists because of businessmen who want to use their money for something eternal. My own life, every man here, I think will be shocked when we get to glory and find out that it wasn't so much about us as the fact that the Holy Spirit raised up little old ladies to pray for us.

And the grace that flowed from Christ because every person is a part of this great endeavor. And I believe that it is this great endeavor that everyone needs to learn is the very thing that they're looking for. A reason to live and die for Him. If I ever go out as a martyr, the last thing I want to say is long live the King.

Long live the King. And we need to have that spirit in every one of us. >> You know, I love that idea, Paul, of praying regularly from the pulpit. And we do try to do that in our church every Sunday. We're remembering the need for men to be called to ministry, called to missions.

That's critical. And in addition to that, I think we also need to really strive to model for the younger men, ourselves, and Paul, you're a really good example of that. You get young men surrounding you all the time. But to model for them what it's like to be a godly minister in the service of God so that young men look at your life and say, there's something really I want to emulate there.

There's something that's gripping me when I watch that man and hear him talk and interact with him. So that you become a mentor for young men that you don't even realize you're becoming a mentor for. That's really critical. Spurgeon said something really interesting, and maybe he exaggerated it because I don't want to make people feel guilty unnecessarily here.

But he said, when he talked to ministers, he said, how many young men, how many young men under your ministry have gone into ministry or missions because of your example? Because they've heard you preach, they've watched your life. And he said, that's usually the sign of a godly man.

And that convicted me at the time because I was a young minister and nobody had come forward yet. But I think you need to be conscious of that and seek to also, when you see young men in your church that are godly, I'll go to them. I'll have a special visit.

I'll take them out to lunch and say, could it be that God might be calling you to full-time service in his vineyard one way or another? And just having the minister come alongside them. Sometimes they say no, but sometimes they say, well, I'm struggling with it, but I don't know how to proceed.

I don't know where to go with it. And I say, well, tell me about what you're feeling. And talk to them and befriend them. So I think the local minister's involvement is very important in this whole area. >> It's such an important point for all of us as pastors.

Speaking, again, kind of historic approach to missions, we've taken a very passive approach. We wait until people approach us, express their interest in the mission field. What you're saying, Joel, is we need to shift into a pursuant mode. We need to be prayerful and looking for those that we would challenge to go to the field.

>> And William Perkins, the father of Puritanism, actually had the reverse role. He said to a young man who was godly, or to all young men who are godly, he said, the first thing you need to ask yourself is, is God calling me to full-time service in His kingdom?

Only then do you have the right to consider another occupation. Isn't that interesting? We say, the way I grew up was you do it in reverse. Only if God really overwhelms you with a call are you to even consider a call, otherwise you're considered to be too presumptuous and too bold.

>> Brother, just one thing I think that the men should know here. In my interaction with a lot of the TMAI centers, whether it was, I don't want to leave anybody out of it, but when I look at, when I've been to Samara, you look at the guys in Germany, you look at the guys in Spain, and several other places, I've noticed they're like incubators.

More than what I see here in the U.S. I see in all those different places, you know, there's these young men that are chomping at the bit. So maybe we could bring them back here to teach us. I don't know, but do you know what I mean? It seems like there's an unusual incubation of men, young men that want to give their life.

>> Well, and I think they're in context where the church is so weak, and these young men are so desperate to see God's Word transform lives in the church, and so there's that interest and that eagerness. I agree with you, we see that as well. Well, listen, we're all students of God's Word and we're called to preach God's Word.

We attempt to do that faithfully in our own calling. We know that the overarching narrative or theme of Scripture is the unfolding of God's redemptive plan from Genesis to Revelation. It's interesting though, in most churches, most pastors take a very topical approach to missions. Maybe it's one Sunday a year or even just one week a year, but those of us who are called to exposit the Scriptures, how can we faithfully in our expositional, approach to expositional preaching, mature the church with regard to their understanding of missions, let it coming out of the text on a more consistent basis.

Thoughts? >> For me, if you're just giving these snapshots, they can't see this, I don't even know how to, this glorious scarlet river, this magnificent, complex, flowing in perfect harmony, tapestry of redemption. And the more they understand the brilliance of God's mind there, the more they see the power of it and then culminating in the person of Christ and culminating in what he did and then what it's going to bring about in the future.

One of the things that I think that we're losing also is the idea of the eschaton, the glory of it, the joy of it. I've lived long enough to know that life is hard and ministry is long and the older I get, the more I go into the text and I'm thinking about what will the new heaven and the new earth be like?

What will it be when Jesus comes back? Don't I want to fight now because this is my last chance to fight against sin, to fight for him? And I think we need this, we need preachers who are going to be able to lay out this magnificent tapestry before people and the more they see it, the more they'll get involved in missions.

>> Yeah, I use a consecutive expository approach to my own ministry and I honestly don't see the difficulty between that and the link with missions because as we already were saying here, the entire Bible, the grand narrative of the Bible is in the direction of missions. When we're talking about the Old Testament, Christ being in the Old Testament, again it's not so much that he's just popping up here and there if you search hard enough.

It's the fact that that Old Testament is building towards preparing for his coming, pointing towards him. And so if you are expounding the Scriptures, even in the Old Testament, with a kind of biblical theology undergirding what you are teaching, you still will find that you are awaiting the appetites of your people for the work that Christ has given us working towards his coming.

Of course, the New Testament plays in that direction itself. So I think the problem is if you are simply dealing with texts in a devotional way, you know, so David brings down Goliath, you can bring down your big problems kind of thing. Then yes, they won't think in terms of the grand purpose of God across history.

And then if I can just throw in one more, and it's, if God's people can see what has been said in this conference from the beginning, that the Bible is about God. It's about his glory, his honor, his grand purposes. Once, it doesn't matter where they are in the Bible, when they are saturated, to borrow the phrase of the Apostle Paul, being filled with all the fullness of God, then again you find that, yes, there may be accountants, there may be doctors and so on, but somehow they will still want God to be glorified in what they are doing, and then also whatever they earn, they want to put it where the emphasis is in the grand purpose of God.

So yeah, we shouldn't limit it to topics. I think there is the overall trajectory in the Bible, and wherever we dip in Scripture, we don't lose sight of it. Thank you. You know, the Spirit-anointed preaching with passion, whether it's going straight through Bible books or other methods, the people are going to catch it, and the minister is going to naturally speak about missions and evangelism often, because he loves the church, because Christ loves the church.

And so when you love the bride of Christ so much, you're passionate about all these things, it will just come out. You'll bring it out of your text here and there where maybe other people don't even see it, because you're breathing, you're praying, you're living for the expansion of God's kingdom.

"Thy kingdom come" is huge in the life of every Spirit-anointed preacher, and I think it will just come naturally in the preaching, and people will catch the flavor of it. Yeah, just to build a little bit off of what Conrad said about, you don't preach David and Goliath and say you can kill your own Goliaths and all this kind of stuff.

It really is about going back to seeing texts, to seeing the Scripture the way God wanted us to see it, not about us, but about Him. And it doesn't take very long to get a global perspective in Genesis 1. It's in the first verse. God created the heavens and the earth.

He didn't create Israel, didn't say that there, and it doesn't say He created Abner, because I don't matter. But He did create the world. And so the "I" must be to the world. This is our Father's world. And with that, everything He is doing and everything He is revealing is to that end.

It isn't just so that we can have a nicer life, even though there are blessings of following the Lord Jesus. We understand that. But it is to glorify Himself and His Son through the work of the Spirit in His people who proclaim Him. And that is what expositional preaching uncovers, every passage by passage by passage, when it is done according to God's intent, united with the writer's intent, because they all thought that way.

All of them thought that way. And with that, a consistent exposition gives the motivations for missions. It gives the methodology for missions, because now we have the rich theology that we need to understand what does it mean to instruct and disciple others. And it gives us the message of missions, because it reveals the gospel that we proclaim.

And it gives us the message of missions, because every text has a point. There is a reason why Paul wrote those epistles. It was to ensure that the church, Jew and Gentile, would be the witness that Christ commissioned. We understand that. And so every text has a purpose. Every revealed truth has a purpose.

And its purpose inherently by definition is missions. And so therefore, the faithful preaching of the Word of God, not the kind of preaching that just wants to tickle the ears or to satisfy some superficial desire, but really uncovering the truth of the Word of God, will take people's eyes off of themselves and on to the purposes of God in Christ and the truth unto Him and unto living for Him.

And missions will always be supported in every sermon. Tremendous, thank you. Well, as one who has benefited from Pastor John's faithful preaching of the Word and seeing a church that is just completely committed to the cause of Christ, the glory of Christ, motivated by the love of Christ, has such a mission's heart and reach, it has come as a result of that commitment to preaching the Word just as you've said.

Well, I have a lot more questions, so this isn't quite fair, but our time's up. I do want to just make a couple observations. Today in our gathering, as we mentioned, we have 750 international pastors and guests with us. And I know, Conrad, as you've alluded to, Paul, your own ministry of HeartCry, Joel, you travel and are working with the church around the world as well as your ministry, Abner.

We are seeing God at work through His church moving in the lives of what we would term, what we think is going to be a global missions movement, a movement that is anchored and flows out of the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. We like to say mature churches become sending churches.

And so we're beginning to witness that in our generation. It's very exciting. It's not just the Western church, but it's the global church. And so we're excited. We want to do our part. Joel, you mentioned a great new book that came out to equip others. There's other ministries that are publishing good sound resources to kind of stem the tide and provide alternatives for what's out there with regard to missions and missiology.

It's been a joy for us to be involved in that endeavor. These men have participated in this project with us, the biblical missions book that you've all received in your box of books. If you haven't picked that up, just know it's there as well as the workbook that goes along with us.

I mention it here because what we want you to know is this labor of love born out of these very convictions that we've talked about, both a theological foundation for missions, the role of the local church in missions, and then a biblical approach to every practice of evangelism, outreach, church planting, Bible translation, mercy ministry, whatever it might be to bring it back to the scriptures.

And this book was written for your church. This was a resource written for you as pastors. Yes, it's large. It's three volumes in one, but it's designed to use through the workbook in your local church. A small group can use it. You can use it in one of your equipping classes or Sunday school class.

It's also designed to be employed for those of us involved in higher education, Bible colleges, or seminaries. And so we want you to know about this project because—and it was released this week. You're the first ones to have it in your hands. It just came out. And we wanted to release it at Shepherds Conference to put it in the hands of pastors who are gonna be committed to the very thing that we're discussing this week.

And so there's gonna be future resources made available to you through our ministry called the Center for Biblical Missions, which will be coming out in September of this year. The book is available. You can begin to use it this year. We have almost a hundred churches that have signed up to teach a missions course in their local church using this resource.

If you'd like more information about the QR code in your program, you can scan it. You can contact us. We'll coach you through that, exactly how to implement that. We'd love to have you be a part of this first pilot group of churches that are employing it. And then through the center, good biblical resources that we can share with those who are looking to engage in missions.

But in addition to that, there's gonna be a feature of that center which does consulting with pastors and local churches about how to assess, realign your mission strategy in accord with clear biblical principles, and then using those in our network who've done that in their churches to be a resource as a consultant with you so that you can call them, ask them questions, and be encouraged in that process of helping your church make sure that its missions ministry is aligned with the principles that we see in scripture.

So be encouraged. We hope this will be a blessing to you and that together in our generation we'll be part of what we think is a reformation in missions back to the authority and sufficiency of scripture. And so we're grateful for your partnership in that. All of you here obviously are good friends of our ministries.

I know speaking for TMA, I just want to say thank you for your support of the missionaries, the training centers, and all that you do. We're grateful that this is a shared labor of love, and we are seeing God bless that and bearing fruit to the glory of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen. Alright, well thank you for joining us for our Q&A today, and we'll let you go at this point. Guys, thank you.