(upbeat music) Welcome back to the podcast. The BCS Pastors Conference finishes up today here on Wednesday, and as I mentioned last time, earlier in January, Pastor John traveled to Louisville to speak at the annual cross conference, and one of the sessions was a panel discussion hosted by David Platt, and he was joined with Pastor John and International Evangelist Max Stiles and Pastors Thabiti Anyewabwile and Kevin DeYoung.

There was a second clip I wanted to share on this podcast, and on this one, the topic is the place of the local church in global missions, and that connection is really important to get this. And here's David Platt himself talking about one of the major themes behind the cross conference.

- One other that's a big emphasis among us and anybody else who you'll see on the stage is the role, central role of the local church in the Great Commission. So these are pastors have served as pastor, everybody who's come up here is either pastoring a church, is part of church planting specifically, so we don't see the Great Commission disconnected from the church.

It's a mission given to the church. Mac, you spoke on that earlier today. Can you summarize in a minute or two just what you shared earlier today about the role of the local church? - Yeah, the local church is the embassy of God on earth, the platform for which the Lord God advances evangelism, discipleship, and mission.

We can't do missions without the church. I didn't always believe that, I didn't always understand that, but I actually went to the Arabian Peninsula to do student ministry, but by God's great grace, we saw many people come to faith, many students come to faith, and there was not really a local healthy church for them to go to, and suddenly we realized, wait a second, we've gotta think about this.

The church is critical. We can't just give lip service to the church. The church is kind of the aim of missions in one sense, and so we rolled up our sleeves, we got involved in a local ex-pat church, English speaking church, but revitalized it in some powerful ways. It's a vibrant, gospel-centered, cross-focused church today that has partnered with the student ministry such that there has been power as the result of being in a church, a local, healthy, vibrant, gospel-centered church, and reaching out into unreached people groups.

So the main thing I want people to hear is don't ever let a missionary tell you, don't get involved in the local church, in a city that you go to as a missionary because it will take you away from your ministry, whatever that means. Don't let people tell you that.

God loves his bride. They're often misshapen, they're often odd, but he loves his bride, and you should love his bride too. And pursue helping the church become vibrant if they're not, get plugged into the local, healthy churches if you become missionaries and workers overseas. Take hold of God's love for the church because it empowers us in ministry.

God blesses those who love his church and are involved in it, help strengthen it, and help it grow. - Let me shift a little bit to something that's been mentioned already a couple times from stage, including this conversation. Do you all suspect as you pray for what will happen over the next few days that 7,000 plus people will leave here and move to another country as a missionary?

And so do you suspect that's gonna happen, or do you think there are other ways God might lead people to play a part in this picture? So we've talked about going and sending. Who wants to give some clarity? - Yeah, they can do that. We can have 7,500 go.

- Okay, that's great. So glad we answered that. But. - I think we need clarity even in front of that question, maybe you're getting at it, but what is a missionary? 'Cause many folks would say, you're all missionaries, and put it on the door as you leave here, go out into your mission field, and we're working with a narrower definition, not at all to minimize the 10 million good things we do in the name of Christ, but we're thinking of missionaries as those who are sent from one place to another, we see in scripture involving the crossing of some sort of barriers or cultures, with the purpose of speaking the name of Christ, planting and nurturing healthy churches.

Something like that would be what we see, and a text that I go to is Acts chapter 14, I won't read it to you, but you can go to the end where Paul is sort of giving, I think, his missionary report to the church in Antioch, and right above that, it gives a summary of what he does in those trips to Derbe and Lystra and around the Mediterranean, and he's doing those three things, sharing the gospel, making disciples, planting churches, and strengthening churches as he's sent to places to do that.

So, as a very good recent book came out, "When Missions is Everything," and that's a play on an old line, but when missions is everything, it ends up that missions is nothing. So we want to specify not every good thing you do in the name of Christ is what we mean by missions.

- But that definition you just gave won't work, because it applies to all American church planters, doesn't it? - Well, for crossing cultures? - That wasn't one of the three. - Well, that was at the front end, I said, of being sent across cultures for those three purposes. - To make disciples.

- Here's a better text. - They're all inspired, John. - Don't you love that moment when John Piper says, "Won't work." - They don't all say the same thing. So, the question you have to ask is, in every church, should there be somebody like Paul, not just somebody like Timothy?

Paul, in Romans 15, said, "I have completed the gospel from Jerusalem to Albania. "I've completed it. "I have no more room for work here." That's ridiculous. There's tens of thousands of unbelievers there, because he told Timothy to go do the work of an evangelist, and he's leaving for Spain.

Now, who is he? Who is Paul? Because he's got no room for work here. Timothy, you got lots of room for work here. Get it done. Do evangelism. Go plant churches among all those people like you. I'm going to Spain because I'm called to something different. Now, that's what, whatever you call that person, that's what I want about 800 of you to be.

That's my number out of my head. You said, "Do we want 7,000?" Paul did not, because when he wrote to Rome, he didn't ask them all to go with him to Spain. He asked them to send him, and if he thought everybody should be a frontier-type missionary, he would have said, "No, let's all leave Rome.

"It's evangelized, and go to Spain." So, I think that's included in your first qualification, to cross a culture, or go to unreached. It's not just crossing a culture. These frontier-types or pioneer-types missionaries are those who want to go someplace where Christ isn't named, and put a stake in the ground, and herald his name, and gather disciples, and then do that amazing thing of forming churches.

And I just want to underline that church issue, because most of you are not heavily engaged churchmen and churchwomen, and you need to be. Spend the next years becoming churchmen and churchwomen, meaning you get it. You understand what elders are, or deacons are, what pastors do, what the role of women are, what the role of men are, what the role of evangelism, what the role of prayer is, how a church works.

Because when you go to an unreached people, and they have nothing, nothing, what are you gonna build? What are you going to build, if you don't have any idea of how churches function when they're healthy? - Such a good word. Global missions in the local church are linked up in the plan of God.

I love this cross-conference conviction. I love how these men articulated here. The BCS Pastors Conference wraps up today here in Minneapolis. So does a very busy January for Pastor John. I am your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the podcast. We'll see you back here on Friday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)