Much mission effort is wasted because of no coherent strategy for turning a continuous stream of contacts into workers

<p>Much mission effort is wasted because of no coherent strategy for turning a continuous stream of contacts into workers</p>

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East Bangladesh Mission of SDA

The State of Missions in Adventism

Eugene Prewitt

The Bible on Missions

Codependent Missions

Making a Connected Mission Strategy

Assets, Cons and Support for Missions


Welcome back to our series on the state of Adventist missions. This is the third part of 4. And let me pray for us and we'll get right to it. Our Father in heaven, I'm asking you to bless us as we talk about missions and what can and should be done. Bless us in our studying.

I ask in the name of Jesus, amen. So I wanna tell you about a man named Mustafa. That's not his real name, but Mustafa lives in Iraq. And when I was stuck at my home and began reaching out to those foreigners in close countries. He was 1 of the ones that I reached out to.

It took me a year for most of them to become Christians, but not with Mustafa. Mustafa was ready to abandon Islam on day 2. The reason was because of his background. He had personally known English translators that were killed because they were English translators after the Gulf War. That is, the local militants in his area suspected everyone that was gifted in English as being a translator for the Allied forces opposing Saddam Hussein.

Well, that arbitrary way really affected Mustafa and he began reading through the Conflict of the Ages series. He cried when he read about the fall of Adam and Eve. He had never realized to what extent a little sin is destructive. Have you ever realized to what extent a little sin is destructive? And so he has been reaching out to friends already, but it looks like, at least at this stage, that he really hasn't had much success in reaching people.

Not much success. He's working for a foreign national company there, and maybe there'll be people working in his area somewhat soon, It's not at all clear. I want to talk to you today, though, about the problem of waste in missions. If you have your Bibles, turn to John chapter 6. In John chapter 6, Jesus feeds thousands of people.

John 6, and we're going to look at what he says in verse 12. So when they were filled, he said to the disciples, gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing is lost. This idea of gathering the fragments is in every 1 of the Gospels. I remember when I was in India about 12 years ago, I saw in the back of the quarterly an advertisement for a number of Ellen White's books, and the prices were really good. Really good.

I thought, let's get them, a lot of them, and let's start teaching the people to sell them. I was helping Amazing Facts start a school there in India. And so I began asking around, where can I order these books? I couldn't find anyone that knew where to get the books. Finally, I found someone who knew.

He took me upstairs to an unused floor in 1 of the tallest buildings there, and there In plastic trash bags, there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these Ellen White books as they had been damaged by dampness and ants and bugaroos and abuse. I began to put things together and I realized what had happened. Some nice person from a western country had come and sponsored the printing of those books. They'd been printed. He'd also paid to have them advertised at a low price in the back of the quarterly, they were advertised.

But there never was a plan put in place for the distribution of those books. There never was a plan put in place to get them into the public. And as a consequence, no 1 thought it was their responsibility to do it. No 1 was concerned with the rotting books because it wasn't under anyone's job description to prevent the books from rotting. So what I'm trying to say is that we need to be sure when we give money in missions that there is a plan for what's going to happen.

We need to make sure. Here in Bangladesh I found the same thing. I found in this building I'm in right now, about 4 stores up, the top store, a book room full of books, undoubtedly sponsored by people from wealthy countries, printed, sent here to the mission, and have been sitting here ever since, some of them for many years. Well, I'm here now, so I've taken that problem in hand and begun distributing those books, just handing them out, getting them out, trying to empty that room. It's gonna take a while because there were tens of thousands of books in that room.

What I'm really saying to you about the state of administrations is it might require more from you as a donor than giving money. If there isn't someone on the ground to make sure that things are going right. Things might not go right because maybe no 1 will view it as their responsibility to make them go right. As I've been at Weimar University the last 6 weeks I've been with Johnny Wong the whole time And I really enjoyed sitting and listening to him talk. 1 of his main messages was about the difference between a congregation that is program oriented, doing like stop smoking programs and cooking school programs and depression recovery programs and Pathfinder programs and whatever other type of programs.

He mentioned how these program-oriented churches very often the heads of their departments view their responsibility as to put on a good program. The health department puts on a good cooking program. The Religious Liberty Department puts on a good Religious Liberty program. The Sabbath School Department puts on a good Sabbath School program. And so on.

What's lacking, Johnny said, is a coherent plan of how to get from our program to get the people into a care group, to get them from there into a Bible study, from there to get them into a reaping program, from there to get them baptized, from there to get them discipled and get them into work. If we don't have a program planned, if we don't have a system planned, it just almost never happens that people come to our cooking school and just find their way all the way along to become a worker. That's just not how it goes in business, it's not how it goes in the church. We need to have a plan. When Jesus said, pray to the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth workers into the harvest, in that context, the workers must be reapers.

I mean that If the harvest is ripe, it's a bit late for sowing. And maybe I'm pushing the metaphor too far, but for sure in our plan, we need to have some sort of reaping business in our plan. And it won't do to skip the middle steps. I mean, to have the cooking school, and a few months later, have the reaping series. We need to have in the middle there some fellowship with administ, some care groups, some challenges, maybe some daily or weekly text messaging with encouraging thoughts or health talks or something we're going to have to have a systematic approach if we're going to really succeed in reaching the people.

So maybe you don't know I hope this doesn't reduce any reward I'd get in heaven for this, but I've been selling assets in North America to raise funds for my own work here. I think if you have multiple houses, it's about time you sell 1 of them and put that money into God's work. I mean, we live in an age when we don't know how much longer this world is going to go on. But let me go on to my third point in this third talk. I want to talk to you about unwelcoming churches.

Now, liberal speakers and I don't have a lot in common, but maybe here we sound like the same bird for a bit, because we'll both talk about churches where what's going on just isn't welcoming. But I wanna tell you about why some churches aren't welcoming. Sure, it's true that a few of them are just cold. They're just full of unconverted people that don't care. But a more common thing is that tribalism I mentioned in the first talk.

People are uncomfortable with having the other tribe present. In America it might be black on white or it might be Asian on Latino. In Malaysia it might be Chinese or Malay. I don't know where you are and what it's like for you, but tribalism is 1 thing that makes church cold. But the thing that makes church the coldest, even churches that have no tribalism and lots of converted people and wonderful preaching, is being too big.

When you're too big, a visitor can come and leave and never be noticed. When I began attending the Weimar church I absorbed that right away and that's why I decided to plant a church and during my year at Weimar God helped me and and we received some funding to do it and we planted a church about 20 minutes up the hill from there. It's still in the process of planting. It's still a branch Sabbath school, but it'll become a church. It's the Dutch Flap branch Sabbath school becoming the Dutch Flap Church.

1 of the real benefits of that church plant is all the people I'm studying the Bible with, when I invite them to church, they have a place where they can vent their concerns, where they can ask their questions, where they can share their praises, where they can give their prayer request. And that open sharing is what makes that little church plant feel so personal. It's what makes it welcoming. It's because we have a small church that we could ask Our friends there that are, some of them have some handicaps that would prevent them from being participatory in some other churches, but not in our little church plant. They can be full participatory persons.

So now I wanna talk to you about some good things that are going on. 1 of the good things going on is the LIGHT program by Wildwood. Medical missionary training that's spreading all around the world. And There's going to be a light program in Malaysia just starting soon. It's going to be so useful there.

It's a great thing. Then ASAP, that mission setting organization that hires lots of indigenous workers. Also, it was working with some friends of mine there in Houston, the Griswolds, to start a wonderful program for reaching refugees there in Houston. I think this refugee business of reaching those refugees in Houston is just an incredible development in missions. And good things like that are happening around the world.

When I talk to you about my concerns, please don't get the idea that nothing good is happening in missions, good things are happening. But oh, there are some things that aren't as good happening too. And let's see what we can do about them and not just let them fly. I want to talk to you a bit about what I'd call heresy and mysticism. When I was here in Bangladesh a little over a year and a half ago, I was sitting down with a mission-minded man that is working with some of those Chinese sciences that I would call mystical medicine.

I'm talking about things like reflexology and things like iridology and like hair analysis, but not the kind that that might be legit, but another kind or applied kinesiology where you smell foods or taste them and see how much strength you have. These are all mystical ideas or adjusting the chi, doing acupuncture or acu-suction. These are all mystical forms of medical missionary work that have nothing to do with Adventism. And I see them around, and I hope you won't encourage them, but I'm thinking of 1 Corinthians 11, verse 19, where it says, we must need to have heresies among us, that they which are approved may be made manifest among us. It requires some patience and some skill in teaching people to move away from mystical medicine, but it's worth doing.

And there we go. Let me talk to you about 1 more thing that's going good in missions, and then I'll review some of these ideas and we'll close our third talk. I wanna talk to you about internships. Now you wanna be trained for missions. I think hundreds and hundreds of you now have gone through these four-month training programs, the AFCO programs in Indonesia or in the Philippines or in Africa or right there in Amazing Facts, or you've gone to Emmanuel Institute, or you've gone to, I'm forgetting the names of some of the other ones right now but there's a number of them there's 1 in Pennsylvania that I can't remember the name of there's a lot of these 4 month or 9 month programs arise as 1 that some have gone to many have gone to even Would you like to follow up on that and get some more training?

Can I tell you how? Go volunteer. It won't cost you anything but a plane ticket and it'll be a better education than what you got already. Go volunteer to work with a missionary. I know a lonely missionary in Cambodia.

I know some lonely missionaries in Malaysia. I know a lonely missionary here in Bangladesh. I know about opportunities in Indonesia. I know about opportunities in other lands, in India also. I think I could just make a long list of internship.

What I mean by internship is you go and spend a year working as an assistant, kind of the way that Elisha did with Elijah, the way that Jeroboam did with Solomon, the way that Moses worked with Joshua, Joshua was his servant, The way that the 3 apostles, Peter, James, and John, related to Jesus, maybe the way that Timothy and Titus related to Paul, I don't think any of these people paid money for their excellent education that they got, what they what happened is they traded a year of service in the mission field or 2 years or 3 years for personal time with the missionaries and they learned so much and I think you would learn more doing that than you would learn by any other means about how to do good mission work. So internship, yeah all those countries I mentioned if you want to know how to get if you don't know who to work with you can contact me I'm contacted all the time anyway and and I'd be happy to give you some direction and may God help us so what I've been saying is let's not have any waste That means when you give your money to missions, make sure there's a plan for how that money is going to be used.

If you're printing books, make sure there's a distribution plan. If you're doing a media program through AWR, make sure there's people on the ground to follow up that are as well funded as the work over the airways. If you don't end up making sure that there is a plan, then the system breaks down, certainly before we get to the harvest and the discipling of the workers to do good work. And then I talked to you about unwelcoming churches. Some of you in big churches just need to plant a small 1 or else you need to make a plan.

So your big church recognizes everyone that's a visitor, so your greeters know everyone in the church and recognize everyone that isn't, you need to have a plan so that your church is a safe, good place for visitors to come where they can be hooked and reeled in. And if you have a church that struggles from tribalism, that's racism in some places, would you make sure that that is squelched so that anyone could come to your church and be welcome there and feel at home? And now I skipped part of my notes here. I don't know how I did that. So I'm gonna get to them before I pray.

1 thing I observed at Weimar is people that are, I call them consumer church hopping. They're just going for where the best program is, the best 1, you know? You got, if Doug is speaking somewhere, go there, and if Mark is speaking somewhere, go there, and if you can find someone else, go there, and, or where there's a choir program, or where there is an ensemble, or a puppet show, they're kind of bouncing church to church. Hey, listen, I know that's how to get fed, but the last thing you need to be is fatter in your spiritual life. Would you please just pick a small church and attend there every week?

They need it. They need someone that can stay there with them so that you can make friends with visitors and get to know their... When you read Paul's epistles, at the end of every 1 of them, you find out how personal he was because he knew by name the people and the parents and the children in the houses where he had been. He knows hundreds of names in the New Testament from his few years of ministry work. That shows, and don't think that he spent like 3 days somewhere and went somewhere else.

In Ephesus, he spent years there. 3 years, we're told, in 1 place. Yeah, so let's do that. Let's make sure that we have very personal work. Second Corinthians 12, 15 shows how affectionate Paul was in his work.

He talks about how the more I love you, the less I'm loved. And in Galatians 6, he says, have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth? He says, I bear you witness that you love me so much you would have pulled out your own eyes and given them to me. Yeah, personal work is the way we need to do our church planting. Let's pray for all those ministries that are working overseas.

And let me pray for you, and then I'll go to that fourth talk in just a moment. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, I'm asking you to fund the good works being done and to give us strategies and plans to connect our first contact all the way to discipleship. Do these things for your own purpose, we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

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The State of Missions in Adventism

Making a Connected Mission Strategy

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Parent Series

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Other Teachings in Series

The Bible on Missions

23m

Codependent Missions

26m

Making a Connected Mission Strategy

20m

Assets, Cons and Support for Missions

18m

Sound Doctrine

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