Christmas In August

Every Christmas for more than 100 years, Southern Baptists have promoted the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering^©. This offering, named after one of our great missionaries to China, was established in the winter of 1881 and has, since that time, enabled missionaries to traverse the world with the Gospel. Last year, however, the offering fell short of its necessary goal by nearly $30 million. This shortfall has resulted in the indefinite suspension of crucial missionary endeavors and a reduction in the number of full-time missionary appointments.

Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt and other SBC leaders have called for a special offering to be taken in local churches during the month of August as part of the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. While you can give year round to the Lottie Moon offering, your gifts to Christmas in August will help offset the shortfall from 2008. Contributions will allow the SBC to continue sending missionaries all around the world. Please consider having such an offering in your local church.

Southwestern Seminary receives no money from this offering. We have developed the free resources below in support of the SBC, to further the Great Commission and to help a sister SBC agency. Please encourage your church to contribute to the International Mission Board for the purpose of reaching 6.5 billion people on this planet for Jesus Christ. Their eternal destiny depends on it.

IMB appoints 21 missionaries in Ohio

7/14/2009
By Don Graham
LEBANON, Ohio (BP)--“We’ve been waiting 30 years for you to come.”
Charles Stoddard* won’t forget the day he heard those words from a family of five living in a squalid shack in Asia. They hadn’t eaten in three days, but food wasn’t the reason the family invited the Southern Baptist missionary to their home — they wanted to know about Jesus.
Stoddard and his wife, Nicole* — who completed a three-year term overseas earlier this month — were among 21 missionaries appointed by IMB (International Mission Board) July 12 at Urbancrest Baptist Church in Lebanon, Ohio. Speaking to a crowd of more than 800, Stoddard explained that many years ago, the Asian family’s grandfather had come to believe in the existence of “one true God.”
Shortly before he was martyred for his faith, the grandfather told his family to wait for the day someone would come to tell them more about this God. Three decades would pass before one of the family’s sons happened to overhear Stoddard talking about Christ in a public park and recognized he was the one they’d been waiting for.
“I suddenly realized that this family, who had never met another Christian, who didn’t even know that a Bible existed — God had been preparing their hearts for 30 years to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” Stoddard said. “That family accepted Christ that day, was baptized, and today a church meets in their home.”
What’s more, at least 40 others have come to faith in Jesus as a direct result of the family’s conversion and passion for sharing the hope they waited so many years to receive.
“Billions are still waiting to hear,” Stoddard said, which is why he and his wife are returning to Asia with their three children to continue spreading the Gospel.
That overwhelming lostness is also what’s sending Tricia Van Lesser* and her husband, Tony,* back to Central Asia after completing a two-year term there in 2008. Van Lesser remains haunted by the sound of women wailing at the funeral of a Muslim grandmother she had come to know and love.
“That evening, as her cloth-wrapped body was carried by her sons to the grave, the sound of the wailing became deafening,” Van Lesser remembered. “As I stood with the family I was overwhelmed at the hopelessness. They wept because they did not know where their devout Muslim grandmother would spend eternity. I wept because I did know.”
Kirsten Hale* and her husband, Geoff,* also are heading to Central Asia. First introduced to missions through Girls in Action, Hale was drawn further into the Great Commission when she volunteered on two short-term mission trips with her church. But she admits making the commitment to serve overseas for an initial term of two to three years — instead of two or three weeks — was hard.
“I valued a college degree, getting married, having a nice home and raising my kids in a safe neighborhood,” she said. “Would I be OK without these things? Would I be able to be satisfied in Christ alone?”
God answered her fears through Matthew 13:44, Jesus’ parable that compares the kingdom of heaven to a treasure hidden in a field.
“Its value is worth giving up everything,” Hale said. “God has convinced us that taking the Gospel to Muslims in Central Asia is worth the cost.”
The appointees bring the total number of missionaries serving through IMB to 5,544. They are being sent to four continents — 14 to Asia, four to Africa, two to South America and one to Europe. Of the 21 missionaries, 18 had previous short-term experience.
Because of a significant shortfall in the 2008 Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, IMB trustees in May suspended two short-term programs and approved a reduction of new appointments for the remainder of 2009. New appointments will continue on a more selective basis, covering the most strategic assignments.
IMB President Jerry Rankin described the appointment service as one of the most exciting things that Southern Baptists do and thanked Ohio Baptists for their faithful support of missions.
“These are your missionaries,” Rankin said. “It’s your prayers that sustain them as they go. It’s your gifts through the Cooperative Program and to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering that enable them to go in obedience to their call. Not one of these has to be delayed in going to the field out of the necessity to raise their support because you as Southern Baptists have already provided.”
Rankin and Gordon Fort, vice president of IMB’s office of global strategy, both spoke of the powerful ways in which God is moving throughout the world. Fort cited the more than 5,000 Southern Baptist missionaries serving in 183 countries around the world and the more than 600,000 new believers baptized last year.
“We are seeing unprecedented breakthroughs that we would never have imagined a few years ago,” Rankin said. “The fact that we cannot identify the places where many of you (appointees) are going indicates that God is opening doors … to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Rankin encouraged the new appointees to walk intimately with the Lord, immerse themselves in the people they’ve come to serve and to identify with suffering.
“You will never touch all the lost people in the places where you’re going. You’re going to be overwhelmed by the massiveness of population, the congestion … it’ll be frustrating and discouraging,” he warned. “Your most effective witness is living out in flesh and blood the reality of your faith.”
Rankin added that the power of the Gospel can’t be overestimated.
“When you’re living without any hope in this life — [living with] poverty, disease and corruption — when you’re living under the burden of fear and superstition … [you] cannot overstate the power of the Gospel message to draw people to Jesus Christ. Once it is received, there is no restraint in sharing it. You’re compelled to share it with others. That’s what happened in Thessalonica. And that’s what’s happening in many places around the world.”
*Name changed

Something New Under The Sun Part 3

New Goals

With all this change, one understandable question is what hasn’t changed? Well, let’s name a few things: 1) the unique saving power of Jesus Christ; 2) the changeless truth of God’s word; 3) the value of godly men and women surrendering their lives to missions; and 4) the compelling vision of all people coming to saving faith in Jesus Christ. These unchanging truths link every missionary from the Apostle Paul to the newest IMB appointee. Each one longs to see a lost world redeemed. Consequently, the IMB vision statement has never been more relevant than today: We will lead Southern Baptists to be on mission with God to bring all the peoples of the world to saving faith in Jesus Christ.

We still have a long way to go to fulfill this vision. Each generation of missionaries moves us closer to that vision by setting goals that draw us ever nearer. Goals serve as intermediate steps on our journey. If they are good goals, they stretch us as far as possible in the direction of our vision.

The history of Southern Baptist foreign missions is filled with the pursuit of new and challenging goals that bring us ever closer to a dream of seeing all peoples come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. When we began over 150 years ago, it was the goal of supporting missionaries in far-away lands that united us as a denomination and ultimately forged us into a major global missions force. It’s difficult now to realize just how radical and innovative that goal was. History records that it met with opposition, and its success was far from certain.

Through the subsequent years of the Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I and the Great Depression, it became the worthy goal of many Southern Baptists not to allow our foreign mission enterprise to collapse. Through decades of economic crises, we managed not only to sustain the work but to expand into new mission fields on five continents. By the 1950s, our agency was well along a course that would eventually send and support more missionaries than any Protestant denomination in history. The goal that fueled this growth was a vision to take the gospel to millions who had never heard it. This period of growth and expansion helped to define the current state of our Southern Baptist foreign missions enterprise by creating the largest Protestant mission agency in the history of the world.

After decades of growth, Southern Baptists in the 1980s once again looked to their vision of all peoples coming to faith in Christ and asked if more could be done. It became apparent that more than massive numbers of missionaries would be required if we were to see an entire world reached. This realization led Foreign Mission Board leaders to draw all of our missionary efforts into a united goal of evangelism that results in churches. No matter how specialized the ministry or missionary approach might be, all Southern Baptist missions would be strategically aimed at evangelism that results in churches.

The impact of this new goal was quickly felt. Initially, as with previous goals, some questioned it. Does this mean that my ministry is irrelevant? A missionary doctor in a teaching hospital asked. The same question surfaced from missionaries serving as school teachers, seminary professors and business managers. Over time, however, most missionaries came to see that the new goal didn’t bypass their ministry contribution. Instead, it offered a unifying purpose to all our missionary efforts—lighting the way ahead and moving us closer than ever to the fulfillment of our Great Commission vision. As our missionaries pursued this goal, impressive results followed. Within a decade, the number of baptisms doubled from 110,000 per year to more than 220,000. Likewise the total number of churches overseas rose in 10 years from 11,500 to more than
21,000.

Over the next few years, this concerted focus on evangelism that results in churches came to be seen as normative and definitive for all missionary personnel serving with the Foreign Mission Board. Each of the goals that have characterized our agency over the past century and a half have moved us closer to the fulfillment of our vision. As we embrace new goals, the old ones aren’t abandoned, they are subsumed into the whole. Today, we are again revisiting our vision and embracing a new goal. It is the goal of church-planting movements among every people group on earth. If our previous goal was so effective, why change it? Because we believe we can do better. By the early 1990s, our global baptism rates had peaked at around 300,000 per year.

Despite our best efforts at evangelism resulting in churches, much of our work around the world had plateaued. Although we could point to an increase in the number of new converts and new churches each year in many countries, we were falling farther and farther behind the exploding rate of population growth around the world. As long as we compared ourselves with ourselves we might feel good about ourselves. After all, we were recording some growth each year. But when we looked to the millions who were going to hell each day without a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, we determined that we must do better.

Look, for example, to Kenya, one of Southern Baptists’ most productive growth fields. Over the decade stretching from 1985 to 1995, despite Baptist growth rates in excess of 14 percent, evangelical Christianity as a whole (including Baptists) grew at a rate of only 3.25 percent per year. Meanwhile, Kenya’s population grew at 3.34 percent per year. Despite a strong harvest in this country, born-again believers have not been able to keep up with the population-growth rate. In the developing countries of the world, which have 38 percent of their population under the age of 15, how can we hope to fulfill our vision?

In the midst of our search for more effective ways to reach a lost world, God has revealed some remarkable breakthroughs in evangelism and church planting that is happening in some of the most unexpected corners of our globe. In these situations, evangelism is resulting in rapidly multiplying churches in a phenomenal way that is vastly outstripping population-growth rates.

One example can be seen among a Hindu people in India. Initial evangelism and church planting began among them in the early 19th century. However, 170 years later there were still only 28 churches among this population of 90 million people. Furthermore, progress in reaching the people had ceased, with no new churches planted among them in over 40 years. Over the last few years, however, things have changed radically. Between 1989 and 1991 eight new churches were suddenly started in this formerly stagnant setting. By 1994, the number of churches had grown to 78, the following year to more than 220, a year later to 547! Then by 1997 there were more than 1,000 new churches among this predominantly Hindu population. The growth rate shows no sign of slowing, as 800 new churches have been planted in the past year. In all, a total of more than 50,000 new converts have been recorded in the decade between 1989 and 1998.

Certainly one could describe this situation in India as evangelism that results in churches, but that seems to be an understatement. A more appropriate term would be a church-planting movement. A church-planting movement is a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches within a people group. We are currently monitoring more than two dozen church-planting movements around the world in every imaginable context.

While International Mission Board missionaries around the world continue their efforts at evangelism that results in churches, God is surprising us with church-planting movements in a wide array of settings. It’s as if He is saying to us, Look to the nations, watch and be utterly amazed. We are watching. We are amazed, and we are taking notes.

What is evident is that only God can start a church-planting movement. However, we are learning how to cooperate with God in this divine activity by removing obstacles that conflict with His desires. Along the way, we are finding that church-planting movements are not limited to one type of people or cultural condition. They have broken out among literate and nonliterate peoples as well as rural and urban peoples. Churches as well as the untouchables. We are seeing church-planting movements among Muslims in the ear East, urban Han Chinese in China, Khmer Buddhists in S o u t h e a s t Asia, cultural Christians in the former Soviet Union, christopagans in Central America and animists in
Africa.

In a Buddhist country in war-torn Southeast Asia, a Strategy Coordinator found a people in desperate need of hope. Missionaries had brought the gospel to the country decades earlier, resulting in the planting of six churches, but they had never envisioned the possibilities of a church-planting movement.

Although the Strategy Coordinator was an accomplished church planter himself, he chose deliberately to work through others in this setting. Gathering ten local church planters around him, the missionary poured into them his vision, his passion and his insights into effective church planting. The results came quickly. The six churches that had not reproduced themselves in decades acquired a new vitality. Within a year they had grown to ten churches, then twenty the following year. By the end of six years the number had climbed to 194 new congregations!

Of course, the real aim of church-planting movements is not just an increase in the number of churches, but rather to see lost people come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Again and again, we’ve learned that planting new churches is the surest way to increase the number of new believers. Recently, among a Chinese people group, an explosive church-planting movement multiplied three churches into 550 in only five years’ time. More importantly, the church-planting movement resulted in some 55,000 new believers. The growth continues today with little sign of slowing!

Church-planting movements seem to be God’s way of racing ahead of the exploding number of lost people that are being added to the world’s population every day. With church-planting movements, there is a genuine hope of seeing an entire world come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Any wonder why IMB leadership has been quick to adopt this new goal of church planting movements among all peoples?

In a real sense, the leadership of the International Mission Board is continuing its tradition of embracing new goals that move us ever closer to fulfilling our Great Commission vision. This new goal of a church-planting movement among all peoples includes a commitment to evangelism that results in churches but raises the bar to a new level of expectations in hopes that all our missionary personnel will initiate and nurture church-planting movements among all peoples.

Something New Under The Sun Part 2

NEW WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES

When Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was launched into space in May 1991, he thought it would be a routine three-month mission. Instead, he was delayed in orbit for 11 months and returned to Earth to find that the whole world had changed. The
USSR that had launched him no longer existed. While Krikalev circled the Earth for 331 days, not only did the Soviet Union disintegrate, but global Communism collapsed, the Cold War came to an end and the territory he landed in, Kazakstan, had become an independent republic! Krikalev is like a lot of missionaries we’ve spoken with lately.

While I was gone, they say, someone reorganized
my denomination, dissolved my mission and even changed the
name of the Foreign Mission Board!

Change is sweeping across our world. Hold on to your hat! To the question “What happened today?” there are a million different answers. Some of these are positive, many are negative. Each of them is demanding a gospel response.

At a rapidly accelerating pace, unseen forces such as demographics, politics, commerce and technology are conspiring together to sweep us into a new world order. No sooner do we adapt to one set of changes than another one is upon us. Let’s look
at some changes and their implications.

Population and Politics

Driving much of the rapidly changing world are sheer demographics.
The world is expected to reach 6 billion inhabitants before the year 2000. Within another half century, this number may nearly double to 11 billion before it is expected to plateau. Fueling this growth is 32 percent of the world’s population below the age of 15! In less-developed countries the percentage of individuals below the age of 15 is as high as 38 percent. Nowhere is this crowding of planet Earth more pronounced than in our cities. The pace of urbanization continues to climb today with nearly half of the world’s population (43 percent) currently living in urban areas.

This human time bomb has led some sociologists, such as Robert Kaplan, to predict a bleak forecast for the coming millennium. Rather than looking to Europe or the United States for future global realities, Kaplan views the future through the lens of West Africa over the past two decades. He predicts a “world (that) faces a period of unprecedented upheaval, brought on by scarce resources . . . , overpopulation, uncontrollable disease, brutal warfare, and the widespread collapse of nation-states and indeed, of any semblance of government.” “Welcome,” says Kaplan, “to the 21st century.”

Unfortunately, many signs of the coming calamity are already here. The world’s chronic refugee population stands at more than 13 million with a further 4.9 million internally displaced persons.

Ecological disasters and global warming have led to floods in South America and Africa along with ruinous fires in Central America and Indonesia. Events in Rwanda, Liberia and the Balkans have made genocide a household word. Hostilities between Pakistan and India threaten to spill over into neighboring countries, go nuclear and possibly embroil the whole world. Meanwhile, militant Islam rolls on unabated as extremists wage a jihad against perceived Western enemies.

If there is any good news for such a troubled world, it’s only in the hope offered by the gospel. Missionaries can be assured that the need for them and their message shows no sign of diminishing in the century ahead!

Travel and Tourism

Despite this bleak side to the future, there are positive trends as well. The world is becoming increasingly interconnected. Nowhere is this more evident than in the arena of tourism and global travel by common citizens. Americans spent more on tourism last year than any other country, over $52 billion. During 1997, for example, Brazil welcomed some 2.2 million tourists, while Spain, the second most popular tourist destination in the world after France, saw more than 45 million tourists.

Countries that have long feared the outside world are opening their doors today, but not necessarily to missionaries. In 1997, an estimated 25,000 Southern Baptists visited China as tourists, businessmen or as other professionals. The allure of tourist dollars
even led relatively closed Cuba to welcome 1.2 million foreign visitors last year, causing tourism to surpass sugar as the No.1 currency earner for the country.

If tourism is opening countries all over the globe, could it be that God is trying to tell us something? Can tourists be missionaries? Can missionaries be tourists?

Communications

In addition to the flood of tourists worldwide, the peoples of the world are becoming interconnected through communications channels. Where formerly people were insulated from one another by political and geographical barriers, today they are engaged in a flood of invisible interaction. At an international conference in Berlin in 1998, Renato Ruggiero, executive-secretary of the World Trade Organization, observed that “thousands of miles of fiberoptic cables now join oceans and continents together, as do the millions of sound waves and electromagnetic signals that crisscross the atmosphere above our planet. Twenty-four hours a day this global network carries the world’s business contracts, currency transactions, medical information and educational resources instantly across time zones, borders and cultures.”

A network that can carry business contracts and currency transactions surely can carry a more precious cargo. Today’s communications networks may be the equivalent of the first century’s Roman roads, allowing the gospel to stream into places where missionaries are restricted.

Commerce

This interconnected globe is creating the closest thing yet to a single, borderless global economy—an economy which will have profound implications for the way national systems operate in the future. With NAFTA, the European Economic Community and the World Trade Organization, we already can see the trend toward freer global trade.

By early next century, almost 60 percent of world trade is scheduled to be tariff free. Already, American companies employ roughly 3 million workers in Europe alone. The implications of all this global interconnectedness for Christian missions is enormous. If we are able to enter the flow of international business activity, virtually no country on earth will be closed to us.

Computers and Technology

It’s hard to believe that only 30 years ago, in 1969, the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) went online connecting four major U.S. universities, and the Internet was born. Since that time, the Internet has doubled in size almost every year. In
January 1997, an estimated 16 million computers were connected to form the Internet. In 1998, more than 50 million people were using the Internet.By the year 2000, that number should climb to 300 million users. Small wonder that as early as 1982, rather
than choosing a “Person of the Year,” Time magazine declared the personal computer the “Machine of the Year.”

The implications of this computer interconnectedness are astounding. According to the Net. Journal Directory, in 1997 there were at least 10,000 magazines and journals available on-line.

Today’s communications networks may be the equivalent of the first century’s Roman roads, allowing the gospel to stream into places where missionaries are restricted.

Already emerging satellite downloads promise speeds that will be up to 14 times faster than conventional telephone modems. This high-speed delivery makes it possible to transmit the text of 35,000 full-length novels every second. The cost of this transmission
is virtually the same whether it is going across town or around the world.

For gospel proclamation, this burgeoning computer network truly has been a God-send. It has enabled us to put the Bible in dozens of languages online so that university students and private citizens in countries around the world can down-load the Word of God in the privacy of their own home or dormitory room. Campus Crusade already has put the Jesus film in more than 20 languages online for computer access. Dozens more language translations of the Jesus film are being digitized now and will be accessible via the Internet soon.

Knowledge and Action

Few would argue that the information age has resulted in far more information than we can ever digest. In addition to the remarkable opportunities afforded by the technology and information boom comes additional responsibility. As never before,
Christians are able to view the world in all of its complexity, diversity and lostness.

Today, we know that roughly 1.7 billion individuals living in 2,000 distinct language communities around the world have little or no access to the gospel. This would have been news to any generation of believers prior to our own. But for us, it is more than
news, it is a haunting reminder of the unfinished task ahead. As the Apostle James wrote: Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins (James 4:17). It is this awareness that drives us with a renewed sense of urgency.

The International Mission Board is changing so that we can take full advantage of today’s possibilities and meet the full range of tomorrow’s challenges. Despite the perils that lie ahead for believers everywhere, the knowledge that millions are still perishing
in darkness carries with it a responsibility to do whatever it takes to finish the course set before us. Let’s press on!

3 Weeks in Texas

Hey friends, family and prayer partners. We are in Texas for 3 weeks. we fly out to Costa Rica on the 23rd. We hope to see and spend time with as many of you as possible. When we leave on the 23rd we will not be back on US soil for at least 2 years. So we want to spend time with you all if possible. It feels so good to be back. We miss you all so much.

Thank you all for you prayers these past 3 months as we completed the first phase of service. Next comes our language acquisition!