Ask Anything about Missions

For that, it's for the sake of the other folks that are in the line, we had a Q&A yesterday and there were probably seven people that didn't get asked their question, so we're going to try to keep things moving along, and then remember what the theme of the panel is, ask anything about missions, so you can start lining up behind the mic, which will be right here, and you can direct your questions to these brothers, so don't be shy, come on up.

What do you think about doing just a brief opening, who we are, just for a handful, or things like that. Chad, why don't you start with you, work our way up, who we are, who you are, and how you're tied to this

conference. My name is Chad Vegas, I pastor a church. I'm called Sovereign Grace Church in Bakersfield, California. And Brooks' dad and I and a few other men had the privilege of starting Radius International together. And then really from there, Brooks and I started Missionary together. And I also am employed by Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, teaching missions and helping out there as I'm able.

Jonathan Master, I serve as the president of Greenville Seminary. And my role here is really all three of us are members of the steering committee for the Missionary Conference. And so we work together in thinking through what the conference will look like. And then Greenville and Radius have a partnership program for training those who will, Lord willing, end up among the least reached peoples in the world. But but what I do

most of the time is just serve it at the seminary. So I'm Brooks Buser. I lead Radius Missionary. And then you've heard about the other campuses of Radius and other locations. Thankful that you guys have made it this far. It's a long conference, three days, but it's not that long in the scope of history. So glad to have you guys here.

For being willing to sit up here and answer our questions. My question is for Brooks. Thank you so much for sharing about your personal experience. And I would love to understand better, as there's 40, 50 believers came to faith, how did leadership work? Did you appoint yourself as elder? Did you act like an elder? How, what, what did that look like as that young church was birthed?

Yeah, so we had two other families on the missionary team, the Sutton family, the Shontare family. And so all three of us from the time that we had baby believers till the time that we left eight years later. The Shontare family was able to stay for the whole duration. The Sutton family had to leave a little bit early. But we didn't name elders. We didn't even start teaching in the books of Titus and Timothy. We didn't have them translated for another two years.

So as we started to teach through those things, that really made a difference. And then we had some specific trainings on what it means to be an elder, what it means to be a deacon, how the Yembiyembis lived, who were Christians, and particularly how they died. was probably the most powerful testimony for the gospel, and that changed the all the DNA of the village in so many ways. So, that that was really how kind of that metamorphosis by God's grace came about. Thank you.

Hi, this question is for anybody. I'm hoping you can provide maybe some context for what we would consider short-term missions, and really how both how does it fit into the work that we've been hearing about the last few days, but really what are the marks of healthy short-term missions, And how do we faithfully do that? Can

I start with what you shouldn't be doing in short-term missions? I Yes. I'm I'm I don't want you to hear this as I'm anti-short-term missions because Radius has a short-term missions program called Radius Serve. I'm not anti-short-term missions. However, I am concerned about the emphases that often occur in short-term missions. And I'm going to tell you, I've been one of the most egregious violators of this in leading short-term missions teams in the past. So this isn't me picking on other people. This is me picking on...

You know, me many years ago. I led teams on what I would probably call exotic short-term church-paid vacations. We went to exotic places of the earth that everybody wanted to see. We had wonderful experiences. But mostly we wore out our missionaries on the field, accomplished very little, and spent just massive amounts of money doing that.

Now, I'm not saying there was no fruit at all from that. Some of those young people became interested in the rest of the world and the concerns of the rest of the world. I just wish I had been more directed in that. So I think if you're going to do short-term missions, they can be incredibly useful if you understand what your goals are. So if one of your goals is, I'm taking this group of young people in order to teach them about God's heart for the world, but I'm not trying to confuse them by pretending that they're going to go plant a church or evangelize some people group. Where they don't know their language and culture and anything else. But we're going to go serve in some capacity, probably some diaconal kind of capacity, right?

Some sort of service capacity. And we are going to intentionally instruct them in what God's heart is for the world and missions. I think it can be very useful. Obviously, there are a number of other short-term assignments that can be useful. The short-term medical missions that sometimes happen.

Some of those kinds of mercy ministries can be quite useful. But again, I... One of the things I said right at the beginning, wearing out your missionaries. One of my big concerns is that you're actually really getting an honest assessment from your missionary. Are we helping you on the field? or are we wearing you out and you're doing this because you feel obligated to do this because your sending churches sort of obligating you to it?

You just really want to make sure that you're actually a help to them and not undermining them.

Thank

you very much. Yeah, maybe one thing to add. And it's really just underscoring something that Chad said and that these two guys have articulated much more clearly than I will. But it is, you know, medical missions is one thing. Diaconal work is one thing. but you also have to think about the fact this is going to sound very odd, but I would be very cautious about being put in the position of doing any evangelistic work when you do not speak the language.

You know, even in English, what... What opportunities there are for being misunderstood and for misrepresenting things. You probably even have non-Christian friends and you've tried to explain things about the Lord to them and they've misunderstood you. And maybe you've even misarticulated it. And this is your native tongue. So think about that in another location where you don't speak the language.

So, it sounds counterintuitive, but I would almost say if you're going to do short-term work in a different language than your own, you actually probably want to avoid being directly involved in evangelistic work. And the diaconal thing, the medical thing, the support for missionaries, I mean, that's wonderful stuff. You can do a cost-benefit analysis, of course, like anything, but that's a different category, I would say.

Does that make sense?

Thank you very much. Good afternoon. I had a question. Hey,

when you introduce yourself, could you give us your name and your church?

Great. My name's Art, and I serve as a pastor for Foothill Bible Church in Upland, California. And we sent a choice servant who's a single gal in Papua New Guinea. She's on furlough. But she raised a question to me that I'm kind of still processing, and that is she's two years away from finishing the New Testament. But the next the assumption was now you go to the Old Testament, at least Genesis in certain portions. But she was asked to consider. Where's the Tok Pisin, the prevailing language? And the question was whether to continue finishing translation of the whole entire Bible or another ministry or even translation work. So I needed your collective wisdom on that topic of how to guide. I have shepherded her on some arenas, but I thought I'd like to hear your thoughts, having walked through that.

Sorry.

Yeah. So you have to evaluate a handful of factors when you're evaluating how much to translate. The preference, obviously, would be to translate the entire scripture in their language, Old and New Testaments. There's a lot of, and I can appreciate this because there's a lot of church history where they started with the New Testament. If you're going to start make sure you get Genesis 1, 2, and 3. That would be my high recommendation. But definitely the New Testament. in language groups where they're experiencing some level of language loss, that's where you're going to have to make some of these dicey calls on how much of this is going to be necessary before the national language starts to usurp the throat and cough] mother tongue that they are speaking. And so there's a science to this.

We do something called people group assessment or language group assessment down at Radius to evaluate what do the 5-year-olds speak? What do the 13-year-olds speak? What are the natural trade routes, the marriage routes? How long do we expect this language? There are some languages that are going to be around for the next 100, 200 years because they're so big, minority languages. They're so big and they're so insular, they're not going to have a lot of interaction with the outside. There's this fallacy out there that somehow in the next 10 years, all the minority languages are going to be gone. That's just not true. The more accurate way is to measure what this language group and the language loss issues are and that's that's really the science behind how much time do we have and if they start to grow into the national language, just so we're clear here like Radius isn't about we need to preserve their language for the sake of language.

If a smaller language gets absorbed into a national language, we should rejoice because there's more biblical resources in the biblical language or in the bigger languages. And so for that sake, it's not a lamentable thing for them to get through a certain portion, and then all of a sudden in Tok Pisin, like what you were talking about, the National Language of Papua New Guinea, there's just so many more resources available there. So So it's kind of a case by case, location by location, language by language call.

Hey, brothers. My name is Caleb Davis. I'm at Hampton Falls First Baptist Church in New Hampshire. So my question is really I'm asking if you would speak a little bit more directly toward women's role in missions. We've had a lot of great encouragement about how many to step up. We need to be first and get out there and lead.

but someone like my sister who wants to go on the mission field, older single, my encouragement to her is find a team, find a pastor who wants to go plant and join that team and help the church thrive.

Would you speak directly to how you handle that and what your encouragement is?

I think I would say something very much like what you said, which is find a team, support that team and you might have different gifts, different skills that you can bring to support that work that they're doing and do that. Go for it. So that is a wonderful, wonderful gift to whatever team she might join. And that's going to be hard work. And it's going to be it's going to require great sacrifice on her part. And there are all kinds of different ways, depending on her background and depending on their needs, where that service could be vital. We have my wife and I have very close friends who now live in the United States. My friend's a pastor. His wife, when she was single, was in a very small, remote village in Africa. And she was essentially doing the schooling for a missionary couple's children.

And because she had those. Kinds of gifts, those skills. and it really enabled this missionary couple, who is also with a team, to to engage more fully in the work that they were called to do. And their children were taken care of. So there are any number of situations like that where it could be vital. So if you're I assume what you're talking about in your question is a single woman. And that that's that's the advice you gave is the advice I would give. I give. I think that's biblical advice. I think there are biblical examples of that. And then countless examples in church history. and even today.

One of the things that we emphasize at Radius is both the husband and the wife need to receive all the training that we're giving. single gals need to receive the training that we're giving. So we we do have child care. So the wife can learn as well because the women, not just the single women, but the married women do have a role, obviously. I mean, for one, they want to learn language just so they can live long term. How are you going to live long term somewhere if you never know language? Well, if you even have friendships, it's going to be difficult to live their life. So beyond that, though, there are some contexts in which women and men are not going to be evangelized in the same room.

And so now you're going to have to have in some context, you're going to have a woman who can teach the evangelist evangelize. And we have one missionary couple I think of right off the top. I one of the things I do when all our missionaries are home on furlough is I spend time training them, particularly in teaching, et cetera. And we have one couple where the woman is a much better teacher than the man. And in fact, she was. She's probably the best first time Bible teacher I've ever heard. And, you know, I'm a guy who doesn't think women ought to be preaching, etc. You know, and then there are other women. And And so, you know, it was like this woman is so gifted. I I'm sure she'll be teaching. She'll probably even because she's very bright with language.

She'll probably even be helping with translation. The first one, the first missionary at my church ever sent out was a single gal. And I, you know, if you're a single gal, you think, well, what you know, what can I bring to the table?

I can think of a single woman. I can't name her because she's in a closed access country. She went out single. She ended up meeting her husband a few years later, a couple years later, a following Radius class. She came to Radius first class, then went to the field.

Two classes later, a young man came through and saw the class graduation picture and said, is that girl still single? Yes, she is. It seems like the girls really dress themselves up for the end of the year picture much more after that. But anyway, they got married and and and they've been a great team. She's she's incredible. She changed our church with regard to missions. We're not single, got married. I mean, this is a gal who is having her third child. She's on her third language now, but she was having her third child. And while in labor, her husband was was practicing her vocabulary with her.

Like these people are no joke. Right. So I there's a lot of. There's a lot of ways in which women can be used that that are quite helpful.

Hello, brothers. Thank you for this time. My name is Philip and a member of the Baptist Church in Garland. My question has to do with the concept and understanding of what a missionary is. My family served in Southeast Asia for a number of years. My hair was brown at the time, but God brought us back to America to continue being a missionary, but a different context. So the question has to do with how to convey and understand in the American context. That you can be a missionary here in America.

So I'm I'm going to answer this generically and then I'm going to bring some specificity that might take some people off. And I'm OK with that. But let me start here. A missionary technically is someone who is sent. That's what the word means. Someone who is sent. So we think about Romans 10, 13. Everyone who calls the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call on the one whom they've not believed and how can they believe? And the one whom they've never heard and how can they hear unless someone preaches and how can they preach unless they are sent? So even when we think about the son of God isn't self-sent. Now, I'm not going to get into all the Trinitarian magic that Kevin DeYoung did for us the other day.

But I I do want you to understand that even the son of God in that sense is sent right into his work. And so no one is self-sent. You're sent by the church and not by the church. Everyone in the church is sent.

We set people apart to send them. The church as a body is sent. And there are members of the church who are uniquely set apart and ordained. We lay hands on them and pray for them. And they are sent out as gospel ministers.

We can call them missionaries if you want to. In the Presbyterian world, we talk about home and foreign mission and home mission would be like a gospel minister at home in our church. And then a foreign mission would be someone we send to a context not our own for a missionary. In both cases, we're saying they're someone who are pre- is preaching the gospel and they're sent by the church to do it. Now, I'm going to take that and not say I think the Presbyterians are totally wrong for doing that. Right. Or anything like that. But just say I think the unfortunate part of that emphasis at times can become everything becomes missions to the degree that nothing ends up being missions. And so we tend to use different language in our own church, not to say we think categorically like I'm sent to my city.

And so in that sense, technically, I'm a missionary. I'm a sent gospel minister to my own city. but I don't refer to myself with that term because we've we've essentially reserved that for foreign missions for the purpose of trying to distinguish someone who's staying home and caring for the church, called to a church And in our case, I mean, I actually uniquely reserve it for those who are going to lay new foundations.

So the Pauline versus Timothy to the thing kind of missions. I'm not saying that definition is the only way you can define the word. Don't hear me saying that. I'm saying we reserve it for that because there's something unique about that that's been lost, which is sending someone like Brooks or his father, Brad, or the folks we have on the field.

We send them them out as missionaries to go lay a new foundation to proclaim Christ where he's never been. I've built on someone else's foundation and I but there's a unique honor to what they're doing, which I'm not jealous for. I praise the Lord that they receive that honor and they're doing that. But I just don't want to confuse like two categories. One is diaconal ministry versus gospel ministry. So I love my neighbor. Therefore, I'm a missionary. No, that means you kept the great commandment. That's not the great commission. And by the way, you should keep the great commandment and you can't really keep the great commission and not. Keep the great commandment effectively. You guys understand what I'm saying? But let's not confuse being a good Christian, a faithful witness with gospel ministry. Those aren't the same thing.

They go together. And so I don't want to confuse diaconal ministry with gospel ministry. But the other thing I I don't want to do is think that if you're sitting next to someone at Starbucks with your laptop and your latte and you say, I love Jesus. I go to this church. I'm a missionary just like Brooks.

No, you're really. Not right. It's good that you're doing that. Praise God. But it is not the same. So I'm just a little concerned about the nature of the way our language sort of becomes egalitarian, where we make everything equal and exactly the same.

And I just so I want to make distinctions for that purpose.

I just brought that out because God has brought the nations here to America and there are unreached people groups within the country. So I understand what you're saying as far as being a gospel versus being a missionary.

Sure. But the mission of the church is not wait for them to come. No, it's go. Right. And so, yes, there are definitely peoples here. I just think we need to be really careful about this talk about diaspora and all the folks who are coming to America from different nations. I think we should go after them. We've had members in our church move in with the Punjab community and try to learn their language and try to reach them. We thank God for them. We think that's noble and worth doing. So I don't. I don't want you to misunderstand me, but here's what's likely not going to happen. You're going to reach that people and then they're going to be like, oh, you know what? I'm going to move back to my home country.

The flow of people tends to go one direction and that's away from home in these kinds of minority languages we're talking about. And so I would want to push us toward going to the minority language where the home is because people are going to immigrate when they get a chance. And then they're going to bring the gospel to the people here. So that's that's a wisdom call. That's not like a biblical requirement. I'm just saying from a wisdom perspective, people don't tend to flow from America back. It's one of the dangers of bringing someone into a seminary in the United States. They come here and they don't want to go back. It's like, oh, we're training this person from this very difficult country and they get here. And if you've been around the world, as much as we complain as a populace about the United States of America, if you've been around the world to these difficult places, you will cease complaining about the United States of America.

You will see problems here. Sure. And there are cultural things in other places. You think this is a lovely feature of this culture. But at the end of the day, you see why everybody wants to come here. So I just want to be really careful about this diaspora ministry from a wisdom perspective. It's not going to I can't go into the middle of Minneapolis and expect that's going to go back to that minority people group somewhere. So that's just where I want to be careful.

OK, thank you. I'm going to quit my grumbling about L.A. County. That was a good word. So I'm my name is Rich Hong. I serve as one of the pastors at Lighthouse. Community Church in Torrance, California. My question for each of you would be great to hear even just insight from each of you. If you could rewind the tape of your local churches and thinking about developing a culture of biblical a culture of biblical missions in your churches, what would you say This is definitely something we put on the chopping block and we wouldn't do less of or we wouldn't even do anymore. If you can go back and change or and this is something we would we would do, we would have begun doing way earlier. Or doing more to help develop a culture of biblical missions.

I'm thinking the kids. I'm thinking our brothers speaking today and saying it the challenge is with the parents. Right. So there's there's a lot of barriers to overcome. And it's not just us here. It's the families. It's the moms. it's... so I'm curious. And for all of us, what comes to mind?

Yeah, I come from a very unique church. I don't know of another church like it. You can ask Chad; It's it's unbelievable in its capacity. What it's got historically sending to the nations, particularly the fourth lane. So what I would do is that send a survive book that is out there at the end. There's a QR code. It has Chad's church missions policies. It has my church, Clairemont Emmanuel Baptist Church. I'm an elder there, has all of their missions policies. We have 18 sister churches that we pray for regularly that are in foreign languages, minority languages. We have 12 translations of the scripture in a display case. That are all alumni. Some have gone to be with the Lord, but alumni of that church members of that church. And so it's a very unique church in many, many ways, I think, to get the DNA into the kids early on.

This is why I'm so big on biographies. Biographies have this unique way to just infuse steel into people's spines. Young men, young women, as they read good biographies, as they're read, too. That's why we did those kids books. And that's why we're going to keep doing kids books for every one of the films.

number two, make sure. That the pastors are taking them on good trips. This is my little thing that I didn't go down with the short-term trip question. Historically, anything less than five years, Hudson Taylor coined this, Adoniram Judson followed. Anything less than five years was viewed as short-term missions. And so take them on good short-term missions trips, probably two, three weeks. Expose them to things. The great benefit of short-term missions is a lot of people that ended up being long-term missionaries started off going on a short-term trip. That's a great benefit. Make sure. That your goals, like Chad said, are set out really well. You're not going there to evangelize people. And they're like, wow, we won 100 people to Christ. So I'm going to go back and do that again. Careful.

and then also get them to good conferences. I think as you get young people and you get your college-age people, you get your pastors on the same trip. Make sure your pastors are there because some conferences have different warp and woof to how they're structured. And they can end up inflicting some things on them. But I think good church policies that have been thought through you can learn a lot from Chad's. you can learn a lot from Clairemont Emmanuel Baptist. So that QR code, if a bunch if you don't have the money to buy it, just go there and open it up, scan the QR code, and then put it back.

We didn't give it out for free. So they have enough money to buy it. There you go. All right. Well, you get it for free. That's my answer.

I think that's a great answer. I would want to echo everything there. The churches in which I've served in a pastoral capacity have been established works. and so it's a little bit different from certainly what Chad's been able to do. And I'm guessing. I think I don't know as much about, but as Brooks' church, in the sense that, so they weren't just starting from scratch in the last 20 years and, trying to bring on board all these things. There were some legacy issues is what I'm saying.

So rewind the tape. If you don't rewind all the way to the beginning and you're dealing with some of these legacy issues, the two things that I wish I had tackled more assertively and given more leadership, to, in addition to the education stuff. I want to agree with all that, is first of all, I would have wanted to expose our people who are thinking about missions, missions committee, and really the whole church to the realities of how missions funding works in our context. So, one of the things that is important to know is when we talk about fourth lane missions, this unreached language group work, one of the reasons why we bring that up so much is not Because the other three lanes don't matter. In fact, we want to always caveat it with, no, no, no, those are really, really, really important.

But if you look at the way funding works, those first three lanes receive, what would it be? Something like 98% of the funding. And so, we're reserving a sliver, 1%, 2% of our missions funding for what arguably should be the highest priority, the point of the spear, the beginning part. And so I would want people to be aware And to think about that. And then that can reshape some legacy realities. The second thing I would say is I would want to model and to emphasize and to facilitate much deeper, more fervent prayer for the missionaries themselves whom we support or whom we might support and simply for the needs of the nations. We have a student mission society at the seminary that I had prayed for. For a couple of years. I didn't want it to start under me.

I wanted the students to, the Lord to work in their hearts. And what they do is really simple. They educate themselves on the needs of particular areas or particular language groups and they pray. And, you know, that's that's a that's an incredibly powerful thing. and we have to remember as pastors, you're a pastor, we're called to be we're called to be men of prayer, to devote ourselves to prayer and to ministry of the word.

And, and so I, I would, I would want to rewind the tape and, and have that more clearly fixed in my mind as a priority.

Can I add a quick thing? because we prayed through the first volume of the unreached 30. We just finished. I taught VBS and I said the new I said, not the Snoop B group, but the Noop B group in the Bhutan area. And they're laughing. I'm like, "You're not You're not going to forget that kids. And so we're done though. But then Codex came out. I got that here. Is that kind of what's going on? Is it going to be moving forward instead of those? Because if it is, I'm putting on that QR code. We have a Sunday weekly. I'm going to, I'm going to integrate that.

Is that.

Yeah. Codex is kind of like the next iteration of that. I mean, there's still enough pastors that really value the, the printed page. I'm one of them And so we'll do volume two; that'll encompass a lot of what codex has in there, but Codex would be the way that I would go. Particularly if I had a youth group. The one thing that I just want to highlight really quickly that Jonathan said, be careful if you have a legacy missions program that you be very generous. Be gentle with those saints that are already in there and you don't go too fast. Sometimes pastors get really excited about, we're going to do fourth lane. That's great. Be gentle with the saints that are in there. Grandfather them into the program. If you don't do that, that's a really quick economic way to split a church.

Like be gentle with those older ones. Now, if they're not teaching the gospel or if they're doing some version of missions that you can point to and go this is counterproductive for the kingdom. That's a different matter. But if they're faithful, if they've done it. If they've been there, be careful about making a huge turn to another direction without accounting for those saints. Amen. That's a pastoral word.

little plug? We have at Greenville. Now, this is, it's not just for Presbyterians to be clear, but at Greenville, we have a, what's called the missions midweeker. We have annually Brooks, is there. Another representative is there. I'm not allowed to name Michael Morales, myself, Jonathan master. There's several of us, Ian Hamilton, and we're helping train churches on how to do missions. Well, how to build a good missions culture. in sending church culture. It starts on a Tuesday and ends on a Thursday, and it's, it's, we have small court cohorts of pastors, elders, deacons, missions can be men, and it's not a big cohort. We spend a lot of time together interacting and teaching. so if you want to jump onto one of those, you can look on the Greenville website from where the next one comes to help you.

And part of all of these things we've been designing, some of which have been from me, not all of, but are are essentially like I've already paid the dumb tax for you. So you need to pay it again. Come learn, you know, I've paid, I've done a lot of stupid stuff. And so I won't answer your question of all the stupid things I'd like to undo too many; It'd be, it'd go on for a long time. but we do have that midweeker. I'd encourage you to jump on. That's awesome. Thank you.

Clay Atkinson. I'm a deacon at Southwoods Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee. My question is around: if we agree that the church is the one that sins when it comes to the financing side of it, how do we approach that, Especially for smaller churches that may just not have budgets to fully support. Does it mainly fall on the sending church? Does it mainly fall on, you know, by vocational work of the missionary? Does it fall on kind of grassroots fundraising from a thousand different sources? Is there preferred ways, unpreferred ways?

anything?

so. this is a hard question because I don't know that I can bind your church's conscience to a particular answer on it and say, this is the way your church needs to deal with this. There's no clear command in scripture on how that ought to go. But I do want to say, even when Radius started, my church had about 80 people, and I went to my elders and said, this is going to cost $250,000, $300,000.

And, you know, we had another church, Brooks' church, down in San Diego, that was going to be helpful as well. And neither one of our churches together were very big. And a group of, kind of a motley crew of men, and our elders were willing to put up every day. We had to get it going if need be.

and you know, when you're a three-year-old church plant with 80 people, you don't have a lot of those dimes, but they were willing to spend them all. And including if that meant I didn't get a salary, which I was game for. I didn't like the thought of it, but I was game for it.

at some point you have to decide as a church: do we really believe that eternity is forever and that people are going to hell and that some things matter more More than these kinds of some of our concerns about do we have the resources? Do we really believe God owns the cattle on a thousand hills and that he'll provide? And are we willing to trust him that if we do the thing he commands us to do, that he'll provide for it? And so I just want to encourage small churches without much money to stop thinking small thoughts.

You know, William Carey had hardly any money they collected in the Baptist Missions Association when they first started. Very little. Very little. and launched a missions movement out of a small group of Baptist churches in England that in many ways reshaped the world in the way we saw missions. And we could look back at them and say, what are you guys thinking? But William Carey, when he preached a sermon on that we don't have the sermon. We have the two points of the sermon. It was from Isaiah 54.

And he commented on how Isaiah 54 says the son is going to receive his inheritance. He's going to receive, his people. They're coming in from every tribe and tongue and nation. He will receive them. Therefore, we should expect great things from God. And he says, and the command is, strengthen the tent You know, tent poles, lengthen the cords, make the tent bigger because they're coming in. So we better attempt great things for God. And I want to say to the church, we should expect great things from God. Do we believe that Jesus is going to get his reward, which is his people? And if we do believe that, that God is committed to giving Jesus his reward, then we should go out and attempt. We should expect great things from God that we have no idea how those needs are going to be met, but we trust the Lord to meet them.

And if we're doing what he wants us to do, he will meet them. Now, with that said, as far as the wise way of collecting money, in our case other churches stepped in, other people stepped in and helped us.

But they got on board because they saw something that the Lord wanted being done in the Lord's church. And so we never lacked the means. We had days in the Radius days and even in sending missions where We didn't know where all the money was going to come from, but the Lord provided.

And I think we either really believe, and I want to keep coming back to this that the Lord Jesus will receive all the sheep the Father has given to him from every tribe and tongue and nation, or we don't.

And if we really believe it, then we stop asking the first question of how will we afford it? And we start saying, "The Lord is going to make this happen. He's going to give his son his reward, So let's go after it, and let's trust the Lord. Can I

also add to that? and I think there was there was something there in what in what Chad described that I think is really worth noting, which is that when they were starting to do this great work, what they did as a church was, first of all, they were willing to put all their, as it were, all their chips in the middle of the table. But also, they partnered with other churches. I wonder, no matter how small or large your congregation is, if there's someone that needs to be sent who's... who's been raised up, I have to think that there is another congregation that you could find that might help just fill in that extra gap. I mean, those... That's how I would look at it, though, that this is your job that the Lord has given the church to do, and so you're going to you're going to work as hard as you can to

partner with others to do that.

Just one thing: Just don't send the missionary out to have to do this all on themselves. This is the one thing that really bothers me, is that we say, "Oh good, you're going to go do the hardest thing on earth. The one thing Well, there's a lot of things.

With regard to this particular subject. "But we're going to send you out to do the hardest thing on earth, in the hardest place on earth. and by the way, unlike our pastor, who gets a salary, you go raise your money. We don't send the pastor out to raise his money. So can, I commend to pastors, if you really believe this person ought to be sent, help them raise the money. Your elders, your deacons, your church, step up and help. Help them. Don't just send them out there to do it all by themselves.

Do you want your members to do that to you? I'd like a salary this year. Great. go out and raise it. You know, I mean, we've got to stop doing that to missionaries. So I'm not suggesting they shouldn't have to do some of it. But, man, pastors should lead the way on that.

Thank you, guys.

Hey, guys. My name is Anthony Galvez. I'm a member at Hope Church in Robinson, Texas. If someone is aspiring to serve in a closed context, a country that's very antagonistic, toward and suspicious of anything Christian, do you all see any significant risk in getting an MDiv and having that attached to your name on the records or even getting your undergraduate