Adapted from the talk as a book chapter, in the speaker's voice. It keeps the argument, stories and wording where possible, but it is an edited retelling, not a transcript. Tap a time in the margin to hear that moment.
Before the talk
Jonathan MasterGreenville Seminary was founded in 1987 to train men for the ministry. Its founders held pastoral and missionary work in high regard, and so they held seminary education in high regard too. They were concerned that standards were eroding (Greek and Hebrew diminished), that confessional commitments they believed the Bible teaches were being sidestepped, and above all that seminary had stopped being what it should be: not just men in a classroom but a fraternity of men seeking holiness and devoting their lives to proclaiming the word of God. They looked to the best models of the past, especially old Princeton in its first fifty years, and essentially took over its statement of purpose, including the phrase that the seminary exists to be a nursery for missionaries. Training a man for pastoral ministry demands a high standard; training one to serve cross-culturally overseas demands, if anything, a higher one.
Jonathan MasterOver forty years the Lord has blessed that work. A little over 92 percent of our divinity graduates are still in pastoral ministry, here or overseas, and around 20 percent of our current students are training to serve overseas. We remain committed to rigorous academics, to the confessional standards that animated our founders, and to being a fraternity of men seeking holiness. As one of Princeton's founders put it, training men academically without a corresponding measure of personal piety does not merely fall short; it harms the church. If you're thinking about long-term work, here or overseas, think carefully about what training should involve. Look to the best models of the past, and think not about the next three years but the next thirty or forty. The harvest is plentiful and the laborers few; pray that the Lord would raise up workers, and workers who, as Paul says, have no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. There's more at gpts.edu, and many articles on missions, including the original pieces behind the new Princeton and Missions book, at confessional.org.
Chad VegasIt's a big privilege to introduce my friend Brooks Buser, president of Radius International. Some of you have seen his story in Yembiyembi: To the Nations on YouTube; if not, spend thirty minutes watching it. We require everyone joining our church to watch it, so they understand what we believe about missions. I first met Brooks at a Panera Bread in Santa Clarita, at a meeting called by his father, Brad Buser, the genesis of Radius. Brooks was home on furlough from Yembiyembi, and somewhere between the table and the soda machine he was already asking me for financial support. I thought, “We should make this man president of Radius; we'll never lack funds.” (He hates that I tell this.) But let me give honor where it's due. In Romans 15:20 Paul says, “I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named… but as it is written, ‘Those who have never been told of him will see.’” Make it my ambition is a compound word that carries the sense of honor. Brooks has had the unique honor of naming Christ in a language where he had never been named. It is my privilege to serve alongside men who have given their lives this way.
My wife and I served for thirteen years in Papua New Guinea among the Yembiyembi people. Let me give you a brief overview, so you have a frame of reference for what follows. We moved in among them in 2003. They had no gospel whatsoever and had never been exposed to the person of Jesus Christ. It took us two years to learn their language. They had no written language, so we had to develop an alphabet, an orthography, and teach them to read and write, while I translated the Scriptures. My job was to translate the New Testament and the Pentateuch and stay ahead of the teaching.
Finally, in 2008, we began to set out the person of Christ. We started in Genesis and walked them through chapters 1, 2 and 3, which were so foundational for our people, setting the God of the Bible against the gods of their ancestors and bringing two worldviews into direct collision. We had the privilege of heralding the name of Christ in a tongue in which it had never been spoken in the history of the world. After four and a half months of teaching we came to the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, on April 21, 2008, and from that came a kernel of believers forty to fifty strong.
We stayed eight more years to see that kernel grow into a healthy New Testament church. When we left, the church had its own elders and deacons, and recently it sent out its own missionaries to another language group in Papua New Guinea. My wife and I have the great privilege of going back every year to check on that church. We see it as the model Paul followed whenever he could: he didn't leave churches behind as orphans. He went back to see them. We have promised the Yembiyembi, “We will come back and see you as long as we can get on the airplane and make the little canoe trip across to the village.” In March we will go back for our eighth visit.
My topic is how to build churches that outlive you: churches that, by God's grace, will still stand when all of us are dead and gone, if the King tarries. He may come tonight; he may come in twenty years. I don't know when he is coming, but I know he is coming. And I want to be specific. Part of the reason we started this conference was not to talk about “missions” in general. Nobody really knows what that means. Terms like “living on mission,” “missional church” and “missions-driven” have largely drained the meaning from the Great Commission. If everywhere is a mission field and everyone is a missionary, no one knows what it means.
So I want to talk about planting a church that will outlive you where the gospel has never gone, among unreached language groups. I prefer that term; Michael Morales made the case in his breakout for why language is a much better measure than “unreached people groups.” Many conferences today talk about missions, and yet the number of people going to unreached language groups keeps falling. Why? Because nobody knows what it means. It is too big, too broad. We need the specificity of what a friend of mine calls Pauline missions: going where no foundation has been laid.
I so appreciated my friend Aubrey's address today. Movement methodologies are ascendant: insider movements, church planting movements, disciple-making movements, Four Fields, short-cycle church planting. Don't imagine these are outliers. They are the vast majority of missions today. And here is the elephant in the room. Go back in five years and see whether those churches still exist; that will tell you the fruit of the method. Go back with someone who speaks the language of the people among whom a church was supposedly planted, and evaluate the metrics then. My fear is that nearly an entire generation has been lost to this kind of missions. Only in the last couple of years at Radius have we begun to see some reflection and possible recalibration.
I speak about churches that outlive us because I don't want men and women to go to the field and realize, two or three years later, that what they gave their best years to is gone, that nothing is left standing. Next year the Yembiyembi church will be nineteen years old, and we'll celebrate its twentieth the year after.
“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” (Colossians 1:24–29)
I have four thoughts on this passage.
1. For the sake of his body
Paul understood the primacy of the church. She who is the lampstand, the bride, the pillar and buttress of the truth, is paramount in Paul's thinking because she is paramount in God's. In some quarters of evangelicalism the church is seen as a helpful accompaniment to the cause of missions, but not its beginning, middle and end. She is considered too slow, too cumbersome, too Western, to which I always want to say: I think Paul and Jesus, two Near Eastern men, would like a word.
The common idea is that you check the church box at home, but when you reach the field a new thing is happening, a new wind is blowing, and you must be ready to flex and adjust to what the Spirit is doing on the ground. No such creative pneumatology ever entered Paul's mind. From first to last he understood the task of missions to center on the church. She was the goal of missions, and so she was worth long timeframes and the slow, patient work of dealing with fallen people through much suffering. Paul saw himself as a minister of the church, a steward of the great mystery Christ has brought to those near and far, so that they might be gathered into one great flock.
Rarely does someone with an anemic view of the church become convinced of its rightful place once they reach the field. They must find it before they go. They must understand what the church is, because that is what they are going to plant. Reverse-engineer that, and it tells you what faithful church membership looks like now, before anyone gets on a plane and crosses an ocean.
Where do they learn it? In a church that values membership, a church that knows them and that they know well, which means steady, faithful attendance. I worry about the college student who has never been a faithful part of his church and wants to go to the field. He doesn't know the toddlers or the children or the older saints; he is well known by the college group and nobody else. Be careful about sending people like that. They learn it in the fellowship of the saints, who assure them of their salvation when they are living worthily of the gospel and warn them to repent when they are straying. That is what a good church does. They learn it in a church that makes the ordinary means of grace primary: the preaching of God's word, prayer, and the testimony of the gathered saints. And they learn it as their old identity (race, job, marital status, where they come from, who they think they are) gives way to a new, primary identity: member of the family of God.
As we taught through Acts in our baby church, and it grew over a year and a half from forty or fifty to about seventy, something happened. The Yembiyembi have four clans: the ostrich, the eagle, the black cockatoo and the toucan. When we moved in, they looked at me (I'm rather tall; I played college basketball, so my nose is a little crooked) and said, “You're definitely in the ostrich clan.” My wife, with her long blonde hair, went into the eagle clan. They adopted all of us into clans by our physical features.
As the church took root, they began using a name we had never heard. A Yembiyembi Christian is called “one who has crossed,” a crosser: someone who has crossed from death to life, from darkness to light. And now they spoke of the crosser clan: those who have crossed over, the clan that supersedes all other clans. Friends, you may have an identity, but if you are in the crosser clan you have an identity that supersedes every other. That is the unity of the family. That is someone who values the church.
People sometimes ask me, “Brooks, it sounds like you have a soft spot for 9Marks.” I have a soft spot for missionaries who go to the field wanting their lives to count. The best way I know to keep them from giving away five, seven, ten or fifteen years and seeing nothing at the end is for them to know the church before they go, to be steeped in the conviction that the church is the lasting instrument our God uses to bring the nations to repentance. The more we pour into the church here, the better it will be for those who go there. For the sake of his body, they must know the body.
2. By means of the word
Paul was a minister, a preacher, charged to make the word of God fully known, warning and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that on the great day he could present them to the King mature in Christ, grown up in every way into him. When the gospel enters a new people and a new language for the first time, the church's primary need is more Bible. That's why we have Acts 13 and Paul and Barnabas, men who knew their Bibles. (H. B. Charles is speaking tomorrow on preaching and missions; go.) It is through the preaching of God's word that people are brought under conviction of sin and repent and believe.
In our baby church we realized quickly that they needed more Bible than the Sunday sermon. So we had men's and women's Bible studies and classes on parenting, discipleship and marriage, all to get more Bible into their system. In our last years we even taught classes on getting a job in town and driving a car. We had built an airstrip out of the jungle and had a tractor to maintain it, so everyone learned to drive the tractor; we set out empty gas bottles as cones, and they ran over them. It was horrible, but we were training them for greater things. And while they learned, they memorized Scripture. You could come to the Yembiyembi church's small-business accounting class, but believer or not, you had to memorize Scripture to graduate. Their primary diet had to be the Bible. There is nothing remotely controversial about that.
But here is something controversial in our day: if a church is going to stand the test of time, it must ultimately have the written Scriptures in its language. Oral Bibles are on the rise. The reasoning goes, “They're an oral culture, so we should keep them in their natural environment.” Leaving aside the ethnocentrism buried in that statement, remember that all of us were once part of an oral culture. Speech has preceded writing in every language the world has known. Your ancestors were an oral culture, until someone developed an orthography, taught them to read and write, and taught them to esteem the written word. So many benefits flow from that.
Orality is not a bad starting point for a group of believers, but it is a terrible ending point for a church.
They must have the written word. Yes, an oral translation is light-years faster; you can hand out voice recorders with recorded Scripture in maybe a month and a half. But when you teach people to read, you give them a means to expand their world, and you dignify what you are doing in their eyes and in the eyes of the national government.
When we moved in we made the Yembiyembi four promises. One: we will learn your language so that we can speak as you speak, because the message we carry is too important to get wrong. Two: we will teach you to read and write. Three: we will translate a very important book into your language. Four: we will teach you what that book means. We won't leave until we're done, but when we've done those four things, we will leave; we're not here forever.
There is no verb for read in Yembiyembi. They say, “The paper talks back to us,” a long phrase. As we prepared the first literacy class, the chiefs and elders gathered and said, “This is far too great a thing to do on the grass like pigs and dogs. We need to build a house worthy of it.” They called it the teaching house. Literacy flowed naturally into the teaching of God's word, and to this day the Yembiyembi have no idea what a church building is. There is a teaching house, and the church gathers in the teaching house. Literacy was the gateway for the gospel. People walked around reading their little booklets and teased those who couldn't: “Oh, sorry, the paper doesn't talk to you.” Christians earned a reputation as the thinking people, the people who took the time to learn what the paper says, so they could follow along in their translated Scriptures as we taught.
A reading church is a much better thinking church, and a thinking church has natural antibodies to heresy and false teaching. As leaders grow confident in the written word, they can read and teach at a high level without carrying recorders and worrying about solar panels. There is a natural analog device that requires only an eye and a finger. It's called a book, and it will speak to them for generations.
The other word-centered aspect of missions to unreached language groups is Bible translation. There's a reason the work of Martin Luther, William Tyndale and Adoniram Judson had such rippling effects: they were experts in the language. The maxim in Bible translation is that your best speakers are your best translators. I was amazed to learn that in Myanmar, the dominant translation is still Judson's. Three weeks ago we visited the Museum of the Bible, where the Yembiyembi translation was put in its place in the collection. It was one of the most emotional days I have had since coming back to the United States. We should all applaud the work being done in languages that have yet to hear God's word in their mother tongue.
But we must be careful that Bible translation projects don't inadvertently start to drive the missions agenda. In our zeal to see translations finished, good methods are sometimes jettisoned for faster ones. There are goals for 2035, for every language to have Scripture. I want that too, but I want them to be real, high-quality translations. The larger problem is that more and more translations are being done, or are already done, with no church to read them, often because there are no believers. When translation is siloed away from church planting, it produces something, but rarely a church that will stand the test of time. Translation and church planting are married, and translation is always the servant of the church plant. That is not a popular idea today.
A few years ago in Tanzania I sat with a translation team to look over their methods. They had worked seven years and had about seven to go. At the end I asked, “Who will you give this translation to?” They said, “We hope and pray someone will come and plant a church, because right now we have no one.” I later learned that perhaps 60 percent of Bible translations in Africa sit on shelves gathering dust. Why? There is no church and no appetite to read them. We dare not run siloed enterprises for the sake of numerical success. I want the thermometer to rise until every language has a translation, but even more, I want people reading those translations. If you want a translation that will last, plant a church that will use it, and both will outlive the translator.
The word of God has always been, and always will be, the church planter's primary tool for dismantling a fallen worldview, relieving human suffering, bringing the light of the gospel, and strengthening the weak and weary on their journey to the Celestial City. It is by the word that people are saved. But if we want lasting churches, let's prioritize the written word, and translation done together with church planting, not in isolation from it. A word with no preacher, no teacher and no church: what does it cost us, and what does it gain? We need the word in their tongue, and an appetite among people to read it.
3. Through rightly understood suffering
When Nina and I moved to Yembiyembi, we were the novelty of novelties. I stand a head and shoulders, maybe a torso, above most Yembiyembi. Our son, three years old when we arrived, had neon-blond hair. We couldn't walk barefoot as they did everywhere; we smelled of laundry detergent; we couldn't eat much of their food. We were a foreign element injected into their lives. But over time our feet toughened, and we learned to eat their food, and then to like it, some of it more than the rest. In Yembiyembi, if they think highly of you, they give you grub worms. My wife would get a plate, I'd get a plate; she'd choke one down and say, “These are great, but my husband loves these,” and empty hers into my bowl.
I even learned to hunt. A boy becomes a man there when he kills a wild boar at night by himself; otherwise he is a boy forever. So I became a real man. But what most endeared us to the Yembiyembi was none of that. An almost biblical plague of boils swept through the village, and my wife caught them in spades, and walked down into the village with open boils on her legs. And I started getting malaria. To hunt wild boar at night you go into the swamps and get eaten by mosquitoes, and you can't wear repellent, because the pigs smell it and run. So you take the malaria: the first time, the fifth, the seventh. It is 110 degrees with 95 percent humidity and you are shivering and vomiting, and the Yembiyembi stand outside your window listening and say, “He's just like us.” That endeared us to them more than anything, and it bought us a hearing when the time came to teach God's word.
Paul says he rejoiced in his sufferings for the Colossians' sake. He is not saying his sufferings were of the same quality as Christ's. He is saying that, for the Colossians to hear the message with open ears and take him seriously, his suffering was necessary, and he rejoices in the privilege of suffering for the advance of the gospel.
Missionaries speak from their scars.
One of my dearest teachers in church planting put it this way: missionaries speak from their scars. That is one of the great arguments for long-term ministry. The accumulated scars of the gospel ambassador speak louder than his words. Through those scars he can identify with the people, share their sorrows, fill up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the gospel's sake, so that they will hear the message.
When we filmed the six-part John G. Paton series, the final episode took us to his wife's grave on the island of Tanna. I'm a Protestant; I don't believe one patch of ground is holier than another unless an angel of God tells me so. But standing there was the closest I have come. Paton slept on that grave for months so that it wouldn't be dug up, and then buried his infant son, who died days later, on top of her. And he stayed.
Believe it or not, that was secondary to visiting his church on Aniwa: a church 152 years old that traces its lineage back to John G. Paton. Its language is close to Papua New Guinea's national language, so I could interview the elders. Are they still preaching the gospel? Yes, they are. Then they took me outside, and beside the church were the graves of three more of his children. It was as if Paton didn't need to say a thing. He could stand before that church and say, “You want to know where my credibility is? It is lying right over there. Those are my children.” It stung me a little, too. I realized I had played in the junior varsity; he played varsity. Our son caught malaria and had to be medevacked to Australia; we nearly lost him more than once, but he lived. Paton buried three children right outside his church.
It is through the sufferings of our sent ones that gospel doors often begin to crack open. Pastor, guard that suffering, and stand with them in it. Amy Carmichael wrote a poem in the last twenty years of her life, confined to bed after a fall, years in which she produced some of her best writing:
“Hast thou no scar? No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand? I hear thee sung as mighty in the land, I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star: Hast thou no scar? … No wound? No scar? Yet as the Master shall the servant be, and pierced are the feet that follow Me; but thine are whole: can he have followed far who has nor wound nor scar?”
It is through our scars that the gospel moves forward. But I don't want to overplay that side of the equation. The goers will have scars. What about the senders, the 95 percent of us in this room? I used to be a goer; now I am a sender, an elder and a faithful member of my church in San Diego. There are scars for those who stay too. I so appreciated what Tim Challies said this afternoon about parents.
Matthew 4:21–22: “And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.” It is no accident that Matthew says they left the boat and their father. Some of the greatest scars today belong to parents who willingly raise their children to be the ones through whom another language group hears the gospel. It takes parents like Zebedee, who lost his right hand and his left in one day. What a credit, not only to James and John, but to Zebedee, that he raised men of such character that when the Master called, they followed. When we get to heaven it won't only be the John Patons, the Hudson Taylors and the Amy Carmichaels. It will be the Zebedees, the parents with scars: “I lost my James and my John to Indonesia. I lost my daughter, for the sake of the name.”
I teach at Radius, and we have found that unsaved parents are an obstacle for some students, but the chief obstacle for Christian young people is often Christian parents. Christian parents want their children to live three blocks away. They want their grandchildren raised speaking English, kept out of harm's way. Oh, for Zebedees! Oh, for parents who see the glory of the King and the brevity of this life, and who bear good scars. We need churches and parents who send well and live for these great things.
4. By his power, for his glory
Everything I have said so far is good and true: love the body by knowing it well, teach the word, suffer well, send your best. But notice that Paul doesn't end this passage with our efforts. He ends with Christ and the power only he can supply. Miss that, and the answer to “How do we build churches that outlive us?” becomes “Be better missionaries and better churches,” and no missionary and no church is good enough for that.
“To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” The mystery is not a method. It is Christ in you, the hope of glory. A church well planted among an unreached language group does not survive because the missionary was gifted, or went to Greenville Seminary or Bethlehem Seminary. It survives because Christ himself dwells in his people by his Spirit, and he does not leave when the missionary leaves. He dwells with his people whatever language they speak.
This takes the pressure off the missionary. If things go badly, brother, this isn't your church; it's the King's church. If things go well, brother, don't take too much credit; this isn't your church. There is great joy in realizing that the church already has an author, an architect and an owner, and that we are unworthy servants who have only done our duty, and that Christ is the one who builds his church.
And look at both halves of verse 29. “I toil, struggling”: there is no room for passivity. There is a one-sided view that says an all-powerful God doesn't use means, so we needn't send missionaries. It was popular when William Carey wrote his Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens: God will save them when and how he chooses. That completely ignores the means God uses. But then the other half: “with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” Human responsibility and God's sovereignty work together for the glory of the King.
God's sovereignty doesn't cut the nerve of missions. It is the nerve of missions.
Sovereignty is the only reason anyone can toil for fifteen, twenty, thirty years among an unreached language group where no foundation has been laid and expect anything to stand. One of my favorite books is J. I. Packer's Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. Packer says the Bible asserts both truths side by side, in the strongest and most unambiguous terms, as two ultimate facts, and that this must be our position too. Spurgeon, asked whether he could reconcile them, said he wouldn't try; he never reconciles friends. In the Bible, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are not enemies, not uneasy neighbors, not locked in an endless cold war. They are friends, good friends who work closely together.
We labor because the outcome is secure. The King will have the sheep he named as his before the foundation of the world. They too will hear his voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd. They will hear the gospel, understand it, and come.
Two great arcs give me hope. Psalm 96: “Oh sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth! Sing to the Lord, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!” We go to the ends of the earth, to poorly reached languages, to places with no churches. Why? Because they don't know the song yet. And then comes the echo at the end of time, Revelation 5:9: “And they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.’” Now they know the song. It begins with people who don't know the One to sing to; we have to go and teach them. As two of today's speakers said, we go because the glory of our God is at stake. Stones and rocks and moons and jungle spirits are receiving false worship. The King is not worshiped among these peoples.
One of my greatest moments came after the Yembiyembi church was established, while we were teaching through Romans. We were paddling down the middle of the river at night. Some of you have never been where there are no cars for hundreds of miles and the sky has never known smog; the stars look like the lights in this auditorium. One of my tribal brothers looked up and said, “I see you.” We hadn't translated the Psalms yet; he knew nothing of Psalm 96. “I see you, Great One. I see you. I'm not a pig or a dog. I know I am a created one, and I know you are there.” The God of heaven was receiving right worship. The song was known.
When we finished in Yembiyembi, we had to take down our house. It was riddled with termites; it had bark walls full of critters; it wasn't going to last long anyway. Our son had been raised there from three to sixteen, and I didn't want him to watch the home of his childhood come down, so he and my wife flew out two weeks early. We used the roofing for the teaching house, where it served for the next seven years, and the leftover plywood for cabinets so the rats couldn't get into the Yembiyembi's Bibles.
The airstrip had flooded by the day I left, so they sent a helicopter, which landed on a little hill next to the village. I'll never forget the elders and a large part of the church walking up that hill with me: hugs, many tears, goodbyes, not knowing whether I would see them again. (By God's grace I have been back seven times.) As the helicopter lifted off, I saw the church lined up on the right-hand side, and as we climbed toward the clouds and turned for the coast, the thought crossed my mind: I could die very happy right now. If this chopper goes down, I die happy, because of what is receding in the window to my right.
Friends, you don't know the satisfaction, the fulfillment, of going to bed at night and saying, “King of kings, seventeen years ago you asked this of me, and by your grace you have seen me through. You saw me through many deep waters, not the waters John Paton or Judson passed through, but you saw me through.” Part of the reason for this conference is that some of you in this room may have the privilege of carrying our King's name and the glory of his name to places that have yet to hear. Through suffering, through the word, through knowing the body, the song will change the world. You will teach them the song, and one day, around the throne, to him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb, we will sing it together. I pray that some of you are pastors who will raise up those of whom, as Aubrey said, the world is not worthy, who will take the name of our King to the languages that have yet to hear.
Father, thank you for your kindness in giving us the Bible in our language. Men shed their blood, were strangled and burned at the stake so that we could read this book in English. Thank you for good pastors who herald the word and study diligently so we can be fed. Thank you for our local congregations; may they last for generations as they are taught well. And Father, from within our midst, raise up some who will leave this country and this language and go to those last places, to see your name known where it is not known. These are hard things to contemplate: hard for parents, hard for churches as they send their best, hard because life is short and we love to be with those knit together with us in the cause of your name. But give us uncommon courage. Give us what only you can provide. You have promised to be with us to the very end of the age; give us that comfort as we press on in the great task you have given us. In Jesus' name, amen.