In the final study of The Mission I promised to post a list of some very basic books that give an overview of what God is doing in our world. I told you it would be a couple of weeks before I could get around to the task since I knew I was leaving immediately for vacation.

These books are offered with the following explanation. The purpose is to offer an easy-to-read, popular approach to global missions, not a technical or academic work aimed at specialists. This is in no way a complete list, just some that come to my mind as a place to begin. Maybe some of you can suggest others. Also, remember that a book is out of date the very day it comes off the press. These books are several years old in some cases, but they are well-written and enough to give you a good sense for what is happening today. Finally, I am not writing this list in proper bibliographical form. I’m simply giving you the title and author. You can ask for them in our bookstore or another, look them up on Amazon or similar or Google them.

• We are the World: Globalizaton and the Changing Face of Missions by David Lundy
• Borderless Church: Shaping the Church for the 21st Century by David Lundy
• New Global Mission: The Gospel from Everywhere to Everyone, by Samuel Escobar
• Mission Now: Developing a Mission Lifestyle by Trev Gregory
• The Book that Transforms Nations: The Power of the Bible to Change any Country by Loren Cunningham
• What in the World Is God Doing, by Gordon Olson

Here are a couple of books that are not “Christian,” but they will give turn your perspective of the world upside down.

• The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, by Thomas Friedman

For those who REALLY want to know:

Here is something to keep in mind and perhaps put on your calendar. I am very pleased to announce that we will be hosting an intensive version of Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. This is a college level course developed by the US Center for World Missions in Pasadena, California. I honestly do not know of another single tool responsible for the transformation of more lives of professing Christians. It is called Perspectives because I guarantee it will totally transform your perspective on the world.

We will be offering this course in conjunction with The Summit. Final details have not yet been announced, but this course will run from February 22nd to March 2nd and will be during the day. It will cost what you would expect a college course to cost and there is a good deal of reading and writing involved. It will be worth every penny and every ounce of effort.

In the future, we hope to be able to offer the normal version that involves one evening a week for 15 weeks. The content is the same and so are the requirements. The course is much easier to absorb spread out over a 15 week period. There are a few other places in the area that offer the course if you don’t want to wait. The regular version is clearly the best way to take Perspectives.

This intensive version is designed especially for busy pastors, missionaries and leaders, but it is certainly open to anyone. I’ll be taking it myself. I have recommended and used the reader for this course since its first publication in 1982, have participated in teaching, will teach two sessions next year in Costa Rica but never had the opportunity to actually take the course because of the time commitment and my crazy schedule. I’m very excited to have to chance to finally take the course myself! Several of our pastors and staff will join me in enrolling, and I know of at least one or two of our missionaries that will be coming in just to take the course. It’s that good and that important.

Not everyone can take off a week from work or school, but some can and will. Are you up for the challenge?

That was our theme this morning as we gave our latest “Vision Update.” We decided to move the Vision Update to August to take advantage of this time when students are getting back to class and all of us are trying to steer life into some sort of  ”normal” mode after a busy summer.

Our theme for the year has been very simply – Grow.  The idea is to finish off the year with a major emphasis on our need to grow and how that happens as we learn to understand and apply scriptural truth to our lives. This Fall we are all going Back to Class! i was very encouraged to get home this afternoon and already have some encouraging messages waiting from people who are very excited about the journey ahead.

Yesterday I had fun giving you a little update on our cruise and how it required some stretching on my part. I was apprehensive as we approached the cruise, but very soon settled down and thoroughly enjoyed it. By this time you are seeing that stretching is a part of growing.  Sometimes frightening, often painful, growth is something that demands our full attention and participation. Ever tried to lose weight without cutting back on calories and doing more exercise?

So, get ready to stretch as we get back to class and see how we can truly assimilate biblical truth into our daily lives. Remember, our ultimate goal is not more information but transformation. The only requirement is to be needy. Excuse me while I cut to the front of the line!

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. (Matthew 5:6)

NOW WHAT?

My name is Jeff … and I have a Life Team.

There. I’ve confessed it. I feel much better. Do you still respect me?

A few months back I attended a unique leadership conference in California sponsored by a couple of shrinks that I hugely admire. Actually, it was more like going on a blind date secretly arranged by a mutual friend because you saw some really, really gorgeous person across the lecture hall in your Western Civ class.

I had seen those two shrinks only in a couple of videos and read one of their many books. That’s all. But I was immediately intellectually infatuated. I really wanted to hear more that these shrinks had to say. They’re good.

So, a couple of weeks later (I know that’s insane!) I was sitting in a resort center in southern California waiting for them to speak. The conference was limited to only 40 admirers, so I was thinking I’d have a week to get acquainted with them and learn some really neat stuff.

I was snookered.

They did speak – for an hour in the morning and another hour just before supper. They were as good as I thought they would be and I did learn some neat stuff. But, there was more.

The rest of the time was spent in several hours a day of group therapy – every day. All day long my little group moved from room-to-room and from shrink-to-shrink (different ones – not the famous shrinks who were speaking). It was one of the most horribly wonderful miserable experiences of my life.

Among the much neat stuff I learned was the fact that I needed consistent, continual, loving, and insightful input from faithful, compassionate friends who love me unconditionally, encourage me, advise me, keep my confidences, share my biblical values and are just as flawed and needy as me. Does that make any sense? Well, after my week in California it made perfect sense to me.

The two shrinks I’m talking about work with some of the world’s top leaders – heads of Fortune 500 companies and the like. They say they have never met a leader who has been successful over the long haul without having this type of insightful interaction with a small group of peers. That’s a pretty impressive statement.

Anyway, I knew I had better get my act in gear. When I got home I hand-picked three other guys to be with me what I call my Life Team. I picked them for the reasons I mentioned above. They all agreed.

Here’s the really funny thing. They agreed because they thought they were helping me. For whatever reason they like me and already knew that I was needy. But, after we had been up and running for a few weeks, one of them said, “I’ve been snookered! I thought I was joining this group to support Adams. Now, I realize that this is about all of us, not just him.”

Got all that? Sorry to have to unloaded all that on you, but I had to set the stage for what I wanted to say.

Fast Forward to this morning. It’s early and I’ve just slipped into the cozy little suburban Panera Bread that we lease out each week for our “office.” I try to get there first so I can get the coffee flowing through my veins and be semi-social. At that time of day I have often thought about making a cardboard sign to hang around my neck -”Helpless. Will work for coffee. God bless.”

So, here I am nursing my coffee when one of my Life Team comes in. The two other guys were out of town. As long as there are two of us we still meet. We sat down and began to talk about whatever. By the way, that’s our agenda – whatever. We don’t do a Bible study; we do life … or whatever. We don’t feel guilty about that because each of us has a life filled with Bible studies out our ears.

OK, I started out this post to talk about “now what?” but I’m really getting into this confession about my Life Team. I feel like I need to explain what I just said about not doing a Bible study and not feeling guilty. This is one of the principle purposes of my Life Team – we do life, not a Bible study. Life involves the study of the Bible, but you don’t have to do a Bible study to do a Life Team. Got it?

Honestly, sometimes I feel like I have biblical constipation. I do Bible studies all the time. When I’m not doing a Bible study I’m studying the Bible for my next Bible study. No wonder I need a Life Team! People like me tend to get really, really goobered up if they’re not careful. They start running around and saying things like “Praise the Lord” and “Hallelujah” and “Amen” at the most inappropriate times and places, even when there are people around who don’t speak Christian jargon and have no clue what we are saying or why.

So, in our Life Team we deal with the demands of life. We just keep dealing and talking. After a while, Bible begins to ooze out. No, we are NOT saying things like, “In Deuteronomy 3:42 God said ….” No, the Bible just oozes out naturally. It’s like when you have had a massive sinus backup headache and finally your nose begins to run and you can’t help it. I don’t mean to gross you out. Just be thankful I switched metaphors from the constipation. Once the Bible starts oozing out naturally like that, I know I’ll be fine.

I’ve stopped ranting now.

So, the two of us are sitting there and this sharp, successful young businessman begins talking about The Mission. He’s talking about the challenge that this whole series has been to him. He’s not just kissing up. He really means it. I can tell. That’s why I hand-picked him for this assignment. He is sincerely, honestly and intensely wrestling with the implications of The Mission for his life, his family – all that. NO! I WON’T tell you what we said. That’s why this Life Team thing is built around confidentiality. But I can tell you that we had a great time talking about how The Mission might apply to the very same life he is living out through his natural sphere of influence in economics. Cool, huh? It was VERY cool, and after a while some Bible began to ooze out around the corners of our conversation – not overtly, but just shaping and forming the parameters of our thoughts and ideas and stuff like that.

In essence, he was saying, “OK, I get The Mission. Now what?”

I’m thinking that there are others like him. For you, this Sunday I’m doing this – Accepting the Challenge of The Mission. I guess I could have called it Now What?

Weitenauer Bibel

As we reflect on The Mission, I want to point out the central role of those who dedicate themselves to translate the scriptures into the mother tongues of the peoples of the world. Our church has always been committed to the authority and centrality of the scriptures in our lives as followers of Jesus, and that is also reflected in our participation in The Mission. One of the first couples sent out of KCBT were Wycliffe translators Orville and Mary Johnson giving over 30 years of their lives to translate the New Testament into the Secoya language of a tribal group in Ecuador. More recently we financed the completion of two New Testament translation projects into indigenous languages of central Mexico and an Old Testament project in another region of Mexico. The two New Testament projects are nearing completion, and the Old Testament project is advancing nicely.

I was reading another of the old mission texts sent to me by a friend. This one, Christianity and the Progress of Man by William Douglas Mackenzie, was published in 1897. He devotes an entire chapter to the missionary as translator. At the end of the 1700′s the Bible existed only in about 50 languages, most of them European. When Mackenzie wrote at the end of the 1800′s, that number had risen to almost 400 languages with at least a part of the Bible in that language. Today, of the over 6,900 known languages, over 2,000 still have no part of the Bible translated, and many others have only a portion. That figure represents over 350 million people who cannot read the scriptures in their heart language.

If you speak other languages, you have an appreciation for the difficulty of translation from one language to the other. Menkenzie relates the following.

For example, can anything be more pathetic than the position of the first missionaries to Greenland, who found themselves unable to reach the people without the Scriptures, and yet unable to translate them, because they were uneducated men without a knowledge of the grammar of their own language! Yet these men did surmount even those frowning mountains of difficulty by the exercise of a humble and patient courage, and began to reduce the Esquimaux language to writing. They and their successors toiled at the workd till the entire Scriptures were translated .

I could fill pages talking about some of the crazy language boo boo’s I and others have committed. Imagine the challenge of those who translate scripture in written form and want to avoid any major blunders that would be recorded for generations.

Again, Mackenzie gives us a some examples from his generation.

In a certain part of India difficulty has been found with the word “flesh.” The nearest native equivalent which could be found meant “flesh-meat” in distinction from bone or blood. It is easy to see what ludicrous misunderstandings this word would suggest in many parts of Scripture. For example one native, on the text, “I will not fear what flesh can do to me,” said: “It is plain enough, but it is a very curious thing to say. It means of course, ‘I will not fear even though the eating of flesh causes me indigestion.’” In Japanese the translators finding no word for “kiss” had to manufacture one, and then, I suppose, had to explain its meaning. In a certain West African language, the missionaries found that in translating the word “heaven,” they had employed a native word signifying only “at the top of a tree” or “of a pole.”

First, be thankful that we have a great history of the scriptures in the English language. Second, keep translators in your prayers. Third, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send more workers into the harvest to tackle the over 2,000 languages still with not a single verse of scripture.

Dr. Oswald J. Smith

In our Summer study of The Mission you have heard me speak often about the challenge of the least-reached – those who have never had enough understanding of the message of Jesus Christ to either intelligently accept or reject that message. Let me share the story of how I first came to understand the principle of giving priority to the least-reached.

Dr. Oswald J. Smith was pastor of The Peoples Church of Toronto, Canada many years ago. He was already an old man when I had the chance to hear him speak. Not only did we hear him, Cheryl and I were fortunate to chauffeur him around a couple of times when he spoke at the church we attended in Wichita, Kansas. I’ll never forget the imposing figure of his tall, thin frame, the majesty of his voice or the passion for The Mission that oozed from the pours of his being. He was the one I heard say on repeated occasions, “Why should anyone hear the Gospel twice until everyone has heard it once?” Dr. Smith was also the one who introduced the “faith promise mission giving” system that is still used by many churches to this day.

One of my favorite memories of Dr. Smith illustrates the pure and simple character of this old Presbyterian minister. Cheryl and I had been invited to accompany the pastor of our Wichita church to take Dr. Smith to dinner following an evening service of the mission conference. The pastor took us to a very nice restaurant. It was not opulent, but clearly the pastor wanted to give Dr. Smith a fine meal in appreciation for his ministry in our church.

Our Canadian visitor was not one for chit chat and projected a serious and formal style that was not unusual for his generation and culture. I don’t want to give the impression that he was stuffy or aloof. He was very nice, caring and genuine. But at the same time he was quiet and reserved. Give this nature, we didn’t think much about it when we noticed that Dr. Smith only had something to drink at dinner.

After a pleasant time discussing missions over dinner, it was our lot to take Dr. Smith back to his hotel while our pastor headed home. Just a few hundred yards from the hotel, Dr. Smith suddenly asked me to stop the car. I did, of course, and as he quickly slipped out of the passenger’s seat he said that he would be right back. Not really understanding what was happening, Cheryl and I obediently waited.

Just a short few minutes later Dr. Smith appeared once again in his three-piece suit clutching a small paper sack from McDonald’s! Humbly and somewhat sheepishly, he explained to us that he was just too embarrassed to have the church buy him such a nice meal. He knew that we were trying to raise a large missionary offering that week and he did not want to do anything to take away from that project. He would never expect anyone else to do the same, and never implied an ounce of judgment toward us who enjoyed our meal that evening. He simply was a man who lived by his principles.

Cheryl helped him with book sales and we ended up with quite a library of his books that he gave to us in return for her help. He was a remarkable man in many ways. There is much information available about his life, but you can get a good overview of his life here.  His influence on my life would be incalculable. He was succeeded by his son Paul who continued to build upon his father’s foundation. I was also blessed to spend time in his presence.