1988 - 1989
"To Whom Much Is Given"
(Luke 12:48)
"I sent the hornet before you which drove them out from before you ... but not with your sword or with your bow.
I have given you a land for which you did not labor,
And cities which you did not build, and you dwell in them;
You eat of the vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant.
Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve Him in sincerity and truth...
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."
(Joshua 24:12-13, 15b)
God gave us so much! He drove out the cult and gave us both a campus and 82 houses for which we did not have to pay and which we did not have to build. It was awesome to contemplate how very much, then, He might require of us.
Shortly before the Victory Celebration on January 16, 1988, Ernie Heimbach, formerly Home Director of Overseas Missionary Fellowship in the U.S. and a long-standing USCWM staff member on loan from OMF, came to morning
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prayers with what he strongly felt was a word from the Lord to our community.
He reminded us that after the victory at the Red Sea, the Israelites started off across the desert and almost immediately started complaining and threatening Moses because of the hardships they were going through. Ernie warned that this would be the next attack against our community. He said that we would be tempted to complain, to be critical of leadership, and to forget all the miracles God had done for us because of the present difficulties that we would face. He urged us to keep up our prayer lives and to keep yielded to God, especially now, right after a victory when we would be most likely to let up.
He was right, of course. Yet recognizing the truth of what he said beforehand did not prevent these things he warned about from happening. God has helped us in these experiences, but not without scars.
During the campaign we had sensed a tremendous swell of prayer for our staff as well as for the campaign. Increasingly, during the past five months, it seemed that everyone who called in — and there were hundreds — assured us of their prayers or told us of groups that were meeting three times a week to pray specifically for us.
After the campaign was over, however, the crisis seemed to be past. The staff were very weary. All we could think about was the need for rest. And right then, without our even realizing it, Satan attacked.
It was as if all the energy he had spent frustrating our fundraising attempts over the years was now directed against our staff.
The Bible says that "the glory of the king is his army." Our army right then was in terrible disarray. A number of us became sick or were in severe personal financial crises. Several experienced the worst marital crises they had ever had. Within months two couples left in bitterness and anger because they felt unappreciated.
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Then, at the end of April, Ralph had a severe pain in his neck, so severe that I had to fly home early from a board meeting in Louisville. He was not completely over that pain before, two weeks later, he had a minor stroke. He wasn't sure just when it happened. He only noticed that all of a sudden he was unsteady on his feet and his speech was a bit slurred. When called upon to sign the diplomas for the university graduation, he noticed that this time it took him twice as long in order to write legibly. Although a number of CAT scans were done, we never did find out just what had happened and why. We were just happy that all these symptoms tapered off in a few days.
It seemed like we were suffering one blow after another, and we wondered if those wonderful supporters all over the nation were still praying for us. Satan could stop us with internal problems just as effectively as having us lose the property. We could win the war and lose the peace. Did our friends perhaps assume that we no longer needed prayer, now that the financial crisis was past?
During the months of the campaign, Wes Tullis, chairman of our Mobilization Division, had been planning for what we should do once the campaign was over. Picking up where Len Barlotti had left off, he had worked diligently, designing and getting into print a very detailed notebook to offer local churches which would help inspire their people with a vibrant vision for unreached peoples in a year-long program. It was called "The Year of Vision."
He had also moved far ahead in the preparation of another basic mission mobilization tool called the "Adopt a People" program. It would encourage churches to adopt a specific unreached people group as their own personal responsibility. As early as February, he had already scheduled eight Regional Mobilizers' Workshops all over the country where these tools would be presented to the volunteers who had helped us in the campaign and, hopefully, to pastors.
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Ralph felt very strongly that those volunteers were crucial to mission mobilization in this country. Even before the end of the campaign, on December 7, 1987, he told our staff:
There was a time in this country, between 1906 and 1913, when there were 3,500 local groups of workers who were promoting the cause of missions, and those people in a four-year period quadupled the giving to missions ....
I hope you don't think I'm being crazy here, but do you realize what our goals really are? ... Our goals include generating a billion dollars a year for missions. The thousands of workers who have joined us for the campaign could readily increase the flow of money to missions by an additional billion dollars a year ...
I almost think God is saying to us, 'Look, I tricked you. You thought I wanted you to go after $8 million, while I really wanted you to go after a thousand local workers. You tried every other scheme to get the $8 million, and you were finally forced to go and recruit a thousand local people. That's what I was really after, but I didn't think you'd have the faith to do it.'
I say that playfully. But God's ways are higher than our ways. All I can say is that we don't always know for sure what His plan is. We have to be very, very open day by day. We need to be open every single day to the nuances of His will as we understand them.
Wes' mobilization plans were not our earliest ones. We still strongly believed that God wanted us to continue raising $15 one-time gifts by a word-of-mouth "grapevine" method, another of Bob's ideas. This was the plan which through the years had often frustrated our very best friends, even Bob, eventually. And yet, the 60,000 people on our mailing list had come to us through this plan, or some modification of it. The earliest $15 donors sent out our "grape-vine" letters, asking their friends and relatives to give us $15 each. Those who responded also did the same thing. And within months we had thousands on our mailing list whom we could never have contacted any other way.
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Fundraisers considered this method of raising funds ludicrous. But it was far more than a fundraising tool; we considered it mainly a method of mobilizing people. Even as a fundraising tool, however, it was not a failure. By the time we got to the "Last $1000" Campaign, we thus had 60,000 "volunteers" we could call on, all of whom had already voted to help us. That was worth a great deal more than the amount of money they had given.
Once the property was paid for, we expected to inaugurate that plan again. Why? To make that money available to other mission agencies or to our "Fund for the Kingdom." We promised to send the $1000 gifts on to other mission agencies once they were replaced by the same amount in $15 gifts. We still intend to do that. Our purpose is not to promote ourselves but to promote missions in general. If each one of those who know us could touch the lives of 67 other people who know nothing about the unreached peoples and motivate them to give $15 and recruit a few others, we could very quickly return or reassign the advances we received. Far more importantly, however, we could quickly see the possibility turn to reality of a mission movement capable of establishing a church movement in every people group by the year 2000.
It doesn't seem reasonable that God would allow us to stumble right at the threshold of the final great harvest that He called us to announce. Not after all the miracles He has done for us here in this place. We are His witnesses — both of this vision and of His marvelous grace and provision.
The eight Mobilizers' Workshops which Wes was working on began in March and ended in August. Those who came were excited by the Year of Vision materials which Wes presented and by the Adopt-A-People notebook. Nevertheless, it was obvious that most of them were no longer in the crisis mode. It did not seem as urgent a challenge to get on with the job of mobilizing as it had been the more
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immediate challenge to get the money in — not to our staff, not to our volunteers.
Ralph was fearful that this would happen. He warned that we would lose that wonderful network of volunteers if we didn't galvanize them immediately into the larger vision God had given us — indeed, the vision for which God has given us the campus in the first place.
Todd Johnson, our youngest daughter's husband, also fretted at the delay. All that summer of 1988, he spent in research about the Student Volunteer Movement at the end of the last century and the aborted efforts of leaders like A.T. Pierson to mobilize the Christians of that period to finish the job. "We are perfectly able to do it," Pierson said repeatedly. But, Todd explained, by the time other leaders in those days got through rebuking Pierson for too much enthusiasm, or checking his tabulations, or insisting that a world-wide awakening had to happen first, the window of opportunity had past. It was not just another generation that was lost; it was four! And we're back to the starting line again.
But this time we have tremendous advantages. And we better understand just what "completing the Great Commission" means. We know now that whatever else it means it certainly includes the basic task, for missionaries from all the world, first of all to get a strong church movement established in culturally relevant form in every last unreached people group. This is much more than getting hands raised. Then, our task as Christians on the home front is to mobilize — to pass on the vision, to stimulate concerted specific prayer, to support those who go with our prayers and our finances.
In all the years the staff at the U.S. Center for World Mission were trying to raise the funds to pay for their property, we never once forgot the larger vision of mobilization. Why else do we have the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course, which we are constantly told turns people's lives completely around? Instead of having 2000 or
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3000 students a year studying this course, there should be 10,000. Who can make that happen? Only those thousands of volunteers who live where the people live.
In the States, this course is taught in 60 places. Several of these have more than 100 students enrolled, including pastors and missionaries on furlough. Two years ago it was introduced in New Zealand, and already is being taught in 40 different places there. It is being translated into other languages to be taught elsewhere. It is merely another tool God is using to mobilize the Church.
[2002 Edition note: Now, some 100+ locations in North America with about 6,000 students per year. There is a special edition in India. There are translations completed in Spanish (being revised after 10 years of use), Korean; portions in French, Portuguese, and translations in process in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.]
And then there's the Global Prayer Digest. We started writing this little devotional magazine which stresses the unreached peoples by name a number of years ago, when we didn't have time to do it because of our paying so much attention to our financial needs. But this was what God had called us to, not just to buy a piece of land and houses. He gave us the land and the houses because he wanted them used for mobilizing the Church. I am sure of it! Yet after all these years only 10,000 Christians are reading the Global Prayer Digest every day. There should be at least a million! It is well written — the "cadillac" of devotional guides one person called it — and inexpensive. It takes only five minutes a day to read. Why don't more use it then?
[2002 Edition note: Now, some 48,000 people use it, but only 8,000 use the U.S. printed version, plus some other thousands via a daily email reminder.]
I'll tell you why. Satan doesn't want the Church around the world to be concerned about the unreached peoples. He doesn't want the Kingdom of God to come. That spells his doom.
What can we do?
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Where is that Army of people who prayed for us during our "Last $1000" campaign? Are they praying for the Perspectives course? Are they praying for the Global Prayer Digest? Are they praying for all the other mobilizing efforts that are coming from this place — like the traveling teams of Caleb who visit the universities of this country every year, or those from Zwemer who tramp the country every week, sounding the alarm for the unreached Muslim world?
Are they praying that someone will join Henrietta Watson, this dear 76-year-old retired missionary from India, who singlehandedly is carrying the burden of the Institute of Hindu Studies. The research needed in that Institute alone is enough for thirty-five people. But she's also running classes, trying to mobilize. Is anyone praying for Henrietta? Will anyone come to help her?
God help us if we win the war of finances and lose the peace of mobilization for the greater war. Except for the excitement over the research Todd was doing, we felt a certain heaviness in our staff all that summer and fall. Some said we were without direction, and yet that wasn't true. Others complained that we were taking on anything new at all. Others insisted we drop some of the things we were doing.
Yet, it seems obvious, at least to some of those in leadership, that the problem was not in what we were doing but in our spirits. We still had not gotten our second wind. And more couples decided to leave.
Fortunately, others came to take their place. But how do you replace key young leaders with new, inexperienced staff, unacquainted with both the organization and with spiritual warfare?
With Todd's research, our appreciation of the year 2000 milestone deepened. The first worldwide recognition of the end of a millennium seemed like just the thing that God might use to launch a final thrust of obedience to his purposes.
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For several years Ralph had urged mission leaders to think in terms of closure — that is, finishing the pioneer missions job — and he urged them to believe that we could do that part of the Great Commission by the year 2000. I remember how, at the IFMA annual meetings in Toronto, in May of 1988, he challenged the 200 mission executives there to not be like the ten spies at the Jordan, who simply would not believe God could give them victory. It was a solemn charge, which most received very well.
Others, not at that meeting, were thinking in the same terms. A couple of months later, a meeting was convened in Dallas where many top leaders discussed the task of closure. Then, in January, 1989, Thomas Wang, director of the Lausanne movement at the point, convened a meeting of "2000-year" thinkers in Singapore. He pointed out the need for unity and said that what would be most likely to derail a collaborative effort would be organizational egos.
It is not easy to get large organizations, like Campus Crusade and Youth With a Mission or the International Assemblies of God, to work hand in hand with each other. After all, for years they have been self-sufficient. Yet they are in actual fact earnestly trying as never before to work together for the Kingdom's sake.
One of the last chapters in the 1987 edition of I Will Do A New Thing was titled "You Will Have to See It to Believe it." Those words have become marvelously true, during the last two months alone. As I write, the daily headlines shout with amazed incredulity over the sudden turn of events in Eastern Europe. The Iron Curtain has come down. Communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and East Germany have collapsed, most of them without bloodshed. The end is not yet. Even Habakkuk would have been amazed had he seen these recent events. Oh, to understand it all from God's perspective! Is He giving Eastern Europe a last chance?
Only a few months ago, several anxious Christian leaders
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were insisting that by the year 2000, at least 80% of the unreached people of the world would be behind impenetrable political barriers. Did they forget about the sovereignty of God? Just the events of the last two months seem to refute such pessimism. Even after the massacres in Tienamen Square, China is still open to Westerners, though with perhaps a bit more cautions. Now it seems that large sections of Eastern Europe will also be wide open, and Christians from the West will be able to go in and out.
This doesn't mean that they will go with the word "missionary" on their passports. But neither did Carey, nor Morrison, nor David Livingstone.
I think constantly of the Muslim world — those descendants of Ishmail who God promised to bless. One of these days, perhaps very soon, we will see the Muslim world come to a sudden understanding of who Jesus really is. And those whose hearts truly seek after God will acknowledge Him as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It could happen overnight. Are we ready for that?
It will take a new understanding of just what missions is. We must begin to look upon it as a unified cause, where those doing research or mobilization behind the front lines are just as valued as those who go. It is not just the armies out in front that win wars. Armies must have gasoline in the right places, food at the right times, clothing of the right weight, water, guns, trucks, etc. We dare not send out new recruits without first doing the research they will need. Someone has to stir the churches to pray for them and to support them, or they will very soon come home as battered soldiers.
It is going to take a multitude of intercessors for us to break the power of Satan over the still unreached people groups. And it is going to take a new level of consecration for our people to release their children for the difficult front lines. Are we willing?
