What a wonderful thing it is to be together to hear these fantastic talks, Kent, Mark Dever, for those of you who heard him on the pre-conference, Jason, I’m so grateful for the ways that you’ve brought the word to us. Yesterday when Toby was speaking, I went back to my room and threw my notes in the trash, came back, heard John, went back to my room. I fished those notes out of the waste-basket, started making everything rhyme. Appreciated Darren’s word last night of how we live in tension. It’s so true, isn’t it?

A Clarified Commitment to Missions

It was 1976. I was secretly engaged to my wife, Leanne, who’s here with us. I don’t know why we were secretly engaged. I haven’t figured that out. We were young and dumb sophomores, and we went to the Urbana Missions Conference, 1976. It was a powerful time. I’d never really thought about stuff seriously like that. It was new to me. I was much like the person Darren described as himself last night. I could not have found John 3:16 in the Bible. I would not have known what that meant, but God had been at work in my heart, drawing me to himself and felt that amazing urge to share my faith and think about other people.

There at Urbana, John Stott was the speaker. The Bible expositor Billy Graham gave the call to missions. Leanne and I are sitting together. Billy issues the call and I popped up. I thought, “Wow. What a deal.” Live overseas, eat exotic food, and meet cool people. I thought, “What a life. Maybe they’ll even pay you a little for it.” Leanne, who was sitting next to me and realizes that her fiance has just made the first unilateral decision of our relationship and not a small one, mind you. She’s looking at Billy. She’s looking at me. She’s realizing this is a pretty big deal. In her quiet, gentle way, she told the Lord, “If it’s clear, if it is clear, I will never say no to you.” So she stood up as well and made that commitment.

I immediately, out of university, went on staff with InterVarsity. I love student ministry. I love what students are thinking about and doing. I love sharing my faith on college campuses. There’s not a student center in the world where I don’t feel comfortable. The two years since that we were going to be on staff and campus ministry and then go overseas turned into four years, turned into eight years, and then turned into 15 years. It’s not that we forgot about that commitment to mission. I was mobilizing students for missions. I was calling people to missions, but it seemed fuzzy, distant and in the background.

We actually directed some short term programs. We were in North Africa, Kenya, Guatemala, and that seemed to fulfill that commitment we had made. It was actually on a short-term mission trip that I ran into Lindsay Brown, who was the director of the Global Student Ministry of IFES. In a very weak moment, I agreed to help Lindsay raise money. That was a very weak moment because Lindsay, as head of this organization, spent a lot of time doing that.

An Unexpected Call

Sure enough, the following year, he came to my house. We flew down to Memphis, Tennessee. We visited two former students of mine. They’d done really well in the construction industry, and Lindsay shared his visions for students around the world and they wrote him a fat check for 60,000 dollars. We were flying home on the plane. Lindsay was just drunk with joy about what he was going to do with this money in the Middle East. He was telling me about the great things that were going to happen in the areas and how they’re going to gather students from all over the Middle East to hear the word of God.

Of course, I was thrilled to hear this until he kind of turned to me, grabbed my arm and said, “We could use a man like you in the Middle East, Mack.” Here was my response. That’s exactly how I responded. My books had just come out. They’re doing well. I’m on the underrated, kind of grade B evangelical jet-set tour, where you get to fly around and talk to folks. It’s cool. It’s wonderful. It’s a great ministry. My wife had a great part-time job as a pharmacist at CVS. My kids were getting ready to enter high school. I mean, I was at the highest field level position with inner varsity. I was supervising wonderful people, a hundred staff all over the Southeast in the United States. It was just absurd. In fact, when I got back, I didn’t even tell Leanne about this ridiculous offer from Lindsay. I just told her, “Wow, Kathy and Allen gave 60,000 dollars to Lindsay for ministry in the Middle East. It was thrilling.”

A couple days went by. Leanne was getting ready to go into work at CVS. She was in the kitchen. She was pulling out the casserole. She always fixed a casserole for the boys before she left for work. I was keeping her company in the kitchen, and I said, “Oh, by the way, let me tell you. This is a hoot. This is ridiculous, honey. Lindsay wants us to go to the Middle East.” She had that casserole. She was holding it. She was looking at it. I was looking at it. I thought, “Did she burn it?” You know what she’s thinking about, right? She was thinking back 20 years to 1976, when before the Lord God she said, “If it’s clear, I won’t say no,” and it was clear. So she said, more to the casserole than to me, “I’m there. I’m ready to go.” I was back on my heels. I said, “It’s hot over there and you know how they feel about us.” She said, “I know. You decide, but I’m ready to go.”

You know how it is when you’re having your quiet time and the Lord is just not letting go of you. He’s doing this number. He’s tapping you on the shoulder and you’re telling him, “Look, I’m doing something important. I’m having a quiet time.” You know that feeling. It wouldn’t go away. I called Lindsay up on the phone. I say, “Lindsay, if that was real, I can’t just ignore it. If you’re serious about that, I need to do something.” He said, “Why don’t you come over to Alexandria and see what we’re going to do with that money? See the conference. Be a part of it. Meet the students.” I said, “I’ll do it.”

Fly to Cairo, take the train to Alexandria. Hundreds of students from all over the Middle East are there. Of course they’re students and they begged me to come. “They said, “Please Mack, I’m at the University of Birzeit in Palestine. I don’t know what to do. Help me. Please Mac, help me. I’m at the American University of Beirut. I don’t know what to do. I want to share my faith there.” What could I say? I called Leanne up when I get back to Cairo. I say, “Honey, I think we’re going to go.” She said, “I know.” Way ahead of me. Aren’t our wives way ahead of us?

The World Changed by 9/11

I quit my job and pulled the kids out of school. Then September 11th hit, September 11th, 2001, when 19 young men, college age men, boarded planes armed with a little more than a bit of strategy, some funding, and no regard for their lives, and they changed our world. No matter what you think of their theology, no matter what you think of their methodology, no matter what you think of their missiology, they changed our world.

How does the church respond to the events of 9/11 or any event like it? Do we turn to the natural? Do we turn to the professional — financiers who shape economic embargoes, senators and congressmen who craft political solutions, the generals and more shadowy secret operatives who run military campaigns? It’s tempting, isn’t it? They have know-how. They have resources. Jesus himself said that the people of the world are more shrewd in dealing with their own than the people of the light. But I believe the response of the church, the events of 9/11 are not economic, they’re not political, and they’re not military. They are missionary. That is the response of the church.

We affirm the power of the truth of the gospel, the establishment of the church, the call of Christ to make disciples in all nations. On 9/12, the day after 9/11, I banged the “for sale” sign in the front yard of my home, bound for the Middle East. Now, that sounds pretty noble, but actually the real gut check happened on 9/13 where the house sold, and that was what I thought two things: “Oh my word, I’m really going,” and, “Darn, too low. I should have asked for more money. Because God was in it. I could have asked a million dollars, I think it would’ve sold. Oh ye of little faith.”

When I staked that thing in the ground, I was so convinced that our theology of the gospel is far more powerful than the theology of Islam. So convinced that a church planning methodology is more powerful than flying planes into buildings. So much more powerful is our call to engage the world that is our missiology, to tell the whole world of the love and the truth and the mercy and the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. To the watching world, it’s as if we have no regard for our lives. We remember the words of Jesus when he said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it can in no way bear fruit.”

Let me tell you, brothers and sisters, it has been the greatest privilege of my life. I suspect that there are 19 guys here who believe that with me. You believe that you with 18 other guys could move out to other lands and the power of the gospel with a little bit of funding, some biblical strategy, and no regard for your lives, and see the world turned upside down because of the supernatural power of God, so much more than those who murdered so many on 9/11. You believe with me the supernatural power of God’s global call. You believe with me that it is more powerful than anything in the world, professional or otherwise. I’m counting on you to believe that.

I know there are many here who are pastoring or will pastor 19 young men who could be sent out in the same way. I want to speak with all of you this morning about what to say to them or yourself. What underpinnings do they need? What underpinnings do you need? What must be taught to your congregations about the supernatural gospel, about the unprofessional church, about the impossible call to the nations before you send people out from your church into missions?

Missionaries and Methodologies

There was a time when someone told me they were a missionary, I was just excited to meet them. I wanted to know their stories, to hear about their lives. Now, after being overseas, I’m more circumspect. I want to know more from missionaries. I’ve come to see the strong pull of the natural to the professional in missions, though it seems odd that missionaries could forget how easy it is for the supernatural to be forgotten.

So when I meet a missionary, I want to know about their theology. What’s their understanding of the gospel? Is your ministry tied to biblical strategy? Talk to me about contextualization. I want to know those things. What about your methodology? What’s your view of the church? Is the church indispensable or optional? Is the church a competitor or a partner? I want to understand their missiology. Tell me more about this call to the nations. Do you believe that you can bring the kingdom to nations through social action? Do you believe that? Or through any human strategy for that matter? Tell me, is everyone a missionary? Really?

All these questions and thoughts come from the seminary of hard knocks in the Arabian Peninsula over the last 10 years. I want to frame these talks in three ways as we face the temptations in missions to move from the supernatural to the professional — the gospel, the church, and our call to the nations. I have three points for each of these three things, three sets of three.

Supernatural Theology

So first, the gospel and missions are supernatural theology. Now, there are three points that need to be understood about the gospel before we move out to the nations — gospel primacy, gospel purity, and gospel boldness. Let me talk about gospel primacy.

Gospel Primacy

Now, I know few in this room would deny that the gospel is central to missions. When I say gospel, I mean the message of God that leads to salvation. That’s the gospel. This message is of course crystallized. We take that message of the gospel and we crystallize it. I like to crystallize it into four parts: God, man, Christ, and response. It doesn’t matter how you think about it. It could be creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. I don’t care about that. I just want to be able to explain the most critical crystallized points of the gospel about who God is, that he’s holy but loving and our creator, God, about who we are before him, that we have been marked with the divine. We have that divine stamp on all of us so that everyone has dignity, worth and honor, and yet at the same time, we are broken, fallen, separated from God and his enemy. I want to understand our response to God through repentance of sin and belief in the risen Christ who has died for my sin on the cross, so that I might be ransomed out of darkness and put into life through simple belief. Repent and believe.

I know you know that. I think most would also agree the gospel isn’t just what gets us saved. Our lives must be lived in line with the gospel. So when the new kid on the block, Paul, rebuked the big pillar of the church, Peter, what he said was, “I noticed that his life was not in line with the gospel” (Galatians 2:14). So that the gospel is not just seen as the ABCs of the Christian life, as Tim Keller says, but rather the A to Z of the Christian life. So just as critical as the gospel must be, those things are central in our lives, so too it must be central in missions. It’s the hub for all we do. The gospel is not the ABC of missions, the gospel’s the A to Z of missions.

Now, you would think that’s just flat obvious. You would think that, especially in missions, but there’s such pressure when we cross cultures to come up with the right strategy, so much so that we can lose our confidence in the gospel, both in sharing it and living it. I completely agree with Jason yesterday morning, that it’s not supernatural versus strategy. The supernatural gospel is our strategy. I’m quick to say I have a strategy. When we landed in Dubai, we had nothing. No one had ever done this before since Mohamed rode to Mecca. No one had ever walked on campus and said, “Hey, well, let’s have a campus fellowship.” I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. It’s the supernatural that we fall to in that situation. I thought we could raise up student ministry and God has been gracious. Student ministries have forms on multiple campuses. We have 12 staff. Our staff speaks nine different languages. They’re cross focused, aggressive evangelists. They are powerful men and women of God. The gospel is everything they do. It comes out of them because they live out the gospel.

Living the Gospel

For years, I thought the gospel was something I had to kind of get this head of steam up for, and then I evangelized on someone. It’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry I evangelized on you.” I didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. Well, then I discovered this idea that we live out the gospel and it’s amazingly freeing. As we live the gospel, it just comes out of us. We see people differently. We’re concerned about them. We desire for them to become, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, new creations in Christ. That’s who they are. My staff team, they remind me of that now.

Let me tell you a story. As the student ministry grew and we started having leaders of all things on college campuses leading Bible studies, it was this amazing miracle. We’d gone prepared to eek out our lives for 40 years, and if nothing ever happened, we would be content. It wasn’t like that. God was increasing things, and so I decided, gee, we need to have some leadership development around here. We got all the student leaders together. They all got a couple friends. That was okay. There were some Christians. I said, “What’s Akil doing here? Akil’s a committed Hindu. Why is Akil here?” I go up to Nissin. I said, “Nissin, Akil’s here?” He said, “Yeah, he wanted to come. He won’t be any trouble.” I said, “I know he’s not in trouble. He’s a nice guy. I like Akil, but this is a Christian leadership training thing. Why is Akil here?” He said, “Well, I’ll tell him he can’t come.”

Well, of course, Nissin did not tell him he couldn’t come. Of course, how long have I been a student worker? Akil was so faithful, he came every week because there was this Indian girl named Shibnita there. He missed on me, and he was so faithful. He didn’t make trouble and he kept coming. Finally, I went up to Nissin and I said, “Nissin, look, I’m going to take care of this myself. I need to go tell Akil he can’t come anymore.” He said, “Okay.”

So I go up to Akil, I say, “Akil, listen, I got to talk to you about something.” He says, “I need to talk to you about something.” I said, “Okay, you go first.” He goes, “Oh, well, I’ve become a Christian.” I said, “You did? How’d that happen?” He said, “Well, you know, I thought I was coming here to kind of put something on my resume about leadership training, but you guys keep talking about this gospel thing. I didn’t know what that was, and you kept talking about it and I realized that was about me. That Jesus died for my sin and I needed to repent and believe the gospel, and so I did.” He said, “What do you want to talk to me about?” I said, “Nothing.” I went back over to Nissin. I said, “Nissin, I’m sorry. Keep bringing the Hindus. It’s okay. They can come brother.”

Hey, just by the way, Akil and Shibnita fell in love and against great, great fundamentalist Hindu opposition, Akil stood up for his faith. He was baptized, they were married under death threat and are faithfully serving Christ in the United Christian Church in Dubai.

Listen, the place to learn is now for your people. Teach your people now how to be confident about the gospel, right here at home. Don’t think they’re going to show up where we are and suddenly be great evangelists. Call them again and again to the centrality of the gospel. Not only for my sake, but for your sake, for the sake of the church. We live that away, live out the gospel.

Gospel Purity

Not only do we see the gospel as primary in all we do, but we seek gospel purity. There is such pressure and temptation to make the message of the gospel relevant and to change the message of the gospel for cultural context. I’ve come to believe that the quickest route to heresy is relevant and contextualized missions. We must remember Paul’s words in Galatians 1:8, that preaching another gospel comes with some of the strongest biblical warnings. Anthropology never trumps theology, ever.

Cultural context is always a challenge. Of course, it’s a challenge and we need to think about it, but it is never a trump card. So teach limits of cultural sensitivity and contextualization. What you eat, what you wear, what transportation you use, what language you speak — those things are great to contextualize.

The world is upside down for me about that. You know the Brewster model of missions? You heard about the Brewsters? They were from Indonesia. And this is true, I ascribe to this: “Good missionaries are people that live with the people, they eat the food, they take public transportation, and they take a stab at the language.” I think that’s by and large true in my experience. The problem is that in Dubai, everyone drives Mercedes-Benz, they eat at five star restaurants, they live in palaces and they speak flawless English because they’ve been to the finest universities in the world, so I’m working on my Mercedes, but there are limits. There is over-contextualization, as Darren talked about last night. I think more work needs to be done on seeker sensitive people out of 1 Corinthians 9 individuals who are seeker sensitive and churches that are cross focused and martyr friendly.

I was traveling back with a man from Iran, his first trip to America. He had an Iranian passport. I discovered rooms in Atlanta, Hartsville airport I didn’t know about, as they said, “Oh, Iranian passport, right this way.” People were professional. They were kind, and the man picked us up at the airport from a large Atlanta church. It was a seeker friendly church. We walked into the church and it was huge. It was this size. He said, “You notice we’ve removed any symbol that might offend anyone who comes to our church.” My Iranian friend who had suffered for the gospel turned to me in a whisper. He didn’t ask this publicly. He’s too polite. He said, “Are they ashamed of the gospel? Are they ashamed of the cross?” I said, “I don’t know, brother. Maybe.”

Subverting the Gospel

Now, I understand Mark Dever said on Friday that the seeker friendly movement is dying out. I’m pretty sure that’s not true because it’s being exported to Dubai and other places. We don’t always export our best, as Toby said yesterday. There’s so many tsunamis that are attacking gospel purity in the mission’s world, bigger than that, health wealth gospel all over Latin America and Africa and India preys on the poor and the uneducated. The insider movement, a strategy to allow Muslims to remain in the mosque, a strategy that reshapes the gospel texts so that people can avoid suffering, really ultimately it’s just a form of synchronism, forming a new religion ultimately. It’s a raging concern in the Muslim world. Social gospel all over North and South America, much of Asia basically at root to just make life better on earth.

Health, wealth, insider movement, social gospel, all have the same pragmatic roots, which is to make life better and easier on earth, but they appeal to avarice and guilty Western consciences and big numbers and a fear of calling for sacrifice. There’s truth in all of them, certainly. They have goodhearted motives, but that’s the problem. Goodhearted unbiblical methods subvert the gospel.

So how do you teach your congregations about these assaults on the gospel? I suspect most of you don’t deal much with the health and wealth gospel. It is a weekly concern for us. Weekly. Teach your flocks. Be sure and preach Christ and him crucified. Make sure to preach about personal sin and how our rebellion makes us enemies of God. Make sure to preach about a real and horrible hell, eternal suffering. Explain that Jesus is the only way. Be shrewd about what it means to call people to be born again. Be far more interested in someone rejecting sin and less interested when someone makes a decision. I know people in India who’ve made decisions a hundred times last year. Every short term that came in, they raised their hand. Bottom line: Warn your congregations about adjusting the gospel or they will wreak havoc on the cause of Christ among the nation.

Gospel Boldness

Here’s the third thing. You know when people face jail, physical threats, deportation, even death for their faith, there’s great temptation to be timid. It makes sense. It’s natural. I know what it’s like. I feel it myself. In May, we will have our fifth Muslim-Christian dialogue. Thabiti Anyabwile will come again to present Christ. We don’t care if we win a dialogue or not. We want the gospel presented clearly and boldly. Thabiti has announced from the stage, from the stage, that he is a Muslim convert to Christianity. Under Sharia, he is under a death threat, and yet he will come again. What a great example of someone living out the gospel.

Yet one of the first things that’s taught to people who come to faith in the Middle East is, “Be careful and watch your security.” These are not biblical commands. We should be shrewd, not stupid, but if you’re going to be bold, you need to develop that. It goes hand in hand with the right theology of suffering. And we need to understand that suffering is connected to the gospel. It has huge ramifications and missions, but I think more is taught in the mission world about internet security than about a right theology of suffering.

We have a couple on our team, Yuna and Nestron. Let me tell you about them. Nestron was a good Muslim girl growing up in Tehran. She was 17 years old. She was in the shower and she heard a voice. The voice said, “I’m going to wash you of your sin.” She’s never seen a church. She’s never held a Bible. She’s never sung a hymn. She goes to the mosque and she asks her imam. She says, “I heard a voice, and the voice said, he’s going to wash me of my sin. Who was that?” The imam said, “That was Jesus. He’s the only prophet that talks that away.” She said, “Oh, thank you,” and she went home.

Same day, her sister in the Netherlands, a secret believer, goes to church. A woman comes up to her and says, “Last night I had a dream. I never have dreams. I never remember my dreams, but it was so real and vivid. I have to tell you this dream. I dreamed that you were sitting on a bed and you were talking to women about Jesus. I think it was in Tehran. I think you’re supposed to go home.” Nestron’s sister said, “I can’t go home. I don’t have any money.” She said, “No, no, you don’t understand. The dream was so real and so vivid that I already bought your ticket.”

Nestron’s sister gets on the plane and flies home. She doesn’t know where to go. Knocks on the door, Nestron and her mother answer the door. She says, “I don’t know why I’m here.” Nestron says, “No, we know why you’re here. Jesus has spoken to me and you’re here to tell us about him because you’ve been living in a Christian country.” So they go sit on the bed. Nestron’s sister explains the gospel, and Nestron and her mother come to faith. Jesus washed her of her sin. These are people I know and love and have ministered alongside. I know the parents. I know them. Now, lest you think it’s cool to have a vision, know that this vision started a life of humiliation, of jail, of deportation for Nestron and her husband, Yuna. No, it’s not cool to get a vision, but it’s very, very godly.

I can’t tell you the time, what it was like when our team happened to be gathered actually with Thabiti Anyabwile in my living room after the last Christian Muslim dialogue and we got word that they were in jail, that they’ve been arrested in the airport. We fell together and wept and prayed. They expected to die. They were arrested in the same way, in the same place as Eunice Pastor, pastor Hike. Perhaps some of you have heard about him. Pastor Hike actually baptized Yuna. Pastor Hike was murdered after being arrested by the secret police. Yuna says the hardest thing he’s ever had to do in life was to watch his wife under interrogation, and yet he said she was so brave for the gospel.

Supernatural Power

Remember, we are promised supernatural power in those times. We’re promised that when we’re dragged into those places. Yuna said that he was terrified, and then the interrogator would come into the room and start asking him questions and Yuna said the Spirit would fill him with power. He would remember verses, he would know what to say, he would encounter the guy. It was just powerful. At one point he said they wanted names, Christian names, and so I said, “Yeah, I’ll give you names.” He took the names of the five friends of his who had been martyred, slid them across the table. The guy knew who they were. “We didn’t kill those people.” He said, “Yes you did. You killed those people.”

Yuna said it got to where the interrogator would leave and he would just be undone, and then the interrogator would come back in and he’d be filled again with the Spirit to answer questions. He said he got to the point where he didn’t want the interrogator to leave. When they were released by God’s grace after months, the interrogator ushered them out. One guy interrogated them the entire time and Yuna told him, “We have told you everything that you need to know to become a Christian. You have heard from us everything there is about the gospel. You should become a Christian. He will forgive you of your many sins.” The interrogator bowed his head and said, “I just might.”

A Clear Call to Boldness

We need to challenge timidity. I believe the most missing component in missions today is a clear call to boldness. Be bold and clear with the gospel. I love studying the prayers of Paul. I know you do too, but the thing I enjoy the most is studying Paul’s prayer requests. There are not very many, maybe 12. Some of them are just, “Pray that I’ll come to Rome.” But most of them are that he’ll be bold and clear from the gospel. Most of them were written that way when he was in jail. Of course that’s what he wanted. I understand. Listen, don’t pray for my security. Pray for me to be bold and clear. Pray for our team to be bold and clear with the gospel. Pray for your congregation to be bold and clear with the gospel.

I think it was James Kennedy who said, most of the world fears the raised fist while we in America fear the raised eyebrow. People say, “Oh, crazy Christian.” If the person you’re sending values safety and security over boldness and risk, they will be utterly silent with the gospel among the nations. If you pursue security and safety, what you get is neurosis anyhow. Call your people to be bold and remember, one person’s uttermost is another person’s backyard.

If you were going to say, “Okay, how can I reach a Muslim interrogator in downtown Tehran at Evin Prison,” that’d be a pretty tough assignment, right? I mean, actually come to think of it, we could actually arrange that for you. You could meet them, but the point is that it would be humanly difficult. How would you do that, right? The funny thing is, Nestron thinks your next door neighbor is just impossible to reach, impossible, but not with God, right? You know your neighbor, your congregation knows their neighbors. They should.

The Church

Let’s look at the second set of three, the church. The church is our supernatural missionary methodology. Three things I want people to know about the church before they ever come in our backyard: The church is necessary, the church must be healthy, the church must be common.

The Necessary Church

First, necessary church. Now, I know just as few would deny the primacy, the centrality of the gospel. Few would deny here in this room that the church is central to mission. Yet when I talk with missionaries who claim to be committed to the church and even church planting, they’re fuzzy about church. These are people who are attempting to establish churches. I’ve had discussions with people who are often in high level mission agencies who argue with me that there’s no distinction between church and parachurch.

I’m a parachurch guy. That’s who I am. So as a parachurch guy, let me affirm that the church is Christ’s primary strategy for mission and absolutely necessary for the work among the nations. We need people over there who come from healthy churches, who’ve seen them in operation here. This is especially important since so many go to the nations with parachurch organizations. Teach your people that they must never see the local church as something in competition with their missionary work, their call.

I wish I had a dime for every time I heard an older missionary coach a younger missionary to make sure not to get involved in church since it would be a distraction to what they do. I actually was coached not to become an elder in our church when asked. They said, “Mack, it will make you go astray from what you’ve been called to do with students.” Now, my experience was as we plunged into church, God took care of the student ministry. He blessed it. He loves the church, and now student ministry is tightly connected to the church and the church has been reformed. It’s been a powerful thing. Be sure to teach that the church is a partner because Christ loves the church. Teach your people against all manner of false ideas that the local church is a detractor from their call. Teach people that the church is not optional or their work will not last beyond themselves, because the church is necessary.

The Healthy Church

Of course, it’s not good enough just for the church to be merely seen as necessary. Lots of people give lip service to that. The church also needs to be biblically healthy. Let me talk about number two, the healthy church. Have you ever seen the book, the missionary book, Where There Is No Doctor? We used it in Kenya on our extended short terms. It’s kind of a comic book that tells you how to do things like C-sections. So it was really amazing. Actually, we used it on a couple occasions to sew up some people. It’s just an illustrative book that you could go to and open it up and kind of get the scalpel and do the C-section with your right hand while you’re looking at the illustration. Actually, it makes for interesting reading.

Mark Dever’s work in The Theology of the Church, edited by Danny Aiken, was for me like the medical book, Where There Is No Doctor, except it’s “where there is no church theologian.” So I took Mark’s book on the Theology of Church in this hand and wrote out sermons in this hand and elder meetings in this hand. It just helped frame for us what are the primary principle things of church.

The church began to be reformed. We took 9Marks and made it our philosophy of ministry. It was powerful. It was fruitful. We grew in strength in the church. I mean, the church had kind of been the sad, sort of lowest common denominator church, but as we rooted ourselves in biblical principles, that grew in strength and power and form. We called a pastor, John Fulmer, who came from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and began pastoring and saw powerful change in the church. So much depth, both in numbers and in depth of theology, that within seven years, the church was strong enough to plant a new church. That’s a church where I go now, I was an elder at that church. I’m an elder at the new church, Redeemer Church of Dubai. It’s a witness when we say its name.

That was three years ago. We appointed a pastor, Dave Ferman, a wonderful, godly man. He has enormous health problems. He has incredible pain in his arms. He’s in constant, chronic pain. He can’t lift up his own children, he can’t turn doorknobs, and he can’t cut his steak. Yet he is so brave to come with his sweet wife, Gloria. We started meeting in a hotel ballroom in the heart of the city. Don’t feel sorry for us about this. There are no bad hotels in Dubai. So we’re talking about five star, crystal chandeliers. You ought to see our chandeliers. Now, every now and then a Sheik has a wedding, we get chased out of the ballroom and have to go to have church on the beach, which is cool. Actually reminds us where we are. Keeps us on our toes.

Pretty quickly, we had 500 people in regular attendance. They flocked from 70 different nations. At our Christmas service about a month ago, we had over a thousand people. David Platt preached to us in October. When he sat down after the sermon, he turned to me, grabbed my arms and said, “Mack, I have never seen anything like the diversity in this room. It is truly a taste of Revelation 7:9.” People want to know how we did it. I mean, you’ve been listening to me for a little while. You figured this out already. Do you think I’m smart enough to have figured that out? You know that’s not true. No, we experienced the supernatural work of God. We committed ourselves to write theology about the church. We preached the gospel and the Lord added daily to our numbers. Strong ecclesiology is desperately needed in the mission world today. The church is necessary, the church must be healthy, and to cross cultures, it needs to be common.

The Common Church

There’s so many trends and fads in missions about church. Remember what I said about contextualized missions being a quick road to heresy. Certainly the contextualized missions’ church is a quicker road to heretical church. So in our church, we have 70 nations. Which culture do we contextualize to? When you talk about contextualization, what culture do we pick? Is it Kenyan? Is it Filipino? Is it Nigerian? American? Australian? Arab? Indian. Our desire, our aim is to pick biblical culture.

Now look, I know that’s hard. I know there are challenges about that, but the way to do it is to shoot for common church, mere church. I think in almost five or six tweetable sentences, I can describe church. I took years to get this together. So humor me. The church is a gathering of baptized, born again believers who covenant together in love to meet regularly under the authority of the Scripture and the leadership of the elders. The church is only required to do a few things. They gather regularly. They hear the word, preach, they sing, they pray, they pray for the sick, they cast out demons, they practice the sacraments of baptism and communion, they practice church discipline. Ed Clowney called it the third sacrament.

The overarching mission of the church is the Great Commission, to go into all the world and make disciples, teaching them to obey everything Christ has commanded. And the mere church exists to worship God to be the visible image of the gospel and ultimately to give God glory and worship. That’s it. That’s the mere church. Now you take any part of that away and you get a diminished church and a diminished church results in a diminished gospel. Of course, there are other things that churches can do — men’s meetings and basketball teams and youth programs, kid programs — but you don’t have to do those things to be a mere church. We aimed for mere church. The astounding thing, the thing that just boggles my mind is that the church in Dubai, when focusing on mere church, became a cross-cultural church, a fantastic cross-cultural church.

Did we get it right all the time? No, of course not. Are we prone to be blinded by our own cultural blinkers? Of course we are. That’s why we have elders from the nations that come together and work to shape the biblical church and to trust the supernatural power of the word and its people to work through the church. Teach your people, please, to beware of the trendy. I don’t care if your church is cool. I’ve started cool churches. I love it if your church is cool. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying make sure the principles are in place. Make sure that you understand and can explain these principles of mere church.

Planting a Church

Let me report to you that it’s happening again. We’re planting another church. We have a friend who’s a lawyer at the Sheik’s office in Ras Al Khaimah, the northernmost and most conservative Emirate. The Sheik was meeting with Gavin, the lawyer who’s a member of our church, and he said, “Gavin, I’d like you to move to Ras Al Khaimah. Why don’t you do that?” Gavin said, “Well, your highness, I couldn’t do that because there’s no church here.” He said, “Oh, you go make a church.” Gavin, “Yes, yes, your highness. I’ll get right on that.”

Gavin is from Ireland. I think he sat on that for a year. About a year later, the Sheik got back to him and said, “How’s the church going?” Gavin realized he was serious about this. Gavin said, “Well, your highness, I called the municipality, but they said I couldn’t get land for a church.” The sheik said, “You call them tomorrow.” It’s the nice thing about not having to deal with a rule of law thing. Gavin called the municipality the next day. They said, “Yes, sir. The sheik has given you a plot of land for your church. It’s yours. We have the deed for you.” There’s not been a church in this part of the world since the Nestorians were there, like 400 A.D. John Fulmer called up Josh Manley and said, “Hey Josh, want to come to the Middle East, pastor a church, pack up your little kids?” Kind of like Jason, he said, “Well, it’s not a no. We didn’t get a no.” Josh moved a couple months ago, moved up to RAK, and he’s there with his sweet family. Oh brothers, it’s historic. When they went to get their visas in Ras Al Khaimah, someone from the sheik’s office came. They walked them through the process, paid for their visas, and watched their kids.

I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but think of it this way. Think of your governor of your state meeting an imam off the plane with a deed to some land in your biggest city, in your state, and then paying for him to become a resident as they walk through — by the way, they went to the front of the line at every line — the residency and legal hassles, and they cut through all that. Can you imagine? Sometimes the hospitality of where we live by the people we’re around is convicting and overwhelming. Listen, maybe you know someone in your church that could be a part of Ras Al Khaimah. Maybe you could go. Church necessary, church healthy, church common.

Supernatural Missionary Missiology

Here’s my last point, our call to the nations, our supernatural missionary mythology. I have three things: inspired call, informed call, and confirmed call.

Inspired Call

I was always amazed, when we directed a short term program, how many students were led to go on our programs. They would call us on the phone and they would tell us, “God has led me, has called me to go with you to Guatemala.” A couple weeks later, after some event would happen in Guatemala, like a civil war or something, they would call me and tell me, “God has now led me not to go.” I’m always amazed at how capricious God is in his leading. I wish he would stop changing his mind. We want an inspired call. We want people to be inspired, but especially as I work with students, the desire is not to a place. It’s to Jesus. The call is to Christ.

I tell students all the time who are struggling over what job to take or who to marry, “Listen, I know the direction of God’s will in your life.” They go, “You do?” I say, “Yeah, I know the direction of God’s will in your life. I’ll tell you right now.” They lean over in their chair, waiting to hear who they’re going to marry. I say, “The direction of God’s will in your life is always to Jesus, always.” They’re uniformly disappointed about that, but it’s true. Inspire your congregations with a love for God first. Teach them about God’s heart for the nations. God will put that together. People are looking for things to give their life to, younger folks in particular. It may take time, but lodge the seeds in them to go anywhere. An inspired call is a critical component of a call. We shouldn’t give that up.

Andy Davis spoke at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on missions. John Folmar, the pastor now of UCCD was in the audience. He listened, his heart was stricken with the word. So when I called him and said, “John, would you like to come be our pastor,” it was almost too easy. I wasn’t quite sure I had money in the bank to fly him over. He responded so quickly because it had been lodged in his heart, an inspired call. A deep inspired conviction about call helps us face assaults on our call as well.

When I sat down with my boss and told him I was going to actually pursue this call in my life to go to the Middle East, he said, “Well, if you want to ruin your career by chasing off some crazy idea Lindsay Brown has in the Middle East, you go ahead.” Now, I took that as a compliment actually because it meant he didn’t want me to leave. I said, “Brother, long ago, that word career left my vocabulary. That’s not what I’m about.” You see, an inspired call protects me. It protects me from knowing what to do.

Informed Call

It’s not just inspired. It needs to be informed. We long for inspired people, but you can just get kind of whoop people up and actually do damage. They need to be informed. Not just cross-culturally, though that doesn’t hurt, but most of all spiritually. What will they face? What are the realities, especially about suffering, about counting cost, about letting people know that we bear a message worth dying for? I suspect most of you here are laying your lives down on the truth of the gospel. I expect most of you are doing that and I suspect you’re calling others to do that. Are you calling others to so believe in the gospel that they’re willing to call other people to die?

I was preaching in our church, Redeemer Church. I was going through some Old Testament passages, especially about the prophets, that foreshadowed the gospel. Luke 24 says all Scripture points to me. I was going through Daniel, not “dare to be a Daniel,” not the moralistic kind of dare to be.

But I preached on Daniel who images the gospel. The one who was unjustly tried, thrown in the pit. The stone was turned over. He was raised from the dead miraculously, and the word was proclaimed by Darius to all the nations of the God of Daniel. It’s the gospel. Or what about Joseph? It’s not about him being the beacon of sexual purity, but the one who sat on the throne after being raised as if from the dead, being given over from the dead after being sold by 30 pieces of silver and sat on the throne of God and looked down on those who had murdered him, begging for the bread of life. It’s not five smooth stones to slay the Goliaths in your life. Not that, but the one who purchased salvation for all of us. I’m going through that.

Then I was in Genesis 22. Abraham was called to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham’s a pretty big deal in the part of the world where I live. I waa talking about how I’ve heard this passage preached all my life. Abraham was a man of faith and we need to be people of faith. Abraham gave up all he had for God and we need to give up all we have for God. Yeah, right. I’ve preached it that way and it’s okay. There’s nothing particularly wrong about it, but it’s not what the text is about. The tendency is for us to put ourselves in the position of the hero in those stories. If we’re anyone in that story. We’re Isaac, we’re bound in sin, we’re on the altar. The wrath of God hangs over us like a knife and our only hope is that substitute in the thicket. It’s so much so that throughout biblical history, through the law and the prophets, that finally when Jesus comes and John the Baptist points to him and says, “There is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” everyone knew what he was talking about. Everyone.

Confirmed Call

The third final point is a confirmed call. We must be inspired, we must be informed about where we are, and we must be confirmed. Have you heard of the 747 principle in missions? Probably not because I made it up. It’s the idea that who you are here is going to be who you are there — the confirmed call. So getting on a 747 is not going to make you holy. You’re going to be the same person you are there when you get off. If you sin here, you’re going to find that sin follows you there.

I mean, wouldn’t it be so easy just to buy a plane ticket and suddenly become holy? Wow. You get on a plane, suddenly you’re an evangelist. You get on a plane, suddenly you’re just cross culturally adept. There is no transformation by aviation. Travel will not confirm that you’re a missionary. This needs to be done by churches. For some reason, I don’t know why, some people get passes on that. Your churches need to affirm the call of the individual confirmed by a record of deeds done where they live. Don’t send people to us you that want to get rid of. Don’t do that. Please. Don’t send us people unless they do ministry here. Send us people you would hire. I’m thinking of elder-qualified people. That’s a sacrifice, right? I know, you’ve invested in them. Think of the cost of the Church of Antioch in Acts 13, to send off Barnabas and Paul. Oh my word. What a sacrifice, but God will honor you and your church if you do it.

Those are the tThree sets of three. Our supernatural theology of the gospel is primary, pure, and bold. Our unprofessional methodology is the church necessary, healthy, and common. And our impossible, missiological call to the nations is inspired, informed, and confirmed.