World Mission of the Church - Lesson 1

Dr. Timothy Tennent
World Mission of the Church
wm601-01
Course Introduction
Lesson Transcript

(0:00 – 1:45) Well, good morning. We're certainly happy to see all of you in the class and looking forward to a wonderful time together as we reflect on the world mission of the church. Okay, before we get into the class itself, let's take some time to pray and to commit the time to the Lord and ask Him to bless us as we meet together each day.

Let's pray together. Lord, we've come before you on this first class of this new year and we just praise you and we worship you for the opportunity to study, to learn, and to reflect upon this great theme and this great work that you're involved with and you're a great initiative in the world. We thank you, O Lord, that missions is not just a task which the church does, but ultimately, O God, this is your great initiative in the world to redeem the world.

So we're here to acknowledge your sovereignty, your great power, and your glory and the privilege it is to be a part of what you're doing in the world today. We pray, Lord, that you'd anoint these times we have together, these short few days as we sit together as a class of learners to think and reflect on your great work. Lord, we pray that you would speak to our hearts, that you would guide and direct us, and may you receive the glory and honor through this time together.

We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's turn to the syllabus and take some time to go through what the expectations for the course will be and what we're going to be looking at in the course.

(1:47 - 2:56) We will be reading a wide variety of books in this course. Probably one of the major requirements of this course is reading. It's a fairly extensive reading list, but I can tell it's a new year. You're up for the task. Many of you have already started. Many of you asked me before the Christmas break. I recommended this would have been a good one to have read over Christmas, but if not, you'll enjoy it now. This is called To the Golden Shore by Courtney Anderson. Your book looks differently than mine.

Mine's probably 20 years old. This is one of the great Christian biographies of missions. This is a whole genre of literature in mission studies, which you should be familiar with. It's great to read about the first American missionary. It's good to be well aware of his life. Students always tell me in their feedback how much they appreciate this book, so I commend it to you. It's a lengthy 500-page biography, but it reads fast, and you'll enjoy it very much. Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore. The other is actually not intended to be read, but it's something that should be in everyone's possession.

(2:56 – 4:46) This is the Operation World Prayer Manual. This is a guide that most of you are probably already familiar with, but it goes from Afghanistan all the way to Zimbabwe, A to Z, organized according to the calendar. Essentially, if you start with early January and you go through over the course of a year, you will have prayed for all the countries in the world. In the early part of the month, which is the time that we're in now, you're praying more generally for major blocks of the world, which is actually quite nice for our purposes. But as you get later on into the month, it finally starts into specific countries one by one. So at first it gives you an overview of the world, and then it begins, I think it's in February if I recall, it begins to go into the specifics. So as far as this class is concerned, you're not required to pray through this volume over the next two weeks, though it wouldn't be a bad idea. You could just be a serious prayer warrior. You're simply asked to start this, you know, and pray through the days while you're in the class, beginning today and concluding at the end of class. So it's a rather modest requirement. I mean, in terms of pages, it's probably only 20, 30 pages. But the idea is to get you in the habit of using this as a daily prayer guide to pray through the world. And you'll find this to be immensely helpful for you as you pray and seek the Lord in the mornings or whenever you have your daily devotional. So I encourage you to pick this up and to take time to pray through the world. 

(4:46 – 6:30) The third book is a book by Vishal and Ruth Mangawati. It's called The Legacy of William Carey, another very well-known figure in mission circles. We talk about William Carey and his role. This is important because this is not a biography of William Carey's life. This is actually a contemporary reflection on Carey by a very well-known Indian author. If you ever go to India, everybody, all Christians at least, have heard of Vishal Mangawati. He's a very well-known author, written many, many books. He writes both scholarly books as well as popular books. This is a more of a popular book, but he's trying to bring to bear a lot of his more detailed scholarship on the question of what is the impact of missions on the Indian culture. And this is really important because today there has been an undercurrent of negativism about the missionary enterprise, that it has somehow damaged cultures or hurt cultures or destroyed people, groups, and so forth, and we'll have to address that in more detail later on in the semester. But I think Carey's contribution to Indian society is immense. India has put stamps out in honor of William Carey. They have schools and hospitals and roads all over India named after William Carey. So Carey is a very important figure from the point of view of Indian culture and society, quite apart from his Christian impact as a translator of scripture and his work as a proponent of the gospel in India. So this is written by an Indian about William Carey, so I think it's helpful to read what an Indian has said about William Carey, and I hope you enjoy this quick read, only 100 pages. Then I have a few articles I've asked you to read.

(6:30 – 7:40) These are articles that I've written in some journals. The first is also on William Carey, entitled William Carey as a Missiologist. This is reflecting on William Carey not as a missionary per se, but as a mission thinker, as one who does strategy for missions. So we'll look at that and discuss some of that as well. This will be available on the reserve shelf in the library, so you can get it there without having to copy it if you need to. The other one is two articles found in a recent September issue of the American Biblical Journal, one entitled The Top Ten Things You Should Know About Missions in the 21st Century, and the other is an article I've written about the mission societies in relationship to Adoniram Judson. So these are articles that are easy reads, but are available for you to get some kind of broader pictures that we need to cover in the class. 

(7:41 - 8:44 ) As far as the textbook for the course, there are actually two that are, I would call, the main textbooks for the course. The first is Chuck Van Ingen's book, Mission on the Way, Issues in Mission Theology. This is a professor of missions at Fuller Seminary and has written a very helpful book exploring some of the broader themes of mission theology, and I will commend that book to you. The other is a reader edited by Ralph Winter and Steve Hawthorne entitled Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, and as you'll see from the syllabus, I have not asked you to read this entire book, but to read selections from this book. So I commend that to you, a very nice, helpful guide. This has been recently updated. There's been about three or four editions of this book. Well, actually, there have been three English, or I'm sorry, three Western editions of this book. There have also been editions of this book published in Asia and Latin America and Africa, and so it's very nice. They have editions that are more relevant to people in other contexts, but this is the one that's the most helpful for us. 

 (8:46 – 10:51) One last book. I forgot. Can't forget Christy Wilson. Many of you may not know or be aware of J. Christy Wilson, Jr., who once taught this class. In fact, he taught it in this very room. I took this class from him. I sat right where you're sitting. Never thought I'd ever be teaching the class, but I sat here and heard this course from Christy Wilson many years ago, and he's a great, what was a great missionary to Afghanistan and a great heart for God. And as you know, we have here J. Christy Wilson, Jr., Center for World Missions, named after him, and he has been a great inspiration to a whole generation of Gordon-Conwell students. He came to Gordon-Conwell after the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and he relocated here and taught missions for a number of years before he passed away. When I came on campus to take his position, they asked me to re-tape the World Mission of the Church course, this course that you're now in, for the Semlink. He had the course on Semlink, but they wanted to re-tape it. I basically didn't want to do that unless they agreed to keep his stories. So what they did was, because he was a very famous storyteller, his classes didn't have a lot of missiological content, but they were great. If you had one of his classes, you had all of his classes, that kind of guy. But they were very, very inspirational, and he could tell you stories about his work in Afghanistan that would just amaze you, and it would inspire you. He was great at that. And he had a nice personal touch with students. So I felt like the stories, though I felt we needed to get some content into the course, the stories were really, really powerful and helpful. So they agreed to tape the Semlink class, which they did here a couple years ago, but then at the end of the class, they have his tapes. They edited out a lot of his stories and put them on a couple of tapes at the end. So you'd go through the class, and then you'd hear all these inspirational stories.

(10:51 - 12:33) So Christy Wilson, though he's with the Lord, he still teaches at Gordon-Conwell via the Semlink program. But one of our students, Ivan Chow, very graciously worked and went through all of his class lecture notes, all of his tapes, because he had taped all of Dr. Wilson's courses, and he edited out all of the stories and typed them up and published them in this book and told them more to be desired than gold, true stories told by J. Christy Wilson. And so, this is your way of getting to know Christy Wilson, because if you read this book, you'll get a little feel for what it was like to sit in his classes, because these are all the stories that he told, because I've heard all these stories from him in person, and you'll find the book to be a delight. By the way, this is the number one bestseller in the Gordon-Conwell Book Center. I mean, that's not the Amazon.com list, it's not the New York Times list, but it is the Gordon-Conwell list. This is the number one, not only faculty book sold, but any book sold in the book center is this book. So it's a really popular book, and people come and buy them by the cartloads. And I'm on the board, actually, that oversees the funds from this book. The school makes no money on this book. Every penny from this book that's sold goes into a fund, which is then used to grant scholarships to students here at Gordon-Conwell. So this is actually, buying this book is helping the ministry right here at Gordon-Conwell for needy students, so it's a great book as well as a great cause. He always wanted that book to be used for the cause of helping the school.

(12:34 - 12:56) Okay, purpose of the course. I think it's worth noting, and I want to look at the specific purposes here and objectives, but this course is designed for several groups of people, and many of you will fit into various constituencies, and I'm well aware of that. I think the major constituency here are people that are preparing for pastoral ministry.

(12:57 – 14:13) So this course, having spent myself ten years as a pastor of a church, and many years since then in interims and various things, I know a little bit about the challenges of how to talk to the church about missions and what needs to be known by people in the local church. So I think probably the main group of people we have in mind here is asking the question, what would a pastor need to know about missions to be effective in the local church? So this is not actually primarily a course saying everybody needs to go be a missionary, though there may be many of you that are in that situation, or some of you certainly, hopefully, that will consider giving yourself to cross-cultural service. The main purpose of the course is actually to equip you to be an effective pastor of a church and to promote missions in the church. This is one of the required, or the only required, core missions course in the MDiv curriculum, either this course or Theology of Missions taught by Dr. Kuzmic. So it's a broad course. But it also is the first course in quite a series of courses that will be taken by people that are preparing for missionary service.

(14:13 – 15:00) So this is the foundation. I kind of compare this course a little bit to taking a journey through a big, beautiful home. You walk into the home, there's a number of rooms in the home. We will not have time to actually carefully examine each of these rooms. We're going to kind of walk through the house, and I'm going to point out things to you about missions. And this is, for mission majors, will be just the beginning of some much more extensive exploration in all of these areas. And for the others of you, this can be just a message about kind of what's out there and kind of get a feel for the whole field of missions and missiology. So we'll spend time looking at a biblical, theological section. We'll take time looking at a historical section.

(15:01 – 16:16) We'll look at an anthropological section of the course, a missiological section. So we're going to kind of let you get a feel for different aspects of mission and mission thought in the course. But in a broader sense, all of you, I trust, upon completion of this course, will be introduced to the world mission of the church, which is the title of the course, and be challenged to become a world Christian, to break out of our provincial ways of looking at the world and try to find a way to think about ourselves as global Christians. We're going to be looking at a broad overview of biblical, historical, cultural, strategic perspective on the world and its peoples. We're going to try to talk about what's happening today, what is the current progress of the Great Commission. We'll look at some of the big challenges we're facing today. So you'll be acquainted with all of that before we're done. You also will be introduced to the key figures and epics in the modern Protestant missionary movement. We will not have time, though it grieves me, but we will not have time to talk about the Catholic work historically, or really even the history of missions up to the modern period.

(16:16 - 16:46) We're mainly going to be looking at William Carey to the present, some of the major themes in the modern period of missions that the Protestants have led, and that will be very helpful. As a pastor, to not be aware of some of the key figures in missions would be a big mistake. We're also going to be introducing some concepts, a few concepts in culture and topology, which have helped us in talking about ways to communicate the gospel across cultural and linguistic barriers.

(16:46 - 17:32) All of us are obviously aware of the importance of linguistics and being a missionary and going to another part of the world and learning another language, but linguistics is just the beginning of actually a whole world of challenges for the cross-cultural communicator. Not only learning the language, but learning the whole cultural worldview of a person to whom that we are preaching the gospel or speaking the gospel with, and this is something that we'll begin to give you some feel for, though we have entire courses on this also available. We'll be looking at a number of biblical passages, working through key exegetical passages that we think are particularly important for pastors to have clarity on.

(17:32 – 18:48) Again, there's so much. The whole course could be devoted to biblical theology and missions, but we're going to be looking at mainly several key paths in the Old Testament. We'll do a fairly careful survey of the Great Commission text in the four Gospels. That will be a huge part of our study, and also some controversial points and passages, especially regarding the lostness of humanity. And we'll be thinking about the biblical data regarding this and how to properly prepare you to engage a world, and certainly even the church, which is largely unconvinced that people need Christ and that Christ is unique, even in the church. And therefore, we have to talk about this biblically and theologically. In all of this, I do pray that we'll grow in our appreciation of the vitality of the Christian faith and desire to share the gospel across cultural boundaries as the Lord enables us. So, those are kind of the broad purposes of the course and objectives, and I think it's in keeping with what we have set forth in the school catalog. Let me just make a case for why it's important for you to learn every country in the world.

(18:49 – 20:27) There's a number of practical reasons, one of which American students especially are chided around the world for being geographically ignorant. I know this is not you. This is somebody else in your school. But one of the things that suffered in American school system has been geography. It was required for most students, you know, for many years, and now you can go through your whole high school and college and not have a course in geography. So it's important. William Carey, the first thing he did as a young man when he worked in the cobbler's shop is he learned all the countries of the world, and this is what birthed in him a burden for the world. So, I have found this is just an invaluable exercise, and it's great because the international students have a leg up on many of you because they know, you know, we have maybe some Africans here and they know the African countries. That's great because Africa can be the most difficult for many students.So it's just a really good exercise of basic cultural literacy, but I think it's also important missiologically for us to be conversant. If I mentioned, you know, something that the Lord is doing in Cameroon, it would be quite helpful if you knew where Cameroon was and could find it on a map. I have added, well actually I had this the last couple of years, but one additional thing that I realized was kind of an oversight, was also to list a number of important cities in the world.

(20:27 – 21:47) These are called gateway cities. You'll notice them on number two, page two. All of these cities are in the top 25, well they're all in one or two categories, but most are in both categories. They're either in the top 25 most populated cities in the world, and I've actually left out some of the huge ones in Indonesia besides Jakarta, but a number of huge cities. But also, these are what we call gateway cities, and it's a concept which you would not know about necessarily, but a gateway city in mission thinking is a particularly strategic city for the sake of the gospel spreading. So take for example Istanbul. If a people movement to Christ were to take place in Istanbul, then it would have a huge impact on the whole of Central Asia because of the strategic nature of Istanbul. So there are certain cities which have strategic importance for strategy, for planning, and how we're seeking to spread the gospel globally. And so these cities all have either tremendous significance in terms of just sheer numbers, or in most cases this is and, they are also gateway cities.

(21:47 - 22:10) So starting with Bogota, all the way down to Tehran at the end, on the top of page two of the second column, you'll see a number of cities there. So you should be able to locate these cities where they're found in the world. What countries are they located in? Because these cities should also be part of your vocabulary.

(22:10 - 23:26) One of the big changes that's taken place. If you'd gone back to 1900, or 1904, let's just say that 100 years ago, and you ask yourself what are the 25 most populated cities in the world, most of them, not all, but almost the great majority of them would be in Europe and in North America. Los Angeles is still, and New York City, are the only two cities in the U.S. that make the list today, and amazingly not a single European city makes the top 25 list today. Paris, London, all those cities have dropped off the list. So what we're seeing is a tremendous surge in growth of non-Western urban centers. And one of the things that we'll argue later in the course is the importance of rethinking missions to not be some tribal area in the middle of nowhere, but the great mission fields today are largely the urban areas. And so part of that, it seems to me, I realize we needed to focus a bit more than we have on making sure you're aware of these cities and where they're located. So there we have it on the list. So there are many other cities we could look at, but I just thought those would be some that you would definitely need to know.

(23:27 - 24:35) You do scripture memory, which are scriptures about the world, and then you'll be learning the countries of the world at the same time, and hopefully beginning to get some of the connections between the biblical call and the countries that you're studying and learning. The final exam will be essentially focused on the content of the course, with the exception of those texts that I've already mentioned, which will be on the midterm exam. So the final exam will be comprehensive and will cover all the themes of the course, including a few selected themes from the readings, but we'll give you fair notice about some of that as well before the end of the course. Hundreds of students have marched down this path before you and have successfully charted these waters. You should go in forward with faith, excitement. One last thing before we take a break and then come back and start, and that is, hopefully you received as you walked in also this little card here, which asks a lot of questions.

(24:36 – 26:30) What will be the largest cities in the world by 2025? This is, again, one of the questions that we have raised in our syllabus. What are the least Christian people groups? What are the world's fastest growing religions? All of these are really questions that people have, questions that you should have as an inquiring Christian trying to think about what it means to be part of a global Christian movement. All of these questions and more can be answered through the wonderful website that is established through our new Wilson Center and the new part of that, which is called the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. And if you look on the back of the card, you'll see the website. There is globalchristianity.org. This is, I think, without any doubt, the whole scholarly community is acknowledging this is the greatest, most powerful, most comprehensive database on empirical study of Christianity available anywhere in the world, came right out of here at Gordon-Conwell through this site, globalchristianity.org. It's a wealth of information. The entire World Christian Encyclopedia is available, searchable now on that. Many, many other things will be available. So you should log on and have a look at that. It's currently also going through a kind of a facelift, an update, so you'll see changes throughout the next several weeks. But it is a great website and I hope that you'll become familiar with it. The fact is, this month's issue, the January 2004 issue of, this is a well-known journal in our field called International Bulletin of Missionary Research, IBMR. This is a very well-known journal and a couple of things about this will be helpful for you.

(26:31 – 28:07) The January issue, every year for many, many years now, has included a statistical table showing the growth of Christianity over the last century, projections for the year 2025, the growth of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, various other kinds of issues. He tracks, in this particular article, 78 different areas that he tracks, everything from total global population. Right now, the population of the world is 6,364,117,000. He has a lot of great data available, how he'll live in urban areas, rural areas. It's just a great, vast wealth of information. This is also available through the website. But one of the interesting things about this journal is every January, they publish a list of the top 15 mission books in the last year. So they'll survey mission scholars and ask them, what do you think are the best books? And they determine which ones are the best. And for the first time, they included an electronic source, a database, on their list of 15 books. And it is the World Christian Database, which I'm talking about here at Gordon-Conwell. So you should have a look at that and enjoy that resource, because it's available to you, and hopefully you'll be able to get good use out of it. One other note about the taping, just so you'll know, this course is being taped.

(28:08 - 28:58) It won't affect at all our interactions or whatever, but this course is being taped because we want to keep updating the course, both for SemLink as well as the tapes are for a website called biblicaltraining.org, which offers seminary education for people around the world. And so this is being taped also to provide resources for the global church. So that's why this equipment's up here. But we'll edit out anything you say. Don't feel like you're being taped if you ask a question. It won't even pick you up. And if I repeat the question, fair enough. But if it's something that, you know, if you want to just, you know, simp and say, you know, that you're having a miserable day, don't feel like that'll be known throughout the world. Okay, great. We'll take a break and come back in a few minutes and start back.