World Mission of the Church - Lesson 9

Dr. Timothy Tennent
World Mission of the Church
WM601-09
History of Modern Missions Eras 1 and 2
Lesson Transcript

I trust that you had a wonderful time with Dr. Roland Verner yesterday, and I'm sure you appreciated his perspective and just what he brings to the table. And I'm so happy that we're able to grant him a class period which represents 10% of our time. So I'm very happy that he was able to give that someone is distinguished as he is. And such a great combination of scholarship and Hard for the Lost is really wonderful. Okay, That's about prayer together. Lord, as we begin this next week, this last week of classes together, we pray that you would continue to be with us and guide us. And not only the. The things that we learn, helping us to choose exactly what to bring forth, but also, Lord, to apply this to. Minister situations and our own context. Help us, Lord, to let this material be useful for the service of your work through the Church. We thank you, Lord, for what you're doing around the world today. And we pray, Lord, that you would give us insights into how we might be called to be a part of your great work in the world. We remember your word, which promises us that this gospel he preached among all nations. So we commit this day to you and we thank you for it. In Jesus name, Amen. I should have mentioned that before I left what I was doing yesterday. I should use the opportunity actually to talk a little bit about briefly the Overseas Ministry's Study Center. OMC You often see fliers in the hallway about it. This is a missions research and study center located in New Haven, Connecticut, and it's right across the street from Yale Divinity School and just up from the university campus in New Haven.

[00:02:23] The reason it's become such an important place for mission studies is because Yale Divinity School has the privilege of having the largest missions collection in North America. And because of that is natural is important attraction for scholars who are doing mission studies of both. For example, Dr. Kuzma and myself both did our last sabbaticals there. I spent six months living there writing my book and he spent his sabbatical there as well, writing some material he's working on. It's just a great place to do research and they sponsor mission seminars throughout the year. Every January they have seminars that are mainly to my seminarians like yourself, who go there for like a January term. Rather than do this, they go and take courses there. People in the church go there. It's a kind of wide variety of people, and they have speakers that range throughout the church life, Orthodox, Catholic, a wide range of speakers. But all who bring to the table a lot of interest and commitment to missions in their own way. So it's a quite a great group. It's headed up by a man named Jonathan Bonk who wrote the book Missions and Money, maybe the most famous book he's written and was a missionary himself in Ethiopia and a really remarkable man. He helps us in our Daemon program as well. Anyway, so once every January I go to the lecture for one day, then I'll be back in March for a whole week talking about missions and world religions. But it's a it's a great opportunity if you ever have opportunity to go down there or study down there or need occasions to, it's going to stay for a few days just to do research in that library, in the data collection.

[00:04:09] It's really remarkable collection. Also, while we're on the subject of just resources, in addition to that ministry there, LMC, there are a number of journals that you should be aware of, one of which I've quoted a lot already, and that is the International Bulletin of Missionary Research. I BMR This is a really great journal. It's in our library and I would highly recommend you looking at it. It has articles that are very readable, very helpful. It has good themes and I think you'd find it very helpful. Every January they publish the statistical data in summary form that you have enjoyed through the world. Chris Encyclopedia says a lot of good information. If you want to know the latest percentage of the world that's Islamic or whatever, you can find that in every January issue. So that's our BMR. The second one journal is one called MIS theology. This is put out by the American Society MIS theology. ASEM This is the January 24 issue. This theology has a collection of articles along a certain theme and mission. So this is the one that just arrived yesterday. This quarter's theme is on the issue of racism, and it talks about the racial missions and racism, issues about equality and outreach. There's all kinds of things historically on this because a lot of basically 19th century, what happened was the missionaries, when they did ordain indigenous pastors, they never paid them the same as they paid the missionary pastors. And there's all kinds of issues of inequality, as you might expect. A lot of that's documented now. So this is just one example, but there's all kinds of themes that are dealt with. This is this one happens to be on the issue of racism. Some good, good articles on that.

[00:06:02] So you have these kind of journal in the final last one is the Journal and titled Mission Frontiers. This is the one that Ralph Werner puts out from the US Center for World Mission. This is a remarkable journal. It's a popular journal, been put out since the seventies. I actually have a complete set, every single issue of this journal. It's a remarkable collection of articles. I want to someday get it on a database so you can easily search it, all of it. But it's it has really, really helpful articles that are easily readable and then they link it to books if you want to read more about it. So it's a very, very helpful thing and begins with an editorial by Ralph Wynter. And it's always worth reading some provocative. So this this month he's talking about missions and the attack on malaria. All right. So he also highlights the World Christian database and this particular journal this month, which is really nice. And then they have articles here. For example, this one's entitled Missions to Thai Folk Buddhist. Well, that's helpful for us because many, many of you would share our commitment to the Thai context. We have a church planning movement among the Thai that we're committed to. Here's an article called The Cultural Core of Hinduism, two page article about the rise of Hinduism to cultural things in India. And then there's an article on church planning Muslims. They see a wide range of articles and then a nice article on the the role of morality. This is a whole new kind of discussion currently in missions about how we deal with non literate peoples in the world. That's probably one of the most important frontiers of missions today, is bringing the gospel to non literate who do not have access or even if they did, couldn't read Bible translations or whatever.

[00:07:53] So it's a wide range of articles. I have about 15 or so complimentary copies that I'll be happy for. If anyone would like to pick one up, you can pick it up. He sends me extras every time and you just take it. And if the good at this these journals cost you though they have student rates that are reasonable. But this journal is free for students. Free flight is free for anybody. When you get out of the student stage, they ask you if you're able to pay, but you never get charged for this journal. So it's, you know, that's helpful. Now, though, we are going a little bit disjointed because we had the break with Dr. Verner. But you will recall that we were concluding the third part of our four areas of missions last time we met on Friday together with my lecturing. And that is where we are now. We I believe we mentioned that 1934 is when the Indian wrote or asked that question to. William Cameron Townsend. If it goes so great, why does he speak my language? And that becomes the beginning of his founding of our cell somewhere inside linguistics, which later becomes part of the work of Bible translator movement. We went through and we we kind of highlighted the themes of Donal McGovern's life. We discussed the homogeneous unit principle, and I have on the handout some of the key themes of the third area of missions. The biggest change from first era to second era to third era. First era focused on coast lands countries. The second era focused on interior, recognizing the unreached fields within countries. But the big and most momentous change comes with this third era, because it's here that we find the emphasis on people groups clearly brought out in the discussion.

[00:09:56] That's why I have 1974 as the real close of frontier missions, because that is only for us. When Ralph Winter made this really known to the missions community at Lassen one. This was the first major evangelical World conference on missions since the earlier ones we discussed already. So it is here that we really find the emphasis that missions is about peoples, not places, and trying to rethink missions apart from the normal kind of geographic spatial categories we only talk about. I think that we need to continue to engage in this. People emphasis a lot of new emphasis on those who cannot hear the gospel by existing means. Explosion of new strategies. Because now we're at this period where air travel is possible and it creates new possibilities. And then the rise of technology has create all kinds of possible fact that in fact, all the missions and work of our translators, for example, it used to be that a person would spend their entire career doing a language work. Now, a New Testament can often be done in a matter of 12 to 15 years. Sometimes they do them in much leave, less than that because of the help of computers. So there's a lot of opportunities that can be done through various kinds of technologies. We're going to actually revisit some of this later on in the course of this week. So that's the third era of missions. We've kind of highlighted that here before you. And that's where we ended last time. So I think we're we're all caught up on our dates, so we're all ready for the fourth era of missions. Any questions about anything? Because we kind of ended abruptly. I wasn't sure if we had time to ask questions.

[00:11:47] Are we okay on the distinctiveness first, second and third era of missions? Okay. Now, Ralph Winter, who is the first one to articulate the concept of eras of missions, and he's the one that first articulated the idea of frontiers and beachhead missions and all of that. He does not accept the idea of a fourth. There are missions. I mean, his ideas. Okay, Unreached peoples. That's as far. What else is there? That's it. But with the greatest respect after winter, I do not think that he is right on this point. And I think that the for a fourth era is definitely in order. And so this this is not in your textbook, this part here. Let me tell you why I believe in the importance of looking at missions in terms of a fourth era. The emphasis in ERA one, two and three is still emphasizing to whom or where. I guess if you look at for beachhead missions and frontier where missions is going, which is geographic to whom it's going, that's ownership of groups that have to these people groups. But none of these actually addresses the question of by whom? There was a big difference between to whom and by whom. I hope you're following me here. But to whom? I don't care what you talk about. You could go into innumerable strategic studies on the tomb side of missions. You know, people, group studies, analysis, their language analysis of their ethnicity. I could go on forever. As Dr. Winters pointed out, there's no end to what can be done through the people group emphasis, because that brings in language, culture, ethnicity, religion, everything. But it doesn't actually address the question of by whom. It is to say who is bringing the gospel to these people groups.

[00:13:49] In this to me is the fatal flaw of looking at third year emissions as the end of the story. I think we have to also address the question of by whom? Because if you ask the question of first air emissions. Who is bringing the gospel to the coastline of countries? The answer is Westerners. North Americans and Western Europeans. If you ask the question who is bringing the gospel to the frontiers of interior, China, to Africa, the answer is Westerners, North America, Western Europe. If you ask yourself who has been the gospel to unreached peoples missions in this whole period, ending it in 2004, but in this whole period, it essentially is a Western movement. All of these interior organizations, virtually all of them China Indian Mission, the very first one had Hudson Taylor all the way to the more recent missions are all founded in the West. So the by whom? By whom? By whom is all the same? So it seems like if we move in situation where the by whom is changing so dramatically, so that today the bearers of the gospel are most likely not Westerners. That seems to be a really important point to make. And so I'm making that point. I think that it's really important to emphasize it. And so I want to say a little bit about it here. I call this fourth era the indigenous initiated missions. I'm starting it in 1989. 89 was a very important year because in 1989 that was the time of listen to. Now, that's the first raise. Now, listen, one, when they 24 listen to is an 89 is on three is this year 2004. Lesson one took place in. I guess it's like asking who is buried in Grant's Tomb? Where did lesson one take place? LASALLE Okay.

[00:16:03] Okay. Lezion took place in Lausanne, Switzerland. So what happened was because it was a formative experience that became the name by which they're all called, even though they never have met in Switzerland since then. So the segment took place in the Philippines. And then the third one, which will be this year, will take place this fall in Thailand. Now that one in the Philippines was really very different from the one in 74 in terms of the participation, there was a lot more inclusion of the non-Western church that begins to raise the question of who is at the table talking about missions. And in 74, you still have a little bit of a tokenism. I'm not not being overly critical, but I think it's just a fact that there wasn't full participation on the table like we have today. But the real big event actually happened also in 1989, a movement known as Jokowi gc0we The global consultation on world evangelization took place in Singapore. Now, that was a truly remarkable event. This global consultation on world evangelization was essentially led by and directed, and the discourse was largely Asian Christian leaders. Who were deeply committed to mission, particularly the Koreans. But also you had a strong obviously representing Singapore, Hong Kong and other key leaders, as well as India from Asia. Also 1989. So both of these events occurred in 1989. So that to me represents why I call this the beginning of. The fourth. There are missions because it's really in 89 that we begin to have serious commitment to not only commitment by Westerners to, quote, let nonsense into the door. That's a form of kind of we're still in charge of actually seeing major council consultations occur where the leadership and the initiative comes from the non-Western world.

[00:18:10] That to me is very significant. We're now seeing huge mission conferences held in Africa where there are no Westerners invited at all. And the Africans are talking about among Africans, about missions in Africa. You have many, many consultations in India by Indians. And I was had the privilege of just being one this past summer where I was there. I did speak, but it was incidental to the larger conference of Indian church planners addressing concerns about church planning in India. These are really positive signs in my mind to see what's happening and what's going on. So they forced their emissions is the rise of the Indigenous church. What is an Indigenous church? What do we mean by that? An indigenous church is an expression which can be used broadly to refer to kind of any church, its native to its own people group, but is often used more specifically to refer to a church that has a weak or unknown link to more traditional historic expressions of the Christian faith. If you had, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention planting Southern Baptist churches in Africa, which happened. Then there's no question that the Southern Baptist churches in Africa have this link historically to Baptist churches in America or the Presbyterian Church in America planted Presbyterian churches in India. Now, what happened, for example, in India in 47, they decided to get rid of all that. They had hundreds denominations who planned church in India, Methodist Baptist Church of Scotland, Church of England and everything. And they just finally said, okay, we're going to do away with all this and create a united church. It's to this day called the CSA, the Church of South India, and later CNI Church in North India became more of their own church.

[00:20:15] Now, in that case, you can still show the tie back to these historic churches have been Africa, especially Africa. You had churches where people that had come to Christ through the missionary effort and belong to just, say, a Baptist church. They got disillusioned with it for whatever reason or felt like it wasn't African enough or whatever, and they decided to break from it and start their own churches. And then many of those churches planted new churches. So after about two degrees of separation, it becomes unclear. And the people that are in the church certainly are totally unaware that there ever was a link to any early mission work in Africa. There's always got to be some link ultimately, but the thread gets so thin that essentially these churches are independent churches and they're often called the indigenous churches. They often will emphasize particularity more than universality. That's not meant as a criticism is meant as an observation descriptively. There's all kinds of pros and cons about this, but in other words, every church in the world should be an expression of particularity and universality. That is to say there are certain things which are true of God's people. Wherever they are, they may be found. There's certain commonalities to the people of God, whether you be your grew up in, you know, Zimbabwe, in Harare, perhaps Harare. Okay. Just okay. If you grew up in Harare or Kiev, just, you know, food for thought. If you grew up in one of these cities as opposed to Los Angeles or wherever, there's certain things are true of the church. That's universality. Particularity would be that aspects would be which would be particular to that local expression of it. There there's certain things where the African culture or the Indian culture will come through in how Christ is worshiped or how they just talk about the Christian faith.

[00:22:27] So in India, for example, it would be unheard of to have this kind of setting, for example, for a church service. We could this could be a church gathering in America, everyone sitting in kind of bleacher seats and the people from worship team, some get them preachers. This could be could be a worship gathering in the West, maybe without the laptops on the table to me, laptops. I haven't seen that in church. But the kind of overall look of this in India, that would not happen. You would never have men and women sitting kind of dispersed together like that. That would be very, very and I've never seen it mentioned on one side, women on the other. You would not have seats like this. You'd have, you know. Mats, pillows on the floor. Things of that nature, it just looks different. The music will be different. All those are particularity issues that are not offensive to the gospel at all. It's just part of the way cultures present themselves before God. That's all particularity. So these indigenous churches tend to emphasize particularity. They tend to strike you as very African or very Indian in the way they do things. Whereas sometimes you can go on mission field as you can in India. In some places, when you don't walk into an indigenous church with a missions church and you walk into the sanctuary and it is a large building with stained glass windows, with pews, with pads on them and there's an organ up front. You know, the whole thing is you just walked into an Anglican church in the middle of of England somewhere, but yet you're in India. I've seen it all over India. In fact, one of our church plants, we were in the city doing church planting and there was an old Anglican church building that had closed up years earlier, just a big building, and we needed a place to meet and we were planting an indigenous church in this town and there was no church left there.

[00:24:19] And so they we got permission to use this building. And so we now have this very vibrant congregation sit on the floor and this stained glass window building. So even we have stained glass windows in our church. That's amazing. Okay. Question. I saw some questions come up. Are we clear on what we're talking about here in terms of Indigenous missions? Our indigenous plan in churches. Okay. And we'll come back to this also a little bit. But you also have what we call theological and historical, this coherence. What that means. Is that a lot of these indigenous churches are not aware of the theological discourse of the of church history. So, for example, you might have churches that are clearly Christ loving Christ, worshiping churches that may not have heard of or understood the Council of Charleston. Or not necessary that anybody in our church with no chance of tossing. I understand the basic formula of Chaucer done about Christology. So the whole conception of how we talk about the data of Christ. Where you have one person, two natures, the whole two nature, one person formula is maybe completely unknown. Now that raises all kinds of missionary problems and how we deal with that situation, which this class does not unfortunately address, but is something we do address in other classes, is a very important issue. How we deal theological churches that are historically in the 21st century, but maybe in their ecclesiology or their materiality or Christology or in the first century before Chaucer done because Chaucer done didn't happen to 451 A.D. So you have this 300, 400 year period of the church's struggle in producing Christology. A solid, biblically defensible Christology. So how do we deal with new church that are coming out? Do we give them a crash course in Chaucer, Don? Do we give them 400 years to work it out on their own without any help of the of the more mature churches? How do we deal with that? Is a very important issue.

[00:26:38] I mean, both these go together, theological and historical, because, as I said, you have churches that are not aware of the church's history and even some basic things. I mean, one classic example is when Ralph Winter was doing research on this and he discovers some churches in Africa who are have heard about the World Council of Churches. They didn't know what it was. They just heard about it. Oh, this is great. A council of churches from all over the world. We want to belong to it. They have signed a petition to join the World Council of Churches. Now, the WCC is very, very liberal organization. But they do insist that those who join would be churches that give communion is a few other things, but one of them is that they give communion. Well, the Africans say, well, what this group, the particular group in Africa, said, what is communion? We never heard of it. What is it? Well, you know, the Lord's Supper. We never heard of it. What is it? You know the Eucharist. Never heard of it. So if I don't know, then they have no idea what we're talking about. Eucharist, Holy Communion, Lord's Supper. All of it was to strike one Strike to strike. So they had no idea what you're talking about. No one ever told them. And so they said, well, you know, they reenact the meal and he can explain the whole thing. Oh, what a great idea. Well, we'll do it. Now, can we join? But it's hard for us to imagine in our contexts that this basic kind of discourse would not be known. And so you work in that kind of experience. So it's quite exciting. Why have they arisen? There are a number of reasons why they would come up.

[00:28:18] One is there's been a rise of nationalism, especially in the post-colonial period, and a lot of people felt like that when the colonial powers left. There needed to be an indigenous church that was fully owned by the national believers. This is not necessarily to implicate the colonial movement and the missionary movement, but it is a mental problem as much as a historic problem that people, unbelievers identify in their mind often. So, for example, the Church of South India was founded in 1947. That's the very year the British relinquish their control of India and India became independent. So there's a linkage often in these situations. So when the French got rid of their colonies in 1960, that becomes the impetus for a lot of indigenous churches to merge in post-colonial French speaking Africa. So this is a pattern that we've observed that for many people it's a sign of nationalism to have your own churches and separate yourselves from the earlier missionary plants that were that were there. There's also been happily, from my view, a breakup of the Christendom model of Christianity or territorial thinking about Christianity in most of the Protestant history, at least from 1500 until more recently, Christianity was tied very closely to political alignments, especially in Europe. We know this to be the case with state churches and all that. And so that model is under serious decline today. This is, of course, the big breakthrough in Latin America, as we'll see later today. So because of that, once you break the political link with the church link, then it opens up all kinds of possibilities in the state church model, which is the old kind of and even to this day, existing Church of Scotland, Church of England and so forth.

[00:30:19] This old state church model was believed that it would be really, really a tragedy to have all kinds of diverse beliefs about Christianity within a particular territory. So in Germany, you needed to be a Lutheran if you didn't like it, move. But if you can be a German, to be a German is to be a Lutheran. That's just the way it was done. It's like, you know, in in Finland, it's that way. You know, they have a state church. To be a Scot is to be a Presbyterian. Feel like it moved to England. You can be an Anglican down there, but if you want to be a Baptist, you've got to get out. And that was the mentality. I mean, you got I mean, literally got persecuted. Look at the Anabaptist experience in Europe. So that mentality is persisted in much of much of the world. It certainly was a big part of the European experience. And so they didn't want the diversity. And so in the mission field, Large was replicating some of that. So you have the Church of Scotland planning Churches, Church of Scotland in India. I mean, amazingly, my Church of Scotland is that the Church of Scotland itself divided between the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland. Now the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland were divided over one basic issue, and that was the power of the king, which was sitting in London or the queen to appoint pastors in Scotland. They had a big dispute over this. And the Free Church of Scotland, as you might imagine, wanted to be able to point their own pastors without any interference from the Anglican Church, essentially. So they both propagate churches in India. Now, you can imagine.

[00:32:04] So here in India, you're not under the king of England. And so, as I explained to you, why are we different from this other group? You know, explain to me again, slowly. So what happened was denominational divisions that were maybe real in our context, historically were real reasons why they arose and they were based on legitimate concerns and whatever else. When they go to the mission field, they become almost laughably irrelevant. And so this caused a concern. And people said, listen, we want to have our own churches. So that diversity is now emerging in the non-Western world. There is, as we've discussed already, a renewed interest in ethnic particularity all over the world. So this naturally has affected the life of the church. And I think to be fair, we have to acknowledge that the non-Western church has reacted to some doctrines that have been neglected in typical Western formulations of Christianity, and there have been some wonderful kind of celebrations of this in the life of the church. Questions or comments about poor errors or omissions? Yes. Just a clarification on Indigenous select trips you're talking about that you have a plant in India. If missionaries are involved, is it no longer indigenous? Right. Basically, the indigenous is defined traditionally according to what's called the three selves. The first is self-supporting. If they are self-supporting, not being supported by the Western any Western church, that's the first sign. The second is self propagating. Are they able to propagate their own members without outside help? Self-supporting. Self propagating and self-governing. They have their own governorship. Or are they being controlled by some outside considerations? If you have the three selves present, then that's typically called indigenous. Now I'm highlighting a particular facet of indigenous, which being maybe no link to historic Christianity in the West or blah blah blah, which may more particular, but in broad scope that's there.

[00:34:09] Paul Hiebert, another scholar in missions who teaches at Trinity now but has had a many, many years of this in India. Wonderful, wonderful scholar. He has advocated that the three selfs should be expanded to fourth selves. And he has written, I think, quite convincingly, from my point of view at least, that we should add to that self theology. Because we need to encourage churches to articulate theology. The one hand consistent with universal Christian theology throughout the ages against certain doctrinal theological anchors, which are true to the church anywhere. But also we need to allow churches to talk about issues which are particular to their cultural situation. I'll give you one example to show why this is important. We may think that our systematic theologies, which are, of course, very important for our culture and for our life and for the church anywhere can be kind of transferred. So if you took like Wayne Graham's theology and you, you know, cut paste and put it into Hindi would be okay for North India. But let me give you at least one example of how this is not true. In India. When I did this survey of top questions that were asked by Hindus, I found that several of the top questions related to idolatry in some way to idolatry, idol worship and eating food sacrificed to idols. It's a huge problem among Indians and Indian Christians. Hindus will have food that's called Prasad. Prasad is the food that is offered to the idols. Or since a statue cannot eat once the food is offered, then the pujari that's what they call the priest will get some. But then you bring the food from the table of the of the God or goddess, and you will bring it to your friends and share it with them as an act of hospitality.

[00:36:10] So Christians in India are divided about whether it is permissible for a Christian to eat Prasad or not. And whether it's a sin to eat food, sacrifice to idols. This is not an historic question. And first Corinthians, this is a major battle in India. And what do you do if you eat it and you don't know until later You find out it was food sacrificed to idols. You eat it. It's the minute you swore. Oh, by the way, that was precise. Like, oh, you know, how do you deal with this? I had a very, very heated I mean, in the best way. Heated. I mean, just a lively discussion on this point with a group of maybe 50 of our Indian leaders. And a Gordon College student was present during the whole discourse. And I was up front. We were taught Prasad and we were discussing my answer to the question in this book that I wrote. And so I was, you know, I was before we printed it, I went through and discussed every answer with them to get their feedback and make changes. Oh, this was the one that really got the boards moving. And people were back and forth. Oh, the the place was just totally divided about it. With all kinds of positions and feelings. After all the discussion, the student said to me, after it was over, I felt like I was at the Council of Charsadda and it was just so amazing seeing all this, you know, real, legitimate theology being formed. I mean, there really were it was an honest discourse of ideas about biblical response to Prasad. Now, what's so interesting, I took Wayne Graham's theology. I mean, this thing is so big, you could use it as a doorstop or.

[00:37:46] And I looked into see if in anywhere in that huge theology he addresses food sacrifice to idols. He doesn't. All right. So that proves the basic problem with universals and a particular systematic theology. Systematic theology is essential for the church's task. All that means is you ask questions of the biblical data, you get answers, and you systematically organize it. Anybody who wants to learn the Bible should be able to systematically. You want to know what the Bible teaches about something. So the best way to systematically study the Bible to find out what it does teach. Nothing wrong with systematic theology anywhere in the world. The problem is not with systematics, and there's people who are very critical of systematic thinking. That's a Western thing. I don't agree with that. I think the western part of theology is we think that the questions that are asked of the text are universal. That's where the problem comes. Certainly there's a huge portion of of questions which are universal. What is the nature of the human problem? What is the meaning of Christ death and resurrection or whatever? Those are central question which are applicable to people everywhere. But there are questions that people ask that are unique to their struggles and their situations. And so a theology should be able to address that. And so I have had so much experience talking to Indians about their theological issues. I realized over the years that we have to produce good, solid, systematic theologies written by Indians for Indians, and that would be self theology. So this idea of what makes indigenous church is actually a very important question and has been debated quite a bit. But generally the three selves has been kind of a major way that's discussed.

[00:39:39] And then this force self is a kind of a newer idea. Other questions. Lesson three is taking place in Thailand. The dates are not right. It's actually not July. Apologize. That's a mistake. It's in September and October, late September, early October 1924. So it's in the fall of this of this year. And Lausanne three has its target to do what has never been done before. And I'm saying in faith, I think we're going to do it. If it happens, then we I will definitely believe we're at the end of the third era in terms of the real emergence of the fourth era, and that is to have 67% of the participants in liaison with non-Western Christian leaders. That's a difficult goal to make. It's a complicated thing. I'm actually on one of the consultations to help make this happen. The problem one is, was location. If it had taken place in Switzerland, which many wanted to return to liaison. It's very difficult to get people from the Far East to the middle of Europe. So the first step is to locate it really in the heart of Asia. And Thailand is a great location for it. Right now they're having these riots with the Muslims there. But hopefully Thailand will continue to be a place peaceful. It's one of those peaceful places for Christian activity in in Asia. One cases of leak located geographically closer to the non-Western world number to find ways to help people get there. The finances are such that I can think of, you know, 40 or 50 Indian leaders, I think, have just got to be at less than three where they can't afford a plane ticket to fly to Thailand. So those are issues. That's a very complicated thing.

[00:41:30] It's not easy to pull off a conference that really does bring together all the leaders of the world in a way that does not involve a lot of difficult financial questions, involves who's going to sponsor them, and on and on and on. But I think that it's coming together and I believe that we will have the most globally representative conference on missions in the history of the world. The ethnical ethnic diversity in the presence of the non-Western church will be quite remarkable. And I think that is worth noting, and that's why I am putting 2004 down in faith. In faith only. So that's why I have that. Just finally, to conclude the key themes. We're seeing major initiation of church planting from the southern continents in this era. That's a very different thing because that's why I emphasize differences between the two whom question and the from whom question. Unreached Peoples focuses on the two question to whom are we going? We're going to ethnic groups, more and more ethnic groups. Every ethnic group, all peoples, all of that. Pontotoc ethnic. But this fourth era is by whom they are found the mission organization organizations in India. I work for an Indian Mission board founded by Indians to plant churches in North India. There's no Western involvement at all. There's not a single Westerner in the whole organization except for myself, and they count me as an Indian. So appreciate that. I think that's really significant. This is not something that any domination or group in America said, Oh, let's do this in India. This is an indigenous initiated ministry. In India, there's thousands like that today. The emergence of indigenous theologians have already come in on that with the fourth self and the rise of Indigenous mission sending bodies.

[00:43:26] This will return to briefing and discuss these top ten issues. And in your reading about the the role of the how this is changing, how we relate to the mission field. So I hope that you can now appreciate some of the changes that have occurred in the in the modern era of missions from William Carey to the present. Indigenous initiated missions does not supplant all of the insights of unreached peoples missions. It's not like, Oh, now it's passé discourse on rich peoples. No. Each of these movements builds on what went before it, and so we don't lose the insights of the third era by talking in a fourth era. We're just saying, okay, let's continue talking about to whom? You know, infinitely, but let's also bring out the by whom. So that's the only it's just different parts of the equation that are really being discussed in the third and fourth era. So hopefully you'll you'll see by me concluding. 24 is not meant in any way to be concluding the discussion or emphasis. It's merely an acknowledgment that by 24 nobody will be seriously promoting missions in any major groups. Ignorant of the ethnic emphasis is just simply not part of mission strategy today. The only groups actually today that have been more resistant to the people group emphasis has been Pentecostal missions. And it's a whole other reasons for that. The Pentecostals have been much more strong about emphasizing multiethnic churches in one place and have been resistant to the implications of church playing in ethnic lines. But they themselves are also seeing the importance of targeting ethnic groups in India. One of the problems there is that ethnic groups don't live mixed together. So if you plan a church in a village, even if you didn't know about ethnic groups, you'd be working within one group.

[00:45:25] And so therefore, it's very difficult to kind of work in a kind of multiethnic concept in some parts of the world. Okay. Any questions or comments about the four areas of missions? Yes. And in regards to the third conference. That bit, really targeting the leader promised a little bit of more of the blame. Urbana is a difficult thing. Urbana. Started out as a student missions conference. Now, I'd say Student missions conference if you follow me. So Havana is slowly emphasizing the life of students in ministry and missions is an important part of Havana, but it is nothing like it used to be. That's what old guys always say. They look back, you know, wistfully. You know, I remember when I never forget my son of the day. Oh, he was talking to another guy and they were talking about McDonald's Happy Meals. We're gone in McDonald's. And here they'd seen one of these happiness toys, like one of the kids in the next to us playing with it. And I heard them saying to each other, Oh, that's nothing like the happiness I used to have. You know, when we were going out, they had this, this, this. Oh, yeah, I remember that one. You know, now the happy ones are like all the even the Happy Meals are going to pot, you know? So there's that sense of, you know, we're in this entropy. And so it's not unusual to look back in a moment and say, well, you know, it didn't have the vibrancy it once had or whatever. In my mind, Urbana is not what it was. So the question, though, as Paul Borthwick often says to me, the real question on our Urbana will always be five years after the conference, you know.

[00:47:13] Are we seeing the people come to Urbana translated into mission recruits for mission organizations or whatever else? And if that happens, I'll be thrilled. But I wonder. I still think we need a really good, solid student missionary conference that really is focused on missions and doesn't insult students. I don't believe in insulting students by saying we have to always kind of come down, down, down. You know, so they'll all be on board. I think students are prepared to to hear good, solid discourse about missions. And I think that has not happened in the last two or. BANOS There's been a lot of hype and excitement and great worship and all that. But when it comes to actually teaching on missions and the kind of things we're discussing, this course, I think could be discussed in Urbana in various ways, maybe more popular in some ways, but the kind of stuff that Ralph Winter did at Urbana nine, there's not just what Larson would not be allowed to do that wouldn't be considered possible today. So those are concerns I have. But I'm happy for Urbana, and I hope and pray that it makes a big impact. Other questions. Okay. Even though it's a bit early. Let's take a brief break and then come back because we have the next segment is what I call around the world in 80 minutes, then another 180 days. And so we did that all in one sitting. So we'll stop at this point.