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World Mission of the Church - Lesson 12

Windows Into the World of Missions (Part 2)

The “ten forty window” is one of the places where there is a concentration of unreached people groups. A window is a way to recognize the big picture while realizing that every local context is unique. The main focus is to look at each of the five mega-spheres and identify what is unique about each one.

Timothy Tennent
World Mission of the Church
Lesson 12
Watching Now
Windows Into the World of Missions (Part 2)

Windows Into the World of Missions

 

I. Introduction

II. Ten Forty Window

A. North Africa and the Middle East

B. South Asia

C. East Asia

III. Post-Christian Window

A. North America and Western Europe

B. Eastern Europe

IV. Orothodox Window

V. Younger Church Window

VI. Christo-pagan/Pentecostal Window

A. Christo-pagan

B. Pentecostal

VII. Summary


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Transcript
  • For people who are pastors or will serve as pastors, this course will expose you to what you need to know about missions to be effective in the local church. This is also a foundational course for people who are preparing for missionary service by considering topics dealing with practical and theological aspects of missions. For everyone, regardless of your vocation, this course will challenge you to become a world Christian. (Note: It is helpful to know that a pericope [pair – ik – o – pay] is a section of scripture containing a teaching or describing an event.) 

  • Mission is the reconciling work of God in the world. Missions is the obedient, Spirit-led strategy and implementation of plans to fulfill God's mission in the world. The basis of the Torah is not untethered from a global heart of God for the nations of the world.  Even in the Writings and the Prophets, the covenant is being celebrated in the context of the nations of the world, including ramifications of both blessing and cursing.

  • Mission is the reconciling work of God in the world. Missions is the obedient, Spirit-led strategy and implementation of plans to fulfill God's mission in the world. The basis of the Torah is not untethered from a global heart of God for the nations of the world.  Even in the Writings and the Prophets, the covenant is being celebrated in the context of the nations of the world, including ramifications of both blessing and cursing.

  • As the early Christians experience missiological breakthroughs, they will cite the Old Testament because they see these events as a fulfillment of what had already been written. The Abrahamic covenant is cited to demonstrate how God is using the Messiah to bless the nations. The theology of Great Commission found in culminating texts in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and reinforced in Acts 1:8. Jesus repeated the Great Commission to his disciples in different ways and at various times. Matthew’s account begins by saying that Jesus is giving authority by the Father for the extension of His kingdom. God has given us a mandate to present the Gospel publicly to the world, not just to separate into a cultic community. The only main verb in the passage is, “make disciples.” God’s command is to disciple all people groups, not just people in each country.

  • As the early Christians experience missiological breakthroughs, they will cite the Old Testament because they see these events as a fulfillment of what had already been written. The Abrahamic covenant is cited to demonstrate how God is using the Messiah to bless the nations. The theology of Great Commission found in culminating texts in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and reinforced in Acts 1:8. Jesus repeated the Great Commission to his disciples in different ways and at various times. Matthew’s account begins by saying that Jesus is giving authority by the Father for the extension of His kingdom. God has given us a mandate to present the Gospel publicly to the world, not just to separate into a cultic community. The only main verb in the passage is, “make disciples.” God’s command is to disciple all people groups, not just people in each country.

  • The verses that contain Mark's version of the Great Commission first appear in later copies, but there are good reasons to treat these verses as part of the inspired text of the Gospel of Mark. In Mark, the proclamation is to be made to all creation. The emphasis in Mark is preaching. The emphasis in Luke is witnessing. The emphasis in John is sending.

  • Acts 11:20 describes the first time the Gospel is intentionally preached in a cross-cultural situation. A church was planted in Antioch and Saul and Barnabas discipled believers there for a year. The Antioch church sends them out, and they come back and report to them what happened. Both local evangelism to your own people group and cross cultural evangelism are important. 

  • There have been changes in missions between 1792 and the present. Many people credit William Carey with beginning the modern missions movement. The Moravians were taking the Gospel to places all over the world, even before Carey began his ministry. The eras overlap because it takes a while for new ideas to catch on. A key figure in Beachhead Missions is William Carey. In Carey’s book, “An Inquiry,” he challenges the inaction of the church in cross-cultural missions. He says God has given to the Church, the responsibility of spreading the Gospel   to other parts of the world, summarizes missions history, gives anthropological data and discusses practical issues people give for not going. Ultimately, people need to be open to the call of the Holy Spirit and willing to respond to the challenge. Carey’s motto is, “Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.” He and Judson wanted to plant churches in a new country. 

  • Hudson Taylor went to China as a first era missionary. Taylor travels inland and pushes the limits of what the missions organizations were willing to do. Frontier missions focused on the interior areas of countries, used a faith missions model for organization and funding, and recruited lay people, including students and women. Contextualization is preaching the Gospel in a way that is sensitive to the recipient.

  • The close of the second era, Beachhead Missions, came in 1974 when Ralph Winter gave his address at the Lausanne Conference on world evangelism. As a result, people began looking at missions in terms of people groups rather than geographic areas. The fourth era of missions emphasizes “by whom” the Gospel is presented. Lausanne II and the Global Consultation on World Evangelization took place in 1989.

  • In this lesson, you will learn that the “ten forty window” is one of the places where there is a concentration of unreached people groups. A window is a way to recognize the big picture while realizing that every local context is unique. The main focus is to look at each of the five mega-spheres and identify what is unique about each one.
  • The “ten forty window” is one of the places where there is a concentration of unreached people groups. A window is a way to recognize the big picture while realizing that every local context is unique. The main focus is to look at each of the five mega-spheres and identify what is unique about each one.

  • It’s helpful to summarize what you need to know as a pastor to communicate to people about missions and what the pathway is to getting prepared to serve as a missionary. Every continent should be a sending and receiving continent. Short term missions is the best thing and worse thing that has happened to the local church.

    Previous to the beginning of the audio, there was a video shown that is not available to us. It was an account of the breakthrough of the gospel into a culture.

  • By studying this lesson, you'll gain insights into the top ten key aspects of 21st-century missions, including their holistic approach, indigenous leadership, partnerships, technology, urbanization, short-term missions, Global South's influence, contextualization, business as mission, and diaspora focus.
  • Some mission boards are associated with a denomination and some are independent. Most missions organizations belong either to the IFMA (Interdenominational Faith Missions Association) or EFMA (Evangelical Foreign Missions Agency). Fundamentalist missions organizations each have a specific focus. The steps you go through before you go to the mission field are designed to help you get good training and build a team that will support you. Churches are tending to provide a larger percentage of support for fewer missionaries. Terms are usually 3-4 years at a time. Your first term is usually spent just learning the language and culture. Missionaries spend time between terms connecting with people and preparing to return. People often are more receptive to the Gospel when they are living in a culture other than their native culture. Air travel and email have made asynchronous relationships possible. People with professional training have access to some countries that won't allow people to come in as missionaries.

  • As you consider becoming a missionary, it is helpful to recognize areas in the world where the population predominantly identifies with another religion. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism are popular with large population groups in the 10-40 window. There are also large immigrant populations in locations throughout the US.

    The map referred to in the lecture with the world religions color coded is not available to us.

  • Hinduism is practiced by a large percentage of the people in India. It also has an impact on the culture and politics of India. Buddhism teaches that there is one path to spiritual enlightenment, as opposed to Hinduism that teaches that there are many. 

  • Understanding world religions affects our strategy and the way we do our ministry around the world. 

    Most people who need a gospel presentation are members of another world religion (e.g., Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism). We study other religions so we know the context of belief of that people group. Identification vs. extractionist model. By understanding the teachings of different religions, you can explain the gospel in terms they can understand. Muslims agree on many parts of the Old Testament but don't believe in the Trinity or that Jesus is God. Religions in China and Japan emphasize sincerity, orderliness and personal and public conduct based on precedent. 

     

Recognizing the responsibility of all Christians to complete Christ’s commission, this course gives an overview of the strategic and historical progress of worldwide missions today. The ways in which a local congregation can fulfill its worldwide biblical mandate are also considered.

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Dr. Timothy Tennent
World Mission of the Church
Windows Into the World of Missions (Part 2/2)
Lesson Transcript

I can just see when they were dancing, the angels in heaven, dancing with them as they rejoiced in their coming to the Lord. And it great how you have this modern contemporary example of the full circle of mission strategy. I thought it was really, really great and helpful. Anybody want to make any comments or questions about the video you'd like to make? Yes, I do. You know, like a lot of that lost real time footage. The entire first video is, you know, after it was all done, they went back later and made a year or so, made the whole video that was all dramatization reenacting what had happened. The second video, all that second section was actual footage of the reply. If you want to get into the actual footage. From then on it was actually footage from the thing that they edited down to a. Now, you know, when you watch this, obviously when that happens and the breakthrough is so dramatic, it's so powerful. And as I pointed out many times, it doesn't happen this way so rapidly. We've had in India so many examples of, you know, sometimes just amazing breakthroughs. We just can't believe it. And in times where, you know, things are just so slow. And so it's hard to predict. But in this particular case, God had prepared the way and they were prepared and ready to receive the gospel. And what a great thing it was. And I love the second and first video where they show the breakthrough, how she's remembering the show, remembering the words that were spoken. You know, you'll never make a missionary.

[00:01:55] You're too fossilized. And, well, I just want to just stay home there. They're better off where they are. All those excuses as we go to the ministry, you'll find, especially today in today's climate, a huge, just huge number of excuses and challenges we made. And part of what we is, is the people of God have to show the resolve to obey God and to take seriously the great gift of salvation and the necessity of bringing the gospel. Those who have not heard. And I think Mark Desert is a great example of that. I think it's inspiring, too, to see that. Okay. We'll take a brief break and come back and start off in our lectures. John Yelverton wisely, I think sensitively said that it would be completely appropriate in light of the video that we offer some prayers of Thanksgiving for God's work among the smoke. And I guess by symbolically, by implication, by God's work around the world for people who maybe even now as we speak, are hearing the gospel for the first time. And obviously those who have not yet have access to the gospel. So what we'll do is take a few moments for prayers to be lifted up spontaneously as you feel led. Just a few brief sentence prayers and then I'll close. So please, as the Lord leads, you offer prayers of Thanksgiving. Our petition. What is thank you for. Knowledge. His faith in the Lord and knowing the next step. Thank you for the hearts of. Lord, we thank you for an opportunity to catch a glimpse of one small part of the world and your ministry and work there through your servant, Mark Zook and others who are praying for him and trusting God's work, your work through his life and the ministry there of his family.

[00:03:53] We thank you, Lord, for your grace in our lives these days, to learn and to reflect. We pray that you would use all of this in our lives to help us be more effective. And we do pray that you would give us obedient hearts and loving hearts and compassionate hearts and all that we do. We ask in Jesus name, Amen. I found missions, you know, just my own experience to be what really helped me to understand and make sense of my whole seminary experience. Because when I was a graduate from Gordon Conwell in 1984 and I spent the next six years, really the next ten, but with some interruption of further studies, but basically next ten years as a pastor. And to be quite honest with you, when I went to the meetings of other we all had these mandatory meetings of all the pastors of the dominant get together and whatever else, and we met every month total. Most of the discussion was about the low salaries we were receiving and the inadequacy of the pension plan. I'm telling you the truth. It was very discouraging for me during all that. Even those years, I was always going to India every year for six weeks a year at least. And I am. I go to India and I would have these gatherings of pastors, you know, similar type thing that they were involved with there. And the main point of discussion was how can we plant more churches and how can we best move the gospel forward among our people? I was just, you know, to me, very dramatic, powerful experience to see what's on the mind of pastors. I hope you don't have that experience if you graduate. And I'm not at all saying that's necessarily normative.

[00:05:39] That was just my experience. But I found that from my life, at least when I began to be more and more involved in India, I began to see the real power of theological studies for me really came alive. It took that contextualization of it for me to really make sense of it all, to understand how theology applied to real life situations. And it wasn't just something I studied and learned and parroted back with something that really made a big difference. And we spent a lot of time reflecting even today on the theological implications of decisions that we're making about church planning or training people and all the rest. And every day I value and praise God for my Gordon Conwell education. But it took getting out into the field to make it real in ways that I it did not happen for me as a pastor. And I had a wonderful pastorate, wonderful people, and God blessed our ministry. But I just for me, the experience that Mark Zook had it to me is just such a fabulous way to really see how the gospel story can be applied in a real life situation in a way that's that's really wonderful. One of the things that we do here at Gordon Conwell is offer the Overseas Missions Practicum. And I really do believe and I say this not because I believe it, because students who've gone on it have repeatedly said this in their evaluations over the over the years, that it is the best contextualized learning experience of their seminary career is not necessarily the most, you know, download of knowledge they had in the seminary career or most information they learned. But the best contextualized experience of applying what they learned to a real life situation.

[00:07:15] And that's a really a great way to learn. And I think I would highly encourage you to consider that even if you're a pastor, it's just good to have that kind of a missions internship. Okay, let's move to the presentation here. I would like this maybe to be rather quick. This in the past has been more of an extensive part of the class. But have I took time to write all this out and publish it? And it's now part of your reason reading. So the substance of this lecture has been published in the Journal and it's in the library and in the preserved section. I've made, I think, five copies that can be circulated in reserve. There are a number of slides and all the of course, can't be shown in that article. The article kind of just flushes it all out and there are a few comments I want to make that are not in the article, but at least gives you some background for what we cover. And the reason I do this is I think it's helpful to kind of summarize what are some of the major issues that we face in our particular contexts of missions. We were looking at this point, kind of missions in general, kind of historically what's been happening and some of the theological challenges and all the rest. But I think for a class like this, it's also helpful to summarize what are the things that you need to know and therefore to communicate to your church. So I'll go through this briefly and then this will lead us to a lot more discussion about as a pastor, the ways you can promote missions in your church and strategy as well as if you were to become a missionary.

[00:08:52] What is the pathway that gets you from where you are now, will say to the mission field. It's a little bit more exotic and kind of some of the challenges, but we need kind of go through that process. Number one, the first point that I make is the rise of the non-Western church. This is a huge factor that we have to take into consideration. We often thought of the church as prominent, predominantly somebody from the Western world in a traditional kind of church structure going over to India and preaching the gospel to someone who is worshiping Hindu idols. And what we're seeing today is that the kind of movement of missions from the west to the east is no longer the dominant model of missionary activity. Now, that's does not meant to say that the Western role of sending missionaries is now so diminished per se. But it's just now we're being joined by Indigenous sending ministries around the world. So this is a this is a good thing. We're seeing the rise of the Western church. Let me show you some statistics. If you look at this chart, you'll see that the blue represents what we call northern Christianity. This would be the northern continents, southern Christianity, it would be the southern continents, Latin America, Africa, Southern Asia. And what you can obviously see is that how dramatically different the world look in 1900 and the year 2000. And you can see that the predominance of northern Christianity is being displaced quite rapidly by the vigorous growth of the non-Western church, mainly in the southern continents. If it's broken down continent icons that you can see there's particularly strong growth in Latin America, which is the top and Africa at the bottom, where we've already talked about in this class.

[00:10:50] Briefly, some of the dramatic changes. We're also seeing some progress in Asia. You can see the dramatic decline in terms of overall percentage of Christian adherents in Europe and North America, which I put as a single block here as a percent of overall Christianity. So the other way, this has been really well documented, and Philip Jenkins new book, The Next Christendom The Coming of Global Christianity, it's a book that's now became the number one bestseller on the New York Times bestsellers list and has finally kind of hit the larger consciousness about this has been talked about in mission circles for at least ten, 12 years, maybe more, 15 years, these trends. But it's only in the last year or so that this has been really published a lot in the secular media. This is an open up book of suppressed book, and it's been very widely received. And in fact, this past ETS, Evangelical Theological Society in Atlanta, Dr. Levin, myself, both gave papers on the book, various reactions to different parts of his thesis, and then he was there. He's a lecturer in a secular university, and he came and responded to our response to his book. It was a really quite remarkable time, well tended lecture. So it's not really a missions event. And yet there was a lot of interest in what's happening in the theological implications of this, because theologically we have to also realize that the normative theology in the entire Reformation period until the present has been Western theology. So now you're seeing. Theologies arise from the non-Western church and has important implications for the whole Christian community. This is actually broken down continent by continent. More specifically, you can see the shifts there. The non-Western church has been on the rise.

[00:12:51] We've actually showed this earlier. Is currently now. This is a theory of the Protestants. You can see that the non-Western Protestants represent 67% of global Christianity. Most Christians today are from nonwhite races. That's a big kind of exploding of the kind of the stereotype. Evangelical Christian is growing the fastest in the southern continents South America, Africa and southern Asia. This is the growing edge not just of Christian in general, but of evangelical Christianity. This is a vibrant Christianity. And as I mentioned yesterday, two of the largest populations are found, surprisingly, in Brazil and China. Two very different economic and political environments and two very different continents. Obviously, that says a lot. This has given a lot of implications for global partnerships because today we are now in a situation where we're not, quote, going over there to do ministry. We're also often linking up with indigenous groups, even in North India, where we have the greatest number of unreached people groups in any country in the world, as you saw in the graph yesterday. All of our work in India has been done in cooperation with other Indians from other people groups just like Mark did with even though they began to learn other languages, cross-cultural boundaries, it's still often better to use national Indigenous people. It isn't always, by the way, to your advantage there sometimes. It's very, very difficult to use people from within the country for all kinds of cultural reasons. So it's a matter of discernment, what's best. But global partnerships is really, really important. We go as learners as well as teachers are appreciated. The videos reflect on that point that whenever you're really involved in any real frontline gospel work, you're always amazed at what you learn and how your own presuppositions about ministry are exposed.

[00:14:54] And I had this happen to me so many times in India where I'm working with church planters and they make observations about things or they bring something to the table that, you know, I never thought about. But it is so insightful because of their experience and their perspective that maybe mine has been clouded over by kind of all the avalanche of material that I have had that maybe keep me from seeing certain things. So I don't think I've ever been to India and come back saying, well, I taught and gave more than I received. I think that it's always a situation where you feel like you've gained more and you have gone away a much richer person, and that's the way any authentic ministry will be. In fact, my own my own belief about mission sending is that every continent should be a sending and receiving continent. I think that's actually healthy and good. I don't see the day when North America will be out of the sending business or out of the receiving business. I think actually a healthy church should be a sending church and a receiving church. So I see the day when every mega sphere will be healthily sending missionaries as well as receiving missionaries. We have situations here in America where we need help to reach certain pockets of people. In our case, it's mostly people in immigrant populations in North America that are not in a really good access situation. There are many ways where people from other countries can help us in that regard and other people groups, but also continue to send. I mentioned we're now seeing Brazilians, for example, go into the Muslim world with great effectiveness. They look a lot like Muslims in some way.

[00:16:44] They share certain features in their ethnicity with Muslims, and they've been very effective at learning Arabic. And they have a lot of energy and they because they don't have a white face, it takes away some of the challenges. I mean, I was really, really disturbed. I won't mention the church, but a church that I know of made a, you know, I think a valid point in their mission strategy. We want to target the 1040 window. Okay, That's fine. I understand that. But what was so amazing was one of our graduates went to the church and asked for support for this particular church. He was not going to the 1040 window. He was going to Latin America. They turned him down even though he had been there for many, many years. And I was really disturbed because I knew and he had articulated this to them, but the reason he was going to Latin America was to train Latinos for sending out the 1040 window. And that was the reason he was going there. So the whole purpose of his ministry was actually to help to train and to mobilize the Latin American church to go into 1041. No. Occasionally I lose my ID like more than occasionally, but I sent a rather brusque, rather stern letter to the church and I said to them, I want the whole thing. I said, You know, here we are in the post-9-11 world. Do you really think that Americans are most likely people to bring the gospel of the Muslim world? Have you thought about the implications of Latin Americans for going in temporary window? It had never dawned on them that Latin Americans would be even thinking about the 1041. No. That's why we have to get away from this idea of, you know, one window, only one window that we have to look at the whole world and see how all this works together.

[00:18:38] So they change their position. They're supported him. He's now happily working in Latin America, training for the 1040 window president we have south in the north. And there's another one that goes Meet the radar, because in many of the missionary statistics, when they look at how many countries are sending out missionaries, they still are bound by this geographic thing. They say, well, you know, how many countries send missions out of their borders? So there are 12,000 Koreans outside of South Korea, for example. That's wonderful. But what about an Indian who leaves kith and kin and home and Kendra and everything in south India goes to north India, learns other language, learns and learns more food, different food, everything. That is a messy, logical transition, even though it's within India. So we have to learn to appreciate that. And this is the work I'm involved in and I'm very familiar with that whole movement, and that represents probably 25 to 50000 Indians are in that ministry. And overall, in the whole whole of India that are doing that. So that's a lot of people to discount Russians going to Central Asia. Then another really exciting development that we're seeing Russia preaching the gospel because their linguistic abilities in Russia have been very, very helpful to Muslim peoples who knew Russian because of the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. And then the Koreans are everywhere. Praise the Lord for the Koreans. They have been tremendously helpful in the global church and have shown so much the church, how people can be involved in mission. And the Koreans are all over India, too. And it's amazing, inspiring to see the commitment the Koreans bring to the task. And we've seen Koreans and Brazilians arrested in India and North India.

[00:20:35] And just the last year that I've been there, both Koreans and Brazilians arrested in North India. The Brazilian brother was jailed for quite some time, but eventually released for preaching the gospel in North India. They're prepared to suffer for the gospel sake, and it's been really, really profound to see that. So what we're seeing is the rise of the non-Western missionary interest and statistics to show you how dramatic this is changing that. Now we have 150,000. Protected over 200,000 non-Western missionaries. That's how they got to 2010. And I still do not think this is adequately counting some of the in-country cultural targeting that's going on. So we're talking about a very dramatic rise so that the non-Western missionary far outnumbers now the Western missionary. So this is, again, blowing away some of the conceptions. But going back to lesson one and 74, one of the statements that was made there that has now become prophetic is the statement. It takes the whole church to bring the whole Christ into the whole world. And I think that's exactly what I advocate in this idea of every continent being a sending and a receiving continent. We're not looking at a situation where we're going to finally step back and just write checks. I don't believe that we've got to continue sending personnel. There are many, many ways that we can contribute to the task, and we have to have the courage not only to empower everyone else in the world, but to empower ourselves and not feel like that we're somehow or another should be excuse ourselves. I never forget the Gambian scholar Lemon Sonia, who's now at Yale, who wrote this very powerful article some years ago called The Western Missionary Guilt Complex. And he basically talks about when he was a young boy, he became convinced of the truth of the gospel.

[00:22:39] And he went to the missionary, the equivalent who, I'm sorry to say, was a United Methodist missionary, which is my denomination. And he went to the man said to him, I'm convinced that Christianity is true. And we baptized. And the missionary said to him, Oh, no, you don't. You know, you are being influenced da da da da. And you should just stay with your own belief system. It really bothered him. So he came. He kept coming back. And finally the missionary said to them, okay, if you still believe this way, in six months, I'll baptize you. So six When I came back, he says, I am convinced, Please baptize me. And very reluctantly, he baptized. Lemon Sunday. He's become a great Christian leader from The Gambia. Now, Watson asks, why was this man so reluctant to baptize me? That really, really struck him. Why was someone at such good news so reluctant to spread it? And one of the reasons he determined one of many reasons. There are all kinds of reasons, of course, but one of the reasons was because he had this inherent guilt complex as it propagated in modern society, that somehow missionaries are guilty of every evil that's ever been propagated anywhere in the world. And therefore, we have the tone this by saying essentially that we have no message to share with anybody. And this is something you have to resist because historically it doesn't bear it out. And. LEMON Sunny has written a number of books on this theme, the best of which is called Translating the Message The Missionary Impact on Culture. A great analysis of the actual contributions of missions to culture. And then this video today, I think, showed that the perceptions of tribal peoples and the reality.

[00:24:27] He brings up quite well. So we want we want to make sure we recognize how God is still calling the Western church to be involved around the world. The second one, I think, comes out through this picture. Again, this is not to distance ourselves from video, but just simply to say this kind of picture and even the video we saw does reinforce certain ideas about the mission field. And I found this idea persisting very strongly in the church because people think about missionaries going to some tribal area and somebody with a bone in their nose or people around a campfire with spears. But that is not the predominant mission field today. Now, neutrons mission, to their credit. That's their focus. That's what they work with. They said that's our mission statement to focus on tribal peoples in the world so that they don't have urban ministry. But if you go to the larger work of missions among across the board, you'll find that urban ministry, urban missions is much more dramatic today. And this. Is the real another important face of the mission field. We have to look at that as a mission field every bit as much as we see that. And I think that's a very important thing, by the way. Anybody recognize what city that is or what river that is? That is the Nile. And that's a picture of Cairo, one of the great gateway cities of the Muslim world. You can see that where Moses floated on the bow rushes there and Pharaoh's daughter came down there. It is just a lot has happened since then. But the urban context of missions is really, really important. If you look at statistics, the world's population in 1800, only three and a half to 4% of the entire world lived in urban areas.

[00:26:38] That's the world that William Carey knew. But look how dramatically this is changing so that today we're actually this this next year passing that 50% mark that the majority of people will live in urban areas. Now that is simply an empirical fact that must penetrate our consciousness about unreached peoples. That's why I had you learn these great cities of the world in this past exam, because places like Tashkent and places like Jakarta, Mumbai, these are huge, sprawling cities with many, many millions. And I really encourage you to go onto the World Christian database and click on the top 25 cities, most public cities in the world, and you'll see that there is not a single European city on there anymore. So we have to really see that this is one of the great facts of your lifetime, is the urbanization of the non-Western world. And these are largely in massively non-Christian cities. And therefore, if you have a heart for urban ministry, this is a great a great opportunity for you. The third. Yes. I'm sorry. What constitutes an urban area? A population. Density. I don't actually know the the criteria they use, but you will find this often in literature different ways. They determine how to define an urban area and it is usually torn in terms of numbers of people within a certain area. Todd Johnson can tell you exactly, because this is his area of him. I can't remember exactly where that line is drawn, but it's definitely the sure numerics and people per square mile. Okay. Let's continue on the for the third point, just reinforce what we've already said. Let's come back later and discuss how to work with churches. But I really think that when mission boards and I think by implication later church, local church as well, when they allocate money, they've got to really think about this access and viability question.

[00:28:46] I think these are two really important criteria and it needs to find a way to filter down into our decision making process. And I'll mention this in the article, that's why I would say it now. One of the tragedies of missions today, in my view, is that missions is often driven by donors rather than by good theology. So smile, come and say to a board or to the church, I want to give money so that someone can go doing that, go do this or that. So in a sense, the church is held hostage to a gift. This happens in all kinds of ministries. It's a challenge that we have to find a way to deal with as a church, because what happens is the donors are all giving from very positive, let's just say, you know, wonderful motives, but they haven't really been trained or to think about things more theologically. So they assume that what they're giving money to is the is the best, you know, is a good thing, and therefore, we ought to promote it. And so the church has a hard time establishing policies that really direct their program in the right direction. And I would try to show you later ways the church can do this and some examples of how policies might work. But I think two criteria that should be way up there is access. How I define these access means do these people groups have reasonable access to the Christian message? Again, I don't care if it's in Queens, New York, or if it's in Tashkent. Do they have reasonable access to the gospel message? That's important question. And again, the data that's available now on the Internet to find out where is the Jesus film, who has able translations.

[00:30:33] I could very quickly show you statistics that show you exactly what people groups have The Bible. Which ones have portions? Which ones have none? That's very valuable information. We use it all the time in our ministry. This is practical information. You're looking at who has access to the radio or radio broadcast in their language. All of these questions come in to help us to determine access and then viability. This is the 5% rule. Can the existing national church be reasonably expected to evangelize and disciple new believers? If you have 50,000 per million, that's kind of the guideline that we've been talking about. Again, the World Christian database. You can find out how many exactly how many known Christians or in any people group of the world. You can find that out and find out. Do we have 50,000 per million? Do we have 5%? It must be done through people. Group one another. Another church, A large church in this state established a mission policy a few years ago. They said, we are not going to send a missionary to any country that has more than 5% Christian. Wow. That sounds like a tremendous commitment to frontier missions. I said, okay, great. Take our mission out of India. Like what? That's because according to that criteria, you take it because India is now over 5% Christian. The problem is all the Christians in India are virtually all completely caught in two states in the south or over in the northeast tribal area of India. So the whole of north India is, you know, 0.01 100th of 1%. But if you look at the country as a whole, India has about 5% Christians. So you have to ask it on the base of people groups, because if you look at Ghana, you look at any of these countries, you'll see there's tremendous differences within the country, just like there is in the US, between the access of a Western European immigrant to the US that's been here for ten generations and a newly arrived immigrant from China into North America.

[00:32:44] There are differences, big differences in access and viability. Fourth one This is the one that I promised you we would look at, and I finally we're getting to it. Short term missions is the best thing and the worst thing that's ever happened to the local church. Let's talk about best things and worst things. Let me first talk about some positive things and then I want to talk about some what I call the six dangerous questions we need to ask in short term missions. I would say a great number of you have already been on short term missions. Let's just take a straw poll here. This this is Iowa. How have you been on a short term missions trip some time in your life? Okay. How many of you have been on a short term missions trip outside the US? Just make sure we're okay. So a lot of you have have had short term mission experience. Okay. I think that says a lot right there. This is something that's very, very common in the church today. So what are some advantages? Some positive points? I don't think I mentioned any of this in the article, but this is certainly to be celebrated that short term missions has provided direct missions involvement, not just seen the US as a provider of funds. And I really appreciate that basic emphasis. People relocating to enter into relationships with other people. That's the incarnation. The Trinity, the great Triune God sends the Son into the world to cross boundaries, to enter into relationship with other people. That's the basic paradigm of any missionary work in search of missions mirrors that. I think it has been proven to be a vision building experience, especially for so-called Generation X and Y, which have been apparently statistically very much more experientially oriented in their learning process.

[00:34:44] They just don't want to hear about something theoretical. They want to roll up their sleeves and do something. And that's the way they learn. That's very, very good. Short term missions provides that. It's been very effective in recruitment for long term service. It's very, very rare today that someone like William Kerry did becomes a long term missionary, not having had a short term mission experience. So this is often the way in which people get motivated and understand they might could be useful in this regard and God speaking to them. My great exception to this is my dear colleague Doug Birdsall, who is the best modern day example of how this not always true. He was a Gordon Conwell, was a graduate. He had never thought about missions, never had left the US, as he says. He had never even been to Canada. He had never, never, you know, did that little daily trip across Mexico. You go there and look for switchblades and come back. He never. Hope you appreciate that. But I know that's what I did when I went to Mexico the first time I went over there and I said, What can I buy a switchblade? You know, because we couldn't get them over here. And of course, the sombrero hat and all that OC hadn't even in Mexico, hasn't ever crossed the border. So he is in his last semester of Gordon Conwell, where he was applying for a pastorate of a church, I think in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. One, you have to ask him. I don't say for sure, but somewhere there and he found out somewhere in the process of being the senior pastor that they had 30 applicants for the job. For this one solo pastor it and it really, really struck him.

[00:36:29] Here I am in a situation where if I don't take this job, there'll be a 29th or 28. We know there's a lot of people prepared to do this job. And he remembered the class he had that Dr. Wilson taught. My predecessor, who had talked about Japan and the need in Japan, and he decided he felt compelled to go to Japan. Because he saw all these opportunities that were not being filled. And he is like the worst that Wilson is, to use the analogy said. It's like you have ten people carrying and this is statistically accurate, by the way, you have ten people carrying a telephone pole in the mission is to carry the telephone pole from this building over to the the care building. So they go out. There are nine people at one end and one poor bloke is trying to suffer on the other end. And so here you are, you feel called to help in this cause of spreading the gospel guidance symbolically by the. So you went outside, you see, not on one end and one on the other. Where do you go. Well the amazing thing is everybody's going to help the nine and that's basically what's happening statistically. So this really bothered him and he said, I'm going to go to Japan. And he spent the next 25 years in Japan before he came back here to Gordon Conwell to help us and our missions work here. He went to Japan, having never been on a short term missions experience. How about that for inspiration and boldness? But anyway, for most of us mortals, normal short term missions is a great way of getting your feet wet and kind of thinking about long term missionary service. It's an expression of global partnership and mutual accountability that's quite powerful.

[00:38:11] The relationships that are developed are wonderful, and that's one of the biggest advantages of it. And five, it's been very helpful, particularly for special projects that you could not you know, you can't really have ongoing ministries involved in that. For example, the Olympics. There are always some really wonderful outreaches that happen just during the Olympics that I don't know how they can be done except the short term missions. It's just a ministry that would go undone. The Hajj. This is the Muslim annual trip to Mecca. There are a number of ministries that are at the port cities that will give out literature as the Muslims pass over to North Africa and across to Saudi Arabia. So this is a great ministry in places like Spain and other places that are at those critical points of travel, national parks, all kinds of ministries and other places where you can have ministries during the summer where internationals are coming to the US for to see the Grand Canyon or whatever. It's a great way to connect with people. And so there's some things that just I don't know how they can be done except this short term mission. So I have a lot of appreciation for short term missions. I do think, though, that as leaders of the church, we need to have the honesty among ourselves to recognize that short term missions has not been without problems. And we ought to have the maturity to ask tough questions about short term missions. And I want to just mention a few of these here today. The first is what is the goal or motivation of short term missions? This needs to be asked in every church. At a some committee meeting when you were talking about missions.

[00:40:00] What is the goal of this? Is this something for them? Is this for us? Are we going to India or Haiti or wherever may be? Is this whole thing for the purpose of helping our youth group become more interested in in the world or whatever? Is this for us primarily, or is this for some particular task that we're going to do? Are we there to recruit? Is this some kind of partnership? We need be very honest about the goals. And I think that there is nothing wrong with saying that this trip is primarily for spiritual formation in our young people's lives. Okay. Let's just state that. It's a bit insulting for missionaries who are on the field who see someone pop in for two weeks, who have the plan to go over to India and plant and help plant churches. They don't know where the language is, the difficult thing. So we need to be more honest about the limitations of short term missions and what the actual goals of it are. In our case of our own program, we're trying to link the short term mission with long term objectives. So if the church had a church planning ministry, you know, in Bulawayo or in wherever, that would be something you could send short termers there to gain the vision. You would say up front, The purpose of this is to help our young people gain a vision for this ministry. But we recognize it's not the ministry yet, it's the preparatory part of that. So. Gordon Conwell We have goals like church planning on the Sean people. We want Gordon Conwell graduates to plant a church on the Sean and unreachable group with no viable church. The result is we have to send short term teams there every year in order to bring up these laborers.

[00:41:46] So that's how a short term missions can connect with a longer term ministry. Number two, what is the cost of short term missions? We have to also be very well aware of this. And this is where church committees have got to ask tough questions about their their budget, because, again, what happens is churches will say today 10% of our budget is going to missions or 20% or whatever. But when you actually look at their budget, you'll find out that a growing portion is as being part of supporting the short term missions program. So what we are seeing is a trend, a tragic trend, in my view, is taking money away from your long term missionaries to support a short term missions program, even though your long overall budget is growing in missions. And my point of view, that's a shrinking missionary budget because you cannot rob from your main thrust to feel this. It's not right. But also just in terms of sheer cost, if you look at what is the cost that it takes to send a young person to Malawi and back for two weeks, okay, The cost of the plane ticket is going to be around 1400 dollars, especially going to summertime and high season. So you're talking about 1400 dollars minimum round trip cost of the flight. And then you have probably $9,000 of various expenses based on how long it is for food transportation within the country. Shots, visas, passports, all that. So you're looking at a church or people within the church putting out $2,500 for someone to have an experience for two or three weeks in Malawi. Okay, Now, that's an important consideration. Now you look and say, okay, what if we were to give the National Church $2,500? What could they do with that money? We would be amazed what they could do.

[00:43:46] That money now in India. And please hear me out before you reach conclusions on where I'm going here. But I'm just saying that in India, for example, we can support a full time church planning for about $50 a month. We can support translators, full time translators for 60 $70 a month. And with all kinds of ways, that money can go a long way. So you can say even if one person were to give that money, you could fund a whole year of ministry. Now, I don't think that argument is valid to put us in the situation of just staying home, writing checks. I do think we need to be very sober about the cost of it and make sure that that cost is worth the investment. Now, if you have like an hour program here, if you have we've sent three teams to Thailand in the last three years. Of those three teams, we now have three of our graduates or current students who are either have gone full time to Thailand or are in the process of applying to be full time insured in Thailand. So you have three workers that's well worth the money. That's well worth it. If you can generate laborers, long term laborers, then the $2,000 is one of the best investment you can ever make. It can be a very good investment, but we need to be clear about how the short term mission is connecting to our long term goals and vision and so forth. And if it's just coming and going back, it ends up almost being like Christian vacationing. And I don't want to ask someone to give me money to go on a vacation. That's not right. So we need to think about how this connects with it.

[00:45:36] I'm just asking hard questions and not to be critical of certain missions. I just think we need to ask difficult questions. Yes, Greg. I think the church is understanding that over the Christmas break or summer vacation are set. Yes, absolutely. And one of these I'll make recommendations later on. We get to some of the nuts and bolts of local church missions work. I would recommend that no young person be approved to go on a short term missions trip outside the US unless they first perform some kind of service project in their own community. Because I feel like there's a mentality that says that somehow when you when the plane lifts off, you will transform into this great servant of God. When you hit the tarmac out of the country, that sanctification just comes all over you. So if we're not prepared to serve in our own community, why should we invest and think that's a likelihood they'll serve cross-culturally? So I think we can make expectation of our church, our young people, and say, okay, we're going to go out and winterize homes this fall. And unless you are part of this when rising of homes, then for elderly or whatever, then you won't be eligible to go on the short term missions trip. As a pastor, you have the right to insist on that kind of thing with your church committee and say we need to have some accountability and make sure it's not just, oh, let's all go to Malawi. And then I've mentioned more later. So those kind of things need to be weighed out. I don't think you need to give young people a big guilt trip about this and say, oh, gosh, it's costing so much. You realize what they could do with the money.

[00:47:10] I'm saying in the leadership committee, you know, the pastor sitting down with their committee, you've got to talk about these things and it needs to be open and discussed. The third dangerous question is where are we sending our young people? Now, this is where it gets difficult, because what happens is there's a growing disparity between the people groups. To whom our long term missionary work is directed and where our short termers go is very typical. And it's mainly for financial reasons. We'll say a church says, okay, we really want to see missions come up in Istanbul. We want to see churches punished and those that are within our long term commitments, we want to see work in them. Heart of the Muslim world in Istanbul. Great. I think that's a wonderful thing. But they're short term missions trip their same students to Haiti, to Honduras. Because it's relatively cheap to go from the US to Haiti or Honduras. And if we can do it, you know, very efficiently and all the rest. So what happens is it goes down to Haiti and Honduras. That's their experience. And it does not at all connect them to the ministry in Istanbul. So this is another way of actually playing tough. I think we have to be able to say to our committees, if you go on a short term missions trip, it must be demonstratively shown how that connects to our long term goals. Just like you wouldn't ask a student to come to a course here and take Greek one or church history one or whatever. They kind of your beginning courses without showing how that will somehow connect to the longer goals of the seminary and your education here. You can't do hermeneutics. You can't take exit Jesus of Matthew unless you have the basic tools you need.

[00:48:59] That's part of the process that's involved in effectively training somebody. So if we're treatment missionaries, we need to think of the same way. So if it costs more, so be it. We have to maybe do fewer numbers or whatever. But the amazing thing I found is that you'd be surprised how the cost is not that much different. It's not as bad as you think. I found in my own pay program that the most expensive trip we have to to work out the budget, though our teams are all the same cost because of our own kind of priorities, how we do it. But the Costa Rica trip is far more expensive than going to Istanbul or to even to north India. North End is one of our most reasonably budgeted trips because when you come with me, I make you suffer enough. But we need to ask, where are we going? How it's committed in Honduras has suffered, suffered, suffered over this. They don't realize it, but anybody who studies the church in Honduras will tell you that the church there has suffered through the onslaught of short term teams coming down to you're actually harming the long term viability of the Honduran church because they develop dependency relationships on the Western churches for everything in their church life, building buildings or everything else. So we sent a youth group down to put a tin roof on a church, and we're trying to train people to plant churches where you can't build a building in Izmir, Turkey. I don't see the coherence of that. So we need to ask these questions again once we decide where we're going in if it is Honduras for various reasons. Great. Be excited. Preach it boldly. Go for it. But in that decision making process, we've got to ask these hard questions for what is the witness of short term missionaries? I've seen this on the other end of being on the field and seeing the teams come.

[00:50:57] I have hosted dozens of teams from the US and mostly actually older teams, you know, church members not I haven't had a lot of expendable youth group type groups, but I know from experience talking missionaries that this is a problem. You have a young person who comes mission field who has not been properly briefed about cultural differences, especially, I mean, the two things that come to mind immediately would be dress appropriate dress. And to interaction between male and female. So a person goes with a good heart to go serve over there, but they don't realize they're being watched. And our culture has a very free relationship between male and female, and you can get around and hug each other. And all that is kind of part of the youth group culture. But it can be shocking. I mean, shocking. I'll never forget in India, one year when a young lady came in, she was so hot, was brutally hot and completely unthinkingly, she wore what we call like a tank top. I think that's a term for it, like a sleeveless shirt. In India, a woman from the US and she was leading singing, she was playing guitar, whatever. And I mean, I the minute I saw up there, I said, Oh, no. And it was so scandalizing that this first lady worship that it would be the only cultural cover I can imagine is if you were in your church service waiting for church to begin and a woman came forward to lead the worship in the nude. I mean, the shock. That's the only equivalent. That's how shocked they were. I couldn't believe it because in India, you do not you can expose your midriff in India because of the saris. That's okay.

[00:52:44] But you don't expose your arms. You don't expose your head that this is just a hole visually. And she was leading worship. Our promises. You didn't know better. I mean, it wasn't like she was like, Oh, I'm going to burst the bonds of, you know, female shackling in India. No, I mean, this girl would've been happy to to wear more modest clothing. She's never been told properly. She was just passing through. You know, India and I was there that day and I saw it. And there's so many examples of this. So we need to talk about our witness, because in most of these cases, the witness of short term teams is not so much in what you accomplish. We went over there and we distributed this literature. We taught this class. We put a tin roof on a church, whatever. It's actually your own relationships, your interactions. They're watching you there, observing you. And if we can focus on this, it's a really important thing. Five What is the impact on field resources and personnel? If we do send a short term missions trip, we need to make sure we really, really take care of the expenses of that trip. I have seen this over and over again. Train a team arrives. They expect to be taken all over to all the places, the tourist places as well, and all the different things. So in our case, we have to go out and rent. We don't have vehicles to carry teams around. We just don't have we can't afford vehicles like that. So we have to go out and we have to rent vehicles. So someone comes in to Delhi, okay, we have to go out, pick them up in Delhi, bring them back to the YMCA, the cheapest hotel in Delhi, put in the YMCA for the night.

[00:54:23] The next morning they get up. There's no train at all. The planes arrive in India between 1130 and 2:00 in the morning, so they come in at that time period. We put them up for a few hours. The train leaves at 7:00 the next morning to go to Dehradun. That's a five hour train ride, which by American standards is very cheap, maybe $20, but for Indian money it's a lot of money. So we put ten people on a train to Dehradun they travel up there with they have another van up there in the front to pick them up and bring them into the campus because it's too far. You can't get like rent 12 rickshaws. You know, you've got to have some way to coherently bring a group. When you really get down to it, you actually look at the cost of it. You know, it's not that much money actually by American staff, but by Indian standards, it's a lot of money. And it can really shut down our minister. We have months. We can't pay our faculty their salary. So when you look at a team come in, we want to serve the team. We want to help them out. But we have to also realize that it's not cheap for us to host a team. Now, in the vast majority of cases, churches are aware of this and they're generous and they are able to meet with the leaders and find out what are the actual cost. But there are a number of groups that are not sensitive to this and actually create financial impairment to the ministries because they visited. We should never do. That's wrong. So I think we need to realize the impact. Another thing we realize is that here we are involved in a church planning ministry.

[00:55:56] A team comes to see our work, which is important, and we view it as part of our long term work is raising another generation of leaders. But for the six weeks that you're there, two weeks that you're there, or however long the trip may be to wherever I say in India, anywhere, they are suspending their normal activity to be with you. And that's a really important sacrifice they've made. Because they have their own ministries. When we send teams to Cairo, we've had to really work around when's the best time to send a team because their field personnel are having to suspend their normal work to receive the team and be with the team, especially to get the younger, younger groups that require a lot more care and oversight than it really does. It can completely suspend their ministry in the case of the Olympic program. We purposely say up front, when we do the negotiations with our partners, we are not task oriented. We don't need to go over to country or place people X and accomplish some task. This is an internship. We want to be brought alongside whatever you're already doing so that our and our mission interns can see what actual mission life is like, not just have false projects being created while you're there. And that's to be helpful. But there are also many ways on the other side of the coin where we bring people in from the outside to India to do things we just simply don't have time to do. They've been very helpful. I mean, our library, for example, all the like categorization of books and scanning barcodes and all that, that's a lot of time consuming stuff. And we're so every one of our professors is also an administrator.

[00:57:36] So you have someone who's a full time professor and they're like the registrar. You can imagine, you know, they're the president of our seminary, is also the professor of New Testament. You know, this is really difficult to have the kind of burdens of caring administratively and teaching. And so things like barcoding books, you know, it's a it gets put off. And so we've had teams come in and help us with those kind of task. And that's been a good thing and it helps us in our resources. So those are questions we need to ask. What is the real cost to them? And you may say, well, you know, that trip up to Dehradun is only ten bucks. That's not a big deal. Don't worry about it. But you may not realize it for them, $10 is right now ₹480. And that's like 480 bucks, you know, I mean, it's a lot of money, practically speaking for us. Finally, what is the impact of short term missions on long term missions? This is the point that I've made all around. We need to find a way to connect our short term missions program with our long term strategies and goals. That's why on the front of our Olympic brochure, it says short term missions, that long term strategy and I think it's a good thing to be aware of in the church to ask the question how is this connected both budgetary wise, making sure we don't rob from long term to pay for short term, but also in terms of objective goals within the field, things that we're doing, where we're going, all these things try to find a way to be cohesive. So all these questions are encouraged are for the purpose of encouraging you to yes, you should have a short term missions program.

[00:59:25] In fact, if you don't, they're going to go somewhere else anyway, so you should have one. It's a great opportunity for the local church come personally involved in missions, but build a short, a smart, short term missions program. Bill one that's smart, that is biblically, theologically solid, and I think can really be used powerfully for the church. Okay, Well, this is important theme. Many of you ask us to make sure we don't neglect it. So we've gone through this. Questions or thoughts about short term missions? Yes. Well, people who do that are normally paying their own way. I mean, this is my experience with I don't know what you're speaking of, but it's a lot of the financial issues, not as much as they are. And so I think a lot of the same questions could be asked in terms of how is that ministry? You know, you have doctors that go and offer their services to a place that has medical problems of medical access. And those are all wonderful things to do, and I highly encourage it. If a person is paying their own way and doing stuff like that, that's one thing. If it's part of a church missions program where they encourage like retired people or anybody to do this regularly, it has to go to the same kind of criteria here. Why are we doing it? What's the impact of it? What's the long term cost of it? How is it going of our long term program? I often compare in if you're from the South, maybe appreciate this. I compare our many mission programs in churches to the houses that I experience as a pastor in North Georgia mountains. What happened is in those houses, they never had architectural plans.

[01:01:08] They just built a room, a one room place to stay. And over the years they kept adding rooms to it. So events when the house was finished, you had this kind of bizarre house where you look out windows and it's another room or, you know, the floors aren't quite level. You know, it was kind of built haphazardly. But, you know, it's it's there. It's a house. A lot of mission programs are like that. Someone comes along, Oh, we ought to do that. Let's do that the next next year. Let's do that. And so when it's all said and done, it looks like some bizarre thing. There was no coherence, nothing thought out. And I think what I'm arguing for is to even if you have disparate things going on, at some point, the church has to look at all of it holistically and ask ourselves some of these difficult questions. And so each of these components would be a part of that. We have three or 4 minutes to answer the questions at short termism. Just two questions. What do you think for short term missions? Would you say more predominantly dominated by teenagers going on? Right. We actually do not know. I mean, I can give you my own gut feeling is this is mainly youth groups and in college students. But I don't really know. No one has ever done an empirical study of short term missions in terms of that kind of data, because the workforce, like a PDA, only tracks what they call short term missions or people that go for less than one term, more than six months. And that would cut out the vast majority of this. So it's something we've talked about it. Dr. Barrett and Todd Johnson are saying they want to get together, some maybe student researchers here to study it globally because it's it needs be study, but no one has can prove for sure who is going.

[01:02:53] We do have statistics on interviewing short termers who come back and feel the impact on missions and on their prayer life. A lot of that's been done kind of people who've gone and come back, but actually knowing for sure who's going on these two week trips. I don't think it's available. Other thought, a second wind beneath Pasteur for the last few years. And almost all the trips are always that churches, the different churches I've worked with are at the focus seems to be getting the students on to mission trips, and they're going adults are going to want to go with. I think that is the trend. Nothing wrong with sending young people to mission field as long as we talk about all these things. But I think we also need to look at how adults can be used as well. A lot of that's just because a sure time and availability of time to go that youth may have, the adults may not have. But I think in either case, they still need to go through this process of these questions because I think even the adults that I've seen in India and other places sometimes make the same mistakes that the youth make. Without knowing it. And also, just to conclude on this point, even preparing them for things they may see, they don't understand. We had a situation a few years ago where we had a person that was clearly demonically oppressed or possessed how you want to language to use who I was preaching the gospel one Sunday morning in this person stood up and began to shout all this demonic stuff. And they they it was a woman. And yet she she was a very small woman, but she was so filled with demonic power that she broke the the bones of people's hands trying to hold her down.

[01:04:40] It took six adult men to hold her down, and they were trying to cast out demons from her while the demons would not leave. It's a long story, but it was really interesting because the faculty met and had a meeting to discuss what they should do, and part of the doctor said we should send her home to her parents because we can deal with her other parts of the world. What does that say to our students? You know, if we tell them, when you have a problem like this, you just send them home. We should shut the school down, pray and fast, and and pray until this woman is delivered. And so, in fact, I thought it's an interesting faculty debate because, you know, I haven't heard that in our faculty, you know. You know, so what happened was they had reached a compromise that they would shut the school down for up to two weeks in prayer for this woman. So we announced the school the next day that we're going on a prayer vigil day and night praying for this woman's deliverance. So the school all classes suspended and they went through this prayer vigil day and night never stopped. So we all we had group prayer for huge sections. And then I had people who volunteer to pray throughout the night and sit with this girl and all this stuff, praying for her deliverance. So the day after it was decided, a team arrived. From Grace Chapel. These are upper middle class people who had never experienced any never been ending their life. Long story short, they arrived there and I had to explain to them what was going on, and they never heard of any out of them in possession, never even in their mind that something happened in the Bible only.

[01:06:18] And the whole thing was just a shock. And they arrived there and to their credit, two or three of them sat up and prayed all through the night with our students. It was really amazing the way they joined into that. And after there was about the third day into it, we were in the middle of this prayer service for this woman and she was sitting there and suddenly this huge shriek came out of her and she fell down like a like a dead person. And she came to completely normal. Completely normal. It was just like the New Testament. And these people, Grace Chapel, we're watching the whole thing. They're like, oh, you know, you don't get this in Lexington now. And they realize, Wow, we're in north India and this is a different world. And this amazing thing about this. Turns out this girl just starting out too late. But real quick to finish the story. She had been involved in the occult prior to coming to Christ. She was a Hindu and she read the occult. And this Muslim man who was in this occult had gotten all involved in this occult activity. And we found in our experience the cultic. Background is the most difficult to deal with in terms of spiritual warfare. So this born out in her situation, we just simply couldn't cast as demon out. It took 200 students, three days of prayer and fasting for it came out. So finally, when she when we we found out that at the same moment. That that demon came out of her. The Muslim man and not because he's a muslim is just that he was just the cultic leader in this whole area in another state of India at that same moment that this statement came out.

[01:08:02] This man collapsed and became insane. Just totally insane. Like he had to be committed to some institution. And this girl has been fine. And she she's we had to work with her, and she actually left school for a short while to kind of recuperate with her family. But she came back. She graduated and is involved in ministry today. Remarkable thing. So prepare your people for what they might experience. Good stuff there.