Faithful to the Church (1984)
Frank Barker and Paul Cedar, Guestsby Gordon MacDonald (mod.)
MacDonald: Across North America there are thousands and thousands of small and large congregations, each led by a man or a woman who is a pastor. These are the people who are going to make it possible for men and women who are called by God to go into missions. They can rally financial and prayer support. Those whom God calls to go need to understand the place of the congregation in their going, at the front end of going as well as at the other end where God will use them to plant the church of Jesus Christ in some cross-cultural or urban or rural situation.
Sitting next to me are two fine pastors. Coming from Birmingham, Alabama, is Dr. Frank Barker, the pastor of the Briarwood Presbyterian Church, and next to me is Dr. Paul Cedar, pastor of the Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena, California. These two men may not look like it, but they combine over fifty years of pastoral experience. Gentlemen, we are all friends. I have listened to both of you preach, and you are pastors of what sometimes are called vigorous, missions-minded congregations. And both of you are considerably responsible for this. Frank, when you look back across the years, what is it that led you as a pastor to become so involved in world evangelization?
Barker: I had a unique experience. I didn't become a Christian until after I was in seminary. I was actually pastoring a church at the time, and when I became a Christian, the change in my own life and the change in. my understanding of the gospel was so dramatic that immediately I knew that everybody in the world needed this too.
Having had an engineering background, I was driven by the sheer logic of the gospel. Either Jesus was God the Son or he wasn't. If he was God the Son, he knew what he was speaking about. He said people were lost apart from him, that the only way that they could be saved was by believing the gospel and committing their lives to him. "Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ" (Rom 10:17). That meant one thing to me. I had to give my life to missions in one way or another.
The second thing was the reading of missionary biographies. I read Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret where he asked God to let him learn to move men to God by prayer alone. And I was stirred by his dealings with God, with God's dealings with him, and by the way God used him in missions. I read William Carey's biography which describes his tremendous passion for missions "Attempt great things for God; expect great things of God." I read about the then recent martyrdom of Jim Elliot in his wife's book Shadow of the Almighty. That happened just about the time I went to seminary. I'll never forget going to my first missions conference which was sponsored by students at that seminary. I was overwhelmed at the stories the missionaries would share about the openness of people in Korea, for instance, and my heart was stirred afresh to make missions the heart of my ministry.
MacDonald: Paul Cedar, where are you in the missions effort? What drives you to make this the central part of your whole ministry?
Cedar: When I was listening to Frank, I realized that God brought me to the same spot through an opposite experience. I grew up in a Christian family and home. My father is a Presbyterian minister. He and my mother are godly people. I received Christ in a youth rally not unlike this one - smaller obviously - but in our local gymnasium in a little town in Minnesota. I became involved in evangelism when I was a boy, and by the time I was seventeen I felt called of God to be an evangelist and possibly a missionary. Many people, such as Billy Graham, affected my life a great deal.
A close missionary friend of my parents used to come to stay with us. He was with the China Inland Mission and had been interred by the Communists in China and then later in Tibet. One time he was staying as our guest in my parents' bedroom next to the one my brother and I shared.
In the middle of the night I was awakened by this strange noise and wondered what it was. It sounded like an animal in pain. And then I recognized that it was our dear friend, George Kraft, praying to God, agonizing in prayer. He had just been released after a couple of years in a Communist prison, and I heard him praying for the people who had imprisoned him. This had a tremendous effect on my life.
Twenty-seven years ago I was at Urbana [57], and God tremendously used this experience, as he's going to use this one in so many lives, to give me a vision for the world. So I have a great deal, Gordon, for which to be thankful, for the heritage which was mine in the church of Christ.
MacDonald: Paul, the other night when students were asked to raise their hands about the longevity of their personal faith, we were all impressed with how many men and women are brand-new believers. It leads me to a couple of conclusions that we ought to talk about for a moment. Many here have not really had a vital experience with a church. Church is not a part of their Christian horizon. They have come to know Christ as a college student, and they don't understand where the church may fit into their entire fabric of faith.
I think also there are some students here who have had bad church experiences. The church has let them down. It has not accepted their vigor and excitement. Many here have not seen how the church figures in the call to mission. What is the place of the local congregation in the whole world missionary effort, and why should these students really concern themselves about the home church as they encounter God's call?
Cedar: Gordon, that may be the most important question that we wrestle with this morning. As a young man growing up in the church, I belonged to a mainline denomination. When I felt called to be an evangelist, they didn't know what I was talking about. The word evangelism wasn't even in their vocabulary. I remember going to a meeting of the presbytery. They knew I felt called to the ministry. But when I told them God was calling me to be an evangelist, there was this shocked-silence.
Many of you may have been turned on to Christ, may have received Christ, may have had that first love and that fervency and yet may have gone back to your home church to find that not everyone was excited to receive you or knew what to do with you. But, as you study Scripture, you will see that it has always been God's strategy and always will be God's strategy to use the church as the major tool for world evangelization, the major conduit, the major vehicle.
The church is not perfect, and if you ever found the perfect church (as someone told me when I was your age), they wouldn't let you join it because you would upset it. The church is the body of Jesus Christ. He is the head. And you need the church, and the church needs you. And I would pray that you would not give up on us. I know the temptation of sidestepping the church, of just giving up and saying, "That pastor will never be with it. Those people do not understand me. I will go out and do my own thing."
You will not be taking a shortcut; you will be taking a long detour, because ultimately God will take you back to get your roots in a local, church and a local fellowship who will team with you in prayer, in support and strategy in sharing the ministry together.
Barker: Gordon, sometime back I was visiting Columbia Bible College, one of the great missionary institutions of our day, and Robson McQuilkin told me, "One of the biggest problems we face here in training students to go out to the mission field is the number who have never had a vital church experience.
We've had over eleven hundred go as graduates of our institution. But many of them have not been actively involved in a local- church. They came to Christ perhaps through a college ministry. They come to Columbia Bible College. Then they go out as missionaries. They go out to plant churches, but they have never been actively involved in a church and they don't know what they're trying to create."
MacDonald: Frank, let's ride with that for a moment. When a student believes what the two of you have just said and sees the centrality of the congregation in this whole process, the next thing is spotting the right pastor, because every one of us needs a pastor, someone who is concerned about the cure of our souls, to use an old phrase.
How would a student spot a pastor who really had a heart for world evangelization? What would be some of the signs? What would be a profile of the sort of person who would disciple a student in that way?
Barker: Let me speak from my own early ministry. I had a great desire to see my congregation be a missionary-minded congregation. I started a new church when I got out of seminary. After a while we evaluated how we were doing and realized we were not missionary minded. So we decided to have missionaries in to present their case. Let's make financial commitments to them. Some thought that would hurt the regular budget. We wouldn't be able to build buildings. But we said, "Let's put God's priorities first, and God will bless the rest."
I remember standing in the pulpit about five or six years and saying, "Somebody's out of the will of God. Either you're out of the will of God or I'm out of the will of God, because it's inconceivable to me that we could have all these billions of lost people in the world and God would not want one of us to go to the mission field. Now he either wants you to go or he wants me to go. If you don't go, I'm going." But I had a deep hunger to see God calling out people in a steady flow from our congregation. These would be evidences to me of a missions-hearted pastor.
MacDonald: What steps would your congregation take to incubate the vision, the call of someone burdened by God to go somewhere?
Cedar: Gordon, I think that you need to begin with a pastor. That is sometimes the greatest challenge. I want you to know we pastors are not perfect people. We do not know it all. We as pastors need you as much as you need us. You look at pictures of those great missionaries and you notice that they're old men with long beards or little old ladies with white hair.
But the missionary movement historically has been a youth movement. And these great names in the mission movement went out as young people, as visionaries like you. And God chooses to give visions to the young. And some of us who have grown comfortable in the church need your vision to come to us. We need you to minister to us.
Step one is to begin to build a relationship with your pastor or your church leadership or your youth pastor or your missions pastor, depending on the size of your staff. And we, those of us in the ministry, have a great responsibility before God to provide a path, to provide a model, to prepare you for the ministry so your roots can grow down into the local church.
MacDonald: Frank, give us three or four specific ideas of contributions congregations make to the incubation of men and women who are going into missions.
Barker: I'd say one thing to do is to get exposed to the inner workings of a church. Ask to be put on select committees or to sit in on these committees. One of the most helpful things for our people who go out to the mission field is to spend time on the missions committee where they wrestle with the interchange between the missionaries and the local church. Get trained in evangelism and in small-group work in your local church.
Nothing could be more critical than being effectively trained to work with people. Go to those in authority with a servant heart.
I remember when the Navigators first came to our church; do you know what they did? They said, "We'd like to come over to your home Saturday and clean your yard up." Half a dozen Navigators came over to my house and did just that. They had a servant attitude.
That's the way to grow spiritually. Get in there and pitch in where there's hard work to be done at the church or in the programs. You'll be receiving training right there.
Cedar: Last night I heard John Bennett say that only about ten per cent of North American churches are really involved in world evangelization. Many of you may relate to churches that are not. And the point that Frank has just made may be one of the most important things you'll hear. Be a servant, a servant of Christ, a servant of your pastor, a servant of your church. The goal is not to condemn and not to straighten out, but to give some leadership.
One verse that I think is central to all this is what Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 4:12: "Let no one slight you because you are young, but make yourself an example to believers in speech and behavior, in love, fidelity, and purity" (NEB). I believe that many of you can become change agents in your own churches, including the one that I pastor.
A part of the sense of God's humor is that he does not decide to reveal all truth to the senior pastor. He decides to reveal some of the most profound truths that I've ever received from some very unsuspecting people. And young people in my church minister to me.
There's a young man who is here today, by the name of Jonathan, who comes to see me about every three or four months. I look forward to his visits. God always says something new and fresh through him and through many others.
I hope that you will see yourself as one called to be an example. You can be a change agent, and you can be used of God to develop some policies, some procedures, and some motivation for missions in your church.
MacDonald: Frank and Paul, let's tell some stories. It's one thing to sit here and exhort and put down grocery lists of various ways in which churches can involve themselves in the world evangelization effort. I'd like the two of you to look backward over the last months or years. Pick a person and use them to illustrate how you see the church so involved in this whole process. Frank, take it.
Barker: Well, let me share about two. One is a couple who are here today, Jack and Kay Matthews. They're with World Team. Jack came to us through our ministry to medical students. Both Jack and Kay had a heart for missions. As they developed their skills and we worked with them to contact various mission agencies, they wound up in Haiti where they have a tremendous ministry. They're recruiting medical personnel to go with them.
Let me touch on another one, Bailey, a man converted through a home Bible class. He was a young businessman, a very shy person. One day Bailey's wife called my wife and said, "Would Frank take my husband out on visitation evangelism?"
When my wife relayed the message, I said, "Sweetheart, there's no way Bailey's going to go on visitation evangelism. He would faint if somebody opened the door. But I guess I've got to ask him."
So I went down to his office and paced up and down, trying to figure out how I could persuade him. I thought there would be no way to do it. So I went in and said, "Bailey, you wouldn't want to go to visitation evangelism, would you?"
"When is it?" he said. 'Tonight? What time? Seven? I'll be there." "You're kidding?" I said.
But we went out and God very graciously gave us two converts, a businessman about 9:00 and an intern about 12:30 in the morning. And Bailey was turned on. It wasn't long before Bailey said, "I believe God wants me in Christian work. But I've got this tremendous job opportunity. What do I do?"
As we wrestled with it, I said, "Bailey, you've got to commit your life totally to the Lord to use you in the best possible way he can. Are you willing to just take the stops off and say, `God, I'm available to be used anywhere you want me to. I want my life to count just as much as possible'?" He struggled with that. It would mean a great financial loss. But he knelt with me, he prayed that way, and it wasn't long before he felt that God wanted him with the staff of Campus Crusade.
They made him a special assistant to Bill Bright the first year. The second year Bill said, "Bailey, we don't have any work in Asia. I'd like to assign you Asia." How's that for a job description? But he went to Asia. He recruited some couples from our church to go with him - one retired couple and another, a dentist and his wife. They set up a training center in the Philippines and went around to various countries to recruit national workers, and brought them there for training.
I went out about eight or nine years later and traveled around Asia with him to ten of the twenty-eight countries he was working in. He had fourteen hundred national staff at that time. This man has grown into a real giant in God's work. And, of course, nothing could have been more thrilling to me.
Cedar: Our church historically has a rich heritage in missions. Dr. James Henry Hutchins, who served as pastor for thirty-eight years, and then Dr. Raymond Ortlund and his wife Ann have given us a solid foundation for missions. I've been there for just four years, Gordon, as senior pastor, and so I must give credit where credit is due and praise and glory to God for that marvelous foundation.
We have a number of missionaries from our church who are second- and third- and one couple who are fourth-generation missionaries. One young man, Tim, came to our church with his parents when he was in high school. He went through theological education and felt called to missions, having gone to Urbana as a student. He and his wife told us the story of how God led them to Brazil through Overseas Crusade Ministries.
Their whole strategy of missions is very much like what Frank just described. They invest in the lives of national pastors who will reproduce others. We have a requirement in our church that any person who is going to be supported by the church must be an integral part of the church family for a minimum of five years.
Now that is not required in order to be mean. That is required so that we may really become a support team, so we may know them and may love them. When Tim and his wife come home, they come home to friends who pray for them, who give to their support and who care for them.
MacDonald: Across our country are many enormous suspension bridges that go from one side of a lake or river or bay to another. When I ponder the role of the church in world evangelization, I see it something like the ends, either-end of the- bridge. All of us who believe in world evangelization are going to find ourselves at one end or the other of that bridge, involved directly or indirectly with the local congregation. Some of us will be part of the sending force, a conglomerate of people who pray and give and who create the kind of love that's necessary for those people on the other end to survive and thrive in the place that God has called them. God may give us the opportunity to invigorate both pastors and congregations with the reality and the practical aspects of the Great Commission.
Others are going to be on the other end of the bridge. And when we get to a Third World country or the center of an urban context, wherever it is, we're going to need several things. We're going to need to be loved. We're going to need to know that back some place is a group of people who really believe in us and who are ready to fill our empty soul and our body and our mind.
Second, we're going to need people who are interceding for us in the most discouraging and in the most successful moments. Obviously, third, we're going to need money. And we're going to need some group of people who are going to be making the sacrifices financially that pay our salaries and our expenses.
And finally, we're going to need a group of people to come home to. That's the church. The prayer of all three of us is that the church will have the right place in your life at one end or the other.
The following is as of 1985.
Gordon MacDonald, alter twelve years as the senior minister of Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, became president of IVCF-USA in January 1985. Chairman of the board of U.S. directors of World Vision, Inc., he has carried on an international speaking ministry as well as writing for many Christian periodicals. His published books include Magnificent Marriage, The Effective Father and Facing Turbulent Times.
Frank Barker is pastor of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a leading congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America noted for its emphasis on personal evangelism, Christian discipleship and world missions
Paul Cedar is senior pastor of Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena, California, a church noted for its active missionary outreach. He is also the author of several books, including How to Make Love Your Motive, Why Join the Church? and Seven Keys to Maximum Communication.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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