Well, hello and welcome to this month's Deep Roots podcast,
Conversations about Theology and Ministry.
My name is Tim Ward and I'm one of the faculty here at Oak Hill.
And it's wonderful to have in conversation today
David Baldwin, who's our director of global mission, and Ray Porter,
who teaches world mission here as a visiting lecturer.
I've been looking forward to having this conversation about which world mission,
because you two guys are real experts.
You won't blow your own trumpet, but you really are.
So it's wonderful that you both teach here at college.
Just tell us a bit about yourselves.
Go on, Ray. Why don't you?
Carry on, Dave.
Well, OK, so I've been teaching here for about 12 years.
Picked up from Ray.
And before that, my wife, family and I, we were in Ethiopia
with Serving in Mission and there I was involved in Bible teaching
and also English language for outreach.
So that's my background.
Came and went from a strong sending church in Reading,
which was like an aircraft carrier, strong and stable in the water
and great for missionaries to fly off and come back to.
So that's my background.
Now I live in Birmingham.
Great. And tell us about church in Birmingham.
So, yes, more and I have got involved with a small church plant or replant.
It's a congregational church in a very multicultural area, which nearly died out.
And save two or three members and now a younger couple have come in.
More and I support couple.
Others are joining the church and we're seeking to reestablish a gospel work there.
But be aware of and relate well to the fact that there's lots of Sikhs there,
lots of Hindus, Muslims, people from all over the world
and lots of different faith backgrounds.
So. Terrific.
And Ray?
Yes, well, I came to Oak Hill in 2005.
I came here seconded by OMF, which was the mission agency
that I've been working with in Indonesia and in the UK
and set up a completely new degree program in theology and world mission
with the conviction that many missionaries are under trained.
There's a lot of people who sort of think, well, you know,
if you're going out to another country, you just go with your Bible
and whatever experience you've got yourself.
But in the world today, as always, really, you need people who both know
their scriptures, know their theology, know how to think about crossing cultures.
And Oak Hill had the foundation of great biblical courses,
great doctrinal courses, and we brought in the element of world mission as well.
And so I taught here full time running the course and Dave
was picked up really by Dan Strange, who used to be here.
Well, I knew Dave because I'd been New Testament lecturer in Belfast Bible
College and Dave had been one of my students there.
So there's a nice sort of.
I didn't know that.
I'm going to tap you for stories when we finish recording.
Ray, tell us about experience overseas.
Yes, I we we had 13 years in Indonesia, 14 years in Indonesia
where I was a pastor in church planting.
It was a tremendous experience because
I'm working under Indonesian leadership as part of an Indonesian church.
The first church I worked with was in a town
which was in the size of Birmingham, Bandung, in a congregation of seven thousand.
And then I went down to very curious, really.
The denomination asked me to be the pastor of a church, which for a foreigner,
it wasn't the period when you expected foreigners to ever be put into that position.
But there was a church where they thought that someone who was outside.
Any of the ethnic groups would be able to to lead this congregation.
And the fact that I came as an OMF missionary free
was also a great advantage to the church at that stage.
And that was a much smaller church of one thousand two hundred.
Oh, really tiny community.
Oh, really tiny community with a central church in a in a market town
and five village churches around it.
We ran as one congregation,
a congregation where two thirds of the members had been converts from Islam.
And we saw conversions from Islam during the time we were there.
That's tremendous.
But it was tremendous to have a congregation like that,
where you'd had so many who had come to faith in Christ
and were first generation Christians in that way.
That must have been hugely exciting.
Yes, yes. So.
Fantastic.
Well, I mean, a tremendous breadth of experience.
Many years in Africa and in Asia.
Before we hit record,
you two guys were telling me that just the extraordinary list of topics
you've been cooking up.
We probably won't have time for all of them.
Where do you want to start?
Well, I mean, Ray and I, we were talking about the question,
do we still need missionaries today, especially Western missionaries?
That was one of the first ones we thought of.
What else do we talk about, Ray?
Well, why not kick off there?
Well, let's start there.
Yes, go for that.
And then we might remember what else we talked about later.
I do. Should we try for a one word answer?
If you've got a one word, I usually run on to rather more words.
Well, I'll say, yes, we still need missionaries today
and we still need Western missionaries.
Say yes. And then you can add some more words.
I mean, I think one needs to qualify what one means by that.
If you still have the picture of pith helmets
and if your image of a missionary actually is the apostle Paul
and you think I must go where Christ has never been named
and I will go myself, forgetting that Paul had a missionary band
with him, usually the individual reaching out
without remembering that, of course, the gospel has been advancing in the world
and in most communities of the world,
there are now Christian churches. They may be quite weak churches.
There may be countries like Japan where there's a lot of towns
and certainly villages in Japan where there is no Christian witness.
But there are Christian churches within the country, within the community,
may not within the ethnic group you're going to work with,
but in a neighboring ethnic group.
And to go in as a foreigner saying, I'm going to evangelize these people
I'm going to plant my church is an arrogance
that sadly characterizes many, many Westerners
and has done down the centuries.
Do you still see that attitude there in some people
who are coming forward from the West offering for service overseas?
Yes. Western culture, of course, is a broad statement, isn't it?
Sure, sure, sure.
And you have the different aspects of Western culture
and it must be said that the British are pretty good at arrogance.
But some while pretending not to be.
Well, yes. Well, some other countries are even more brazen
in their self-confidence in going into mission mentioning their names.
No, I'm I remember when I was in Bandung,
someone coming to me who was an independent missionary
from another country, which I will not name.
But he said, there's no one born again in this city.
And I sort of said, well, you know, I am part of a congregation of seven thousand.
And whilst I couldn't count on every one of them being born again,
many of them are, but they probably don't use that terminology
because there are many other biblical terminologies
about what it means to become a new creature in Christ Jesus.
Yeah.
And it was quite funny, actually, because this man had gathered a sort of small group.
And one day I was leading a service in the home of one of our members.
We had regularly house groups every week and I was leading this service.
And this missionary came in because the husband of the family we were in
had been going to his services and he had someone else from his mission
he'd brought to show their prize convert.
They came in and there were we as a congregation.
We welcome them to come and join us and sit down.
But it's that attitude that, you know, I'm going to go and do my thing.
If you look at the history of Western missions since William Carey in 1792,
famously, he wrote his inquiry into the need for means.
The whole modern missionary movement kind of kicked off from that.
I'll come back on that when we're back.
You can do, yeah.
And the story is told, isn't it, that he stood up in a meeting
and was told, sit down, young man, if God wants to convert the heathen,
he'll do it without your help and mine.
But Carey won the day and he was in the service.
But Carey won the day and the Missionary Society has got started.
And in that 200 years since, Western missions have dominated,
which is a bit as Ray said, we've got 2000 years of Christian history
and the gospel going out cross-culturally.
So it's a bit of a blip, a bit of an anomaly
that the last 200 years have been dominated by Western missions.
And I think we now need a bit of humility
that the church has grown, has prospered, is sending out missionaries
from other parts of the world.
So especially Asia, the Korean missionaries I was working alongside,
African missionary societies, they're sending a lot of missionaries,
and Latin American in particular, these regions,
these three sort of continental regions, they're adding to the mission force.
So Western missionaries need to change posture
and work alongside in partnership with these other newer sending missionary countries, I think.
So this is really interesting.
Many people have heard this, you know, from everywhere to everywhere,
the kind of language that gets used now for mission.
For someone who is wondering if God is calling them overseas
or a pastor seeking to discern that kind of call in others or maybe foster it in them,
what does this mean about what we should be looking for?
What we should be looking for and fostering in those whom the Lord may be calling to go elsewhere?
Yeah.
Yes, can I just correct one thing, though?
Please correct me.
William Carey, from the British point of view...
Once your teacher, always your teacher.
Yeah, I love this.
From the British point of view is maybe the beginnings of mission,
certainly into what we would describe as the majority world.
But the Dutch had been there a hundred years earlier.
Okay.
I mean, the first Protestant missionaries really are the Dutch
and translating the scriptures in Taiwan, in what was the Dutch East Indies,
from the beginning of the 17th century.
Right. Was that wrapped up in Dutch expansionism and colonialism?
It was Dutch expansionism.
The Dutch East Indies Company, as one of its...
The conditions of its monopoly from the government was to establish the Protestant faith,
which the British East India Company didn't have.
I stand corrected.
Now we need to circle back to the question.
No, that's really helpful.
So actually that shows, doesn't it, that is this right in a sense,
what we're still grappling with in the West is what does mission look like
if it's not riding the coattails of empire and expansion?
That's kind of the issue, isn't it?
Yes.
So I'll come back to your question.
Please do.
I'm sorry.
I knew you would.
What do you say?
Well, I mean, first of all, you need to have someone who really does have a burden
for the gospel going out and someone who's proved themselves to be a gospel person.
Yeah.
I remember this one person arriving in Indonesia and saying, I'd never preached.
Do you have any opportunities to preach in English before I get the language?
You know, and I thought, well, who on earth sent someone out
to be in a situation where you needed to preach if they had never preached?
Sure, sure, sure.
And then you need to have an understanding that you're going to work with probably
alongside under a national church.
You are going to have to adapt yourself to them rather than try to force them into your mold.
You have to have a degree of humility, not thinking that you're the fourth member of
the Trinity when you arrive somewhere else.
And of course, the whole great thing, going back to the question of Christian experience,
ministry experience, that crossing water doesn't translate to the gospel.
But crossing water doesn't transform someone.
And what they are here is a preparation for what they will be there.
That's right.
And when the pressures of cross-cultural life, in particular, ministering in a new context
where you're new to the language and the culture, you feel like a baby.
Some of those underlying, no missionaries, perfect, obviously, the Lord uses foreign people.
The apostle Paul talks about his thorns in his flesh and his weaknesses.
But things will really come out under pressure.
And that's why good screening is needed.
So to come back to your question in a couple of ways, as Ray was talking, it made me think of
the first church to call and send out, which actually wasn't the Jerusalem church you
might expect from the early chapters of Acts, but was the Antioch church.
It already was quite a cross-cultural church, and Greeks, and Jews there.
Barnabas rocked up, the Cypriots.
He'd been in Jerusalem too.
He went and got Paul from Tarsus, and they ministered there.
And as Ray said, they proved themselves at home in their ministry, staying in Antioch for
a year, teaching, preaching, transporting a gift, demonstrating financial credibility
and reliance.
And only then, in Acts 13, do we read that that church, and you read the list of elders,
their names actually are indicative of quite broad demographic.
You've got somebody serving in Herod's court.
You've got obvious Africans there.
If you've got names, they pray, they fast, they lay hands on Paul and Barnabas to send them out.
But Paul and Barnabas, if you'd have been able to stop them and have put a mic in front of them
at that point and say, what was your sense of call?
It would be fascinating to hear what they said.
I think they probably both would have said they had a burden for the lost from other nations.
You can look at Paul's conversion story, where he reflects a little bit on his conversion to Christ
and his calling into ministry.
What would Barnabas have said?
I don't know.
They grabbed others and took them along.
Timothy, for example, they grabbed him and took him along.
So it's interesting the different ways people get involved in cross-cultural mission.
But I think one thing they would emphasize was the importance of the sending church,
to which they always returned to report back at the end of every missionary journey,
back to Jerusalem, back to Antioch and report back.
We're accountable to the local church, which cuts across the Western trend for individualism
and this kind of mystical sense that I have a missionary call,
but it's nothing to do with my church and the church needs to test a sense of calling.
Yes, I remember one person who they were going to resign from the mission
and I immediately picked up the phone to their church.
They said, why did you contact our church?
Your church sent you out.
As you're coming back, you need your church's permission,
to put that whole relationship in the right context.
Well, lifting into this a bit more, what kinds of good practice do you see
from the side of the local church in relating to those who they've sent out?
I mean, out of sight, out of mind is always easy, isn't it, when ministry is incredibly busy.
So what kind of good things do you see going on local church is doing?
Dave, your?
Well, I think as Ray said already,
making sure that the local church is cross-culturally wired and think,
well, if they're preaching through the scriptures, mission is their cross-cultural mission.
Mission is their cross-cultural movement of the gospel is there.
So faithful exegesis and hermeneutics will imply a missological impulse.
People will want to be involved in the gospel going from one group to another.
You had a really tightly packed sentence there, something like,
faithful exegesis will imply a missional impulse.
Well, in common language, I suppose, all I'm trying to say is if you open the Bible and read it,
it screams mission because the Bible is all about God's story of salvation.
And that involves all nations.
And when you get to the gospels and the acts, obviously starting with the Jewish people,
then the gospel is going across cross-cultural barriers and spreading around the world like wildfire.
So that's just going to be in our preaching and teaching if we're actually
seeing what's really there in the scriptures.
It's going to be there.
But then churches will be thinking about how does this flesh out in terms of our involvement?
What have we got going on locally?
Because there are very few parishes or church areas where there aren't people from the nations
living there around the church.
So how does cross-cultural mission flesh out for us here in this local church?
And then, of course, not thinking in a clunky way that that's different from overseas mission,
but joining the dots up, connecting the fact that we will also want to send,
call, test, and send people to other parts of the world too.
And to think of all of that as our cross-cultural mission.
Yeah.
Yeah, one of the best things when I was a pastor,
I think one of the best things we ended up doing in order to develop a mission or focus,
just keep those that the church had sent out or was supporting in mind,
fresh in mind as if they were part of us.
The best thing we did was we had a little run of groups of church family members going out
to visit them.
Yes.
And so lots of churches do this.
In a sense, it's a no brainer.
I can't remember where the idea came from, but there was a real buzz around who's going to go.
And they come back, you know, you have a church evening where they show their photos
and they tell their stories and they then become evangelists for the mission that they've seen
in action.
And I had a slight worry that, you know, for the two weeks or whatever that they were there,
that was slightly, you know, cramping the style of the person who should be at it
and how wrong that was.
The mission was saying, how wonderful.
I'd love to have them kicking around for two weeks.
The thing that surprised me was the people who put their hands up to say, I want to go.
Some of the people who I thought there's no way they're going to want to spend two weeks
in a village in Tanzania in fairly rudimentary.
I mean, I just totally misjudged them.
We don't some older people just going, yeah, I've not traveled much.
I'd love to see.
I'm sure you've seen that kind of thing.
Yeah.
So you can't second guess the Lord on how he's going to provide for mission in terms of finance,
in terms of personnel.
And I've been very surprised, but A, where money's come from, not where I've expected B,
the types of people that the Lord calls for short term or for long term.
Even if it's just for a visit, I think your point's very, very pertinent.
Chris and Roz Howes, who were graduates here, are probably in Ray's early classes now serving
in Uganda.
They've written a list of top 10 things that are good ways to support your missionary from
your local church.
And they include some of the things you talked about, things like don't think you're bothering
us by calling us, writing to us, emailing us, phoning us up and visiting us.
And they like to be pestered.
They like to feel that they're still well connected to their sending church and not
out of sight, out of mind.
He goes as far, and I think he's pushing the envelope to say, you know, consider us as a
member of staff, but just serving in a different location.
Keep us informed of church meetings and keep us involved.
Yes.
I have one caveat, though.
That is that nowadays, when a missionary arrives at their destination, their first question
all usually is, how do I get on the Wi-Fi?
And this idea of continual communication with home actually is counterproductive sometimes
to people really getting stuck into the culture where they've gone to.
They're so concerned to keep their supporting base there that they never really feel part
of the local community.
I remember a couple who's serving in Africa I once met who said, you know, they were lacking
fellowship.
So I sort of inquired about the country they were in and the church that was there.
And yes, there was this church of several hundred, but there were no Westerners to have
fellowship with.
So I said, what about the Africans?
Are you having a fellowship with them?
Are you recognizing that these are your brothers in Christ?
And that's where you need to put your roots down now because that's where you're serving.
Yeah.
You make a very valid point, Ray, and especially in the first few years.
And I know your organization, OMF, particularly strong in this, people shouldn't return for
the first four years.
And mine, S.I.M., were the same because in those first four years when you're really
committing yourself to a new people and a new language and a new culture, it is very
important not to keep looking back home.
So I take your point.
And I think we have rules about how long before you can actually have visitors.
Yeah.
Which is wise, I think.
It is wise because you've got to get into the language, you've got to get into the culture.
When we went to work in Indonesia, the church that we ended up working with, the lead pastor
sort of said, well, you're coming on this condition.
You live where we tell you to live.
And you have fellowship with us.
And it was a city that had the hills on one side.
And you don't go running up the hill all the time to have fellowship with other foreigners.
And that was the conditions.
Yeah.
We had a normal house in south Bandung, which was the area that had been destroyed by the
retreating Indonesian army when the Dutch advanced and then rebuilt by them rather than
the houses in the north, which were still the Dutch bungalows.
OK.
So you live there.
Yeah.
You have that fellowship.
If you move there, you've really got to live there.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
We almost didn't dare speak to a foreigner for a little while until they asked us to run
an English service.
But that was another matter.
Yeah.
And Arsi, did you feel well cared for by the church which had made this insistence?
Yes.
We felt very much that we were welcomed in as part of that church.
And we were really part of it.
And the important thing for a missionary, really, is not only to get into the work,
but also to know and have fellowship with the people you're working with,
but also be able to react with them.
I remember when we came back to England for a short while in the middle of that time,
another missionary couple who were still in a stage of developing their language study
came to live in our house.
And I sort of said when I came back, well, how did you get on with them?
They didn't joke like you do.
Yeah, well, being able to joke in somebody else's language and cultural thought forms
is a sign that you're really making good progress.
And when we went back some years ago, which was about 20 years after we'd left,
the street sort of came out.
You're back.
It's so good to see you again.
These were the Muslim neighbors.
Yeah.
Oh, that's tremendous.
We had.
That's tremendous.
So, you know, that's the sort of relationship I think one wants to build up in the community.
Absolutely.
That's true wherever we live in, but especially if you're going overseas.
Wonderful.
Take us somewhere else.
Give us another topic.
Could we talk about, Ray, could we talk about the relationship between the mission partner,
be it's a single couple or a family, the church and the missionary society or missionary agency,
which is a bit of a triangle.
Can we talk and Crosslinks especially, neither of us were with Crosslinks, but we've got a
lot to do with Crosslinks and they describe it as a three way partner, a triangular conversation.
Let's talk about that for a few minutes.
All right.
What role does, why do we even need missionary societies?
Let's start calling them agencies to suggest that they are like catalysts,
facilitators rather than have their own interest.
Yes.
Society was a good word in many ways, wasn't it?
I mean, Kerry, it was the particular Baptist missionary society because at that time,
society was something new in the culture, that you had a society for the improvement of manners
and a gentle folk society and all this sort of thing.
So the idea of a missionary society, the idea of people collaborating together
and being together in fellowship, agency is a little bit more distance, a bit colder,
I think, as a term.
It may be preserves the idea that we are doing a task, but you lose some of that fellowship idea.
Yes.
But why do you need them?
You need them in some ways as facilitators.
There are some churches that send out missionaries directly.
They often piggyback on the back of societies.
I remember one well-known church that was sending out his own missionaries.
They said to me one day, you've got people in Hong Kong, haven't you?
Yes, yes.
Do they have to come home every year for a holiday because there's nowhere to go on holiday in Hong
I said no, and there's plenty of places to go on holiday in Hong Kong, but their missionaries
had sort of told them that there was nowhere to go on holiday and they had to come back every year
to have a holiday in England.
So there was no society to mediate that kind of information.
There was no one there with the local knowledge.
Yeah.
OK.
Is that what you find?
Yes.
Very often, as Ray said, there is an impulse and there's almost a biblical
warrants, depending on how you read the scriptures, for thinking church to church is actually
cut out the middle man.
There's some people who have even said to me that missionary societies or agencies are a
little bit parasitic and that's far too strong.
But I think some mission leaders have realized that sometimes in the past mission societies or
agencies have come to churches and they've wanted the money and the best people.
Yeah.
But they're going to boss things and I think they're realizing that the local church should
call the shots.
God reveals his wisdom through the local church.
So you've got local churches and sending countries and receiving countries and they are
they are the body of Christ, not the agency.
Yeah.
But that expertise, a church thinking they can do it without a mission agency, sometimes
gets people in trouble.
So they may send somebody to another country where there's been no agency helping them
work out things like medical care, how to set a budget, which is the right budgets that
we live at the right level in the society we're going to, some cross-cultural orientation
and expertise, evacuation procedures if necessary and all these kinds of things.
So societies, they've been doing that for 200 years.
So there's some level of expertise there that local churches just cannot have.
So it makes sense to have a partnership.
And as Ray says, if people come without a society, they'll end up running to the door
of the societies on the ground and saying, I've got this problem and we've seen it again
and again, please help us.
That's really helpful.
We're next on your hit list of topics.
Well, should we go up the drive and think about the mission tree?
Ray.
As in, because we're down in the bowels here, aren't we?
So we're going to go up the drive.
So up there, along the drive.
Near the gates.
The mission tree.
Ray was probably best placed to talk about the mission tree.
Yes.
I think you probably put the silver spade in, didn't you?
When we...
I don't think I was allowed near it.
I think the Queen wanted to do it, but we go, no, it's got to Ray.
Yes, sorry, Your Majesty.
It was when our first year of teaching, we started teaching in 2006.
So this would be 2009 because it took me a year to write the course.
And 2009, you get it validated and all the rest of it, you know.
So 2009 was the first graduation of people who'd done the three-year course.
And they wanted to somehow commemorate that this was now the completion of this degree course.
And so the initiative was taken to buy this Canadian red oak tree.
Had to be an oak, didn't it?
It had to be an oak because we were at Oak Hill.
And to plant it in the grounds.
And now it has flourished.
And it's been exciting to think that as the tree has grown,
it's a bit like a tree in Narnia, I suppose.
As it has grown, so these people who graduated from the course
have gone out into other places.
Yeah.
Five continents, 60 different individuals we totaled up, didn't we?
A couple of years ago have now gone out.
Some of them were on deliberately on the cross-cultural course that Ray started.
Others were just here to study theology and the Lord called, sent them overseas.
So we reckon that there are about 60 people, some of them have come home,
who have gone and served overseas from Oak Hill in the last 20 years,
which is wonderful.
And it's been exciting to see where they've gone, what they've done,
to see their ministry, the way their personalities have worked out within their cultures.
And as Dave said, the other thing is that having brought a mission course into Oak Hill,
people fought mission in a way they hadn't before.
The late Mike Ovi.
The last time I think he met the college council before he sadly died,
he presented this mind map of where the college should be going.
And right in the center was the great commission.
And he blamed me for bringing this in as the center of the church's life and direction
with the mission course.
But as that course had been taught, so other students,
some who one would never have thought about going overseas,
they would go overseas, they've gone.
Maybe into church ministries, international churches,
but otherwise to plant churches in different countries in Europe,
as well as to be involved in mission around the world.
Yeah.
And as these mission partners have gone and some have come back,
we've noticed too that they've often when a society mission agency is looking for a new director,
they often appoint old Oaks who have served overseas and come back.
Steady hand on the tiller, well theologically trained.
And mission societies have not only appointed,
but they have praised Oak Hill graduates who have gone into mission overseas.
Because as Ray said earlier, if you send your roots down,
we're back on the tree thing,
if you send your roots down deep theologically and biblically,
it gives you endurance, perseverance in ministry.
That's true at home or anywhere around the world,
but especially where life and ministry is tough.
It's important to get alongside the cross-cultural stuff,
a deep theological training.
Do you want to say a bit more about that,
how you've seen that happening in individuals or maybe experienced that yourself?
Yes, well from personal experience, I went to Belfast Bible College,
where Ray was one of the teachers.
I wanted to do it as quickly as I could, get the training thing ticked,
get out and save the world.
Now that's what most young, arrogant Western missionaries are like.
And some mission agencies do have that line as well.
They do.
But a wise one will say, as my pastor said to me,
slow down young man, you stay in the church, prove yourself in the church,
a bit like Antioch and...
Sorry I interrupt you, carry on.
No, it's fine.
And then you train thoroughly.
So I gradually got convinced by that and stayed for four and a half years
at Belfast Bible College.
Not to say everybody needs to stay that length of time,
but it's those, and loved learning about the Word of God more deeply.
Now when the going was tough, there were things that kept me going,
when the going was tough, there were things that kept you there.
I'm thinking rural Ethiopian location, difficulties in ministry.
It was a deep theological knowledge and love for God and His Word,
and a sense of personal call confirmed by the church.
They're the things you kind of cling to when the going gets tough.
Ray, what do you think?
Yes, I mean, I think so.
Some years ago, there was a project on resilience
and why missionaries return and who keeps going.
And they found a correlation between the years people had done in missionary training
and their resilience on the field.
Interesting.
As in the deeper the training before they go, the more resilience.
It wasn't just theology training.
You know, they've just been to a theological college, it didn't make a change.
But if they'd been to a college where they'd also really thought through the training for mission,
and so they had their missiological understanding as well,
they were better for the situation.
That's right.
And that's the remap.
Yes, remap.
Remap too, yes.
All nations college, and they had people from all over the world come together
to look at this question of missionary attrition, why people leave the mission field.
Obviously, there are good reasons to leave the mission field,
like if you get to retirement age or the job's done or something like that, you handle.
But this is looking at bad reasons, so attrition, which is preventable.
And that's what the remap study was.
And that was one of the factors that they isolated, wasn't it?
The depth of training.
Yeah.
So, I mean, when it comes to a church, thinking about someone,
it doesn't need to just be someone young, actually, of course.
Sure.
And another area which might, perhaps, I don't know how much more time we've got,
but the other area to get on is talking about professional missionaries,
which we'll perhaps just touch on in a moment.
Yeah.
But when a church says, we believe that God is calling you into world mission,
or someone comes to the church and say, I believe God's calling me,
then if the church say, yes, we'll endorse that call,
the church also should be willing to put their money where their words are
and actually finance them through their training, as well as when they go out to the field.
Yes.
Now, you've written controversially on this in Evangelicals Now, haven't you?
Yes.
An article which says, well, churches, they pay for their local staff,
vicar or minister, whoever it is, youth worker.
But missionaries have to go around lots of churches, cap in hand is how you put it.
This should not be.
And churches should undertake to, well, they should provide all the financial support,
not just for their local clergy or ministers, but for their overseas ministers, too.
And if, I mean, if it's a church that can't afford it themselves,
then they go to their brothers and sisters in other churches and say, look, here is this person.
You haven't got any missionaries.
We have.
We're not in the situation of the church since Singapore, where on average there is one
missionary from every church, at least.
And, you know, churches are all sending.
But can I just move on to another topic?
Please.
We talk about missionaries going out.
What are they going to do when they go?
In many places, the church is doing the task of evangelism very well.
But there's a need for training in discipleship.
And how to live as a Christian within that culture.
So it's very good if some people who go out, maybe in years to come, it will be the majority of people
go out, don't go out as full time gospel ministers, but go in some secular job.
Within that job, they can then evangelize.
And where they can be an example to the national church, the national Christians, of this is what
it means to be a Christian working in this culture.
And that's a very valuable thing.
Of course, the difficulty is that there's many Christians who in this country don't think of
themselves as missionaries within their workplace, as Christian missionaries.
In their workplace, as Christian witnesses in their workplace.
Hudson Taylor, who founded the China Inland Mission, had this idea that people should be
fully supported so they can be fully committed to gospel ministry.
William Carey, of course, had a different view.
He said people should be financed to get themselves out to the country to establish themselves.
Then they should get a job.
And then they should work there.
And so that view goes back as far as Carey.
Yes, yes.
Carey had that idea.
I mean, he was employed in the jute industry.
I mean, in addition to translating the scriptures into 13 different languages and with the team
of 40 languages, he was actually doing a job within a company.
There's a fascinating article on who was William Carey written by two Indians.
And I mean, the work he did was extraordinary.
The way in which he advanced botany within the country and the first botanical gardens
came out of Carey, the first university, et cetera, et cetera.
And of course, the other thing he did, which is a bit controversial, maybe for some,
in addition to translating the scriptures into the Indian languages, he translated the Indian
classics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata into English.
OK.
Because he says, we need to understand their culture.
Wow.
Can you see in the New Testament any kind of precursors to this?
Sometimes people call it creative access or business as mission, going especially to
countries where it's difficult to get a missionary visa and doing a job.
But in the New Testament, do you see any precursors or?
Well, I mean, there's the apostle Paul with his sewing business, making tents, which is
often they talk about tent making.
But I mean, in the New Testament, you had Christians who were crisscrossing the Roman
Empire in their work.
You've got Lydia, haven't you?
Yes.
The fabric.
I mean, she's dealing in purple.
She is a rich woman with imperial contacts, and she is there.
an
Yeah.
You've got other people who have all these connections, you know, the connections into
Herod's household.
Yeah.
And Aquila and Priscilla, of course, they were also tent makers.
And Priscilla, also tent makers, yes.
And they're involved in gospel ministry.
They were moving around cross-culturally.
which is fascinating.
A few years ago I had a young couple come to see me here.
They didn't study at Okil Satli, but they came to see me
because they said they had a burden for Japan.
And we talked about all the different ways
they could get to Japan.
But he was working for Hitachi.
Okay.
So I said, could you get a transfer?
Yeah, yeah.
And he applied and got a transfer to Tokyo
to work with Hitachi in Tokyo.
Yeah, yeah.
It was very tough
because Japanese working patterns are very long days.
Sure, yeah, yeah.
And, but he was able to get into places.
They could have dinner parties for his Japanese colleagues.
And when after two years his foreign contract ended
and he went on to a local salary and a local position,
then much more they were accepted as being part of
the Japanese team, reaching people that missionaries
could never reach.
I don't know of any converts,
but certainly they were building bridges as a Christian.
And he was showing what it meant to work as a Christian
within a Japanese company that other Japanese Christians
could then see, yes, you can live here as a salary man,
as a Christian.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which is very important, I think.
I think so.
And sometimes people in a society are quite suspicious
about, especially a Westerner that might come in,
that doesn't seem to have a proper job like the rest of us.
And this enables people to fit in.
So somebody presents from another country,
people are thinking, well, what do you do?
It's one of the first questions we ask each other, isn't it?
What do you do for a living?
And people are thinking about that.
And if it's not immediately obvious,
it can create some questions.
So there's pros and cons on either side.
The person who is fully supported,
they can focus on their ministry.
Person who's got a local job, they may be so overworked,
they might find it very hard to do any Christian ministry,
and you just have to get the balance.
Maybe something in between works quite well part time.
Yeah, that's helpful, that's helpful.
We need to always be thinking creatively.
This has been tremendous conversation,
to bring it into line.
Before we do, I'd love to give you a chance, Dave,
to talk about what you and your wife, Maura,
do with the 219 ministry.
Be great to hear a bit about that.
Yeah, so Ephesians 219, Paul is reflecting
on the cosmopolitan nature of Christ's church,
and Jews and Gentiles, barriers broken down
and being together in Christ.
So that's where the ministry gets its name from.
We've added a bit more memorably, teach to reach,
thinking about how to help churches in the UK
to connect with multicultural communities around them.
Very often, churches want to connect with people
from other nationalities.
I'm thinking of established British churches.
They may have other nationalities already
in the congregation, and they may look at people
from other faiths and other backgrounds around them
and think, how do we connect to them?
So we just try to build a bit of confidence,
provide resources, get them started.
Very often it's through things like international cafes,
which Friends International are very helpful onto,
with tertiary education level people,
and maybe English classes, depending on what a church
wants to do, and reaching out, not just across the world,
but across the street, cross-culturally.
But then of course, you've got to think,
what happens if people start becoming Christians
and join the church, which obviously you want?
You can't assume they're just going to fit
into a British worship style.
So it throws up lots of questions about integration
and diversity in church life too,
but that's a nutshell what 219 tries to help with.
Great, and just so if someone was intrigued, wanted to just
see more of the resources.
Yeah, so it's all on the website, just type in 219,
Teach to Reach, and you might get a restaurant
in Los Angeles, but your second hit will probably be
this ministry, yeah.
Tremendous, yeah, tremendous.
Just to finish, it'd be great to hear from each of you.
Thinking, I guess, thinking of a pastor,
they want to be mission-minded, they know that,
the demands of a local church ministry in a sense
always suck them in, but they keep wanting to push out,
that heart is there.
What would be a top tip, something that they might know
or have lost sight of, or might just not quite
have occurred to them, a top tip,
just to keep that front and center?
Well, I think that I'd come back to today's point
that you've just been talking about, really,
who have you got in your local community,
and how are you going to reach out to them?
I mean, I know there are parishes in England
where the congregation is a gathered congregation,
really, Anglican churches, but if you look at their parish,
the majority in their parish are actually people
who've come from elsewhere who follow a different faith.
How are you connecting to them?
How are you relating?
So before you think about the question of,
are we going to send missionaries overseas,
what are you going to do on your doorstep?
Thanks, Ray.
Yeah.
Oh, I'd say open up the Bible.
That missional cross-cultural impulse is there,
and if we're faithfully teaching the Bible,
then that's going to come across,
and we need to teach our congregation what the Bible says.
But we have to do it bearing in mind
that we are culturally located ourselves.
I think sometimes we think we're neutral,
we're culturally neutral.
We just read the Bible, and it says what it says,
that's the gospel, but we're failing to realize
that we're actually, in my case,
I'm a British person reading in English
with a certain educational background,
and that will color the way I appreciate it.
And just a bit of a self-awareness there, I think,
helps us to not be so focused on our own concerns
and our own communities
and to think a little bit further afield.
Right.
I mean, I think that in preparing the text of scripture,
it's very good if the pastor can actually find commentaries
from different cultures.
And increasingly they are being written,
and well, I guess they've always been written,
but increasingly they're being published and marketed,
aren't they?
Yes, that's it.
And I mean, I discovered, I mean,
this is not a Christian commentator,
but Jonathan Sacks writing on the Pentateuch.
I've read him, and he asked the questions
I'd never thought about asking of the text,
and it's a new insight into what the scripture's teaching
from a Jewish point of view.
And if you can do that from other cultures as well.
Yeah.
It's wonderful.
Amen.
Wonderful.
Dave, Ray, thank you so much.
I've really enjoyed this conversation.
We're gonna stop now,
but we may just continue talking about this.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.