LIKE A MUSTARD SEED

LIKE A MUSTARD SEED

William Lane Craig
Research Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, CA, USA
and
Joao Mordomo
Co-Founder and Executive Director of CCI-Brazil, Curitiba, Paran‡, Brazil

God is on the move in the world today! Across the face of this planet, like a great tide in its ebb and flow, the kingdom of light is pushing back the frontiers of darkness. We are living at a point in world history of unprecedented expansion of the Christian faith, and huge doors of opportunity stand wide open before us. As we look out at the world today, we are positively optimistic about what the future holds.

Now perhaps this comes as something of a surprise to you. As you read the newspapers, it seems like influence of Christianity is continually on the wane. The world is going down the drain to hell, and the Church seems powerless to stop it. Indeed, statistics do show that since 1900 the Church in the Western World has been in a state of steady decline. Secularism has become the dominant force in the West, shaping its intellectual outlook, its culture, and its social values. Meanwhile, the population of the world is exploding, and it seems like it's impossible for the spread of the gospel to keep up. It all seems so hopeless.

Well, if that's how it seems to you, then we've got great news! For the truth of the matter is that we are players in the greatest drama the world has ever seen, a part of the greatest movement in the history of mankind, which is continuing to spread and change lives across the surface of the globe. The pessimistic, defensive attitude that characterizes many Western Christians is largely due to a sort of nearsightedness which focuses only on what is happening in our immediate here and now, and so fails to see the larger picture that God is painting. It's due to a lack of knowledge of the facts of church history and contemporary demographics.

Let’s look back, then, over the twenty centuries of the existence of the Christian faith and ask what we see. Let's take a bird's eye view, so as to see the grand sweep of world history without getting bogged down in the details. What we see is simply stunning. We see the hugest, most successful movement in the history of mankind. From its humble beginnings in the three year ministry of an obscure Palestinian preacher, Christianity has spread throughout the world - with adherents in virtually every nation and in over two-thirds of the world’s ethnic groups - so that today around 2 billion people at least claim to be Christians, thus making Christianity the world's largest religion.

Other religions as old as Christianity have either been extinguished or stagnated in their growth and remained confined to geographic or cultural boundaries. But Christianity has leaped all boundaries - national, ethnic, racial, linguistic, geographic, economic - to become a truly world religion. Today one third of world's population claims adherence to Christianity, in comparison with 20% to Islam, 13% to Hinduism, 8% to Buddhism, and do forth. The great Yale church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette in his monumental seven-volume work, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, summed it up nicely when he wrote,

The most thought-provoking set of facts in human history is that in spite of its seemingly absurdly inauspicious start, within five centuries Christianity won the professed allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the Graeco-Roman world, that it survived the demise of that world, and that within nineteen centuries... it penetrated to practically every corner of the inhabited globe and became a molding force in every great cultural area of mankind.

As we look back over the history of this remarkable movement, it's instructive to see how it spread. The growth of Christianity has been compared to a huge incoming tide which advances and

retreats, advances and retreats, but progressively gains ground over time. The first period of advance spanned the first five centuries after Christ. From a persecuted splinter religion of Judaism, Christianity grew to supplant the religions of Greece and Rome and became the state religion of the Roman Empire. But even this incredible triumph did not guarantee that Christianity would survive the decline and fall of Rome.

Indeed, during the next 450 years Christianity did experience its most disastrous and enduring retreat. Islam dealt a blow to Christianity from which she has yet to recover. The geographical expanse of the Christian faith was reduced to 50% of what it had been, and the Christian churches in lands that rapidly became Muslim – such as in North Africa and the Middle East – entered into a steady, unrelenting decline, until today only traces of them remain.

Around AD 950, however, Christianity experienced another surge forward, this advance lasting some 400 years until around 1350. During this time the faith spread into Scandinavia. Central Asia, Ethiopia, China, and continued to persist in India. Never before had any religion been so widely represented geographically, and Christianity's influence in the life of mankind was even greater as a result of this second advance than as a result of the first.

This advance was followed by another retreat, but not so deep nor so long as the previous on. For 150 years, from 1350 to 1500, the Church suffered as old empires fell and new ones rose. The great Mongol Empire of Genghis Kahn broke apart, thus cutting off Christian communities in Central Asia and China from the Christian West. In Central Asia, the Mongols turned to Islam, and today this region constitutes the Muslim dominated republics in the former southern Sovie t Union. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire of the Turks arose and overran modern day Turkey, bringing Islam with it. Constantinople (modern day Istanbul), which was the successor to Rome as the capital of Christianity, was sacked, and the famous church called Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque and remains so today. Despite these setbacks, however, Christianity did advance into Russia during this time, and Moscow declared itself the successor to Rome and Constantinople as the seat of true Christianity.

Then shortly after 1500 came the Protestant Reformation, and as a result of the revival it brought to the Church, the next 2 1 / 2 centuries were a period of further expansion of Christianity. Perhaps one of the most exciting missionary enterprises of all times took place during this period. Under the leadership of Count Nicolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the Moravian Church in the first half of the 1700’s sent out a phenomenal 75% of their members as missionaries (some even sold themselves as slaves in order to reach the unreached!), and in a mere 20 years sent out more missionaries than all Protestants and Anglicans had sent out in the prior 200! Perhaps even more incredible was their prayer vigil that continued around the clock, seven days a week, without interruption for more than 100 years!

From about 1750 until 1815 came a period not so much of retreat, but of stagnation. Many within the Protestant church had, as a sad result of faulty doctrine, believed that Jesus had given the Great Commission uniquely to His disciples of His day and that it was not relevant beyond their time. In 1792, William Carey, today considered the father of the modern missions movement, published his now famous Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (and that’s the shortened title!), which began to awake the church from her stagnation.

Then beginning in 1815 and lasting until 1914 came what has been called "the Great Century". Spurred by the evangelical revivals in England and America during the late 18th century, modern missions was born and the gospel was carried into Africa, China, the islands of the Pacific, and the American frontier. Nothing even remotely like this expansion could be recorded of any other religion at any time in human history. It's interesting that numerically speaking the greatest expansion of Christianity during the 19th century was in the United States. In 1815 less than one-tenth of the U.S. population were church members. The church faced enormous obstacles: a westward -migrating population, millions of immigrants flooding in from Europe, exploited non -Christian minorities in the Indians and Negro slaves

to be evangelized, and so forth. Yet, amazingly, the church rose to this task: by the end of the Great

Century, church membership had grow from less than a tenth to more than two-fifths of the population, and the gains were proportional all along the line: whether blacks, whites, Indians.

It is probably impossible to exaggerate the importance of this 19th century evangelization of America. It set the stage for Christianity to make an enormous impact in the 20th century with the emergence of the United States as the world’s foremost power. As a result of the 19th century evangelization of America, the richest and most powerful nation in the 20th century was also the nation with the largest number of Christians of any country and was the most evangelized society on earth. The global center for missionary sending had shifted from Europe to the U.S. during this century when the vitality, diversity, and size of her Christian organizations and activities nearly defied description.

The world of the 19th century came to its shattering end in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, in which the world was treated to the spectacle of nominally Christian nations destroying each other in Europe. Contemporary historian Paul Johnson said of World War I, “It was a European suicide; it was also, in a sense, a suicide of Christianity.” He goes on to explain that although that war

was conducted in what was still a Christian context, the world which emerged from that war bore the first unmistakable signs of total de-Christianization at a state level. For 1917 saw the birth, in

Russia, of the first atheist state dedicated to the destruction of religion of all kinds and of Christianity in particular, and that evil regime itself soon evoked in response others which repudiated all the restrains of Christianity....

The impact of that change in the world-order has been horrific. Johnson believes that the principal cause of the horrors of the 20th century is that great power has been acquired by men who have no fear of God and so no absolute code of moral conduct. Lenin, he explains, hated Christianity and was determined to stamp it out. For Lenin there was no Christian code of conduct; anything can be justified in the name of the State and the Party. “Can we wonder, then” asks Johnson, “that this monster murdered or starved to death five million of his own countrymen and that his successor Stalin dispatched a further 20 million?”

The moral counterpart of Lenin and Stalin was Adolf Hitler who, according to Johnson, hated Christianity with a passion that rivaled Lenin’s. Shortly after assuming power in 1933, he told Hermann Rauschwig that he “intended to stamp out Christianity root and branch.” “One is either a Christian or a German,” he said, “You cannot be both!” Hitler found it expedient to use the state church until the Third Reich had attained supremacy; then he planned to wipe it out just as he had annihilated the Jews. “Can it be wondered,” writes Johnson,

that these two fearful regimes—Communism and Nazism—created by men dedicated to the destruction of Christianity, “soon plunged the world into a yet more extensive and destructive

Armageddon, which cost 50 million lives and saw men resort to degrees of savagery and wickedness never before practiced or even imagined? Had the world ever before seen horrors like Auschwitz or the Gulag Archipelago? Here were the first bitter fruits of a de-Christianized world.

In the post-war era the most important and dramatic phenomenon has been the sudden and massive pullback of the Western colonial powers from the developing world. As the colonial powers retreated, totalitarianism, civil war, and international war rushed in to fill the vacuum. In the five decades following World War II, wars and civil conflicts in the developing world have claimed some 35 million lives, not to mention the countless others who perished in prisons or famines engineered by corrupt regimes, where, as in Ethiopia, the restrains of Christian government were thrown aside.

When we contemplate these tragic and terrible statistics, the natural assumption is to suppose that with the close of the Great Century in 1914, we have entered once again upon one of those calamitous eras of retreat for the Christian movement in the world. And yet—and this is the incredible paradox, the best-kept secret which you will never hear on the evening world news—it is not true. The truth is that despite these setbacks, despite the de-Christianization taking place at the state level, the twentieth century has been an era of incredible advance for the Christian faith around the world.

Professor Latourette characterized the three decades between 1914 and the close of the Second War as “advance through storm”. You see, even though Christianity had become very widely spread during the Great Century, the percentage of Christians in each land was very tiny. But during the 20th century those percentages began to multiply. During the thirty years leading up to 1945, the percentage of Christians in the non-Western world approximately doubled. The quarter century following World War II, during which the Western powers pulled back from the so-called Third World, have been called by missiologist Ralph Winter “the 25 unbelievable years,” as Christianity underwent a spurt of unprecedented growth in the non-Western world. In Africa, for example, in 1900 only 3% of the population adhered to Christianity. By 1970, that percent had grown to 28% (and by 1995 it had grown to 48%!). In Latin America, Evangelical Christianity grew from less than 1% of the population in 1900 to over 5% in 1970 (and perhaps 15% by 1995). Protestantism in the entire non-Western world had, by

1964, enjoyed an 18-fold increase over 60 years, a rate of increase which was over twice the rate of population growth during the same time.

But if the twenty-five years following World War II can be characterized as “unbelievable”, we begin to run out of superlatives for the last quarter of the 20th century. Never before in history has such a high percentage of the world’s population been exposed to the gospel, nor the increase of evangelical Christians been so encouraging. The increase in the percentages of evangelical Christians in the Third World has been spectacular. In the 10 years from 1975 to 1985, the number of evangelicals in the Third World grew from 68 million to 130 million, an increase of 6.7% annually, well over twice the population growth. Today, in Latin America, for example, over 11% of the population is evangelical Christian, with the highest percentages, according to Patrick Johnstone in Operation World, being in Brazil (18%), El Salvador (20%), Guatemala (23%), and Chile (27%). In Africa, about 7% of the population was evangelical in 1970; today it is over 15%, thus more than doubling in 30 years. In Asia, the most dramatic advances of the gospel have occurred in the last quarter of this century. In the ten years following 1975 the number of Protestants increased by nearly 10% annually, compared with a population increase of only 1.7% annually. In 1987, the number of evangelicals in Asia surpassed the number of evangelicals in North America, and in 1991 it surpassed the number of evangelicals in the entire Western World! So today in Korea, for example, evangelicals now constitute over 25% of the population. In Indonesia, following the bloody coup in 1965, Christianity experienced rapid and substantial growth in a predominantly Muslim society. This is the first Muslim nation in the world in which such a phenomenon has occurred. One of the most amazing stories is China. When missionaries were forced out of China in 1948, they left with a feeling of failure and defeat and were fearful for the 1 million or so Christians there. It was long thought thereafter that the repressive Communist regime had all but exterminated Christianity in China. But then during the 1970’s news began to leak out of China that though the church had been forced underground, she had flourished and grown, until today she numbers conservatively 60 million believers, with some people estimating as many as 100 million. That would mean that China has the largest population of Evangelicals in the world (with the United States in second and Brazil in third). If you add these figures from China to the world statistics mentioned before, that means that between 1975- 85 the number of evangelical believers in the Third World grew at an annual rate not of 6.7%, but of 9%!

One of the exciting consequences of this phenomenal growth is that it is not only the Church which is multi-national, but also her missionary enterprise. Just as the geographical sending center for missions shifted from Europe to North America at the end of the 19th century, there is a new shift taking place today. It is no longer primarily the Western Church that is involved in completing world evangelization. Today the global Church is completing her global mission. There are Indian missionaries and Brazilian missionaries and Nigerian missionaries and Korean missionaries – and many others – and they are scattered around the globe planting churches so that the Lord Jesus Christ may be exalted among peoples who were formerly totally unreached.

Listen, God is on the move in the world today! He is building His church, just as He has been building it down through the centuries. Jesus’s parable of the mustard seed comes to mind:

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in a field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and made nests in its branches. (Mt. 13:31)

Perhaps all the statistics thus far can be best summed up by some remarkable figures released by missiologist/historian Ralph Winter. In a chart labeled “The Diminishing Task,” he plots the number of evangelical Christians per non -Christians in the world. These figures do not include under either category people who are just nominal Christians. In the year 100 there were 360 non-Christians for every evangelical Christian. By the year 1000, there were 220 non-Christians for every evangelical. By 1500, there were 69 non-Christians for every evangelical. By the year 1900, there were only 27 non-Christians per evangelical. By 1950 that number had shrunk to 21 non-Christians per evangelical Christian. Today, it is generally agreed upon that there are only about 9 non-Christians to be evangelized for every evangelical believer in the world!

100 AD ‐ 360 to 1 1 0 0 0 AD ‐ 220 to 1 1 5 0 0 AD ‐ 69 to 1 1 9 0 0 AD ‐ 27 to 1 1 9 5 0 AD ‐ 21 to 1

1 9 8 0 AD ‐ 11 to 1

2 0 0 0 AD ‐ 9 to 1 2020 AD - 5 to 1?

Do you believe in the possibility of world evangelization? We do! We’re so used to hearing about the world population explosion outstripping the growth of Christianity. We used to wonder how the Bible could say that God is not slow about his promise to return, but is forbearing towards us, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance (I Pet.3:9). Given the population explosion, it seemed that the longer God waits, the greater the percentage of people who go to hell. But the statistics we just shared show that’s not true. Between 1980 and 1989 the number of evangelicals in the world grew by an incredible 81% to a 500 million people. The world’s population only grew by about 13% in the same period. There's no comparison! And today there are nearly 700 million evangelicals, over 10% of the world’s population!

Do you realize that most of the people who have ever lived in the history of the world are living right now, at this very moment? We have the numbers, the financial resources, and the technology to evangelize the whole world in our generation – and thereby to reach the majority of the human race who have ever lived! Do you see why we’re excited?

And the best is yet to come. The chief difficulty in reaching the whole world today is the fact that hundreds of millions of people live in countries which are legally closed to the gospel and so evangelism is almost impossible. It's estimated that bet ween 15-25% of the world's population lies beyond the present reach of the gospel. But here, too, God is working in unbelievable, unpredictable ways. Books on world mission published during the 1980's lamented the fact that 20% of the world's population wa s classified as non-religious or atheistic, making atheism the second greatest religion after Christianity. But, of course, most of the people thus classified lived in communist countries like the Soviet Union or China, where the official ideology was atheistic. In 1985 the then new leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev vowed he would achieve what his predecessors failed to achieve - the elimination of religious

belief in the USSR. His utter failure has been abundantly demonstrated in the years since! The collapse of the communistic system and Marxist- Leninist ideology in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe came so suddenly and so unexpectedly that publications on the then current scene became antiquated overnight. The handbook Operation World, published in 1986, for example, has this to say about the Soviet Union:

Pray that the active efforts of atheist teachers, discriminatory laws, secret police and prisons to
speed the demise of Christianity may not only fail, but that the Church may emerge victorious.

Wow! Talk about an answer to Prayer! The Marxist-Leninist system, which conquered over a fourth of the earth's land surface and resulted in the loss of millions and millions of lives and incalculable human suffering, which forbade hundreds of millions of people to hear and believe the gospel, all but evaporated almost overnight. The 1993 version of Operation World has quite a different tone concerning Russia than it did in 1986:

The spectacular demise of communism took the world by surprise. The ideology that sought to destroy Christianity and promised to parade the USSR’s last Christian on television was defeated by Christians who prayed.

George F. Kennan, who drafted America's cold war policy, said that recent events in the former Soviet Union have been some of the most significant events in the history of mankind. It's hard to accuse him of exaggeration: the threat of worldwide nuclear holocaust, the arms race, Soviet-sponsored wars of national liberation, all these are gone. And spiritually speaking, the changes are just as dramatic: over 416 million people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, less than 3% of which are evangelical, now lie open to the gospel. Especially significant is the fact that the Islamic republics of Central Asia, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, from which Christianity was virtually extinguished in the 15th century, are now open to the gospel.

During a recent visit to Moscow, I (Bill) toured the Kremlin, the seat of the Communist government. To my amazement, there are several, beautiful, golden-domed churches with dozens of crosses shining against the sky right in the Kremlin. When I asked, "Were those crosses never taken down all these years?" I was told that they had stood there since before the Revolution. What an irony, I thought. For 70 years the cross of Christ has towered over the Kremlin in the heart of a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship antithetically opposed to the Christian faith. Now that tyranny over the souls of men has proved its bankruptcy and is passing away. I'm reminded of that line from an old hymn: "In the cross of Christ I glory, towering o'er the wrecks of time."

Today, the Christ of the cross is triumphing in the hearts of men and women across Russia, having destroyed the political barriers to the Gospel, and there is overwhelming evidence that His Spirit is also powerfully on the move in what remains the largest closed country in the world, China, in spite of the overwhelming political barriers. Despite over 50 years of harsh communist rule and unrelenting opposition to religious movements and their adherents, the growth of the church in China has no parallels in all of history! Millions of Chinese are professing faith in Jesus Christ (with some observers estimating around 1000 conversions per day!), from the rural peasant farmer to the urban university student. When I (Bill) was recently in China lecturing on the Christian faith at Peking University, I was surprised to find out tha t there is a budding movement among Chinese intellectuals to turn to Christ. The interesting thing is how this has happened. Apparently the Communists never banned translations of classical Christian works, like Augustine’s Confessions or the writings of Anselm and Aquinas, and Chinese intellectuals began to read these works and secretly come to faith. Yes, God is on the move in the world today!

Nowhere in the world is there more across-the-board opposition to Christianity than among predominantly Muslim nations, yet even here, in what may be considered the greatest challenge of all times for the Gospel, there are tremendous signs of encouragement. I (Jaon) routinely lead teams of Brazilians to Turkey, one of the world’s least-evangelized nations. These teams inevitably discover that

there is an unprecedented openness among Turks, 99.8% of whom are Muslim, to Christianity. Just consider that:

· For the first time in Turkish history, the government has granted official status to an
Evangelical church. Since its recent inauguration there have been tremendous opportunities for ministry.

· There are unprecedented reports of people becoming followers of Jesus, being baptized and being discipled, with less time and fewer contacts with the Gospel than in the past.

· In his final months in office, the country’s former president Demirel made remarkable comments concerning the incompatibility of 235 Koranic verses with Turkish law and that the country cannot have two legal systems. He also said that Turkey needs to recognize the array of cultures living within her borders. On Christmas day, in a totally unprecedented gesture, he greeted the Christian minorities on television.

· The country’s most recent former president, Ahmet Sezer, declared his commitment to religious freedom.

· The recent tragic earthquakes have united the Turkish churches in outreach and believers are becoming increasingly bold.

· Thousands of copies of the new Turkish New Testament are being legally distributed throughout the country.

· Turkish believers invited Luis Palau to Turkey, and they planned all of the events. 10% of the Turks who heard the Gospel indicated a desire to become followers of Christ or know more about Christianity.

Happily, Turkey is not alone among Muslim nations. God is at work in unimaginable ways among Muslim people and peoples across the globe. We are firmly convinced that, like the Iron Curtain, the Islamic Curtain will also be torn down in our lifetime and the Gospel will penetrate those lands as well. Every people group of the world can be reached in our generation!

What a joy to be alive today! To be a part of such a strategic time in history, when God is moving in the world in such dramatic ways! We have the privilege of working together with the Father to surmount the great obstacles to world evangelization that still remain. In the power of the Holy Spirit and for the sake of His glory among all nations, we, the Church, can overcome the six remaining challenges that Patrick Johnstone identifies in his book, The Church is Bigger than You Think :

· The geographical challenge (especially the 10/40 Window) • The people challenge (especially the 12 affinity blocs of unreached people groups)

· The urban challenge (especially megacities like Manila, Bangkok and Calcutta)

· The social challenge (especially children at risk, drug addicts and disease and war victims)

· The ideological challenge (especially communism, capitalism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism)

· The spiritual challenge (especially the Church’s need for a healthy understanding and practice of prayer and spiritual warfare)

Remember: The pattern of the Church's growth throughout history has been one of advance and retreat, advance and retreat, with overall advance over time. And in God’s sovereign plan, He has chosen to use His people to spearhead the advances. In other words, we should be not merely spectators, but actors in the drama of the greatest movement the world has ever known. No matter how small or seemingly insignificant our role may be, we can make a contribution. Let us close then with six practical suggestions on what you can do:

1 . Buy a copy of the book Operation World, and on each day read about the country for that date. You will become significantly more well informed about the world we live in, and this world consciousness is, we believe, the real key to mobilizing the Church for world missions today. We need to become world Christians in our outlook.

2. Befriend a foreign student. Each year, thousands of the very top students leave their homelands and come to the United States to study. And to you know what? We have heard many times that these students expect someone to tell them about Christianity and about Jesus. They are usually very far away from home and family, and any hospitality and kindness you can show them is a treasured gift to them. Have them over for a weekend, include them during the Holidays when the Universities are empty, or just invite them for a meal. Buy them a Christian evangelistic book and perhaps a Gospel of John and give it to them. The next time you get together, they may want to ask you questions. Many students who have contact with Christian families become Christians during their stay in the U.S. When these students return to their countries, they assume roles of leadership in their nations. They may open the doors to missionaries and Christian influences. This is a mission field at your doorstep, and you have no idea of the impact your ministry in their lives might have!

3. Get involved with a particular missionary or outreach. Don't merely give money to the church and expect it to allocate your funds for you. You should also be involved in supporting and praying for a particular missionary whom you know personally, whose field is a burden on your heart, and whose ministry you know is effective. And better yet, GO on a short-term trip to their field of ministry in order to get a first-hand perspective of the challenges of life and ministry that they face. You will not return the same!

4. Give generously to the Lord's work. We Americans are so wealthy in comparison to the rest of the world. Many of us can and should be giving 20% or 30% or more of our income to the Lord's work. When C.S. Lewis was asked about giving, he replied, “I’m afraid the only safe rule is to give more than you think you can.” It is rare to meet even one missionary who says that he or she is fully supported. This is really inexcusable. We can and should be doing more.

5. Partner with a developing world missionary or mission agency. More than 50% of global Christians reside in the “global south.” The developing churches there have tremendous human resources – people who for many reasons would be more effective more quickly as missionaries among the least reached peoples of the world than many American or European missionaries – but relatively little in the way of financial resources. Why not participate in God’s global body by supporting one of these missionaries or agencies?

6. Be sure you are a Spirit-filled, witnessing Christian yourself. You are part of the greatest movement in the history of mankind, so don't be intimidated. Speak out boldly for Chri st to friends and coworkers. At the same time, do your best to be a true disciple of Christ, leading a life holy and pleasing to God, manifesting the fruit of the Spirit, and steeped in the truth of Christian doctrine.

7. Consider prayerfully the possibility that God may be calling you to go as a missionary. And don’t get stuck in the “I’m not a pastor” mode. Pastors are very often the last people who can get into the countries where the Gospel is most needed. Today, perhaps more than ever, God is looking for tentmakers, like the Apostle Paul. He wants mechanics and medical professionals and teachers and engineers and pilots and...well... what are you? Whatever you do, you can do it cross-culturally as a tentmaking missionary for the sake of God’s glory in a restricted access region.

There's a saying: “If you feel far away from God, guess who moved.” The problem with that saying is that it assumes that our God is an inert, immobile God. But He's not. God is on the move, and we can drift away from Him just by standing still. Don't get left behind at this critical, thrilling juncture in world history. The world can be reached in this generation, and it should be, because the God whom we serve both greatly desires and richly deserves to receive glory among all peoples.