The Elder As Missionary

Listen now to God's word as he speaks to us in Psalm 96. Oh, sing to the Lord a new song. Sing to the Lord all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name. Tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples.

For great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods. for all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him. Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples. Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name. Bring an offering and come into his courts. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. Tremble before him all the earth. say among the nations the Lord reigns yes the world is established it shall never be moved he will judge the peoples with equity let the heavens be glad and let the earth rejoice let the sea roar and all that fills it let the field exalt and everything in it then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord for he comes for he comes to judge the earth he will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness.

Well, we got started last night and Pastor Paul brought us a message that said the church ought to be a place where there's unity to maturity, that as every part does its work, it builds itself up and becomes what God wants it to be. We line ourselves up with what God has already told us we are. And he mentioned he told us last night that missions is all about taking that from here and putting it there.

That is, if this is what we do here, that's what we do there. If we put together, if God builds his church using us as his instruments here, then he's going to do it there. And I've always loved Paul's emphasis on that. If we're not doing it here, right, we won't do it there. And so tonight he going to come and minister to us And again build on what he started last night so we have a biblical understanding of mission So Paul How are we doing this morning?

Good. Good. so as pastor tim said last night we addressed the role of the church in fulfilling the great commission we saw that that role includes the preparation and the logistics of sending missionaries we're going to get into that more detail today but now if the responsibility of the church is to send, the question is, is it in a position to duplicate itself? We talked about that last night.

What is the church doing right now? Are we pursuing unity to maturity in Christ right now, right here? And while there are no guarantees in this, and I don't want to sound like there are guarantees in this, but generally speaking, I guess in a proverbial way, Strong, mature churches are likely to plant churches that will eventually become strong, mature churches that can duplicate themselves and continue that process.

You might be familiar with 2 Timothy 2.2, where Paul instructs Timothy to take the things that he has seen and heard in the Apostle Paul and pass it on to faithful men who can in turn teach others. There's four generations mentioned there, and that happens at the church level, not only among leaders, but the churches that are strong and mature are likely to continue that process. And one of the key factors is leadership.

So we want to talk about that today. We want to consider the elder as missionary. And this is a little outside the box of most churches, most missions, philosophies. But we're going to address this and see what the scriptures have to say. Any discussion of ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church, whether it's missions or otherwise, must include a discussion about leadership. it not the only issue but without it a discussion about missions is going to be incomplete You have to discuss the issue of leadership You have to include the issue of leadership.

If it's true, as we saw from Scripture last night, that the church is the vanguard, is at the forefront with respect to the Great Commission, then I think we need to be clear about leadership. and so the concept of of doing it here and transporting it there comes to bear on the whole issue of leadership in other words if you're weak in leadership here you're going to be weak in leadership there a church with weak leadership or no leadership is going to have great difficulty planting a strong mature church and so we need to talk about that we need to consider what the scripture say so can any warm body step up and be considered a missionary now you can answer that question no no and yet it happens and it happens a lot i mean over the years in kenya we saw quite an array of individuals show up there uh bearing the title missionary and it was very interesting to see hear their stories and we need to recognize with the number of long term career missionaries at an all time low the temptation is to change the standards so that we can sort of beef up the picture and so one of the ways that's done is by even changing the definition of long term or career missionary because it used to be that a long-term or career missionary was somebody who basically spent their working lives overseas doing missions. And now if you're out for two years, sometimes even one year, you're considered a career missionary. And that's in a missions handbook that I read.

So we're changing definitions, and sometimes we change the definition of leadership or we just we don't deal with it all altogether we ran into that this a few years ago we were invited by a large mission organization down to florida because that's you know florida is where all the big organizations have their headquarters i don know why couldn be the climate maybe i don know So we were invited down for three days So I went with another brother from our church They invited us down because they wanted to talk to us about CPM. And I don't know if you've heard of church planting methodology or church planting movement. And they wanted to expose us to this philosophy, this methodology that they were implementing in their organization.

And this is the, I'm not interested in organization bashing, so I'm just going to refer to them as the third largest mission organization in this country. You can Google whatever you want. But, so we went down for this three-day seminar thing, And partway through the second day, we'd been listening to them talk about this methodology and this movement and the rapid growth of churches, especially in the Middle East.

And this methodology included some interesting things. One of them was the identification of what they called the man of peace. And this was an individual who somehow received a dream from supposedly from God. and this dream instructed him to talk to certain people and do certain things. The role of the missionary in that case was to find that man of peace and ask him if he had a dream.

I kid you not, this is their methodology. And if he answers in the affirmative, yes, I had this dream, and usually the dream included something about Jesus, then the missionary was to you know move forward with the idea that this guy was God's choice to do the missions work in that area and so he would the missionary would start working with this man of peace and he would have him sit down with people and talk to them about his dream and then he would get other people and this man of peace would lead these groups. The missionary would only talk to the man of peace, but the man of peace would be the individual who dealt with the people.

So we listened to this for like a day and a half. And they had books that were written on it and all of this stuff. So then I just, I decided, ask a question, so I raised my hand and I said, so where does church leadership development fit in on this? And there was a little conference up front, you know, between the guys that were up front, and the answer was, well, we haven't thought about that yet.

Leadership development, haven't thought about that yet. Third largest mission organization. the leadership in this organization had bought into this CPM they did not require it of the rank and file so you may not have heard of it because a lot of missionaries have not bought into this methodology of relying largely on dreams and the existence of dreams to plant churches and to disseminate the gospel but this is this is an example of the repercussions of not making leadership development a priority here at home even before we talk about anything happening overseas what's happening right here do we see second timothy 2 2 being played out in our churches here do we see faithful men being raised up and the question we sent asked yesterday do we see the church sending out for instance men who are skilled in expository preaching? Is that happening here?

Are we even thinking about it here? So in discussing this topic of elder as missionary, I think we should define terms here, and hopefully we can clarify some things that we said yesterday, some things that we touched on. While every Christian ought to be concerned with making disciples, and we saw that to be the case, The Great Commission is to the whole church.

It was given to the entire church, but not everyone is a missionary. Missions is not simply disciple-making. Disciple-making is a central part of what's going on, but it is not just simply disciple-making. There's other factors that come into it. there's a further biblical concern with the task of selecting a few people to do a special work we sending people to do a specific thing we see that throughout the book of acts individuals were chosen to do certain things and the New Testament the whole of the New Testament shows us this And we going to look in a minute at Acts 13.

Acts 13, 1 through 3, shows that there were certain individuals marked out by the Holy Spirit who were commissioned to leave the church at Antioch. Now in that passage, which again we're going to take a closer look at in a moment, New Testament missionaries were the duly authorized representatives of the church. They were the ones commissioned to conduct the activities of the missionary endeavor, namely evangelism, teaching, church planting, building up of the saints.

Those were the things that they were ordained to do, that they were sent out to do. So we see New Testament missionaries being akin to, virtually synonymous if you want to say that, with the office of an elder. Teaching, evangelism, church planting. So what is a missionary? Well, simply defined, one sent on a religious, this is a conglomerate definition that I got from a bunch of sources, just kind of looking around at what different people were saying, one sent on a religious mission, especially one sent to promote Christianity in a foreign country.

One sent on a religious mission, especially one sent to promote Christianity in a foreign country. Now, is that a biblical definition? Is that a biblical definition? Don't answer that question too quickly. We're going to explore this. The definition of missionary that we use at Grace Covenant Church is this.

A missionary is an ordained pastor, elder, and his wife, and his wife if married, who are sent to cross-culturally teach, preach, baptize, disciple, plant, develop, and strengthen churches. Strengthen local churches. Put that in there. a missionary is an ordained pastor elder and his wife if he's married who are set to cross culturally teach preach baptize disciple plant develop and strengthen local churches now you might be interested to know that the english word missionary doesn appear in any original language in the bible it not there any time you choose to use a word that actually not found in Scripture there is the added burden of having to decide its definition.

So that's what has to happen with the term missionary, because the term itself doesn't appear there. It actually appeared around the late 1500s with regard to the Jesuit priests of the Catholic Church. They were the first ones to actually use that term. It was a Latin term then. But some folks along the way connected that Latin term with the term that we do see in the scriptures, the Greek term apostolos, from which we get apostle. and in both cases the word simply mean or both of those words simply mean sent one one who is sent on a mission and it especially the word apostle is a very generic word in that sense even in classical greek it's just used of anybody who's sent to do anything so even if you're going to use the word apostle you have to define it and the scriptures do that for us the scriptures definitely defined the word apostle for us as one sent by the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

But the term missionary, we have to come up with that definition ourself. And we have to use the scripture to do that. So the idea of being sent by God started where? Who was the first one sent by God? You want to venture to answer that? Paul?

A little farther back than that. A little farther back than that. What's the first command given in Scripture? Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. Fill the earth. So there's always been, and not too long after that, you had the Tower of Babel.

So God has always been interested in sending people all over the world to do what he has called them to do. So this idea of sending has been around for a long time. And most of the time, God sends people to tell other people about himself. We just read in Psalm 96 declare the glory of God The prophets in the Old Testament were sent all over the place to do that Not just to Israel.

Where was Jonah sent? He was sent to Nineveh. And what was he sent to Nineveh to do? To preach what? the message of repentance right and who sent him god sent him so god said jonah to nineveh to preach repentance and that has that happened a lot in the old testament the prophets were sent to declare that same message and we get to the new testament and we have the apostles and who sent them we've already said that who sent the apostles officially it was jesus he chose chose them and named them and organized them and trained them and sent them out that's what he did and what were they sent out to do acts 1-8 to be witnesses right to testify regarding jesus of who he was and that's exactly what the Apostle Paul did.

Went into the synagogues and argued that Jesus was the Christ. And they all preached the message of repentance. The same message that Jesus himself preached. Mark chapter 1 verse 18 records what Jesus proclaimed. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel. That's the message that is carried. but that message falls into disuse when we don't see the importance of repentance and the doctrine of repentance has undergone much trouble of late and it seems often and god has ordained that the leadership in the church are the ones to guard theology and to guard the fact that we need to continue to preach the whole gospel, the entire gospel. And that's why church leadership, it's one reason why church leadership is so important when it comes to missions, because they need, it is the leadership that needs to maintain that the gospel message goes out unadulterated, unchanged, exactly the way that Jesus intended it to go out.

That's one of the of leadership. But that was Jesus' message, and that message sounds oddly similar to what happened in the Old Testament. Same thing, right? So maybe modern missions isn't so modern. We talk about modern missions as if this movement was something that only happened recently. But God has been sending people out with a message of repentance for a long time.

But are they the only ones to go, the apostles and the prophets? And are we only sending elders? No. But as we said before, we started this question yesterday. We want to again probe it this morning. What are the conditions surrounding their sending?

This is the question. What is the condition surrounding their sending? What are they being sent to do? Because that's going to determine who they are and what we're going to call them. I mean, about, I guess it was 12 years now, we showed up at Grace Covenant Church, fresh off the mission field. I wonder what it would have been like if I had told them when I got there, I was sent to you from Kenya.

God sent me to you from Kenya. What do you think that they would have said? I didn't tell them that, but I was thinking back. What if I had showed up 12 years ago and told the church that God sent us to you from Kenya, what do you think they would have said? What could you say to somebody who comes and says, God sent me to you? Okay.

You're asking how I would know that? How I determine that? Okay. Okay. That's right. It's supposed to be the other way around.

What's that? It's supposed to be the other way around. How so? We're supposed to send people to Kenya. Okay. Well, let's say that Kenya was in a position to do that, to send.

And they sent me here and I showed up. That's what we do a lot of times in missions, isn't it? Except we're the ones sending people somewhere else and we basically say, we're here. God sent us here. What should they ask us? Why?

Why Why are you here What are you here to do Who sent you Who sent you And what are you here to do Those are important questions. Questions we need to have the answers. Can you imagine if somebody showed up in the room here? Right? Out of left field kind of thing. Yeah, God sent me to you.

Right? It has happened. Okay. All right. All right. So if you call yourself a missionary, if you call yourself a missionary, what are you sent to do?

What are you actually sent to do? We make all kinds of assumptions regarding that. What are you sent to do? In fact, go back to our Jack and Polly Martin yesterday. For those of you who weren't with us, we had a little scenario going yesterday. Jack and Polly Martin trying to become missionaries to Zambia.

But what were they being sent to do exactly? Do you remember in our little scenario? They were medical missionaries. And one of the questions that we were going to ask them was, where's the church? Who's your sending church? Where's the church out there?

How does the church out there fit into it? but now we and and one of the other questions was jack for jack and polly is what are you guys doing now ministry wise right and a more pointed question would be to jack jack are you an elder are you a church leader right and what exactly are you being sent to do and if all jack can say is i'm sent to be a doctor how does that fit the Great Commission? we have to ask that question how does that fit the Great Commission? I think we need to we need to take a look at the book of Acts the story of the Holy Spirit in the church but when we do this we need to make sure we understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive have we discussed that before here? hopefully just a quick just a quick challenge and that is to recognize the difference between descriptive and prescriptive there are things in the scriptures that describe things for us they don't demand us to do them they don't call us to obedience they don command us in in any way in that section it just descriptive of how things are Now there might be things in there that we do because there are other portions of scripture that are prescriptive, that prescribes that we should do that. There are commands in scripture that tell us to do that.

And this whole idea of sending fits into that because the scriptures show us that we should be sending people out in acts, but it doesn't necessarily give us the specific commands on how to do that. How do we send somebody? What's entailed in doing that? What are the details in how you send somebody out, actually? And we don't necessarily have all the specifics about that.

So when we go to Acts, we're looking for big picture descriptive stuff. If we're going to find things that were prescribed or commanded to do, We're going to have to go to other portions of Scripture. But Acts still is very helpful for us because it does show us how it's done and how the commands of Scripture are actually being carried out. And the church in the book of Acts, I don't know if you've noticed, if you've ever sat down and read through Acts like you would a novel.

If you haven't done that already, you should do that. It's a great, you should do it several times because it's a really good story. But in that book, in the book of Acts, we see the church in a state of flux. It's always moving and changing and all kinds of things are happening. There's all kinds of activity happening surrounding the church. From the very beginning in chapter 1, when they're trying to figure out how they're going to replace Judas, which they come up with a plan and they carry that plan out.

And then we get into chapter 2 and the day of Pentecost arrives, which is a pretty important event. That's when the Holy Spirit arrives and dresses God's people to the nines, as one put it once. He clothed his people from on high. And that was unlike anything we had seen in Scripture up to this point. We've not seen anything like that. Same spirit, still, you know, filling God's people like he has even throughout the entire Old Testament, but in a way that we haven seen before And Jesus promises children that this would happen that they would be clothed on high And this was a clear sign, as Peter stands up to preach on the day of Pentecost, it's a clear sign that we are now in the new covenant.

We are now seeing the new covenant unfold, and he quotes Joel 2 to show us that. And so following this, this is all happening in Jerusalem. and Jerusalem then became pretty much the center of Christendom at that point. Everything that we see happening from chapters 3 all the way to chapter 7 is all happening in the confines of Jerusalem. And there is growth still going on and certain amazing events, lots of healings going on.

Peter is preaching. Peter and John are testifying before the council. the believers are preaching the gospel boldly get to chapter 5 and we have the story of Ananias and Sapphira which was an amazing thing that happened in the early church the result of that 511 says great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things so there's amazing things happening the gospel is being preached and we actually see the first use of the term church in 511. Great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things.

Ekklesia, the called out ones. That's what that word means. And so they were all in Jerusalem at that point. And then in chapter six, you have some leaders chosen who were quite probably the forerunners of what we would call a deacon, chosen to wait on tables. But these were men full of the spirit chapter 6 verse 3 tells us and one of those men was Stephen was Stephen Stephen was an amazing man of God articulate and he has the opportunity to witness for Christ in chapter 7 and then he has the opportunity to lay down his life when he is stoned at the end of chapter 7 and so his martyrdom is a turning point because then when we get to chapter 8 we see this young man Saul is there at that stoning chapter 8 verse 1 proving of the execution Saul was but then look at the rest of chapter 8 Verse 1, and there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.

The apostles stayed put. They didn't go. They weren't sent in that place. Actually, nobody was officially sent. They were scattered, which is different. But still, God sent out his people, scattered them all through the regions of Judea and Samaria in fulfillment of Acts chapter 1 and verse 8.

He said he would send them. He didn't say how. Right? In this case, he scattered them. So we know that they were sent by God. They probably didn't think of themselves as being sent by God, but they were scattered throughout all those regions.

And then Saul, verse 3, was continuing to ravage the church. He was, that's what he did that was his calling entering house after house and he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison so this was the state of the church at at that point involuntary church planting as believers are scattered but let's not now as we as we reach this point we don't want to forget our original question what are you sent to do so when we see in church, here in Acts, we see it in usually one of two states, generally, a little bit of overlap, but any single local church can be and should be involved in both of these simultaneously, depending on their level of maturity. The first one is planting.

Is there planting going on somehow? The church is never to be stagnant. It was never meant to be stagnant. It was never meant to be us for and no more and we're all in this comfortable little place happy fat and here we are it was never ever meant to be that acts is anything but that in acts the church is this rolling organism filling the earth in fulfillment of chapter 1 verse 8 there was always meant to be church planting.

Sometimes we get the idea that this is a new thing. It's like, oh yeah, church planting It sort of a fad You walk into bookstores and you get on CBD and all these books on church planting and there a ton of them now As if it was some new thing But the church has always meant to be planting itself to be duplicating itself Just like we see in Acts 1.8, God is using that. But if we flip over in chapter 9, verse 31, we see it happening.

We see the dynamic nature of the church. Chapter 9, verse 31. So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. We looked at this yesterday. Walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied. It multiplied.

The church was planting itself. Churches were being planted. The church was growing in number and the church was growing in stature and the church was growing in places, in actual logistics. There were actual logistics unfolding. So, even then in 35, chapter 9, 35, all the residents of Lydda and Sharon saw him and they turned to the Lord. This is the story of the healing of Aeneas there.

It starts in verse 32. So now it's spread to Lydda and Sharon. And then dropping down to 42, we see it spread to Joppa. It became known throughout all Joppa and many believed in the Lord. Is that happening? Are we seeing that happening?

Because what's happening here is churches are being formed and they're spreading and other churches are being planted. It's almost like it's a natural thing. Why is it that church planting has to be forced? Could it be that we're just not doing what we're supposed to be doing as a church? We talked about it yesterday. Unity to maturity in Christ.

Are we doing, are we being what God intended us to be? Because if we are, church planting should be natural. It shouldn't be a forced situation. So we should be either planting, and the second one is, and we should be progressing. Really should be both of these, planting and progressing, because they go hand in hand. Go hand in hand.

We see the church progressing in Acts, but particularly in Acts 15, we have a record of the Jerusalem Council. This is very interesting because this is the first time that we see the church in Jerusalem having direct influence in the other churches So you remember in the Jerusalem, in Acts 15, we have the issue of whether or not circumcision should be required. We had the Judaizers following Paul and the others who were preaching the gospel around, and they were saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, you need to believe in Jesus, but you also need to be circumcised.

You also have to keep the law. And so the council met and they decided, no, you don't have to be, the Gentiles don't have to be circumcised. It doesn't have to happen. And so when they made that decision, some individuals carried that decision out. So we drop down to Acts 15.30. So when they were sent off, that is, they were sent off with the letter that outlined the decision.

So when they were sent off, they went down to Antioch and having gathered the congregation together, they delivered the letter. So here's now this relationship between Jerusalem and Antioch over a doctrinal issue. And when they had read it, they rejoiced because of its encouragement and Judas and Silas, verse 32, who were themselves prophets, encouraged and strengthened the brothers with many words. so this building up of the church is happening and after they had spent some time they were sent off in peace by the brothers to those who had sent them so they returned and then verse 35 says but Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch teaching and preaching the word of the Lord with many others also so there were many individuals carrying on that preaching ministry there So when we send out missionaries, what are we sending them out to do?

Are we sending them out to plant churches? Are we sending them out to aid in the growth and the progression of that church? And the model that we have in the book of Acts is that the leadership, the church leadership are the ones that are accomplishing that. They're the ones doing that. Turn back to Acts 13, and we're going to see that, that that's exactly how that happened. and why it was those individuals doing it.

Acts 13. Now there were in the church at Antioch, the church is already established there and there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers Barnabas Simeon who was called Niger Lucius of Cyrene Menean a member of the court of Herod the Tetrarch and Saul. He hadn't yet had his name changed, Paul, so he's still Saul. But they're ministering in the church.

This is one of the reasons that we understand from this model and other commands in scripture and teaching in Paul's letters that a church becomes a church in the complete sense when you have leadership, qualified, ordained elders. And in our next session, we're going to talk about Titus. We're going to look at Titus chapter one, where Titus was left in Crete to organize things there by appointing elders.

So here you have these men who are busy about the ministry. Verse 2 says, while they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. Then after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them and sent them off. That is, dismissed them. So being sent out, the idea they're being dispatched, dispatched by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia and from there they sailed to Cyprus.

Now let's just notice a few things as we think about the whole sending process. Here you have individuals, five of them, in leadership and teaching ministries in the church at Antioch, and the Holy Spirit sets apart two of them and identifies them. I want these two guys to go. The rest of you are going to stay here. I want you two guys to go. Now this is God's decision.

The Holy Spirit decides this, and through the idea of them worshiping the Lord and fasting, somehow this was communicated by the Holy Spirit. We're not told exactly how, but we know that the Spirit of God often communicated through dreams and visions. We don't have a problem with that as we read it in Scripture that it happened. But the Holy Spirit communicated that, and it was clear that Barnabas and Saul were to be set apart for a specific work that they were being called to. and as the rest of as we saw as the rest of Acts unfolded we saw that that specific work included preaching the gospel teaching and then even organizing the believers in the different places where the churches were established So those two men were sent out, and there was fasting and praying going on, so the church there at Antioch had a part in it.

And I wonder, as I read this, I wonder, you know, we talk about a lot of the logistics of sending missionaries. How much of it is prayer and fasting? I know, this strikes me. I mean, I'm not doing it as much as I ought to. And I wonder how much the church is actually doing that, praying and fasting when it comes to making these kinds of decisions. But it was going on there.

That was the means that God was using in the lives of the church there at Antioch. So it was God doing the sending, but they had a part to play in that. And they were to be identifying these individuals. And so they sent them out and the rest of the book of Acts chronicles for us all that, not all, but some of the things that God had them doing. And it wasn't always easy.

There was some struggles going on there a lot. But let's ask this question. was Paul and Barnabas the only ones who went? Now, they were the two guys that were chosen from the five leaders in Antioch. But no, they weren't the only ones that went. I mean, there's other places, but just down close by it says, when they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews, and they had John to assist them.

And you might remember that whole thing about John, how he left partway through. John Mark, his full name, and he left partway through, and there was some discussion about that with Paul and Barnabas. But down in verse 13 also, Now Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos, came to Perga and Pamplia, and John left them and returned to Jerusalem. So the left them leads us to believe that there's probably more individuals with him.

And we actually later on in Acts can find lists of that. They were often accompanied by even Luke, who chronicled Acts, was with them for much of their journeys. And Aquila and Priscilla and many others. So there were others who had gone. Now even Timothy was with the Apostle Paul for a while But it is clear that missionaries like Paul and Barnabas were specifically gifted and set apart by the Holy Spirit in a way that others were not to conduct what we now call missions work.

So the question is, that we need to ask here, is where is the rule on this continuum? of planting, progressing? What needs to happen? What is happening? What needs to happen in this? Are we asking ourselves questions with potentially scary answers? Right?

I hope so. I hope we are. Now you saw what it looked like to plant a church in Marion. All right, you're watching what's going on there, seeing how things have progressed, how they are progressing. What would it take to plant a church in Zambia or Angola? Now, we're going to get more into this in our next session.

But there are logistics in church planting overseas and in other cultures that the scriptures really don't get into as far as the specifics are concerned. But the point that we want to understand is that as long as we are taking care of business the way that we know that we should be, according to what the scriptures are teaching us, that God is going to direct us in those other ways. and we're going to have the means and the opportunities that we need to do that. Particularly, for instance, in Angola.

While we might not be able to march right into Angola and plant a church, I don't know if you knew this, I found this out last year, but the main language in Angola is Portuguese. I didn't know that, maybe some of you knew that. and that there are actually church planting opportunities underway from Brazil, not from the United States, into Angola. And that because what do they speak in Brazil Portuguese Imagine that So we trying to get involved in that whole thing because we have a family in Brazil So if we going to be involved in Angola we going to go through Brazil to get to Angola Now, where do you find something like that specifically in scripture?

Naming Brazil and naming Angola and languages and all the stuff that it takes to do that. It isn't. It isn't there. Right. But what we do know is that this this family that's in Brazil, the husband is functioning as an elder there in Brazil, in the church in Brazil. And we want them to come back and they are going to actually come back this year.

And we're going to actually put him through our leadership development ministry so that we can send them back to Brazil to continue that work. And then we hope to send families in the future that can go through Brazil to Angola and be involved in church planting there. It's an amazing scenario. I mean, I don't even know who could have thought that up, that the Lord just laid it in front of us.

And so we want to be faithful to do that. So as we said at the beginning, this idea of elders as missionaries is kind of a new thing to many churches. and it's not a widely accepted approach to missions. Why do you think that? Why do you think that it would not be? The idea of sending elders. It's a lot harder to do.

Is it? You've got to have an elder. Okay, fair enough. You've got to have an elder to send. Yeah. What would make it so challenging? it takes time right because now it's not just somebody stepping up and saying i'll go right although that's not a bad thing to step up and say i'll go but then the question has to be asked what are you going to do when you go right so it takes time for an elder because elders if we go to to timothy chapter 3 titus chapter 1 we see there's qualifications these men have to be tested, they have to be raised up, they have to be trained, they have to exhibit, they can be new converts one of the qualifications is so that all takes time Why else What other challenges do we face Oh that an interesting question Go ahead Why doesn the church do that No, go ahead.

I think it's just been this general drift over the last couple of generations of forgetting that the Bible is able to say that. Yeah. Just ignoring what the Bible says. Right. Yeah. And see, again, when we use a term like missionary, and I'm not saying that that's a bad term.

I think it's actually a pretty good term. But we have to impose a definition on it. We have to give it its definition. And if we aren't going back to the scriptures for that, that's where we run into trouble. Because you can just use the term willy-nilly. So as we said yesterday and also alluded to today, there is a sense in which every single Christian is a missionary. but not missionary in the technical sense, in the sense that there has to be a gifting, there has to be a calling, there has to be preparation, there has to be intentionality.

What are you going to do when you go? And if we're talking about preaching and teaching and church planting, who else is qualified and called by God to do that except elders? But yeah, you're right, Tim. If we just kind of put the scriptures aside and impose our own meanings on missionaries, you know, to the term, then yeah. What else? There's actually several other challenges.

I think obviously the language issue is going to be huge for our mission. It's probably someone who's mature. If you don't already know that language, that learning service is long. Right. And that's where we thank God for Timothy. who was a young man and still functioning as an elder. When I went out, I was a pretty young man.

I was not functioning as an elder, but I was not disqualified as an elder. I was qualified to be an elder, even though I wasn't functioning when I went out. But in time, our sending church ordained me and sent me back out as an ordained elder. But yeah, there are challenges. There's much in overseas cross-cultural missions that is sort of the young man's game, if you will, the strength of our youth.

But it doesn't mean I have seen some older missionaries go out. Older men, as elders, go out later in life, and they did manage to acquire the language, but it does get increasingly difficult as time goes on. Yeah? What else? What other challenges? There was one that, you know, Tim said that we set the scriptures aside, and when that happens, we fall into sort of a way we do things, sort of this understanding of missions.

And then when you go against that, to even, when we first started talking about this some years ago, about, well, you know, we really only ought to be sending out elders as missionaries. It's like you came up against a wall, right, in the church. People were like, well, there's not going to be any missions done, you know, kind of thing. It's like, if we only send elders, kind of thing.

But we're not saying only send elders. We're saying if you're going to be planting churches, then you need to send only elders to do that. But we can send out and we should send out teams. But we just have to define what everybody's doing when they go out. And that's what's not happening generally in missions. Somebody just has to step forward, like we said, a warm body and say, I'll go.

Right. Money is usually never the problem. They get lots of money and they go over there. and what do they do They do all kinds of things I mean there was one missionary and I think the only reason that they were in Kenya was to be the caretaker for one of the largest videotape libraries that I ever seen for missionaries to come down country and get videotapes and watch movies.

And that wasn't, in fact, the only thing they did, but it was a big part of what they did. and it was just amazing over the years to see what was going on in the name of missions and it was a broad array of things many of which are just not in scripture so it's no wonder that that proposing that it be elders that go is an amazing thing and proposing that we really ought to be about church planting. While medical works are good and food relief in some cases is really important and necessary, that's not what the church is primarily sending people to do. Now, we can be involved in those things.

The problem is that over the years and over time, those things become central. And then when we talk about missions, we're okay with sending somebody over to be involved in a relief ministry only. And we'll give them precious missions funds to do that. Funds that should be used to plant churches to help pay and offset the costs of disseminating the gospel in the context of the church But instead, we've allowed all these other definitions to come in.

So these are some things that we need to think about when we think about the elders doing that. And whether it is just in Marion or some other nearby place, or whether we are trying to overcome the logistics of cross-cultural ministry, and we're going to talk some more in our next session about church planting as missions, as a part of missions. Whatever the case, we know that what we need to know and do as far as the foundation is in the scriptures for us. and we always constantly have to go back and measure everything that we're doing.

All of our terms and definitions all have to be rooted in scripture. And if it goes against the status quo, we just need to know that God's grace is sufficient, right? And we need to press forward. But sometimes it involves some very difficult decisions. One of them would be that if you are a local church and we had to do this at Grace and you're coming to the point where you're adjusting your mission's philosophy and you realize that you've been supporting a missionary for X number of years and they don fit your new philosophy what do you do I don mean it a new philosophy It just that it a new mission philosophy for you What do you do What do you do with that person Your church has been supporting this person for 20 plus years, but they just don't fit.

Like not even close. This is not like, well, maybe, maybe not. This is don't fit at all. What do you do? Those are some hard choices. some very difficult choices to make. Any questions real quick on anything?

I know I've kind of thrown a lot at you here. No, it's all that clear, huh? That's good. All right. Well, I think we're supposed to take a little bit of a break here at this point. Let me pray and then we'll take a break and then we'll come back for our next session.

Father, we do thank you that, again, you've given us your word. And we know that it never fails, Lord, and that you have provided all things necessary for life and godliness. And even though we might be faced with difficult decisions as a church regarding missions, Lord, we too can be encouraged that you will equip. You will continue to equip. you will help us to move forward to be accomplishing what it is that you've already decided, Lord, that we should be accomplishing.

And we thank you for that. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.