Baptists Committed to World Evangelism » Resources

Train, Family, Undercover, OG, Pray, and more!

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:30:42 +0000

• These Monday Updates sneak up on me so quickly, but I have a good excuse this time, I was on a 10 hour train to the Capitol. We left around 9:30 Sunday night and arrive Monday morning around 7:30. We had four adults, two kids, and lots of luggage in a room with four beds about the size of most Americans bathrooms! Good times!

• My parents are in town, so we have been spending a lot of time with them. This is their first time to China.

• Sunday school was good this week. I asked my dad to give a testimony and I was able to translate for him. I preached a strong gospel message from John 3:36 and another class member also gave a short message.

• Almost all of the Sunday’s during our short furlough (December 2012–February 2013) are filled up. We still have a few spots open and then we will look at booking Wednesday. If you are interested in having us in, let me know!

• There are two families coming to China soon. You can check out their blogs sinoproject.org and asiachurchplant.com. Consider helping them get here to train and prepare for missions work in China!

• Past Post: Undercover or Under-the-Covers | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | The theme in the following post have to do with the problems in being undercover. | “Suffering is part of God’s plan in spreading the Gospel.” | “We desire more than to train them to be saved and safe. Our training says ‘we are training you to be exposed to danger or risk for the sake of the Gospel!’”

• Missionaries working in closed countries PLEASE read the article above!

• Two awesome missions events that you and your church should consider are the Our Generation Camp (May 28-June 1) and the Our Generation Summit (December 27-29). Lord willing, we will be part of the Summit in December.

• We visited Tiananmen Square yesterday. An older lady tried to make some sort of “statement” and threw some papers over the railing where they raise the flag. Not a good idea! A guard and police officer quickly grabbed her and dragged her to the side. A few minutes later a big police van with tinted windows came by. They got her into it the van and drove off. Yikes!

• Pray for one of the guys I have been working with. He seems to be understanding more and seems convicted by the gospel. Pray he gets saved!

Book Review: Planting Growing Churches by Aubrey Malphurs

Travis Snode — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:29:30 +0000

One of the most thorough books on church planting I have ever read is Aubrey Malphurs book Planting Growing Churches.

Reasons why I like his book:

It gives a comprehensive look at the church planting process from the preparation stage to the reproduction stage of another church.
It has a good balance of general principles that could apply to all church-plants and specific applications that help to explain how these principles are lived out.
It places a big emphasis on preparation and character which are essential for the sustained growth and maturity of the church plant.
It looks at ways to grow and mature the launched church.
The goal of church planting is not just to get big but to plant other churches.
There is a wealth of material in the 150 pages of appendixes to help with specific aspects of church-planting.

If you are a pastor, a church-planter, or the member of a church, you need to read this book and ask God what He would have you do to help churches grow, mature, and reproduce!

Review Questions for Planting Growing Churches for the 21st Century by Aubrey Maphurs

Monday Mind Dump

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:00:49 +0000

• My in-laws are in town.

• I translated in Sunday school for my father-in-law as he taught the class. This was my first time translating in a “live” setting. It went pretty good.

• Went to Grace last night across the river and the pastor led one person to Christ! Amen!

• Been in “decision mode” for about a week and trying to make plans for our “next step”. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

• You need to check out the Our Generation Camp taking place this summer! God used it in my life in great ways and I would encourage you to look at it and consider it.

• Teamwork: Take none of the credit or glory. Don’t worry about who gets the credit but be willing to praise your teammate.

• Training: Get out of the way and be forgotten. This is hard. Who wants to feel they are no longer needed? Who wants to give up the power of a position? How can we get into the history books if people don’t know my name?

• Past Post: “Tips, Helps, and Suggestions For Short-termers Traveling to China”

• Our home church, VBC, is hosting a Bible Expo this month. Check it out!

• I am going to try a new plan with my blog. Monday’s post being similar to this, Wednesday post will be an article written by me, and Friday being a guest/repost from other blogs. We will see how it works.

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Monday Mind Dump

Expository Preaching Conference – April 12-13 in Alpharetta, GA

Travis Snode — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 10:00:07 +0000

One of the things I love about my pastor and my home church is their dedication to expository preaching. Pastor Gardner preaches through the Bible every service and he has been a big help to me as I learn to preach expositionally. They are hosting a Bible Expo on April 12-13 that I hope you will do your best to attend. If you are pastor, missionary, Sunday school teacher, or concerned Christian, this conference will be a big help to you.

The primary speaker of the Bible Expo 2012 is Pastor Scott Tewell of Rosedale Baptist Church. Pastor Scott Tewell is the Senior Pastor of Rosedale Baptist Church outside of Baltimore Maryland. Pastor Tewell began ministering to a dedicated group of Christians in 1997. Since then, God has marvelously blessed and multiplied the congregation from under 200 to over 1500 in attendance weekly as they have sought to honor and glorify God through chapter by chapter and verse by verse teaching.In 2010 Pastor Tewell finished teaching through his 59^thbook. The Lord has blessed Rosedale with 3 different auditoriums, a new Family Life Center and is currently building a new educational wing. Gods hand has been on Rosedale since the beginning. All glory and praise goes to the Lord and is attributed to bringing glory to Him and Him alone and a commitment to teaching His Word.

Testimonials from the 2011 Expo:

The meeting didn’t disappoint! Everything taught, was centered around everything needed, to have a New Testament church built upon the final authority of God’s word. Thank you for hosting the meeting!- Pastor Justin Gazaway

Bible Expo 2011 was a great challenge and encouragement to me personally in the area of expository preaching. I was charged with preaching messages from the Bible and not messages that contain some Bible in them. I want the text to dictate what I preach. The Bible Expo gave practical tools for Bible study to pull the meaning from the text. I was charged with organizing my schedule to devote serious time to daily and weekly Bible study. - Missionary to Chile

Pastor Austin Gardner explains what the Bible Expo is:

It is NOT a church growth conference. I believe in church growth and always want my church to grow but the truth is that if we aren’t careful we become very pragmatic. We do whatever it takes to get people to come. We soften our preaching. We try to be likable. I believe that what you will learn at this conference will cause your church to grow. But that is not our purpose in this meeting.
It is NOT a leadership conference. Again I believe in leadership and believe that we should all be the best servant leaders possible. But this is not a self help, success, leadership conference. I believe that you will be a better leader after the conference because you will be preaching more like God wants you to preach. But that is not the purpose of the meeting.
It is NOT a fellowship meeting. We are not getting together to just chew the fat. We are not getting together to just learn about what each other is doing. We will do all of that. We will have a great time of fellowship but that is not the purpose.
The purpose IS to learn more about preaching the Bible. We can all sharpen our skills and learn more how to preach the Word of God correctly. I know that I am a preacher. I love preaching. I know that I spent many years confused about what it means to be a Bible preacher.
The purpose IS to preach the Bible and not about the Bible. We spend lots of time telling people that we believe the Bible. We preach about why we should preach the Bible but we often don’t really say what the Bible says.
We want to invite every pastor possible to come and be with us. We will provide all the meals if you will get a place to stay. If you would like to stay in the home of one of our members I believe we can help you with that also! We are very excited you plan to join us for the Bible Expo. The conference is free of charge, however we want to be prepared for your visit.

Click here to find out more and register.

Find out about more events at bcwe.org.

Book Review: Missionary Methods by Roland Allen

Travis Snode — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:00:51 +0000

St. Patrick’s Day Resources

Travis Snode — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 10:00:59 +0000

Today is St. Patrick’s Day. March 17 was made an annual feast day in the early seventeenth century and has become a celebration of Irish Culture in general. Though much of what is associated with Patrick is not really true, he is one of my favourite Christians of all time. Patrick was a born again believer in Jesus Christ. He was not Protestant or Catholic, but was a missionary sent out by the ancient Christian church. He was a true believer, a Bible preacher, and believed in believer’s baptism. As a result of his ministry, thousands of converts were baptized, hundreds of churches were started, missionaries were sent out, and many kings were saved. Ireland changed from primarily a place of pagan worship to a centre of Christianity, largely through the influence of Patrick. Attached are a few resources that you might like to read or use this St. Patrick’s Day.

Who Was Patrick? Brochure
The Real St. Patrick

Find more helpful material at bcwe.org.

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St. Patrick’s Day Resources

Raising Radical Kids

Scott Newton — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 21:11:10 +0000

We are currently in our third back-to-back missions conference (whew!), Cornerstone Baptist Temple in Dayton OH, and we are staying with some pretty amazing people. One of the awesome things about deputation is that we often stay in homes of church members. We have not only made great friends this way, but we also get to see the Great Commission being lived out in lives of people who are just as called and just as passionate as missionaries.

We are staying with the Fortner family, and we are something like the 70th missionary family to stay with them! They have a large and beautiful home, and have designated a large portion of it to be used for housing missionaries. We have stayed with 3 families in a row now that love this kind of ministry: The Kidds, the Mortons, and now the Fortners.

When talking with bro Robert about how his daughter Michaela had introduced me at the church as “her missionary”, he said something that really blew me away:

“My daughter thinks it’s normal to have missionaries always hanging around the house, it’s really all she’s ever known. We talk about missions all the time, and she loves it! She doesn’t see color either: we have every nationality stay with us, so she thinks racists are weird.”

Need I really comment more? That is AWESOME. The Fortners work “normal” jobs, are not considered to be “in the ministry”, and will likely never lead a church plant in a foreign country. But they are passionate missions advocates, crazy about their calling

Let’s step up and say “My kid isn’t going to waste his life on NORMAL

as senders, and dedicated to raising their kids to be radical global Christians. And I think that’s phenomenal.

This was a challenge to me, and I hope it will be to you as well: maybe you don’t have a large home and couldn’t have the same ministry, but why don’t you think and pray about how you could get your kids exposed to missions and get a heart for the world?

That direction sure isn’t going to come from the world around them: it’s got to come from YOU. Dads: we are the spiritual leaders of the home! Let’s step up and say “My kid isn’t going to waste his life on NORMAL”.

Maybe instead of Disney World this year you could find a good missionary to go visit and be a blessing to them! Maybe instead of encouraging your senior to go on that ski trip, send them on a Vision Tour to see the need in a place like Thailand, South Africa, or the UK.

Here’s an easy but GREAT one: get them to the Our Generation Summer Camp this summer! This is really a camp like no other: a week of preaching and activities centered around global missions, taught by missionaries!

I have a feeling Michaela is going to grow up a little weird… but it’s going to be those “weird” people who have no interest in the American Nightmare (I mean Dream, sorry) who God uses to turn the world upside down. I hope my kids are weird like that!

Comparing the Church Planter to the Leader Trainer

Travis Snode — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:41:12 +0000

This article was written by my pastor, Austin Gardner, several years ago. As a church-planting missionary, this article has some very important truths for me and other missionaries to consider. God greatly used my pastor when He went to Peru as a missionary, and I think that following this method had a lot to do with it.

Most missionaries are able to start and leave very few indigenous churches during their missionary career. The majority will have to leave their work with a North American missionary when they return to the states on furlough. They can get the people together and have everything that looks like a church but be unable to have trained leadership to carry on the work. It is completely essential to consider the contrast between training leaders and being a regular church planter. Most missionaries go with a pastor mentality instead of a missionary mentality. They want to reproduce what they had in the states but do not know how to go from there to having a national pastor to take the work.

Consider a church planter that can plant a church every year. That means knocking on doors, winning enough souls, getting a place to meet, training the people to be faithful, tithe, pray, preach, and all the other things that make up a church, plus find a pastor and leave in 365 days or one year. He would be doing a better job than most any living missionary today. If he could consistently continue this ministry and take care of his family at the same time he would be able to start and leave a total of only 32 churches in a typical missionary lifetime. That means he started planting churches at the age of 25 and continued until 65 taking a furlough every 5 years (4 years on the field and then one on furlough). Consider that–32 churches. If they really become self supporting, self governing, and self propagating he will have been used far beyond what most modern missionaries do. Almost anyone that has any experience on the mission field will realize that this is near to impossible if not totally impossible. For those of you that live in the states show me any church planter in North America that has ever been able to accomplish a similar feat in the States with all the advantages that the North American church has.

Now consider something far more within the realm of reason. What if a missionary could start a church doing all of the above mentioned and leave it with a national pastor every 4 years just before going on furlough. That would mean that he could start 8 churches in the same time period. In a short period of investigation you will find that few men have been able to consistently carry forth this ministry either.

Finally consider the missionary who approaches the ministry with the mentality of training leaders as mentioned in the article above. He too will begin to plant a church but instead of getting bogged down in the day to day operation of pastoring a church he will search out and prayerfully train leaders. What he can accomplish will be unlimited because the difficult part of planting churches is not the getting people together etc but leaving a trained leader that can carry the ministry forward. It only makes sense to train leaders. II Timothy 2:2.

Before leaving this subject consider the greatest missionary who ever lived. Most consider Paul the greatest missionary and without a doubt he was the second greatest but Jesus Christ obviously has to be rated as the greatest. He spent 3.5 years preaching, healing, teaching, ministering, and doing the work and yet when he left his ministry there were only 120 members in His church and that was the first time they had to count the women to get a good attendance. He failed in the big church planting ministry if numbers are your goal but he certainly won out when you consider that he gave his time to the training of 11 men who would shake the entire world in their lifetime. What was his goal–to rapidly plant churches or to train men who could train others to plant churches. You decide 32 churches, 8 churches, 1 church or train 11 men or as many as you can to reach the greatest unlimited number of churches and souls possible.

Read more helpful articles at bcwe.org.

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Comparing the Church Planter to the Leader Trainer

February 2012 Update

Jeremy Hall — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:38:12 +0000

Dear Pastor and Praying Friends:

We have just returned from a short visit to the states and are very excited to be back home and back in the work. The reason behind our visit was to attend a few meetings that we were invited to, and to visit family. But most importantly, to find out what we needed to work on, in order for the church to be self sufficient. Our absence revealed a few things and we are working on them now. Our goal is for IB Omega to be independent very soon, so that we will be free to start other works. We would appreciate your prayers in this.

Church attendance has been a little bit lower than normal, which is usual for this time of year, due to many being away for summer vacation. Another factor is the unusual flooding that we are experiencing here in Arequipa. Even with these hinderances, we praise the Lord for the Luis Ramirez family who have decided to join us! Also, today (Feb 12th), a young girl named Stephanie, who has been attending faithful for the past few months, brought her mother to the service for the first time and she accepted Christ as savior after the preaching!

Last week we were also able to have a three day retreat with the leaders of the church in the city of Mollendo. We successfully mapped out what we would like to accomplish this year. We also had a great time of fellowship with our coworkers. It will be a very busy and exciting year!

We ask that you pray with us for a couple of upcoming events; our Ladies Conference which will take place the 17th and 18th of this month. Please pray for Bekah as she will be teaching on Saturday. Also, today we began a new project at IB Omega, “Projecto 7”. We had new tracts printed and bundled in packs of seven. Each member of the church will take and pass out one for every day of the week, for this year. We had thirty individuals sign up this morning and are expecting that number to grow to 100+. Please pray with us that this project will be successful and that we will be able to see many saved through it.

One last request, please remember the Henry family in your prayers. Patrick, Leslie and their three daughters arrived here a couple of weeks back. They will be working and studying with us for the next six months. This is a great family that I’m expecting God to use tremendously. Pray that He will use this time in their lives to give them clear direction for their future.

As always, thank you for your prayers and financial support!

Lord Bless,
Jeremy, Rebekah, Brayden, Olivia, Jackson, and …… Hall

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February 2012 Update

The Impact of a Short Term Missions Trip

markcoffey — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:30:02 +0000

During this year’s OG Summit I taught a class on Short Term Mission Trips. I wanted Missionary Matt Allen to take a few minutes and speak about his field in person, but unfortunately he wasn’t able to because he was teaching another class at the same time. Instead, he wrote out a testimony that I have placed below that really touched my heart. He also wanted me to let others know that currently, from people visiting him on the field, there are 6 families on deputation who are raising support for Papua New Guinea, and two more that are starting this year.

From Matt Allen: Missionary to Papua New Guinea

Last year, we had 80 visitors come stay with us in the remote mountain jungles of Papua New Guinea. As I look back on it, I wonder “What else did I do!?” But we were able to accomplish a lot of work, with those groups coming and being a part of the ministry–right there around and behind us. Many times 2the question comes up, “What good will I do on a missions trip?” My answer may come as a shock: “You probably won’t do any good.” But don’t give up on me that easy!

A short-term visitor does not usually know the language. They are most likely not experienced preachers. They probably haven’t done any counseling. And I doubt they have any idea what their target audience thinks about their message–much less their necktie. So, with that in mind, quit thinking “God is going to use me to turn the world upside-down” on this two-week missions trip.

Instead, come into the trip asking God, “What do you want me to learn on this trip?” Because you will be turned upside-

down. Your world-view, which has become so ideological in your own eyes, will be thrown in the trash. I’ve had college seniors tell me–just five minutes after landing in our village–”I had no idea people really lived like this.” Welcome to the world, dude! You will have to put behind your cell phone, your desire to stay out of the mud, your beloved itinerary, and what you thought about how God deals with people. You will be changed, inwardly, and that’s what makes the difference in a short-term missions trip. You will no longer think of the kingdom of God as “going-to-church” but instead as spreading His glory to all the world.

On a missions trip to our area, you will be involved in carpentry, children’s ministries, nursing, guest-lecturing in the Bible Institute, and being a manual laborer. Maybe, if one of the national pastors lets you, you’ll get to preach. You will work hard, sweat a lot in the tropical sun, inevitably get rained on, and pick up some weird intestinal bug. You will weep with those that weep. You will laugh with those that laugh. And a month later, you’ll have a moment where you are back in a pew in America, and you’ll think, “What are all these people thinking? They have no idea. I have to get back to the mission field!” And then you’ll just cry. That’s normal. It has happened to me many times.

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The Impact of a Short Term Missions Trip