The comments, questions about anything that's been discussed thus far? We have property in Florida for you. In one sense, some of the things we've covered have been academic, because if you're not in the pipeline to become a missionary, Or to support a missionary, it's kind of like, yeah, this is nice, but it's kind of a little bit theoretical or a little bit, I know, thy word have I hid in my notebook that I might not send again. I mean, it's just information you put in your notebook, but don't really plan to apply. But if you were in the process of thinking about missions, and one or two of you are, if you were thinking about sending someone, then a lot of this is much more pertinent to you, much more relevant to you. NASA once hired a scientist to go around and explain what NASA was doing in order to gain general encouragement, and this NASA scientist spoke at about 15 universities in the physics department. And they're on his way to the 16th University, and his driver, the government had provided a government motor pool driver, said, you know, I've heard you give this lecture so many times, I could give it at this next school. And the scientist said, well, you know, I've never been there before. They don't know me. You can go ahead and give the lecture, and I'll be the chauffeur. And they won't know the difference. We'll see. And sure enough, went to the next university, and the chauffeur guy gave the lecture flawlessly. Perfect. It was just home run. They did not know that there was to be a Q&A after the lecture. And so graduate students, being graduate students, want to show how much they know. So this one guy stood up and had a five-minute long question. And the guy up front of the microphone said, that's such an elementary question. I'm going to let my chauffeur here answer it. So these are my two chauffeurs. And I wanted to answer any questions you have. Any questions you have. John DeVito. I'll get the ball rolling. As somebody who is involved with a local church and who does desire the sending of missionaries to places that need to hear of Christ and His gospel, I'm wondering if there are any suggestions, any thoughts, any recommendations about how, you know, in many of churches that we can encourage people, we may not have current people in the pipeline or even people who have expressed an interest or anything like that, but are there suggestions in how we can keep these things before our people and things we can do to help to hopefully raise up those who have been called by God to help begin this process in many of our churches? These other men will have profound things to say in a second. Let me say a less than profound thing. I know of a church that beat its people for several years to do evangelism and missions, but it fell totally flat because we need to build up the church. And so we need to do a lot more evangelism to build this church up. God isn't interested in blessing your evangelism program just to give you a bigger church. He's interested in saving people for his own glory. but not so you can have more numbers and a bigger budget. And that's what the church was doing. And they just spent a couple of years, everything that was preached on the pulpit, all they read was on outreach, outreach, outreach, evangelism, evangelism, evangelism. And, you know, if you think about what really motivates your heart is that Jesus Christ would save you. that Jesus Christ would love you. And if he could love me and he could save me, then he gives you a heart for other people. But beating you over the head with evangelism doesn't give you a heart for other people. Seeing your salvation and the work of Christ for you, and compassion bubbles up with your heart, you begin to have a heart for other lost people. So I would suggest not beating the drum of evangelism or missions right off the bat, but keeping Christ always in the forefront and his great love for sinners. and something like that will be caught, and then it's easier to whatever you just choose to do, show missions films, have them read missions books, but be careful to always keep Christ before them. Martin Lloyd-Jones didn't preach much on missions, but he had a lot of people go forward to be missionaries. Because, look at what Christ has done for me, and then, you know, when I was first converted, I had an instant compassion for my fraternity brothers who were lost. And I wasn't involved in any Christian organization yet. I was just a new Christian. But the joy of my salvation, the wonder of it, and the need of my fraternity brothers, and I carry my little record player around with my Christian record on it. Listen to this, guys. So I think just keeping Christ and Salvation Central will help them the most. Another brain trust here. He said it. I mean, I think the most important thing is, this is why we started with the theology of missions and started with God. It's getting a vision of God and the glory of God. Understanding who he is is what moves us to love him when we see him. So again, it's our focus isn't so much on the mission itself as much as it is on the one who gives it and the one who it's for. It's on the Lord himself. And with that, that also is in how you're encouraging your people in missions. It's in one of the things Steve said last night about the Syndian Church encouraging missions is praying. Of course, I would say that's the next foundational thing, of course. That we're praying for the Lord Himself to work in our own hearts, work in those who are in our congregations. But most of all, our prayer is for the Lord's glory to be known. And when that is the heartbeat of the pastor, and it becomes part of the people, you see how the Lord moves it that way. Several things we've seen in our church is any time we have a missionary that's available to come, we snag them and say we want you to come and preach for us. Guys like John DeVito who was getting ready to go to Africa and things like that. That is the biggest thing that we can do in our church. The people meet them, we'll usually have an agape feast at someone's house and they'll get to eat lunch with them. and they give a presentation and things like that. And so actually seeing and hearing someone who is actually going is a very big deal. And like one time we had a man come in and our church got so excited. They said, he preached on, he didn't preach a mission sermon. He preached on the great exchange, my sin for the righteousness of Christ. And people were like, I've never heard a missionary preach about that, because usually it's about, here's China and here's how many people belong, and this string represents how many, you know, it bores people to death because it's statistics and people can't see and touch it. Our church got so excited that it goes, the same gospel we hear every single week here is the gospel that's going to that country. And so suddenly our commission prayer focus guides, which we print out every month, which have specific tangible requests for each day of the month for our missionaries, national pastors, church planters, and for our chaplains, I would throw away several of them, maybe half of them every month. After that time, they were occasionally would have to reprint them because they were going like hotcakes. So that's one aspect is grabbing ahold of missionaries themselves. Another thing is in your preaching, there's no shortage of illustrations to use for missions history in your preaching of the word. Praying on Wednesday nights for Your missionary is very specifically making sure you're outward focused in your prayer meeting. So that you're, okay, let's read the letter from Alan Beardmore. Let's read the ARPGA update. Let's read those things and let's pray for them. And then let's just send a brief email to them and say, brother, our church prayed for you tonight. And this is what we prayed for. And those little tiny emails, they're not going to be long, means the world to the missionary. Another suggestion is, and I say this somewhat Somewhat cautiously. The DVD series dispatches from the front. I wouldn't show every single one of those. For instance, the first one deals with human trafficking, and it's probably a little too much for little ears to hear. But selectively, you screen it first. It is a wonderful, we would do one a month on Wednesday nights. And people go, oh, are we going to watch the dispatchers from the front tonight? I can't wait, you know. And it really helped them to think through, you know, things like that. So just suggestions like that. Keep missions always before their mind. If you take your hymnals out and look at page 271, I think it shows an order that might be the way that we hold it in our hearts and in our preaching and in our churches. Isaac Watt's classic hymn, How Sweet and Awful. Awful's changed. Some modern people change the word to awesome, but awesome doesn't quite carry it. Full of awe, how sweet and full of awe is the place with Christ within the doors. While everlasting love displays the choicest of her stores. Here's the Lord's Supper. Here's the great exchange of Christ. While all our hearts and all our songs join to admire the feast, each of us cry with thankful tongues, Lord, why was I a guest? And do we remember, why am I enjoying the wonders of salvation and knowing Christ? Why was I made to hear thy voice and enter while there's room when thousands make a wretched choice and rather starve than come? I was the first Christian I knew of in my family, in my extended family. Why did the Lord have mercy on me? Well, it was the same love that spread the feast that sweetly drew us in, else we had still refused to taste and perished in our sin. Electing love is the difference. God chose to save us and set his affection upon us and sent his spirit to make us get it. So here I'm reflecting on God's grace in my own salvation, His electing love. Pity the nations, O our God. Constrain the earth to come. Send thy victorious word abroad and bring the strangers home. Here's a mission's burden that comes out of reflecting on God's grace to me. We long to see thy churches full. We do. that all the chosen race may with one voice and heart and soul sing thy redeeming grace. Imagine a Lord's Day, depending on your eschatological views of the return of Christ and all that, but imagine a Lord's Day when thousands upon thousands of churches all over the world are booming with people, people standing outside, hanging in the windows, and they're all singing Christ's praises. You go, that's either the millennium or we're in heaven or some new eschatology we haven't figured out yet. But I think missions flows out of wonder and thankfulness for grace received. That was a good question. Yes, Kevin Cook. I have a son who's 26 years old and he's very interested in missionary work. As a parent, I don't know a lot about missions, I will say that. I've learned more here today and yesterday than I knew before coming here. But what scares me is some of the areas that he talks about. And he's not specifically mentioned certain areas that I really would be fearful about, such as the Middle East. But I would ask you guys. Now, RVMS has a program that is obviously well thought out. You're building on the knowledge and experience of centuries. But what would you guys do if you had somebody come forward from a local church and they say, well, I want to go to, let's say, Iran or to Syria? Now, you can't take that lightly. You have to take that in a whole different, there has to be a different thought process there because they could be killed very quickly doing something. And I just wonder if you've run into that situation. We have. How does it differ, I guess? How does it process? We always ask them, what did your mother and father say? No. Because seriously, I'm a dad. I've got a daughter who's married to a pastor. If they went overseas, I would care where they went. We have a missionary in a Middle Eastern country now. We have a minister in a Middle Eastern country now. Now, he left Arbca and RBMS a year ago in the debacle over the doctrine of God, but he's still over there. Again, it's the local church that has the final say-so. I mean, now, if RBMS could say, well, your local church is behind you and you want to go to Afghanistan and do something, we go, well, we wouldn't be against you, but I think we might caution you to wait. Missionaries are soft targets. We're very soft, you know, bullets go right through us. And so there would be a certain amount of prudence. But I was telling somebody here, when Jim Elliott, those guys were martyred down in Peru, or Ecuador, excuse me, Ecuador, in 1955, The Waorani Indians, they were called the Akas now, the Waorani's, thought they were coming there to cook them and eat them. They thought they were cannibals and mistook their overtures as aggressive and stabbed them and speared them and shot them full of arrows and all five men were found where they were left off. And the widow of one of them, Elizabeth Elliot, went back, took her daughter there, and actually stayed among, lived among those people. And some of them came to Christ. Some of the men who killed the missionaries came to Christ. You know, she's written a lot. I would encourage you to read some of Elizabeth Elliott's stuff about God's providences, why go to dangerous places. Don't you know you could be killed there? Well, yeah. I could be hit by a car in downtown Atlanta, too. I was hit by a car in a Chick-fil-A parking lot once, and that was dangerous enough. Not my car was hit, I was hit. Steve Saint is the son of Nate Saint, who was one of those martyred missionaries, and he's a missionary pilot with Missionary Aviation Fellowship. He struggled with his adult life with, okay, I understand suffering and stuff, but why couldn't my dad have just been hurt or something? Why did he have to be killed? Why did all of them have to be killed? You know, the what if questions that aren't answered. And he had to fly someone to West Africa. And he had a layover, and he saw on a map Timbuktu. And he goes, man, I always wondered where Timbuktu was. So you're in a plane. They got some gas. So he flew to Timbuktu. Whoa. No wonder it's the end of the earth. There's no buildings taller than two stories. It's out in the middle of the desert, the Sahara, in what is now Mali. And he landed and he said it was a very unfriendly group of people. They're almost all Muslims, kind of primitive Muslims. He was not welcomed. There was no hotel. Restaurants were primitive and kind of Middle Eastern restaurants. He was trying to think of how he could spend the night and then leave the next day. And he saw a small church sign on a building that was very nondescript. And he knocked on the door and no one answered. And he went in and yelled out. And finally someone came out. There was a man there in his 30s who was the pastor and said he had a very tiny congregation of two or three people. And he said, what do you want? And he said, well, I'm with Mission Aviation Fellowship. I'd just like a place to spend the night. Okay, and so they began fellowshipping and talking, and the pastor didn't have anybody to fellowship with. And then as the night wore on, they talked more, and then the pastor unburdened himself and said, you know, I don't know how I stay here, but I do. And he said, this is a godforsaken place. I mean, there's nothing going on here. The people are cold and indifferent. He said, yeah, I've cried many a tear for these people. I almost quit a couple years ago. I just couldn't take it anymore. And then I read this book about these missionaries in Ecuador in the 50s and they were killed risking Christ. Is it worth it? Is it worth it to risk in the hopes that God might use this? And Steve Sane said, I went to Timbuktu to hear a man tell me that my father's death kept him in the pastorate working with people. I, you know, my son-in-law could be killed as a pastor in Charlotte. just preaching the gospel, depending on how things go. The question is, is the risk worth it? If it works, I mean, everything's a calculated risk. Driving through Atlanta traffic is a calculated risk. And I'm not playing fast and loose because he's your son, but some places you just say, well, maybe not now, maybe later. But some places, you know, God gives amazing results and other places... And I'm not saying, if he receives the call to do this, and if the church shares that, I don't want to go. I don't care where it is. But what I'm saying is, are there the tools? Can he be really prepared well to know? Because it's not like going to Daedong. I mean, this is going to Iran or somewhere. And I assume you guys wouldn't take it lightly that you wouldn't train him exactly the same way that you would train somebody else to provide resources or whatever. There has to be more. How would you draw in other resources? Like for the military, special forces get more training than Joe Average guys, because they're usually going to tougher places. Yeah, I think he's asking specifically. the local church for the proper questions, the proper process, the proper equipping that a local church needs to do to send a man to that place, to minimize the risk. I know that you minimize risk, but at least minimize a person going there at risk in a way of not knowing what they need to know. Right. Like, you're going in and blending in with the culture and so forth. You're minimizing it quite the same way you're trying to do it. But what does the local church need to do, from your perspective, to handle that situation? There's three things that come to mind just off the top of my head. The first thing is, and this is something that I'm afraid that we've kind of dropped the ball in in years past as RBMS. These guys were only back on RBMS in the last couple of years, so this is not referring to them. It's very imperative that if a missionary wants to go out to, you know, someone wants to go to the mission field, one thing, we need to investigate his wife. and interviewed his wife very carefully. Now, in this case, I know your son's single, I assume. No, he's married. They both share the same right. But we want to make sure, for one thing, that she was on board, was counting the cost, truly had her heart in it. That's imperative. Something that is not known about William Carey very often is his wife Dorothy went insane. She was not on board with what he was doing in India. And for 12 years, she was starkly mad. And it was a mistake in not recognizing her part in that calling, that she plays a role in her husband's call. So that would be one thing imperative right there. If I was interviewing someone to be a missionary and their wife was not on board, for me that kills it until such time as God brings her on board or God is redirecting in some way. So there's one thing. The second thing is, even in our, Steve mentioned the situation where we had a man in the Middle East, I look back at that circumstance and I realize we should have insisted that this is a case where certainly you need to go out two by two. There should not have been just a couple going out where they have no fellowship whatsoever, in a desert waste, don't even know the language, no fellowship, that's setting up a problem. So the accountability and the sharing of the burden, I would say in a situation like that you would need really two couples ready to say we share this burden, we're going to be with each other because you are going to need more emotional, spiritual sustaining than I can give you on Skype, you know, or something like that. So I would say we would insist on that. Furthermore, the third thing is Steve mentioned cross-cultural training. There are two different institutes that specialize in cross-cultural training and we would want to say, insist, in fact this man who went to the Middle East went to one of them. It was very expensive, but their church was able to raise the capital to put him there. And he said it was extremely helpful for him, so that you're going in understanding what the culture is, where they're coming from. So those are three things right off the top that I would say, absolutely, we want to know, you know, those kinds of issues. He would need that kind of support in the field. One thing I would, go ahead, John. Well, I think another thing that's important, particularly when there can be at times a zeal without knowledge, it's just making sure that that's not the case, that it isn't just a zeal without a recognition of what the risks are and what the realities are. So working through that, I think, and understanding. And then also thinking through what a plan would look like for them to be there, what they would be doing, because again, it's not going to be exactly the same if, say, you go to Australia versus you go to Afghanistan versus you go to somewhere in the Far East, right? That's also going to look very different. So you have to take through all the factors involved in that and actually work through a very clear sense of Now, at the same time, as we heard, we make our plans, but the Lord is the one who directs the steps and changes those things, being open to those things, but making sure that we're careful before ever going, right? So that's a large part. Another aspect of it is there's more than one kind of training school as well, and again, that's also dependent on where they should go for the field they go to. For example, there was a man who was in Africa that was sent where you're not going to be able to go to your local Jiffy Lube and fix, get your car fixed. He needed to be trained in actually how to take care of cars and other things. That's part of that field. So again, it's recognizing what are the skills necessary for that particular field and where is the training that he can receive in the church, sending them to that, making sure that they're well equipped. That's part of it. One of the things that Augustine and Calvin and Lloyd-Jones and Packer have both, all four of them advocated, they said to really grow as a Christian you need to know yourself. You need to know God, but you need to know yourself. How has God providentially wired me? Okay, demonstrably we're not all the same people. We have different temperaments and personalities. The Bible talks about Christian character. Are you honest or not? Are you loving or not? It doesn't talk about personalities. It talks about character. And some Christians don't get that. And some Christians, for example, a man needs to know himself. If a guy is kind of, yeah, we're going to go over there and we're going to get a blimp and we're going to fly around. OK, well, that's a possibility. But is this guy kind of a wild eyed? I mean, has he ever taken an inventory on his personality and his temperament so that he knows himself? I took the training years ago and I saw two men, one man was totally out of touch with how he was like. All the inventory showed he was just like, he was dressed impeccably, he had beautiful expensive cufflinks, he was just perfect. But he said, no, I'm this hard charger over here. And we go, no. And then he wanted to sell himself as this person. He couldn't accept who he was. The guy I took the training with, we drove home and we're pulling off the off ramp up from the interstate to our highway. And I go, boy, you've been real quiet. He says, I'm in shock. Why? He goes, people are different. Yeah. He says, well, I thought we're all the same. He says, most of those people are defective. And he wanted to be a Christian counselor. And he is a Christian counselor to this day, and a poor one. But he didn't know himself at all. He was a former NFL linebacker, and he approached the Christian life like a linebacker. Fill the hole. And he didn't have any clue. I mean, if you don't know the people are different, life's going to be hard. And so people like that tend to be insensitive to their wife, insensitive to their kids, insensitive to other people. You don't want to send a bull on a china shop into a strange culture, for example. And so men need to know themselves. They need to make sure their wife's on board. I've, over the years, I've seen men who threw all their energies into the ministry and neglected their wife, and their wife who doesn't learn the language and is stuck home with the kids, and she's always an outsider. She can't go to the market and barter for tomatoes. She can't communicate with her neighbors very well. Her world becomes very small and very isolated. And wives have nervous breakdowns. I had a wife in my home one time. They were on the field in the Philippines, right on the equator. And she said, the only time you got cool was when you stood in a cold shower. And as soon as you stepped out, you'd start perspiring. You were always perspiring, and you're always wet. And then she had a baby. And then she had postpartum depression. And then the baby didn't sleep for eight months, and she had sleep deprivation. And they had to come home from the mission field. And I could tell her husband was ticked at her that they had to come home to the mission field because she couldn't handle all this. But he was an ignoramus for not recognizing what's going on and wanted to be helpful and sensitive. You know that poor woman in Texas a few years ago who drowned her five kids? Remember that awful story? She went into postpartum depression after the first child. And he kept, and they had four more babies on top of, and she had this huge depression. She was out of her mind. And he said, I don't know what's the matter with this woman. She just went crazy. Well, she'd been in a terrible place for a long time and he just ignored it. This has nothing to do with your son. But it is important for men to understand themselves, to understand the culture. Did you know that Iran's been experiencing a revival for 20 years and more Iranians have been converted in the last 20 years than in the last 2,000? And the Arab Spring in Iran two years ago was mostly Christians wanting to change the government and change Sharia law. And the people are throwing off Islam in Iran. like crazy. In Egypt, a mullah was on the radio haranguing his fellow Muslims in the Middle East. He said an average of six to eight million Muslims a year convert to Christianity, and that was an insult to Allah, and he was castigating them for what terrible Muslims they were. But it's not the kind of stuff you hear in the States. So some of those places might be safer than New York City, but you would want to know all the details and be prepared for it. Another bit of advice as well is something that John hit upon yesterday. Paul was a minister in his own culture for ten years before he went off to the mission field. The pastor is brutal in your own culture. And I would think it would be important for your son to be able to prove himself as an elder in this culture. and maybe perhaps even as a church planter in this culture. Because suddenly going to another place and saying, all right, I've never planted a church before, but I'm going to learn a new culture that's antagonistic to me and plant a church. Well, that's what's hit home most yesterday and today is actually hearing the qualifications. Now, they're both physical therapists, and they've been, you know, they went through medical school together and all that sort of thing. And every year, they'll go down to Peru and spend three weeks there and treat patients and all that sort of thing and do what needs to be done on the medical side. That's a far cry from what I've heard yesterday and today in terms of knowing how to pastor, knowing how to plant a church. William Carey was a pastor of two different churches before he ever went to the mission field. And one of those churches split. It had a massive split. As a matter of fact, the way they were having so many problems, what they literally did is they disbanded the church and reconstituted it. and said, you're all not members anymore. Here's the new constitution. If you're on board with that, join. That's what they did. And solved their problem. But he knew the pastorate, the ropes of the pastorate, long before he ever went to the mission field. Even talking about sending out men two by two. You look at Paul and Barnabas, those men worked side by side for years. And so you can't just have two guys that have a burden and say, okay, let's put them together, and yet they can't work together. These men had worked long and hard beside each other before God sent them out together. So there's a lot of just preparation practically in your own culture before you can really go to another culture and begin to win them. Years ago, I wanted to build a playhouse for my kids. And every Monday of my day off for six months, I worked on it. And there was a lot of standing and staring. What am I doing? I remember it took me forever to put the four posts in for the four by fours. And a friend came over and goes, wait a minute. This is a rhombus. There are no two sides equal or parallel. It's just this weird configuration. So we had to square up the foundation. And the point being is that, If you've never done something and you've never seen it done, it's going to take you a lot longer because you're making it up on the fly. You're kind of trial and error. And so when we started Reformed Baptist Church, none of us had ever seen a Reformed Baptist Church. What does a Reformed Baptist do? What are they like? I didn't know. And so in his Presbyterian context, he should be an elder in his culture. If he's serious about planting a church, he needs to preach evangelistically, go to the rescue mission, go to nursing homes, practice preaching, communicating his faith, sharing his testimony. Again, if it doesn't come in the States, it probably won't come overseas. It's great, it's awesome he's got these opportunities to go down and do three weeks of work. It's a great experience. At the same time, It can easily have a rose-colored view of the mission field. I'm not saying that he does, I'm just saying we can. My fellow missionaries may be jerks, but they're only jerks for three weeks. Culture shock is a very real problem. And I was talking to a former RVMS missionary one time. I said, I know the problems with my own sanctification I struggle with in ministry here. I can only imagine what it is in a cross-cultural context. He said to me, oh yeah. He says, the mission field is your sin nature on Miracle Grow. Because the frustrations of just being able to communicate simple things you know, to seek and buy meat for your family or something like that. Very real problems. And suddenly the romance is gone, the people are gone, you're by yourself, you're isolated in a culture that is completely foreign to anything you've ever known. So there has to be a very realistic counting of the cost of what that's going to entail. I was going to say, often they've shown kind of like a graph of the emotions of a missionary. And, you know, as they kind of are in this early stage of being excited about it, they're learning more, and it's building and building over time, and the highest point in their whole life is right before they go. As soon as they get there, almost all missionaries, they have a big drop. Lord willing, most of them come back up to kind of a stable. But there's this period of time. It's just, at least from what missiologists have said, that's kind of the norm. So again, be equipped with that. Yeah, and don't really get there. And especially if it's terrible. One of the things that's Really, when you think about putting a missionary on the field, he needs to be, he and she needs to be vested. And you need to know her heart, not just, you need to know them completely. And not like a hug and like this. We started, Judy and I, started two missionary programs. in churches, and the second church, every missionary that came asking for money, we would thank them and say, what's happening with your life? What's happening? And you know, that's very important. It's very important that you see in their lives, I believe that everyone that comes to the mission conference should be given money. I'll go. You wouldn't believe the people that we have coming. It's so hard, I decline to be the chairman the next year on that. But when you think about, okay, we're gonna throw money at something, but it needs to be tested, it needs to be looked into, you need to know their lives, you need to know their weaknesses, their strengths, and all that. And if we don't do that, and it sounds to me like it's being done, Years ago I had a speaker, he's now a speaker on the radio, but he was just a friend, a peon like me back then. And he was discussing a woman who worked for him on staff in his city and he said she just got engaged to this guy. He doesn't know her at all. He's only been on dates with her. He said, she's been my co-worker for eight years. I've seen her first thing in the morning before she's had her makeup on and her hair's not done. I've seen her out of fellowship. I've seen her in fellowship. I've seen her in all kinds of situations. He's only been with her on dates. Their relationship is very shallow and very superficial. They're going to have some rocky things to work through. The idea of a man being tested. How is this couple doing when they've had some big hits? When John G. Payton went to the South Pacific, his wife lost their baby in childbirth, and then she died, and the missionaries are trying to eat him. So he's grieving up on top of a tree, in a coconut tree, hiding from the guys who want to eat him while he's grieving over his wife and baby's death. Now, if a person's never had any testing prior to this, that'd be an awful way to find out what you're made of. you know, losing a child, having something happen, struggling through a disease. Martin Luther said the thing that makes a great theologian is prayer and suffering. Have these people suffered at all and are they prepared to suffer in the mission field? I know missionaries who went to Moscow and they were working at the University of Moscow and they're living in a high-rise apartment and you come back from campus one day and Your wife's sitting on the sofa with tape in her mouth and a guy sitting with a knife in her throat, and they want all your valuables, so they're going to kill your wife and your kids. Because crime is just really bad in Moscow. All Americans are filthy rich, right? So they took their laptop and a couple other things and left. That's pretty traumatizing. Do you stay or do you go home? Or other stories of missionaries on the field when horrific things happen and scary things. In Argentina, this couple, they had to come back from the field because the wife got so traumatized she couldn't finish, but people came in their home and tied them up and put the knife to the eight-year-old son's neck and said, we're going to kill him unless you give us all your valuables. And the wife just, you know, whatever they had, which wasn't much, gave to these guys. And they left, but she was so traumatized. The husband's trying to minister to her and goes for a walk around the block. And a block over, they're carrying out the body of someone who these thieves had gone to that house, done the same thing, but killed the people. And they were carrying the bodies out and they saw this. And she just got freaked this time, and she just, she never felt safe again. In fact, she had post-traumatic stress and had to come back to the States, and she's still struggling from what she saw. I mean, the devil doesn't play by the rules. He's super mean and super deadly and, you know, read the life of Adoniram Judson and John G. Peyton, and they're missionary heroes and heroines because they went to hell and lived through it and persevered. And though they didn't see much at the time, seemingly the Lord used that what they did. And so I would say, what is this, what are these people's capacity for suffering? Have they suffered at all? And how'd they do? I'm also remembering last year, we had our School of Oral Missions in Louisiana, First Baptist in Clinton. And this was the place where they were sending out Alan Byrdmore, and he was still there, he was sent out a few months later. And the Lord's Day got brought up, the subject of the Lord's Day. And Alan made this very great comment, and it stuck with me. He said, you know, you shouldn't just ask a candidate for the mission field, what do you believe about the Lord's Day? You should say, how do you spend your Lord's Day? And he said, because of If this candidate can't give 24 hours a week to the Lord, what makes me think he's going to give the rest of his life to it? And I thought that was a very good observation, you know, just throwing out another thing to think through, you know. One of the things that's striking me in light of the questions, the conversation we've had over the last couple of days is Really how far modern evangelicalism has departed from so many of these biblical principles. I think of, in a sense, how we recruit for missions today. Again, short-term mission trips for youth. Especially strong is missions conferences geared towards college-age students, right? So you have Urbana, you have, well, you have all kinds of them. And I think what we wind up with then is among a younger generation, again, that zeal that you talk about. And yet, a lack of maturity, of preparation. And again, you think about the need for them to be qualified as elders. They're not to be recent converts. They're to be able to rightly hold the word and be able to teach. So a lot of those things. I'm wondering, as we live in a country and in a context that in, I'd say really in an evangelical cultural zeal to reach these unreached people groups, how to, on the one hand, follow these biblical principles, and yet at the same time recognize that pressing need. So we don't react negatively and just retreat in, we're not going to send anybody who's under 50 years old and, you know, after 20 years of geriatrics for Jesus. But yet at the same time, how do we be discerning in so much of what's going on in today's culture around missions, especially geared towards, again, some of the younger people in which they are, as they're making these major, again, decisions about vocation and a lot of those questions. I think your question is an important one. I think, what's your name again? Algeria. I was alluded to it, but we're really close. And going back to Kevin's question, his son wants to go overseas, wants to potentially go to these places. Are you making yourself qualified to be an elder? It's a good thing, Scripture says, to aspire to be an elder. That's a noble thing, it says. And so are you doing the things to make yourself equipped to be an elder? Are you growing in your understanding of doctrine? Are you growing in the qualifications of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1? Are you living with your wife and understanding why is she with you? Are you practicing hospitality in our culture? Are you doing the things that will just, if we shipped you overseas, you'd just be doing the same good things in another culture, but have you started doing the good things already? And it doesn't, you're right, we can kind of have so many qualifications that by the time the guy's qualified to go, he's too old and he can't make the trip. But I think, you know, I was converted in college, I wasn't ready to go into the ministry. I don't know if anybody's ready to go into the ministry other than Spurgeon at 21 or 22. 19 for Spurgeon, right? But I wasn't even saved yet. But anyway, so I did student work for 10 years and kind of grew up, learned my Bible, read theology, grew, read my Bible, made mistakes, grew, threw dirt in the air, grew. That was like a lot of my early ministries. Kid in the sandbox throwing dirt in the air. And it comes down. You get an itchy scalp. But I finally came to the Doctrines of Grace, came to see the biblical call of the ministry, received a biblical call of the ministry, had a church commend me to the ministry, was an elder in the church, thought about going overseas, was going to apply to a couple of places. The Lord told me, I sensed, I didn't hear a voice, that I should stay here. But I, so I was 31 with two kids when I went to seminary. And Jerry rigged a way of paying for it, and my church paid for my tuition, and a couple of laymen paid for books, and I've had some support from my parachurch ministry days to help pay for living expenses, but I managed to pull it off, because I wanted to get here, and God was growing me through all the trials. You know, one time we had 29 cents to our name. We paid all of our bills, and we had 29 cents. Well, I sure hope my math is good here, because, man, if I bounce all these checks, you know, we're hurting. My math was good, and we made it another week, and then I got a paycheck. I'm not trying to make myself anybody grandiose, it's just what guys go through when you go to seminary, things are tight. Or go through a heartache, you know. People lose a child that they had really wanted. Or I have a friend in Kansas City that lost an eight-year-old child to cancer. And they worked through it and stayed on the field. Or you have a rebellious son that you have to... I know a man whose daughter was so rebellious and she was so strong-willed that she just went berserk one day and her father couldn't get her controlled. And he's a very strong-willed man, believe me. And he left the room and the daughter was in the corner having a hissy fit in the corner. Her mother came over to her and calmed her down. Where'd dad go? He went down into his office. Why'd he go there? He's writing out his resignation. Why? Because he's not in the head of his home. He's not controlling his daughter. And he can't serve Christ that way. And the Lord got a hold of his daughter, and she got converted that day, and he stayed in the ministry. But he was resigning because he wasn't meeting the qualification. And if you can't deal with your own problems at home, then don't ship me overseas not to deal with my problems. So part of a pastor is dealing with my own problems first, then I can tell people, well, I've been through that too, and here's what I learned, here's how I faced it. But I think that we should encourage young men along the way and don't make mistakes. Jerry and I have met so many that hitting our forehead like this causes our hair follicles to fall out. This is true. We're meeting with a stranger. with a stranger. We're having lunch. I said, Jerry, come on, we're going to meet with this guy. He came to the Doctrines of Grace and wants help. We meet with this guy. He's all excited about the Doctrines of Grace. We're giving him counsel and we're going along. And out of the clear blue, Jerry goes, you know, I prayed that the Lord would give me, you know, like a double portion of Steve Martin's blessing. And that's what happened. I mean, we're just having lunch together. I told him, I said, he's such a godly man. Just give me the double portion of spirit. I woke up the next morning, I was bald. So one time in my life I was seeing Steve speechless. We make mistakes. I've made mistakes. You know, what is repentance is the universal antidote. Asking forgiveness is the universal antidote. And unless they do something that totally disqualifies them from the ministry, just keep working with them. I was going to say another aspect of that as well. Let's not forget, like the John Marks and the Timothys, sometimes it's a younger man that goes with an older man. That's part of the team concept as well, so that it may not be a guy who's 50. Maybe it's a guy who's 30 going with a guy who's 50, who's had that experience. So you have some of those things. And again, John Mark wasn't a qualified elder at that point when he went. So there's even a place for some of these who have a zeal, desire for it to go and actually see what it's really like with someone who's doing it. And in that sense, you get a sense of what is the end goal, which can encourage them in doing what's necessary to get there. And again, I also think the important part of this is recognizing there is a place for those who aren't the church planters to go and support and help and do different things as well. So we don't have to throw a wet blanket, as it were, on this desire to reach the nations. It's a good thing. but channeling it into biblical ways of thinking and outworking instead of just, you wanna go, go, be warm and well fed, we'll talk to you later. You know, kind of, which can often be the case, so. And Brandon, can I say one other thing before you, are you? Yeah, I just had a question. Okay. Along the same line, there's tremendous pressure in the modern Calvinistic, New Calvinism movement to be radical. Do something big for God. The young man I talked about who went to India from our church, he was bipolar. He would not pay his bills on time. He was always being threatened with they're going to shut his water down. He shut his water off and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he sat on the front porch again, pleading with him not to go. He says to me, I just want to do something big for God. I don't want to spend my life in small things. I want to do something big. And I said, you want to do something big for Jesus? Pay your water bill on time. And I was serious. I said, be faithful in little mundane things. Show yourself faithful there and then God can make you faithful in much. We don't need to be radical. We need to be ordinary. We really do. Something that I would say is the biggest lesson Steve Martin has taught me and he's taught us over the years is when you're young, you want to be radical. You know, and you're like, I'm going to turn the church on its ear and, you know, be the next Martin Luther and blah, blah, blah, blah. And the problem is people who set out to be radical for this. I can preach this because Steve's said it to me so many times. People who set out to be radical. I've lost my memory. I'm sassy now. No, he just knows I'm not getting it. So he has to keep on telling me. No, but people who set out in church history to be radical wind up being heterodox. I don't want to be radical. I want to be faithful. And there's a sense in which, yes, I want my ministry to be successful in the sense of reaching people for Christ and seeing God glorified. But in one sense, my aim isn't to be successful, it's to be faithful. Because Jesus on that final day isn't going to say, well done, good and radical servant. Or even well done, good and innovative servant. Well done, good and faithful. And to be found faithful is to be found successful. And that's the message we need to communicate to our people. You know, sometimes we have people, we all have people in our church who are like, oh, we're going to win the world for Jesus. And yet they'll neglect their children. Their own children aren't getting the gospel. We'll deal with the lost people in your own living room first. Learn how to minister to them. Because that's a big deal. If I can just be found to be a faithful husband and a faithful father at the end of the day, praise God. We need more faithful husbands and fathers in our churches, don't we? And just be found faithful. So we need to emphasize that as well. It's good to have zeal. But look at what God wants you to be. He wants you to be faithful. What's required in a steward is that he be found faithful. And so we need to emphasize that a great deal in our churches and to our young people. Because faithful's hard. Faithful's not easy. Remember, Steve said to me, he was talking about Jim Elliot, and he wasn't criticizing Jim Elliot, but he said, you know, it's easier to be martyred on a beach at 27 than to be found faithful at 85. And it's really true. Think about that. It's easier to be martyred in your 20s than it is to keep going decade after decade, not dropping the gospel, not falling into life-affecting sin, and make it to the end. I'm 68, and I'm not there yet. I still have to put my sins to death. I still have to keep trusting Christ. You know, I would have rather, maybe if somebody had shot me in my 20s, a lot of misery would have been prevented along the way. But the Lord says, no, it'd be good for you to persevere. So I persevere at pursuing the Lord. And, you know, I'm not radical, but I hope to be faithful by the time I die. Something that John said to your son, maybe he can start learning some things about being an elder, but as Jerry said, maybe he can go with a team to this place, and he and his wife set up a physical rehab place, and they're able to support the church, be a part of the church. What do you think about Jesus? And maybe the Lord could send them over as part of a support team, even if he's not ready to be an elder. Last question before we break. I've heard you talk about the authority of the local church, that the local church can decide to send a missionary without RBMS. I've heard you talk about the authority of RBMS in vetting this missionary and bringing a particular missionary before the association of local churches, what's the authority of the local churches? Do they have any say-so whatsoever if a missionary is to be sent out? You're asking, can a local church veto another church's missionary? I'm asking, can the assembly? Does the assembly have any authority as to whether or not a missionary is accepted? Or is it just because RVMS said so? If it's the RVMS, then they see. You know, you're asking a good question. I don't know what the policy says. For example, the RVMS may say, yeah, we vetted the guy and we think he's good, and then they pass his name up the channel to the Administrative Council. Then I don't know if policy says the Administrative Council has to give them out to all the churches, or if we just go on what our BMS administrative council said and vetting them and looking at them. I don't know policy. I think that is what happens. I don't think it's put before General Assembly for a vote. I mean, it's possible, but probable that, what would another local church know about this missionary? I mean, would they find something? Would they have something? There is obviously a case where that has happened, where another church had had dealings with the man and they had an objection so it actually was brought to the assembly and that came to the place where he wasn't put forward so that has happened at least in the history of our association so there is a place it's you know Obviously, you kind of hope that those things would happen before it got to that place. So it's not like churches don't have any recourse. Obviously, we're an association together. If there's a concern, it can be brought up. It seems to me it would have to be a safeguard, or otherwise you're a denomination. Right. If RBMS vets it, the administrative council of ARPCA says it's a go, and the assembly has absolutely no say whatsoever, then you're no different than a denomination. So for us to be an association of churches, there has to be some authority in the assembly, I would think. Now the question is, is that authority delegated to the Administrative Council or to RBMS? Well, it certainly is by the policy manual, but at some point, the Administrative Council can't be an end to itself. The Assembly certainly, in this case, that John's stating, and I remember that, this case, the Assembly said, we appreciate RBMS, we appreciate ARCA, Administrative Council, but we have questions now that one of our local churches has brought questions. Actually, the Assembly didn't say that, the local church did. Well, no, but then the Assembly finally made some decision, correct? Or was it? I don't even remember the situation. Oh yeah, that was a stateside church planter. He was? Wow. Maybe I, was I an ARCA? I mean, we can end there. I just think it's important I would like to know the distinction between a denomination where missionaries are sent out by the denomination and missionaries sent out through an association of churches. One other difference, if I can just say, I'm not denying your question in that sense, but one other large difference is putting him forward isn't saying every church you're now giving, whereas if it's the denomination, We have, you all just give and this board decides what happens with the money. Where this is saying, we're putting you before him as we've vetted him and that, but you as a local church, you're the ones who give. So in that sense, that's always the case. And you can always say no. Right. And I want you guys to voice that. You can always say no. Right. John? I'm by no means an expert on RVMS policy or our policy. Neither are we. We just said that. But in my mind, the key really came down to what you said earlier in RVMS's role here. You are simply assisting the sending church. So in your commendation, that commendation is really given on behalf of the sending church. And there's no independent authority in RDMS or DAC. And so in that sense, it's simply a sending church that is sending that person. It's making public. And so then there's really no vote, per se. It's just a something that can happen, and then, like you say, one can decide whether or not they want to support that missionary in light of whatever considerations they have. Now, I would think it would be important if a church had concerns that they go to RBMS or the AC in that process. And the RBMS and the AC may even seek that kind of counsel from other churches that may be aware of that missionary candidate through that process. But I guess, to me, it comes down to, again, what kind of authority are we talking about? It seems to be an assisting authority to do what the Senate Church is trying to do. RBMS is acting as a representative for the association. That's our role is in that sense of vetting for the purpose of the whole of the association. But we're not saying, you as a local church, now, over here, because you're a member of RFK, you must support this person. But it's saying, going through this vetting process, we see what this local sending church is saying about them is legitimate. And it's not just, oh yeah, we have this guy and we want to send him. really because we don't like them, but hey, that's not going on. So it's in that sense a safeguard. But each local church is the one that decides who they will support. And most of our missionaries aren't supported by, well, none of them are supported by every church in the association. Most of them are supported usually by five or six churches, and that's enough for what they need and that kind of thing. Thank you for your question. I didn't understand your question. The reason I ask that is because in this room there are people from Southern Baptist contexts. But they're Christians. Hopeful. They might know the difference, but for the recording's sake, you're going to have people that maybe watch these. And so you've alluded to some of these things. Some, it's been more than an allusion, it's been very plain. But some of it is not so plain because people don't know the difference between how a denomination functions for the missionary versus how our country functions. And what is the role of a local church, another local church? They can say no by simply not supporting that missionary. That's an authority they have, a local church, their autonomy and independence in that sense. Yet, they can also come to RVMS and say, we do know of a concern. People would like for that concern to be questioned. And then RBMS can investigate that further, and if it needs to be brought to the assembly, if something eventually happens that between RBMS, the RKAC, and the local church, if it can't be solved, it can be brought to the assembly, and ultimately the assembly would decide. That's right. That's right. That's what we meant to say. That's a big difference, though, between what happens in the SBC. Yes. And there may not be people that really understand that.