Baptist Church. Are you guys excited to be in church? I tell you what, I have been going to church since before I was born. I grew up in a pastor's family. Actually, my wife and I actually both come from pretty big families. There was 10 kids in our family. Seven boys, three girls. 10 kids in her family. Right now, my parents have 33 grandchildren. And two of my siblings aren't even married yet. And so, church has literally been my life. So I grew up in church. you know, pastor's family. We were homeschooled. My wife was homeschooled. Then I ended up serving at our church and served at our church for 17 years. Fellowship Baptist Church, Clark Lake, Michigan. Served there 17 years. And like we mentioned before, Jeff and I both started around the same time serving as youth pastor. And this is what happened is I started as youth pastor. And then over those years, I moved into an assistant pastor role. And then after that, near the end, probably I would say the last six years, six or seven years, I moved into more of an administrative pastor role where I was working with a lot of the teams and kind of doing a lot of the administrative side of things. But this is what's interesting is every time I switched roles and started doing the new requirements and the new roles, I actually still kept doing everything I was doing before. And so by the end, I was doing so many things on a Sunday. I would be leading music, teaching classes, working with the media team, and I'd just be running like a chicken with my head cut off the whole service. But listen, I loved it. I literally loved serving at our church. It never, I want to say, it never felt like work as far as, like it never felt like a job. It just felt like my life, if that makes sense. Everything we did, it wasn't like when we were doing it, I felt like I was working. It's just like part of our life. It's what we did. Having people over. Connecting with people after services. Discipling people. Preaching. Teaching. It was just who we were. It was part of our life. So for 17 years, it was such a privilege to do that. We absolutely loved it. Loved our church. Served underneath my father, Pastor Daniel White. He's still there pastoring right now. Loved working alongside my dad. We honestly, we thought we would be there the rest of our lives. We really did. Never could we have imagined that God would start working in our lives and lead us in a new direction. But guess what? God gets the trump card on what we do. Amen? We can try to make our plans and make our strategies, but we are servants of God. And when God calls us to go, we just gotta trust Him, and we just gotta go. And so my four children aren't here with me. Have you ever seen a missionary family come in, and their children are just, they're sitting there, and they're so sweet, and they obey, and they don't pick at each other, and they get up, they go to class, they're so respectful. Those are not our children. If those are the type of children, those are not the children we have. Our kids are very normal, unfortunately. They pick at each other. They have way too much energy. Unfortunately, they get that from their father, traveling long periods of time in vehicles. They get antsy. Sometimes we just got to stop at a rest stop, and they just go out in the grass, and they just run circles. It's like, just get your energy out. But we are very privileged. We love our children so much. Wish they could have been here with us. But yep, 17 years served there at Fellowship, and then God led us to start serving at Corps Missions. And so let's go ahead and show the video at this time. This will explain kind of what our ministry is about, and then I'll get back up and kind of explain a little bit more about what we do with Corps Missions. All right, I'll just kind of explain it. You can mute it. You don't have to play the music. I definitely cannot do it on time with what I'm doing. It's kind of weird, actually. But CORE missions. Okay, so CORE stands for Centered on Remote Evangelism. And what we do with CORE is we work with national pastors to reach places where Americans can't go to, so that would be closed countries, or places in countries that are very hard to get to. So that would be countries or places in countries like up in the mountain villages, out in the remote areas, those type of places that are hard to get to. That right there is in Honduras. And we just have a passion at CORE Missions about getting the gospel to the unreached areas of the world. closed countries, hard to get to countries. That's what CORE stands for, centered on remote evangelism. And we believe one of the best ways to get the gospel and to plant churches in these areas is by working with and equipping national pastors to reach these areas. In many cases, this is the only way that we are going to be able to get the gospel to these areas is by working with and equipping the national pastors. That right there is in, that's when we were in the Ivory Coast of West Africa. So what we do is we come alongside these national pastors and we equip them in four different ways. We equip national pastors financially. Between one to $300 a month, we can fully support a national pastor. That's a livable wage for the country that they are in. One to three hundred dollars a month. So we come alongside them and we support them financially. Now, we don't come alongside them and support them indefinitely. We come alongside them when we support them and we do it in a church planting model. And that is we come along We support them, but ultimately the goal is for that church to take on the support of the national pastor because that's the biblical model, is that that church is the one supporting and taking care of that national pastor. So we do it in more of a church-planting mindset with these national pastors. Come alongside, support them. Ideally three years, if we can get the church to that point within three years that the church is, they have the time to commit to the church, to grow the church to the point the church can support them. Three years, sometimes that's four or five years, but that's the goal is to kind of, I don't know, almost like graduate them to that the church is supporting that national pastor. So one to $300 a month can support a national pastor. We also come alongside these national pastors and we equip them theologically. I know it's hard to believe, but national pastors, especially in third world countries, have little to no theological training. About 90% of national pastors in third world countries have little to no theological training. Now, I know that's hard for us to believe because, I mean, we got a college right across the road, right? America is the land of education. We love our education. And listen, I am thankful for our education. I'm thankful for what it has allowed us to do. I mean, our education here has allowed us, really, as far as on a spiritual level, has allowed us to spread the gospel all over the world, learning and developing. I love education. Honestly, I've been serving for 17 years. I still love going to pastors' conferences. I still love going and rubbing shoulders with these other guys, and I always feel like I'm learning something new when I go to these places. It's really astounding. On my iPad right here, I have a library of books that could literally probably cover this entire wall on my iPad. Theological books, commentaries, different types of digital books that I've purchased that help me study and help me learn. Listen, when you're a national pastor in Honduras, and you're one of the Mosquito people, that's what they call them. They're the indigenous people to Honduras. They're the Mosquito people. And guess what? There is no commentaries in Mesquite. There's just not. They don't have access to what we have access to. You know, even in the Mosquito language, they have one Bible written for the Mosquito people. First off, it's amazing that they even have a Bible in their language because it's such a small group of people, but they have one Bible. Listen, praise the Lord. I mean, think about it, that we even get to have debates and discussions about what version to use. You know what a lot of people, some don't even have a version. The mosquito people, guess what? They got one. They don't even get to decide whether they have, like, which version is the best. They only have one. And so we're so blessed. And our goal is to help train these national pastors and help equip them to better reach their people with the gospel. And so we come alongside them. We equip them financially. We come alongside them. We equip them theologically. We also come alongside them and we equip them physically. So we help these national pastors with, let's say, like a building project. So right now we're helping a handful of pastors in the Ivory Coast of West Africa with some different building projects that they have specifically for their churches. But we never just come and give them the money to build their church, okay? Let me explain that. What we do, whenever we're working with these national pastors, is we always try to do a partnership with them. So for example, the churches, I think we're helping like 15, 16, 17 churches in the Ivory Coast of West Africa with their buildings. This is what we say, for every brick that you purchase, we will purchase two bricks to match that. Now, it takes longer, okay? It's actually more work for us to constantly be working with these churches, and as they purchase, we keep matching. It would honestly just be easier for us to give them the six or $7,000 to build their church, but this is what we have seen, is it's much more healthy for the church to invest in their own church. And even though we could come along and build them a church, honestly, just like that, and have it done in six months, This is working alongside them can take five to six to seven years to build these churches, but what it does is it takes it from being the church the missionary got for us to being our church. Does that make sense? Like they take so much more ownership and pride. And so what we really do, we're not just out there just trying to crank out and do as much as possible. We're trying to do it in a healthy way. And this is kind of, as we have learned, you know, just like, Not supporting a national pastor indefinitely, but training the church to take on the support of the national pastor. Our goal is not to just get a whole group together, and honestly, let's say something crazy happened and core missions folded. Which obviously isn't gonna happen, but let's say it did. Guess what? All of those churches that we were just sitting there supporting them, poof, they're gone. Because all the money is gone. So our goal is to get them, get them started, and to really help get them going and then take our hands off so that church can continue on. That's our goal. Because that is what we believe is a healthier, more sustainable model. So, come alongside them, we equip them financially, we equip them theologically, we equip them physically, and then we also equip the national pastor with accountability. Let's be honest. We all need accountability in our lives. Amen? If we just are honest, we need accountability. We need to build those accountability structures in our own lives. And at CORE Missions, we have worked very hard, and we're very proud of the accountability process that we have given to these national pastors. We communicate them on a monthly basis. They have to, they have, I can't get into our whole accountability process, but this is our goal for the national pastor. Listen. Do we have temptations in our life? I think we understand that we all have weaknesses and temptations. Our goal for the national pastor is to just help them be faithful to what God has called them to do, okay? We're not there to try to control them. We just want to keep them faithful to what God has called them to do and help them get to that point that their church can take them on for support. So we also equip them with accountability. Right now, by the grace of God, praise the Lord, we're working with around 200 national pastors, and right now we're in about 20 different countries. You know, what we are doing, we don't look at this as a replacement of the American missionary. We look at this as an extension of the American missionary. I'm so thankful for what God has done with American missionaries going over. Honestly, we could not do what we're doing without the American missionary that God has used to spread the gospel all over the world. But, we look at it as, if the American missionary can reach this far, the national pastor can just reach farther than the American missionary can. And you know, American missionaries, when Americans go to countries, this isn't always true, but it's typically true, American missionaries tend to go to the cities. Okay? It makes the most sense. There's the most amount of people. You can reach the most amount of people for the shortest amount of time. Obviously, that's logical. But our heart, like I said before, is really for those remote areas. The places that aren't being reached. The mountain villages, and especially those closed countries. That's kind of where our heartbeat is at. And you know, I don't know anybody that argues with the fact that more missionaries are coming off the field than going. More missionaries are coming off the field than are going onto the field. I can't tell you how many churches we've been in, and the pastor tells us, he's like, we have, you know, in the past year, we've had three or four missionary families come off the field. And typically, it's not always just they went and it was too hard and they're coming home. A lot of times, I'll be honest with you, most of the pastors that I've talked to, it's missionaries who are retiring. They've been there for decades and they're just old. They're ready to come home and be with their grandkids and spend their last little bit at home. And there are more missionaries coming off the field than are going onto the field. And listen, that's not sustainable, okay? I'm not a math whiz, but if you have more missionaries coming off than are going, there's going to come a point where that's a tipping point. Does that make sense? So that's another one of the reasons. You know who's not coming off the field? The national pastors that grew up in those villages. That's their home. That's where they live. They're not coming back. They're there for life. And so that is one of the reasons, another one of the reasons that we're so passionate about equipping these national pastors to reach their different areas. You know, we have a vision right now. We're working with 200, and right, you know, we have a vision to see that grow from 200 to 300 to 500 to 1,000 national pastors. And Right now we're at 200, and our ministry is in the place where we're trying to develop a structure to continue to grow our national pastor base. There's a lot of moving pieces, if that makes sense, of working with these national pastors. Actually, on our drive here, I was talking with another one of our directors for about an hour and a half about some of the future and how we're going to continue to build things and grow things so that we can equip and work with more national pastors. And so you can pray for us as we continue to work through that. But how can you get involved? Here's the question. How can you get involved with what CORE Missions is doing? Well, here's what's cool is you can actually get involved in a few different ways. Number one, obviously, you can help support us, okay? I'm not gonna pull any punches. That's why we're here, obviously. So our family needs support, so that we can continue to do this full time. We'll be traveling to these various countries. Actually, I'm headed down to Cuba here in December. to do some training with national pastors down there. Next year, we're headed off to Bolivia. We're going to Cuba again, Honduras, Jamaica, I think there's one more country that we're going to. Anyways, working on next year's schedule, and we're doing that for various reasons, but guess what? It takes money to do that. Okay? Traveling is very expensive. And so you can help by partnering with our family. Another thing that you could do is you could pray about possibly supporting one of these national pastors. You could pray about your church supporting them. We even have individuals that support some of these national pastors. We have these pastors on our website. You can actually get on there and look and see what national pastors we have there, COREmissions.org. what ones need to be supported, what ones are already supported. We have all of them with their pictures, depending on what country they're in. So for example, we're in Egypt, so their pictures are blurred out because that would be a closed country. We don't want to be advertising the Christian pastors in Egypt. but you can get on there and pray about supporting a national pastor. Another thing that you can do is pray about your church coming on a mission trip with us. One of the things that we do with CORE Missions is we host mission trips, we take churches from the states, and we go to some of these countries with these national pastors, and the church helps that national pastor, whether it's, you know, depending on your gifts and abilities of the church, with a building project, whether it's like working, doing like vacation Bible schools at those churches, evangelistic crusades, helping evangelize the local neighborhood and the local village that they're in. Really the giftedness of your church can go and help some of these national pastors. I'm taking a church next year and one of the things that that church told us is they're like, we really enjoy sports. So they're gonna run a sports camp at one of the churches and reach out to the community, bring kids in, and then obviously teach them basketball, soccer, whatever, and then obviously we're going to preach and then have evangelistic services in the evening. So pray about bringing your church on a mission trip. Be amazing. help some of these national pastors. And then the last way that you can get involved is pray about sending your pastor on a training trip with us. We take special trips that's just with Bible teachers, and we do pastors conferences where we do training with these national pastors. My trip to Cuba, that's going to be a training trip for national pastors down there. And I have some other pastors that are coming with me to help do those trainings. And so we train in places like India, the Ivory Coast of West Africa, Honduras, Cuba. So pray about sending your pastor on a training trip with us to train some of these national pastors. Those are some of the ways that you can get involved. So pray about what God would have you do to reach these unreached areas with the gospel and help plant churches. Let's take our Bible very quickly and go to 1 Timothy. I'm just going to read just two verses, make some quick application. But I want you to imagine something with me. Imagine, imagine, and this isn't super hard to imagine, but imagine I had a penny, all right? I have a penny in my hand. And I determine that once a week, I am going to give this penny to another person. I'm gonna give a penny a week to another person. So I find a person, I give them that penny, and then I tell that person, I take some time and I teach that person, your goal is to once a week give a penny to another person. And then you teach that person how to give a penny. Okay, it's just a penny. A penny a week. Does that sound extravagant? Does that sound like, wow, I could never do that? But imagine I did that to one person, and then taught that person, listen, all I'm asking you to do is give another penny to someone else, and you teach that person how to give a penny to someone else. That's all I'm asking you to do. And I'm not talking about every day, I'm talking about once a week, a penny a week, okay? Imagine that, just a penny a week. Each person gives a penny to another person every week, that person gives another penny to another person every week. It doesn't seem like much, does it? You'd be like, I think I could do that. Doesn't seem like much, but you know, if each person faithfully passed a penny on to someone else, something incredible would actually happen. How long do you think it would take before every person in the world had a penny? One penny a week. And that person passes on a penny to someone else, and that person passes a penny on to someone else. How long do you think it would take before everybody in the world had a penny? 33 weeks. 33 weeks before every person in the entire world, over 8 billion people, would have received a penny. And do you know how much would be given by that? Imagine everybody, and this is the power of multiplication, okay? This is the power of multiplication. How much money do you think would have been given, every person giving a penny and that person giving a penny and multiplying that? How much do you think, within 33 weeks, everybody giving one penny a week and multiplying that? In just 33 weeks, by the way, that's only 33 cents that you've invested, okay? 33 pennies you've invested giving to one person and so on and so forth. The total approximate amount that that would be is almost $86 billion will have been given in 33 weeks if everybody gave somebody a penny. Now listen, I know that's kind of a silly illustration, but this is the idea that Paul gives us when it comes to pastors, when it comes to reaching people with the gospel. Paul gives us this idea, and we'll see this in this passage. Let's look at 1 Timothy 2, verse 1. It says, thou therefore my son, this is Paul. He's speaking to Timothy. Timothy was his son in the faith. Timothy was somebody that Paul was mentoring and developing. I guess you could say this, Timothy was someone that Paul was giving his penny to. Paul was passing on his penny to Timothy. He was one of the guys he was giving his penny to. And this is what he says, thou therefore my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Before we get to that next verse, let me just say, Paul's writing to Timothy and Paul's encouraging Timothy to be strong, not in his own power, but in the power of God. Listen, guys, you understand It's hard, right? It's hard to live the Christian life. There's a lot of hard things going on in our lives. And I want to ask you this, how many times do we depend on our own strength? I do. How many times do we neglect our time with the Lord? and just think that we can take care of it ourselves. Listen, the Christian life is not hard to live. The Christian life is impossible to live without Jesus Christ. Okay? Jesus Christ never meant for us to live the Christian life outside of his power. He never intended that, okay? If you pick that up from Scripture, if you ever get from Scripture that you were just meant to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and live the Christian life, you are either just not reading the whole Bible or you're reading some other book. Because we are to live the Christian life through Jesus Christ. He comes, lives on the inside of us. He does it through us. Don't depend on your own strength. Actually, the reason the law was given was to show that we can't keep it. We need Jesus Christ. We need God. We need Jesus Christ to do it through us. Nobody here can keep the law. The law condemns. It shows us that we need a Savior. and to Jesus Christ to come in and do it through us. We all need God's strength in our life, whether we work in ministry, for us in missions, raising families, serving in our church, reaching our communities with the gospel, sending missionaries, being good testimonies, or just living the Christian life. We need the power of God, and we need his strength in order to do it. So before Paul gets to the next one, first he says, hey, before I tell you this, let me tell you this. Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Use God's strength to do this because you can't do this on your own. All right, now let's look at the next verse. Verse two, and the things which thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also. This is what Paul is saying. Timothy, I've taught you. I gave you the penny, right? Obviously the penny, silly illustration. But I gave it to you, and you know what you're to do? You're to give it to others, who then give it to others, who then give it to others, who then give it to others. Right, that's the multiplication. And the things which thou hast heard of me, the things which thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same, those things commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. This is the heart of core missions. We partner with national pastors in places where American missionaries can't go to. We commit the truths of the gospel to faithful men who are able to teach others in their local villages. And as those national pastors teach others in those local villages, those guys then go and start other churches. And so on and so forth. Listen, that's the multiplication that Jesus intended for his church. Churches that start churches that start churches. That's the way God intended it to happen. And through equipping these national pastors, the gospel spreads faster and further than we could ever accomplish by ourselves. But listen, that's not just the job of, spreading the gospel is not just the job to do on the mission field. That's a job to do right here too. That's our family is called to reaching the unreached places, but guess what? I guarantee you there are unreached people here in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania that need to be reached with the gospel. And guess what? That compounding effect can happen right here. We've all been given the penny, right? We've all been given the gift of salvation from God. If you haven't, hey, listen, it's readily available to you. but we've all been given a gift from God. And here's what's crazy is the more that we give this gift away, the more that gift does for us. Isn't that wild? Given it shall be given you. That's kind of the verse that just popped in my head. The more we give it away, the more we're blessed from it. What has God asked you to do in helping spread the gospel? For our family, it's serving with core missions and it's reaching the unreached areas of the world with the gospel. but we have to be willing to get involved. Romans chapter 10 verse 13, for whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. We've heard that verse, but listen to the next verse. How then shall they call on him of whom they have not believed, and how shall they believe on him of whom they have not heard, and how shall they hear without a preacher? We gotta tell people. You gotta take that gift, you gotta take that penny. Listen, this is what I would challenge you to do. Take that gift, And this week, share it with one person. Does that seem impossible? I would hope not. A whole week, just share it with one person. Imagine if you shared the gospel and that person shared the gospel. The same thing with the penny, right? The entire world would hear the gospel in 33 weeks if you shared it with one person a week and you encouraged that person to share it with someone else. What are we going to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ? Pastor Jeff. It's a good challenge. Good job. Doing the ad lib presentation for us apologies for that Would have been even more impressive if you could have just kept time with it, and you know Just said it word for word, but I mean, I guess we can't hold you that I But we'll probably put that video on our display for next week for anybody that just wants to see the video and hear the video. And no offense to your in-person rendition of the video, but we'll make that available. It's a good challenge to end the message and the presentation. And if you've thought of any questions for Brother White about The ministry that they do I would encourage you when we are all done with the service today just go to him and and ask any questions you may have make sure you get a prayer card be praying for him and um at this time we are going to I don't think we'll have a an invitation tonight instead we'll we'll switch gears and we'll Go into our lord time for the lord supper And so we'll cut out the live stream and if our four gentlemen could come and sit in the front row That are going to be ushers for