Let me say a few more words about
the do-lost, because I think it's important
for people within OM to be able to
answer questions about the ship ministry.
If a Christian leader, and you have contact
with Christian leaders, maybe your own pastor, or
elders, or whoever, asks you to tell about
the ship ministry, what does the ship do,
what do you say to them?
Oh, they sell books.
Or they have pastor's conferences.
I think it's important, when we're talking about
the ship ministries, to be able to explain
that it is a multiple, it's many ministries
based on ship.
It's not just one thing.
There are about ten different major ministries based
on that ship.
And in a sense, just any one of
those ministries alone would not justify the enormous
expense, the number of people, and all that's
involved in a ship ministry.
We're not just going to have a ship
to go around selling books.
Well, that's a very big ministry, and the
book sales in Latin America have just been
phenomenal.
The figures for Mexico are so huge, that
though we on one hand think about the
huge fire in Bombay that's taken a quarter
of a million dollars, the profit from the
sale of books in Mexico has been higher
than that in the past month and a
half.
The profit, because the book sales were over
three quarters of a million dollars.
Now, I don't say that everywhere I go,
and outside of O.M., if I say
that, I've got to do a lot of
explaining.
Because people are pre-tuned to think small.
That's why the world's not going to be
evangelized.
And it's not going to be.
Despite all the optimists with their little computers
in California, the way we are going with
our small thinking, and our Donald Duck methods,
and our Mickey Mouse prayers, the world is
not going to be evangelized, so forget it.
If that's your goal, just forget it.
Either that, or join with some of us
who want to see some radical changes.
And one of those things that's going to
be radical change is to think a little
bigger.
I was a little bit concerned yesterday when
I read what it's costing to light up
Tampa, Florida.
Not my favorite place for the ship to
visit.
But it came into balance when I was
talking with Sheila Walsh at tea yesterday afternoon,
and heard that for one weekend of meetings
at Wimbledon, they're paying 10,000 pounds to
rent Wimbledon.
10,000 pounds just to have one more
meeting in London, where we have more meetings
than almost any city in the world outside
of the United States.
We have Joni this month, we have Luis
Palau preparation meetings with several people this month.
You know, London, it's just night after night.
You have to book some of these famous
Christian venues, places, you know, a year or
two in advance.
10,000 pounds to rent Wimbledon for a
weekend of meetings, mainly music and a few
messages thrown in.
And people pay.
5,000 people have already written in and
sent a couple of quid each to get
the tickets to be there.
And I just believe that the Lord wants
us to be able to trust Him for
greater things as we press on in this
huge task.
What are some of the ministries of Dumas?
Just very quickly, we've mentioned the book exhibition.
Both Christian and educational books, and the educational
side of the ministry is a legitimate ministry.
It's not a con, it's not a cover
-up.
It's a legitimate social work, relief work, that
gives us the kind of favor we need
to get in to these countries.
It is a huge task to get this
shit in to these countries.
And of course, it also is legitimate tent
making.
But in Mexico, 25% of the book
sales were Christian books.
It's an enormous amount of literature, especially because
often when they purchase an educational book, they
get a Christian book free.
I don't know if you've ever been on
Dumas when the exhibition was going full scale.
It is really something.
Three or four or five cash registers.
We went over the Humber Bridge yesterday, the
great white elephant of Northern England.
They only had one cash register operating to
handle the traffic.
They had three or four booths, and they
only had one.
I think of the Dumas, they handled the
traffic coming through the book exhibition.
They often had four or five cash registers
operating.
This is all computerized now.
So the sister who is working the cash
desk, when she punches in a code number,
it goes on to the computer and tells
the warehouse people, eventually through a printout, what
they need to restock the exhibition.
I mean, this is a tremendous thing.
And to be with Mike Cook, I spent
more time with him than anybody, because he
is a close personal friend among other things.
And to see the computer in operation.
I sent them a lot of video cassettes
to the ship.
They put all this on the computer, and
while we were talking, he punched a couple
of buttons, and a huge readout of every
single video cassette they have on the ship,
and its content, and tiny, comes whipping out
of this computer.
It really is amazing.
Pray for those who work on the computer.
So the book exhibition, of course, is very
much the front line ministry.
It's that which the public sees.
It's that which gets us into a port.
And it's going very, very well.
It takes a lot of work.
A lot of work.
Pray for this mountain of Christian books that
have been planted in Mexico.
You know, many Christians in Latin America have
never seen these Christian books.
Have never seen them.
Or they may have seen 5% of
them.
Christians in Latin America don't read Christian books
to any great degree.
And now with the invasion of television, you
know what we're up against.
And one of the things about the ship,
it doesn't just sell books, it creates what
I call book fever.
Now, some of you probably don't have book
fever.
You're supposed to get book fever when you
come to the LN.
It's a fever you catch from other people
in which you want to read Christian books.
I think the most anti-reading person I've
ever met is my son, Benjamin.
He's so proud.
He hasn't read a book in several years.
And he has what's called a reactionary fever
from his brother and sister who live in
books.
And he's a carpenter.
He's the working class.
He doesn't want to be identified with all
these middle class university snobs.
And so he's dug his heels in.
He's not reading.
He does read Hot Rod and custom car
magazines.
But as he was on this trip, the
book fever even caught him.
And he read right through completely a Christian
book.
And he's doing a lot of reading now
that he's stuck out in LN Pakistan and
LN India.
But book fever hits the city when the
ship comes in and many people start to
read Christian books.
Another main ministry of the ship I've already
mentioned are the pastor's conferences or should we
say the conference ministry.
The conference ministry in itself is many things.
And in fact, if you think of the
ship like a hotel, and in a hotel,
each room has to pay.
Each room has the capacity or what they
call earning capacity.
If you don't put people in the rooms,
the hotel is going out of business.
And in a sense, those lounges on the
ship, that's our earning capacity.
To get people in there and to invest
in them spiritually.
And so really, I feel that the conference
ministry is equally important as the book exhibition
ministry.
Pastor's conferences, women's conferences, married couples conferences,
conferences about the cults.
You name it, they have conferences about it.
That brings people, when the people leave the
conferences, they go up and buy books.
They have a very good book display in
the conference area.
They now also have the large screen, not
the large screen, but big TV sets so
that all the audiovisual material can be relayed
to the whole lounge, to several hundred people
sitting in the lounge through this television network.
And they've been very slow to purchase this
because of the tremendous struggle in finance.
They've literally waited a couple of years.
But they finally got this, and it's very,
very powerful and helpful in communicating.
Whenever you pray for the ship, and you
should be able to pray for the ship
ministry even if you haven't had a ship
report in a year, because it's so basic,
you know what the ministries are, you know
they're always having pastor's conferences, they're always having
some of these other conferences.
The speakers need prayer as they minister, sometimes
through interpretation, etc.
The third big ministry, I think, of the
ship is the ministry to the people who
are on the ship.
This is, in a sense, what makes the
whole thing a very sane, down-to-earth
program.
You know, if all these people on the
ship were professional people who could in the
world earn normal salaries, I would say, you
know, this ship is an awful lot of
people and a lot of money to keep
this thing going.
But that ship is being run largely by
volunteers.
And it provides them, as they're running the
ship, from the computer to the book exhibition,
to many, many of the other aspects, of
course the people in the engine room, and
the deck, number of other areas are professional
people.
But usually the officers, the people under them
often are volunteers learning those skills.
And so for everybody on the ship, it's
a training program.
A valuable, once-in-a-lifetime, for most
people, training program in which they're learning to
relate to other people.
That's certainly one of the biggest things you
learn on the ship.
They're learning how to live in difficult, pressurized
circumstances.
And people might say, well, isn't that a
little unreal?
I don't think it is.
Because I think the pressure that comes on
those young people, when later they get married
and fit back into society, is greater than
any pressure we can put on them in
OM.
You may feel at times you have a
lot of pressure even living here.
This is largely because you are very young
and still probably a little naive about what
life's about.
The pressure's ahead long after you're out of
OM and probably even forgotten to renew your
prayer letter, and many ex-OMers don't even
get prayer letters because it's just a forgotten
experience in their past.
And they've got so many present pressures, they're
so battling for survival where they are now,
they're not going to worry about what happened
10 years ago on OM.
And I have a lot of contact with
ex-OMers, and most of them say it's
tougher when you leave than when you're on.
And that frightens some people, because when they're
on OM, they're barely making it.
Much less when they get married and they
discover their husband, who seemed to be such
a sanctified, loving, wonderful bloke, ends up to
be a bit of a contentious, hung-up,
emotional case who needs a lot of tender,
loving care if he's going to make it
through life.
And here this woman is trying to minister
to this neurotic husband, a lot of them
are, and then she's got three children also
to cope with, and then the children want
a dog, and then the children also have
their friends, some of whom want to go
to bed with them, and then some of
the other children want to get into this
thing or that thing, and when they get
older, one wants a motorcycle, the other one
wants a hand glider, the other one wants
to go to California in a spaceship, and
life really begins to get complex.
Oh, I often sit back and dream of
the single life.
I really appreciated these three days on the
bus.
I was going to go back to London.
That's why I wasn't sure I was going
to be here.
I was going to dodge back to London.
I just so enjoyed it.
I forget London.
I get to stay right here on the
bus.
Of course, life, as you get married, as
you get children, and all that's involved with
that gets incredibly complex.
Incredibly complex.
Your home, after you once have a family,
can become a pressure cooker that will make
that OM team look like small play.
My home has its arms.
I realize not everybody is going to be
like the Verwer family.
We're heavy on energy, heavy on mouth activity,
highly strung, emotional, temperamental, moody.
That makes the whole family.
And having a meal at the Verwer family
can be equivalent to some kind of travel
through a space movie.
Anyway, I won't get into that.
I don't want to scare you away from
marriage.
But I just have such a burden that
OM train people for life.
It's not training for missionary work.
That is not the first goal.
It's training for life.
Even many missionaries.
Even Michael Griffiths, who often has a go
at us, at least our short-term work,
he likes the long-term.
Well, he's not out there anymore.
He's not in Bible college.
He had to settle down.
He left OMF because he needed and wanted
a more settled life with his children and
his family.
And so he took that job.
So even if you go out as a
missionary, you're probably not going to remain out
there all of your life.
It's so beautiful to have to relate to
different kinds of people.
And you know, this is one of the
dangers in OM.
Every spiritual training program has built within it
the seeds of its own destruction.
Built within OM are the seeds of its
own destruction.
Because if some of the things we believe
so strongly get out of control, they are
very destructive.
This is why you always hear me banging
the gong of balance.
Because this kind of thing that we teach
in OM without balance can be very ugly.
It certainly could have been very ugly in
my family and very ugly for my wife
if I hadn't come into some degree of
balance.
So one of the great ministries I feel
on the Dulas, and it's true in OM
we hope in general, is that everybody's in
training.
One of the things about Dulas is they
often throw different people in different jobs.
And in one way this seems a little
insane, but in another way it stretches people.
And here's a man like Michael Boshart.
I had a lovely time with him.
He took me out and bought me one
of these beautiful ice creams.
I hadn't even been off the ship in
three days.
So we went off and had an ice
cream.
He started in the engine room.
And when someone suggested he go into lineup
work, you know, you could hear the murmurings.
And yet now he's one of the longest
term lineup men.
This very unique Swiss brother.
And you know, to me that's one of
the beautiful things about this fellowship.
That God has called us into his wide
range of people.
Politically and in his thinking, Michael Boshart when
he came into OM, with his long hair
and his unique form of dress, was mildly
left.
Joe Blow, Californian right wing, short haired American,
probably would have considered him far left.
And yet to see that brother settle into
an environment that does at times get dominated
a little bit by right wing, more straight
types of individuals.
It's a miracle.
And you know, if the body of Christ
had more of this, and some places it
does, just a wider range of acceptability of
people.
Letting love cover the differences.
Not feeling we've got to change everybody to
get them to believe just as we believe.
You know, I believe the church would be
going a lot further.
And we wouldn't be so hung up on
secondary issues.
So I get excited when I see that
inbuilt training program.
Even God allowing that storm, people seasick all
over the place.
Praise the Lord, this is what life's about.
Life consists of getting sick.
None of you that have never been sick,
I'm not talking about seasickness, any kind of
sickness.
Life can be such a picnic until you
lose your health.
You never appreciate your health until you don't
have it.
So you're lying in a hospital bed wondering
if you have cancer, or wonder whether you're
going to die of a heart attack.
Life can suddenly take on a very different
turn.
And that little taste of getting sick, the
Lord can use even that.
Next time you have to go to the
dentist, and some people around, however, you'll probably
be all afraid to open your mouth today,
they really need to go to the dentist.
Really.
It doesn't cost that much.
Owen's willing to finance it, it's part of
your support.
Even if you don't have support, we'd like
you to go to the dentist.
Because, you know, it's really not very pleasant
if you're sitting in a meal one day
and suddenly a tooth falls out of the
guy's mouth and lands in his soup.
That's it.
On the Dumas, they have their own dentist.
And I challenge people to go to the
dentist.
And you know, when you're at the dentist
and you get a little bit of pain,
praise the Lord.
I always praise the Lord at the dentist
when I get pain.
Not because I'm a masochist, not because I
like pain, I don't.
But because I need that kind of exposure
to reality.
My life's been a little bit too easy.
Compared to a lot of the people I
read about.
Compared to people who had to live through
the war.
My life's been relatively easy.
And any little bit of pain, no.
In one sense, of course, I don't want
it.
On the other hand, I thank the Lord
for that reminder of what a lot of
people are in permanently.
In prisons all over the world.
In hospitals all over the world.
A tremendous thing for some of you to
get into hospital ministry.
Hospital ministry, ministry in jails, ministry among drunkards.
Three major things that helped form my whole
frame and lifestyle before O.M. was ever
born.
And exposed me to some of the things
that I had not seen in my little
sheltered, middle class, North American, suburban background.
And it was a great challenge.
Another ministry of the Dumas, of course, is
the ministry of taking the word to the
people.
We have the ministry of all those coming
to the ship.
The conferences, the book exhibition, we might add
to that.
We have another ministry, the ministry of evangelism
on the ship.
They have evangelistic meetings on the ship.
They have evangelistic film shows on the ship.
Sometimes people go right from the exhibition into
a lounge and they have an evangelistic presentation.
It's fantastic.
But then there's the ministry of going off
the ship.
The open air, that's waned a little since
Ray Lynch has left the ship.
And then the ministry of literature distribution.
The ministry with churches, taking them out in
evangelism.
And then, of course, the ministry, it's another
whole separate ministry, if you're making a list,
the ministry of teaching and challenge in the
churches.
Sometimes on Sunday, 30, 40, 50 or more
meetings.
And the amazing thing is that while taking
those meetings, many young people are getting the
opportunity to give their testimony for the first
time.
They're getting the opportunity to learn how to
handle book tables.
They're getting the opportunity to, in some cases,
preach.
And the ships have been turning out quite
a few people who have learned how to
minister while being involved in those church meetings.
A lot of other things go on on
shore.
Sometimes the teams go into the interior.
The Lagos around India, a lot of the
activity has been in the interior.
And people are often thrown into the deep
end.
You know that expression.
Some of you don't know English as a
first language.
You must die with the expressions we have
in the English language.
What does it mean to be thrown into
the deep end?
Well, it's simple.
There's a swimming pool.
The shallow end is for the children.
The deep end is for those that know
how to swim.
So you don't jump off the diving board
in the deep end if you don't know
how to swim.
Unless you're in Operation Mobilization.
If you're in Operation Mobilization, they'll push you
off the diving board into the deep end.
And you either swim or you sink.
And it seems that nine out of ten
do swim.
And of course we have the rescue program
just before the person drowns.
The tenth person, we go get him and
pump the water out of him and encourage
him and counsel him and then push him
in again.
So that's an exciting ministry.
Another ministry that goes on on the ship
is the ministry with films.
If you read on reports, I went through
about a hundred yesterday, you know that one
of the things that God is using are
these films.
Team after team, all over the world, the
film, the use of films and slides getting
in openings.
And we're presenting the gospel to tens of
thousands of people through films.
That Dr. Schaeffer series that I sent to
the duos in Spanish, I don't know how
many times, they've shown the entire series.
And whereas in some fields, it's difficult to
organize the audiovisual, the equipment, in India it's
a miracle.
We've never been able to organize it.
And as you know, about $40,000 of
equipment was destroyed in that fire.
But praise the Lord, there's more than that
out on the fields.
Don't think that all the literature equipment was
destroyed in the Bombay fire because India is
very decentralized, very decentralized.
So a lot of it was spread all
over the country on the teams, literature, films,
and projectors, and it's going on.
It's going on.
The backup from Bombay, that has been destroyed.
And of course, with a ship, they can
do so much more in audiovisuals.
You know, I remember when I first launched
this Super 8 film vision, it was almost
unheard of.
It was another one of those little brainstorms
that came.
People said, it won't work.
I can remember Moody Institute of Science writing
me, the big film people.
No way.
And yet, that Super 8 ministry has taken
off and is being greatly used.
It's interesting that on the British airway jets,
the jumbo jets between New York and London,
they show you a film, Super 8.
They're using Super 8 films on a lot
of the jets for the films they show
you when you fly long distance flights.
So the world, they sometimes are way ahead
of us in some of these things.
There are other ministries that go on aboard
the ship, the ministry of counseling, never-ending
counseling people on an individual basis.
One of the values of the ship ministry
is that you have a number of highly
qualified leaders who are generally available most of
the time.
Now that doesn't mean everybody gets their share
of fellowship.
Nowhere, in a sense, are there enough leaders
and enough gifted people to give everybody everything
that they want in the way of counseling
and fellowship.
And that's always a great struggle.
But these men are living there.
Their wives are living there.
Because they are serving one another, all the
women don't have to go cook their own
food and all that kind of thing, people
often have more time.
Far more man hours are available on a
ship because of the way they function than
in normal life.
Because in a sense, it takes as much
time to prepare food for, say, 20 people
as it would be almost to prepare food
as they're often preparing it for 500 people
when they're feeding one of the pastor's conferences.
There's a lot of time available that can
be used for counseling, fellowship, and that is
an important ministry in itself.
Well, I didn't mean to say so much
about the doulos and about the ships.
And maybe some of that's just repetition.
But I think it is incredibly important that
you, as the backup office for this ministry
and the whole ministry of OM, really understand,
as we say on gut level, what it's
all about.
Because sometimes I pick up feedback of people
who are trying to explain this ministry to
a pastor and a Christian leader, and believe
me, it is a greatly misunderstood ministry.
And there is over-opposition in this ministry.
Our close friend Michael Griffiths, some of you
may know, wrote me a letter explaining that
he doesn't believe in this ship ministry.
And if he, with his understanding of missions,
has his questions, you can imagine the many
questions and doubts other people of that type
have about this ship full of young people.
Some people think we just sort of come
into a port, and we all rush down
the gangway, and we distribute gospel tracts.
And, of course, we do give out tracts.
Probably represents 2%, maybe 2% of the
ministry of the ship.
As you pray for the ship, remember the
enormous financial mountain that has to be moved.
Despite the book sales, 60%, between 50%
and 60% of the money still has
to come in through your office, and New
Jersey, and Mosbach, gifts.
You see, if you don't see the gifts,
you don't buy the books in the first
place.
When you sell the books, you may make
30% or 40%, but if you don't
have the gifts, you can't buy the books
in the first place.
The 30% and 40%, all of that,
all of that is spent day by day
running.
Part of the 60%, the investment in the
books, a large part of that goes back
to pay for books.
But not enough, not enough.
And all they need is a 10-day
period in which they're not selling books, and
you will see the whole economic scene within
LM go through vibrations.
Because they often distribute more books on one
day than the entire budget of places like
Pakistan or Bangladesh in a whole year.
And one of the struggles we're facing within
LM is the huge size of the ship
ministry in comparison to the very tiny size
of LM Israel, LM Arab World, LM Bangladesh,
LM Pakistan.
Now put all that together, it's pretty big.
Throw India in, it's bigger than the ship.
But those fields operate independently.
They tell us, can we have $1,000?
Now they're crying out for $1,000.
Where over in Duas, they're crying out for
$100,000 so that they can pay the
next avalanche of book bills or fuel bill
or dry docking.
Dry docking often is $50,000 to $70
,000, just dry docking.
Lagos is dry docking right now in a
month or two.
Duas is dry docking and the pipeline finance
needs to be kept open through intercessory prayer.
The future of the ship, the Duas is
uncertain.
Remain in Latin America, come back to Europe
for a short time, go to Asia.
This has not been settled.
If you've heard rumors it's settled, well you're
doing better than I am on the gallery
telegraph system.
We just want the Lord's mind.
Some of us, I guess I'm in that
camp, really would prefer it to move on,
whether via Europe or Africa to Asia.
But it's not my decision.
It has to come more from the people
who are committed to that ministry.
They've got to have the faith for that.
Financially, we're still not ready for that move.
At least that's the way one or two
ship leaders that I spoke about feel.
We need to just wait upon the Lord
and trust the Lord to show what his
plan is.
You know they had some great problems with
the generators.
That's still not totally resolved.
And those generator problems, as big as they
were, that's small compared to what can happen
on an old, old ship.
You know I was amazed as I went
down into the bowels of the ship and
that one whole section of cabins was torn
out.
The amount of work just blows my mind.
Because after they fixed the steel underneath it,
they had to rebuild those cabins piece after
piece, washbasin after washbasin, vents, everything had to
be rebuilt.
They're running two months behind schedule.
In a sense it was taking just that
much longer because it's just so much work.
Why are they doing that?
Some other problem takes place and some other
steel has to be there.
And to meet some of these people who
are doing the physical work on the ship,
men like Randy Jury and Brian Jury, who
have been on the ship almost from the
beginning, welders, just really speaks to my own
heart.
Routine, hard, difficult work.
You know some kind of jobs, a lot
of things I do, in an hour or
two hours a job is done.
I have a meeting, one hour it's over,
it's a sense, wow, finished.
Some of their jobs take them weeks and
weeks and weeks and weeks before you see
the end.
Just that one job.
And I think we need to train more
for the people on the physical side, the
physical side of the ship work.
And the officers, the whole area of safety.
Alfie Franks, in sharing about the fire, we'll
talk about India in a little while, he
said it never even came to his mind
in the past years that a fire would
ever take place.
Never came to his mind.
Man, never had a fire before.
He's been there 17 years, why should he
all of a sudden start thinking about fires?
But you know on the ship they think
fire, they think safety.
Instead of one fire station on Dulas, they
have four fire stations.
Whereas the Bombay Fire Department did not arrive
with oxygen equipment, we have full oxygen equipment,
perhaps two sets or more on the Dulas.
They're ready to fight a fire.
And I think it's good for people in
O.N. to know that that ship is
a safe ship that's gone through all the
inspections, that's going through all the necessary process
to be as much as possible a safe
ship where we can rest at ease in
one sense to send our friends or our
children or whoever to go there and to
travel and to work and to live.
Let's just spend a few minutes in prayer.