Normally we give a little more part on
Friday morning to prayer and praise and testimonies,
but I have something very important on my
heart this morning.
The recording of it also has to go
quickly to some other places, so I'm going
to be taking a little more of the
time.
I did want to say just a word
about this thing called social policy, because I'm
not around here much when these things take
place and announcements are made.
But I might just say that sometimes people
get the wrong idea of what the social
policy is.
The social policy is supposed to be.
I'm not saying what it is for you.
You have to decide.
But the original concept is it's really glorified
dating.
It's just a permission to start to talk
and date and meet with a person.
It's not pre-engagement.
It's not going steady.
When I was 13, I went steady.
If you were married to a big football
player, you hung his big ring around your
neck in those days, or you exchanged something.
And I went steady for about three years.
And I tell you, if anybody got near
my bird in those days, they got in
serious trouble.
Imagine how serious I was at 14.
I was the only freshman at the senior
prom.
And the girl, of course, weighed more than
I did.
She never did marry.
But when someone has social permission in OM,
whoever that may be, it's not a thing
to make big up.
There's no way that, of course, anybody can
do anything, whether it's Bible college or OM
or even out in the world, which there
is some excitement or talk.
I mean, you have to learn to live
with that as well and not be over
-spiritual and over-idealistic.
Also, when people, perhaps something comes to an
end, things begin, the Lord giveth, the Lord
taketh away.
It may not only be SP.
It may be even sometimes an engagement.
Now, in the eastern countries, breaking an engagement
is a very serious thing.
In our part of the world, it varies
from place to place and culture to culture.
But generally, a lot of people have been
preserved from a lot of agony.
They have the courage to break an engagement,
especially in our part of the world.
So I think it's good when we have
these things, just to try to play it
down.
You don't have to be phony about it.
But sometimes it's an embarrassment if somebody just
gets social policy.
It's going to all end in a few
weeks anyway.
People are congratulating it all.
You made it!
So that's the official line from the international
level, whatever happens in Bromley.
I'll let Neil and Mike Wheat contextualize it.
That's what OM is all about.
Let's see, is there any other thing I
wanted to mention?
I don't think so.
Let's just pray.
Let's pray.
Father, you know our burden this morning is
we focus on the challenge of Europe.
We focus on the vision you have given
us for this great continent.
And we just believe, oh God, that we
need to grow an understanding of this area
of the world.
So needy with such a tremendous variety from
southern Spain to northern Norway.
From Moscow to Dublin.
From Lisbon to Istanbul.
Grip us, oh God, with the challenge of
this great continent.
So ancient its culture.
So diversified its people.
Yet so needy spiritually.
And enable us to somehow move forward with
great unity, even in the midst of this
tremendous diversity.
For we pray in Jesus' name, amen.
This little message is long overdue.
And I'm happy to be able to just
share a little bit with you of the
burden and vision God has given us for
Europe.
I think sometimes we forget here in England,
and especially right here in Bromley, that this
is part of Europe.
This country is also part of the European
common market, whatever your political view may be.
In fact, that could be a great help
to us with the ongoing visa crisis.
People in the common market, we hope will
play a greater role here in STL and
in the ministry in the British Isles.
I keep trying to find out exactly how
many Muslims are here in Great Britain.
I've heard a million, a million and a
half, two million.
I now have a figure that there's seven
or eight hundred thousand Bengali and Pakistani residents.
A high percentage of those would be Muslim.
But people still are insisting they're far more
than that, more like a million and a
half.
My research goes on, but you can be
sure.
In God's providence, he's given us a great
army of immigrants.
Keep in mind that many of these people
are highly insulted when they are referred to
as immigrants, if they're second generation young people
speaking English, studying in our universities.
The whole history of Britain is a history
of immigrants, if you go back far enough,
including the Roman invasion, which I was just
reading about some time ago, a very exciting
part of history.
Realize how old Christianity is in Great Britain
also is quite something to challenge.
But we're not thinking about Britain this morning,
we're thinking about Europe.
We have this map, and as all maps
of the world, Europe doesn't seem like such
a huge place, but represents, of course, a
highly populated area.
Places like the Netherlands have one of the
highest square mile population statistics in the world.
Often, in OM, we develop a rather narrow
view of Europe.
We're usually thinking of the part of Europe
we're involved in.
But we want to try, as we think
of Europe, to think of the whole of
Europe.
I was just trying to remember where Europe,
in fact, ended, and was reminded by one
of our geography experts, Mike Wee, that Europe
goes all the way to the Ural Mountains.
Moscow is in Europe.
When we think of Europe, we should think
of the whole of Europe, not just because
that's a geographical fact, but because that is
the vision that God gave us, even without
us really knowing it from the earliest days.
For example, the vision for the Soviet Union
in the communist country predates the vision we
had for places like England and France, even
Germany, not by much.
So, in some ways, that's not so important,
because it was all in the early days
when God put these countries on our hearts.
But way back when just a few of
us were praying at Moody Bible Institute, the
Soviet countries were very, very much on our
hearts.
Now, one of the reasons I'm speaking on
this subject is because I had a letter
recently asking me to write an article for
a newspaper, a Christian magazine in Spain, because
it was the 25th anniversary of the birth
of OM in Spain, which I hadn't even
thought that much about.
So, I wrote this article, and it's caused
me to do some thinking.
The work in France also was born at
that time in a very tiny way, but
it was going through France on my way
to Spain in 1960 that I was just
gripped with the need of France.
I already had prayed a lot for France,
and it was a country that we were
concerned about, because we were in the very,
very late 50s.
Europe was really beginning to get mentioned a
lot.
At places like Moody Bible Institute, the Greater
Europe Mission was just down the road.
We had a lot of missionaries coming back
from Europe, and it was considered, really, the
neglected continent.
It was through studying, of course, about Spain.
Also, during that same period, I remember seeing
a film about Franco's semi-Nazi Spain, it
seemed.
That film just gripped my heart as a
young student.
And, of course, I'd already been studying Spanish.
I'd already been to Mexico.
Some thoughts of Spain had been there previously.
But as I went through France, I realized,
well, it wasn't certainly as needy as Spain.
It wasn't closed like Spain, but, you know,
it was so needy, it was difficult to
make comparisons.
I made a decision immediately at that time,
around that time, to go forward and to
see something happen in France, In a sense,
Special Projects was born at that time.
I've always had this burden to help in
special projects that might not necessarily be completely
within OM's mainstream.
The name OM didn't even exist then.
It was called Send the Light.
We hardly ever sing that hymn anymore, Send
the Light.
We must sing that on our anniversary.
Maybe you've sung it.
But I met a missionary over in Grenoble,
and we agreed to go ahead with a
bookmobile in France.
I don't know how many months before that
bookmobile was on the road, but that bookmobile
in France, in a sense, represents the very
beginning of the work there.
A number of other things started to move.
But the burden really was Spain, so I
drove on down to Spain.
My wife flew in about seven months pregnant
with Benji.
Somehow, though, my vehicle had broken down, and
I needed a new engine, and all kinds
of things went wrong when I took the
wrong route and tried to go over the
Alps in a beat-up little tiny glorified
baby carriage, which didn't make it.
But somehow I still arrived at the airport
when her plane landed from the United States.
We had nowhere to stay.
We sort of drove around looking for a
place.
We took another wrong turn, went down to
another, it was in Madrid, but it seemed
like a mountain.
It was actually just outside Madrid, and we
couldn't get back up.
It looked like the engine was going to
go again.
A very interesting day, our first day in
Spain.
Almost no contacts, no preparation, just the conviction
that God wanted to turn this country.
Well, I guess we used the term a
lot in those days, upside down.
To make a long story short, because I
don't want to focus that much on Spain,
we, within a few months, had a Christian
bookshop open, though we could only sell a
limited number of books because it was all
illegal.
Everything seemed to be illegal then.
We started sending out gospel literature through the
post.
A number of full-time workers joined.
Can you imagine somebody joining this unknown group,
you know, within a couple of months after
hearing about it?
Quite an amazing story, how these young Spaniards
joined full-time.
Remember, the thrust of OM initially was for
nationals to reach their own country for Christ.
It was not initially international.
Our burden in Mexico was Mexicans to reach
Mexico.
Our burden in Spain was Spaniards reach Spain.
And so we got national workers, and we
supported them.
And that's how they joined.
It was only after some understanding and realization,
especially that for Europe, there must be a
real equality in working together.
You couldn't be financing Europeans out of Chicago.
Somehow Europe was beyond that.
And you know, it's good that I did
not come across from the United States with
some nice little packaged strategy.
That would have been, you know, that would
have been catastrophic.
It's good that the board of directors in
New Jersey never thought that they were the
great managers and forward planners for the work
in Europe.
This was a work being born of the
Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit goes where He will.
Like the wind you read about in John,
it doesn't mean that today things should go
on the same way.
Of course, 25 years later, it will not
go on exactly the same way.
But may we never get to the day
when we're not totally, greatly dependent upon the
Holy Spirit to lead and guide us.
It was after Spaniards joined us and became
the leaders that God began to unfold more
His strategy.
Some of you know, the next summer of
61, Roger Malsted joined me in Paris.
I was on my way to the Soviet
Union.
I had been studying Russian all year, teaching
English, studying Russian and advanced Spanish in a
little school in central Madrid.
And launched off for this great Soviet exploit,
which proved to be basically a failure.
Many, many lessons were learned through that.
Because on the way to the Soviet Union
again through France, gripped by the need in
France, out in the streets.
In fact, when we were giving out tracts
in the streets of Paris, Krista Fischer, destined
to become Krista Eicher, was dancing in the
streets of Paris as a confused, lost soul
in another part of the city.
We found that out later when she came
to Spain and became one of our first
persons to come to Christ through the ministry
of people outside of Spain.
But we went into the Soviet country with
our little printing press and our literature.
Due to my own mistake, we got arrested
after a couple of days.
We're kept in custody under suspect of being
spies.
They decided we were religious fanatics.
Imagine that, I mean, lack of discernment.
And we went back to Austria, and there
we had this day of prayer.
And that's where all my thoughts about Europe,
I've been thinking about Britain, I've been thinking
about France, I've been to Switzerland.
I've been thinking, of course, about other countries.
We had just been in Yugoslavia.
We got arrested there as well, but we
got a lot of the literature out there
before we got arrested.
That was somebody else's mistake.
I always remember that because we had a
broken windshield, and I learned how to drive
hundreds of miles with a sheet.
We rigged up a sheet, a bed sheet,
as a windshield.
And just with, you know, holes in it.
And so the whole burden of Western Europe
was really bursting upon us at that time.
It was there, and it's true, in the
top of a tree, in the mountains, in
a day of prayer, that this name came
to my mind, Operation Mobilization.
And the vision was to see Europeans united
in a revolution of love.
And to see Europeans reach out and shake
their continent for Christ.
The main vision was not, you know, that
they all run off to the Soviet Union,
or all run off to the Muslim world.
One thing you have to try to understand
about OM, there are parallel visions.
I spoke about this at the September conference,
and I think it was a very important
message.
I'm trying to trace it down, it's on
tape.
But I shared the fact that when we
have a new burden, or we increase our
thrust in a particular area, like this decade,
we're trying to increase our thrust in the
Muslim world.
We've always had the Muslim world vision.
We're trying to increase that.
We're trying to focus on that.
But that does not destroy already existing strategies
and visions that God has given us.
Now that doesn't mean that the Lord cannot
change some strategy.
Doesn't mean the Lord will not lead us
to move out of a particular country.
But that's separate.
That has to be prayed through, and thought
through, and wrestled through, especially with the persons
within that country.
But generally speaking, any new vision is built
on existing vision, or parallel with existing vision.
This is why it is easy for visionary
people like myself to get a high frustration
rate with OM today.
We want OM to grow, we want to
be more effective, we want to see more
projects, more literature.
We want more of everything.
And yet when something is already this size,
and this complicated, and this expensive, such an
amalgamation of so many visions, so many burdens,
it will often go slower.
And you as a new generation who will
determine really, you're the ones that will determine
where this will go, will have to be
patient.
We at the same time must be ready
to compromise.
Much of OM's strategy is a result of
compromise.
It's an amalgamation of the vision of nationals
and internationals within a country.
They have a burden for their country.
They want to do this, they want to
do that.
It's a compromise between them and other leaders
like myself who are outside of that country.
Now we're involved in that country.
We've got to help find the manpower.
We've got to help find the money.
We've got to help keep the peace.
We've got to help build the credibility all
over the world, without which they're not going
to get the money or the workers, and
they will get a lot of other problems.
What we do in England affects the work
in other parts of Europe.
I will tell you, if our credibility goes
down with the British Church, and we make
some big mistakes in Britain, and suddenly the
word is out that we're this or we're
that, they will know that very quickly in
the rest of Europe.
And in many ways God has used the
work in Britain to be an example, to
be a...
I don't like the word pace setter, because
different fields are setting the pace in different
ways, but it has been that to some
degree.
And so I think it's important to remind
ourselves, especially those of us who are really
burdened about the Muslim world, we want to
reach Muslims.
We're increasing our efforts there slowly.
There have been some significant breakthroughs.
This does not mean that Dick Griffin in
Mexico goes into retirement, and that Mexico is
no longer important.
Mexico is very important, and we have been
able to put more effort into Mexico in
the last two years than before that, especially
with David Hicks, Don Hammond, Jack Rendell, he's
just back from Mexico again, really doing far
more than I was able to do for
Mexico, living in Bombay, or Kathmandu, or even
London.
New specialized efforts don't destroy other parallel existing
burdens or visions.
OM's unity has to be in the midst
of diversity.
As we, and we don't have the time,
think of each one of these countries in
Europe, I've visited almost all of them, have
friends in most of them.
Every one of these countries is unique.
In fact, there's a great lack of understanding
in England about Wales, and about Scotland, and
about Ulster, much less about Dublin and Southern
Ireland.
These are separate nations in a cultural sense,
in the people's group sense that people are
talking about.
Today, a lot of the things that are
happening in England are barely happening up in
Scotland.
They're more conservative, very different in their background.
The wars they've been through, the Covenanters, the
whole history of Scotland is very, very special,
and that is true of every part of
Europe.
That's why it is foolish to make generalizations
about the Soviet Union.
It's a land of many different people.
There are some areas of common denominator.
Even Norway and Sweden are very, quite distinct.
Many people don't realize that Finland is not
Scandinavia.
Finland is Finland.
Scandinavia is Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.
They're supposed to have a little more in
common.
And I believe that any strategy, and this
has been true in O.M. 25 years,
any strategy in Europe must be tailor-made
for the culture of that country.
And we have seen this.
In O.M., Belgium has developed very differently
from France.
France is very different from Austria.
Spain is completely unique, as the Lord led
us, I believe, very clearly, for a number
of reasons, not one reason, at least five
reasons, to let the vision and the burden
in Spain flow within those people that we
had discipled.
O.M.'s first strategy has always been men,
seeing men saved, discipled, turned upside down for
Jesus Christ.
We had a vision from the earliest days
to see churches planted, but we weren't sure
in the very early days how much we
would actually do the structural part of planting
the church.
We tended to think that we should be
the catalyst.
We tended to think we should see men
saved and trained who would go back to
their own churches, their own denominations, and into
other church planting groups, and then churches planted.
Any measuring of O.M.'s strategy and O
.M.'s effectiveness over 25 years in Europe must
take into consideration what our ex-O.M
.ers and graduates are doing.
Otherwise, you are going contrary to the whole
burden and vision of the work.
The O.M. burden and vision is not
just what are those who are in O
.M. right now doing.
No, it's what are those people who were
saved through O.M., who were trained through
O.M., who had their lives turned upside
down through this work, through this vision.
I prefer to use even the word vision
rather than the word O.M. Because many
times we took a meeting, people were converted,
people recommitted their lives, people started in a
whole new ministry, and O.M. was never
even involved except that we brought them to
Christ in the first place.
Here in England we see a very powerful
kind of church growth going on.
You could take a very interesting survey and
find out how many leaders and key people
in the church growth movement in Britain today
who have been involved in planting whole new
churches, got their beginning in their Christian life
through Operation Mobilization.
I could give a lot of names, but
there's not time this morning, and some would
be left out.
And I see that this is one of
the most important parts of O.M. strategy.
It's to give people a start.
There are plenty of churches and groups and
missions that want people.
Once they mature, they know how to pray,
they know how to handle relationships, they know
how to speak with wisdom and understanding, they
know how to spiritually survive.
Do you think there's any lack of places
for such people to go?
Contrarywise, one of the great struggles we have
in O.M. is to keep a few
people around with everybody else trying to recruit
those who have been trained and caught the
vision.
And that will always be an endless struggle.
The tremendous work that God has done in
France.
People often ask, why has France received so
much attention in God's work, even within O
.M.? More has been done in France, more
literature distributed in France, more time, manpower, effort,
money than any nation in all of O
.M. apart from India.
In fact, hardly any even come close to
what we've put into France.
There's a number of reasons, but one, that
God gave in his sovereign way men of
vision and drive, who also felt very united
to the vision and drive of the whole
of O.M. You see, you might find
a Spaniard who's on fire and he wants
to see Spain really reach, but he may
not have the rest of the O.M.
vision in terms of practical reality.
You know, the Muslim world, India, the ships,
STL, so many different parts of the work.
And the amazing thing about the work in
France is that these men were so like
-minded among themselves for what they wanted to
do in France, but they were also able
to maintain that like-mindedness with the rest
of us and convinced us that what they
had on their hearts for France was God's
plan, and so we went with it.
Didn't always understand everything.
A publishing house, a church planting program, and
this fits completely into the original vision and
strategy of O.M., which was, Lord, give
us men.
Originally, we thought more nationals.
As time went on, we saw the strategic
place of internationals.
We saw the strategic place of internationals who
were becoming like nationals.
People like Mike Evans, learning fluent French, marrying
into the French-speaking world.
People like Jonathan McCroskey, reared in Africa, most
of his life after that now in Europe,
marrying a European, learning one or two languages.
We saw that God is no respecter of
persons.
Just working with a national because he's a
national is not God's strategy.
It's an important factor, but we want God's
men.
And we felt, years ago, that God had
given us a team of men in France,
and we wanted to go along with their
vision.
At times, it was much bigger than ours,
at least as far as France, and there
was great discussion.
And, of course, there was compromise.
Compromise, maybe you don't like that word.
There was partnership.
O.M.'s strategy is a strategy of partnership.
It's O.M. international, linking hands with O
.M. national movements.
Each movement in O.M. is semi-autonomous.
There's no official control.
The official control is within the country.
It's in the hands of the board of
directors.
Now, we have some authority.
We could put up a good fight.
If one section of O.M. really went
astray, I suppose went into false doctrine, I
believe it would be an interesting battle.
We've never had to have that.
We don't ever want it.
International council plus area leaders plus other boards
of directors versus Operation Mobilization Board of Trustees,
Yugoslavia.
We've never had that kind of situation.
We believe that in these next few years,
we must strengthen the boards of directors in
these individual countries.
As O.M. has become so big, the
need for biblical autonomy is even greater.
And I'd ask you to pray, those of
you who hear this message, really pray that
we may have the right men on these
boards.
They are the ones that have the power
to remove the leader of that country.
We've seldom had that.
But it happens in Christian work.
I am thrilled that the board of directors
in the USA and England have the power.
They'll probably have to get the agreement of
the area leaders.
It'll have to be a united thing.
But it wouldn't necessarily have to be 100
% agreement.
If it was a serious situation, maybe I
had one guy who was really deceived by
me and he was ready to stand against
everybody, he'd go down.
Because consensus would overrule.
And I think it's important for leaders in
O.M. today, and that's why I've done
those five leadership tapes, to grasp a little
more understanding of what actually O.M. is,
how it functions.
And one of the reasons I share this
with you is because some of you are
praying about longer-term ministry within O.M.
And if that's the case, you need to
really understand it.
Not just have a subjective, superficial understanding of
it, which may come as a result of
perhaps being in a particular place at a
particular time, going through particular struggles.
God has given us a different strategy for
each European country.
At the same time, we've been able to
unite together for special campaigns.
All of Europe has backed these big campaigns
in France.
All of Europe backed the big Muslim push
some years ago, which helped lead to the
birth of many other things, in terms of
our outreach to Muslims and immigrants.
Immigrants was the focus.
Mickey Walker was very key in that, if
you remember.
We united together and had a full-scale
thrust in Belgium.
And we are praying about uniting together again,
perhaps in a greater thrust among Muslims.
That will not destroy, and we don't believe
it needs to hinder, the individual strategies that
must go on in each country, unless the
Lord clearly shows us other ones.
That's not going to mean we're going to
fold up STL.
STL doesn't fit enough into the Muslim thrust,
or it doesn't fit enough into this or
that thrust.
One of the greatest mistakes we make about
STL is we think this is some kind
of tent-making for India.
I know that gets in people's minds because
it's part of the strategy.
When you get married, you'll discover marriage is
made up of many things.
Don't ever say, I mainly got married because
I needed someone to wash my shirts, and
cook my meals, and take care of my
children, and make my bed, and pick up
my dirty socks.
You're going to get in serious trouble if
you go along that line.
Bringing the whole full marriage partnership, love, you
know, that's supposed to come in there, love,
you know, and all that.
And so it is with the strategy of
OM.
It isn't just one thing in the strategy
of STL.
It isn't just one thing.
If we did not send a single penny
to India, this work would continue as a
vital part of OM Europe.
And this work of STL has acted as
a prototype, as an example for the birth
of other similar works in and out of
Operation Mobilization.
We could talk about the publishing in Sweden
that was born directly out of this vision.
Directly.
And the publishing work in Norway, which was
born directly out of that.
And the publishing work in France, which has
some of its roots back in here.
To me it's so exciting that our unity
can be in the midst of diversity.
That Johan van Damme, a Dutchman with an
Austrian wife, he and his men can get
on their faces in Austria and they can
get God's vision and program for Austria.
What do I really know of Austria?
Am I going to transplant what I know
from India into Austria?
We've learned a lot about Austria over the
years.
We've learned that book selling isn't the greatest
method generally to go about in evangelism.
And so we have not forced on them
a strategy from overseas, but we have let
them find God's way with their retreats, with
their conferences, with their endless discussions among themselves.
They are the people who are in this.
They must find God's way.
We can help.
We can hopefully send manpower and send money
and mobilize prayer, which is so important.
God's strategy is prayer.
We often pay lip service to that.
And the way sometimes we treat our prayer
partners in terms of when they get their
prayer letters and the kind of communication they
get from us is sometimes indicative.
One of the greatest miracles in all of
Europe in my mind is Belgium because it
fits more my original burden.
It grew in a very unique way with
some very special people.
But the fantastic thing is that for the
last few years the work has been led
by an on-fire Belgian who has his
own vision and his own burden.
It's his own nation and yet he has
been able to integrate that into OM's ways
and OM's vision and all that we believe
in.
How easy it would be in some of
these countries for them to throw aside book
selling because book selling in some ways is
the more traditional OM thing that came very
much from my own strong bend in that
direction.
And yet they haven't, in the midst of
launching drama and launching church planting and launching
this and that, they haven't thrown away some
of these basics.
France is another fantastic example of that with
all their going on into other strategies, publishing,
church planting, a lot of in-depth type
of evangelistic work.
They are still the largest distributors of tracts
in all of Europe and they still have
as much of the literature vision as almost
any place in Europe.
There are countries that sometimes get neglected when
we think of our strategy and what God
has done in Europe because sometimes we don't
think of them as main evangelistic fields.
I think some confusion comes when we just
try to neatly separate different kinds of countries.
And let me destroy a few false ideas
and just say that OM Britain is a
major evangelistic field.
It was when I came here in February
of 62.
The bigger vision was British workers into Europe,
British workers around the world.
But just right next to that, we want
to see Britain evangelized.
We want to see people saved.
We want to see revival.
We want to see renewal.
We were publishing one or two million tracts
in the first one year of OM Britain.
We blitzed all of London.
We blitzed Manchester.
And millions of people were reached for the
gospel in the various early days.
And if you do a little study, you'll
find out that probably more evangelism is going
on through OM Britain than almost any other
European country.
You know, in Britain, we don't want to
just be classified as some field off here
that mainly sends money and workers because that's
not true.
And when we think of the gift now
that God has given people like Nigel Lee
and Peter Maiden and a number of others,
gifted evangelists as well as teachers, we think
of friends from abroad, we think of the
Arab work, we think of summer campaigns, which
date back many, many years.
We believe that Britain is to continue to
be both a major sending field as well
as a main evangelistic target area.
You see, in OM, we play with words.
They can mean different things to different people.
You can't get all of this up on
a chart.
It doesn't always easily fit on a page
in a notebook because we believe the Holy
Spirit will lead different people in different ways.
I am convinced that Germany is also an
evangelistic field.
One of the greatest events in Germany is
the Easter campaign.
But I think the way that OM as
an international body should have evangelistic input into
Germany should be quite distinct from Austria.
In fact, the more it goes on without
people knowing that OM has anything to do
with it, sometimes the better it is.
We're not trying to gain credit.
We're not trying to produce material to write
a book.
We want to see people saved.
We want to see the church renewed.
And in some cases, the better way to
do that is to work your way out
of the job or to get behind the
scenes and let it go through the existing
churches.
Let it go through the existing other evangelistic
movements.
This has generally been our strategy for Sweden,
for Germany, for the Netherlands.
Evangelism, training, renewal, but through existing structure.
In other lands, like, for example, Belgium and
France and Austria, where there's much less structure,
there we've had to see some new structure
born.
I believe there's tremendous possibilities in this coming
decade for the work in Europe.
And that as we continue the ship ministry,
try to increase the Muslim thrust, as India
continues to be a major part of our
work, that Europe will continue as a vital,
all of Europe, including those Soviet and Iron
Curtain countries.
That's part of Europe.
OMS has a phenomenal work there.
We don't talk about it, but it must
be considered in our thinking, in our praying.
And this is why sometimes one part of
Europe has to be a little bit controlled
in its vision and its burden.
This is why we may not be able
to launch immediately a big thrust into Italy
and Spain or Portugal and Greece, when we've
got all these other countries where at present
we are short of long-term personnel.
We are short of fighting.
And I believe ultimately, and we know, I
wish I had time to talk about what
the ship has contributed to Europe, far more
than I believe is seen on the surface.
And how to follow up on all this
is an enormous task.
But one thing is for sure.
If we're not of one heart and of
one mind, if somehow we allow the old
devil to get in and things get out
of control, then it's going to slow everything
down.
And today the work in Europe is a
work of enormous diversity.
And it's been contextualized in each country.
And it's going to take a lot of
wisdom and a lot of love to see
unity in the midst of this diversity.
I pray that here in Britain we really
will continue to seek God's face for his
strategy for this country.
God has given us a great foundation, some
great people.
I pray in Austria they'll do the same,
in Belgium they'll do the same, in France
they will do the same.
We're in a new day in France as
the work has grown so large and in
such a significant way.
And perhaps one of our greatest needs at
present is for us to get on our
faces in each one of our countries and
to get God's mind as much as we
can for that country.
And as different countries share that vision with
the other countries and with the rest of
us, let us as much as possible reach
out, even though we may not fully understand,
and stand with them to see what's on
their heart accomplished.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you for all that you're
doing in Europe.
Lord, we thank you for 25 years of
miracles, for so many people that have come
to know you personally and are laboring with
so many different groups and fellowships and organizations,
some in literature work, some in church planting,
some in other organizations, some still in OM,
linked hand and heart with this revolution of
love that you began here on this continent
25 years ago.
Lord, help us to find new visions and
new plans without denying our roots.
And help us, Lord, to really count the
cost of what it's going to take to
see even the existing work, however small or
large we may think it is, that summer
campaign in Spain and the other related works,
that summer campaign in Italy, those small efforts
in Denmark, the beginning of that greater growth
in Norway, the forwarding of the work in
Finland, so easily neglected.
Lord, help us as we pray also for
Portugal and Italy and Greece, Switzerland, as we
cry out to you for Albania and Yugoslavia,
Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Soviet Union.
Father, we think even of the fact that
part of Turkey is in Europe, Cyprus is
aligned to Europe.
Lord, this is an overwhelming challenge.
And when we think on top of that
of the ships and South America and the
subcontinent and the Muslim world, we say in
ourselves, Lord, this is too much.
It's too much for us.
Lord, it's not too much for you.
And so we're trusting you and believing you
for wisdom and unity and oneness of heart
as we go forward to see Europe and
the world shaken for Jesus Christ through preaching,
through literature, through church planting, through ministry of
media, through personal evangelism, man-to-man discipling,
summer campaigns, year programs.
Grant us the grace to find that unity
in the midst of the diversity, for we
pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.