One, two, three, oh lord You're the light
of my soul You're the light of my
soul One, two, three, oh lord You're the
light of my soul All my thoughts are
in the air Let me not be ashamed
Of my enemy's triumph over me Give me
a shade.
Only me a shade.
Let it come that way.
Only me a shade.
Lost in thee.
I'm lost in thee.
Let me not be ashamed.
Let not my enemies triumph over me.
Show me thy way.
Thy way is the law.
Show me thy way.
Lost in thee.
I'm lost in thee.
Let me not be ashamed.
Let not my enemies triumph over me.
Remember the blessings of my
youth.
Lost in thee.
I'm lost in thee.
Let me not be ashamed.
Let not my enemies triumph over me.
Remember the blessings of my youth.
Lost in thee.
I'm lost in thee.
Let me not be ashamed.
Let not my enemies triumph over me.
One more song?
Let's try that again.
Because He lives, I can
face tomorrow.
Because He lives, all fear is gone.
Because I know He holds the future.
And life is worth the living just because
He lives.
God sent His Son.
They called Him Jesus.
He came to love, heal, and forgive.
He lived and died to buy my life.
His empty grave is there to prove my
Savior lives.
Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because He lives, all fear is gone.
Because I know He holds the future.
And life is worth the living just because
He lives.
All sweet to hold a newborn baby.
And feel the pride and joy He gives.
But greater still, the God-assurance This child
can face uncertain days because He lives.
Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because He lives, all fear is gone.
Because I know He holds the future.
And life is worth the living just because
He lives.
And then one day, across the river, I'll
find life's path, His
way to victory.
I'll see the lights of glory and I'll
know He lives.
Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because He lives, all fear is gone.
Because I know He holds the future.
And life is worth the living just because
He lives.
Let's pray.
Father, we praise You for the truth of
this song.
Because You live, we can face today.
We can face tomorrow.
We can face the hard things.
We can face the setbacks as well as
the victories.
The illness as well as the health.
We thank You, Lord Jesus, that our life
is not hinged on circumstance, but on the
truth of Your Word and on Yourself.
Guide us in this time together, in Jesus'
name.
Amen.
I've been really wrestling with what I should
share because I have literally hundreds of lectures
and messages that I would love to give.
The Lord's met with us in our retreat
day, in our night of prayer.
But I was thinking that as much as
possible I should perhaps try to give something
that I can be almost sure someone else
is not going to give you.
I was thinking of speaking to you on
why I am a Christian, and the intellectual
reasons as a doubting Thomas, why I've followed
the Christian faith.
But maybe another day for that one.
I'm sure you can give it yourself.
And I decided to give you an overview
of OM worldwide, linked with the command of
Jesus that we go into all the world
and preach the Gospel to every creature.
I feel that a lot of people in
OM have a very localized view.
And they get sort of pinpoint views.
A speaker comes in and he pinpoints a
particular part of the world.
It may be some, you know, unreached people's
group.
And that oftentimes people, even in OM, have
a very disjointed view of what OM is.
Where is it working?
What is it doing in Mexico?
What are we doing in Australia?
What is the policy and strategy for Singapore,
Malaysia?
What about the communist world?
What is OM doing there?
And I thought that for this morning's study,
we would take a look at this map
of the world.
I don't know if anybody has a longer
pointer than my pen.
But we'll take a look at this map
of the world, and I want to share
with you on the scope of this work
that God has put us in.
At least most of you are committed to
this work for a year.
Many of you are going to want to
pray for this work for the rest of
your life.
Not as the only work you'll be praying
for, because you'll be praying for many other
works.
But I think if you have this overview,
it will help you greatly to pray, to
see all that God has done, which will
also help you at times understand why we
can't just immediately jump on every new project.
Sam had a phone call yesterday.
There's another bus for sale.
So I came over and just had a
chat with him.
Somebody's selling a great bus for 6,000
pounds.
You know, just go out and buy it.
Why not?
No, I don't think we're going to buy
that bus.
We got about 25 other uses for 6
,000 pounds right now.
Much less buy another coach of that type
anyway.
So when we have an overall grip or
understanding of the work, I think it helps
in many ways.
And I'm going to try to follow the
countries in order that O.M. got involved
in those countries.
I'll probably get mixed up eventually.
The first country, of course, that we got
involved in was Mexico.
Now, before I went to Mexico, I was
involved in my hometown, New York City.
The home city, though I lived outside the
city.
When I was converted, I used to go
in and give out tracts.
And I went through the whole underground one
day.
Must have distributed 20,000 tracts.
I've been trying to think where I ever
got this vision to give these tracts out,
because this was very early days.
And someday I'll have to research that.
But the first work really of any degree
of overseas work, since three of us who
went to Mexico were all born in the
States, Dale Rotown, Walter Borchardt, and myself, was
Mexico.
And it's good, and do try to write
down at least one prayer request for each
country.
If we realize that Dick Griffin has purposely
held back the work there in some ways
so that we could grow in other parts
of the world.
Mexico has been the leaping off point for
other parts of the world.
And yet the work has still gone on.
There was a time when we had six
bookshops in Mexico.
The early work in Mexico provided the prototype
for SDL as it's known today.
And actually the work of SDL follows closer
the original, original vision than actually the rest
of the land.
Because the original, original vision, before we really
understood what we said should be our main
thrust, was definitely literature.
If you had heard me speak 25 years
ago, you would have heard again and again,
literature challenge.
All the facts about what the communists were
doing, what the cults were doing.
I don't know if you ever heard any
of these old tapes.
And it was very much a literature movement.
And in the minds of some of the
people in the United States who were involved
in the early days, oh, it is still
a literature movement.
And they can more easily understand SDL than
they can the OM side.
Back then the whole work, and it officially
became incorporated in 1958 under the name Send
the Light Incorporated.
I got that name from the hymn, Send
the Light.
We should sing that hymn once in a
while.
I don't know when did we last sing
that here.
But that was the theme song of Operation
Mobilization.
The first time we went down, the three
of us, of course we were there very
briefly.
We just got this vision for doing more
correspondence courses, radio broadcasts, bookshops.
And within the next two years, even though
we were mainly students, we opened about six
bookshops.
And I was very much involved in opening
those shops and management of them right down
to cleaning the toilets in the back of
them and painting the furniture.
And that's a whole bit of history we
haven't got time to go into.
We still have one key shop in Mexico
City.
And Samuel Castro is in that shop.
It's also the literature hub.
It's also the legal entity to carry out
a lot of other work all over Mexico.
But our main work in Mexico became summer
campaigns, Christmas campaigns, training weekends with local churches,
going out and helping churches start other churches
into the streets.
Dick Griffin has always been one of the
best leaders for just sticking in the streets.
All through these years, Dick has stuck out
in the streets, sometimes almost every day.
And still the coordinator of the whole work
in Mexico.
Balimar Aguilar was the co-leader, a Mexican
who got a bigger and bigger and bigger
family, decided to finally move out of the
city and get on a farm so he
could survive.
And that's what he's doing today.
It was only a few years ago when
Balimar went to the farm, we finally gave
up the Monterey Bookshop.
We had one in that key city for
over 20 years.
The bookshop we opened in Mexico City, the
first one where I lived when I was
first married, is owned by Bethany Fellowship.
Very expensive rent shop.
That's why we gave it up some years
after I left Mexico and took on a
lower rent shop.
But that shop's still open.
And Bethany has grown into a very large
-scale distribution operation in Mexico, actually similar to
STL here.
Well, that was the first place that O
.M. ever worked.
The States continues to be, in O.M.'s
sphere of thinking, a sending base.
There are so many evangelistic agencies working in
America, literally thousands of them, plus tens and
tens and tens of thousands of local churches.
We feel that when people leave O.M.
in the United States, they should get back
with their local church or get back with
some other agency, but that we should not
start a nationwide program.
Quite different than the strategy even here in
Britain.
Because though Britain is a sending base, it
is also one of our major evangelistic fields.
London Arab teams, FFA, small summer campaigns, Easter
campaigns, quite a few other things, plus, of
course, so many more people working here, taking
meetings and campaigns every weekend.
Pray for New Jersey.
They've doubled their staff since David Hicks took
over as the co-leader.
They're growing.
They saw about a 20% increase in
people.
God purposely caused us and led us to
put the USA on a very low profile
because we wanted the work, we felt the
work must be European.
There's not time to go into all the
details about all this, or I'll never get
to these other countries.
But we feel now that the work is
very much established in Europe.
Most of the leadership positions throughout the work
are held by Europeans or Asians or Indians.
That we can open the gate a little
more for the states without facing the problem
we would have faced 20 years ago of
just mainly recruiting Americans and having the thing
dominated by the states.
You may not understand all the reasons for
that, socio-political reasons, but I can't go
into it right now.
Only after a couple of years do we
see the strategicness of Canada.
Canada almost started itself.
A group of people there, they heard what
was happening.
One of them, a couple of them came
in the 1962 summer campaign.
The first real summer campaign in Europe was
1962.
The exploits into the Soviet Union were 1961.
And some Canadians said, we want O.M.
Canada.
So I had to go there.
I'd never been to Canada.
And see what these people were up to.
And I didn't have much of a choice.
So O.M. Canada was born.
I thought I was against it.
Not sure I had the opportunity to think
that much about it.
And it was very much centered on Ontario
Bible School.
But rapidly spread.
Keep in mind that in the first summer
there was no American charter flight.
The only Americans were the small group that
had been involved in Mexico.
People like Dale, Roger Malsted, Paul Troper, a
few others, who had come by ship to
Spain after the summer of 1961.
We had the first September conference there in
Madrid.
Just a couple dozen of us.
And that's where I shared the burden that
God had given me coming out of the
Soviet Union.
I think most of you have heard some
of that history.
The burden for Canada, again, similar to the
states, only we're wanting to increase our thrust
in Canada.
Because Canadians are Commonwealth.
They have an open door just like British
people.
In some cases like Bangladesh, even greater.
Canadians can go into Bangladesh without a visa.
British, for some reason, now have to have
a visa for Bangladesh.
So pray for Canada.
Small operation based in Port Coburn right near
Niagara Falls.
Burt taking a lot of meetings.
A small office staff.
A very good office they have now.
Marcia was working in that office.
She can tell you about it if you
want details.
Oh, and very, very quickly crossed the Atlantic
and in a sense never went back.
I left the States in 1960.
And I've never been back except for a
very quick preaching tours.
We just felt that more and more as
time went by, this is where our roots
should be.
Our main roots.
The first country was Spain.
We could be here a long time telling
you about the history of Spain.
We don't want to do that now.
I want to tell you where is O
.M. Spain right now.
We don't have a full-fledged program in
Spain as it once was.
Spain became rapidly very big.
We ran into many difficulties.
One of them was nationalism, that they could
not comprehend an international work.
And they certainly weren't about to put any
money into anything international.
Spain, when we arrived there, was a closed
country.
And each denomination was also very much its
own denomination.
The charismatic movement had not yet been born.
The few Pentecostals in Spain, they were very,
very few.
Now when freedom came, and O.M. was
very much involved in the early freedom that
came to Spain.
O.M. was functioning with the freedom three
years before the rest of the people knew
the country even had it.
By the time they knew there was freedom,
we had already been in every town in
the nation with huge campaigns, every town, every
province, millions and millions and millions of pieces
of literature.
And as more and more freedom came, 65,
66, 67, more groups came, more groups came.
The Church began to flex her muscles.
And we saw that O.M. should flow
back more into the Church.
Guess as we moved toward the end of
the 60s, and that we should pull out
and go in in the summers.
The influence of O.M. has never left
Spain.
The literature of O.M. has never left
Spain.
The leaders that we have trained are in
various ministries in Spain.
This was part of a strategy that I
strongly felt that we don't need O.M.
as a structure to have O.M. as
a vision, as an ongoing work of the
Holy Spirit.
That our burden is not to promote a
name.
Our burden is more and more structure.
If there's a different way that the Holy
Spirit can get on, so a work will
be more national, more tied to the soil,
then let it go.
I think only one summer had we not
had a summer campaign, if my memory holds
me right.
More and more in the last years, there
have been some who felt that this is
again the hour for Spain, and that they
would be more ready for an international, interdenominational
group.
There is no working together in Spain to
any degree of charismatic and non-charismatic Christians.
They do not understand O.M. on this
point.
And not only that, they are scared of
us.
They're afraid we are Pentecostals, the one group,
and the others would fear that we're anti
-Pentecostal.
You get shot from both sides.
So it's nice to say, let's go back
into Spain.
Most people who say that don't really know
what that involves.
I'm sure we could, but we need the
right men, we need the right senior Spanish
leaders, and we don't have those people at
present.
But with the ships, with the summer campaign,
with a small team lining up for the
summer campaign, and they're working all year.
In fact, O.M. is there.
Jonathan is still acting field leader for Spain,
and we'd ask you to really pray.
What is, of course, the Lord's mind?
Top of their list is to recruit Jack
Rendell, but that may sound like the answer.
But my own view is that any move
in Spain in putting the senior leadership into
a foreigner rather than a Spaniard, to me,
is going backward for a European country that
has been dominating too much in its Christian
work often by foreigners.
I, of course, am stronger than some of
my co-workers on building a work on
national leadership.
What was once an unquestioned principle in O
.M. later became a debatable subject because of
lessons learned along the way.
So keep praying for Spain.
Actually, before I went to Spain, I went
to France.
And Special Projects was born.
Because wherever I went, I always launched projects.
It's part of what God has done through
the way I live and think.
And I met this man, and we prayed
about France, we were not planning to do
anything in France.
And I got a vision for a bookmobile.
Within a year, through our financing, we got
into the hands of another group.
We sponsored it.
They operated it.
A bookmobile.
That man was Mr. Dormois.
Just had contact with him.
And this is 23 years later.
And he thinks O.M. in France was
the birthplace of O.M. in Europe.
That means Mr. Sleep, by the way.
Mr. Dormois.
So we launched the bookmobile.
We launched some literature projects.
And ever since those earliest days, we've always
been involved in projects all over the world.
I could keep you here all morning just
telling you about projects we're involved in all
over the world.
Not only in O.M. countries.
Because there's such a need, such a need
for what I would call Special Project.
Maybe a bookmobile.
Maybe a certain book to be published.
Maybe a certain film to be dubbed or
to be reproduced.
Just endless requests come to us from all
over the world.
People are crying for help.
It's like a Macedonian call.
And SDL, of course, has been a vital
resource for many of these Special Projects.
Remember, as you pour so much of the
fruit of your labor into India, that sometimes
frees other money to go to other places.
So in a sense, though, SDL, a lot
of your cash goes to India, though you're
involved in a lot of other projects, including
direct projects of giving literature grants.
The fact is that you are freeing the
general O.M. fund to move in many
other directions, including the Special Projects fund.
But the first big action took place in
France, really in the summer of 1962.
And we saw France, because France was an
open country, as the ideal training ground, the
ideal place for a big summer campaign.
I'm not going to give you the history
of that, but France, as it is today,
became one of the strongest O.M. fields.
In not every country have we been able
to develop the work to the full degree
we want to.
Sometimes it's the Lord's will that we take
the work this far, and then other groups
take it the rest of the way, or
other churches take it the rest of the
way.
In France, this did happen.
We took it so far, other groups did
all kinds of things.
But the Lord led Mike Evans, a very
unusual, dynamic leader, to take O.M. also
much further, and planted 15 or 20 churches
through O.M. teams.
In the last couple of years, we've hit
some considerable opposition in France.
We are now definitely a middle-aged group
in France.
We're 23 years old there.
We discovered we're not attracting the French recruits.
It's a solid work.
A publishing house was born, a very solid
French publishing house.
A distribution program was born.
Literature has not only gone out in France,
but French Africa, that's another prayer request, that
largely our books are too expensive for French
Africa.
We would like to put thousands of pounds
subsidy into French books for French Africa.
I've done a little, and when I get
the invoice from Paris, which we pay for
out of special projects, my head spins, because
these French books are so expensive.
I think I owe them some money right
now.
They're definitely overstocked on a few books.
We know what that's about in STL.
So let's pray for the French publishing house,
which is called Feral.
We're doing several books a year, but in
the process of the church planting, and the
publishing, and the in-depth, building up, tremendous
study program in France, we started dropping greatly
on French returns.
And for the year program, the last couple
of years, it's been very, very low.
So there is a key prayer target.
We don't need somebody to come into every
pyramid and give us the same prayer requests
again and again.
There is a prayer target right through the
year until we see those French young people
with us at the July-August conference.
Now, praise God, meanwhile, other movements were born.
Why when?
When in 1963, summer in France, Lauren Cunningham,
as YWAM was just being born, he came
on OM.
YWAM was already born.
He had a vision, but he wanted to
see how we were doing.
And he came, and actually he was in
charge of the book room.
The man who is the present international leader
of YWAM, a movement that's grown much bigger
than OM.
And they are now moving very strongly in
France.
Praise the Lord.
God has different task forces that move in
at different periods of history to gleam a
harvest.
And when we think of 50 million souls
in France or more, you know, there is
plenty of scope, just in Paris alone.
The next field that very much got involved
was Italy.
I came to England in February 1962.
One of the decisions I had to make
within the next month was the summer campaign
to include Italy.
We had almost no contact.
In fact, we hardly had ever thought about
Italy.
And I decided in Easter of 1962, I'll
never forget it, to go to Italy.
By the way, a lot of prayer was
going on for finance at that time.
We were completely broke.
It hasn't changed totally.
We were desperate.
I had these printing bills.
And of course, we didn't have a finance
committee.
I was the chief bookkeeper.
I was in charge of vehicles.
I was in charge of the literature department.
I was in charge of the toilets.
There were only three of us, actually, the
total staff.
And when I arrived back from Italy, a
gift of several thousand pounds was waiting from
a lady, an unknown lady who had only
heard by secondary source about OM that it
even existed.
And God touched her heart to send in
thousands.
I think it was 5,000 pounds, something
like that.
Now, that's when a pound was a pound,
not a penny.
You can be sure I just went right
through the ceiling and called the fire department
and got me down.
But meanwhile, the Lord opened the door in
Italy.
I went there to my amazement that somewhat
interesting brethren assemblies received me as if, you
know, I'd just fallen out of a PB
cockpit.
And I spoke at this PB, Primus Brethren
Conference in Rome, and they decided to back
OM.
And for the next two summers, I went
to Italy as the team leader and as
the country leader for Italy and learned some
Italian.
And Italy became a very major, major field
of action for the next 15 years.
Italy today has gone in a similar way
to Spain.
After a period of time, we discovered that
the charismatics and the non-charismatics don't mix.
We discovered they don't really go for international
things.
We wanted our work to be Italian.
Our Italian leader, Giovanni de Fenis at the
time, really had a burden to more or
less move in his own direction.
And so we said, Look, Giovanni, you start
something else and other OM-trained Italians will
move in other directions and let you breathe
for a while and see what happens.
So we pulled out.
And Giovanni started a movement called Mobilization for
Italy, something like that.
And other things were born.
And we went back in the summers.
We've been back every summer.
We went back with the ships.
Again, we wrestled with should we reopen Italy.
Again, we don't really have the Italian long
-term leader willing to throw himself in to
what we want to do.
But it's a key country.
It really is a key mission field.
I don't know why there aren't more people
interested in going to Italy.
It is as unreached as many parts of
Africa, many, many parts of South America.
Northern Italy would be far more unreached than
most of South America.
It's a hard place.
Dr. Schaefer started to work down there.
Very little happened.
Southern Italy, there's more response, especially the Pentecostal
Church, which in many cases, I'm afraid to
say, is very extreme.
Other cases, it's balanced.
So Italy is another field we still want
to be involved in.
We're still pushing a number of publication projects
there, which is also true in Spain.
We hope you'll keep praying.
Actually, before we got in Spain, in France,
excuse me, and Italy, we were moving in
to the Soviet bloc.
The original vision of OM was not Western
Europe.
It was the Muslim world.
And, of course, you know the story.
I got arrested with Roger Malmstead in 1961.
And that was one more factor.
We went for a day of prayer that
led us to think Western Europe first.
Let's get the Europeans with a vision for
the Communist world.
They're more acceptable there anyway.
Let's get the Europeans thinking about the Muslim
world.
Why just think of a small number of
people perhaps coming over from the States?
And through that concept, Operation Mobilization was born,
as it's known today.
By the very next summer, I think it
was 1963, not 1962, we again started immediately
sending teams into the Soviet countries.
We started publishing books in the Soviet countries.
In fact, before that, we had Secret of
Happiness published in Russian.
I can remember us working on a manuscript
right here in London as far back as
1962, as I found some fellow here in
England who spoke fluent Russian.
And Special Projects was born for the Soviet
Union.
And I can't give you the statistics, but
I can tell you, O.M. has put
millions and millions and millions and millions of
pieces of literature behind the Iron Curtain over
the last 20-some years.
The trials, the struggles, the problems in that,
that story probably will never be known.
Around 1965 or 1966, those dates are not
accurate, Dale Rotom was having to come out
of Turkey, and I felt he should take
over the work in the Soviet countries.
He then developed a whole new security program,
which after that, for a while, even I
didn't know what was going on.
And O.M. Eastern World went underground and
has only been allowed out from underground two
months ago.
Two months ago, at the September conference, we
decided to at least announce, publicly you can
do this now, that O.M. exists in
the communist countries.
It's still sort of a bit of a
tricky thing because we won't tell people very
much.
And if they want to know, they have
to write to John Hymas, who's the sort
of secretary for the Muslim world country.
He's located in Wales.
And you can write him if you want
more information, and you can get it if
any of you are interested in the Soviet
countries.
In the summer of 61, I also went
into Yugoslavia.
In fact, Yugoslavia was one of the countries
highest on my list.
It was in my top ten.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, these were in the top
of the charts back in the late 50s,
and Yugoslavia was one of them.
I went into Yugoslavia.
We started some special projects.
David Borman, who came with us in the
early days in Spain, married a Spanish girl,
settled in Yugoslavia.
He later became independent because it seemed an
independent worker had more freedom.
In fact, our policy for many years is
that when a person went into one of
these countries, he renounced O.M. at the
border and went in independent.
You can't go in these countries as a
member, full-fledged member of an organization.
You get arrested, you get questioned, what are
you going to tell them?
It's no game, I can assure you.
It's one of the toughest kinds of work
anybody can ever get involved in.
One of the reasons we are bringing it
into the open, at least some of it,
and to at least announce our existence, is
we are in desperate need of prayer for
that work.
Last year was a very hard year.
Jerry Davey, by the way, is on the
oversight committee.
He will fly or drive to Vienna in
a few weeks for another oversight meeting in
that very, very unique and difficult work.
So Yugoslavia was a great burden.
When they wanted to bring Richard Wurmbraut out
of Romania, we were one of the first
they contacted.
I remember making the decision.
The conference was down here in St. Mary
Cray.
Somebody said they want to use an arm
truck to haul Wurmbraut out underneath.
I said, no, I don't think that we
can get into that.
The Norwegians brought him out the legal way.
It cost them a fortune.
Ours would have been much cheaper.
But we decided not to get into that
kind of people delivery service.
There's not time to share with you what's
happening in those countries.
But I can tell you right now, this
week, Dale Roton and his wife and Mike
Strachura are all evangelizing and holding campaigns in
Poland.
And that's something we can pray about.
You can be sure that most of the
time when you pray and look at your
map of the world, that something is happening
in those Soviet countries.
Very quickly the vision spread to Germany, to
Sweden, much slower to Finland, slower yet to
Norway, for recruits.
Of course, the big sending field from February
1962 onward became Britain.
And of course, the scope of the work
in Britain, the development of the work in
Britain, it would take me all morning to
explain.
We saw Britain firstly as a sending field.
We saw Britain as much stronger than we
thought.
Those of us who were foreigners.
And of course, by the first summer there
were 90 British people.
By the next summer there were 900 British
people who crossed the English Channel.
And it was about that time that I
realized this is the place where I want
to throw a chunk of my life.
The Indian vision was then born.
And my dream was six months in India,
six months in Britain, six months in India,
six months in Britain.
I did that for a number of years,
though I was always involved in a lot
of other countries as well.
Certainly in the plan and purpose of God
we can see that Britain was to be
the anchor for OM rather than what would
normally look like the anchor, the states, because
these is Commonwealth.
And India was to become the primary and
largest OM field where what happened just went
beyond all of our wildest dreams.
We launched out of India.
1963 we arrived.
By 1964, January, an amazing bit of history
there's not time to tell about.
People said Indians are not going to work
for this kind of thing.
You're not paying any salary.
What future is there?
There was instantly quite a lot of criticism.
Many people stood at an arm's length.
Some people cooperated with us.
And it was clear when I went there
in a survey trip, Rotan had already been
in a survey trip the summer before, that
I should return there with my family, which
I did, in September, October of 1964.
And things just began to explode.
Spiritual Revolution newspaper recruits, requests for teams all
over the country, and of course we were
faced with a staggering population.
I remember then we thought of 400, 450
millions.
It just seemed to eclipse everything else that
we were doing.
Now it's 750 million.
It's a hard country just to even keep
up with the population.
The burden in India, as in many countries,
is mass evangelism and training of Indian nationals.
Mass evangelism through every possible means, especially literature.
But while we're doing that, on-the-job
training of nationals.
Teaching them the life of faith.
Teaching them to believe God.
Teaching them how to win others.
Teaching them how to relate to one another.
And the Lord has blessed that work there
in a tremendous way.
Simultaneously, however, the work which had already been
born in 1961, as far as I remember,
before I got to England, wrote on Roger
Ball State, Krista Fisher, now anchor, living in
India.
I arrived in Turkey.
Primary OM field.
We used to live and breathe and think
Turkey every day.
Because we had the statistics.
Hardly anybody was there.
Hardly any literature was there.
There was no Christian bookshop.
We immediately opened a bookshop in Ankara.
It had to be half-educational in order
to survive.
That became the seed of the birth of
educational book exhibits.
When that shop folded up, I asked a
team traveling to India, I was living in
Bombay, to pick up the educational books.
We don't want to lose the money on
them.
We'll sell them in India.
Get rid of them.
That led to the birth of educational books
in India, which later transferred to Nepal.
That's where I got the idea of using
an educational image for the ships.
Because I was living in Nepal, involved in
educational book program, which is one of the
ways we stayed in Nepal, because it was
a semi-closed country.
So the teams went to Turkey, and they've
been there ever since.
Turkey has always been two-fold work.
Literature distribution, much of it, in a very
quiet way.
The losing ministry, we've lost millions of pieces
of literature in Turkey, a very absent-minded
group.
And at the same time, a lot of
the effort is very much personal evangelism.
Learning the language, very important in Turkey.
Dealing with people individually.
Then working with the small groups of believers.
It's really a full-fledged, as OM worked
in many countries, it's a full-fledged missionary
work that is very similar to what other
mission societies would do.
Some people have always felt or thought, well,
OM is short-term.
OM from its birth was short-term and
long-term.
In fact, the longer term almost became before
the short-term, because when we launched out
in the early days, we never thought of
anything but just our life in missions.
And then slowly the concept developed of short
-term.
That terminology was not even used in the
early 60s and late 50s.
So the longer term work has gone on,
and I'm sorry to say that the number
of recruits this year in Turkey is down
to about 17 or 18 people.
Now the catalyst effect, which has spread to
many other fellowships and organizations, has increased greatly
the number of people coming in from other
groups.
So the fact that our numbers are down
a little bit, that is not such concern,
though it is concern.
A team around 1962 went across North Africa.
And I haven't got time to share, but
it never seemed to develop that OM should
have a major thrust in North Africa.
We've had various efforts over the years.
And Bertil Inquistar, our world leader, has just
completed a survey in North Africa a few
days ago.
We had him sharing at our retreat last
night.
We've had some efforts there.
We've had people in prison there quite a
bit.
Very tough situation.
We didn't want to jeopardize the work of
the North African Mission or the Gospel Missionary
Union with OM's sort of situation.
Plus, we started to get very involved in
Iran.
Iran became a major field.
We had teams every year there up until
the Iranian Revolution.
It was out from Iran that we started
to get more and more involved in Pakistan.
They went for visas in Pakistan.
About the same time the work was born
in Iran, which is now in the hearts
and the minds and the lives of nationals,
Afghanistan was entered by Gordon Magney and a
few others.
And today, there are ex-OMers in Afghanistan,
but our main thrust is among the refugees
because there's 2 or 3 million refugees who
have come out of Afghanistan and are there
in Pakistan.
So this very much became the target area.
But we discovered the rapid growth took place
in India.
Much easier situation.
The church, much bigger, something to work on.
And we discovered that often the kind of
people we have in OM, the kind of
ministry we have, works better when there is
a church and there are national young people
that we can train, that we can work
with.
So we didn't give up the Turkish people,
which is sort of the whole type of
missionary work needed from A to Z, demanding
a more skilled person, a more trained person.
We didn't give that up, but we saw
fantastic possibilities in India for doing much more
literature, films, training, mobilizing the church, mass campaigns,
reaching 10 to 15 million souls every year,
and many of them Muslims.
And we discovered that very little was being
done among the Muslims of India, now numbering
100 million, so we wanted to have a
greater thrust among the Muslims.
So you can see what happened, that within
a decade, from a very small beginning, in
1957 of 3 people going to Mexico, within
one decade, our work had expanded from Mexico
all the way across to Bangladesh.
And that was the expansion that took place
within the first 10 years, a lot of
it within the latter half, because the growth
of the work in OM from 1957 to
1962 was very, very small.
We weren't sure what God was doing.
We were learning basic lessons about prayer, about
relationships, about the spiritual warfare.
And you know, that's a beautiful illustration, almost
worth this whole lecture.
Don't be impatient with yourself.
It takes time to make a man or
woman of God.
It takes time for a work of God
to be born and have its roots.
The idea for the ship, of course, came
in 1964 in the converted pub in Bolton,
Lancashire.
But there were six years in which I
was mainly, with a few others, alone in
this vision, researching, visiting ships, finding out prices,
answering the criticisms.
Two years later, 66, Graham Scott joined.
And together, we worked on pioneering the ship
vision.
Since most are familiar with the ship ministry
and with its expansion, being born in September
of 1970, first voyage early 1971, has expanded
OM all the way across almost the entire
world.
Lagos covering this whole area, Doulos covering this
whole area, Lagos making at least two trips
around Africa, strongly convinced us we should not
start permanent, long-term works in most of
Africa, but should be a catalyst, should supply
literature, should get involved in special projects.
Because with our push and reach out here,
and then eventually here, just to take on
another whole complicated continent with many, many individual
nations, we were not ready for, and we
don't have any go-ahead present for anything
south of the Sahara.
Rapidly around 71, 72, we started getting committed
into Sudan.
Kamal joined the ship, caught the vision, went
through the intensive training program, went back to
Sudan and became the founder, praise God.
The first time a work was really almost
founded by the national of that country, and
has gone on ever since.
Of course, South Africans began to get involved
because there are always South Africans floating around
Europe.
Then when the ship went there, the first
trip, I was on the ship at that
time, more interest developed, and through just a
slow process of growth, an office was born
under a dear lady, Mrs. Wiles, for many
years as a volunteer, and it's still changed
to Mrs. Voslo, who operates that office as
a volunteer.
Australians, we're as far back as 1962.
In fact, the first truck driver on the
land in 1962 was an Australian, Leslie Payne.
His name was popped into my head.
But we never felt we should start an
office there.
It seemed so far away.
We were battling with new offices opening almost
every year.
But eventually, a few years ago, after more
and more Australians getting involved, then Lagos going
there, the chief engineer, John Yar, going back
there.
He's with the Lord now.
We opened an office in Australia.
Originally, we wanted to send Lagos to South
America for one year.
This was the burden I had.
Just as a catalyst, just to let them
know what God was doing in the Muslim
world, just to plant some catalyst explosives.
But as the Lord brought the Dulas vision,
it seemed Dulas should go.
The response was so overwhelming in South America,
it was difficult to ever pull her out.
It became one of the great controversies within
OM.
What we should do.
But it's clear that the Holy Spirit has
led us to a degree of commitment in
South America.
So now there are unofficial offices in many
of these countries, all run by volunteers.
Only in Argentina is there a full-time
worker, Brother Perfetti and a couple of others.
We felt, after much prayer and debate, we
should have at least one definite, full-fledged
OM base in South America.
We already, of course, had Mexico for Central
America.
And there's not time to go into the
details.
But there is a new report about what
the ship...
The negatives are lying with our printer here.
I don't know if you could give Dave
Brown the go-ahead to just do at
least 10,000 of those.
He wants to know what they're for, but
they're for me.
But there's a special report on what God
has done in South America written by Frank
Dietz that we all need to read.
Because it's clear that God has done something
very, very real.
As Lagos went this direction, of course, Singapore
became a key place.
The only reason Singapore got involved was it
was a place to register the ship.
I was looking for a flag of convenience
how to register the ship.
The hurdles we had to overcome in the
first six months of the ship ministry are
just unbelievable.
And Singapore was a place.
We sent a man out there to find
out.
We got the ship registered in Singapore.
I had been in Singapore in 1968 to
an Asian congress on evangelism.
I had some degree of burden for that
part of the world.
I had been to Indonesia.
And so it seemed that through Lagos, Singapore
and Malaysia were to become sending fields just
like Canada, USA, and Britain.
And now, of course, there's a full-fledged
operation there that's growing.
We just praise the Lord for it.
Through the 1971 conflict between Pakistan and India,
we ended up working among refugees.
This led us eventually into the birth of
the work in Bangladesh, a very significant but
small work going on.
And, of course, when the ship visited Karachi
three or four years ago, that was the
final confirmation, especially now that I could not
get back into India.
Mike Wakefield became the founder, leader of the
work in Pakistan, could not get back into
India.
More and more, as we got a foundation,
Bangladesh, it seemed we could add Pakistan, became
one of the most recent of the receiving
fields for OM.
Through Lagos, of course, many other nations got
involved, Korea.
The Koreans had come on OM long before
Lagos, but that gave us more input there.
We still don't really know how to handle
that situation.
Koreans want to go to the mission field.
They have a terrific problem getting the English
language.
They have a lot of difficulty getting the
finance.
And generally, they want to leave their wives
behind, which we eventually made a decision that
we could not take people for a year
without their wives.
That's still ongoing debate among the 100 other
debatable subjects.
Philippines, of course, there was explosive interest there,
but it's a country that has far, far
more missionary work than most of the other
countries OM's in.
So we treated Philippines also somewhat as a
sending field, a new, third-world sending field.
And that's going on in a small way.
Same is true of some of these other
areas.
We need your prayers, as this thing has
so exploded across the world.
The open doors are just, you know, without
limit.
The work in Israel was born around the
same time that the ship visioned.
In fact, the same week, in the same
room where God gave the burden about the
ship, Ray Lynch gave you the burden about
Israel.
And we opened OM Israel around 1964, and
it's been going ever since.
One year we closed it, and the people
of Israel begged us to reopen the work
and said they felt it was the most
significant evangelistic work going on in Israel.
The work in Southern Ireland was really born
through campaigns from Northern Ireland, where for a
while there was a separate OM entity.
There was also a separate OM entity in
Scotland for a while.
We had to learn that sometimes in order
to take three steps forward, you've got to
take one step back.
We hit a lot of difficulty in the
early days in Southern Ireland, so we pulled
back.
And then later, through STL, opened a shop
there, or carried on an existing shop.
And then, with the vision of Peter Mayne,
Nigel Lee, others, we started OM Southern Ireland
as it's known today.
Church planting throughout the year, very small.
And the campaigns in the summer.
Now, I don't think I've touched every single
country that OM is involved in, that's for
sure.
But our time has run out.
I really hope that you will take the
map of the world next time you look
at it, and really begin to pray in
a bigger way for the whole scope of
ministry that God has given us right across
the world, because both ICT and STL are
indirectly involved, and often directly involved, in every
single one of those countries.
There are spiritual hotlines from every one of
those countries right into this building.
And we need to just realize that sometimes
a little effort here, a little extra push
here, goes a long way through those spiritual
hotlines.
And a little prayer here, and a little
faith here, goes a long way to touch
nations and people's groups right across the entire
world.
I'd love to say a little bit more
about China, where we're not officially involved, but
have had some ministry.
I'd love to say a little more about
a lot of places where we've had short
-term evangelistic campaigns.
Vietnam, Campuchia, Laos.
I'd like to say a little more about
Nepal.
There's not too many places in the world
where we haven't had some opportunities to light
some fires.
And, you know, it's amazing, even when we
have to pull out in structure, fires keep
burning, because that's the way the Holy Spirit
so often works.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank You for this little panorama
of what You have done across the world
in these two and a half decades.
We know it's impossible for us to grasp
all that You've done.
The tens of thousands that have come to
know You.
The 300 million that have received something of
Your Word across the entire world.
And when we add to it the tremendous
work of so many other groups and societies,
we know that You are a living God
who answers prayer.
And we praise You and thank You.
And we can say with all of our
hearts great things You have done.
Though we have been feeble, though we have
failed, great things You have done.
Increase our vision, we pray, in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Any questions or feedback you have as a
result of this session, I'd be more than
happy to receive.
Any urgent announcements?
So, it's going to log off today.
We're going to be outside the warehouse at
10 o'clock.
And we've got some cold weather.
Good.
Doulas is due in Swansea at 5 o
'clock.
I'm hoping to be there.
And they are going to be shocked by
the weather coming up from Spain.
I think it's a greater shock to some
of our vehicles.
Okay, please go quickly to your bases of
operation.