As I was going in to my third
decade of being a Christian, I was converted
to Christ in March 1955 and now it's
1985.
I reprinted this memo if you look at
the top 82 and 83 and there's a
little introduction and I said seven years ago
since I wrote this memo I'm circulating this
memo again because I feel that the points
presented here are more relevant than ever before.
I would appreciate rereading this, you're rereading this
memo and praying through it.
When possible please give me feedback on just
one or two areas.
I think it's so important both for those
of you who are new, how many of
you are going into the year program for
the first time?
Not summer, year program first time?
That's 80 percent of you.
Many of our longer-term people by the
way no longer can come back here because
of the expense, others will be coming next
week, others are recovering from 10 or 7
intensive days.
Some of us have been in 10 days
of leadership meetings and training, some in seven,
some have just been able to come to
the general council the last three days and
have had to go back because these different
offices have to keep going, especially things like
STL, which is a ministry but also has
to function as a proper business.
They cannot close, the orders are piling up.
Filey, one of the biggest book exhibitions we
ever put on in the world off the
ships, they need help so that's a big
challenge.
So many of you have not seen this
before and I'd like to just go over
it together with you because I think you
want to know the heartbeat of OM.
A brother from a particular country shared with
me today, I mainly all day been having
fellowship and discussions with various individuals and he
said you know in my country the people
seem to grasp some of the OM activities,
campaigns, crusades, conferences, but he said I don't
think, he's a long-term missionary, I don't
think they grasp the spiritual life, he's known
OM for many years, the spiritual message and
we talked about the message of a cross
without which OM and all of its activities
is worth very little and the emphasis on
real prayer and communion with God and the
emphasis on spiritual life and knowing Christ and
walking with Christ and I think that may
be partly true in that man's country and
that's a country where the people don't get
to these conferences, it's a new situation and
they don't know yet too many of them
the heart of OM, it's possible to get
the periphery activities of OM, you know track
distribution, door-to-door work, street work, even
chalkboard open-air preaching, lots of activities and
they miss the heartbeat.
This memo is a plea to not lose
the heartbeat of what it's really all about.
So let's just look at it.
I think we'll just go down to the
third paragraph.
I do mention in the previous paragraph, second
paragraph, the work has grown almost beyond our
dreams.
By the way, the first ship existed when
I first wrote this, not the second ship.
So we thought the work grew when the
second ship hit us, you know we went
into outer space, especially OM trying to do
all of this with such a very small
administrative base because all of us were involved
in preaching and evangelism minus those faithful secretaries
and a few others.
There have been enormous disappointments and setbacks.
I think it's good to state that, it's
not all victories and OM's history is not
all victories.
At times also it seems that things are
going out of control and we now have
so many different leaders, programs and countries in
which we are involved.
I would like to use a key phrase
for these coming 10 years, consolidated spirit controlled
expansion.
We found that much more difficult than it
was to write this memo and we could
not get unity on how fast we should
expand and some felt we were going too
slow and some felt, they proved to be
the majority, felt we were going too fast
and that people were getting walked on and
the thing was getting a bit like a
machine and God brought us to the foot
of the cross and we asked him to
help us have more personal care for each
individual and all kinds of seminars and programs
have gone on, you wouldn't believe it, to
try to improve in our pastoral care, in
our counseling, a number of men took specialized
courses in counseling, to have consolidated spirit controlled
expansion.
Growth is perhaps a better word.
We want both to expand in advance but
we truly want to be led of the
Holy Spirit.
This means an increase of true spirituality through
the entire work.
If you're in Dr. Schaeffer's book on true
spirituality, I think it needs reprinting.
Dr. Schaeffer once came to this conference in
the 60s and he spoke for three solid
days.
We actually put a lot of it on
film.
We were the first people ever to film
Dr. Schaeffer.
It was from that that he got his
vision for films, later became the most widely
used Christian films almost in the world among
Christians.
True spirituality, not extremism on one hand, not
spiritual duplicity and lukewarmness on the other hand.
It also involves an increase of like-mindedness
plus facing our failures and our weaknesses with
a new dimension of faith in reality.
And you know, we want to go into
this conference on this kind of footing.
It was my hope that this memo would
go into other languages but I don't think
it ever did because it's not easy to
translate all this material.
If you ever think that OM is not
interested in the other languages, I'd like to
have a personal chat with you.
Because as far as I know, no movement
in missionary history has pushed more material into
other languages than Operation Mobilization in terms of
quantity.
In terms of variety of languages, it would
have to be Wycliffe and the Bible Societies.
So, you know, we believe in those other
languages and we believe that there need to
be more books written in the language, not
translations.
Books written by Germans for Germany, by the
French for France.
And we've been involved in that as well.
But this memo, maybe it got into some
other languages but I couldn't find any copies.
And this is one of the other reasons
this meeting tonight is good that it's in
English.
OM cannot do everything.
Every week a new vision comes across my
desk.
And I'm already known for being almost crazy
for taking on too many things.
Someday I won't even be able to get
into my office which is becoming a warehouse
of all the magazines and memos and books
and everything, tapes people send me from all
over the world hoping that I'll take on
their vision.
The latest vision I've just taken on is
the vision of those unreached people's maps.
That I couldn't resist, you see.
I bought 500 of those maps even though
I don't have any money, much.
I got some credit.
There's a field in OM called special projects.
And sometimes a gift is given to me
and rather than just put it into the
general working, even though that's always needed, it's
sometimes designated to a special project.
Like we have special projects among unreached people,
special projects for India, special projects for the
communist countries.
I have some credit in that special projects.
I don't have any money, any cash.
Anyway, I got credit on 500 of those
unreached people's maps.
And that is a worthwhile investment to get
one of those maps.
They are really something.
And they're out there on the literature table.
OM cannot do everything.
There are many good ideas, plans and visions
in which we will not be able to
get involved.
They wanted us to start OM Japan some
years ago.
I had letters coming off my desk.
And I challenged this one brother, I said,
why don't you go join one of the
existing missions that's already working in Japan?
Praise God, that's what he's done.
He's there now.
And our burden is to see the total
picture with all the different mission agencies and
then find our place.
There are many countries asking us to begin
to work.
It would be easy to spread out so
much that we would come apart in the
middle.
And that almost happened to OM.
But God was gracious.
And we got our act together.
We prayed together.
There was repentance.
There was tears.
And we pressed on as one body.
We must keep our main goals and emphasis
constantly before us.
And isn't it good in the beginning of
this conference to just have some of these
basic goals ahead of us?
You're going to be thinking about your own
personal goals.
Now, I warn you, don't become too goal
oriented.
We're all different.
And we approach this whole thing of aims
and goals in different ways.
Some people aim too high.
David Seaman's in his brilliant book, Healing for
Damaged Emotions, and every copy we had here
is already sold out.
You can certainly borrow one.
There's perfectionism and sometimes aiming too high.
For some of you, you're going to feel
in the next couple of weeks, OM is
over your head.
It's just beyond you.
Challenge after challenge hits you.
And in seven days time, you'll be shaking.
Learn to just take it a little easy.
You know, one of the things that's so
helped me here all this week, it's a
very intensive week for me.
For a feeble character like me, it's the
toughest week of the year.
And every morning I've been out jogging.
I don't jog a lot, maybe a mile,
two miles.
You can jog around here in this old
farmland.
I went by one field, it was all
bulls.
Thirty bulls were looking at me.
Then I bumped into an Alsatian.
It's always interesting when you're jogging.
It's best to stop at that point and
walk.
But it's so ministered to me, just jogging
around these fields, down the woods, burning up
some of that early morning energy.
You may say, I haven't got any early
morning energy.
Well, maybe you need to jog later in
the day.
But it's great to have some physical exercise.
I'm the kind of person that needs to
do physical work.
It doesn't have to be jogging.
Physical work just helps me stay in balance
when there's a lot of sitting, a lot
of sitting.
So I thank God for his grace.
And I hope we can keep these aims
and goals in front of us without becoming
neurotic.
Number one, to glorify God in a life
of personal holiness, spiritual reality.
This is what OM is about.
Personal holiness, purity, honesty, integrity, victory.
The main thing this coming week isn't geography.
It's not really, what country am I going
to?
One minute you feel you're going to Afghanistan.
Next minute you feel you're going to India.
The next minute you hear another challenge, you're
sure God's leading you to Israel.
Next minute you hear a leader in the
Arab world, better go to Jordan instead.
And some people really get wound up.
They sit next to somebody at the dining
room.
They're trying to eat a meal and the
guy's laying on a heavy trip to work
in the office in Moscow.
And he says, you know, isn't it providential
that I'm sitting next to you here today?
I think Nigel may have a full message
on this, so I won't go any further.
Just let me say this and you underline
it.
I didn't have this phrase back when I
wrote this memo.
Reality first, geography second.
Can you say that?
Let's say it.
Reality first, geography second.
It really helps a lot.
Number two, to share this reality and life
in Christ with others, especially on a man
-to-man basis.
Now I didn't put all the scripture references
in here because we have messages on every
one of these subjects in the tape library
and in the conferences and in all the
scriptures.
Maybe I should have put more scripture references.
But this, of course, is one of our
main goals.
To share this reality and this life in
Christ with others, especially on a man-to
-man basis.
We do a lot of other things in
O.M. Mass evangelism, street evangelism, but let's
not forget that eyeball to eyeball, man-to
-man contact.
And for some of you that's going to
mean also some serious language study.
Number three, to train men and women for
world evangelism, spiritual revolution, for work both overseas
and at home, in the streets and in
the factories.
O.M., from its early days, taught that
discipleship can be practiced at home, in a
job, as well as overseas.
And I find some O.M.ers are
using vocabulary that I stopped using years ago.
For instance, I don't easily tell people, you
know, I'm living by faith.
Because if they're working in a job, that
might communicate, what are they, living by unbelief?
It takes faith to get a job and
to keep a job, to be a Christ
-like employee.
That's also the life of faith.
We threw this term out years ago, and
O.M. sort of picked it up.
I don't like it.
Faith mission.
Does that mean the denomination missions that pay
a bit of a salary?
They're unbelief missions.
Or they're salary missions.
I want to tell you, some of the
greatest missionaries in history have gone out from
denominations with a salary.
Now, of course, if we're just talking in
the way of identifying a certain group of
missions, we call them faith missions.
Fine, as long as we understand what we're
talking about and we define our terminology.
So we're trying to train people for secular
spiritual penetration, as well as career missionary work.
Number four, to work with local evangelical churches
and to help evangelists to plant living churches
in areas where there's little or no witness.
Giving priority to Muslim and other unreached lands.
Remember, this was written in 1975, before most
Christians were even talking about unreached people.
That's why I would do well to go
with enthusiasm to that video on the unreached
people.
That's why I would do well to at
least study that map.
If you can't buy one, I'm sure every
headquarters will get one.
Because this must continue to be our aim.
We have so much more information today.
Someone said to me, oh, I understand OM
is now going into church planting.
We were in church planting 15, 20 years
ago.
But it is not our primary goal, especially
in the summer campaigns.
You see, there is a choice of strategies
in OM.
Try to get this.
And it's up to the national leader in
his country to decide what strategy of OM's
choice of strategy that he's going to use.
And he has plenty of freedom.
My brother Issam from Jordan, I hope you'll
get to speak with him.
We just had a tremendous time together.
He is involved in Christian camps.
Now, this was never one of the original
strategies of OM, Christian camps.
But OM has been involved in that, working
with other missionaries in Jordan.
They're not OM camps.
We're just helping.
And Issam is just on the committee.
He's not the guru, director, chief, but he's
on a committee.
And that ministry has been greatly blessed of
God in the land of Jordan.
So we want to work with the local
churches.
And that will get us involved in a
lot of things.
In Nepal, we use our trucks to carry
the dead out to the secret cemetery of
the believers.
They have no vehicles in the Nepali churches.
It's a tremendous problem to get anybody among
the Hindus and the Buddhists, who all believe
in, most of them believe in cremation, to
get involved in this.
I don't know if they're still doing it.
But last time I talked to one of
the Nepali pastors.
I used to live in Nepal, and it's
one of the most challenging areas of unreached
people that OM is involved in.
And Wayne Taves, if you're interested in Nepal,
you'll find him very easily, I'm sure.
But the strategy will vary from one place
to the other.
Number five, to engage in mobilizations in which
all these goals become reality in our own
lives.
While at the same time, millions are reached
with the gospel.
Does that click with any of you?
That was the purpose of these summer campaigns
that you've just been through.
Double barrel.
You ever shot a double barrel shotgun?
Boom!
I never got into it myself very much.
And from the earliest days, our burden was
to get young people into a mobilization in
which their lives would be changed, in which
they would be forced to put into practice
what they've been hearing in Sunday school since
they were knee-high to their cat.
And simultaneously, to reach millions of people in
the process.
People say, what is the goal?
Is it to reach the millions, or is
it to give these people a training program?
What a silly thing to argue about.
It's both.
There is a sense in which Satan does
not allow any training program.
Satan doesn't say, all right, you get some
training and learn how to completely destroy me,
and in two years, we'll get together for
combat.
Satan is not stupid.
From the moment you are born again, you
are in real combat.
This is why I really believe that some
of the ideas that some of the seminaries
give about training are totally unbiblical and false.
The idea that you're not ready for spiritual
combat, you're not ready to do this, you're
not ready to do that, you must just
come here and study.
So most of these seminary students, and I
can tell this is the truth, know very
little about prayer, very little about the spiritual
warfare, very little about the tactics of Satan.
So what happens by the time they graduate
from these wonderful institutions, many of them are
wiped out.
Spiritually, they may function academically, but they are
wiped out spiritually.
And I just believe it's part of a
con, a trick of Satan, to get us
to think that there's a period of time
in which mainly we're just preparing, we're just
training.
There is no such period of time given
to us.
We are in the spiritual warfare.
Now don't misunderstand that.
Because of our long-range program as young
Christians, our priority should be on laying a
foundation, study, maybe even seminary if God leads.
But at the same time, we must have
on the whole armor, and we must be
in the battle.
And I will tell you, the greatest mission
field, one of the greatest mission fields God
ever sent me to, was Moody Bible Institute.
I went two years to Moody Bible Institute.
Half the students I met were spiritually, as
far as I could see, just not functioning.
They would hardly ever go to a prayer
meeting.
They even mocked going out in personal evangelism,
because it was required.
And in those days, anything required, people were
against it.
And it was there at Moody, Dale and
I had already met, we had already been
to Mexico, that, boy, I tell you, a
lot of things were shattered in my life.
And that's when I started to use the
term revolution.
I was listening to Vance Havner.
He's been ministering the Word of God for
53 years.
And he was saying the greatest mission field,
I just listened to this a few hours
ago, the greatest mission field in the world
is the church.
You may not agree, but Vance Havner has
been ministering 53 years.
He was sharing his testimony.
Vance Havner began to preach when he was
12.
A number of years later, he dried up.
He did a lot of study, a lot
of academics, and he dried up.
And then God, he got into the novelties,
all the new novelties in presenting the gospel
and a lot of new theology.
And God did a deep work in his
life, and he decided to turn away from
the novelties and get into antiques and go
back to the old-fashioned gospel.
Only God knows how many tens of thousands
have come to know Christ or rededicate their
lives to Christ because of Vance Havner still
preaching in around 80 years of age.
Reality first, geography second.
The church, to see the church stirred.
I was stunned when some people couldn't see
any purpose in bringing the Lagos and the
Doulos back to Europe for a while.
I couldn't handle this.
Because to me, Europe also needs revival.
Europe needs the challenge those two ships can
bring.
Now they're headed away from Europe.
Fine.
That gives us in Europe left behind a
greater responsibility to follow up, to work for
revival and renewal and reality in the church
and with the church.
And one of our policies or practices we've
been engaging in over all these years is
to have training weekends, FFA, that dynamic work
penetrating immigrants, especially from Asia, throughout the British
Isles, hoping to have a new team this
year in Bradford where there are 30,000
Urdu-speaking Pakistanis just in Bradford, England.
A city that suffered much, by the way,
where that tremendous fire took place in the
stadium.
And this summer they suffered from a gas
leak in which people were evacuated and many
people were ill.
Other terrible things have happened in the needy
city of Bradford.
But they have these training weekends in FFA
to mobilize the church, to work with the
church.
Some of the biggest events in the early
days of OM were training weekends.
In London, we'd have a thousand in a
training weekend, moving out across the entire city,
distributing a half a million gospel tracts.
And I praise God that again, various training
mobilization weekends and weeks are being planned.
Easter in France, Easter in Germany, Easter in
England, Christmas in Mexico.
Number six, to distribute literature in every possible
way in connection with other forms of evangelism,
in an effort, of course, with other mission
agencies, to see the entire population given at
least some opportunity to know and hear the
Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation He offers.
You will never understand OM if you don't
understand that.
So if you want to understand what you're
getting into, get to understand that.
There's an enormous tension between digging in, say,
in one people's group and staying there until
you plant a church, as we're doing mainly
in Turkey, for example, and among the Afghans,
and in many, many, many other situations.
There's a great tension in that, and reaching
out, not to the millions, to the hundreds
of millions.
But I believe one of the purposes that
God has raised up OM for is to
reach the hundreds of millions.
And in the number of people that we
have given the gospel to, we are moving
toward the 400 million mark around the world.
That is perhaps one of the greatest single
answers to prayer in my entire life.
It is a direct fulfillment of the vision
and burden God gave us as far back
as the early days at Moody and Mexico.
Now, because of many, many reasons, we shifted
the early vision of OM, which was emphasizing
literature much more, because a bigger vision even
then was training nationals, working with nationals, to
turn their own nation upside down for Christ.
And that led us to make the training
of nationals, and then the training of internationals,
and then the kind of thing that was
born in 61 and 62, when Operation Mobilization
was first used as a name.
And so the literature ministry became somewhat less,
but it's still one of the major goals.
The ministry of STL, based in Bromley, flooding
literature out across the world, the French publishing
house, the publishing program based in Bombay, based
in Lahore, Pakistan, many other publishing literature programs,
one based over there in Vienna, reaching those
immigrants who are coming out of those communist
countries in every possible way, and all kinds
of other things that there's not time to
talk to you about.
It's all part of that goal.
Number seven, to be a living demonstration of
New Testament biblical Christianity, not firstly in word,
but in life and in practice.
One of the things I like about OM
is that a lot of things, we don't
let them set in concrete.
This never became the seven major goals of
OM.
It's just part of the thinking, the foundation.
There are other ways to express our goals.
There's a new leaflet just published, the seven
distinctives of OM.
In the latter part of the leadership manual,
which most of you have, others are more
than happy to have a copy if you
want one.
It's got to be rewritten soon, so we
want to get rid of these present copies.
You'll find a section on goals and aims
of OM, and there are five cassette tapes,
leadership tapes that go with that manual and
that deal with those goals and aims especially.
But let's move on because I want to
finish this and give you time to go
to that India special slide night.
Of course, such goals could be divided and
subdivided and added to.
Now we're going to have to just go
over this much more quickly and hope that
you'll read this on your own.
Someone once said, OM has got too many
visions.
By the way, in OM, the definition of
a vision is not Verwer at two o
'clock at night seeing technicolor dreams in the
back of the old coach.
By the way, the last trip we took
in the old coach, we brought my daughter's
dog, and I think he's left behind in
the coach certain little insects that are now
attacking me in the night.
I'm still hoping it might only be a
mosquito, but pray for us in the coach,
three of us living in there.
It's cheaper, by the way, when you live
out.
If you go pitch a tent in the
woods, save a few francs.
I don't know if they allow that.
All right, in the light of these goals,
what are some of the main visions?
We stay away from things that might be
good, but not our principal ministry.
In this category, we include printing and publishing
books.
Why did OM just start a publishing operation
in every single nation?
It takes an enormous effort.
France was a very strong work.
They had a vision for this.
The Lord led that to be the exception.
STL was the other exception, though STL started
as mainly distribution, eventually was pressed into some
publishing, especially these magazine books, specialized tasks.
But generally, we work with other publishers, and
they appreciate that very, very much.
We don't like to duplicate what other people
are already doing.
There's so much to be done.
Then we become stronger than ever on teaching
people the life of faith and prayer, teaching
young people dependence upon God.
Although faith for finance is only one aspect
of the life of faith, glad we were
emphasizing that even 10 years ago, in a
work like this, it is very important.
Just as a man who's working in the
job, it is very important that he arrive
on time, that he do his job well,
then he will get his salary.
So with us, we're not saying we're better
than him, but we are saying that if
we don't know how to release finance through
prayer, it's just not going to work.
Please understand that OM is not underwritten.
Do you know what that means?
There is no guaranteed money.
There is no money to any great degree
sitting somewhere.
Some groups invest money and you live off
the interest.
Now, if some prayer partner wanted to put
some money in the bank and give us
the interest, we're not against that, but we're
not doing it or we don't have it.
And it's something very important for you to
understand that praying doesn't mean we don't believe,
and living by faith, trusting God, praying, whatever
you want to call it, doesn't we don't
believe in giving people information.
We have always been very strong on giving
people information.
We were always very, very hyper-conservative to
not give financial information unless people asked.
This was discussed in the last couple of
years at our general council until we were
blue in the face.
And finally this year, the Lord has given
us a consensus, a unity, that in a
careful way, in certain cases, we can mention
financial information.
We already started that a year or two
ago when we sent that little leaflet to
your church so they can know because the
churches have strongly criticized OM for certain aspects
of our financial communication.
And in the coming year, we hope we
can be a little bit more down to
earth in communicating the facts, especially to your
churches.
Get more about that at some other time.
But we want to teach people a way
of living and moving and walking by faith,
whether they're in Christian ministry or back on
the farm.
Number three, we must continue to maintain personal
simplicity of lifestyle, also as much fugality as
possible in the work.
While desiring proper organization, we must run from
organizationalism.
We must remain more dependent on God and
His main method, prayer.
You still believe in that?
You won't easily grasp that because naturally, OM
seems so big.
And when you first come, you cannot grasp
all that we are trying to organize.
You will also see wastage.
Some of you are very conservative with money.
You will see people who spend more money.
And you will have people here who wouldn't
feel maybe free to go down and spend
90 francs or what on some frits down
on the corner stall.
And there'd be other people that would feel
completely happy.
Hilarious about doing that.
I'm glad we have that in Operation Mobilization,
because otherwise I think the thing might become
something of a cult.
Now, there's no easy road.
But let's beware of dragging into OM, not
spiritual principles, brothers and sisters, our own psychological
hang-ups from childhood.
Because maybe your father never gave you a
nickel or any money to buy an ice
cream cone.
And somehow you developed the idea that that
was being spiritual.
I almost did.
There will be wastage.
Different OM leaders live in different size houses.
They drive different kinds of cars.
Almost all of them are fairly old and
inexpensive.
There may be an occasional exception when someone
is given a little better car.
Is that sinful, to be given a little
better car for God's work?
Do God's servants always have to drive around
in something that someone else scrapped?
I find that God works in many different
ways.
People ask why we don't have more new
cars then.
And with us it's a simple matter of
priorities that when we get extra money, and
God does give us money, we have a
set of priorities.
One, the Word of God.
Most people don't have that.
To the unreached people, to the millions that
have never heard.
Number two, the support of an army of
national workers as we have in India.
Number three, well, I don't want to get
into ten different ways that we're using God's
money to evangelize.
Films and literature and whatever else.
Number four, we must not become too big
and impersonal.
We should not measure by size, but be
concerned about quality.
Some of your teams, it's good to see
a few leaders here tonight, they're not going
to be as big as you're dreaming.
The key, as you know from years of
experience, is not the size of your team,
it's quality.
I have a secretary right now named Vera.
She can do the work of three people.
That proves quality is she only eats and
needs the support of one person.
She's a single woman, very little to keep
her going.
Quality.
Now, of course, that takes time.
Vera's been on her limb 10, 15 years.
I phoned her today, she had to fly
home because her sister is very ill.
My prayer for Vera's sister is unbelievable.
Migraine headaches has just been top hospitals, they
can't figure anything out.
She returns home with these terrible headaches.
Vera Zabramsky's sister in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Well, I don't know, it takes too long
to go in depth on each one of
these points, but I hope you'll read point
four.
Point five, we must not slack off in
the work of witnessing man to man, door
to door.
Every believer is a witness.
Number six, we must stay in tune with
the local churches and the church as a
whole.
Sometimes shortcuts I mentioned here can prove to
be dead end streets.
Some young people say, you know, I'm going
to mobilize and get my church to stand
with me.
I'm going home for three weeks.
Well, you might get a little disappointed.
Some of you, maybe before you go this
year, you'll only get a week or two
home.
But if you're going to be a longer
term missionary, you may have to spend a
half a year or a year at home
somewhere, building up that relationship with the church.
That's not just some kind of secondary activity.
As soon as I leave this conference, I
get a week or so at home and
my wife and I are off for an
intensive series of four weeks meetings in Canada,
churches, Bible colleges.
And a lot of my work is not
within OM, it's in the churches.
OM is involved in depth with about 1000
churches.
And that is as key in OM's policy
and strategy as all of our great praying
brothers and sisters.
Because God uses the church.
In December, I'll be going right around the
world ministering in the Gulf and in Singapore,
Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and I'm in Mexico
and where else.
I was talking to Raymond Koh, the leader
of the work in Malaysia.
He said, look, what title should we give
to your meeting among Christian leaders in Malaysia?
The Lord just brought this to mind.
He wrote it down.
The local church and world evangelism.
So that's what I'm going to do.
Of course, it's often the title when I
speak to Christian leaders.
Number seven.
We must be ready to take up a
part-time job in order to support ourselves.
We must be ready to move back into
more crowded and uncomfortable accommodations.
You know, the tendency of man is, and
we're all human, including in OM, is we
like a little bit of better facility.
Even my own living facility, which has always
been unbelievably small and usually a community, four
families living in one, you know, long old
house somewhere.
Then we changed.
And as our children became teenagers, we finally
got sort of a bit on our own,
which we recommend when you have teenagers.
But you know, God may give us a
little better facility.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But we need to be ready.
We need to be ready.
And I tell you, next year, we may
not have this conference center any longer.
They've now put a limit number of people
that we can bring here, and it's way
short of what we can do.
And I tell you, we are now cast
upon God again.
And the years of factories and tents and
warehouses is not over.
I remember having this September conference once in
one medium-sized church, and that wasn't so
many years ago.
In London, everybody staying out in homes and
churches and basements.
No leader had an office.
There were no special rooms.
I mean, it was wild.
I remember meeting one group in the back
of a bus, having meetings.
I remember the 63 campaign in Paris when
everything was intense, and when it rained, the
entire women's tent dormitory was flooded out.
They came running out at night with their
wet sleeping bags.
How many had wet sleeping bag experiences this
summer, or wet rain experiences this summer?
Any of you?
Yeah, it still goes on.
Not so much.
More churches.
We've been involved in starting some of them,
so now they welcome us to sleep in
them.
By the way, an in-depth relationship in
OM with a church doesn't mean sleeping in
it.
We're talking about sending workers, evangelists to campaigns
together, support, all that kind of thing.
You read that.
Need demands reality and discernment.
All of our needs in our way of
thinking are not always going to be met.
And sometimes we get the idea, well, we
need something, so we pray and we get
it.
No, sometimes you have to wait.
We need about eight more computers, if we
count the small ones.
But, you know, we're going to have to
battle, we're going to have to pray, we
don't have any money.
And then, very quickly, number eight, we must
be more honest with each other.
Please read that.
This takes courage, for it means love.
We want this conference to be a time
of honesty.
Don't be afraid to be honest with the
person that interviews you.
They're only doing something that they've been asked
to do.
Very few people are asked to go home
from Operation Mobilization.
Very few people.
You may decide, after you get to know
us better, that OM is not your cup
of tea, it's not your thing.
Fine.
Nobody's going to lay a guilt trip on
you if you decide to go home and
wait a year.
And I hope that this conference will be
marked by honesty and openness and walking in
the light.
Number nine, zeal, discipline, initiative, hard work, brokenness,
compassion, humility.
Wow.
I'm still just struggling along in some of
those areas, but that's at least our direction.
And then we must, number ten, give great
attention to the large number who have left
OM, now 37,000.
Thirty-eight, I guess, after this summer.
Many of them only came a short time.
We don't presume that OM is the biggest
thing in their life.
Isn't it good to sometimes just to be
a small thing in somebody's life?
A lot of my ministry has just been
a small thing in somebody's life.
I often hear of people like Jeanette, you
know, quite a big thing in her life,
my little message, but a lot of times
my ministry is just a small thing.
I'm happy for that.
I want to tell you, my life and
the joy I often get, mainly little things.
Little things.
The joy of calling by phone my own
mother and father, who I've never lived with
since I was 17 years of age, except
a few days here and there, and just
wishing happy anniversary on their 53rd wedding anniversary.
To me, that's more significant sometimes than speaking
to 2,000 people or some television program
or something that people think is so important.
And just learn, especially in your early days
of OM, that little things are important.
As I walk around the gardens here, I
pick up tins, cans the Americans think, tins
that people throw away.
It doesn't kill you to reach over and
pick up a tin and put it in
the rubbish bin.
That's public property on the other side of
the fence.
It belongs to the local town.
It's a private tennis court, by the way,
so don't get any inspiration by that.
And I tell you, some of those people
don't appreciate some of the things that have
happened here.
So, little things.
And I'm concerned for the people that have
gone through OM.
I hope you read our little ex-OMers
newspaper called In Touch.
You'll find one on the literature table.
I hope you'll help us get in touch
with ex-OMers that we're out of touch
with, if they'd like to be.
And I hope you'll read this.
And perhaps you could do something that I
should have done when I wrote it.
Put more scriptures there.
Write all the scriptures that back that up.
You'll find a few hundred.
And right on the back page, I left
it blank.
Yes, God has, in his mercy, raised up
Operation Mobilization for a specific task in this
generation.
And we want to welcome you.
We'll welcome you again tomorrow night.
But we want to welcome you and hope
you realize that OM is so structured, get
this, that the new recruit is the heartbeat
of the work.
Very few mission societies in history, apart from
the early church, were so structured that the
new recruit was the heart of the work.
Eighty percent of you sitting right here are
new recruits, as far as the year program.
You're not just coming for training.
We have prayed for you for years.
I wanted to interview Susie Buss because she
came here as a little girl 20 years
ago, almost.
A little girl with her father, who was
a head mechanic in Zaventem.
And I started praying for her.
And now she's a woman.
And Peter Maiden's personal assistant and secretary, carrying
on a vital ministry.
Isn't it tremendous how God answers prayer?
Isn't it tremendous how different mission agencies and
fellowships are used in different ways, with different
kinds of people?
Aren't you happy that there is one mission
agency, and there are a few others, who
have at its heart the new recruit?
If you don't function this year, OM doesn't
function this year.
We'll stumble along somehow, but we'll be missing
a big part of our heart.
So don't just drift into this thing thinking
you're in some kind of glorified mobile Bible
school.
You have signed up for a spiritual invasion.
When you leave here, you will go trained
in weaponry to some degree.
And when you get out there, for some
of you, all hell will be let loose
to wipe you out on the front lines
of spiritual combat.
Welcome to Operation Mobilization.
Let's pray.
Our God and Father, in your sovereign purposes,
you brought us here from Korea and New
Zealand, from Australia, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, from
Canada and Finland, from Holland and Spain, from
Italy and ERA, from Mexico and the United
States, from Malaysia and Singapore, from Sri Lanka
and India, from the Middle East, the Far
East, South and North.
You brought us here from all over the
world, some by train, some by foot, some
by air, many by old vehicle.
And Lord, you're filling our hearts with a
spirit of expectation.
As we become trained in the weapons of
the warfare, as we begin to reach out
by faith and touch the ends of the
earth with the gospel, as we go out
to fill those gaps that those who have
returned or gone into other missions have left
in almost every single ON field around the
world, we are aware that this is a
holy and awesome task.
And we are humbled before you.
And Lord, I thank you that somehow as
I go into my fourth decade of walking
with your Son Jesus in weakness and mercy
and forgiveness, that I can renew my commitment
to these major aims and goals.
And somehow go forth another decade, if it
be your will, to see this come to
pass.
Father, we think of all that you have
done since this memo was written.
The second ship, the move into South America,
the Far East, Singapore and Malaysia, Australia and
New Zealand, the deeper thrust into the communist
countries, the deeper thrust into the subcontinent, especially
Pakistan and Afghanistan, the huge literature warehouse in
Waynesboro, the huge steps forward in STL, the
birth of the ICT coordinating base, dozens and
dozens of other ministries, all since this little
memo was first written.
And Lord, we know when we read this
ten years ago and began to pray, you
heard our prayers, you answered our prayers.
And we want to just take this moment
to thank you.
Though we have failed, you have been faithful.
Though we have sometimes collapsed along the way,
you have picked us up, forgiven us and
sent us back to the task.
Fill us afresh with your Holy Spirit tonight.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
Let's just stand and sing in closing to
God be the glory.
God
be the
glory.
Number 53.
Now unto Him who is able to make
that which we have spoken of tonight a
burning reality in our hearts and lives.
Our Lord Jesus Christ and His indwelling Spirit
moving out and through feeble, yielded, crucified earthen
vessels.
May Him be all the praise and all
the glory.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
Amen.
God bless you.
Remember the free literature tables and the materials
we've talked about.