Lord, we thank and praise you for what
you're doing around the world.
And our hearts go out as we think
of this world of six billion people.
And we would, in obedience to Matthew 9,
we would pray specifically that you would send
workers out into the harvest field and that,
Lord, you'd use this little video or this
little audio tape to challenge people wherever they
are to be more obedient to your word
in praying and giving and going.
We thank you, God, for what you did
there in Pretoria last week and for that
three and a half to 4,000 people
who came together.
And as they've gone back to their individual
countries, 133 nations across the globe, we pray
that they'll be able to implement those things
that they made decisions about.
Strengthen us as we in Operation Mobilization and
here on ICT and in the Special Project
Ministry especially attempt to launch in a greater
way Acts 13, Breakthrough 2000 and other strategies
and visions that you've given us.
Don't let us grow lukewarm about these things,
especially as other people around the world are
getting so excited at this point.
We look to you and we praise you.
In Jesus' name, amen.
I especially would like to dedicate this report
to those of you who have been praying
for Chicoe or for 82,000 and also
praying for ICT and Special Projects as in
the last two years, this has been one
of the most labor-intensive, challenging ministries that
we have been involved in.
I remember when Louise Bush asked me to
become the co-director of a consultation for
missionary executives.
There has been no such consultation in my
lifetime of this kind.
It had been a dream that Ralph Winter
had for a long time, a dream also
that I had.
Not that there have not been missionary executives
at other events in attendance, but they have
not come together to deal with the issues
in a large way on an international scale
that face the body of Christ.
And after consultation, especially with Francois Bousslo, because
the whole Chicoe Pretoria event has been built
on what God has been doing in Love
Southern Africa, of which OM is one of
a number of the main players.
And each one of these great global consultations
are quite different.
And there certainly isn't time tonight to go
into the history, but it is exciting to
see how over the past years, things like
the Doulas visit to South Africa, Love South
Africa, the Wellington meetings have all built up
to bring this partnership between 82,000 and
what God has been doing in Southern Africa,
which included the 82,000 movement in South
Africa.
Email has been coming at a phenomenal rate,
and I learned more through the email I
went through in the last couple of hours
than almost I learned when I was there,
because this consultation was totally unique in that
it was 10 consultations going on simultaneously.
When I arrived, they gave me this, Dreen
and I, this big book with all kinds
of information about the program and also listing
the various consultations.
And one of the first things we had
to do on the Saturday evening was go
have a reception with the mayor of Pretoria.
On Sunday, we were mainly involved that first
Sunday in preaching at different churches, churches that
were committed to this event.
And then on Monday, we came together for
the first plenary and then immediately into the
separate consultations.
I thought it would be good because I'm
sure many of you are not aware of
all that was happening there.
And this cassette and video may go quite
widely.
But just hearing the titles of these 10
consultations, I think, is a challenge in itself.
There was a consultation for business executives that
was attended by over 500 people.
And again, seldom has there been a consultation
of that kind.
That has led to a new network in
82,000, the Business Executives Professional Persons Network.
That may not be the exact title, but
that's what it's all about.
Then secondly, the mission executives, especially for Africa,
this included people who weren't necessarily mission executives,
but very much were shakers and movers in
world missions.
About 550 came to that consultation, though there
are many other missionary leaders who chose to
go to other consultations.
The biggest consultation being the African Initiative, where
Howard was also involved.
One of the smaller consultations was Caring for
the Poor and Needy.
That is also, I think, birthed a new
track in 82,000.
That may have a different name than that,
because people going around with this badge, Poor
and Needy, there was miscommunication about their personal
situation.
Then there was the African National Initiative.
I think 1,100 approximately were involved in
that.
Many people saw that as the most crucial
consultation as far as Africa.
Then there was a consultation for training for
church planting movements.
It was good to see a number of
former OMers involved in that, other people that
I knew.
Then South African local pastors, and then perhaps
the most unique of all, presidents and academic
deans.
It looked for a while, 10 months ago,
that they were going to be a very
small consultation.
But in the end, 200 or more presidents
of colleges, academic deans came together, and believe
me, something major happened in that gathering.
Then there was the consultation for university students
and youth leaders.
That was rather small, a couple hundred.
I went over there to speak.
But an alternative youth event for any young
people that wanted to go was going on.
Bill Drake led in a prayer meeting there
for a couple of hours, and 2,000
young people were there.
Then there was worship and performing arts consultation.
That somewhat tied in with the track that
Frank Fortunato is helping to lead.
Then finally, somewhat last minute, a new consultation
was added for focusing on children.
When the final reports were given on the
final plenary day, the children report, with all
those children up on the stage, certainly was
one of the most exciting.
In trying to enable you to pray for
what happened there, I'm going to try to
break down this report into 10 words that
I hope you can remember.
And if you're taking some notes, a little
hard if you're listening on cassette driving your
car, but if you're taking some notes, you
may want to just write down these 10
words that came to my heart as I
was really praying about this report and what
I should say and how I should share
it.
Because sometimes it's how you share something you've
just been involved in that really determines whether
what you share provokes people to do something.
And I share this with the hope that
it will provoke you.
I wish each one of you could be
there.
I talked to a lot of people.
I talked to more people in the last
week than any week this year, including OM
conferences, because they just rush you, especially Africans,
and they want to talk.
And everyone I talked to, of course, there
are negative factors.
Of course, there were criticisms.
But everyone that I talked to just sensed
this was such a powerful time and that
God was doing something unusual, especially for Africa,
but not exclusively for Africa.
I think we in OM need to especially
in all humility, humble ourselves and acknowledge what
a privilege it was to be so involved
in such a conference when they can choose
from the whole world who can be involved.
And believe me, it was an amazing range
of speakers, some of whom had only six
minutes total time.
And I am just humbled by the doors
that were opened not just to us in
OM, but many of our associates and former
OMers who were involved in a very major,
major way.
Faith is the first word on my little
list.
And I want to try to keep this
report brief, which as you know, is not
my major gifting.
Though in my major presentation to the whole
congregation on the final day, I had four
minutes and I stuck to my four minutes.
The next morning in the big march and
open air meeting, I was given 20 minutes
and then asked to give an invitation to
the whole audience out there in this big
square to come forward and register to become
a missionary.
I was really under pressure to do this.
I didn't really want to do it.
And Francois assures me, as one of the
ones who gave me this challenge, they had
all the follow-up materials already.
500 people came forward and filled out forms
to go.
So it was a venture of faith from
day one.
There wasn't enough money.
There wasn't huge structure.
The people in South Africa had never done
anything like this before.
This kind of partnership with Louise Bush in
82,000, their little team out there in
Colorado Springs.
It was a great step, a great adventure
of faith.
And God heard our prayers.
He brought the people in three and a
half to 4,000.
He brought key leaders together.
Just so many things came together.
So many obstacles were overcome.
Almost everyone who went there paid their own
air ticket.
Most people had to pay their own registration
and other expenses.
For many from two-thirds world countries, that
was quite inexpensive.
And in South Africa, they raised a lot
of the money to help subsidize that, including
the money from the church meetings that many
of us took.
That leads me to the second word that
just jumps to my mind as I attempt
to give this report, and that's the word
church.
In all the big events that I've been
in, including OM events, I've never seen local
churches so proactive.
All the venues were low budget because they
were in churches.
More people stayed in the homes of Christians
than I've ever seen in this kind of
conference.
It was just exciting.
The church where we had the mission executives
consultation, we had to do very little.
They had it organized.
They had extra phones.
They had transport.
They gave us all the room we needed
for literature.
They had all the meals prepared.
As a so-called co-director, I didn't
really have too much to do.
I had met with them many months ago.
Of course, people like Francois had a little
more, and I'm sure things were happening that
I didn't even know about, but praise God
for what he is doing in the local
church in South Africa.
And without exaggeration, it's one of the reasons
I'm giving this report, many churches in South
Africa now are pace-setting churches for world
missions.
And there's nothing wrong with churches in other
countries and other parts of the world, including
our beloved Britain, to just look a little
bit at what these people are doing in
regard to missions.
Missions conferences, giving over Sunday morning meetings, raising
money, esteeming the whole work of missions.
And no wonder that South Africa, together with
Korea, are the two fastest growing new sending
countries in the world.
They gave statistics about the number of new
South African missionaries from all the different agencies
just in the past few years, and it
seems that it has doubled in the past
few years.
And I believe this is partly because the
church is seeing its role.
There's no country in the world where there's
more excitement about the Acts 13 breakthrough strategy.
This is the greatest opportunity I've ever had
in the last year and a half since
that vision came to really present it to
a lot more people.
It was featured, the leaflet, we printed a
special edition for South Africa, went out widely,
and I'm sure that we and the Mission
Mobilization Network, whose address is on that leaflet,
we're going to have a lot more work
and a lot more correspondence with people who
want to see that Acts 13 reality.
What is that?
It means have an Acts 13 prayer meeting,
seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit as
to what your church should specifically do in
regard to sending people into missions.
We had some lively contributions concerning that.
Both Sundays, before and after the major consultations,
were considered part of the event.
And so speakers went out to those churches.
On the first Sunday, I think I covered
350 kilometers for the two churches.
I think Howard here went, didn't you even
go by air to get where you had
to go?
And I think it will be a long
time before we get full feedback concerning that.
Let me just share what happened Sunday night.
One of the largest Dutch Reformed churches in
the nation, a church that I previously had
to cancel as I got double booked some
months ago.
But they were very proactive about that.
They felt this Sunday was God's timing.
Just before going to the meeting again, Francois
gets on the phone, says, I really think
you should give a full invitation for people
to go and an invitation to call them
forward.
That is not the normal thing in Dutch
Reformed churches.
But I decided to do it.
However, I wanted to talk on personal revival.
I wanted to talk on missions and marriage.
I wanted to give my testimony.
I wanted to bring in the gospel.
I had one or two other things on
my mind.
In the last eight minutes, I shifted into
the you should go, gave the invitation, and
25 people came forward to the front, including
the pastor's son.
This particular pastor, a very godly man, by
the way, has a serious eye problem and
is losing his sight.
But a phenomenal church.
And they sold, I guess, about two or
three thousand dollars worth of books.
Dollars, not rand.
Fourteen, fifteen thousand rand of books just in
that one evening meeting this past Sunday.
That was, by the way, the church that
had the mission executives' consultation.
So maybe they were prepared.
How exciting that was.
The third word that comes to my mind
is the word hospitality.
I've already commented on that, but I just
wanted to say personally, because maybe some in
South Africa will hear this report, how it
stirred my own heart to see people reaching
out in hospitality across racial lines, across denominational
lines.
Just quite encouraging because it's always been a
struggle with me why God's people across the
world aren't more hospitable.
We all know the story of how the
conventions and they send their people in advance
and get all the JWs.
Maybe they changed in the last years, but
get all the JWs staying in the homes,
often of Christians.
And of course, they come back from the
meeting.
They're all excited.
The Christians and others have to be courteous.
They have to listen to these people.
And that has been a factor bringing many
people into that false cult.
So the hospitality on many, many levels is
the only conference I ever went to where
they registered to you and welcomed you before
you got to customs or immigration.
They were there.
Just came down the escalator.
You saw where you're going to get your
passport.
There the Jokowi people were.
Within three minutes, you were registered through all
that red tape, which is often such a
pain in the neck in conferences.
And I thank God for the way that
went.
The fourth word is the word partnership.
I wish you could have been there and
listened to Phil Butler of InterDev share with
his mission executives the challenge of what God
is doing in this whole area of partnership.
Of course, what some of you have been
involved in for years with CERV, that that
is the kind of partnership they're talking about.
So it's not completely new, but it's it's
not been done that much.
And when I was talking to Phil Butler
and some others later, they just fell behind
the scenes.
And through ad hoc meetings, many new mission
partnerships were born last week.
And that's a challenge for prayer to be
able to follow up.
In a sense, the whole conference was a
partnership as I teamed up with the leaders
of the Southern Baptist to lead the mission
executive consultation together with Louise Bush and, of
course, people in South Africa.
There are all kinds of other partnerships.
Almost every one of these consultations involves some
kind of partnership in funding, in prayer, in
preparing the program.
And it's exciting.
And I believe another one of the factors
that brings great rejoicing in heaven.
The small group meetings that often took place
that weren't even originally on the agenda are
something else that were quite exciting.
There were Christian leaders, major Christian leaders at
this event that had known of each other's
ministry for years and never once spoken face
to face.
And it was exciting.
Perhaps our particular consultation was the one with
the most excitement, as we had very strong
disagreement on a number of areas.
Maybe I'll touch on that later on.
The fifth word that I want to mention
is the word unreached.
And I guess that's one of the reasons
we in OM are so proactive in AD2000.
With all of its messiness, with all of
its complexity, and just after this consultation, Louise
Bush met with those of us who are
leaders or chairpersons of AD2000 task force or
networks, tracks, and that in itself, just that
meeting of leaders would have been worth flying
to South Africa for, because a number of
things were clarified.
And I'm just convinced that the best three
years for AD2000 are now between now and
the end of the year 2000.
There's very little now of the idea that
in the full sense, the gospel is going
to be in every people's group in the
world in terms of churches that can be
reached by all the people living in that
population area.
There is a general sense that that's not
going to happen.
But we want to have a church planting
team in all those groups.
We've also faced the reality of the large
blocks of people, Hindu and Muslim people, that
will not be reached through the Joshua Project.
We even stated publicly that in many situations,
the Joshua Project is just the beginning.
It's not the end.
There's no further use of the word closure
in the AD2000 movement, apart from maybe some
people that are not involved in the center
anymore.
There's just a lot more reality that will
get me to another word I mentioned later
on.
One of the exciting things in the consultation
for business executives is that we were able
to get mission leaders to sign up and
make a commitment to the unreached people on
the list.
And amazing lists have come.
Tremendous amount of work.
This is the list that Louise Bush and
the AD2000 people provided.
Global Guide to the Unreached People.
You can feel free to take a look
at this.
And it shows who's working.
It's incomplete.
I'm sure parts of it can be criticized,
but it's incredible.
The 1,700 people's groups listed here.
Information about who's working among them.
And so when it came to our consultation,
we had about 500 people's group where we
didn't seem to have anybody much committed.
And over half of those now, we've got
people committed to see Ray Tomlin of Arab
World Ministries get up in Louise Bush's session
and share why he had ticked off all
these people's groups in North Africa.
The Indians had their own special meetings, which
they're very gifted at.
They've also produced a new book of peoples
of India.
And at the beginning of the consultation, it
looked like there was considerable tension between what
Louise Bush was trying to say and what
some of the Indian people were trying to
say, including our brother Joseph D'Souza, who was
very active during these days.
But by the final day, I went to
Joseph and I went to one or two
others, and it seemed to be coming together.
There seemed to be, I don't actually understand
how that happened, but it seemed to be
there's agreement that we need this India people's
guide, which is more thorough, but we can
also use this other guide and somehow try
to reach everybody in India with the gospel
and try to, and it's going to take
long past the year 2000 to see the
church established in every people's and in every
place.
So it was exciting.
And whatever problems there may be, just the
fact that this movement continues to be so
focused on the unreached people is quite phenomenal.
Maybe some of you are aware of what
we've been battling for the last 35 years.
But to find a business consultation going on
where the main focus is the unreached people,
they were focused on other things as well,
especially money, and took a huge offering there.
I'm going to figure out where that's going.
But their report back to the main body
was very, very exciting.
And some of our own friends and people
were there.
It would take a long time to give
a report on each consultation.
That's impossible right now.
The sixth word is our old favorite.
It's the word mobilization.
It's certainly happening in South Africa.
It's certainly got a great liftoff in connection
with this whole body being presented with a
challenge of mobilizing 200,000 new missionaries.
Unlike some other situations, I found very few
opposed to recruiting 200,000 new missionaries.
Most of those people seem to think this
isn't really enough.
Of course, that includes tent makers.
Last minute, we got a tape about tent
making from Ruth Siemens.
We got a $1,000 gift to reproduce
that.
We reproduced over the weekend.
From the time I arrived to Monday morning,
we got 1,000 of those reproduced.
They went out, everybody, or at least 1
,000 people in the consultation.
That was just one of many cassette tapes
that got distributed.
The materials that were being given out, quite
amazing.
Just before I left, Nate Williams mentioned to
me that he and Kathy Hammond both agree,
without realizing it, the best book they ever
read was Blake Locke's book, Knowing and Doing
the Will of God, or Henry, not Blake
Locke, Henry Blackabee.
I've heard about this book.
I knew that God was using this book,
but I wasn't proactive in distributing it.
In our consultation, I find out that Avery
Willis is planning to give every single person
in the consultation a copy of Henry Blackabee's
book, Knowing and Doing the Will of God.
That's the kind of material people are going
back to their church, back to their mission
society with.
Our total book sales, as we had book
tables in every consultation, 10 book tables.
The story of God providing free of charge,
beautiful table covers from our friends in Cape
Town who has that factory making those things,
is another little exciting sideline story.
And there are hundreds of those kind of
sideline stories.
But I remember going to the Asian Congress
on Evangelism 1968 and seeing a little tiny
book table up in the corner and having
the birth of a dream that maybe someday
in these world consultations, there could be book
tables that are worthy of the number of
people that come.
And certainly this, in many ways, was the
ultimate opportunity, though, of course, Jikoa Korea was
also very exciting in regard to books.
They sold about $80,000 in powerful missionary
and discipleship and other books, about 450,000
Rand.
Believe me, it was a breakthrough.
And that is going to multiply right across
the 133 countries that were represented in this
consultation.
The seventh word is the word reality.
And perhaps that's the most important thing I'd
like to comment on.
There were disagreements.
In our consultation, we had a panel that
was supposed to discuss funding God's work.
And one of my many mistakes in my
part in all this, and I made a
few, was that I didn't get very involved
in that panel.
I didn't look at who was on it.
And last minute, we discovered everybody was more
or less saying the same thing, which was
very upsetting to some other people.
It was very much that we must do
everything to never, ever be dependent on foreign
money.
Very much came out of problems in Africa,
where churches had been receiving foreign money too
long and didn't become indigenous.
But then it became generalized, and some amazing
statements were there.
At that point, KP Yohanan came up to
me, and he was very upset.
And he said, if I had known this
was going to happen, I wouldn't have even
come.
I hope you'll forgive me for mentioning that
on this tape.
But we had some good fellowship.
There were some other people more close to
us who also were in agreement.
And I tried to talk my way through
it.
But as I went to bed that last
night, I realized that panel, that was not
good.
KP Yohanan was set to speak the next
day on some other subject.
When he got up in front of this
group, and he took on this panel, some
of whom had seemingly disappeared by then, it
was a momentous occasion.
I cannot say that all of his statements
were totally grace awakened, but his point got
across.
Other people were very much wanting him to
say that, just to bring the balance.
And he almost got a standing ovation.
Certainly, there was a great sense of agreeing
with him on much of what he was
saying.
And to summarize, it's simply this.
We saw from the very first day when
Paya Baba spoke, and I also spoke, that
our unity was going to be in the
midst of diversity.
And we saw that in action.
And I think a lot of people who
didn't even necessarily agree, they just felt it
was good that people were expressing themselves.
Up to that point, there may have been
the sense that people weren't really speaking out.
In the evening session also that Ralph Winter
gave, there was a sense that he said
some things that a lot of people didn't
agree with.
And there was pressure then for question and
answer session.
So during the lunch on the last day,
we had a question and answer session over
the lunch.
You could bring your lunch into this big
room.
There was Jerry Rankin, President of Southern Baptist
Missions Society, myself, Ralph Winter, Patrick Johnson, and
someone else.
Ralph Winter again, answering a question, said some
things that were interesting.
And an Arab brother jumped up, known to
some of us here.
And I will tell you, Ralph had left
the room by then for some reason.
But this brother really, really tore into what
dear Ralph was trying to say.
And it was on this very controversial issue
of contextualization in reaching Hindus and Muslims.
And for the next 10 years till the
Lord comes, that is going to continue to
be a very hot issue among missionary leaders.
Obviously, we did not resolve that issue.
But we at least saw some fireworks.
And many people who didn't even realize there
was such an issue are quite aware of
it now.
It was hard.
Maybe some people were hurt.
We never want that.
But it was reality today.
Major world missions movements are not in harmony
and unity.
And I say, and this is one of
the reasons I got involved in this, we
need to at least be talking to one
another.
We need to be listening to one another.
And we saw a lot of personal fellowship.
There came times of confession.
There came times of also recommitment.
When I went over to the pastor's conference
and spoke, I shared one of the strongest
messages I've given to pastors in a long
time.
Pastors can be quite intimidating.
And if you're in a foreign country, you
want to be careful what you say.
But somehow with the ethos of this conference
and the way things were going, I just
felt so completely free to combine the challenge
against lukewarmness from revelation with a challenge to
go, with a challenge about people's prayer life,
tied in with the neglect of the unreached.
At the end, I found myself giving an
invitation for these pastors to repent and to
be filled afresh with the Spirit of God
and to go anywhere and do anything.
And in fear and trembling, I gave the
invitation and 80% of these pastors came
to the altar to make a recommitment.
And many of them in confession and brokenness
and many new relationships were born at that
time.
The next morning, I spoke to the Advocate
Initiative.
I didn't give an invitation, but I felt
a similar response there.
And it certainly was a unique opportunity.
There was some reconciliation going on.
The business people in the final day, including
people from different nationalities who don't easily do
this, knelt before the whole body, a couple
thousand people, and apologized and repented of their
bad attitude toward missionary leaders and mission societies.
And then suddenly, I was sort of encouraged
to go and receive this, you know, and
forgive these people.
And of course, what could I do?
I had to apologize in front of all
these people that we sometimes, as mission leaders,
do have a wrong view about business people.
And sometimes we don't always have the right
agenda.
Just think of them for what money they
might be able to give.
All of this, in all of its messiness
and other moments of reconciliation, just to me
spoke of reality.
There was brokenness.
Calvary wrote in Afrikaans and English, one of
the fastest-selling books in the entire event.
And I believe only eternity will tell the
story.
The eighth word is the word fellowship.
Jokoe represents a further Africanization of George Burwer.
Africans are so responsive when you share your
heart.
And they were ganging up on me.
I have invitations to more African countries than
I've had, I think, in my lifetime.
The Nigerians, especially, who I'd already told them
I can't go to their big student event,
really got ahold of me.
And after praying with them, I told them
I at least was open there, promising 15
,000 people in Nairobi if I will come,
plus business opportunities, pastor's opportunities.
On every level, we had the opportunity to
bring in our message about financing God's work
and statements about how many workers are still
waiting for finance before they can go.
And I think the fact that we and
others could bring that statement in brought an
element of balance.
It's going to do these new two-thirds
world-sending countries a tremendous service to share
with them some of our failures and our
struggles and provide them with books like friend
-raising and people-raising that we only got
ahold of in the last few years.
Many people would say in an event like
this, the fellowship, over the coffee, over the
meals, and the first evening meal, I found
out so-called VIPs could have gone to
a nice, warm room and had some snacks.
But I just went with the multitudes, including
one of my prayer partners from Iowa, and
it was very cold.
I thought it was going to snow any
minute.
And this meal was out in the open
air.
My dear friend Stan Vermeer, when I began
to see him literally shake from the cold,
I thought maybe we should quickly eat and
go find some other warmer place.
And we did.
But the way they served thousands of people
so quickly, and very good meals, impressed me.
And that's where a lot of the fellowship
took place.
A lot of reunions, people that hadn't seen
each other 20, 30 years.
Everywhere you looked, you seemed to see people
who were at one time on OM.
And so just that was exciting.
We had a little reunion.
It wasn't so well attended on the Saturday
afternoon, and it was great to see quite
some former OMers there.
Brother Kamal was very much involved, together with
Joseph D'Souza and Howard here.
Kevin Penman was there.
Dave McBride was there.
A number of others whose names just don't
flash into my mind right now.
Praise God for the fellowship.
The reality that though we come from all
different nations and backgrounds, we are one in
Christ.
That what we have in common is greater
than what separates us.
If the body of Christ could accept that
across the world, it would bring, I believe,
a revolution.
And then the ninth word is the word
unity.
I felt that people there didn't want to
pretend about unity.
There was constant emphasis on diversity.
There was some emphasis on Charles Swindoll's book,
Grace Awakening.
They were all sold out within the first
couple of days, as we realized that on
a lot of things we had to agree
to disagree.
And some of these things that are old
hat to some of us, other people haven't
processed, they haven't thought through that.
What do you mean agree to disagree?
You mean I'm going to work together with
this brother in evangelism when we don't have
the same view on eschatology, or we're not
using the same translation of scripture, or what's
going to happen to the converts after they
come to Jesus?
So we saw that our unity was going
to be in the midst of diversity.
We realized that there were a lot of
things that people wouldn't see eye to eye
on.
But I felt that was quite helpful.
And then lastly, my last word, I had
a debate between the word follow-up and
the word implementation.
But I think there's a general sense that
the implementation is really the big challenge.
There are people around the world, of course,
who are totally opposed to these big events.
They've been making that known to me for
at least 37 years.
I almost got into that camp.
But I made that decision way back in
the 60s that we should be involved in
these big events.
And I asked Greg Livingstone to go to
Berlin.
And Greg Livingstone, believe me, was very active
at Jokowi.
And he leads the church planting among Muslims
track, which is a permanent part of the
82,000 movement.
And he's quite realistic and helps, I believe,
focus people while at the same time bring
them into balance.
I personally was involved then in the Asian
Congress out in Singapore, in Lausanne, and then
Jokowi in Manila.
And I'm convinced, though, of course, the more
important work is done out on the front
lines, in the trenches, among the church planters,
that there is a place occasionally for this
kind of major event.
80% of the people in Pretoria were
not in Korea.
We acknowledged in our consultation that we had
less than 5% of the missionary executives
and leaders of the world, therefore decided that
decisions could only be made as we took
what God gave us and took it back
to our peers for discussion and ongoing decision
making, which has to be a process.
And I am convinced that this was an
atomic spiritual explosion in Pretoria last week, and
would ask you now to pray for the
fallout.
The negative always attaches itself to the positive.
We try to urge our people, when they
get back to their own country, to be
grace-awakened in their approach on how they
share what happened at Jokowi.
And I'm hoping this report somehow is a
report that does that.
In fact, our very first morning at mission
executives, we especially emphasized the need to esteem
others better than ourselves, as we looked at
that verse in Philippians.
And that got quoted a number of times
on the internet and on the daily newspaper.
There's the Jokowi paper, big pictures of K
.P. Yohanan asking for forgiveness, pictures of me
with my global balloon.
And most of this also went out across
the world on the internet.
We certainly do live in a different world.
I wish you could have been a fly
on the wall in our consultation, especially some
of the meetings.
I think of Eddie Waxer's six minutes about
sports, and then somebody from the great movement
in terms of church planting speaking, and the
chairperson of Lausanne in Germany presenting the vision
of Christian radio.
It was exciting.
So there are my 10 words.
Maybe I could read them over again.
Faith, the church, hospitality, partnership, the unreached, mobilization,
reality, fellowship, unity, follow-up, or implementation.
Can we pray that somehow these almost 4
,000 people, as they go back to their
churches, that probably represents maybe 3,000 churches,
I don't know, that they will be able
to implement what they have decided?
And of course, the decisions will be ongoing.
Let's pray.
Lord, again, we're reminded of this world in
which we live.
The great 1040 window with lands that were
mentioned again and again in Jokowi, like Libya,
and Tunisia, and Algeria, and right across that
1040 window, Afghanistan, and Turkey, and Iraq, and
Iran, and Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and North India,
and Burma, and right across China.
We do pray, God, that all of the
people's groups in the world, not just these
bigger ones, but also the smaller ones, somehow
may soon have a church-planting team.
And we pray, Lord, that we may see
a major liftoff of all the burdens and
all the visions that are upon our heart.
Again, we would ask you for 200,000
labors to be spread out among all the
mission fellowships, and many local churches now that
have their own mission society, that many of
them would go out to the 1040 window,
and the places where hundreds of millions have
still never heard.
Father, we are excited because you have met
with us there in Pretoria in South Africa,
and you met with us in our flights
and in our vehicles, and you have met
with us, we believe, here tonight as well.
Enable us, Lord, to take the steps of
faith, to follow up on what you've said
to us at this time.
Release, we pray, O God, the finance that's
so desperately needed to carry forth this great
worldwide mobilization and church-planting effort.
For we ask in the name of Jesus
Christ.
Amen.