I believe this is an important time together.
We are an unusual and a diverse team,
in which some people have things scheduled a
long time in advance.
I guess I need to take the blame
for not getting out the dates of this
retreat much earlier, a number of hindrances, so
that a few of those people could have
put this into their schedule.
At the same time, I think we're used
to, in OM and on this team, going
ahead and making the best of what the
Lord has given.
He's certainly given us a very precious opportunity
to be here together for these two and
a half days.
Again, let us be just so thankful for
the provision of this place.
One of the reasons we stopped many years
ago having the all-British retreat, we used
to all come together, all the teams, I
can still remember the occasion, was wherever we
had it, there was just considerable expense.
In those days, things were very tight, and
then there was a lot of travel expense
as well.
I certainly, once a decade or once every
five years, would love to see all of
us who work in Britain come together.
Maybe that will happen.
I wanted to, just in this first session,
a number of the sessions are going to
be led by Peter.
He's going to lead two sessions on the
whole thing connected with strategic thinking and forward
planning, and just help us understand what is
actually happening.
I think a lot of people, I've indicated,
are really interested in understanding this better.
Of course, the door is still open for
input into the whole flow of thinking, even
though it's getting near decision time in January,
there's still opportunity for input.
He's also going to share with us from
the Word of God, and Tony Sargent will
also share from the Word of God.
Tomorrow night we'll have our prayer time.
I hope it can perhaps be a little
bit different than at Forest Hill.
We know prayer is prayer, but there are
different ways to pray.
There are different styles of prayer meeting.
We'd like to focus a little more tomorrow
night on some of your own personal prayer
burdens that you have, rather than, when we
do that, of course, it's some prayer meetings,
but rather than just praying for situations around
the world, we'll perhaps have both.
A number of people will join us for
tomorrow.
But I want us in our first session
tonight, and I won't be speaking to you
that much, so I count this an important
privilege.
I'd like to just talk about the vision.
If we're going to go forward on this
team, we need to make sure we have
a vision of what it's all about.
On a team like this, it's easy for
that vision to get a bit blurry, because
we are doing so many things.
We're out taking meetings, we're out selling books,
we're showing hospitality, we're having conferences, we're serving
India, we're in the personnel department, of course,
including Carlisle.
We're in almost everything you can in some
ways imagine.
And it is easy, when you're doing a
lot of things and you're very busy, to
lose the vision.
What are we actually aiming at?
And, of course, part of our rethink that's
going on at OM right now has been
tied into that, and we've come up with
vision statements together with a restated goals and
aims statement.
And I'm not going to be presenting this
as sort of an official document for OM
or even for the team.
This is just the vision as I see
it for your particular department, for your particular
ministry.
You have to subtract or add and contextualize
it into your own situation.
But I'm thankful to the Lord as far
as I can see on our team.
There is a lot of vision still after
all these years.
It's five years in this particular mode.
We made a leadership change five years ago,
a little over five years ago.
I'll never forget the first day that I
arrived in Forest Hill.
I think Peter was there as well, was
the day the news came in concerning the
sinking of Lagos.
Hard to believe, five years.
Here we are in 1993, November.
1988 was also the year my mother was
taken home to be with the Lord.
And I feel that there has been a
lot of vision and that that vision has
been a major factor in our motivation.
It's amazing what we can do if we
stay motivated.
I have a whole bunch of sort of
little mini strategies to stay motivated because I
find it very hard to do what needs
to be done if I'm not motivated.
It may seem strange.
It may sound like an exaggeration.
But in God's mercy, in God's grace, I've
never had a non-motivated day since my
conversion.
That's, I guess, a gift from God.
I guess it's partly my temperament.
I think it's very much linked with repentance.
If I'm cold, if I have a wrong
attitude, even a few seconds of wrong attitude
toward any brother, any sister, anybody, even the
guy pumping the petrol, the conductor on the
train.
By the way, he was a Christian too.
I had a great chat with him last
night.
And I repent.
I just repent.
If I find my heart getting cold, if
I find discouragement coming in, which is usually
several times a day, different types of discouragement,
I repent.
If lust tries to work its way in,
and I've had some of that recently.
In fact, this last week being served at
an OM dinner by a waitress who didn't
believe in the need to wear a bra
and her bending over to serve the vegetables,
I was getting somehow a lot more than
vegetables.
And it was God's grace to just cut
the lust and turn away and say, thank
you, Lord.
Little things, but men are being cut down
and destroyed by little things all around us.
And very few people seem to be willing
to talk about it.
Though I've had a vision and motivation every
day as long back as I can remember,
with plenty of bad hours and moments and
failure and all that goes with it, I
don't presume for the future.
I believe that if I'm not careful and
find the right balance and the right recipe
from the Word of God, that I could
go into depression, even though I've never known
it.
I had morning depressions back in the 70s.
I learned how to fight that through jogging
and through cups of tea and through a
little more relaxation, a little more balance in
my life.
One of the things that helps me keep
going is the right balance of the things
I find very hard with the things that
I love.
I don't know if you practice that.
But if you're going through things that are
very hard, and life is full of those
things, and as you get older, the equation
seems to get more weighed on that side.
It's not so little as new.
If some of you are here at this
retreat, for example, and you really look forward
to this on the human level, spiritually I
hope all of you look forward to it,
but if you actually look forward to this
on the human level, I mean, that's wonderful.
Probably you're a new recruit.
Probably you may be in a position where
you don't get so much fellowship with people,
and so you really appreciate coming and having
fellowship.
That's good.
Some of us, you know, we're fellowshiped out.
We're just people, people, people, seven days a
week.
We have friends everywhere.
We can't even sit on a train without
people wanting to talk to us, and praise
God, when they end up giving a hundred
pounds, that's better than when they ask you
for a loan.
But I think we have to acknowledge that
as we get on down life's road, and
our hearts get broken because some of these
great friendships break, or they go into limbo
because the person's got away from the Lord,
the friendship can still be there, things do
change.
So if there are people who, humanly speaking,
are really looking forward to these couple of
days, that's just wonderful.
You should rejoice in that, and I hope
you're blessed right out of your socks.
But other people are here because we just
believe this is God's will.
We need this kind of thing on our
team.
We need time together.
We need to seek the face of God.
We need to listen to one another.
The leader needs an opportunity to share something
of the vision and the burden and the
direction.
You need the opportunity to ask questions.
So it's just great that we have this
time.
I noticed one other team, they have a
retreat and consume their entire weekend.
I think many OMers very much treasure their
weekends as a time of some degree of
freedom.
I wonder how it would be if we
organized our retreat on the weekend, and then
you could work all week and not lose
those work days.
Some are happy to lose the work days.
Some are not happy to lose the work
days.
It's all quite complicated on our team.
Vision is so important.
I guess one of the reasons I've never
had a day when I didn't have a
degree of vision is because I tend to
see things as being rather simple.
That the whole world out there needs the
gospel, and we've got the gospel, so the
job is simple.
Give them the gospel.
Of course, you'd be accused of oversimplification.
But it was quite simple when I was
converted.
I belonged to a high school where most
of the people were lost, and so I
had a vision to reach them with the
gospel.
So we gave out Gospels of John.
We started prayer meetings.
No one had taught me much how to
do these things.
I guess I just picked them up from
various influences.
Don't claim it was all original.
I think of Billy Graham's influence on me
from the earliest period.
Is it not amazing that Time Magazine has
featured Billy Graham this week in a way
I have seldom seen any world leader feature?
In the USA edition, it's front page and
three or four other pages.
In the international edition, it's the bad blood
in Germany on the front page, but the
inside has a four-page feature on Billy
Graham.
There's almost nothing negative, including a full-page
picture of him at his present age.
It's called A Christian in Winter.
I will be circulating one of the editions,
the American edition.
Maybe the international one as well.
I have both.
I wanted to send a fax to Time
Magazine.
I've been studying and reading Time Magazine since
I was 13 years of age, nonstop, hardly
missed a week.
You do have some habits.
I had to study it at 13.
Maybe I was 14, I think, in high
school.
It was a high school course called Contemporary
something, things that were going on.
Vision.
Vision equals motivation.
Motivation will help us in the action.
And the action, I've tied together two words
in my notes, faith and love.
I'm in the midst of one of the
toughest decisions I have made in a long
time, and I'm getting scared.
I may share about it tomorrow, but I'm
on the edge of accepting the chairmanship of
one of the tracks of the 82,000
movement.
I spent time a Saturday morning with the
leader of that track, who has been a
friend for a number of years, Perry Rickards
of YWAM, who has the main mantle of
YWAM's thrust to the unreached people, Target 2000,
and has the main mantle of this track
with AD 2000 and beyond.
And as I was almost about to commit
myself, I told him I would not do
it.
David Hicks is on to me quite a
lot about this, and Louise Bush and a
few others.
I started reading through the documentation and discovered
this track is believing or aiming or working
toward releasing one million new missionaries.
At that point, in studying the documentation, I
had a deep...
whatever, it was sort of a pain that
I was going too fast, that there's no
way I could become the chairman.
This was a mock-up piece of communication
that was about to go out to thousands
of people all over the world.
My name was on the bottom as chairman,
and on the top it was one million
new workers.
This came about the same time on the
train as rereading your latest thing on the
forward planning, the blue page, isn't it?
Anyway, I read that whole thing through as
well, which is an interesting, challenging document to
say the least.
Well, this morning I got on the phone
with the number two man at YWAM about
this and expressed that I really felt I
couldn't go forward.
And then they called me, Perry is in
the States right now on the Good Samaritan,
that's their smaller ship, that's where I first
met him, and he called me.
And to my own amazement, they are ready
to completely compromise and reduce this goal.
It's quite interesting to hear how they came
about this particular number.
We're now starting to talk about the possibility,
because that goal is really, to accomplish that
in the next seven years is more than
faith.
To me it's completely bizarre.
I couldn't possibly even believe it's God's will
that he wants another million missionaries.
I don't think the world's evangelism is linked
with the number of missionaries.
More is better.
The total number of missionaries in the world
at the most right now, if we add
all the kind of national movements like within
India, Korea, if we add all kinds of
things, we might push the present number up
to 200,000 max.
We're going to do some research before we
announce that or use that.
There's so many different figures going around.
There's some excellent ones in Operation World, which
I want to look at again.
But I suggested a compromise, and that I
might be willing to consider the possibility, if
the others agree, and I don't even understand
yet how they make decisions in this movement,
but the thought of possibly doubling the number
of laborers in the world.
Even that would be the most fantastic, incredible
leap forward of missions in this century, or
the last two centuries.
If the number is 200,000, think of
pushing it to 400,000.
It's interesting.
One of the reasons they've got these high
numbers is they're looking at the numbers that
Korea...
Korea is saying, we're going to mobilize 100
,000 alone.
Korea, 100,000 missionaries.
Some of you, I know this may not
make much sense, and maybe you think, well,
100,000 missionaries, great.
I tell you, every 1,000 new missionaries
we get is a blood, sweat, and tears.
Every 1,000, because we're living in the
day when they're retreating.
They're going back because they don't have the
finance.
I'm going to be checking into this Korean
statistic.
I think it's tied in with the thought
the border is going to open in Korea,
and these people are going to flood into
North Korea, and maybe they consider that cross
-cultural.
I don't want to get into that now.
Let your creative juices flow a little bit,
and tomorrow I'm going to share more and
ask for feedback and ask you to help
me make this decision, which is not finalized
yet, and I certainly will not be able
to do it if it's a huge time
-consuming thing.
The chairman is not supposed to have to
give a lot of time, though the one
major time of the year is December, and
I will have to fly to Colorado Springs
for a few days.
I must confess that at this stage in
my life, I need increased vision.
I need younger men like this Perry Rickards,
who's just so visionary.
I need these kind of people, and I
need AD2000, a movement of this type, to
help me maintain my own vision, because surely
there's no way that my vision could be
limited to Operation Mobilization.
Operation Mobilization is less appealing to me than
perhaps it has ever been, in the sense
that the job is so huge and OM
is so small.
No matter what we do, it is so
small that we've got to get beyond thinking
what OM is going to do, and we've
got to somehow see the whole body of
Christ realizing our vital place, and as I've
said in many public meetings, to be a
tiny part, as we are in OM, of
all that God is doing is absolutely thrilling.
And one of the great blessings to me
when I went to Lausanne, way back when
it was in Lausanne, to just realize what
a little tiny thing OM was, in the
midst of all God's great work, and yet
not find that demotivating.
You know, it is possible in Christian work
to get in an ego trip, and OM,
from almost its birth, has been opposed to
allowing Christian work to become an ego trip,
and building an empire, and getting self-centered,
even though Jesus may be on our lips,
self is on the throne, and we're in
it to somehow get our own emotional needs
met, or our dreams and plans met.
Not that God has never used a person
who has had somewhat of an ego trip,
and who are we to judge other people?
I don't want to get into that, but
I have to stand very sharply on the
self-life of George Verwer.
Vision equals motivation equals action.
That action, with faith and love, I believe,
brings results.
I believe it brings results every time.
Those results, for example, as in Turkey, may
not be big, but they're there.
The results as in Afghanistan may not be
huge, but they're there.
And we can name country after country where
God gave us a vision, He motivated us,
we took the action, prayer, recruiting, sending, with
faith and love, and we've seen the results.
And I feel sometimes in OM we have
become a bit introspective, and we don't know
how to properly rejoice in the results that
God has given.
And that can be true even on our
own team.
And sometimes we go to our own local
church on Sunday, or we go to some
other organizational meeting, or we see some kind
of video in which the people are much
more gifted at presenting their results.
And, of course, we just get stirred by
what God is doing over there.
And, of course, we should be.
The motto, the challenge, the goal of the
82,000 movement, which we in OM are
somewhat aligning ourselves to, we've even been persuaded
to have our area leaders meeting in Korea
just before the big 82,000 mega event,
mid-decade event, 1995 in May.
I believe it's May, isn't it?
We got persuaded to, before we hardly knew
what was going on, some of us, to
have our area leaders meeting there, which means
we all now are committed to stay through
the whole 82,000 Congress, which is, I
think, 10-day working Congress.
And so I think it is good for
people in Operation Mobilization, especially on this team,
which is going to be very much tied
into this, to know what this is all
about.
That's why we brought thousands of these across
and have been distributing them all over Europe.
And we certainly hope that you have read
it, because we are part of this thrust.
It's not something you really have to join.
It's something you sort of align yourself with,
you sort of buy into, you slowly take
ownership.
Both David Hicks and Mike Stracciura are both
in official committees or boards.
They have many different names.
I'm convinced the whole thing is going to
continue to be messy from A to Z.
It's going to be messy from A to
Z.
There's no way something like this, so large,
with such a tiny staff, networking with so
many different groups, is going to be just
sort of nice and tidy.
You can stand up in two minutes with
an overhead projector and say, this is AD2000,
this is what God's done this week.
It's just way beyond that.
It's way beyond that.
The AD2000 movement, in some ways, is as
big as the whole body of Christ, because
the burden of the movement is the gospel
for every person and the church for every
people.
It's harder to get bigger than that, though
there are people with a strong emphasis on
building the kingdom who would say, well, look,
this is not enough.
I told Louise Bush on the phone that
if AD2000 is going to just buy in
in a huge way to some of the
extreme teaching about the kingdom, so that we're
going to add to these goals and aims,
building houses, opening hospitals, AIDS clinics, as wonderful
as those things are, fighting for justice in
every nation in the world, street children cleanup
programs, and that makes me nervous.
I'm not sure I want to get involved.
Not that we're against those things, but the
focus of AD2000, which I believe can incorporate
all of that ultimately, is to reach the
world with the gospel and to see the
church planted in every people's group in the
world, which, of course, has been on our
hearts in OM for 35 or some years.
How does this affect us as a team?
I just want to throw out some hot
words, some new, some old.
I guess none of them are new to
some of you who are so up on
things.
But just some hot words that help me
express things in a little different way than
I have in the past, since I have
spoken on this subject before, and I'm sure
some of you are a little bored.
I'm George Zora speaking on a vision aims,
you know, of ICT.
But these are some new ways of expressing
things.
The first word I have is facilitating.
That's a big word these days in missions.
Facilitators.
Have you heard that word?
We want to facilitate.
To me it incorporates helping, it incorporates serving.
I like it.
I want to be completely open to anything
new that God brings through any believer, whoever
he or she may be from anywhere in
the world.
I'm not interested in throwing up barriers because
I'm now 55 or because I know a
better way to do it or I know
this doesn't work.
I want to be completely open to new
ways of saying things and of doing things.
I also, however, when I'm speaking say to
a new church group, I want to be
very careful about language, more so than I
would speaking to my own team.
And I hope you understand you just can't
go into the ordinary church and just start
talking about contextualization, bonding, facilitating, some of these
other things without a lot of definition.
Some of them are still in John 3
.16 or Acts 1.8. And I feel
that God has raised up ICT, both Carlisle
and London, as a group of people that
are committed to facilitating.
Facilitating people, facilitating churches, facilitating our own workers,
facilitating people from other organizations.
This means helping people financially, it means helping
people with literature, it means helping people with
information, it means helping people in just so
many different ways.
I remember Peter speaking once years ago, to
whom much is given, much will be required.
Maybe it was on tape, I'm listening to
a number of Peter Maiden tapes.
And it's so true.
And let us acknowledge God has given OM
so much and God has given ICT much
more than the average OM team.
The speakers we have, the literature we have,
the exposure we have, let us not take
this for granted.
We have teams that are so sensing such
isolation.
I just had a memo from our brothers
and sisters laboring in Japan.
How much contact do you think the grants
have in Japan with the rest of Operation
Mobilization?
How many visiting devotional speakers?
They feel very much isolated and they're really
struggling just to keep going there in Japan.
I just had a letter from my nephew
in that little village just over in Iraq.
No electricity, guards guarding their houses because I
understand there's a thousand dollar bounty on the
head of all Americans over there on the
part of Saddam Hussein.
You can be sure they feel a little
bit isolated.
Of course, they're very new, they're very young.
They seem to be going okay.
But we have so much.
Just go down in our book room and
look around what we have there.
Just look on our shelves.
You ever look at Philip Morris' India Library?
It must be one of the better resource
centers for literature about India and Britain apart
from official libraries, the Indian Embassy and wherever
else.
I'm not sure they have all those kind
of Christian books.
To whom much is given, much is expected.
And so we have a call, we have
a mandate to facilitate, to share, to help
others.
It often involves linking people up.
I hardly take a meeting now where I
don't have to link somebody with somebody else.
Somebody's traveling here.
Can they meet somebody there who's in the
Lord's work?
Maybe Albania, maybe Mongolia.
But there's a lot of that that we
are involved in and we want to do
it heartily as unto the Lord.
I think of the day so many years
ago when the Verwoerd Davie Partnership ran STL
and I passed the old out-of-print
edition of this book over to Jerry Davie
and said, you know, should we consider reprinting
this?
It's referred to in the opening section of
the book.
Can we even imagine what God has done
through that one book?
Now in America alone, 330,000 copies.
Ralph Winter alone, 100,000 copies.
But it would be my burden that this
particular edition would go over a million.
If AD 2000, if they're plugged into what
the Spirit of God is wanting to do
and if this networking that is being dreamed
of and planned and the mobilization of so
many new missionaries, then I don't think a
million copies of that book is too many.
And may God grant it.
And we certainly are part, we are part
of the team to help that happen.
And to me it's exciting.
So maybe you could buy into that word,
facilitator, facilitating.
You can add to it, you can subtract
a little bit if you want.
The other word I have is networking.
Of course, it's amazing, people using these words
now, some cases by very conservative people accused
of being New Age.
Let us not allow the cults to rob
us of words that are in the English
language that we want to use.
When we talk about networking, we're not talking
about what the New Age people are talking
about.
By the way, something that's very interesting, a
sideline as I think of New Age, is
that the mainstream of the whole Herbert W.
Armstrong movement is wanting to shift into Orthodox
Christianity and accept the Trinity.
It's unbelievable.
I've received their magazine for 30 some years.
I've read the biography of Herbert W.
Armstrong.
If you follow the magazine lately, it is
absolutely powerful.
A clear presentation of the gospel and how
they're going to shift an entire cult into
mainstream Orthodoxy is amazing.
Huge chunks of it are pulling out.
But it looks like the heart of the
Armstrong cult is coming into Orthodox Christianity.
I ever cease to be amazed at some
of the things that happen.
It hasn't happened fully yet, so maybe I
better be patient.
Networking.
Again, this is the bottom line in the
whole A.D. 2000 movement.
It's not a matter of joining A.D.
2000.
It's networking.
Dawn is already out there.
And if you don't know what dawn is,
you need to do a little homework because
dawn is one of the hottest things going
in world missions, especially in certain countries like
the Philippines.
It is also taken off to some degree
even here in Britain.
In some countries like Canada, they aren't sort
of officially dawn, but they've caught sort of
their vision from dawn.
And they've launched, I think it's called Vision
2000 in Canada.
And it's just amazing to see how many
denominations are tied into the dawn program there
in Canada.
To me, any movement that can make inroads
with the big denominations, that's where a lot
of the muscle is in the Church of
Jesus Christ.
It is in these large denominations.
You go to Brazil.
There are two major Assembly of God denominations
in Brazil, probably more.
I was just with the head of A
.O.G. for Latin America.
We were ministering at a conference together.
Of course, each group in Latin America is
autonomous.
A.O.G. in the United States has
almost no say-so.
And to think and look at the growth
of the Assembly of God, not only in
Brazil, but a number of other countries, is
major.
To think of evangelizing the world without somehow
including in the network movements like the Assembly
of God, to me, is ridiculous.
And this is why what we did 30
years ago, which was a bit unusual, of
marrying together the so-called charismatic and non
-charismatic movement, that's the only way to go
now.
And if you want to understand the difference
between A.D. 2000 and Lausanne, there are
many differences, but one of them is A
.D. 2000 is another further step.
Lausanne was already partway there.
But A.D. 2000 is another further step
to esteem and bring together both the charismatic
and the so-called non-charismatic, often called
evangelical, side of the body.
And if I get more involved in A
.D. 2000, one of my burdens would be
to try to win to this movement, networking
with this movement, people who are perhaps a
little bit too conservative to get involved without
a little help, perhaps from someone like myself
or others in a similar camp.
I'm excited.
When I call up Joe Stoll, as I
did last week, the president of Moody Bible
Institute, to find out that Louis Bush was
just the speaker at the missions conference that
Moody just had.
I'm excited about that.
I won't go into detail.
Networking is a key word.
Sharing information, building unity, inter-team and inter
-field networking.
This is internal.
In O.M., we're constantly, constantly having a
bit of tension between the internal and the
external.
What does that mean?
Internal, all those things within O.M. External,
all the things outside of O.M. Because
of Peter Maiden's willingness to take on the
job that he has, I've been able to
shift my use of time.
I always was maybe 30% external in
the past and 70% internal.
Certainly now, it's at least 50-50.
50% of my time, effort, thrust is
external.
50% is internal with some percentage on
either side for flexibility because I've never actually
measured it that closely.
It will be a tension on our team.
I don't think there's a way forward without
some degree of tension.
How much time and effort do we put
into internal things?
As we've been doing this forward planning and
this task force, it seems that a very
large amount of it all is internalized.
You've said that more or less in your
memo, looking at our own problems.
With the goal, the hope, if we can
get some of our own problems a little
bit more sorted out, then we'll be able
to reach out externally outside of O.M.
When it comes to networking, it sometimes is
a hard decision, but there's no way in
the future, there never has been, but there's
no way in the future any sane mission
organization can operate in a vacuum.
We've got to be involved with the others.
We've got to consider collaboration.
This is the big move even in the
secular world.
The so-called multinational company, don't want to
get into that, but it just is interesting
when you buy something now, how the parts
and the components can come from so many
different countries.
We're seeing in Central Asia, we're seeing in
a number of our new fields, teams sort
of form on the field that consist of
people from different missions.
This has actually been going on in Turkey
for some years.
Again, all these things have their problems, and
sometimes it seems it's more difficult to get
a group of different Christians to work together
in some kind of a network team than
it is non-Christians, because Christians carry with
them their doctrinal baggage, and they carry with
them their peculiarities, and it's not going to
be easy, and we're going to have to
know our limitations.
We're going to, no matter how much networking,
no matter how much vision, we're going to
have to be able to say no.
You cannot say yes to everything.
One of our great commitments on our team,
both internally and externally, is to build unity,
and if we go back to our earliest
roots, we know that OM had almost an
extreme emphasis on unity.
I felt, and still do, that unless you
emphasize unity in almost an extreme way, it
doesn't get through.
People just sort of, they just presume, in
fact, I remember a man really getting upset
with me saying, well, you know, we're already
all united in Jesus Christ.
We're one body in Jesus Christ, so we
don't need to go on and talk about
unity.
I sort of looked at him and wondered,
you know, exactly what he had been drinking,
because certainly the New Testament doesn't just presume
that because we're all one in Christ that
there's going to be unity.
Quite a few of the epistles seem to
be written to attempt to sort out disunity
and things that seem to be worse than
disunity.
Another key word that I'd like to throw
into the arena for our thinking, the word
bonding.
I like this new word, bonding.
When it first came, I thought, wow, can't
we just be friends?
Do we have to bond?
And then I sort of picked it up,
and I realized that bonding for a person
like me is almost better than the word
friendship.
Because, you see, I bond with somebody very
quickly, thousands of miles away.
I then leave that country.
You can't really say to him much of
a friendship.
You know, he is a friend.
You know, you had a few hours with
him, and you flew off back to London.
And to say, you know, he's a friend
of mine.
Well, that's all right, you can say that.
But to say, you know, I met this
brother and we bonded.
There was something there, something happened in which
there was a uniting of mind, there was
a uniting of vision.
There was a sense of somehow some glue,
some cement bringing us together.
That will hold even if he doesn't see
me for five years.
One of my close friends from years ago
is Philip Lerman.
I never forget meeting Philip at Cambridge University.
He was very upset about something, very disgruntled.
Took me aside after the Cambridge meeting that
I spoke at.
I can't remember what he said, but I
knew that God wanted me just to link
with him.
Among other things, around that time when Philip
tried to preach in the open air in
Cambridge, he was thrown in the river.
And this was a crushing experience for his
temperament, where he was emotionally, this was a
devastating experience when it was written up in
the Cambridge college paper that he was thrown
in the river.
He then, after his time on OM, I
don't have it all clear in my mind,
he began to be subject to emotional and
mental illness and had to be treated medically.
He came out to see me once in
Kathmandu.
He came to see me at a conference
down in the Herne Bay court.
And for a number of years we got
together quite regularly.
He was then doing advanced pure math research
at Cambridge University, which didn't seem to me
necessary to help him emotionally.
And I remember God just bringing him through.
It took years.
He then went back, got married at 33
years of age.
He took his father's business and has kept
that business going.
He told me yesterday his dream was to
get a new Jaguar, which he's just got,
only cost him 29,000 pounds.
And then we discussed that.
But, you know, with where my dear brother
was so many years ago and what I've
seen him battle through, I could only praise
God.
I could only praise God.
He has two lovely daughters, young and a
son, who I guess is about 13, except
the son went walking over the hills of
Yorkshire yesterday.
There was a bonding way back 25 years
ago, though we seldom see each other.
Coming together this weekend was like a celebration.
And now it may be in God's providence
there will be a resurrection in that relationship,
meaning that we will just somehow get some
more time together and it may become more
active, especially as he wants to line up
a businessman's and professional's dinner.
He's an elder in his church.
His church has worked, by the way, closely
with OM teams.
I think we might be able to get
to see one another a little more.
He's excited about the possibility of Network 94
and being involved in other ways.
So I like the word bonding, and I
believe one of the most important ministries of
our team, it is not just me, it
is all of us, is bonding with people.
They may just come to Forest Hill or
to Carlisle for a day, but through like
-mindedness, through love, through the reality of Jesus,
the reality of Jesus in our hearts, there
is a bonding, there is a linking, that's
the old word.
We'll maintain that by phone, we'll maintain it
by letter, by literature, by sending books.
These people that we send books to, a
number of you are involved in that.
There's no way I could ever do that
on my own.
It means so much to them.
When somebody receives a free book, as Philip
and his wife did, Operation World Children and
Adult Edition, it says something to them.
It says to them, people are thinking about
me.
It says to them, people care.
It may be small, but I will tell
you, in this world, a lot of the
things we do have to be small things.
Life is not mainly big things.
And I just believe that God has given
our team, with all the resources we have,
just with the people that we are friends
with, can you imagine the possibilities of 82
,000 ex-OMers or OM graduates?
There's all kinds of papers going around about
what we should call them.
We don't, in ICT, ever expect to be
in touch with all those people.
But when we think of our link with
the other OM fields, our link with the
other OM teams, our ability to encourage them,
to supply them with literature, they in turn
are in touch with a very high number
of all these people.
I'd love to get a count on it.
How many ex-OMers had some contact with
some OMer last year?
What a fantastic statistic that would be.
I know in the course of one year,
I'm in touch with hundreds and hundreds myself.
So if the average person around OM is
even doing one-tenth of what I'm privileged
to do because of my situation, that's a
lot of people.
I think we're in touch with a lot
of ex-OMers.
And I can assure you that we have
a desire to see OMers giving to OM
because it's better to give than receive.
Our greatest burden for ex-OMers is just
to see them going on for Jesus.
That's the bottom line.
And that's why we try to somehow chase
after those a little bit who have drifted
away and be an encouragement to them.
That's not so easy because sometimes we just
hardly know what to say.
And I think there's always a danger that
we're unwilling to take risks with people who
are away from Jesus.
And instead of doing something, we end up
doing nothing.
And I think that's a great mistake.
Another word I've written down here, of course,
is an old-fashioned word.
Serving.
We've got the book, Serving as Senders.
We've got the book by Swindoll, Improving Your
Swerve.
That's for our driver's course.
I've just got Swindoll's latest book.
I brought it here with me.
Flying Close to the Flame.
Boy, he comes up with good titles.
You wouldn't think after all these years anybody
could come up with another good title.
With all the books we have.
Flying Close to the Flame.
And it's interesting, the first part of the
book, when I opened it this afternoon to
read, Swindoll was sharing how again and again
he turned down the presidency of Dallas Seminary
and now has accepted it.
Charles Swindoll, living in California, will be commuting
to Texas and be the new president of
Dallas Theological Seminary.
Vera has some information we don't have.
Is he moving to Texas?
Oh, I saw you shaking your head.
Yeah.
Well, we all are.
But anyway, that's written up in that book.
It's an amazing book that you might want
to get to read.
When I think of what God has done
through that book, that now will be the
book of the day in Urbana.
It's an unknown book.
And probably would be unknown to today, to
a large degree, if Neil Parola, who was
about to walk away from me after a
night of prayer at Biola.
He was tired of waiting.
There was a big queue of people talking
to me after the night of prayer.
He was about to walk away.
Somebody said to him, hang in there, he'll
talk to you.
And eventually I got to him and he
showed me this book.
And I tell you, it was like jump
-starting a Concord because that book just grabbed
me.
And we've been working on that.
It's going into Spanish soon, German.
Like I said, it's the book of the
day at Urbana.
The hundreds and thousands of copies that we've
distributed have been networked.
And it's just amazing to see it being
reviewed.
This is part of our ministry.
This is to me part of the excitement
of this team that we can meet somebody
like Neil Parola.
We can buy into what he has produced.
That's his life, that book.
He's crying out there that he'll have the
opportunity to take seminars and share this in
person.
He's not getting too many of them, but
he is getting some.
I just talked to him on the phone.
And he's very encouraged by some of the
new opportunities.
The message that we have as a movement
in that book and in our hearts and
on tape about being a sender is absolutely,
absolutely vital.
Tied in with the word serving, I wrote
a couple of other words, the hospitality ministry,
the pastoral care challenge that we are so
committed to and want to be more committed
to and much more happens in that area
seen on the surface.
Then I've written down releasing resources.
Again, quite a few of us now have
this phenomenal open door to be involved in
releasing resources.
And it's a team effort.
And a lot of the work that's linked
with releasing resources, I'm afraid, is nuts and
bolts routine work.
So much of the work my own wife
is doing and Vera and May and a
number of you in this room is very
routine in some ways.
There are the moments of excitement, there are
some new challenges, but quite a bit of
it is routine.
One of the ways I deal with routine
is I have quite a bit of it
as well is try to mingle it with
prayer.
Mingle it with prayer.
Because those addresses of people and OMICT, we're
getting more and more and more and more
addresses just to keep up with our own
movement.
All those countries and the changes and the
job the personnel department has to produce that
little miracle book every year.
And that's just, of course, the beginning in
terms of addresses that we attempt to maintain.
Serving.
But releasing resources is another challenge that...
I don't know, maybe there's something wrong with
me.
I'm just so excited about this.
I just find it so exciting to pray
with someone, meet with someone, and then find
out the person's just given $10,000 or
just given 50 pounds.
A man rushed up to me after the
meeting yesterday morning.
He said, I haven't heard anything like this
since Emerus Davis.
Is my preaching like Emerus Davis?
Is it Welshman?
I don't think my preaching is like him.
Anyway, he hadn't heard anything like this since
Emerus Davis.
And he was all excited.
He was an older man.
And he just reached into his pocket and
gave me all that he had.
It was about 50 pounds.
New notes.
Looked like he just checked it out of
a money machine.
And I just find that so exciting.
Don't you get excited when people rush up
to you and give you 5 pounds or
50 pounds or 100 pounds?
Am I the only one with that disease?
And when we think of the money that
has come into ICT in these past five
years to keep all this going while maintaining
a very generous philosophy toward others and pushing
a quarter of a million from special projects
into other people and other fields, some of
that to ICT as well.
Then there's those old mainline visions and goals
and aims, whatever way you want to describe
it.
Recruiting, which God has put us on the
cutting edge of.
Prayer mobilization, which we don't want to neglect.
In fact, we want to be involved even
more.
Building unity in the whole of OM and
the whole body of Christ.
I wrote these three sort of slogans here
at the end of my paper.
Unity in the midst of diversity.
I guess we've said it hundreds of times.
Reality in the midst of the mess.
There is a great thrust right now to
try to make OM a little less messy.
I'm in favor.
But I will tell you, when the Holy
Spirit is moving in power, things will get
messy.
If we suddenly, with all of our planning,
all of our thinking, all of our strategy,
if we suddenly see 200,000 souls saved
in Turkey, do you think it's not going
to be messy?
We will see problems in the Middle East
like we've never had before.
And if you don't think so, just go
to Indonesia.
Just go to any nation where the harvest
is coming in.
It's messier than when the harvest has not
really started.
So though we plan and we're very perfection,
excellency oriented in these days and all of
that kept in balance is good, I think
when it comes to evangelizing the world, the
whole world, 6,000 people's groups still waiting
for their first church, it at times is
going to be messy.
There will be backsliders.
There will be division in some of these
churches.
There will be immorality.
There will be things going wrong.
None of those things we want, but it
happens.
And I think I would have lost my
faith a long time ago if I didn't
believe that God was sovereign and He's working
in the midst of a mess.
How can you explain God using our friend
in the Netherlands, equivalent to Oral Roberts, who
for 20 years has slept with prostitutes?
Does that fit into your theology?
It doesn't fit into the Bible school theology
they taught me, I'll tell you back at
Moody.
But if you look around the world and
no one is excusing any kind of sin
because now that man is out.
He's on the shelf.
He's finished.
But to say that God was not using
him during those 20 years or that God
never used Jimmy Baker on television or that
God never used this one or that one
as we encounter all these things I think
would be a great mistake.
It's a mystery.
It doesn't fit in to some of the
things I learned.
But I love this little expression.
Reality is often in the midst of a
mess and I'm preaching to myself.
Don't get discouraged by the messes and believe
me there are plenty of them.
And then lastly I've written here community in
the midst of individuality.
We as a team especially are a team
of individuals and I think at times I've
heard statements that make us sort of feel
a little bit guilty about that.
Individualism.
The triumph of individualism.
That's bad, isn't it?
Well, I think the triumph of individualism is
bad.
But I think we have to accept our
individuality.
Every single one of us is different.
My wife and I according to the Bible
we're one flesh.
And over these last years we've been discovering
just how individual we are.
My wife is more of an individual than
she was 10 years ago or 20 years
ago.
She's more free to go her own way
and to express herself and to grab the
bowl and run with it.
On some things not even consulting that much
with me about it.
And you know what I say?
I say hallelujah because she is an individual.
She's not just the wife of George Verwer
or whatever other way she might be described.
She's an individual.
Jerry's an individual.
Each person here is an individual.
Each person is important.
Don't be intimidated by your individuality because tied
into your individuality is your creativity.
We're not just creative as a team, a
blob, a creative team.
We're creative as individuals.
And you're going to create and do things
in ways that I'm not going to particularly
do it.
So there will be creativity that comes from
the group, but a lot of the creativity
comes from creative individuals.
You look at history.
You look at the church.
And there's a strong emphasis these days on
team leadership.
I hope we can have some team leadership
without losing the dynamics of individuals anointed of
God with vision who want to set the
pace for other people who may not be
in tune in exactly the same way.
But I still feel a strong commitment to
community and to fellowship.
It's going to be a hard struggle to
keep these things together.
And I commend you as a team for
what you have done in maintaining that community
in the midst of all of our individuality.
Well, there's my few miscellaneous thoughts just to
somehow set things moving at this annual retreat.
And to be honest, it helps me to
put these down on paper, to think through
them, and to make a recommitment to this
vision and to this calling.
I realize for everything I have here, there's
something missing because the ministry of this team
and the vision and what God has called
us to is so much beyond what we
can put down in an hour of sharing.
Let's pray.
Lord, I just thank You for speaking in
my own heart as I wrote these things
down, as I've thought about these things again
and again over these past months, and especially
in this past weekend, dealing with this new
challenge of AD2000, trying to see what Your
will is and what Your mind is.
Lord, we know that in these days of
great vision, these days of great faith and
great expectation, we're also surrounded by many, many,
many prophets of doom, prophets of gloom, self
-appointed judges and critics of almost every kind.
We don't believe the way ahead is going
to be easy.
We're just so unique.
What You're doing is so unique.
How are we in OM going to work
closer with You through the mission?
How are we going to work under this
umbrella of AD2000 and network with WEF and
link on a local level with hundreds of
organizations, thousands of churches?
Lord, it's only going to be Your grace,
but we realize that we have to obey
and we have to take the steps of
faith to deal with our own lack of
vision, to deal with our own lack of
motivation, to deal with our own wrong attitude
or some subtle area of pride or something
else that may be hindering us from really
getting in the heart of what You're doing
in the world today.
Lord, we don't want to be found somehow
left out of what You're doing today in
a mighty way through Your church as we
move toward the year 2000, as we move
toward what some people call closure, as we
move toward the fulfillment of at least a
certain, a particular aspect, the pioneer mission aspect
of the Great Commission.
Lord, in ourselves, we're scared, we're trembling.
We can see the problems, people like me,
way too much.
But somehow by faith, we want to keep
our hand on the plow again and go
forward in obedience to You that the Gospel
may go to every person and that the
church may be established in every people, among
every people.
We ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.