I've taken down some notes so I won't
go wandering all over the place.
I don't want to repeat things that I
have said before, though most of you I
don't think I've spoken on this subject before,
so you may not even be aware of
some of the material development, God's Way, resourcing
God's work, and a number of other tapes
that I've done, just to try to really
contextualize all that people are saying about money
into really where OM is, and was, and
is going, and to try to keep the
unity, especially in a movement where brothers and
sisters have been used to working with a
certain set of terminology and a certain ethos,
and that has changed, and we don't want
to lose people for the sake of semantics,
and we want to be very, very sensitive
to the fact that different people pray and
think about these things in different ways.
The first thing I had on my agenda
was to just again emphasize how thankful we
are to God for all that he has
done, and thinking in the context of Britain,
and my mind jumps back to being with
a couple of businessmen in Manchester.
Valgary wasn't yet involved at that time, but
his close friend Norman Alexander, and one or
two other men, a man named Mr. Hooghly,
after my Sunday meetings, this was 1962, they
said, you know, you need to organize, you
need to do things properly.
Hooghly, British, of course, was good at doing
things properly, and suggested that I get a
board of trustees, and they helped put together
that original board who now represent a number
of sub-boards and boards overseeing the whole
of OMUK with all of its international implications,
and as I look back at 30 years
of work here in Britain, I just thank
God that I could have just even a
small part in it, because we've seen amazing
things happen, and we've seen amazing amounts of
money come in, in phenomenal ways.
We would tend to think, and to give
God the glory, that this money came in
in answer to prayer, and that is part
of the picture.
But the money came in also because people
worked hard, because people sacrificed, because people took
more meetings to talk about the vision and
the work than perhaps anyone could ever count.
And we know that the Bible emphasizes the
importance of the whole council.
Paul said, I shall not declare unto you
the whole council of God.
And if we're going to do that, which
we've been learning how to do, we're still
learning, then it has to include basic biblical
understanding about money.
As we think of this subject that we're
gathered here especially to talk about, releasing finance
for the work of OM and the work
of God in general, a few very basic
things I just want to reemphasize.
Number one, we want to be a work
of integrity.
Absolutely.
Our spiritual father, my own spiritual father, Billy
Graham, has managed to keep going straight all
of these years despite many pitfalls.
There's another 500-page book out about Billy
Graham.
And I tell you, if there was any
skeletons in the closet, they have nailed him
on a few issues, especially his Nixon link
-up.
But basically, he stood out as a man
of integrity.
And as I was reading that review of
that book, that message again came out.
Integrity.
And we want that far more than we
want another million pounds or another hundred thousand
pounds.
Integrity touches every aspect of our Christian life.
And there's no challenge in some ways greater.
Moral integrity, financial integrity, integrity in terms of
what we say.
And it's just so beautiful when we can
meet people and work with people of integrity.
And in God's grace, he has given O
.M. a testimony, generally in the Christian world
after all these years, many mistakes and sins
and failures, he's given us a testimony of
being a movement of integrity.
And we're going to have to fight with
every inch in us to maintain that.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but that's a
word I especially hope we can allow to
go very, very deep.
As we move into the area of being
more open about finance or as sometimes it's
referred to, fundraising, the minefields are many, the
pitfalls are many.
But the last thing we want to do
is what so many people have done, overreacting
to manipulation, extremism, all that kind of thing,
things we see on the television, overreacting to
that into a position where basically they're just
not going to do very much.
Surely there is something more biblical than that.
The second principle I want to just lay
as a foundation is spirituality.
I know we live in a day when
people even mock spirituality.
The very word, you know, spirituality, people make
jokes about it at Bible college.
People have funny ideas about spirituality.
I found out recently someone I know quite
closely thought I had a particular view on
spirituality, which I didn't have at all, but
obviously I miscommunicated.
But I think spirituality is something bigger than
perhaps some people define it, and I believe
the bottom line of spirituality is knowing God,
knowing God and walking with God.
Though we're here to focus on a particular
subject, we need to remind ourselves that that's
only part of the equation.
We didn't come here for a general overview
of the Christian life.
Spirituality, we do that all the time in
OM.
All the time.
We've come here to focus on one particular
area which is crucial and which we feel
sometimes we've neglected and to be quite honest
where we as full-time OMers need desperately
the help of people who are thought of
as laymen or as people outside the work,
and we'll get back to that later on.
But the pastoral care of our people, evangelizing
in the best possible way.
In other words, how can we improve our
work among Muslims?
How can we be more effective in church
planting in Pakistan?
How can we do better in Jordan?
We have a big meeting in Jordan starting
in two days.
They won't be talking that much about finance.
I certainly hope it comes up a little
bit.
They'll be there dealing with everything connected with
that work, which is in a time of
crisis by the way.
So try to do our work in the
Middle East.
That's the Middle East leaders meeting in a
better way.
Thirdly, I personally believe that if we don't
have real love and concern for people, we're
disqualified from this aspect of Christian ministry.
I'm not sure what aspect you are able
to get into.
If you don't have a love and concern
for people.
We have a problem in the United States,
much more acute than here in England.
You have it here as well, in that
everything is professional.
Here's a guy that was doing this kind
of thing all of his life, and he
never really was interested that much in people.
And suddenly because he gets a job, he
just seems to be so interested in people
because his job is to get those people
to put their money into the box.
I'm not judging that man because he may
have went through a quick conversion.
But I personally don't like to see people
just totally green in their Christian life.
Going into the whole area of development and
financing, resourcing God's work with all that that
involves, especially in terms of relationship.
Because we need to understand that though initially,
initially we may get involved with a person
because he is a potential supporter of the
work, it never ends there.
It doesn't end there.
Because as Christians we're bonded together, there's relationship.
People that once supported our work financially are
actually broke right now.
What do we do?
We drop them, forget them, don't pray for
them anymore, don't phone them.
It doesn't work like that, not in Christian
ministry.
But in oftentimes very professional, hard sell kind
of Christian fundraising, that's the name of the
game.
And though people may pretend otherwise, the bottom
line is shown where people spend their time
and where they spend their efforts and their
energy.
So I hope that all of us who
go into this, and I don't think you'd
be here if it were otherwise, do have
a real love and concern for people.
Fourthly, I've just written down the words so
famous in O.N., prayer and faith.
We're reminded of the scripture that says the
weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but
mighty unto God to the pulling down of
strongholds.
Some of you read that old leaflet that
has to be revised, I wrote it 15
years ago, releasing finance through prayer.
And I still stand on almost everything I
said in that leaflet.
It needs a few adjustments, that's why I
guess it's not reprinted.
But to have only a few adjustments over
15 or 20 years might be somewhat miraculous.
That leaflet has been reprinted actually in magazines
in different languages all over the world.
And in many ways, O.N. has always
had a very strong emphasis on money.
From the beginning, when I first walked up
to a businessman in the parking lot of
a new church in my town shortly after
my conversion and more or less hinted to
him or said to him that I wanted
some money for Gospels of John for my
high school.
From that very day to this day, there's
been a phenomenal emphasis on money.
And I think we have to admit that
in our old days, at times there was
almost a neurosis.
There was almost a neurosis about money.
And it got too important.
I think too important more in the older
days under the older policy than actually our
newer days where there's a little more freedom,
a little more humor, a little more reality
and honesty than perhaps we sometimes had before.
My uneasiness about our older policy which has
now been changed goes back 25 years.
I didn't change easy.
And there's a lot of pressure on me
not to change even though very little of
it came from the Bible.
It came from peer pressure.
It came from people patting me on the
back, giving me the idea this was the
best way and we weren't like others.
Owen was different.
We weren't like others.
That creates a very interesting vibration.
Of course, here in England, we found more
fellow travelers with our old policy than we
did in other parts of the world.
And perhaps the Lord knew we needed that
to get the roots that we needed in
this unique country that has more emphasis, even
though it's much smaller now, on that particular
style and approach.
But we in no way are turning away
from the prayer and faith approach.
And anything we say, that's got to be
as the foundation.
And then number five, we are not here
just to look at one little aspect of
God's work, though that's important, but we are
also here to try to honor God, to
try to honor His Word, and to develop
a more biblical view of resourcing God's work
and even a more biblical view of wealth
and of work.
Now, I hope we're not going to have
to go into all the philosophy of this,
because we've been doing this a lot for
the last few years.
We've got Mike Strachur's booklet on fundraising, God's
Way, which I think most of you have.
We've had papers at the General Council.
We've had documents by various people.
Forgive us if we haven't got those widely
circulated.
O.M. is great for producing all kinds
of things.
Don't let them drift out of print.
So I know different people here who have
had different amounts of foundation thinking in terms
of the biblical view of money, faith, wealth,
and work.
One of the books I've been pushing a
lot lately is a Navigator book, Your Work
Matters to God, because a lot of God's
people have a negative view of work.
I'm finding it everywhere, and I'm having the
joy of trying to set some people straight,
that Christian work is first class and secular
work is second class.
I'll tell you some of the people who
helped propagate that view are people, of course,
who worked in secular work and found it
very rough, wanted to go into Christian work,
and when they went into Christian work, the
way they share that wonderful experience in their
life makes it sound like the secular work
was more or less of the devil, but
this stuff I'm in now, this is the
real Christian work.
In O.M., you have people going in
both directions.
You have people who have been in Christian
work a long time, and some of them
want to get back in secular work.
Mike is a person that went in that
direction, was in it, and has come back,
which I think has given him some experience
and skills we greatly need to know him.
So we have people going in both directions.
The general situation right now in recession is
that people, more people want to get into
Christian work than ever before I've ever seen
in all my years of ministry.
Those of us in so-called Christian work,
especially when the money does come in, we
almost feel a little embarrassed as some of
our people are losing their jobs.
One of my best prayer partners just talked
to me on the phone two weeks ago,
just lost the top job of the big
company in the United States.
And I noticed he's just gone for an
interview with a Christian Bible school.
He faxed me today.
He wants to meet me, meet two hours
and talk about becoming a full-time worker
in a Christian Bible school.
In no way am I saying that's wrong,
but it does present a unique challenge.
And certainly in OM, we are hoping that
some people will stay in their job and
help produce the resources to carry all this
on.
And that is something I'm sure we're all
going to be faced with more in the
future.
Moving from the foundation, what does the present
need?
And where are we at present?
God has given us a great ministry.
I think many of us as OM leaders
are almost too aware of our weaknesses.
I live in a perpetual state of consciousness
of OM's weaknesses.
Even when I'm introduced in a church and
the man introducing me pays a wonderful tribute
to OM.
It doesn't seem to impact me.
It does a little bit.
I'm thinking about the weaknesses, the problems.
Why aren't we doing better in this?
And even in my own life, maybe in
God's grace that's good.
I've had people tell me they thought that
was good.
I guess it's an area where it's hard
sometimes to find a balance.
So God has given a great ministry.
I find it a great challenge to work
with the people that I'm privileged to work
with, both my own team throughout Britain and
throughout the world.
We just come from the international field and
country leaders' meetings in Germany.
And though meetings in general of that style,
that's not my particular first thing as a
preacher, and with other things that I'm really
motivated to do, I do find it a
very important and valuable time.
And when I see, and then I visit
a lot of these people on the field,
I see the work they're doing.
The sacrifice, because many of these OM leaders
are sacrificing.
Time, money, personal desires.
That doesn't mean there's never any blessings or
any benefits or even things that minister them
as human beings, but it does mean that
most of our leaders are people of tremendous
integrity, people we can trust.
If we give them $25,000 to buy
something for $500, we're going to get the
right change.
We're going to get the right change.
And of course, that's going to be an
ongoing battle as the work gets bigger.
And I've written here at point one under
this thing of where we are at present
and what is the present need, that OM's
greatest asset are all of our friends and
prayer partners.
And one of our purposes in this area
of ministry is to more highly esteem the
people who are praying, giving, helping, and supporting
this work.
And a lot of the things we want
to do are in the area of being
a servant.
And the response we get from our prayer
partners when we give out a challenge is
quite awesome.
When we lost that ship and gave out
the challenge to get Lagos II for a
couple of million, the response was overwhelming.
And we saw through that experience that there
was a lot of credibility out there, a
lot of friends, but that they weren't always
faced with the opportunity of doing something specific.
And Lagos II provided that and it also
awakened us to a number of things.
As Lagos II and the finance of Lagos
II very much came in linked with our
new policy, whereas the money for Lagos I
came in under the old policy, though there's
hardly anyone apart from myself that knows the
true story of the financing of Lagos I
because in those days I didn't talk about
those things.
And that was considered to be more spiritual.
Even film strip is in error because it
gives the idea that finding the crew took
years, but finding the money, it all came
in in...
Do you remember that film strip?
That's totally false.
The money was coming in over a period
of seven years, but through the old field
credit system it was all out in literature
projects all over the world.
But I tell you, when we went to
buy the ship, the word went out, get
the money back!
And all that money flowed back and then
God brought in the remainder from gifts at
the time and we didn't have enough.
We did not have enough to buy it
when we signed the contract.
In fact, people came into the early ship
ministry under the pressure and the challenge of
our teaching back in the early 70s.
I can think of even crew members.
They gave everything they had.
I think of one captain.
Everything he had.
Thousands.
That was five years before we ever had
a ship.
So from those earliest days of the ship
ministry it wasn't just manpower.
And that kind of lopsided view that the
manpower and getting the people, that's really important.
The money, that's nothing for God.
It's a distortion.
It's a distortion that also leaves the people
in the secular world feeling that their part
isn't really much.
When it's both.
It's not either or.
It's both.
And the sacrificial giving to that first ship
and then 1977 Dulos is quite amazing.
So that friendship, those prayer partners, the credibility
in thousands of churches, which all needs ongoing
work.
One of the reasons, try to get this,
that we need people from outside of the
work to help us is that we are
short staffed and most people already have too
many jobs and if we then, on top
of there's already too many jobs, say you
are also the fundraiser, which we are saying.
We are saying it.
It gets sometimes almost to the point of
the ridiculous.
Now miraculously in this room we have Paul
Ingram who I think's primary focus is actually
finance.
Is that not true?
Though I know his boss over here, Chris
Papworth, certainly has that as a good chunk
of his focus and I know that Tony
as the leader of the whole work in
Britain has that as a focus as well.
But when you take a man who's the
director of a whole field like Tony and
get him all jazzed up for finding finance,
you can be in the danger of heaping
burdens on people too great for them to
bear because already the pastoral care of the
people, the strategy, the relationships of all kinds
makes it difficult to put a lot of
time into this challenge that we're talking about
here during these days together.
Now it will all tie together especially when
we talk about friendship, credibility, church relationships.
An example is one day I went out
of here for a Sunday morning meeting to
a church not far from here where we
had friends, where I knew the pastor, we
had credibility so I got the Sunday morning
service.
If you don't have the Sunday credibility and
acceptance you're not going to get the Sunday
morning service.
Even in Britain, in America it's even more
difficult.
And I talked a little bit about money
in that Sunday morning service and so a
businessman who I guess must have felt somewhat
relaxed came to me at the book table
and said I'm amazed that groups like you
need money.
And you can imagine we had quite a
good conversation.
And within five days I had a 20
,000 pound check from that man.
So it all ties in together.
If you don't have the credibility and the
linking you're not even going to get in
the meeting in the first place.
You wouldn't be here tonight if you didn't
believe that somewhere God had his hand on
Operation Homilization.
I simply wouldn't be here.
Number two under this segment is what I
call the challenge of the personal support battle.
Now we could start a debate whether we
should even operate this way.
Why don't we just pay salaries like the
Southern Baptists?
Then you only have to argue about how
much you should pay.
Southern Baptist missionaries are pushing up 40,000,
50,000 a year.
They aren't seeing a huge amount of growth.
There are a number of missionaries, but I
don't despise what they're doing.
Their lifestyle is very upsetting to a lot
of people on the field, but there are
still some very good people.
An interdenominational faith mission that started from nothing
in our generation, we're only 30 plus years
old, doesn't easily start making quantum leaps and
talk about just paying people a salary.
When I talk about a salary I'm not
talking about paying back a man money that
he has raised.
You may call it a salary.
When I talk about a salary, I'm talking
about the way the secular world talks.
They don't bring you into a job at
IBM and then say, now go raise the
money.
We're going to pay you a salary, but
you go find the money.
So the key is not the word salary.
The key is the concept that these people
have to find basically their own finance.
Whatever form we give it back, big lump,
small lump salaries, they basically have to find
most of it.
If you know the O.M. system, you
know that we also have the general pool
so that if someone is short, they're not
just asked to leave.
We somehow put more milk, more water in
the soup.
We pray and general gifts have been absolutely
vital in maintaining staff support within O.M.
because that helps the thing keep going while
the person continues to work on their support
battle.
And I think in our brainstorming together, we
certainly will want to spend a little time
talking about personal support because it is the
largest single chunk of O.M. income, personal
support.
And we have phenomenal opportunities to increase it.
Can you imagine a movement of 2,000
people if they all increase only 10%?
You're talking about a lot of money.
And all these 2,000 people have their
friends, their relationships, their churches.
And as we even teach them how to
do a better prayer letter, as we teach
them how to use audio cassettes for communication,
how to have a better furlough, all these
things we're working at in various ways.
You can imagine the impact.
It's quite amazing.
Three, we're not concerned just about having people
on the mission field.
We want them to have the tools to
get the job done.
This is one of the reasons we are
committed to finding bigger sums of money.
David Hicks is doing a thesis on the
internationalization of missions with O.M. as his
case study.
It's a brilliant piece of paper, a brilliant
thesis.
And he's gone back into our history and
our roots.
And he asked me for a copy of
a book that I hardly ever show anymore
that influenced me when I first went to
Spain.
It was written by a Spaniard.
One of the chapters in that book about
doing missionary work God's way, something like that,
Samuel Vila, he was an old man at
that time.
He's now moving toward 100, still alive.
One of my very first contacts.
He wrote this book urging missionaries not to
just come to the field with support only,
but to come to the field with money
to get the job done.
Did you read that book?
That brought into the work and into the
first leadership manual a term that somebody said
later was grammatically incorrect, producing faith.
And if you've seen that in our old
literature you may say, well what is that?
What we're talking about there is faith not
just to get there, not just to get
there and feed our children and live in
a house, but money to buy literature, to
get a bicycle, to get a cassette recorder,
to get videos, tools to get the job
done.
And I think one of the very encouraging
things has been OM's ability to supply our
missionaries with the tools to get the job
done.
Hundreds of bicycles, hundreds of vehicles, millions and
tens of millions of pieces of literature.
And I'm sure one of the reasons people
don't give, and we'll have a time of
questions in a little bit, is they don't
realize how much their money can do in
world missions.
They don't realize what that money can do
in world missions.
I must confess that when it comes to
saving money and the use of money, I
haven't really changed much, though I have more
grace and more balance and I know how
to spend money a little bit, even for
recreation.
It's always the hardest thing for me.
But one of the reasons is I've just
seen what even ten pounds can do.
What ten pounds in the right place can
do.
We're not just talking about big gifts.
And I think OM, even under our older
policy, often had that ability, without asking anybody
to point out what that money could do.
Certainly that's what I was doing all the
time behind the scenes.
And I used to pray with all my
heart, oh Lord, put it on their hearts
to ask the right questions.
Under the old policy, nothing was more important
almost than for the people to ask the
right question, which was, how do you get
your money?
Of course, some of the dumb answers that
OMers sometimes gave when that question was asked
could make up really one of the Christian
joke books of this century.
And some of you know some of those
stories like this lady that wanted to give
you a huge amount of money but heard
it was a faith movement and certainly didn't
want to interfere with that.
And some other person whose pastor asked him,
well, how much money do you need to
go?
And almost in an insulting way, the OMers
said, well, this is a faith movement.
We look to God alone.
And of course, some pastors there are just
thrilled because they've got lots of things they
can give their money to much less this
OMer going to the field.
So we're not just in a personal support
battle as big as that is, but we
have that desire and that goal to see
the tools to do the job done.
And that involves a lot of literature.
I don't know if you realize that one
of our goals in the early days of
OM was gospel advertising.
I ran ads in India in New Year's
Digest.
We had massive response.
I eventually gave up.
Of course, some other groups were doing that.
God led me to a millionaire named Mr.
Sherrod.
And just to keep the record state, in
God's providence, he's let me fellowship with people
of all financial spectrum.
And OM has always had a few very,
very wealthy people who were linked with us.
They say to have a lot of wealth
you've got to be a little eccentric.
I don't know.
I've also been accused of being eccentric, so
maybe that's why I get on with some
of these people.
But this man, Mr. Sherrod, and I'm not
going to mention many names this evening, was
one of the few that as a multimillionaire
wanted to have no money by the time
he went to heaven.
And so he was spending all of his
money.
As far as I know, he's now broke.
We never hear from him anymore.
He's lived a lot longer than he expected.
I don't think he's suffering.
He's from Texas or Arizona.
This man had this vision to put hundreds
of thousands of dollars into advertising the gospel.
Some of his ads were very blunt.
He wanted us to put these gospel ads
in the Hindu newspapers that were absolutely hard
sell.
Gospel, and we had some difficulty with that.
And I think he bypassed us eventually and
ran them all over India.
I don't know if you noticed in Newsweek
or Time recently, Moshe Rosen, the founder of
Jews for Jesus, is one of the great
fundraisers of America and has a great organization,
is running full-page ads in Newsweek.
Do you know what kind of money that
costs?
But do you know how many people see
that?
How many Jews read that?
Now somebody may say, well, I don't think
that's the most effective way to reach Jews,
but there's no group in the movement in
the world that's hardly read more Jews to
Christ than Jews for Jesus.
And it, I think, is a great work.
And then I've written here that our burden
is not, again, a small burden.
It, in fact, is a very large burden
and is to reach millions.
OM is a movement that has always sought
millions.
God has given us the privilege of giving
the gospel face-to-face, counting literature and
personal testimony, upward toward 500 million people.
And we, considering population explosion, want to continue
to reach millions.
People with a small vision, they only need
small money.
But if people have a big vision, they
need big money.
And I think with a 30-35 year
track record of handling money carefully, of having
men and women of integrity, of being based
on the Bible, that God, in His sovereignty,
wants to commit large sums of money to
us for World Evangelism.
Now He already is.
We have our annual accounts.
That also was a mixed, somewhat of a
mixed blessing.
It should have been done in pounds.
I wasn't, I'm afraid, involved in that and
caught it after it went out into print.
And some, as most things in OM, some
people didn't particularly like it.
I have some copies there.
But other people felt it was very, very
helpful.
But certainly some people, when they see the
total amount of money that goes through OM,
they get a bit of a shake.
There are some people who give smaller sums
of money that these days would prefer to
give to something else other than OM.
It's just too big.
One man wrote me and said, I used
to pray for you, but the work has
become very big and very complicated and I
don't feel I can give anymore.
Could you please take my name off the
list?
Well, what was he praying for over the
years, that we shrink?
So we lost that prayer partner.
I don't think we should be intimidated by
a few people that we lose in the
process of going forward with a greater vision
and with greater steps of faith.
With the people that we have in leadership
in OM, the area leaders and the field
leaders that they work together with, I don't
think OM in the next decade is going
to launch anything bizarre.
I don't think Tony would put up with
it, the engineer.
OM is not a movement that's launching bizarre
things, even the way British people think.
Now the way Americans think, you can be
sure we're not launching bizarre things.
Our goals toward the year 2000 are considered
quite obtainable.
That was boring to some of the goals
being launched more by people in other countries.
We're a movement that's committed to growth, growth
that we can keep in balance with the
pastoral care of the people and with all
the other things that we have to do.
But at the same time, it's going to
take millions.
And with recession hitting us, with so many
other factors, I can't go into detail because
of the time.
I tell you, it's going to take a
lot more work and effort just to keep
up the existing budget.
Just to keep up the existing budget is
going to take more work.
I kept my ICT budget up last year,
but I worked 10% harder than the
year before.
So it all looks nice at the end
of the year, but you can ask my
wife about my lifestyle.
And I could have never done that if
my children weren't grown up and out of
the nest.
I couldn't do it years ago because my
children had a big esteem and your scheduling
has to be around your children.
So I've been able to work harder because
you don't get involved with a lot of
people and a lot of relationships and then
just leave them.
It just doesn't work that way.
I listed also under this section just two
other points.
Not only are we trying to reach the
millions of Christ and of course the priority
now isn't literature, it's church planting, it's every
kind of evangelism and every country is different.
But on top of that, my next point,
we have a burden to respond to the
church in need.
The church needs the kind of books and
teaching materials that we have on our ships,
that we have on our shelves, that we
have right on this table.
That takes money.
I was with Jack McAllister.
Jack McAllister last week pioneered fundraising on television
in America, which unfortunately later on was misused.
He launched it 40 years ago and he
launched Every Home Literature Crusade, which probably gave
out more tracks than any other movement in
the world, certainly one way ahead of us
because they specialized in tracks.
He later went through some difficulties and was
removed from his own organization and I just
praise God that we went into the desert.
He fought his way back and Jack's main
ministry now is intercessory prayer.
I know no one that follows me as
closely as Jack McAllister.
He seems to know more where I'm going
than sometimes I do.
There's a phone call ahead of time waiting
for me to call him back so we
can pray on the phone.
I just had a time of prayer with
him and his wife and he said to
me because this is in my morning meeting
and I had this book table on a
donation basis and he said to me what
few say even homers, he said with that
book table you have doubled the impact of
your visit to this church.
Now here's a man 77 years of age,
in fact I was with him on his
birthday and praise God I think most OMers
do see that.
The printed page.
Right now almost every OM field is asking
for money for literature projects and a lot
of it is going to be turned down.
Love Europe, there's the thing I think right
on the table was given to me today.
They need money for literature.
I've got written requests but I don't have
the money and we know that the money
is not the only thing when you have
a literature project that you then got to
get it printed and delivered and a few
other things.
So we don't just have this burden of
reaching the millions with all that costs and
all that involves but we have the burden
to be partnership with the church, work with
the church, supply them with literature, cassettes, books.
It's not just like the old days we
came along with books now we come with
cassettes, video cassettes and a few other things
thrown in.
Your church also is crying out for evangelistic
tools and India, which is our largest field
as far as literature distribution, we've had the
privilege of providing hundreds and hundreds of churches
with literature.
Some of them are more than happy to
give it out but they've got to have
it and it's amazing what can be done
as we supply churches and individual missionaries.
Exoemers are constantly wanting more literature to give
out and then thirdly under this subsection sorry
probably the notes are not very clear if
you're trying to write things down is we
are concerned about the physical needs of people
and we want to be involved.
Some of our own young people reared in
this work all they're asking for is to
go on OM.
All they're asking for is to go on
OM.
Should we not have a scholarship fund, some
money, whatever we call it, we don't have
to announce it but we have to propagate
it if it's even by word of mouth
so that we can put our own young
people.
I mean we live in a culture where
people in the secular world are paying tens
of thousands.
I know it's not so much in England
as America.
Tens of thousands that put their young people
through college.
Can we not trust God for the finance
to give our young people an OM experience
or help them through Bible college.
We have an amazing number of OM teenagers
now headed into Bible college or university or
Christian college and it's put a lot of
strain on parents.
We have some cases where parents for 10
years were putting 80% of their money
into the work.
80% into the work, 10% living
on it, 20%.
Now they're needing some money back because they've
got children going to expensive universities and when
they in some cases try to get any
money they got, they ran into a brick
wall.
This is where sometimes Peter and I with
special projects and other funds which are very
limited try to come to the rescue and
a lot of other interesting things are happening
in OM because of pressure, increasing tendency for
people to get wheeling and dealing to make
money on the side.
Some of which is acceptable.
Some of which OM leaders are very naive
and some of them are going to end
up in court because I tell you a
mix in business with full time Christian work
has proven in the past to be very,
very tricky.
I know I launched a company in Bangkok
with my friend Everett Lange and it didn't
result too good personally.
We did stay out of court.
Some people can do it but it's not
everybody's thing.
And then the reality of the recession.
I'm still under this main category the present
need.
Just giving some basic things about the present
need.
The reality of the recession, there's two R's
you can remember, and it's effect on Christian
work is awesome.
Not just in terms of lack of money
but in terms of pushing further apart the
rich and the poor.
So I can go to a particular city
in the United States where they are raising
$50 million for a building and where there's
hundreds of Christians unemployed who are barely having
food on the table because of course this
particular church has 35-40 millionaires in the
church.
So for them to raise $20 million is
not such.
It's still hard work but it's not so
difficult.
The division even of wealth within the churches
is quite amazing.
In America wealthy people usually start with Episcopalians
and then they're Presbyterians.
Baptists are more middle and then you get
out of the poor they're usually Pentecostals.
That is a wide generalization which has changed
significantly in the past 20 years.
There's still a factor.
It's amazing how many churches that we are
involved in are just barely keeping up their
own budget.
Now how are we going to get good
amounts of finance from churches that are not
keeping up with their own budget and that
includes their missionary budget.
I could be full time just taking missions
conferences in churches that think George Verwer is
one of the keys to get their missions
budget back on target.
I go, preach my heart out.
This Sunday I preached eight times in one
Sunday.
That's not the norm and basically, of course,
OM isn't going to get much out of
it because they're already 50% under in
their budget and they've got existing people.
It's not that they wouldn't like to give
to us, but if they've got missionaries out
there who they're having trouble supporting that has
got to be priority.
I'm just trying to learn how to communicate
with these churches so that maybe we can
have both.
We can increase their budget, but that OM
could come out with some money for the
Muslim world.
That's what I usually talk to these people
about.
It's interesting what they classify by the way
as missions.
In some churches it's another whole story.
I thank God for the occasional time I'm
still learning when I have the courage to
ask, look, do you think you could take
in the middle of this weekend one offer
for operation mobilization in the Muslim world.
Fortunately, occasionally they do take the initiative on
this, but you'd be surprised how many times
there's no way you're going to get the
offering.
The offering is for their program and what
they're doing.
You come in as a speaker, they'll give
you your expenses, a little on top and
you go your way.
How do we get a little more honest,
a little more open so that we can
get some balance in this?
I think I took what I felt was
the more spiritual approach.
Esteem the other organization, esteem the existing missionaries,
just go in and praise the Lord you
even have the privilege of preaching.
Part of me is still there, but isn't
there a better way?
Can't we just be a little more open
that though we have a burden for the
whole work of God, we have a mandate
from the Lord for Central Asia, for Turkey,
for Afghanistan.
We believe strongly in what we're doing and
so we're not afraid to say, look we
know this whole weekend is geared toward your
own mission program, but do you think there's
something that we could do for OM's work
in the Muslim world?
And I'm finding when I talk, quite good
response.
But if you don't say anything, often it's
just bypassed.
The reality of the recession especially hits us
when we see key givers to OM out
of work and unable to give anymore.
We also are greatly affected by increasing numbers
of people who gave to the work, financially
supporting individuals, but through their contact with those
individuals, they decide they want to become a
missionary as well.
This is happening all the time.
I've never heard anyone even discuss this more
than 15 minutes.
What happens to a brother on the field
who's supported largely by a person who now
decides to go into ministry himself?
Well, who makes up the difference?
And this is why honesty and speaking about
these things is so important.
Now moving on to my fourth main point,
if you're able to follow me, how do
we respond?
I've written here prayer and action, and that's
a bit of a generalization, but it is
my prayer that people are But this will
not be one more 15 hour period of
just talk because though you may be new
to OM talking about this, some of us
aren't.
The hour has come, we've got to have
action.
And one of my burdens for this, and
you can bounce this back, is that some
of that action has to be men outside
of OM and women taking the initiative without
too much backup from us.
We'll give the backup, but we're limited.
At the Quinta we're limited, on my team
we're limited, and is there a way that
we can go forward in which we're giving,
especially men who are in what the world
calls the retirement sector, a few of you
are in that, hardly retired from watching the
way you're working and going at things, who
could really be out there doing the job.
And that has been my challenge to some
of you, I have not challenged all of
you personally about this, though I notice almost
everybody here I have talked to about money
in recent years, even Alec Gordon, I think
I may have surprised Alec with some of
our new views the last time I was
up there, but he's pressing on, he's got
so many irons in the fire, I'm not
sure he can all count them, but we
need a few people who are going to
actually go out and do the work.
What do I mean by that?
Phoning people, sitting down with people and talking
to them, because it's that personal contact that
is the greatest need.
Now we've got videos, we've got audios, we
do have back up, we've got more literature
about world missions than almost any group in
the British Isles, we're handling the money properly,
Mike Blight's going to make sure we continue
to do that, but we don't have especially
people who know how to talk to business
people.
It's not every O.M. that knows how
to talk to a business person or even
get an appointment, but if you've been in
business, you know the language, you know how
people think.
Some of you have actually been in fundraising.
Doug was major in that with the Louise
Palau campaign.
I think you both helped Louise Palau find
his money and help those campaigns.
So I just long that we'll go from
here, even if we don't get full agreement
about every detail, our time here is short,
we'll go determined to do something.
I'm very thankful that when we were talking
about it for several years, my friend David
Olst picked up the ball and organized a
fundraising dinner, for lack of a better term,
in Merseyside that I think went relatively well.
It's still early days and our approach, even
in any event like this, is always fairly
conservative and laying foundations, building relationships, rather than
coming down on them with self-addressed envelopes.
So my prayer is that there will be
a lot of prayer and action.
I've written here, I believe the Holy Spirit
wants to lead those of us committed to
the right people at the right time and
the right place.
And my life is as exciting as it's
ever been, even when I was a missionary
in India, because the Holy Spirit just keeps
leading me to the right person at the
right time and the right place.
I'm sitting on a plane, I get talking
to the stewardess, or she heard, overheard a
conversation, we befriend her, we say if you're
ever in London, phone, she comes to visit
us, now she's giving us free flight coupons
to the United States.
Now she has just retired from TWA, just
gone bankrupt, and she's moved from Wheaton down
to right next to Peachtree City and she's
hinting on the phone, maybe we want her
to work in the office.
God, in the whole area that we're talking
about, the Holy Spirit, if we're available, the
Holy Spirit will guide us.
But I believe we have to be motivated,
we have to be available, and we have
to be aiming.
If we're only mainly aiming at recruits, we
will only mainly get recruits.
What can an organization do that gets recruits
and doesn't get money?
In fact, we're losing recruits all the time
because we're so weak in finding the finance
for the recruits.
Do not go out any longer after this
weekend, and we're also learning together, and say
that the greatest need is for workers.
Please do not say that anymore because it
is workers and finance.
We can't even finance the workers we have
on OM, much less just go around and
say, come all and sundry and join OM,
especially families, the number of families that want
to join OM right now.
It's becoming quite an enormous burden.
They all want to meet with you personally,
don't they?
They all want to talk.
You can correct me on this, but nine
out of ten is a dead end.
It just doesn't work.
Do you know how much time is consumed?
People like us,
it's
very to get involved.
I'm not asking any of you to do
what I'm not already doing and want to
do more of, but I can tell you
what I can do is limited and also
what we can do in partnership together is
huge.
For example, if you know anybody in the
British Isles that is interested in giving finance
to a land and for some weird reason
wants to talk to George Burr, I will
tell you that is no problem.
You live in a small country because I'm
ready to go the length of the whole
country just to talk to one man who
is willing or woman to put finance into
the work of God.
I flew to Vermont over Christmas for one
meeting.
That's ten thousand miles for one meeting and
it's not for money, it's for recruits.
See, recruits is still bigger in my own
ministry than finance so I'm trying as you
can guess to put it in balance.
We've got literature, we've got now some tremendous
videos, we've got, well I touched on the
whole credibility, I don't want to repeat that
again, tremendous prayer letters going out from La
Quinta and other places and I just believe
we've got the basics to really do something
a lot greater in this area of releasing
finance.
I've just written a couple of other things,
one is under this main four, how to
respond, we've got to mobilize the laymen, it
can't be done by all full time people.
What happens in the states, they basically hire
fundraisers.
The fundraiser may be raising a hundred thousand
and his salary is twenty five and they
think that's doing pretty good.
We've got people now fifty percent of the
money is for the fundraising, fifty percent of
the dollar fundraising, others it's twenty five percent.
That's when they really analyze it properly, not
play games, as some people do in their
annual reports.
I'm not even judging that.
Finding finance for the work of God is
so difficult.
I'm not about to point fingers at anybody,
but I think the example of Wycliffe Bible
translators who launched Wycliffe Associates is a tremendous
model that they mobilize the laymen, they give
the laymen freedom, by the way Wycliffe is
now more conservative than us, we just in
the last general council passed them up.
They're still arguing over it.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that we now through the last
general council accept the terminology fundraising, though no
one in OM is forced to go into
it, right down to the individual in his
prayer letter, and we accept that there are
times and situations where there's nothing wrong by
the guidance of the spirit to ask somebody
for money.
Now to tell you how good we're doing
at that, I can assure you that we're
doing very well because we've got a cloud
over us of 30 years, but there is
that freedom, and just to have that freedom
has relaxed the movement and I'm just thrilled
with it, but it's got its problems, as
I'm sure you can understand.
Anything we can think about, brainstorm about, to
help us mobilize other people to find finance
would be great.
Someone already in our pre- discussions mentioned
how the Bible Society seems to have their
man or their woman in almost every church.
What an incredible thing if a system like
that could be worked out right across the
country.
I'm not saying we should do this.
We had people who really were in there
battling for finances.
It would be exciting.
Some wonderful things have been done here in
Britain long before we even launched a new
policy.
There's very little that's new.
Breakfast meetings, supper meetings, pastor's meetings, but in
the midst of all the things we're attempting
to do, it's impossible to keep all these
things going, especially if we're limited to full
-time staff.
We've got to get the lay people mobilized.
One of the things I'm most excited about
is totally informal one-month notice.
I go to somebody's house and he's brought
15 or 20 people.
I just talked to Ken Taylor.
I'm the founder of Tindale House on the
phone three days ago.
I said, Ken, I'm going to have one
day in Chicago in the whole of 1992.
I said, I want to come to your
house.
I wonder if you can bring some people
in because Ken is happy about our new
way of going.
Will you bring some people in who you
think might be interested in financing?
At this point I had to explain to
Ken, Ken, most of my meetings because of
who I am seem to be with young
people and in the area of recruiting.
This meeting is the other side and I
share some of my reasons including the fact
that another major donor whose close friend just
died on Friday, Peter Gunther, and that this
meeting in his home is aimed at the
other side, finding support for these young people.
Why is it totally legitimate to have meetings
for recruiting?
It takes so many meetings for recruiting but
it's not legitimate to have a meeting in
which we are really looking for donors and
prayer partners who will give.
All kinds of meetings we can engage in
the next 12 months in some experimentation.
If there's a businessman who's busy, he only
has an hour in Heathrow, that's me.
Maybe one of you guys has a VIP
lounge I think in Heathrow.
Let's meet these people where we are.
I tell you, I'm not big into food.
I only need a little bit but I
enjoy food.
But I'll tell you, if I have to
go to a really nice restaurant in central
London to meet with somebody, I will do
it.
And I think as we do a little
experimenting, as we try to understand a little
more about where some of these people are,
some of these people are who are holding
all this money.
I'm sorry to say that that is all
there is of this recording.