The strange quacking noise which can be heard
in the background of this recording is not
because George was in a farmyard, but is
due to a fault in the machine which
he was using when he recorded this message.
We hope it will not distract your attention
too much.
Here now is George Verwer.
Well, Father, we do now commit this session
to you as we deal with some of
these basic principles on how we can be
servants of others, how we can have a
ministry of encouragement to people as they go
forth in their Christian life.
We thank you for what's happening in Easter
evangelism.
We think of your blessing there upon us
last night.
And again and again, we just see so
many young Christians who want to go on
for you.
Lord, we do want to be able to,
in a godly way, focused on you, O
living God, lead these people forward properly.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, I hope you remember to bring your
little manual with you.
If not, at least take out your notes
or something you write on.
You remember we finished our third session and
just urging you to read carefully the section
on the financial and business policies of the
work.
One of the most important factors from the
earliest days of OM, since we were even
in those early days in Mexico, immediately thrust
into opening bookshops and starting radio broadcasts and
correspondence courses, was to, of course, try to
operate in a business-like and a proper
way, knowing the scriptures also clearly say that
all things should be done decently and in
order.
And this section, these two pages, two and
a half pages, sum up really some of
the very, very basic foundational goals when it
comes to this area of finance.
The first is giving glory to God.
Now, I have to watch myself at this
point because I want to cover quite a
few chapters and not give a little message
on each one of these themes.
And, of course, giving the glory to God
always causes us to want to want to
share because it's such an important principle.
And it's easy to pay lip service to
this.
But, you know, the human ego and the
human heart is totally opposed to this particular
principle.
And as human beings, we have a canny
way of attempting to get at least some
glory for ourselves.
So we try to take some practical steps.
Admittedly, we learned it was a lot more
difficult than we thought.
We tried to avoid a lot of publicity,
especially man-centered publicity.
We never ran any advertisements.
I don't know if you even realize that.
Sort of advertising O.N. and telling everybody
what a wonderful group we were and that
they should join us.
Have you ever seen some of the adverts
for some of the Bible schools?
Reading the advert guarantees me I don't want
to go there because I don't believe it,
what they're saying.
I once confronted quite strongly a Bible school
principal about the ethics of his adverts about
his Bible studies.
On the other hand, of course, we had
to share with our prayer partners.
So we always, from the earliest days, tried
to have some kind of basic information.
Naturally, a movement that grows and gets such
a wide range of people, you don't always
have 100% unity on what to say,
on the place of pictures, especially pictures of
people.
We tried to keep that in balance.
We know that in our effort to walk
in humility, we can get into all kinds
of traps, false humility, subtle forms of pride.
So we know there's no simple answer to
this.
There's no way that we can suddenly stand
up and claim we give more glory to
God in our work than Joe Blow gives
in his work.
We ultimately have to stand before God.
But on the other hand, if we just
give this up, we feel, well, this is
too idealistic.
We're failures anyway.
That is going to lead us, I think,
deeper into difficulty.
Number two, of course, the aspect of the
OM message that upset people more than any
other aspect is this emphasis on forsaking all.
But from the earliest days, not just in
recent years, we tried to find the balance.
The last paragraph, there must be balance.
And we often talk about the fact of
Philippians, that God will supply.
And from the early days, we believed God
would supply the furniture we needed for our
bookshop.
Remember the first bookshop we ever opened there
in Sao Tio, Mexico.
I, together with one or two others, had
the joy of cleaning the place out, cleaning
the toilets, cleaning the floor, and preparing the
place for the grand opening.
Our goal, we were only going for six
weeks in the summer, was to see some
national workers mobilized to get a hold of
the place to rent a shop and have
it open before we left to go back
to Bible College by the end of the
summer.
We didn't even have a place.
But God answered those prayers, and we had
a place, and it was open before we
finished the end of the summer.
We were also studying in university at the
same time.
We had to learn some very, very basic
things.
And we learned that God could supply needed
equipment.
God supplied gospel recordings.
God supplied literature.
God supplied typewriters.
We still believe that.
Today we're praying more for computers than we
are for typewriters.
This is the big top line prayer request.
There's about six offices in O.M. that
all want computers.
Interesting.
If you've got any money hanging around that
you want to release in the name of
the Lord for the computer fund, please feel
free just to go on ahead and do
that.
The book Revolution of Love and Balance came
out of some of the difficulties we faced
in this area.
In the goal of forsaking all.
Number three, living by faith.
It was a book that made quite an
impact on us in those days.
Written by a Spaniard.
He was quite already an elderly man.
Samuel Vila, and he's still alive today.
Amazing man.
Went through the whole Franco regime.
Was there when the Civil War was fought,
and he was one of the few in
Spain that extended to us the right hand
of fellowship when just a couple of us
arrived.
He emphasized in his little book, which is
no longer in print, the need for missionaries
to have producing faith.
I don't know if he called it that.
That may be my word.
It may not even be proper grammatically.
What do we mean by that?
We mean faith not just to survive.
Not just faith to have food on your
own table and a roof over your head,
but faith to give nationals, maybe in a
country where there weren't a lot of resources,
to give nationals the tools to do the
job.
It's a very basic concept in L.A.
that is greatly neglected in some places.
Oftentimes people now just think in terms of,
well, I can just get my minimum support
or my support.
Of course, that may be good for the
first year when you're starting, but even then
it may be good to take a greater
step of faith.
So our burden wasn't just to live by
faith.
We soon discovered this word meant different things
in different countries.
And in some countries we determined very much
we should lean more on tent making, which
is what we did when we went to
India.
But we've never lost that burden.
It's one of the ministries we have here
in Brahma of believing God for the tools
to do the job, keeping the overhead to
a minimum.
This is, I think, one of the areas
where we've been hit the most.
It's hard to explain how cheaply we were
able to live 15, 20 years ago.
That has changed.
You know, it's possible now in some countries
for the man living a very simple lifestyle
to still need more money than he could
earn if he had a second job in
the same town.
Because things have so shifted.
And often people with second jobs in some
countries, they cannot make ends meet.
They have to get into corruption or at
least fiddle on the income tax or at
least send somebody else off in the family
to work.
Most families in the world, in the third
world countries, survive by famine, by somehow pooling
the resources, getting several people in the same
little house to work.
That's how they keep going.
And of course, depending on how many bribes
they can take in or other means of
income, they may have an uncle off working
in a wealthy country who will be sending
back money.
So you can imagine in those countries where
in our teaching we try to practice equality.
The person coming in from overseas is to
a degree living very close to what that
national worker in that country is supposed to
live on.
Believe me, the complexities are stagnant, especially when
it comes to the overhead of getting something
done.
Because again, just living is one thing.
But getting something done, getting that equipment, getting
maybe transportation causes a great challenge.
We still, however, have this as a goal.
And we believe that we must keep it
as a goal.
And you won't understand O.M. if you
don't understand that goal.
Number five, using common sense.
This is another difficult area because different people
have different ideas of what common sense is
when it comes to spending money, when it
comes to what you eat, when it comes
to what you buy.
Someone says get product A, that will last
longer.
But it usually costs more.
Someone says get product B, look at it,
it's half the price, but it may be
broken in two weeks.
So when somehow we get peace, we go
up and come in to product C, you
know, may not be the best, but it's
not the worst.
This takes more research to really find out
what is the best deal for the money.
And ultimately, of course, you never get unity.
You never get unity, even in your own
family, if you have any of this with
your wife, as to what you should buy,
what kind of washing machine you should buy.
I never knew, but I watched it in
The Curse of Life and in the marriage,
that there was such a thing as a
washing machine crisis.
I can tell you, there are many washing
machine crises.
Because the one you buy will break down.
And then you'll be right back in the
crisis again.
And if you think it's a matter of
just praying in a ten-pound note to
get the washing machine, even a good used
one.
And I was fortunate, the last time I
met a prayer partner, I think I was
giving out tracts on the high street, and
he said, you know, could you use a
washing machine?
And they'll get me off the roof of
Burnley South.
But it's an ongoing struggle, time and sense,
time and sense.
We learned a hard way in our vehicle
program about this.
We could get in a very big tangent
at this point.
But people used to give us every kind
of vehicle imaginable, usually after no one else
wanted it.
They'd phone up the L.A. mechanic and
say, hey, I've got a vehicle, I'd like
to donate it for the Lord's work.
And it used to be more of a
nightmare than you'd ever know.
We'd get more and more vehicles just piled
up, and pretty soon the neighbors were phoning
in.
You know, what is this, a junkyard you
just phoned in?
And many, many problems through people being so
generous with their own vehicles toward operationalization.
Good things can get out of hand.
Number six, recognizing people's abilities and gifts.
I've just been listening to Peter Maiden's message.
I did a lot of jogging over the
weekend, listening to messages as I was jogging.
One of them was Peter Maiden, on the
gifts of the Spirit.
He goes into a little assembly and says,
I sense I'm here in a very gifted
group of people.
They all perk up and listen.
I was listening to Dennis Alexander, actually I
was in the bathtub listening to him, yesterday.
He was saying that on the one hand,
he felt one of the most important things
was to discover your spiritual gift.
Your gifts, God has given.
This is something we want to work more
on.
This is why we often try to get
people into a variety of tasks.
To see what gifts the Lord has given
to them.
Number seven, realizing we are children of learners.
And number eight, the toughest challenge, perhaps in
the whole of Christian life.
Honesty and integrity.
Especially if you're in business.
In fact, in some countries, to be in
business and to be honest is a complete
contradiction.
It's not possible.
Nobody even pretends it's possible.
You would have Christian businessmen who would attempt
to be as honest as possible in the
light of the circumstances.
And this is where Christians, especially Anglo-Saxons,
with the particular ethical teaching we have had.
We are unbelievably naive about the real world.
And believe me, this challenge of being honest
and being men and women of integrity in
certain countries is the same as telling you
that you should never, never have even one
inch of lust or one inch of pride
or one inch of envy or one inch
of jealousy or irritability.
See, there are sins, aren't there?
The black and white things that are clearly
written even as laws in our society that
we're not supposed to do.
These we easily say.
Not always, of course.
Christians have struggled in these areas as well,
in any country.
But these we see and we very much
look down on anybody telling a lie or
anybody mudging around with their income tax or
anybody that's dishonest in their business practices.
Immediately, they'll be alarmed.
But sins of a disposition, irritability, in our
society, they go on unchanged.
And I've always found something that's helped me
to be a little less judgmental with people
that maybe are not as straight in business
as I would like is to not compare
my strong points with their weak points but
to compare their weak points or their strong
points with my weak points or at least
look at both sets of weak points.
And so much division comes in the church
because we compare that person's weak points.
Maybe he's a bit of a liar.
A liar, a Christian, telling lies with perhaps
our strong point that we feel it's been
several years since we've told at least a
lie that maybe we recognize.
Now, of course, a little gray area, stretch
truths.
Exaggeration, of course.
Well, that's not so bad, exaggeration.
To me, it's the sometimes most subtle form
of lying.
Well, that's a chapter I hope you'll spend
some time on.
Going over to social relationships, I don't want
to go into this in detail.
It's not the purpose of this session.
But it would be good for you to
read advice to leaders about this whole thing
of social relationships.
I think for some leaders, I haven't read
this actually for quite a long time.
There's other supplementary material.
Each country was given freedom to develop this
within their own country, hoping they would keep
somewhere within the bounds of what was set
out here and in the discipleship manual.
And, of course, we have discussed this in
our coordinator's conferences or general council meetings that
have made some changes.
I think they're incorporated in here, but not
in detail.
As I shared the other day, the whole
social policy thing within OM will not work
unless people come into OM with the right
goals and the right aims and don't see
it as a situation where they want to
try to get away with as much as
possible, but they see it as a situation
where for at least one year they want
to give themselves totally to God and to
His Word and to evangelism and to all
the basics of the spiritual life with the
realization that probably within the next year or
the year after God will be doing something
in their situation in terms of social relationships.
I don't think I'll take time again to
go into detail because I want to cover
other issues that we don't normally deal with.
Informing others and sharing the vision.
A lot is being said about this in
these days.
Again, it's good to go back to our
roots and realize that in the earliest days
that which really challenged people to come on
OM was to sit in on an OM
slide set.
Now, I have my own little personal convictions.
But I believe some of those early slide
sets in which we didn't even have tapes
and we didn't have music and we didn't
have all the expertise were as powerful as
anything that we have today.
Why?
Because we had the anointing of the Holy
Spirit and because people saw the enthusiasm and
they saw clearly what God was doing.
And every time we would show off in
a set of slides people would sign up.
I mean, three of us as a team,
my wife, Josie Burks, a black brother and
myself only arrived in England in February of
62.
February.
There was nothing here, absolutely nothing.
By June we had 90 British people recruited
and on the way with an unknown organization
across the English Channel to attempt to distribute
25 million pieces of Christian literature.
That didn't just happen because of prayer meetings,
that was a major factor.
It happened because there was communication.
People knew how to spread the vision.
And believe me, we used slides.
I think it's perhaps a mistake I made
of not using slides as much as I
used to.
But I hope you will make use of
slides and other audiovisuals when you're trying to
share the vision.
Just give this chapter a little re-study
before you launch out.
There's a lot more material now.
I think the little leaflet we have on
what to do when you go on a
furlough it's called after or in between a
new addition.
I think that should be studied.
And there's a lot of other good material,
how to write a prayer letter.
The ship has turned out material.
It's impossible to keep up with all the
material that has come out.
But sometimes it's the basics.
Simple things like when you take a meeting,
have some notes.
Most people cannot speak very well extemporaneously.
Peter Maiden was sharing a message I was
listening to how he so often uses quite
extensive notes to keep on talking.
Some people can speak extemporaneously.
Some people have a lot memorized.
But most of us need notes.
Especially if you're given only five minutes.
Many of the opportunities I had to share
the work initially had five minutes.
That's all they gave me.
When I came to Brownlink, that was in
1962, I had seven minutes in a Youth
for Christ meeting.
And the man touched on those seven minutes,
Ron George, was on OM for years and
is now the founder and leader of Gardner
Trust.
Seven minute meeting in Brownlink.
Sometimes if you can't say it in seven
minutes, you probably can't say it.
Now we're not talking about Bible teaching where
you go verse after verse, you need seven
minutes at least for each verse.
We're not talking about a ministry of exhortation
where you may be giving exhortation on different
subjects and give all the subjects we're touching
just in this one session.
But if you're going to a church and
you have at least one vision, something you
want to say, you can, if you have
to, say it in seven minutes.
You might want to practice that.
Because when you get back to your own
church, they may not say, now you've got
an hour to share with us all you
can do in our operationalization.
That's something we need to practice.
Moving on to prayer meetings, I don't know
if this is missing from any of your
manuals, but since the writing of this page,
we have what happened to the prayer meeting
and important little leaflet.
We have part two, what happened to the
prayer meeting.
We have George Miley, why we believe in
extended times of prayer.
And it's obvious that prayer, mobilizing prayer, leading
interesting live prayer meetings, a very, very important
part of the basic principles and policies that
God has put upon our hearts.
Some of you, within the coming months, when
you get back home, may have the responsibility
of leading a prayer meeting.
It completely amazes me how people who have
been on OM, they see prayer meetings, they
see the good things and the bad things.
They may even be a little critical.
Every prayer meeting could be better.
I've never been in a prayer meeting and
thought it could be better.
It's the story of my life.
But when they are suddenly in charge of
leading a prayer meeting, it's just a disaster
because they have failed to have even the
basic simple ingredients.
So many things can go wrong in a
prayer meeting.
I noticed last night in our prayer meeting,
we were praying down with Easter evangelism.
One man got going on the longest prayer
I have heard in at least a year.
I mean, I could tell it wasn't a
bad prayer.
And you could feel people resting trying to,
you know, stay in there.
If it hadn't been for a couple of
other rather long prayers in the first part
of this prayer meeting, we might have survived.
I decided right after that, we're moving into
groups.
And that all just can break a heavy
atmosphere in a prayer meeting and get people
into groups.
I think OM was one of the very
first to use this method.
It was unheard of 20 some years ago.
Breaking into groups in a public meeting, you
break into groups, go into different rooms or
something like that.
And I remember when we first started practicing
this.
Students in Moody Bible Institute, they had never
had that before.
We even had people in a main auditorium
just turn to the person next to them
and behind them and pray.
Now, of course, that particular practice has spread
all over the world.
I'm sure there's something spreading simultaneously with us
that we didn't have contact with.
It doesn't matter where it began.
It certainly works.
And I hope that you will study the
literature on prayer and be able to lead
prayer meetings.
It may only be a few people.
My first nights of prayer in Spain, two
of them.
I'll tell you, there were words I forgot
to lead that happened.
You get tired of listening to just two
voices over a couple of hours.
I should have written a leaflet, How to
Have Revival in a Prayer Meeting where there's
only two.
Prayer letters.
Here's another important section on how to write
prayer letters.
I'm convinced that so many people who turn
out prayer letters in the land don't read
these things because some of the prayer letters
that we turn out are really grim.
Now, maybe I just get the bad copy.
Maybe they just feel, well, here's a leftover
copy that the mimeograph machine almost ate and
we'll send that to George Burwell.
Here he wants a copy of the prayer
letter.
I don't know if you get Steve Hart's
prayer letter.
I've been getting it for 20 years.
You could put his prayer letters together and
you would have a powerful book.
Now, his job isn't writing prayer letters.
He's the head of the accounts department.
But you can learn how to write a
good prayer letter.
I don't write a great prayer letter.
I'm not a great writer.
I have to accept the degree of ability
that I have and get other people to
help me.
But I know that people read those letters
and they did before I was ever known.
You may think, oh, they read them now.
People know you.
People like to get a letter from a
personal friend more than from a famous, so
-called famous, leader.
You get enough of those letters.
They would like a letter from you, your
friends.
They don't know me.
Some of your friends who are praying for
you don't even like operational delay.
They're only tolerating a letter because they like
you.
Well, you're their friend.
And that is a powerful foundation to build
upon.
So please do study this section and try
to put some of these things into practice.
Steve Hart has written another memo on this
subject.
And I think you will find that memo
very, very helpful.
The last thing I write, Colossians 4.12,
on page 18, pray for your prayer partners.
I try to pray for many of my
prayer partners.
I can't say all because I don't know
who they all are anymore.
I was on my way praying to the
USA computer list of prayer partners, which originally
was my own prayer list.
Of course, I discovered a vast percentage of
these people.
Now, I don't know, so it wasn't so
easy to pray.
But I've discovered that when people sign up
as a prayer partner for us, for this
vision and this work, they end up getting
a tremendous blessing.
I think it's so important to realize it
is the privilege of the Church to be
involved in world evangelism.
World evangelism is not O.M. Satan.
World evangelism is God's plan and it's firstly
for the Church.
And we are supposed to be sent out
by our churches.
I know some churches that are crying to
God, some for years, that some young people
from their church would go into missionary work.
They would count it a great privilege because
they know what the Scriptures teach, to have
one of their young persons launch out into
missionary work.
Now, the problem is if it's not with
their own denominational mission society.
That's what causes the tension often when they
come on O.M. instead.
And this is why you and I have
to have wisdom on how to communicate what
O.M. is to our denomination and our
group, which means you need to make a
little thorough study of your own church, your
own group, their roots, then make a study
of O.M. and their roots and see
where you can get some amalgamation rather than
launching out immediately with the thing that affects
them the most.
Like writing back...
Well, I won't use that illustration.
It's too explosive.
Let's move on.
Publicity.
We now...
In this thing of publicity, we now have
a group of people who are trying to
maintain control over some of the publicity that
other groups make on our behalf.
This is a problem.
I can't get into it.
But we have a policy of working with
other groups.
Other groups want to get financed sometimes, O
.M., to help extend their ministry, close their
publishing bibles.
Yeah, they're going to be on O.M.'s
doorstep to buy bibles.
And in turn, they're going to tell about
O.M. in their magazine so that their
people will give them money to buy the
bibles so they can give the bibles to
O.M. We can't stop that.
We can't say, we're not going to cooperate
with anybody who raises money or who mentions
our name.
So we try to work for balance.
A group was here last week filming O
.M. because they, as their ministry, raise money
for these booklets.
Praise the Lord booklets.
We still have quite a few in the
warehouse, by the way.
I don't know if they sold those.
I think we started with 500,000 so
we don't have so many left.
That's their ministry.
We don't tell them, we go to them
and say, hey, we want you to raise
money to buy us these booklets we want.
No.
That's their ministry.
The booklets are there available.
They are looking for missionary agencies that will
help distribute them.
So it's foolishness, and it would be a
form of spiritual pride to be unwilling to
link in with them simply because we may
not agree with some particular method they may
have in their fundraising.
Most of the groups we work with are
fairly conservative in their fundraising.
And we have certain rules that we share
with them.
But the problem of publicity is ongoing.
And it is good for you to know
what O.M. teaches and what we feel
about that.
The most important thing, again the last line,
our best publicity is a Holy Christ centered
life.
We believe that more than film strips or
good literature that communicates or any form of
publicity, some will call it propaganda, that the
light, the light is that which is the
most important.
The greatest recruiters we have, this has been
proven in surveys, the greatest thing that brings
people on the web is the XOM or
another O.M. These other things can help.
And they are especially good for follow-up.
Somebody's life touched in a message or through
a testimony of an XOM or just through
a challenge by an XOM, then that literature
about the different countries, that is a terrific
follow-up, focusing.
And we want to use all these different
methods.
Bible shares, Lord, with no organizing prayer groups.
This was a major goal in the early
days that has really slipped.
I'll tell you, there's an area where we
have experienced discouragement.
It is in this.
The original policy, which we had to bend,
was that people couldn't come on land unless
they had a prayer group.
And when Dale Rothschild wanted to come across
to Europe, I challenged him to stay in
the States and get a prayer group.
Trust God for $12,000, which is equivalent
to $100,000 today, before he came, because
that was a combination of waking up a
prayer group, producing faith, and some of these
other principles.
I just had a gift and wrote a
letter this week to one of the founder
members of Greg Livingston's prayer group.
Not only we don't have the prayer group,
we don't have Greg Livingston either.
We have the Turkey prayer group.
In Chicago, we saw Satan just about demolished.
But it is a tremendous thing, when you
get time home, if you can start a
small prayer group, even if they meet once
a month.
If you don't feel you're able to challenge
them to be a prayer group for O
.M., make it a prayer group for World
Missions, where you emphasize different groups.
I still believe organizing prayer groups is a
major, and should continue to be a major
ministry of O.M. We have some very
good mission groups.
It takes on different forms in different countries.
But it's a basic principle to have prayer
groups.
Often the church in general is not willing
to do very much about missionary prayer.
Their own one prayer meeting a week is
just struggling.
They cannot make that a missionary prayer meeting.
And so we need other prayer groups.
It should not conflict with existing church prayer
meetings.
The more it can be tied into a
church or another organization, the better.
A lot of our prayer groups in Britain
are in universities, very low profile, under sort
of the general umbrella of the Christian Union,
rather than some second thing.
And we're working with our own assembly or
church.
All these things we're seeing today, 25 years
after this all began, that we need to
give more emphasis.
But you know, as we come up with
new ideas and new emphasis, it might be
good to study some of the old emphases.
We might discover that some of things, a
brand new fantastic idea, is already a basic
principle that we have neglected along the road
in which we have tried to, you know,
obey so much of the Lord and follow
the Lord in so many different aspects of
the Christian life.
Try to just review those seven points.
So many.
Number one, show a definite interest in the
church and its activities.
Number two, be friends with the pastor and
the elders.
Even when you're out and have letters to
such people, the chairman of the mission committee
that indicate a degree of submission are so
helpful.
Three, do not expect people of the church
to agree 100%.
Four, attend the prayer meetings and pray with
the people in your own church.
Five, then spend time with people.
Don't present No.
6OM as a secret society.
We had a problem in the early days
when we were not well known.
And some people misunderstood our policy about publicity
and thought we were sort of a secret
society.
Even today, if this work is not presented
properly, people can get the idea that it's
a cult.
Every OM should be able to just rattle
out 10 ways you can know that OM
is not a cult.
I've touched on those at times.
But there's no thinking evangelical leaders that have
any contact with us.
And that's in, what, 100 nations?
Not that we're working permanently in 100 nations.
We're working permanently in about 35.
But we've had contacts and friends and campaigns
and meetings.
There are over 100 nations that give courses
and trips.
There's nobody in here who's accusing us of
being a cult.
There are people who don't like us.
I think we've, you know, 25 years proven
that that is not our direction.
But new people don't know that.
I mentioned back in that chapter on finance
and business policies in the conclusion.
I talked about the board of directors back
on page 10.
Some people don't even know we have a
board of directors.
People want to know who is this George
Burwell responsible for?
Because absolutely people are petrified of the idea
of dictatorship.
I don't think it would be difficult to
find Christian world leaders so far from a
dictatorship.
You can't do anything without agreement and unity.
And especially because of our link with certain
kinds of churches in our early days I
always strongly believe in the plurality of leadership.
It's not a one man show.
Now there needs to be men with authority,
with a job done, and of course the
ultimate responsibility is to God and we believe
God has appointed people to board of directors
and our churches.
Because of the way OM is geared in
with the churches, there is no way that
I can, for example, be responsible to only
one person or one group.
It's not possible in this kind of work.
I am responsible to some degree to my
own churches.
I am responsible to the New Jersey board,
the USA board, which in a sense sent
me out in the first place.
Though these were, because the work was only
being born, these were all men that I
recruited.
But it won't be that way for the
second generation.
It may be that in a pioneer stage
these men of course were recruited by me
and so our relationship may be a little
bit different than the next person who comes
along.
But they are there.
And now that I live in England, I'm
responsible to the British board of directors.
I'm also responsible to the European leader.
Jonathan McCarthy, as far as I'm concerned, can
have input and correction into my life at
any time.
And I try to always be responsible because
the word of God says to make yourself
one to another with other people that I'm
working together with.
And here in Bromley I work very much
in submission to Jerry Dayton and to Jack
and Neil temporarily and I think this kind
of submitting to one another and teamwork is
that which we see very clearly in the
New Testament.
And I believe it works.
Now it's a balance because men also are
given gifts and those gifts need to be
recognized.
Men are given discernment and putting all this
together is a challenge.
But I hope you will get to understand
your own church and be able to convince
them that O.M. is a fantastic arm,
set of arms, fingers, however you want to
describe it, that they can work through for
the fulfillment of their vision, not mine.
They've got a vision to evangelize the world.
We can be the arms, the fingers, the
means of helping them fulfill their vision.
I want to tell you there's at least
a thousand churches that see this in many
different fashions.
At least a thousand churches that are strongly
committed to working with and through O.M.
And if John can give us a thousand,
he can give us a thousand in one
and your church can be involved there as
well.
It isn't easy.
I'd love to have a whole session on
this sometime.
Then we talk about leading a team of
daily evangelistic activities.
You know this time this Easter evangelism that
we're involved in right now was one of
the most basic phases of O.M.'s work.
Here in London, again and again, we would
have training weekends.
And of course we had to immediately recruit
leaders.
Many of them had never met anything before
in their life.
And this little chapter came as just a
small effort to try to teach a person
on a practical level how they could lead
daily evangelistic activities.
Very simple.
Very basic.
You feel it goes into too much detail?
Down in the bottom.
One of those hours should be used as
follows.
Washing dress and getting things in order.
Having a quiet time, eating breakfast, washing up,
getting literature ready, move out distribution, etc.
Of course, this is not literally followed down
throughout O.M. This kind of thing is
now in the hands of the National Foundation
which has quite a bit of adaptability.
That kind of policy, leading a team of
evangelistic activities, would be a very different kind
of policy than say the social policy or
the doctrinal state.
Very important to understand.
Different kinds of policy.
Some, you have to be a little more
firm or you'll have chaos.
Other types of policy like how to lead
daily evangelistic activities is a fantastic scope.
If you haven't read that chapter, it probably
won't cause so much difficulty.
It is two pages actually.
It goes down to point fourteen.
Transportation and highway safety.
I thank the Lord that from those early
days we had our driver's training sessions.
Billy Graham Sherman coming to us in the
beginning stages of O.M., highway safety is
a spiritual problem, plus some of the actions
we had in a very early stage all
reminded us that on a practical level it
would be hard to find anything more important
than this chapter.
I wonder if you'd be humble enough to
re-read this and to acknowledge that your
own driving needs improvement.
Mind us, I am duly ashamed of some
of my driving.
I prefer as I was the whole weekend
to be soaking around under the expertise of
David Morgan who drives that lot better than
many people drive the smallest car.
I feel very, very safe sitting in the
back of that old coach when he's driving
and I get well acclimated including sometimes some
sleep.
Maybe God has given some of you the
gift of driving.
I could have a debate on this.
Is driving a gift or a skill?
I would like to believe it's both.
All of us, if you're going to drive
a car, need to develop the skill of
driving.
Some who are going to be spending a
lot of time driving, maybe several years truck
driving in India, maybe driving a bigger vehicle
is a big problem in the West if
five people can drive bigger vehicles, maybe that's
a gift.
We'll have to work on that theology.
The gift of driving is certainly a great
need within Operation Mobilization.
Of course, there's a lot of other material
on that subject.
And then lastly for this morning, travel in
general.
Please do read that.
Try to have patience and understand our philosophy
about travel.
This existing network of garages and maintenance spaces,
Paris, Zottington, Lucknow, Katmandu, Bromley, now Manchester's developing
a little bit.
New Jersey's got, this thing can happen overnight.
Three to four hundred vehicles on the road,
some of them big lorries, some of them
coaches.
This, I believe, is a very unique and
significant part of O.M. Because of our
thrust to reach the masses, and we've reached
now over three hundred million people with the
word God, that is directly linked with this
philosophy of transport and travel.
And of course these various policies are all
fighting together.
Because if you can't believe God for some
petrol money and diesel money, your beautiful transport
program is not going to do so much.
You may do some camping with it.
Try to understand the fantastic way that this
has developed.
And now the facility that we have should
get on with world evangelism.
Let us pray.