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First Presbyterian Church |
Frontier 2000
by Bob Taylor
The Frontier 2000 conference about blew me out of the water. I was startled, excited,
and deeply moved by it. I feel very inadequate to the task of communicating about it, but
I have some videos and a cassette tape of part of it. The experience turned me upside
down, and if all or most of our congregation could have experienced it I think it would
turn our church upside down. I hope I can use the audio and video materials to have an
impact on our church.
I had little idea what was going on in our denomination in the missions area. Harold
Kurtz, founder and executive director of Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, claims that
what has happened and is happening in the World Wide Ministries Division will bring our
denomination back to its historical and biblical roots. And what I learned at the
conference about what is going on in other Presbyterian churches and on the mission field,
I am convinced, could have a profound effect on the life of First Presbyterian Church.
Perhaps we can look at some of these things, and if the Committee and John pick up and buy
into some of the things that the conference offered, perhaps we can make a significant
difference in the life of our church.
As an example, it was indicated that the income problems of churches commonly disappear if
the mission commitment is allowed to permeate the life of the church. Those who are
committed to the Christian mission are the large givers, and these people join churches
where they sense a church-wide commitment to world wide evangelism and ministry. It seems
to me that this fall's stewardship program is moving in the direction I am talking about.
The conference consisted of four plenary sessions attended by the 570
registrants, three periods for which we chose a seminar to attend, and luncheon
discussions. The plenary sessions were Friday evening, Saturday morning,
Saturday evening, and Sunday morning. The Friday evening and Saturday evening
sessions began with banquets. Each of the four sessions included short speeches,
music, a worship service led by the Rev. Isaiah Jones, and a major address.
Friday evening Harold Kurtz addressed us, and I have a video of that. Saturday
morning a missionary to the people of the Near East in Berlin, spoke, and I
have a cassette tape of her dynamite message. Something went wrong with the video
recording, much to my disappointment, but I have the tape. The Rev. Oswaldo Prado of the
Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil addressed us Saturday evening. I gather that it
was a good message describing an evangelistic explosion in Brazil, but I could not stay
with him. He had someone translate from the Portuguese to the English, but his accent was
such that I could hardly get more than an occasional sentence.
Then, Sunday morning, the Director of the PC(USA) Worldwide Ministries Division,
the Rev. Marian McClure addressed us. It was good to hear of her support, as
head of the mission arm of our denomination, of Frontier Missions. I chose the
addresses by Harold Kurtz and another missionary and the video on the history and present involvement of PC(USA) in Frontier
Mission as the most challenging and, possibly, useful to us at First Presbyterian. If you
can view them
sometime, you may have ideas as to how to use them. The international missions video comes
with a discussion guide.
Syngman Rhee, the PC(USA) Moderator, addressed us briefly at the beginning of the
conference, reminding us that he is a Christian because of the frontier mission work of
Presbyterians. John Detterick, Executive Director of the General Assembly Council, also
addressed us briefly and reported on his recent worship experience with the Suri of
Ethiopia where John and Gwen Haspels work. Both the Suri and the Dalit (pronounced
Dah-leet, I learned), were mentioned more than once during the conference.
Each seminar was about 1 1/2 hours long, one late morning Saturday, and two Saturday
afternoon. Saturday morning I attended "Frontier Mission: Creative Models and
Approaches." to learn "how churches are discovering creative ways to be involved
in mission among unreached peoples." Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship officers, Kathy
Giske, who planned the plenary sessions, and Dan McNerney were the leaders.
Giske and McNerney talked a lot about what is going on in the groups being
served. They pointed out that wherever a missionary goes, God has already been
at work and that we should feel honored to work with Him. For the groups in
which we have missionaries, they suggested we need to understand whether the
people are open or resistant and why, the history of the church in the area
before they got there, whether the country in which they are located is
politically opening up to Christianity or closing to it, and the best ways to
enter the society. We need to build on whatever church activity may have
occurred before our missionaries got there, search out and relate to any
isolated Christians that may have resulted, and enter the society to serve the
felt needs of the people there, which may not be as missionaries. I thought of
Don and Kim.
Giske and McNerney also talked about getting the church leadership involved in the dynamic
process of frontier mission, using the Global Prayer Digest and other prayer resources,
doing research into the work and the people it serves, exploratory mission trips, and
several other components of the process that it would take a lot more ink to go into here.
Both Giske and McNerney told stories of churches getting involved in frontier mission.
Giske recounted the overwhelming change in the First Presbyterian Church of Colorado
Springs, where the senior pastor was persuaded to visit in Egypt and there established a
partnership between his church and Egyptian Presbyterian churches trying to minister to
unreached groups. You may know that this is the church that Al and Harriet Johnson are in
now. McNerney talked about how a Presbyterian Church in Hammond, Indiana sent a missionary
to the Aguaruna people of Peru and was having trouble acquiring the Aguaruna New
Testament, which had been translated by Wycliffe/Summer Institute of Linguistics
personnel. I informed him that I knew one of the translators, since she was a linguistics
professor at Kansas State University when I taught there. So I am currently involved in
trying to get McNerney in touch with people who can help the missionary and his church
gain access to the Aguaruna New Testament.
Other seminars available for the morning are listed in material to be provided later.
When we broke for lunch we picked up box lunches and assembled for conversation groups. I
chose the one on the ministry of the Presbyterian Center for Mission Studies, Michael
Boykin being the Director and discussion leader. We talked about various things, including
the resources available to mission committees and churches from the Center, how they stand
ready to advise and encourage local churches in their Commitments, and how the
denomination came to be and remains involved with the AD2000 and Beyond Movement. The
excellent lunch consisted of two delicious turkey sandwiches, a small pasta salad, a good,
solid, tasty delicious apple, and a large-size chocolate brownie with nuts in it. I'm
afraid I didn't get down all that was said, and I'll blame the good lunch. Boykin took a
number of questions, and the conversation ranged first one direction and then another. You
may be interested in the other conversation groups listed.
In the early afternoon I attended "How To Care for a Missionary: How churches can
really support their missionaries beyond just sending financial support and writing
letters. Jerry
Cooper, Associate Pastor of Missions and Discipleship in the Central Presbyterian Church
of Baltimore, Maryland was the leader. This church of 700 members has a missions budget of
700 members and 33 % of its budget goes to missions, totaling $380,000. His talk mainly
described what they try to do for their missionaries and why. I was so moved by this
seminar that my eyes smarted and my throat felt constricted much of the time. He talked
about how to get connected with missionaries, mainly through the Worldwide Ministries
Division, the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, and the Outreach Foundation of the
Presbyterian Church. He stressed that the issue is not a program and techniques but caring
for missionaries as people like you and me. He stressed that they are part of the Church
Family, should not be put on pedestals, and are equal in importance to the rest of the
church staff. He told of how Central was faced with possible cuts when he began to serve
there and how he informed them that if the missionaries were cut, he would take a cut in
his salary of the same percentage. The cuts were avoided.
I can't go into detail on everything he talked about. He talked about listening to them,
encouraging them, commissioning them, and honoring them. They commission all of their
missionaries as they return to the field. Central represents missionaries with the IRA and
other agencies and advises them about retirement problems. They hold them accountable by
asking them to state their goals and evaluate how they have been meeting them. They see,
in so far as possible, that they have transportation on furlough, satisfactory places to
live while in the country, and so on.
Central gives all their missionaries a five percent raise each year, and if a radical
currency fluctuation occurs, they try to help the missionary fill the gap. They stress to
the congregation that missionaries have to live frugally and ask members to consider
whether or not they, too, should live a simpler lifestyle.
They concentrate on praying for their missionaries and for the people they are serving in
a variety of ways, including special prayer meetings for them and the people groups.
They encourage members of the congregation to send letters, e-mail messages, audio/visual
materials, care packages, news articles and newsletters, magazine subscriptions, and
prayer requests, among other things.
They help missionaries to reenter the culture when they return, honoring them and
ministering to the whole family, including the children. They encourage congregational
children to become friends with missionary kids and, when they go elsewhere, to
communicate with them.
The church maintains a conference fund, a hospitality fund, and a general discretionary
fund to help take care of the above matters.
Central emphasizes understanding the missionary experience as a basis for prayer,
communication, and other forms of support. Cooper outlined a ten-phase life-cycle of being
a missionary. They are call and confirmation, training and education, raising support, the
honeymoon phase, disenchantment, resolution, adjustment, returning home, itineration, and
the return to the field--each having its own characteristics, difficulties, and rewards.
Missionaries have to be prayed for knowledgeably, consistently, intimately, and
scripturally. They need prayer for their relationship with God, their physical and
emotional health, their relationships with other missionaries, their country of service,
family matters, the effectiveness of their ministry, and physical and spiritual welfare.
Whew! There are some things here for us to apply.
For the third seminar I had planned to attend "How to Mobilize the Laity for Mission,
led by Art Beals, who heads our denomination's mission work in Eastern Europe and Asian
countries of the former Soviet Union. But I changed to Networking: Connecting for
Effective Mission, since it was led by two men with whom I have had e-mail contact--Larry
Beckler and David Hackett of the Presbyterian Center for Mission Studies. Larry Beckler
reads Beyond Our Walls and periodically sends me suggestions and notes of encouragement. I
especially wanted to meet him.
Beckler and Hackett talked about Ralph Winter, as did Harold Kurtz in his address and
others at the conference. Winter was to receive special recognition at the conference, but
was not able to be there. He was a Presbyterian missionary in Guatemala for ten years,
after which he became a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. He noticed that only
about ten percent of the returned missionaries in his classes were working with unreached
peoples, and he decided to try to do something about it. With his training in linguistics
and anthropology, he looked at the world in terms of the culturally distinct societies
that eventually were called "people groups." Winter founded and heads the U.S.
Center for World Mission and William Carey International University in Pasadena, CA.
Winter, Kurtz, and others worked to get the PC(USA) to commit to working in partnership
with other organizations to reach the world's cultural groups who were without
self-supporting, self-propagating Christian churches. I need to get better informed on
this, but Winter, Kurtz, and others worked to get overtures approved at the 1981 and 1988
General Assemblies. These resulted in our denomination becoming the only mainline
denomination to be associated with the AD2000 and Beyond Movement, a partnership of some
450 organizations committed to work together in Christian unity to take the Good News to
all unreached people groups. Our denomination is working in 198 such groups, and our own
Session in 1996 signed a Commitment to Share the Good News with the Suri people of
Ethiopia and the Dalit (untouchables) of Uttar Pradesh in northern India. That is why we
have been encouraging the congregation to become familiar with these two groups and the
work among them.
Hackett and Becker also talked about establishing e-mail networks involving missionaries,
the importance of communication between the congregation and the missionaries, and
meetings and consultations concerning the development of our roles in the Good News
Commitment. They discussed a number of kinds of ministry we need to know about and support
and, if opportunity affords, even participate in appropriately, namely personal witness,
visiting teams, literature distribution, broadcasting, development aid, medical service,
and translation. Some of these would involve short term mission commitments. They pointed
out that we need to know where our members travel in the world, since some of them might
like to visit a mission field in a country in which they are traveling. Reports to the
congregation by such travelers are valuable. A church should work to develop a permeating
"mission vision" with the "senior pastor" being a key player. They
also developed the idea that the churches which experience a high level of financial
support for all areas of their life are those which have this mission vision.
So, I missed Art Beals seminar, but, (can you beat this), the following Sunday we attended
our oldest daughter's church in Ventura, CA, and who brought the message that day! That's
right! Art Beals! He reiterated many of the things I had herd at the conference. We've
attended that church twice, and judging by those two experiences, it is a church whose
mission vision permeates their life. It has two packed out services, all kinds of study
groups and SS classes, and noisy people swarming all over the place.
I am full of all kinds of hopes for our church in the light of what I saw and heard in San
Diego, but I guess I'll share those in another place. I thought I had an above average
knowledge and understanding of Christian missions, but I learned that, relatively speaking
I knew nothing! I was especially ignorant about what is happening in our own denomination,
and I have some learning to do.
I hope you got this far! I know my comments are somewhat disorganized and incomplete, and
that I can't possibly get you to feel what I feel, since you do not have the context of
having been at the conference. But I pray that we can go somewhere with all this and that
the Lord will make me adequate to communicate what you might want to know about how all
this might relate to the life of our congregation.
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Last update
2007-07-15 19:47:42