This pic from my friend @esfeather is worth sharing with you:
Faith in God is so important…
“Faith in God is so important. Am I letting him direct my steps? Westerners (and I include myself here) are such driven people. We rely on statistics, we rely on technology, we rely on news and we rely on our experiences and gifts. But we are not always good at learning to wait on the will of God. I have learned and seen true faith in some of these leaders who are being persecuted and have nothing. They truly understand Paul when he writes, “I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8).“
– Paul Borthwick
from Western Christians in Global Mission: What’s the Role of the North American Church?
(Link to my blog of quotes from the book)
Seed of the Gospel and Indigenous Christianity
“The Gospel is like a seed and you have to sow it. When you sow the seed of the Gospel in Palestine, a plant that can be called Palestinian Christianity grows. When you sow it in Rome, a plant of Roman Christianity grows. You sow the Gospel in Great Britain and you get British Christianity. The seed of the Gospel is later brought to America, and a plant grows of American Christianity. Now, when missionaries came to our lands they brought not only the seed of the gospel, but their own plant of Christianity, flower not included! So, what we have to do is to break the flower pot, take out the seed of the gospel, sow it in our own cultural soil, and let our own version of Christianity grow.”
-D. T. Niles ( from Sri Lanka)
A hero of the faith speaks about obstacles – James Gribble
This is taken directly from the journal of James Gribble:
“There is no place in all the world more needy, no place more dark than [central Africa]. It seems as if all earth and hell have united in saying ‘No’ to the carrying of the Gospel there.
Yet we know that it shall be preached there, for the ‘Great Commission’ implies it. And we find that the church will be composed of representatives from every tongue, tribe and nation (Rev. 5:9).
“So even if the obstacles that confront us tower up to heaven, we know that we will, by the grace of God, overcome them.”
– James Gribble
If you’d like to know more about James Gribble and his story, I’d recommend this video “A Grain of Wheat” by my friend Dave Guiles who masterfully tells the story.
UNREACHED People Groups and our rationalization…
Almost every time I speak about unreached people groups, I hear a comment like, “We’ve got plenty of unreached people right here where we live, without worrying about groups halfway across the world.” And that’s true. There are more individuals living within already “reached” people groups, than there are in all the unreached people groups of the world. However, there is one major difference. Most people in the West have great access to the message of Christ through media, local churches, and believers. For 300 million people in the unengaged, unreached people groups of the world, there is no way, outside of divine revelation, to hear the message of Christ. There is no church, no missionary, and not one verse of Scripture translated into their language. How much longer will we wait until we go to these groups, and put them on our priority list for funding and manpower?
By Paul Eshelman // Director of Finishing The Task)
Read the rest of Paul’s article in Mission Frontiers
Hear Paul tell the story of when God grabbed his heart for the unreached
Church, C.S. Lewis, and a Waste of Time
The church exists for nothing else but to draw men
into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are
not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions,
sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of
time. God became a Man for no other purpose.
— C. S. Lewis
Gleaned from Neil Cole’s blog Cole-Slaw here
Not Jesus’ Way
“Christianity isn’t currently spreading rapidly anywhere in the West. That, in and of itself, is an indictment that we are not doing things Jesus’ way.”
-Ross Rhode in Viral Jesus
Becoming Missional: We Reap What We Sow by Felicity Dale
Becoming missional: We reap what we sow
I’m reminded of a story about D.L. Moody. Someone once criticized him for the way he brought everyone to the front to respond to the Gospel.
“Well, how do you do it?” Moody asked.
The man had no answer because he wasn’t leading anyone to the Lord.
Moody’s response: “I prefer the way I do it badly to the way you don’t do it at all.”
There’s much I don’t like about the way the Gospel is preached in this country–for example, televangelism. But can I criticize if I am doing nothing myself?
Another story, this time about John Wesley.
John Wesley was an itinerant evangelist traveling widely in order to preach the Gospel. One day, someone challenged him that he should only speak to people about the Lord when he sensed God prompting him. He tried it for one week. During that time he spoke to virtually no one because he never sensed the Lords’ prompting. At the end of the week he concluded this didn’t work and went back to speaking to everyone he met.
I speak to myself: we have lost the art of abundant Gospel sowing.
The principle of sowing and reaping applies. The harvest we reap is directly proportional to the amount of seed we sow. (Obviously other factors such as quality of soil, water etc. need to be taken into account). In general, we reap little because we sow little. Are we trying to harvest in fields where little or no seed has been sown?
The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptists have produced a wonderful video called Like a Mighty Wave. It can be downloaded from their video resource section It examines the ten common practices of movements where many people are finding Christ and many new churches are starting. One of these practices is abundant Gospel sowing.
What does it look like for us to sow abundantly in a way that fits our simple/organic principles? If we cannot do it here in our own culture, how do we expect to do it on the mission field?
-By Felicity Dale
Reposted from her blog: Simply Church here
Arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed…
“Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without Divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it. We boast in the Lord but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him . . . . Pseudo faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails it. Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of any second way or makeshift substitutes. For true faith, it is either God or total collapse.”
-A.W. Tozer, “Root of the Righteous”
(thanks Maurice Smith & J. Guy Muse from their Facebook pages)