Flags from over twenty different countries lined the church steps and snapped in the crisp autumn\u00a0breeze.\u00a0\u00a0A display of African spears and\u00a0hand\u00a0drums graced the atrium.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A preacher wearing a jacket screen printed with an image of the globe strode to the pulpit.\u00a0 It was time again for\u00a0the annual missions conference.<\/p>\n
We were treated to exciting stories of sometimes dangerous work in exotic places, where thousands of tribes people were coming to Christ.\u00a0 There were charts and statistics and terms like “10-40 Window” and “people group.”\u00a0 These were marshalled to support the electric claim that in this generation<\/em> the task of world evangelization could be completed, if only we would pray and give and go.\u00a0 The completion of that task would speed the return of Christ:\u00a0 “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”\u00a0 (Matt. 24:14).<\/p>\n But Christ could not yet return because there were people groups who had not yet heard the gospel.\u00a0 Without hearing the gospel, these groups were “lost” — that is, bound for Hell.\u00a0 And until they heard the gospel, the prophecy of Matthew 24 would remain unfulfilled.\u00a0 Both the souls of these “unreached people groups” and the timing of Christ’s return therefore urgently depended on us.<\/p>\n After these missions conferences, most of us would pray, for a while; some would give, many generously; and here and there, a few would go.\u00a0 Occasionally, someone I knew would abruptly quit his or her job and head off to the mission field.<\/p>\n I prayed, and I gave (though not as generously as I ought), but I never went.\u00a0 And because I never went, I knew that I was a second-class Christian, at best.\u00a0 I had graduated law school with honors, I had gotten married to a wonderful Christian woman, I was working at a large corporate law firm, I was generally honest and free of obvious sins, I was active in every Church committee imaginable — including chairing the committee that put on the annual missions conference — but, I knew, none of it was adequate.\u00a0 Millions upon millions of unreached people were dying every day, and I was fiddling while they burned.\u00a0<\/p>\n Only occasionally did we glimpse the difficult reality of the actual mission field.\u00a0 There were many stories of disappointment, failure and heartbreak, and very few of triumph, when the conversation turned to real people and real families who went.\u00a0 Some came back psychologically spent and broken.\u00a0 Some persevered.\u00a0<\/p>\n As I participated in the missions conference year after year, the world both changed and remained the same.\u00a0 The Church, in some parts of Africa and South America, really did\u00a0grow explosively, and began to take on an indigenous second-generation quality, warts and all.\u00a0 In other places, such as China and the Arab world, progress\u00a0remained painfully slow.\u00a0 Throughout much of the world, poverty, war, disease and injustice continued to claim countless millions of lives.\u00a0 One thing became perplexing and obvious:\u00a0 God seemed to have purposes and timetables, for\u00a0individual missionaries, peoples, nations,\u00a0and the parousia, that the missions conference couldn’t handle.\u00a0 Somehow, I felt, there must be a better way to think about God’s mission and our role in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Flags from over twenty different countries lined the church steps and snapped in the crisp autumn\u00a0breeze.\u00a0\u00a0A display of African spears and\u00a0hand\u00a0drums graced the atrium.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A preacher wearing a jacket screen printed with an image of the globe strode to the pulpit.\u00a0 It was time again for\u00a0the annual missions conference. We were treated to exciting stories of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-v7","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}