Come to the International CP GAP
for Planters, Coaches and Strategy Coordinators
March 25 – 30, 2012 in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Conference: The C.P. International Gap is for all Y-Org FM CPers, SCs, and
Coaches. A “Gap” is an Uzbek term for “a regular gathering held by a group of friends”.
The Gap is being organized by Y’s C.P. Coaches, the “Jo’raboshi” (Uzbek – “leader in
a ‘gap’”) of the Gap.

Venue: A hotel and conference center in Chiang Mai is the site of the 2012
International Gap. TSN Group Hotel is a retreat / conference facility located. It is a
beautiful area. They have a Web site were you can look at the facility and area:
TSN Group Hotel:        http://tsngrouphotel.com/index.php

Who is this GAP for?
● Experienced, Front-line CPers, Strategy Coordinators, and Coaches committed
to initiating and serving CP Movements among the Unreached
● Later Stage successful CPers
● Early Stage struggling CPers
● Any CPer in between
● CPers who want to learn Coaching Skills
● CP Coaches who want to Upgrade their Skills
● Active CPers committed & ready to Learn from one another

What can I expect during the GAP?
● Sessions focused around Current, Real-time issues of Participants utilizing
Interaction and Collaboration
● Useful, Practical tools that can be applied right away
● Coaching Skills that anyone can use, whether a coach or not.
● Resources to take back to your team
● Learning from each other. Not sharing our ignorance.
● Mentoring by Successful CPers Individually and in Groups
● Reports from Y’s CP Teams that have seen breakthroughs and breakdowns. We
need to learn from both.

What not to expect during the GAP?
● Long Sessions focused around one Big Name Speaker
● Theories divorced from Reality
● Experts who have all the answers
● Lengthy presentations of someone’s new project

What can I Expect When I leave the GAP?
● To be Relationally connected – more deeply and more broadly — with a Likeminded
and Like-hearted Band of Brothers and Sisters
● To be Renewed in Passion for Jesus, His Glory and His Unchanging Purpose for
the Nations
● To have Clear Steps Forward
● To have both fresh ideas and renewed hope for seeing a CP Movement among
my people group
● To have an Ongoing, Accessible Support Network in place

Can we find a simple “how to” book for making disciples among the world’s remaining unreached tribes and nations? Many tasks can be accomplished by following a list of directions. For example, to bake a loaf of bread, we follow a recipe, adding the right ingredients in the right order. For assembling a new bicycle, we have written instructions to lead us through the process. In planning a new project, we try to figure out the sequence so we can move along step by step, from start to finish. However, when it comes to helping people, you can forget orderly sequences. God doesn’t seem to like formulas very much either. He wants us to depend upon His Spirit and His Word.

Help comes as we study the New Testament and find key principles. We are about to look at Biblical principles for multiplying churches among unreached peoples. The logical way is to present the keys in a linear fashion, from beginning to end. The danger in this is that we then expect our actual work to follow the same progression, step-by-step. We may worry so much about doing something out of sequence, that we miss the leading of the Holy Spirit!

Avoid thinking in terms of steps to be followed: 1, 2, 3, 4…. Rather, let’s look at these key church planting principles as actual, literal keys designed to unlock specific doors. Think of all the keys (we’ll identify 26 of them) attached to one big key ring. As we move into pioneer church planting, we will carry our keys along. We may find that many doors are already swung wide open. No need for a key if the door is open. Keys are only necessary for unlocking closed doors.

Imagine being a church planter who arrives on the field and immediately discovers a small, healthy fellowship already formed. The leader speaks your language and tells you the church is eager to multiply and reach their people. He asks, “We’re not sure what to do, will you help?” What joy! The process is well underway! You would not go to “step number one,” you would join God in what He is already doing and use whatever keys might be needed as He leads you and these local believers forward.

Expect things to come out of sequence. There will be overlap. Many things happen simultaneously. By becoming familiar with the keys, you’ll know what to use, when, as you unlock church planting movements among the unreached.

To better understand New Testament keys to unlocking church planning movements among the unreached, we are going back in time to the first century A.D., when these keys were first used. As we do this, please be sure to check the footnotes for input on applying them today. Although these principles are 2,000 years old, every one of them is vital and relevant for today! Let’s learn from the experiences of a fictitious first-century cross-cultural church planter named Stephanas, as he simply follows the example of Jesus and the apostles.[2]

MORE HERE

That world is covered in spiritual darkness. Four billion people out of the 6.9 billion on this planet never heard the good news of Jesus, and are separated from Him by spiritual darkness, and even in some cases, deep deception. I have listed the reasons that compel me to go, and why I ask others to do the same, below.

However, these reasons will remain just one more list of things we “ought to do” someday, unless we submit our inner motivations to Jesus. May I request that you join me in thinking for a few moments about our reasons to make Jesus known to others? Would you please ask the Lord to speak to your heart as you read through this list?

The Lamb is Worthy

At the end of time people will gather from every tribe and tongue and nation around the throne of God to honor the Lamb of God, all worshipping in their redeemed cultures. They will gather joyously around the throne of God and celebrate the victory He has won on their behalf. The One who died a shameful death to redeem the peoples of the earth will be the object of honor and praise for all eternity. All of history will be consummated in the praise of the One who gave Himself for us. He died to make us a kingdom of priests. He set us free from religion and fear and superstition so we might freely enter His throne room of grace. Everything is headed for that day. All we do that has meaning will find its fulfillment at that celebration. May it come quickly, Lord Jesus! This is the mission of God, and that is the mission of the church of God. The church’s ultimate purpose is not the programs we offer to people or the missionary outreaches we do, or our budgets or faith giving, our missionaries dressed in strange costumes, not even about the lost people or the needs of hurting millions. It is about Jesus, the Lion who became a Lamb, the Redeemer of the all peoples, the Savior of the world. He is our great goal. It is for Him. We go to others so Jesus will receive the just reward of His suffering.

The Lost Are Dying

Most of earth’s population will spend eternity separated from God if they do not have a chance to hear the Good News of God’s salvation. Eternity is real, and though many people believe theoretically in hell, they don’t really believe that a â?ogood God will send people to hell.â? May God impress deeply on our hears the terrible reality of man’s lostness without a savior. Men and women need forgiveness of sins. There is no other way for that to happen than Jesus. It is by hearing, believing and calling on His name that people are rescued from a certain, eternal, separation from God.

The Poor are Suffering

We can easily become immune to the horrendous suffering of the victims of drought, famine, poverty and injustice. It is only by the grace of God than our hearts can be filled with the compassion of Jesus. The Bible says that when Jesus looked upon the crowds, He had compassion. May we have the same response, whether it be to a neighbor in need, a child’s face in a Christian advertisement, or a news broadcast from the Horn of Africa. We know the statistics, we hear and see the faces, may we now become hardened to their plight. There are only two ways to maintain genuine compassion: getting involved with the poor, and maintaining a lifestyle of personal devotion and prayer for the poor.

The Church is Commissioned

Jesus commanded us to go, and go means a change of location. We have been commissioned to go, teach, baptize and make disciples. There are people waiting for us to obey, whether it be the villages of North Africa or the mountains of Tibet. They wait for our obedience. The issue is not whether or not we are called. All are called. All are commissioned. It is a matter of location, of those in the church will join with God in sacrificial obedience. Willing hearts hear His voice. The Lord Jesus said to His disciples, “As the Father sent me, so send I you…”

The Believers Are Perishing

Without a vision greater than the pleasures of our culture and the comforts of life, we will perish. By joining God on mission, we find a vision worth dying for and worth living for. It is not enough to send our money, because money does not have to lay down rights, weep, or give itself. It is not enough to send native workers, because native workers cannot pray, love and disciple in our place. God uses people to reach people. He uses people to encourage faint hearts. If for no other reason, we must go for our sakes. If not, we will surely perish. For the sake of the church we must give our very best, lest we die from lack of sacrifice, from lack of personal involvement. If we will not, we will perish.

The Father is Waiting

The highest motivation for preaching the gospel is not what lost or needy people receive from our efforts, but what God receives from our love for Him. Joining Godâ?Ts mission is first and foremost about God. He created the nations to seek after Him and find Him (Acts 17:24-26). He brought them into existence so they might find their satisfaction in their Creator (Revelation 4:11). The Father is waiting. He longs for the worship and obedience of His creation. He made the nations. He made them for a purpose. Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, God is yearning for the peoples of the earth to come home to Him.

The Spirit is Moving

We are living in the time of the greatest revival in the history of the church. There have been times in church history when the Spirit has moved on one continent, and then other times when the Spirit has moved on another continent. What is unusual about this period of history is that the Spirit of God is bringing millions of people to Himself, simultaneously, on every continent. The church is growing mightily in China, Indonesia, India, Korea, Latin America, Africa -literally all over the world. God brought down the Berlin wall, and the communist governments of Eastern Europe, and now His Spirit is tearing down walls of fear and cultural separation that hide Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists from Jesus. Itâ?Ts God’s gracious invitation and the Churchâ?Ts sacred privilege to participate in this unprecedented move of the Holy Spirit. Who would want to miss out on what our Father is doing on the earth?

God has chosen this time to gather people from all the peoples of the earth in a way He has never done before. It is the will of God for the Church to be part of what Father is doing. The Church is what God is doing; He is raising up a people for Himself from among all the peoples of the earth.

From the beginning, missionaries have sought to obey Christ’s Great Commission by seeking to make disciples by the means of “teaching them to obey all I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19). Jesus taught that his primary commandments were to love God and our neighbor (Matt. 22:37-39) so consequently missionaries have always sought to obey both the Great Commission and the Great Commandment.

Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only 70 years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Page 159)

Simple logic dictates that we must, like Lewis, decide what we will be “bothering about” with the limited amount of time we have to serve God here on earth. Historically missions thinkers have had three basic positions on the Church’s responsibility to be involved in “justice issues” as we go about the task of making disciples.

1. Liberationism – Liberationists tend to equate the Biblical notion of Salvation from sin with the struggle of poor and oppressed people for justice. Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian Roman Catholic priest, is the primary developer of “liberation theology”. This view, leaning heavily on Jesus’ announcement of his job description in Nazereth (Luke 4:17-18) sees salvation through the eyes of a Marxist view of class struggle with the Biblical liberation at Israel’s exodus from Egypt as the primary lens through which to view salvation.

2. Holism – To use a “spicy” analogy, holists can be found on the spectrum from mild to medium to hot. Mild holists would seek to minister both to society and individuals, socially and spiritually but giving a certain priority to evangelism. Hot Holists see the Great Commission ideally as equally distributed between society/individuals, physical/spiritual and body/soul.

Some call holism “incarnational”ministry and view Jesus as their primary model who ministered both to the physical and spiritual needs of people. Hot holists would emphasize his healings and ministry to the poor while mild holists would emphasize his teachings on eternity and destiny.

3. Prioritism – Prioritism sees the Great Commission as primarily to make disciples of the nations through evangelism and church planting with the Book of Acts being the primary model. This has been the more traditional viewpoint on missions (up until World War II) and sees other Christian ministries such as mercy and justice for the poor as good and needed but secondary and supportive.

From my observations of YWAM, I see very little liberation theology (thank God!) in our midst. Most of our workers tend to be either somewhere along the Holistic spicy continuum or lean toward the traditional Prioritism approach. While everyone, of course, has to seek God for His strategies for the particular arena of ministry He has called them to, I would like to offer a few additional perspectives.

The Historical Perspective

When we read the biographies of William Carey, Hudson Taylor, Amy Carmichael, Adoniram Judson and others in the 19th Century (what Ralph Winter has called the “Great Century” of Christian missions) we certainly see at least a mild holistic approach (i.e. Carey’s stand against the injustice of suttee (widow burning) in India). Thousands of schools, orphanages, medical clinics, hospitals, feeding programs, etc. that were established by Christian missionaries and some, like Carey and Wilberforce even worked for legal changes to bring justice for the poor and slaves.

John Elliot, who worked among the Algonquin Native Americans, fought for justice and clemency for Native American prisoners, freedom for Native American slaves, and prevented Algonquins from being defrauded of their land. He also established schools for the poor.

Two of the most successful missionary pioneers and historical models for YWAM have been William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army and John Wesley and the Methodists. Both were soul-winning, church-planting, gospel preaching movements but both have also been given credit by British historians as being effective social justice reformers, using the whole Bible as their paradigm.

I believe history, to use a broad brush, would paint a picture that would confirm the following statement: Those missionaries that were the most successful in influencing society towards Biblical justice were those who put the preaching of the gospel and the changing of individual hearts at the top of their agenda. The Salvation Army and the Methodists are a classic example of this.

The Theological Perspective

Taking the Bible as a whole, there are hundreds of references either implicit in the text or commanded by God for His people to care for the poor and and to stand for social justice – hence our mandate to disciple nations from which we can draw much from God’s instructions to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament.

As we turn to the New Testament, however, the Biblical data for Christians being involved in social justice activities gets much slimmer. A hard-core observation and inductive study of the passages in their context reveals that most of the social justice issues dealt with in the New Testament were “in-house”. The caring for the widows in Acts 6, for instance, was among the Christian widows. James’ exhortation to faith and works was given to believers to take care of “…a brother or sister be needy of daily food…” (James 2). John’s encouragement to share our goods with the poor likewise seems to be an in-house commandment(1 Jn. 3:17-18). Even Jesus’ oft-quoted exhortation to feed and clothe the poor and visit the prisoners was apparently not referring to all poor and prisoners but to “these brothers of mine” (Matt. 25:40).

Furthermore a simple lexical review of the Hebrew word for “poor” (anao) and the Greek word for poor (ptochos) can both be translated “meek”, “poor in spirit”, “broken” and “contrite” as well as physically and circumstantially poor. As we observe the book of Acts, of course, and get an idea of how the original disciples understood Jesus’ Commission we see, even from a casual look that their primary emphasis was evangelism, casting out demons, healing the sick and planting churches.

The Eternal Perspective

In a scene from the blockbuster movie, Gladiator, the hero of the story exclaims, “What we do in life will echo in eternity.” John Wesley said, “I value all things only by the price they shall gain in eternity”. C.S. Lewis said, “Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”!

Simple logic, as Lewis explained in the above quote, forces us to the conclusion that Christianity’s assertion that “every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be true or false”, leads us to a certain priority on what we should be “bothering about”.

Jesus asked the following rhetorical question, “What would it profit a man if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul?” or “What will a man give in exchange for his soul?”(Matt. 16:26). Jesus’ obvious and logical answer to his question was that the value of a human soul is worth more than all the value of all the possessions in the whole world, which would include any services we can give to anyone here on the earth.

In Conclusion

Should we, as Frontier missionaries, seek to obey the Great Commandment and improve the lot of people in this life and alleviate suffering whenever and wherever possible (as did the good Samaritan)? Yes. Should we feed the poor, visit the prisoners, clothe the naked, heal the sick and perform other expressions of the Father’s heart simply because God’s love is unconditional? Yes. Should we, without partiality, love our neighbors as ourselves, be they individuals or nations, rich or poor? Yes. Should we be “salt” as well as “light” and bring godly influences into the various spheres of society that make up the social structures of the nations to which we are called? Yes. But Biblical discipleship has to center around the Lordship of Jesus and the keeping of his commandments which includes his “first” commands to “repent and believe the gospel”(Mk. 1:14-15)

To swing to the Liberation extreme and import a 21st Century paradigm on the Biblical text, trying to influence nations with Biblical principles of justice and righteousness without the Cross of Christ at the center would have been ludicrous to the original apostles.

One of the reasons we are so enamored with causes other than simply winning people to Christ and taking care of their needs as we do it,while not neglecting societal influences in the spheres is because we tend to focus on the things which are seen rather then the unseen world as Paul commanded us (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).

I recently heard a heart-breaking story of some Christians who raised money in the West to go to the developing world to rescue young girls from human trafficking. With pure motives they went to a brothel “bought” the girls out of slavery but delivered them back to their Buddhist village to integrate back into their society without once telling them the good news of the gospel. They thought they had set the girls free. The Biblical worldview would inform us that they were rescued from one form of slavery, delivered back into another form of slavery and if they don’t meet the Jesus alone who has the truth that can truly set them free(Jn.8:32), they will be in slavery for all eternity.

Wherever we find ourselves along this continuum, whether holistically mild, medium, hot or following traditional Prioritism may we keep in mind Jesus’ question, “What would it profit a man if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul?”

Aloha,

Danny Lehmann

Dean, College of Christian Ministries

Youth With A Mission