TO BE A CH A P EL MISSI ON S. By Bob Schneider

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1 TO BE A THE HISTORY OF CH A P EL MISSI ON S By Bob Schneider

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3 Pastor Bob s heart for the spread of the gospel worldwide, and his knowledge of the spiritual condition of countries near and far, is exceptional. His leadership influenced so many of us to be involved in long-term outreach to tribes and nations that have had little exposure to the Gospel. BRUCE (& CAROL) BRITTEN Missionaries with TEAM Global Alliance for more than 40 years Schneider s work shows how one church tackled the command, Go into all the world. I urge you to read, learn, and join the adventure of God faithfully reaching the lost to build His Church. JOHN (& EVA) HERBERICH Instructor of Biblical Studies, Belhaven University (Chattanooga)

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5 BLESSED TO BE A BLESSING The History of Chapel Missions By: Bob Schneider, Pastor Emeritus The Chapel Akron, Ohio

6 2018 The Chapel. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

7 To my wife, Myra. Without her support, encouragement, and wholehearted partnership, our journey of helping take the Gospel to the nations would never have happened.

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9 CONTENTS Foreword... 1 Acknowledgments In the Beginning Branching Out To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth Growing and Going! Stepping Out in Faith Gaining Perspective A Sharper Focus Reaching the Unreached Open Doors Into the 21st Century Good Stewardship Eternal Impact Building Partnerships Conclusion: Completing the Great Commission Epilogue. 181 Gallery Appendix A: History of The Chapel 189 Appendix B: Chapel Missions Building Projects Appendix C: Chapel-Sponsored Missionaries.. 198

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11 FOREWORD The Chapel s history of missions could be just a list of names, organizations, fields of service and dates. Instead, Bob Schneider s Blessed to Be a Blessing: The History of Chapel Missions provides a journey of the ministry of The Chapel that spans the generations; from a humble storefront to today s multi-site locations. The ministry of The Chapel is far more than buildings or size of congregations. The Chapel is a family. A family of believers in the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of Christ that flows from this family of believers has penetrated our community, our country and our world. In Blessed to Be a Blessing: The History of Chapel Missions, Bob has carefully traced this family journey of memorable lives and experiences. Like any family-tree history you will read names you may or may not recognize, but keep reading as events become memorable and you travel with Bob on mission trips around the world. As you journey through this history you will gain a knowledge of not only a mission family, the generous funding of mission partners and projects, but also receive a powerful course on world missions. Bob has devoted his life to world missions and faithfully ministered at The Chapel for a generation. He and his wife Myra are a wonderful model and testimony of heirs together of the grace of life. I was born the year my father founded The Chapel. To me and countless others, it is our spiritual home where we have been nurtured on God s Word and responded to Christ s commission Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. What a blessed heritage and foundation for today and tomorrow s generations to build on until He comes again. Maranatha. When you finish reading Blessed to Be a Blessing: The History of Chapel Missions, the words of our familiar doxology will fill your heart and mind, Praise God from Whom all blessings flow. DAVID BURNHAM Senior Pastor, Pastor Emeritus 1

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13 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A very special thank you to Patti Lee without whose tireless work and meticulous editing this book would never have become a reality. Thanks too, to Jordan Supan, Jane Day and the Creative Arts department at The Chapel for all their work to transform a manuscript into a real book. I am thankful for all the countless longtime Chapel members I interviewed about the history of The Chapel in my research for the book. I am especially thankful for Gloria Killian who served as The Chapel librarian for many years. Because of her foresight in saving many historical records and archives, I had access to invaluable material that was vital to my research. 3

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15 CHAPTER 1 In the Beginning It all began on a cold February Sunday in Carl Burnham s heart had been touched at an evangelistic service at Calvary Baptist Church, and he knew he had to settle this once and for all. He spent the afternoon at Gorge Park reading the Gospel of John from a simple New Testament he had recently purchased. That afternoon, he gave his life to Christ and thus began a remarkable journey toward establishing a ministry that has touched millions of lives around the world for more than 80 years. Carl was born in Dukedom, Tennessee in 1909 and raised in Fulton, Kentucky. Like thousands of others, the Burnhams moved to the boomtown of Akron, Ohio, in 1921 to find work at one of the rapidly growing rubber companies. After attending Grace Elementary and West High Schools, Carl was working at the B.F. Goodrich Company. There he met Bill Denton, a relatively new convert himself, who came to Christ in Akron in Denton had a passion for evangelism and was already volunteering at the old City Mission on Main Street across from the Goodrich plant. It was he who invited Burnham to come and hear the evangelist Bascom Ray (B.R.) Lakin, who was preaching at revival services at Calvary Baptist Church that February. (Lakin was an itinerant preacher, known for riding a mule from church to church through the hills of West Virginia and 5

16 Kentucky.) After coming to faith in Christ, Burnham began attending Sunday School, growing in faith as he studied the Scriptures and contemplated his future. About that same time, Denton started a new ministry, The Furnace Street Mission. Burnham began assisting him, and was then licensed to preach later in Sensing a call to the ministry, Burnham moved to Chicago and enrolled in Moody Bible Institute. His heart for missions was challenged when exposed to Moody s great vision of taking the Gospel to the world. He often walked miles to hear the famous evangelist Paul Rader preach at the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle. Constructed in 1922, this 5,000-seat auditorium drew thousands of people coming to hear the Gospel. Formerly the pastor of Moody Church and President of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, Rader was America s first nationwide radio preacher. Burnham had very little money in those days, so he would walk to hear Rader preach and ride the bus home. Burnham once told his son, David, that Rader was the greatest preacher he had ever heard. Burnham was only able to afford a couple of semesters of classes at Moody, so he returned to Akron in late His mentor, Bill Denton, was having trouble managing the rapidly growing ministries of the Furnace Street Mission. He invited Burnham to be his assistant. That experience provided Burnham a crash course in ministry as he and Denton sought to reach out to the poor, homeless, and hurting who had flooded Akron during those years and who were now facing the Great Depression. From the very beginning, what Burnham learned about ministry was always focused on reaching out, not turning inward. If he had returned to a traditional church, he might have adopted the typical come and hear mentality of many churches. He was an outstanding preacher, and no doubt many would have come to the church to hear him preach. But he and Denton were taking the Gospel to the streets, preaching on corners and using a Gospel Bus 6

17 to play music and attract crowds in poor neighborhoods throughout the city. Rather than seeking to convert those who were already part of churches or a religious tradition, Denton and Burnham reached out to those who were the outcasts of society alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and those in trouble with the law. In addition to the regular preaching there was also always the element of faith in action a practical expression of God s love through food, clothing, and other necessities. In the Winter, coal was delivered to homes throughout the city that had no heat. In the Spring, they acquired free use of several acres of land adjoining Akron Municipal airport, where men being helped by the Mission were allowed to farm their own gardens to provide for their families. And with those many demonstrations of God s love, the Good News of the Gospel was always preached. Response to that preaching was overwhelming. Great crowds came to hear Denton and Burnham preach several times each week at the Mission. Soon they outgrew the Furnace Street facility so they turned to a strategy being used in other cities, The Gospel Tabernacle. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, evangelists in cities across America built large, simple structures called Gospel Tabernacles that could accommodate large crowds for evangelistic services and revival meetings. More durable than tents but not as expensive as structures made of brick, these wooden tabernacles drew hundreds of thousands of people throughout the United States to hear gifted evangelists. The Furnace Street Mission built its first tabernacle in 1930 at the corner of E. Market and Prospect Street (a site currently occupied by the Haven of Rest Rescue Mission). It was built using men the Mission was assisting in order to help them earn money. The Akron Gospel Tabernacle seated upwards of 2,000 people and gave Denton and Burnham many opportunities to reach new people with the Good News. Little did Burnham know when he preached 7

18 there on January 31, 1931, that Oscar Stewart, the future Sunday School superintendent for The Chapel at Brown and Vine, was in the audience and would come forward to receive Christ that night. Burnham continued to preach at the Furnace Street Mission and lead evangelistic crusades throughout Ohio and the Midwest in the early 1930s. It was then that the Lord laid on his heart a vision for starting a church in Akron. He married Agnes Williams in July of 1933, just before he began a series of revival services at the Oklahoma City Gospel Tabernacle. On December 1, 1933, while returning home from Oklahoma in a Model-A Ford, Carl and Agnes spoke and prayed about their dream of a new church. Two weeks later they sent a letter to friends asking them to support a new church they were starting. It would simply be called The Chapel. The first service was held on January 15, 1934, in a rented building at the corner of W. Exchange and Maple Street. Both Carl Burnham and his father, B.A. Burnham, spoke that day, preaching the Gospel of salvation. To have Sunday School the children had to climb through a trap door in the floor and down a ladder to the basement! The history of Chapel missions was born out of a strong emphasis on evangelism and a desire to reach the lost with the Gospel. As an independent church, The Chapel had no ties with any denomination and no support from any other church or organization. Beginning as a storefront church, evangelism was at the heart of everything and their motto became, In the heart of the city, for the heart of the city. And although there were no formal programs offered, the church grew. 8

19 By 1936, the congregation had outgrown its Five Points location and moved to a lot at the corner of Brown and Vine near the University of Akron. They built a simple basement church that year using the men of the church to dig the foundation. They called it digging their own graves and worked hard to keep the costs down for the project. It was only later that ministries such as youth groups, choirs, women s ministries, and other such activities would develop as part of The Chapel s outreach program. It took 11 years and a series of additional construction projects to completely finish the church in September When World War II started, Carl Burnham tried to enlist in the Army. But a routine physical revealed a heart problem that disqualified him from serving. Not willing to give up, he asked if there wasn t some way he could serve, perhaps as a chaplain. He was told that he could indeed serve as a chaplain, but that first he d have to have a college degree. Rising to the challenge, he entered the Municipal University of Akron as a freshman. Three years later, Burnham graduated Magna Cum Laude, all while pastoring The Chapel. By that time, the war was nearly over, and the challenges of ministry were continuing to grow. Many churches around the country were holding revival meetings, and The Chapel at Brown and Vine was no exception. In June 1945, 30 churches in the greater Akron area came together to sponsor a three-week, city-wide series of revival meetings June 2 through June 24. The featured evangelist that month was a converted Jew by the name of Hyman Appleman. Each evening meeting included a 200-voice combined choir and a message by Mr. Appleman. The first week of meetings was held at the Grace Reformed Church of Akron. The second week of meetings was held at Central High School. Because the crowds were so large, the last week was held at the Akron Armory. 9

20 Dr. William Troup, pastor of Goss Memorial, was the chairman of the Executive Committee for the revival. Carl Burnham was chairman of the noon services committee. Although it may be hard to believe in our secularized society, all the noon revival meetings were held at the O Neil s department store on Main Street. They were so successful that in the last week of the revival, they averaged 500 in attendance. In all, leaders reported 820 people came to Christ and saw many recommitments. In an additional display of unity, on the first Sunday of the revival all the pastors of these churches exchanged pulpits and preached on the subject of revival. These pastors became part of the Akron Ministers Fellowship. In 1947, The Chapel congregation presented Pastor Burnham and his family with a well-deserved gift. They sent them on a vacation to the Maranatha Bible and Missionary Conference in Muskegon, Michigan. Carl knew the area well, as he used to bring boys from the Furnace Street Mission to another camp in the area sponsored by evangelist Paul Rader. A strong missionary emphasis was part of this conference each year. After hearing Carl Tanis, a missionary speaker and director of the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Burnham received a fresh new vision for the importance of missions in the Church. Tanis spoke powerfully on the lostness of the heathen and the need for all men to hear the claims of Christ. It wasn t long, then, before The Chapel at Brown and Vine sent out its first long-term missionary, Dorothy Cedar. Dorothy was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, and came to Christ at 13 through the preaching of Carl Burnham in an evangelistic meeting held at nearby Kingsville Baptist Church in March She came to Akron for nurses training at Akron People s Hospital (now Cleveland Clinic: Akron General) in 1944 and joined The Chapel at Brown and Vine in She soon became a friend of the Burnham family and often babysat their son, David (future senior pastor of The Chapel). 10

21 Upon her graduation from nursing school in 1947, the Burnhams invited Dorothy to go with them to the Maranatha conference. During that week, she met many SIM missionaries including Carl Tanis, their candidate secretary. It was there that she heard the call of God to missionary service. In 1948, upon Tanis s recommendation, she enrolled at the Moody Bible Institute and worked part-time at Cook County Hospital. After graduation in 1951, she was accepted as a missionary candidate with the Sudan Interior Mission. She began serving as a missionary nurse in Nigeria, West Africa, in April of Dorothy soon learned the Hausa language and served in many medical roles: assisting in surgery, mid-wife, anesthetist, dispensary supervisor, and treating wounds. She also risked her own health caring for patients with leprosy. Her Hausa name was Mia Jinya Dariya the nurse who laughs. For nearly 20 years, Cedar was a highlight of The Chapel s annual missionary conference, delighting generations of children with her famous giant python skin and the story of how she acquired it after she ran over the snake with her car. As she finished her story, she would roll out the 18-foot python skin across the floor to the amazement of the children. Throughout the years, Cedar served in so many roles and places, and her itinerary so extensive, that she was given another Hausa name, Mia Jinya Duniya nurse to the world! Many missionaries were part of the great post-wwii missions explosion in which veterans of the war felt led by God to bring the Gospel to the lands in which they served to reach those people who had once been enemies. Others were so affected by their experience that they developed a strong heart for missions and wanted to help promote missions in their churches any way they could. One such person was Leon Wilson. 11

22 Wilson graduated from Kent State University in 1940 and married Bernice. When WWII began, he was not eligible for the military because of a heart condition. He began working as an accountant at The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company the following year. He was working with a man named Henry Clark, a member of The Chapel at Brown and Vine. Clark witnessed to him regularly and invited him to church. Finally, Leon and his wife began attending and heard the Gospel very clearly from Pastor Carl Burnham. In fact, the Wilsons became good friends of the Burnhams that year. Finally, in 1944, because there was a desperate need for more men in the military, Leon was drafted. The night before he was to leave he accepted Christ as his Savior. After basic training with the Army, Wilson was sent to the Philippines and worked a desk job at a base there. As a new Christian, he was hungry for fellowship. He soon began attending a Filipino church led by Pastor Gregorio Tingson. Tingson was a pastor and evangelist, often called the Billy Graham of the Philippines. Wilson began going to Tingson s home almost every Sunday after church and was discipled by the pastor. Through that connection, The Chapel began support for Tingson s ministry in the early 1950s. He was both the first national serving on the staff of Youth for Christ and the first national that The Chapel s missions ministry supported. Upon his return to the States, Wilson began attending The Chapel again and served as its treasurer. Harriet Grafmiller and Richard Vellattay both served as missions secretaries, responsible for the missions budget. As attendance and giving increased, the church s missions outreach expanded with new missionaries being added each year. Eventually Wilson began serving as the missions secretary of The Chapel s board of finance. He was fond of saying that if a church would give faithfully to missions, God would bless that church. In 1951, the missions offering was $17,000, supporting 12

23 17 missionaries, 2 national missionaries, and 23 organizations and projects. From the 1940s to the 1970s, approximately 10% of church s offerings went for missions. The total giving of The Chapel in 1954 was $110,878. As The Chapel grew, the people s heart for evangelism never diminished. In 1952, Burnham invited evangelist B.R. Lakin, to return to Akron and lead a week of evangelistic meetings. Dr. Lakin was at the time pastor of the Cadle Tabernacle Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. The response to the meetings was tremendous each night s service filled the sanctuary. The Cadle Call newsletter reported that 60 to 70 people received Christ as their Savior that week, and many rededicated their lives to Him as well. With this constant emphasis upon evangelism and the regular scheduling of annual revivals at The Chapel, the church grew rapidly. There were nearly 1,400 members when Pastor Burnham and the board decided they could expand no further at Brown and Vine and would need to move. In 1949, The Chapel purchased a 2.5-acre lot on Fir Hill, just a few blocks away. A large brick home once sat on this lot, the home of Akron pharmacist and business entrepreneur Alexander Commins. Built in 1870, it eventually housed the Akron Art Institute from 1937 until it burned to the ground January 2, The church began its first building fund drive in 1950 and raised $35,000 that year. In 1951, $40,000 had been raised with another $60,000 needed to reach the $100,000 mark, which would enable them to negotiate a loan to finance the total project of $400,000. Wilson s comment that a church that gives faithfully to missions will be blessed by God was literally coming true. During the time of raising funds for the new church, giving to missions never wavered. 13

24 On June 29, 1953, some men of the church gathered on the Fir Hill lot to pray and to begin clearing brush and debris from the property. The next week, Pastor Burnham and the leaders of the church gathered July 5, 1953 for the official groundbreaking for what was to become The Chapel on Fir Hill. Nearly a year later, Burnham led a ceremony for laying the cornerstone, in which a membership roll of the church, a Scofield Bible, a copy of the Akron Beacon Journal, and several other historical items were placed. Much of the construction of the church was done by the men of the congregation in order to keep costs down. The $400,000 project included a sanctuary designed to seat 1,500 with 46 Sunday School classrooms and six small assembly rooms. Beautiful stained-glass windows telling the story of the Bible would surround the sanctuary. Finally, on March 27, 1955, the long-awaited day arrived. On a cold, snowy Sunday morning, nearly 1,000 men, women, and children marched with police escort from The Chapel at Brown and Vine to their new church, The Chapel on Fir Hill. Paul Shepherd, who had recently returned from military service, proudly led the march holding the American flag. That afternoon, a formal dedication service was held with B.R. Lakin giving the dedicatory address. The following day, Lakin began a week of revival services at the new church on Fir Hill. The church with a heart for missions and a passion for evangelism was about to expand its horizons and extend its influence even further. 14

25 CHAPTER 2 Branching Out After moving to a new site on Fir Hill in 1955, the newly named The Chapel on Fir Hill recognized the need for a church camp to expand its ministries to children and youth. Burnham understood the importance of camping through his work with the Furnace Street Mission. In the summers, he had helped take boys to camps in northeast Ohio for many years. Unfortunately, he was never able to see that camp become a reality, as he died of heart failure in 1962 during surgery at the University of Minnesota Heart Clinic in Minneapolis. His son, David, took over as senior pastor shortly thereafter. In 1964, Pastor David Burnham learned that the YWCA Camp YAWACA near Ravenna, Ohio, in Portage County was for sale. In an ideal location near West Branch Reservoir, it was less than 45 minutes from The Chapel and had several cabins, a lodge, and a small lake. To get a better view of the camp and evaluate the opportunity, Pastor Burnham took advantage of his pilot s license and flew over the camp with two others. One was Pastor David Fair, who had grown up at The Chapel at Brown and Vine, and who had much experience in working with youth. Fair later became the executive director of Furnace Street Mission s Denton House, a halfway house for ex-convicts named 15

26 after founder Bill Denton. Pastor Fair later founded Shelter Care, a ministry for children who had come to the attention of the juvenile court system. The second man was Jerry Rose, a missionary from Papua New Guinea who had a wealth of missionary stories of working with stone-age tribal people. Rose had met the Burnham family while working as a lifeguard at the Maranatha Bible Conference. Eventually, he and his wife, Darlene, became missionaries with the World Evangelism Foundation. When it came time to make an offer for the camp, Pastor Burnham took David Fair and Jerry Rose with him to meet with the board of the YWCA. Rose shared several of his exciting missionary stories, and the board members were very receptive to them. What Pastor Burnham didn t know at the time was that Kent State University, also interested in the camp, had offered a higher bid. Fortunately, the women of the YWCA board were sympathetic to the purposes that Pastor Burnham outlined for the camp s use, and they accepted The Chapel s offer. On Sunday, May 31, 1964, The Chapel took a special offering toward the $50,000 down payment on purchasing the camp. The congregation responded generously that day and gave exactly $50,281! When the sale was finalized, the congregation named the camp after our founder who had such a heart for camping ministry. Thus, Camp Carl was born. Since that time, Camp Carl has served hundreds of thousands of children through youth retreats, summer camps, and other events, all with a purpose of evangelism and spiritual growth. Many missionaries and missions events have been part of Camp Carl s history as it continues to have both a local and a global impact. 16

27 Another new beginning during this era was the start of the Chinese church of Akron. In 1969, Pastor Andrew Lim began what was then called the Akron Taiwanese Family Church. By definition, the focus of this ministry was Taiwanese immigrants to the United States. In 1972, with the blessing of Pastor Burnham, they began meeting at The Chapel. Their focus broadened, however, in 1974, and they changed their name to The Akron Chinese Bible Study Group. Over the next 10 to 15 years, the church attracted immigrants from both Taiwan and mainland China. A final name change was made in 1987 when they registered with the State of Ohio under the name Akron Chinese Church. Although it continued to meet at The Chapel, the church was now registered as an independent one. During those years, leadership of the Chinese church had moved from Pastor Lim to several lay leaders of the congregation. As it grew, the need for a long-term, full-time pastor became apparent. So, in 1996, the Chinese church hired Pastor Ray Sung to become the church s first, true full-time pastor. During the 17 years that Pastor Sung led the church, closer ties were developed with The Chapel. Todd McKenney, the international students pastor, worked actively to get the Chinese church more actively involved in The Chapel s outreach to Chinese international students. Later, Todd Schreiner joined the staff working part-time with international students and part-time as the youth pastor of the Chinese church. Over time, the Chinese church really caught the vision of reaching out to the Chinese international students and became even more involved in the ministry to them. 17

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29 CHAPTER 3 To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth In June 1972, The Chapel began a tradition that was to continue in various formats for nearly 40 years, an annual Missions Conference. Beginning on a Sunday with an outstanding missionary leader speaking in all the worship services, The Chapel hosted numerous men s breakfasts, ladies luncheons, home meetings, and special evening sessions all featuring various missionaries from around the world. Special music from the choir and orchestra, and having the children march down the aisle presenting the flags of the world, were highlights of those conferences. The Chapel continued to grow during these years as ministries expanded to every age group and segment of society. New ministries for children and youth were attracting young families from throughout the greater Akron area. Many people from non-evangelical churches began attending The Chapel, attracted by the strong and dynamic Bible teaching of Pastor David Burnham. By 1970, both Sunday services held in the Fir Hill sanctuary were packed to capacity to the point that people were arriving early in hopes of finding a seat. As the board struggled with a decision of whether to move or expand on the current location, several properties became available on Hamilton Street just to the east of 19

30 our buildings. The board decided this was of the Lord and canvassed several other homeowners on Hamilton seeking to buy their homes to make room for building a new sanctuary on Hamilton. By the end of 1971, the properties were purchased and construction was able to begin. The Chapel completed its new worship center in December 1972 and adopted the new name, The Chapel in University Park. The expanded sanctuary, seating more than 2,000, allowed the congregation to meet all in one service. The preaching of the Word of God was most important to Pastor David Burnham, so the auditorium was designed with no pillars and a unique, fan-shaped auditorium so that no one was seated more than 84 feet from the pulpit. On May 6, 1973, the worship center was officially dedicated with a special service featuring Moody Bible Institute president George Sweeting. The new sanctuary, with an expanded seating capacity, spurred even more growth within the rapidly growing church. As we moved into multiple services, we also continued developing new ministries to reach the city and the world. In the fall of 1972, a new chapter of outreach began. Prior to this time, The Chapel had no formal or programmed outreach to the University of Akron. With God s perfect timing, Ed Tubbs, who had worked with the Navigators ministry at Kent State University, had moved to Akron to start a new ministry to college students on the campus of the University of Akron. That fall, Ed began meeting with and discipling several men who would become leaders in this ministry. I was part of the core leadership team who began Students for Christ. We chose the name Students for Christ, and almost all of the students and leaders involved in the ministry attended The Chapel. The leaders were in a discipleship study with Ed, and most of them were also leading their own studies and meeting with individual students for one-on-one discipleship. At that time, most of the students and leaders attended 20

31 the college class at The Chapel taught by Bill Koptis, a local businessman who had a great heart for students. For several years, Bill hosted students in his home in Bath recreation time was in a converted barn, and he led an open Bible study. Every Friday night there was a large gathering there with a basic Bible study for young Christians or seekers. In addition, a smaller group of leaders would meet with Ed for in-depth Bible study and discipleship training. Over the next five years, many young men and women were discipled through this ministry. A number of them went into full-time positions as pastors, missionaries, or leaders in para-church ministries. Among them were Dave Belden, Howard Williams, Mike Eddy, Doug Davidson, and myself. It is a testimony to Ed s leadership and the Navigator discipleship principles he modeled and taught that almost every person trained through that ministry in the 1970s still walks with God to this day. In June 1973, The Chapel held its second annual missions conference, themed A Living Christ for a Dying World. Pastor David Burnham was the main speaker, along with Ray de la Haye, a missionary of SIM at their missionary radio station, ELWA, in Monrovia, Liberia. Also speaking was Robert Thompson, representing the Brazil Inland Mission. As was done the previous year, the children were part of the opening ceremony of the conference with what was called The Parade of the Flags. Another highlight of the conference was Dave Schroyer leading The Chapel choir and orchestra in performing the great John Peterson missionary cantata So Send I You. The Chapel family was reminded of the global nature of the Body of Christ when they were able to hear from Filipino evangelist Greg Tingson. He was then leading an evangelistic ministry, Truth on the March. Tingson became the first of many national Christian missionaries that The Chapel would partner with and support over the next 40 years. 21

32 In June 1974, The Chapel s third annual missions conference was Go Tell the Untold Millions. This conference lasted an entire week with Dick Hillis, president of Overseas Crusades, speaking the first Sunday and Walter Frank, the president of Greater European Missions, speaking the final Sunday. This was a particularly significant conference in the history of The Chapel because it was the first time we introduced the concept of Faith Promise giving. The Christian and Missionary Alliance developed the concept, and it was strongly promoted by Oswald J. Smith, pastor of The People Church in Toronto, Canada. Pastor Smith was known for saying, Why should anyone hear the Gospel twice until everyone has heard it once? In brief, Faith Promise is an agreement or commitment that one makes with God, trusting Him to provide a certain amount of funds to be given to missions each year. But it is not a pledge, and no one from church ever reminds you about your commitment it is strictly between you and God. When Faith Promises are received from a congregation each year, that figure becomes the church s missions budget for the coming year. Before this, The Chapel had generally set aside approximately 10% of its annual budget for missions. Putting the missions budget into the hands of the congregation was a real step of faith. The missions budget for 1973 was $114,010, so the board set a goal of a modest increase to $125,000 for The first Sunday of the 1974 conference, Dick Hillis spoke on the challenge of Faith Promise giving. In a Chapel news article about the conference, both missions chairman Paul Tell and missions secretary Leon Wilson said, The Lord will bless The Chapel as we grow in missions. At the final service on Sunday evening, June 30, 1974, Pastor David Burnham spoke on Faith Promise and the commitment cards were collected. It was a genuine faith-builder and joyful experience to hear that the Faith Promise for the upcoming year was $155,552! 22

33 This was a 35% increase in one year! Although it took different forms and was called by different names, this practice continued for nearly 35 years and saw an increase in giving to missions from $114,000 to more than $1.9 million by Although a missions budget of $155,000 may seem like a modest amount today, it was a significant amount in By God s grace, it allowed the missions committee to disburse funds of over $132,000, including $7,000 to Wycliffe Bible Translators, and $10,000 to the SIM radio station ELWA in Liberia. Just as significant was the fact that the Lord moved in powerful ways in many people s lives. At the end of the conference, 36 people dedicated their lives to full-time Christian service. At that time, four members of the board of trustees served on the missions committee: Leon Wilson, Larry Baldwin, Al Barath, and Cliff Kaufman. Paul Tell Sr. was not a trustee at the time but was appointed by the board to serve as chairman of the committee. There were two other at-large members of the committee: Bruce Clounie and Larry Roberson. Sonja Davis was just beginning as the official missions committee secretary. Pastor Burnham s heart and vision for missions was expanded when he attended the First International Congress on World Evangelization, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July Convened by Billy Graham and John Stott, this conference was one of the great milestones in modern church history. The conference called the Church to commit itself and its resources to the priority of world evangelization. Similar to the World Congress of Evangelism that Pastor Burnham attended in Berlin in 1966, this congress deepened his own convictions concerning the vital importance of world evangelization and the need to continue making missions a priority at The Chapel. 23

34 As The Chapel had always sought to reach out with the Gospel, they discovered opportunities not only globally but some in our own community in For many years, David Fair had served on the pastoral staff at The Chapel, especially in the area of youth. Fair had a tremendous heart for young people, having worked in the field of juvenile delinquency and social work. Because he already had a strong background and passion for youth work, Fair decided to begin a ministry to help these young people before they got into trouble with the law. In the fall of 1975, he put together a proposal to incorporate a new ministry in the State of Ohio Shelter Care Incorporated. The stated objective was to share the hope of Jesus Christ with boys and girls who came from troubled homes or who had come to the attention of the juvenile justice system. The focus of this ministry would be youth from ages 10 to 17, with most of the referrals coming from the Summit County Juvenile Court. The method of intervention in these young lives was to place them in shelter or group homes for one month. In this setting, they would live with Christian house parents in a structured home environment that would provide the stability and care they so desperately needed in their lives. Fair made a formal proposal to The Chapel and the result was two Chapel properties on Hamilton Avenue were provided to Shelter Care for use as group homes. Both the girls and boys homes would be provided rent-free for the first year. In addition to a $1,000 start-up gift, The Chapel agreed to pay the mortgage, taxes, and maintenance costs. The Shelter Care proposal also included a plan to add two additional longer-term shelter homes and eventually a foster care service. The homes continued operating with very close ties to the church for several years. Eventually the ministry established its own headquarters and offices in the community and branched out to establish relationships with many other social service agencies and 24

35 churches in Northeast Ohio. It also established a new facility and ministry called Safe Landing, where runaway youths could go and receive shelter and help in a safe environment. Now, the ministry has expanded several times and continues to impact thousands of lives under the leadership of Fair s son, Wes. Dave Fair went home to be with the Lord in Another milestone event in the history of Chapel missions also occurred in For many years, The Chapel had supported Gordon and Laura Smith, missionaries with the Christian and Missionary Alliance and United World Mission. During their years in the Da Nang region of Vietnam, they had the opportunity to minister with the Dang family, who lived in the region and were studying at the Bible school that the Smiths operated. One of the members of that family had become a Christian and was killed for his faith. Later the Dang s son, Cang Dang, became a pastor and came in contact with the Smiths. In 1975, when the North Vietnamese army was sweeping south, Vietnamese Christians were in great danger. Many thousands of them were fleeing south to escape the onslaught of the communist forces moving toward Saigon. The Dang family left Vietnam by boat and was rescued by the U.S. Navy. They lived initially in several refugee camps. Through the help of Gordon and Laura Smith, Pastor Dang, his wife, and their 11 children were evacuated to the United States, sponsored by The Chapel. The Dang family was able to move to Akron in July and live in one of the houses The Chapel owned on Hamilton Avenue. Before long, Pastor Dang had begun a Vietnamese Church that met at The Chapel it reached out to Vietnamese refugees and immigrants who had moved to Northeast Ohio in the wake of the fall of Vietnam. That ministry has continued to this day and has even expanded as Pastor Dang s oldest son, Minh, has developed a very fruitful ministry to the people of Vietnam by collaborating with several other evangelical organizations. 25

36 In the fall of 1975, Ray Wolfe became chairman of the missions committee. He had previously served as a missionary with the Africa Inland Mission at Scott Theological College in Kenya. Now the dean of the Moody Evening School in Northeast Ohio, he brought great knowledge and expertise to The Chapel s missions program. During the next year, several policy changes were made to the missions program and budget. Two groups, the Women s Missionary Group and Women for Christ, were incorporated into the missions budget. And, because of an increasing number of national workers being supported by The Chapel, a policy was enacted that limited support for those workers to two years, after which they would need to be supported by resources in their own country or elsewhere. For our own long-term missionaries, a policy was enacted that all missionaries would be supported through their current term unless an urgent need to discontinue support arose. To better evaluate the missions program, it was decided that all commitments to missionaries would be reviewed each August. A new policy that would have a far-reaching impact upon The Chapel for decades to come was also begun in the mid-1970s. An internship program was developed for young men of The Chapel to serve for one year following their graduation from an approved seminary. This program allowed them to receive valuable experience in several different areas of ministry and learn first-hand from older, more experienced pastors who could mentor them. Many of those who were part of this internship program during the next 20 years went on to become members of the pastoral staff. By the end of 1976, 14 men were studying at several seminaries throughout the United States. One of the most significant ministries The Chapel began to support around this time was The India National Inland Mission, founded by Paul Pillai. In the late- 50s Pillai was an attorney and committed Marxist working in the area of Madras, India. After 26

37 becoming a Christian, he enrolled in the Hindustan Bible Institute (HBI) founded by Rev. Paul Gupta. Whereas many of the students were from rural villages without much previous education, Gupta was from a large urban area and well educated. Rev. Gupta encouraged Pillai to go to seminary and become a missionary to the large urban areas of India. Around that time, there was a missionary named Mary Granas who was serving as a short-term missionary teaching at the HBI. Through her home church, Glendale Presbyterian Church in California, she was able to get Pillai a scholarship to go to Talbot Seminary in Pillai accepted the scholarship and attended Talbot along with a fellow student, John McArthur. Mary met another student, Annie, at HBI and discovered that she, too, had traveled to America and was studying nursing in the State of Washington. In typical Indian fashion, Mary contacted both families, arranged for Paul and Annie to meet, and worked out an engagement so they could get married and they were! In 1964, Annie actually did not want to move to India, preferring to stay in the U.S. They moved back to India to the city of Delhi, though, in June 1964 a city where they knew virtually no one. Just outside Delhi they found a piece of land being sold for an unusually low price. The man who originally purchased it had died suddenly, and his son was given the land. After taking possession of the land, the son suddenly died as well. After these tragedies, the wife and the mother of these two men were actually convinced the property was cursed and decided it must be sold no matter what. She was so desperate to sell that Pillai was able to purchase the 60 acres for only the equivalent of $3,000. Pillai came back to the U.S. in 1965 and incorporated his ministry, The India National Inland Mission, in California. One of its first board members was Paul Nelson of the Glendale Church. Paul remained on the board for nearly 50 years until his death at age

38 While in California, Pillai was invited to some Christian Businessmen Committee (CBMC) meetings where he developed several good friendships. Years later, one of his Christian friends invited him to a large CBMC meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, and there he met Ralph Fraley, a businessman from The Chapel. Ralph and Paul developed a strong friendship that lasted many years. Shortly after that meeting, Ralph introduced Paul to the missions committee of The Chapel, and the congregation gave a gift to his ministry. The Chapel began regularly supporting Pillai s ministry and The India National Inland Missions and did so for nearly 40 years. We, along with Arcadia Baptist Church, have been their longest supporting churches in America. A little-known fact is that the ministry of Operation Mobilization (OM) in India actually began in Paul Pillai s living room. The early OM India leaders all knew and respected Pillai and even did their final planning and organizing for establishing a formal India ministry while sitting in Pillai s home near Delhi. Also, K.P. Yohannan, founder and president of Gospel For Asia, was a member of Paul Pillai s church and had actually served with OM in his younger years. The India National Inland Mission continues today, stronger than ever, and is making an impact through the country of India and beyond. Its ministries included Grace Bible College, a seminary, and, until recently, more than 1,000 children in the Bethesda orphanage. They also support many evangelists, pastors, and church planters throughout India and other Asian countries. Historically, over 90% of the children in their children s home become Christians and nearly half end up going into full-time ministry! (In 2014, due to government pressure to force the teaching of Hinduism to the children, the INIM began moving the children into hundreds of foster homes, living with Christian families that are members of churches connected to INIM. Looking back, the 28

39 Chapel s partnership with this outstanding ministry has been a long and fruitful one one of the best investments in the history of our missions program.) The theme chosen for The Chapel s 1976 missions conference was Declare His Glory Unto the Nations, and the main speaker was Peter Deyneka, the president of Slavic Gospel Mission. The Faith Promise goal for that year was $210,000, but the congregation s continued generosity resulted in an actual Faith Promise of $258,704! At the end of the fiscal year, the actual income for missions was $283,865, with more than 1,000 families participating. The abundant provision by the congregation allowed the committee to give special gifts to several new missionary endeavors, including a $5,000 gift to provide 100 camperships at Camp Carl. In the fall of 1976, Trudy Smith was hired to work part time as the missions secretary. With the ministry and budget expanding, the committee was able to increase support and give additional gifts to many ministries. Support for Shelter Care increased, as did specials gifts to the OM ship, Logos, and Wycliffe aviation. The Chapel also expanded its regular prayer bulletin with a list of more than 40 missionaries and specific prayer requests from them. A shift in our campus ministry also occurred in the Fall of Pastor Burnham wanted to expand the outreach of The Chapel by bringing an additional full-time pastor on staff for college students. That person was Wes Hartzfeld. A graduate of Bethel Seminary, Wes and his wife, Connie, had served with Campus Crusade for Christ for several years at The Ohio State University and Kent State University. Having a married couple ministering to college students opened up many new doors for ministry to the women students on campus. The Hartzfelds brought with them the strong emphasis on evangelism of Campus 29

40 Crusade at a time when both The Chapel and the University were growing. The size of the campus ministry of The Chapel increased greatly in those early years, as the church invested more time, energy, and resources into reaching the nearby college campus. In light of this development, Ed Tubbs was concerned that there were now two campus ministries based at and supported by The Chapel. For the sake of unity, Ed believed the Lord was leading him to begin a similar ministry on the campus of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia in He had a very successful ministry there for several years and later, he served as a missionary in both Russia and Estonia. A final development that marked a very active year in the expansion of The Chapel s outreach ministries was the establishment of its first daughter church. The man chosen to lead this work was Joel Cochran, who had joined The Chapel s pastoral staff following his graduation from Tennessee Temple. Joel had a burden to preach and a heart for evangelism. To pursue this goal, Joel returned to his home community of Marlboro, Ohio, an area several miles east of Hartville, to plant a church. At age 28, he went door-to-door inviting people to the new church. Marlboro Church had its first service in late-1976 and continued to meet in a local public school for three years. By 1980, they had more than 200 members and were able to purchase property and build their first facility. By 1991, they had run out of room and built their current worship center, which seats 1,200 people. Over the years, they have always had a strong vision for missions and have continued to reach out in faithful ministry to the communities in the Marlboro region. The use of Camp Carl as a creative outreach to the Northeast Ohio community continued in Ray Wolfe and the missions committee approved providing 100 camperships for children from 30

41 the children s home, and several discussions were held concerning finding ways to provide scholarships for minority children from the area. That same year, the board approved transferring $50,000 from the missions budget to the Camp Carl budget as a subsidy in order to keep the camper fees low and allow for continued expansion. Regular support for other local outreach ministries like the Haven of Rest and the Furnace Street Mission also continued, and increased funding was provided for Shelter Care. Pastor Burnham also challenged the missions committee to do a complete review of The Chapel s Philosophy of Missions and definition of missions, and even to develop a comprehensive support plan for our missionaries. In addition, Bob Provost joined the pastoral staff as executive pastor in June of 1977 and became responsible for the pastoral oversight of missions. Bob had studied Russian in college and was able to utilize his language expertise in Russian during a career in the military. After leaving the service, Bob pursued a career in business in the Pittsburgh area. But after coming to Christ, he felt a call to the ministry and entered seminary at Grace Theological Seminary. Once he graduated, he was invited to join the pastoral staff. After coming to The Chapel, part of his duties was to oversee the missions program as both the chairman of the missions committee and as the pastoral liaison to the missions committee. Also in the late 70s, a retired businessman, Howard Williams, began to assist Bob with the missions program. Howard and his wife, Katie, had been among a group of believers in Cleveland who had admired the ministry of The Chapel and had inquired if Pastor Burnham would be willing to start a similar church in the Cleveland area. He encouraged them to pursue this on their own, and thus was born The Chapel in Cleveland in They called the Rev. Cal Hanson as their pastor. Over the years, this church moved several times, assuming the names of The Chapel in Beachwood, The Chapel in Solon, and, finally, Parkside Church. 31

42 Howard came to The Chapel in Akron in June and began serving on the missions committee on October 5, Bob Provost continued as the pastoral advisor. Howard also served as a volunteer missions coordinator in the office two days a week. Around this time, Pastor Rory Wineka began developing a youth missions program that would progressively involve middle and high school students in various short-term missions trips, culminating in an overseas trip by their senior year. Some of the earliest missions trips were to the island of St. Kitts to assist the ministry of missionary radio station WIVV. Other trips included helping the poor in Appalachia and ministering to Native Americans in Alaska. These trips were initially led by youth pastors Rory Wineka and Vince Didato and chaperoned by various couples such as Al and Marge Parsons and Chuck and Margaret Mealy. At first, the progressive short-term program was simply divided into four levels. Eventually, they were designated as Andrew, Barnabus, Cephus, and Doulos, with Doulos being the overseas trip, usually reserved for high school seniors. Because The Chapel is a non-denominational church working with many missions agencies, it began a unique experiment involving creating partnerships with key missions agencies. The Chapel had been supporting nearly 100 missionaries, but few members of our congregation really knew them or were praying for them on a regular basis. A new model of building closer and more effective relationships with our mission agencies and missionaries was developed by Howard Williams and Bob Provost. This model would not only allow The Chapel to focus upon fewer missionaries and missions agencies, but would also enable us to do a much better job of recruiting and training our future missionaries. Committee members also took the initiative to visit the headquarters of Greater European Mission, The Evangelical Alliance Mission, and Slavic 32

43 Gospel Mission. Later they visited several other agencies as well. The Chapel built strong relationships with these agencies and began to discuss a concept of developing a formal partnership with a few them with which we would work most closely. When it was finalized a few years later, they would call this partnership The Akron Model. The idea behind the experiment was to develop a strong relationship between a local church and four strong missions agencies that were compatible in doctrine and philosophy. The goal was that they would get to know each other very well and be more effective in recruiting and deploying missionaries. But the top priority of Chapel Missions was to send out member men and women whose fruitfulness in local Chapel ministries had served to set them apart and provide a base of prayer. As much as possible, all of The Chapel s future missionary candidates would be directed to these four agencies for preparation and assignments. The new model also aimed to reduce the time necessary to raise support and allow candidates to keep their support base reasonably close to The Chapel. The partnership believed that same-culture effectiveness precedes cross-cultural effectiveness. Substantial prayer was considered a vital component and Chapelsupported missionaries were expected to develop and maintain a devoted prayer base within The Chapel community. The four agencies that eventually became part of this Akron Model were SEND International, Gospel Missionary Union, Sudan Interior Mission, and Operation Mobilization. Each agency, having specific areas of the world they were focusing upon, gave a broad range of options for The Chapel s involvement in world missions. Each agency also selected a representative to be a liaison to The Chapel for meetings to plan and develop this partnership. The missionaries chosen were David Woods (SEND Int.), Carl McMindes (GMU), Ken Lloyd (SIM), and Marc Kretzschmar (OM). This partnership also led to increasing involvement of 33

44 The Chapel in short-term missions, sending young people to places such as Alaska (Send and GMU) and Europe (OM). Through the encouragement of a former OM missionary, Carl Knirk, a number of young people spent their summers serving with OM in what was then called Summer Campaign and later known as Love Europe. 34

45 CHAPTER 4 Growing and Going! As the 1970s drew to a close, The Chapel s giving to missions continued to grow. The Faith Promise goal of $300,000 from the fall of 1977 was met and exceeded by a record $322,000 in giving in This increased giving allowed the missions committee to give a gift of $25,000 to the building program of our first church plant, The Chapel in Marlboro. Because we were growing in our understanding of the strategic importance of supporting the ministries of nationals, we were also able to give a $5,000 gift to the ministry of Filipino Greg Tingson for an evangelistic crusade in India. As our missions program continued to grow, we were always looking for ways to engage the congregation more personally with our missionaries. One of the strategies we used was a program encouraging Chapel members to write to our missionaries using aerograms. This was, of course, a time before the Internet and s. We had a member of the congregation design two beautiful wooden racks and fill them with pre-addressed aerograms to all of our missionaries. Although the actual number of people who took advantage of this opportunity is unknown, we received numerous responses from those missionaries saying they were really encouraged to get letters from Chapel families. 35

46 As the complexity of our missions program increased, the missions committee was diligent in re-evaluating the program s purpose and priorities, along with developing new guidelines concerning missionary support and accountability. Because each mission agency had its own formula for calculating how much support its missionaries were required to raise, our committee carefully considered each new agency that approached us for support. The committee sought to be good stewards of the funds entrusted to them by the congregation. Thanks to the encouragement of committee member Pete Kesler, The Chapel began increased giving to the Gideons to distribute Bibles overseas. Pete had met the Gideons through our missions committee chairman, Paul Tell, a long-time member of the Gideons. In addition to being involved with the committee, Pete also represented the Gideons to many churches in the area and traveled overseas with them on Bible-distribution projects. In 1978 alone, several thousand dollars were given to place Bibles in India, Thailand, Ethiopia, and Japan. As The Chapel s missions outreach continued to grow, there was a need for greater understanding of how to best 1) manage an expanding program and 2) mobilize the congregation for greater involvement. Although other large churches around the country were also growing in their missions involvement, there was no platform for these churches to get together and share ideas, strategies, and best practices. Fortunately, a fairly new organization came to The Chapel s attention in That summer, Bob Provost and Howard Williams attended the national conference of ACMC (Association of Church Missions Committees) at Wheaton. A few years earlier, a group of missions professionals gathered together in California to form an organization that would create a network of missions-minded churches throughout the country. This group included Dr. Ralph Winter and Dr. Peter 36

47 Wagner of Fuller Seminary, along with Monnie Brewer of Grace Community Church and several other church leaders. ACMC s regional conferences were designed to meet the needs of missions committees, lay people, and staff seeking to integrate missions into their church ministry. These conferences featured well-known missions leaders and speakers and workshops on topics such as how to form a missions committee, how to write a missions policy manual, how to run a missions conference, and many other practical subjects. Out of these conferences grew a wealth of books, manuals, and other materials specifically designed to assist local churches in being more effective in their missions ministries. The Chapel and its missions outreach gained invaluable insight from the practical tools and materials we received from these conferences and from being part of the ACMC network. Another major development that grew out of the ACMC movement was the emerging of the Missions Pastor position. In the very early years, there were only a handful of official missions pastors scattered around the country. Men like Paul Borthwick, Monnie Brewer, Carl Palmer, and Woody Phillips were pioneers in creating such a position. Before long, regional gatherings of missions pastors began: CAMP (California Association of Missions Pastors) and ECAMP (East Coast Association of Missions Pastors) are two examples. These gatherings provided an ideal platform for veteran missions pastors to share their knowledge and experience as they mentored new and younger missions pastors in this new ministry. Toward the end of 1978, several Chapel-supported missionaries and missionary candidates were in transition. Jerry Harpool and Chuck Huffstetler were preparing to go back to their respective fields in Swaziland and the Philippines. Future missionaries like Martha Heidinger, Dan Zachary, and Sally Rittenour (Dyck) were just beginning their journeys into 37

48 cross-cultural ministry. A number of others were serving on one-year assignments to Europe or on summer assignments in Alaska with some of our mission agency partners. Thanks to the hard work of Carl and Evelyn Knirk, several young people were able to take part in special cross-cultural missionary training in his home. This 11-week course was designed by Operation Mobilization and utilized material from George Verwer and other missions leaders. One of the missionary couples The Chapel began supporting as part of its global outreach was Bruce and Carol Britten. Natives of Wisconsin, the Brittens were living in the Chicago area in the 1960s while Bruce worked as an engineer for a local firm. Bruce had been raised in a very missions-minded church and had a strong heart for missions even as a young man. When the Brittens got engaged, he shared with Carol his goal of giving as much of their income as possible to support missions and missionaries. Bruce heard a missionary from TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission) speak at their church in 1976, and he inquired as to whether there was anything he could do to help. As it turned out, TEAM was looking for someone who could go to Swaziland, Africa, to teach high school chemistry and physics for two years. After praying about the opportunity, the Brittens decided to accept, and Bruce took a leave of absence from his job. They didn t know anything about raising support, so they used their own savings to finance their first two years of missionary service. At the end of those two years, Bruce continued teaching at a Swazi government-sponsored school, and he received a small salary. They continued on for almost 17 years developing various ministries to students, women, local churches, and other outreach ministries. Because Bruce had learned the Swazi language, he was able to preach in churches and lead Bible studies. Although they were not officially TEAM missionaries, during the early 1970s they met and befriended a young TEAM missionary 38

49 from The Chapel Jerry Harpool. Jerry came to Swaziland in 1974 and was teaching at the TEAM school where he became good friends with the Brittens. The Brittens returned to the United States in 1984, and Bruce began teaching at Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy (CVCA). For almost seven years, Bruce and Carol influenced students, faculty, and many others with their passion and vision for missions. During this time, the Brittens began a monthly prayer meeting for missions called Fellowship of the Yoke, which often featured a missionary speaker or lesson on unreached peoples and ended with an extended time of prayer. (That ministry continued many years, even after they returned to Africa.) By 1990, the Brittens were developing a growing burden to return to Swaziland to help train and mobilize the Swazi church for world missions. Rather than simply assume that Swazi Christians could only reach other Swazis, the Brittens wanted to encourage them to send out their own missionaries to other parts of Africa, especially the Muslim north, and to other regions of the world. Because they had previously been associated with TEAM, they formally applied to be fulltime, long-term missionaries with TEAM to Swaziland. After completing candidate school, they were approved and moved back to Swaziland in Their vision expanded in the 1990s as they began to reach out to a heretical quasi-christian African church movement, the Zion Church. Numbering several million, they had drifted from orthodox Christianity and incorporated many traditional animistic African practices into their teaching and worship. In order to reach this significant number of Africans, the Brittens started a Bible school called Zion Bible College, which met once a month at several sites throughout Swaziland. Over the next 20 years the Brittens, and their associate missionaries, the Donaldsons, developed two teaching teams to provide sound biblical 39

50 teaching to more than a dozen extension sites in Swaziland. Hundreds of students have now graduated from Zion Bible College, and only the Lord knows the extent and eternal impact this training will have on the millions of people in southern Africa! Although the Faith Promises for 1979 totaled a healthy $361,000, an unfortunate trend was starting. A careful look at the expenditures in that year revealed that nearly 50% of the money Chapel members gave for missions stayed either in the Greater Akron area or within the United States. The reasons for this trend are not hard to understand. Most churches in America are re-active rather than pro-active meaning most respond to whatever ministry shows up at their door. In many cases, the majority of requests for personal support or funding comes from local student and campus ministries, Christian social service agencies and shelters, and a vast array of Christian ministries doing various U.S. outreaches. These are good ministries. The reality is, however, that you do not have many missionary candidates approaching churches about going to the least reached countries and unreached people groups in the world. The reason these areas are still unreached is because they are simply very difficult to work in. There may be restricted access to these countries for political or religious reasons. It may even be illegal to share one s faith publicly or have a meeting publicly. But the fact remains that the vast majority of unreached people in the world live in these areas, and it is the responsibility of the Church to do everything it can to reach those peoples. At The Chapel, we have always believed in the biblical principle To whom much is given, much will be required. Since the majority of churches in the United States do not have an active global missions program, we believed it was even more critical to organize our own missions program to make the least reached peoples in the 40

51 world our top priority. As the 70s ended and a new decade began, faithful giving by the congregation allowed the church not only to meet critical needs here at home but also to assist in emergencies that arose around the world. In December 1979, The Chapel was able to give $10,000 to help Cambodian refugees fleeing the horrors of the Pol Pot regime. At the same time, they were able to increase the annual subsidy that the missions budget was providing to Camp Carl from $50,000 to $65,000. Camp Carl continued to have a strong evangelistic emphasis, with more than 100 decisions for Christ in the first three weeks of camp in Also, Martha Heidinger moved to Vienna, Austria, in July 1980 to begin a lifetime of service (which spanned over 35 years) with Child Evangelism Fellowship. During those years, she trained future CEF missionaries from several Eastern European countries and even lived in the Czech Republic for several years to establish the work there. (From 2000 to 2015, Martha served at the CEF training center in Kilchzimmer, Switzerland, training future CEF missionaries from all over the world.) A new era of cooperation and partnership with Operation Mobilization occurred when The Chapel hosted the 1980 OM North America conference from June Families from the church graciously provided housing for nearly 180 young people. Those attending were mostly students from around the United States and Canada who were preparing to go on short-term summer missions trips to Europe and elsewhere. As a result of this conference, six young people from The Chapel went to Europe and eight went to Alaska for the summer to serve with GMU. Two of our young people also went to serve for two years on the unique ship ministry of Operation Mobilization. Over the previous ten years, OM had purchased two large ships in order to travel to ports around the world and share the Gospel. Just one of those ships, the Doulos, received over 22 million visitors and visited 108 countries during 41

52 its term of service. Those serving on the ships went through discipleship training and learned many practical ministry skills, as well. For many, it was the beginning of a life-long commitment to missions. This enthusiasm carried over into the next year at The Chapel as over 60 college students were in training for future trips. In high school, 71 sophomores and juniors were also in training. In light of all this interest, The Chapel invited Missionary Internship, an agency that trains future missionaries, to come to Akron and evaluate our youth missions preparation program. It was very gratifying to get their report a few months later giving us very high marks for the program. The new decade also brought a renewed emphasis on reaching the Northeast Ohio communities as well. At that time, The Chapel was growing at a rate of 7% or more a year, and there was great desire to do more to reach children. In 1980, Children s Pastor Paul Gerdes proposed a program of five-day Bible clubs to be held in neighborhoods throughout the city. The hope was that they would be able to reach children who might not ordinarily come to church or to a Vacation Bible School. To establish this program, the missions budget helped fund the children s department. Nearly $9,000 was provided to get the ministry off the ground, and by 1981 the program was a roaring success. In summary: there were 122 neighborhood Bible clubs attended by 2,287 children with 244 decisions for Christ! There were also 339 children who enrolled in a child-centered correspondence course. Camp Carl also had a spiritually fruitful summer with 222 decisions for Christ. As the spring of 1981 arrived, The Chapel s commitment to the Vietnamese Church and ministries reaching out in Vietnam continued to grow. The committee approved increasing the support for helping pastors in Vietnam to $500 per month. This money was distributed into Vietnam through Pastor Dang and contacts he had 42

53 with the underground church. A few months later, the Vietnamese Church baptized 18 at The Chapel one Sunday afternoon. Our concern for and commitment to local and national ministries continued strong in the summer of Camp Carl had nearly 50 full-time workers, both the camp and Neighborhood Bible Clubs continued to see many children come to Christ. In June, Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Marting established the Lois Saunders Fund to assist our seminary students who had financial emergencies. For the first time, we began separate support of the Harvest Home, the new ministry to homeless women at The Haven of Rest. Annual gifts to several of the area s Christian schools were also approved. In October of 1981, Julius Schipper, father of committee member David Schipper, began serving two days a week as a missions coordinator, assisting Howard Williams in the missions department. After a career as a school administrator, Julius served nearly 12 years with Trans World Radio (TWR) in Bonaire. That same fall, The Chapel began support for the newly formed Summit County Chaplaincy Service at the jail and supplied 40 Bibles to the Children s Home. As 1982 began, the vision of the Akron Model finally became a reality. The personnel directors of SEND International, SIM, and GMU all visited The Chapel and formally endorsed the partnership, affirming its goals and purpose statement. Bob Provost also began attending inter-agency meetings of the personnel directors of evangelical missions agencies from around the United States. Also in 1982, Bob announced a change in the way the missions committee would be organized. Beginning in August, Howard Williams would serve as the official chairman of the missions committee, with Bob Provost serving as the pastoral advisor. Julius Schipper would continue as missions coordinator. In light of the fact that Pastor Burnham announced in August that he was leaving The Chapel, the additional responsibilities that Bob Provost would face as chief of staff made this new arrangement with 43

54 the missions committee even better. The Chapel s relationship to the Operation Mobilization ship ministry and especially the ministry of OM India continued to grow. In addition to our support of OM, there was an increase in our interest and support of the OM literature ministry and their work throughout India. In response to a devastating fire that severely damaging the OM book warehouse in Bombay, The Chapel gave $5,000 to help replace lost literature. Later that year, Dave Hicks, the U.S. Director, invited The Chapel to send one of its pastors to visit India and see the work that OM was doing there. Also in 1982, the missions committee seriously began to discuss the possibility of pursuing a ministry to international students. In late 1979, a Chapel member and student at the University of Akron, David Yoho, had written a paper promoting the idea that The Chapel begin a foreign students ministry. David and his wife, Julie, actually began working with international students in 1979 and continued to do so until As the need for such a ministry became more evident, Howard distributed the paper to the committee at their June meeting, along with an article from Christianity Today, on the need for outreach ministries to international students studying in the United States. Although The Chapel did not have any staff assigned to or available for such a ministry at that time, the committee wanted to at least take the first steps. In October, therefore, they allocated $2,000 to college ministry at The University of Akron for the purpose of outreach to international students. At that same time, Chapel members David and Lisa Sipp were also feeling a burden for ministry to internationals. Having gone on previous short-term missions trips, they already had a heart for missions. So upon hearing about an organization called Internationals Students Inc., they decided to join the staff there and raise support in order to minister full-time to international students. In December 1982, they presented their ministry to the 44

55 missions committee and were approved for support of $100 per month to serve with ISI at The University of Akron. About that same time, a movement began that culminated in the founding of a significant pro-life ministry that continues today. It actually began in 1981 when Pastor Burnham asked me to fill in for him in speaking to the local Christian Medical Society. At the time, we were showing the Francis Schaeffer/C. Everett Koop video series Whatever Happened to the Human Race? It dealt with moral issues such as abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. After speaking to the Christian Medical Society, I met a few doctors who were particularly concerned about the growing abortion problem in America. In subsequent conversations with Dr. Kerry Sullivan and Dr. Gus Barkett, we decided to begin a local chapter of a national organization called the Christian Action Council (CAC). This organization was an evangelical response to the fine work that the Catholic Church had been doing for more than 10 years in opposing abortion. I met the CAC through one of my professors at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dr. Harold O.J. Brown. Dr. Brown was one of the founders of the CAC, and I had joined the Northern Illinois chapter when I was in seminary. Over the course of a year, the two doctors and I developed slideshow presentations about abortion, and they were presented to many churches and organizations both in the Akron area and throughout the State of Ohio. As we continued to share a strong pro-life message, there was a growing feeling by many that we should be doing more. In October 1982, we held a pro-life meeting at Cathedral Park in Cuyahoga Falls. There, another doctor, Ron Jones, stood up and suggested we must go beyond being anti-abortion and begin doing something positive to provide an alternative to abortion for women who are going through crisis pregnancies. After an overwhelmingly 45

56 positive response, those of us who were leading the local CAC chapter began to explore the possibilities of starting a ministry like this in Northeast Ohio. Fortunately, the CAC already had a network of similar ministries in various locations in the U.S. Called Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPC), they were dedicated to providing support and a wide variety of services for women. Initially, we formed a steering committee of local evangelical leaders as a first step to creating a board. After several months of meetings, and in October 1983, a local pro-life attorney, Alan Segedy, helped us incorporate the center as a government-recognized, 501(c)3 non-profit organization to be known as Summit County Crisis Pregnancy Center. We then contacted the headquarters of CAC in Washington, D.C., and arranged for one of their top trainers to come to Akron and provide training for potential CPC volunteers we would recruit. Word spread to local churches about this ministry, and an informational meeting was scheduled for those who might be interested in being involved. In February 1984, we had our first meeting, and we were overwhelmed by the response. More than 170 people showed up at The Chapel to learn more about how they could be part of this exciting new ministry. In May, Barb Hammond, national lead trainer for the CAC, came to Akron and did a weekend training seminar for those who were seriously interested in volunteering at the new CPC. By July of 1984, the Summit County Crisis Pregnancy Center opened its doors. Initially there was not sufficient funding for substantial rent. But through the kindness of board member, Eileen Thomas, the women s director at The Haven of Rest, the center was housed early on in some rooms in the Harvest Home. And then, through the generosity of Doug Estes, the husband of board member Shirley Estes, the Center was able to move into a much larger 46

57 facility housed within a building that his business used on Mill Street. Since that time, the Center changed its name to Akron Pregnancy Services and moved to a strategic location on East Market Street. Over the last 30 years, APS has expanded its ministry to many other needs and facets of the lives of pregnant women and their families. They have also provided extensive counseling for women who are suffering with post-abortion guilt and consequences. By God s grace, APS has ministered to thousands of women from all over Northeast Ohio only the Lord knows how many children are alive today because of this ministry! Howard Williams continued attending ACMC conferences each year, where he heard more and more about the need for churches to adopt unreached or hidden people groups terms popularized by Dr. Ralph Winter, the founder of the U.S. Center for World Missions in Pasadena, California. In discussions with our partner SEND International, we were made aware of an unreached Muslim people group called the Maguindanao, who live on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. In the midst of discussing these opportunities with the committee, Howard found there was a young man in our congregation interested in just such a ministry. Eric Palmquist had come to Christ through a neighborhood Bible study and had received discipleship training from The Navigators. He had already gone on several short-term missions trips with OM and SEND. Eric had heard of the need in the Philippines and was very interested in pursuing an opportunity to spend 11 weeks there working with veteran missionary Chuck Hufstetler. The committee approved the trip in January, and Eric reported back to them about his experience at their May meeting. Following the counsel he received from Send International, he applied that spring to go to Dallas Seminary to 47

58 prepare for full-time career missions service. After completing seminary, Eric began a one-year internship, serving with me in the missions department. Also in 1983, an event occurred that eventually changed the course of my ministry and my life. That fall, Operation Mobilization chose to have their North America conference at The Chapel in Akron. This conference brought together missionaries from all over the world including many young people who were preparing to serve that summer in various places around the globe. Large meetings and workshops were held throughout the week, and a strong challenge for missions was given on Sunday by OM Director George Verwer. At the close of the conference, George Verwer and his staff met with Senior Pastor Knute Larson and some of his staff to reflect on the conference and discuss missions. At that meeting, George challenged The Chapel to send one of its pastors overseas each year in order to keep the vision of missions alive. Consequently, I volunteered to go overseas as soon as an opportunity presented itself. In fact, I sent a formal letter to the missions committee in December of 1983 making myself available for any short-term missions assignment that might become available in the near future. It wasn t until the fall of 1984 that an opportunity with Operation Mobilization presented itself. By that time, God was already working in my heart, and I was more than ready to take on the assignment. (More on that later ) In the meantime, several important developments occurred in our missions program. Early in 1984, Pastor Larson recommended creating a missionary internship for individuals who had completed their biblical and missionary training but had not yet left for the field. We discussed the concept of a one-year pre-field internship with SEND International. Steve Bucy had completed both his training at Moody and Columbia Seminary and had recently been appointed as a missionary candidate to go to the Philippines with SEND. With full support of both The 48

59 Chapel and SI, Steve Bucy became the first missionary intern at The Chapel. The experiment went well Steve became the first of many missionary interns we would have over the next 25 years. In a similar vein, Marty Heidinger, who was working full-time with Child Evangelism Fellowship at the time, served as a Missionary in Residence at The Chapel that year, assisting primarily in the Children s Department. David Sipp, who had been working among international students with ISI, decided to leave that ministry to pastor a church in Elyria, Ohio. In his place, Steve and Mary Bucy began working with international students through a Friday night outreach that they continued until they left for the field. Steve developed and presented an outreach plan to the committee that helped grow the ministry significantly. After they left, Terry and Rebecca Lingenhoel, future missionaries with Operation Mobilization, took over the Friday night ministry. In fact, it was expanding so quickly that The Chapel s board agreed to make improvements to the old Boy Scout building we had purchased and were now using for the international student outreach. By October, as many as 65 students were coming each Friday night. People were on the move everywhere toward the end of Future Chapel International Students Pastor, Jim Hibbard, was leaving for a two-year assignment in the Philippines. Steve and Mary Bucy were raising support for their long-term career service in the Philippines with SEND International. Donna Schaber, too, was raising support for career missions with International Missions Inc. (IMI). Her ministry would be focusing on reaching Muslims through a health ministry on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Finally, as part of our year-end giving, the committee voted to give $5,000 to assist Operation Mobilization with their ship, the MV Doulos. This gift, and The Chapel s strong support of the OM ship ministry, had a direct impact on me because it was soon to open a door for my first significant cross-cultural missions 49

60 experience. Because of our close relationship with Operation Mobilization, a unique opportunity arose that allowed The Chapel to be a blessing not only to OM but also specifically to one of their faster growing fields, India. In early 1985, we became aware of a critical health need of the OM India leader, Alfy Franks. He needed serious heart surgery, the kind that would best be done in the United States. With Bob Provost acting as an intermediary, Chapel doctors Rich Murray, Bob Beggs, and several others made it possible for Alfy to come to the United States and have his heart surgery at Akron General Hospital at no cost to him. I had the privilege of praying with him before surgery, and there was rejoicing in both India and the United States the next day when it was reported that he came through the surgery with flying colors. Several years later when I was in India to visit at the OM headquarters in Hyderabad, Alfy introduced me. To the audience gathered in the main auditorium he said, Bob comes from the church that gave me my life back! What an encouragement it was to have a part in seeing this outstanding Indian leader back to health and serving the Lord with enthusiasm. When I volunteered for an overseas missions assignment, the Lord had been working in my heart for some time in the area of missions. By way of background, I had been involved with The Chapel since Having trusted Christ in 1969, I was looking for both a new church home and a place that had a significant number of college students I could fellowship with. I found both at The Chapel. As a result of my own training with the Navigators, I had a keen awareness of the Great Commission, as expressed in Matthew 28: I also attended the great Inter-Varsity Missionary Convention, Urbana 1973, where I was further challenged concerning the need for missions. After graduating from The University of Akron in 1974, I moved to Columbus, Ohio, for a year 50

61 of additional training with the Navigators before pursuing a career in my major, social work. Following a brief career in social work, my wife, Myra, and I began to pray about going into full-time ministry, with a focus on missions. We were undecided at the time, so we applied both to SIM for missionary service in Nigeria and to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The decision didn t get any easier when we received a yes from both organizations. Fortunately, I had the blessing of knowing three men from whom I could seek godly counsel: Dave Burnham, Dave Fair, and Dave Johnson of the Navigators. All three pointed out something that should have been obvious to me from the beginning. First, if I were serious about full-time ministry, I would need to pursue seminary training at some point. Second, it would not get any easier to pursue training when I was married and had several children. That being the case, Myra and I moved to Chicago in 1977 where I enrolled as a seminary student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I took several courses in missions because I knew God had laid missions on my heart. Although I had no specific leading from the Lord yet, I wanted to be as prepared as possible for any future opportunities to serve in missions. After graduating with a Masters of Divinity in 1980, I received a call from Bob Provost at The Chapel inviting me to return to begin a one-year, post-seminary internship program. Considering the fact that we had a new baby and no current job opportunities, that was an easy decision! Although the internship was intended to last a year, I was invited to join the pastoral staff full-time in December of At the time we had divided the church into five major geographic zones and were organizing Chapel families into what we called Neighborhood Fellowship Groups. These groups met in homes and would meet monthly for a time of Bible study, prayer, and fellowship. As a result of this experience and my training with the Navigators, I served in the area of small groups and discipleship for 51

62 several years. In the fall of 1984, Operation Mobilization again held their annual North America conference at The Chapel. This conference drew hundreds of young people who would be going out the next summer for overseas evangelism. It was then that OM s director George Verwer challenged us to send one of our pastors overseas each year, and I reiterated my desire to go on such a trip when the opportunity was available. A few months later, I heard from Marc Kretzschmar of Operation Mobilization about an opportunity to serve with the OM ship, Logos. The ship ministry, begun in 1970, is a floating book exhibit attracting thousands of visitors each day that the ship spends in ports around the world. Staffed by a crew of hundreds of young people from many different countries, the ship uses a variety of evangelistic ministries to share the Gospel in every land they visit. At that point, OM had two ships, the Logos and the Doulos. The Doulos was the oldest continuous operating ocean-going ship in the world, having been commissioned in 1914, two years after the Titanic. The Logos was going to be in Central America, and OM asked me if I would be willing to serve for two weeks as a daily Bible teacher on the ship during that time. The decision wasn t easy my wife and I had three young sons, ages 5, 3, and 18 months. It would be a tremendous burden on Myra for me to go, but she encouraged me to go nonetheless. I was amazed that she was willing, yet it reflected her heart and our shared vision for the importance of missions. So, in summer 1985, I traveled with the ship s director, Frank Fortunato, to Guatemala City. Upon our arrival, we discovered there had been a miscommunication. We were intending to spend the night there, but the local OM people had scheduled us to leave on a night bus through the dangerous Guatemalan Mountains. There is nothing quite like sitting on an ancient bus going around hairpin 52

63 mountain curves with no guardrails, all while sitting directly in front of a woman with a chicken on her lap! After arriving at the Logos in the middle of the night (I had thankfully gotten a few hours sleep), I awoke to an amazing sight. Out my port window I saw a long line of more than a thousand people standing in the hot sun, waiting for the opportunity to come on board the ship and see the books. For two weeks, I served as resident teacher and chaplain on the Logos as it visited ports in Guatemala and Honduras. I also had the opportunity to do door-to-door evangelism with a Guatemalan pastor. Meeting young people from all over the world who had given two years of their life to serve in this kind of ministry made a tremendous impact on me and launched me into a renewed interest in pursuing a missions ministry through The Chapel. It wasn t all serious, however, as there were some surprises as well. The first Sunday on the ship, I was assigned to speak at a church that was meeting in a rural area. A Guatemalan Christian picked me up at the ship and drove into the interior until we were far away from civilization. When he let me out of the car, I noticed right away that there was no building nearby. Where s the church? I asked. Well, they meet under that tree over there, he said. So we waited for the first people to arrive for what was supposed to be a 9:30am service. And we waited. The first people to arrive came about 10:00. It was a father and son who were in charge of the sound system. I had to laugh as the boy climbed the tree and hung what looked like a speaker you would see at a high school football game on one of the branches. Next, to my astonishment, the father pulled out a lapel mike and hooked it to my shirt! It was powered by a large battery pack of several D cell batteries on the ground. The rest of the people, numbering about 25, finally arrived between 10 and 10:30. My first experience of speaking with a 53

64 translator was about to begin. As if I wasn t nervous enough already, just as I began to speak, a young woman about 18 years old dropped her dress to half-mast because it was time to nurse her baby. To say the least, I needed my best concentration powers to preach that day! The next Saturday, I was asked to speak at a youth rally in the town where the ship was in port. It was there that I learned the true meaning of the phrase no problem. We were scheduled to be in a building that would hold several hundred teenagers, so we planned to have a band play a concert to start the evening off. Our OM advance team asked the local Christians who found this building if there would be enough plugs for us to connect all the amplifiers, lights, and sound equipment for the concert and rally. No problem! we were told. So, we arrived about an hour before the event to set up for the evening and discovered that the building was not even wired for electricity! No problem! Fortunately, the OM ship crew is prepared for almost any emergency. They quickly went back to the ship and brought back about 300 feet of extension cords, which we ran from another building across the street into ours. Not only did the Logos take many ministries into the villages and communities near the port, it also provided a platform to invite many different groups onto the ship for practical seminars. During my time there, the ship s crew offered seminars to schoolteachers, health professionals, student groups, and pastors. These seminars on cults, witnessing, and discipleship were all designed to help build up the local churches and equip their pastors and lay leaders. As I flew back to the States, I reflected on what I had just seen and heard serving with the OM ship ministry: Hundreds of young people from many countries representing widely diverse cultures and languages all working together because they love Jesus Christ and want to share the Good News of the Gospel with the world. Evangelism was part of their DNA and permeated everything they did. Everyone on the ship views himself as part of something much bigger than himself, and does so with a servant s heart. 54

65 They all had a constant focus on world missions and being world Christians. They were constantly talking, praying, and thinking about reaching people for Christ. The emphasis and practice of prayer on board the ship was also quite remarkable. These are young people from a wide variety of backgrounds theologically, but one thing that binds theirs hearts is that they spend so much time together in prayer. In both morning and evening sessions they were praying for each other, the ship s ministry, and other OM ministries around the world. As I mulled this over, my dominant thought was, If only I could get everyone at The Chapel to see the thousands of people waiting in line to get on the ship. If only I could somehow communicate the desperate need there was to get the Gospel to those who had never heard. If only I could expose our young people to the enthusiasm and passion that drives these OM youth to serve so selflessly. Little did I know that there was much more to learn before that would happen. 55

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67 CHAPTER 5 Stepping Out in Faith In the fall of 1985, the missions program continued to expand and strengthen. Shortly after I gave my report to the missions committee, Pastor Larson went on his own missions trip, serving as a guest teacher in October on the OM ship Doulos. Having heard two very positive reports about the ship ministry, the committee approved a gift of $3,000 for needs concerning the Logos. While two of our Chapel families were in preparation for serving as missionaries to the Philippines, representatives from the four agencies involved in the Akron Model spent several days at The Chapel meeting with both the committee and several members of our pastoral staff. The response of the missions agencies was very encouraging to say the least. As a result of their time with us, they felt that strong bridges of trust were developing and that they were gaining a much deeper understanding of how the local church works and the challenges it faces in seeking to promote missions to the congregation. They also sensed that The Chapel was beginning to better understand the challenges missions agencies face and the need for support of the home offices that provide so many services to missionaries. 57

68 Marc Kretzschmar from Operation Mobilization again contacted me that fall about a missions opportunity with them. This time he invited me to work with their Eastern European team for the entire summer of Their plan was for me to serve as a roving Bible teacher for 12 short-term teams that would be serving in Austria and several countries behind the Iron Curtain. I was very skeptical about being gone for so long, so when I asked Pastor Larson about the opportunity, I thought there was very little chance that he would give me 10 weeks off to do it. As it turned out, he was very positive about the opportunity and was gracious enough to grant me a leave of absence. I was also skeptical that the missions committee would approve support for that long but, again, I should not have doubted the Lord s plan. To my surprise, in April the missions committee provided the support that enabled my family and I to move to an area just outside Vienna, Austria. When I received news that the trip had been approved, I had to go to Myra and say, Now what are we going to do? They said yes! Moving overseas with three pre-school boys was going to be a major challenge to say the least, but it was clear to us that God was in it, so we stepped out in faith. That summer allowed me the opportunity to minister not only in east Austria but also in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Many of these ministries had to operate underground because the countries resided behind the Iron Curtain under communism. We were able to visit and encourage Chapel missionaries in several countries in both Western and Eastern Europe. Myra was absolutely amazing in the way she so quickly adapted to living in a new culture where she did not know the language. She learned to drive through Vienna traffic in a manual transmission OM van. She navigated shopping in a grocery store without knowing any German. But most of all she was wonderful at getting to know the wives of OM workers and the single women 58

69 working there that summer. When we had the opportunity to visit missionaries, she was invaluable in meeting with the wives, lending a listening ear, and encouraging them in ways that I never could have. My ministry to Chapel missionaries would not have been fruitful or effective without her! One of the more unusual encounters we had occurred while visiting missionaries Paul and Becky Luedtke in Switzerland. One July day we were driving in southern France when we stopped at a rest area for a picnic lunch. As we were eating, I saw a man walking across the parking lot who looked remarkably like another Chapel missionary, Ed Cox. I discarded the notion, because the Coxes were living in England while working with The Navigators. Then I saw a woman walking with him who looked remarkably like Ed s wife, Linda. Finally I yelled out, Ed Cox, is that you? Well, it was. They were driving all the way from the U.K. on their way to Bulgaria and just happened to pull into this particular rest stop to eat a late lunch. What are the odds of that happening at this stop on that day, with both families there at the same time? I don t know, but God never makes a mistake He arranged this meeting to encourage both of us. Myra had a wonderful time sharing with Linda, and Ed and I got to discuss various strategies of reaching people in Eastern Europe. My main responsibility that summer was to visit various OM teams scattered throughout Austria and provide an in-depth Bible study for them. Most of them were college students serving overseas for the first time. Unlike most short-term trips that last two weeks, these students were there for an entire summer and encountered stresses and challenges that are often avoided on trips of a shorter duration. I had many students talk to me about struggles and decisions they were facing about the future, whether it concerned a career or giving themselves fulltime to missions. Regardless, it was a very fulfilling experience to have the opportunity to influence so many young lives at an especially crucial time in their spiritual development. 59

70 Looking back, it is easy to forget that before the Berlin Wall came down it was still very risky for Christians doing ministry to travel behind what Winston Churchill called the Iron Curtain. In those days, Vienna was used as the last outpost of freedom before traveling into the Soviet Union-controlled communist countries of Eastern Europe. To preach the Gospel openly or distribute literature in these countries was often forbidden and breaking these rules could get you kicked out of the country or worse. For several years before I arrived in Vienna, OM had a very sophisticated system of getting Bibles and Christian literature into the Eastern bloc countries. They had an old Mercedes van with many secret compartments to hide the literature. Some countries, like Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, were relatively easy to enter and did not provide a significant risk. Other countries, like Romania and Bulgaria, were hardcore communist dictatorships and required that special precautions be taken. Marc Kretzschmar told me that they often used a disarming form of humor to get through customs at some of these borders without obviously lying. When asked if they had Bibles, they would sometimes just laugh and say, I can t believe you would even ask me that! How silly. It often worked. Another strategy was to take the custom official s questions to the absurd in a joking way. In response to a question about Bibles or contraband, they would sometimes say, Of course we do. We have Bibles, alcohol, guns, pornography, anything you can name. Often the border guards would laugh and say something like, Oh, you crazy Americans. Always joking. Now get out of here! And the Americans were more than glad to! On a personal note, I found myself as the chief smuggler more than once on trips into some communist countries. On one, the long-term OM workers decided to hide all of their evangelistic literature inside MY sleeping bag. When I objected, asking why they had to put it into my bag, they explained that if we were caught, the 60

71 worst that could happen to me is that I would get kicked out of the country. That was not a serious problem since I was just a shortterm worker who was only there for the summer. If they got caught, however, being kicked out of the country and put on a watch list would cripple their ministry and make it impossible to continue in that country. OM s strategy in working behind the Iron Curtain was fairly simple. Where there was no church, they would try a variety of types of evangelism ranging from literature, music, street drama, and other creative ways of sharing the Gospel. Where there were evangelical churches, they would seek creative ways to partner with those churches to enhance their own evangelistic effectiveness and, hopefully, build up the church. A clash of cultures, however, was sometimes unavoidable. Once we were working with a Baptist church in Poland that had set up a large circus-style tent to do a week of evangelistic service. I was scheduled to speak a few nights, right after an OM rock band played music. (To say the music was loud and edgy would be an understatement.) As you might expect, the older people attending, who represented the majority of those there, were not very happy about the music several walked out. Cultural challenges were a fairly typical part of my experience on these trips as well. You expect to face unusual food, drink, and housing arrangements when you travel to different countries. What I wasn t prepared for was a quite different view of modesty. At a couple of the campgrounds we were at in Yugoslavia, I discovered it was perfectly acceptable for people to shower outdoors. I also learned it was normal for people returning from swimming in a lake to change out of their swimsuits while sitting on their blankets in an open area. Of course, I did not follow the old adage, When in Rome do as the Romans do! My lasting memory of those trips, however, was clearly the strong emphasis on the Gospel and evangelism. Everyone on the 61

72 team was totally committed to finding creative ways to sharing their faith through any means possible. The focus of their prayers and activities each day were always on seeking opportunities to build friendships and sharing the Good News of Christ. Their passion for evangelism was something that every church in America could profit by following. One of the long-term benefits of this experience in the summer of 1986 was a greater sensitivity to the spiritual needs of the millions of people living in Eastern Europe. Although only very few organizations were working actively behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s and 80s, the door was about to swing wide open. When the Berlin Wall came down and, one by one, the Eastern bloc countries left the Soviet Union and moved toward freedom and democracy, dozens of missions agencies moved in to take advantage of the almost unlimited number of opportunities to do significant ministry there. At the time of our summer of service, Martha Heidinger had already been living in Vienna for several years and serving as a missionary with Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), focusing primarily upon Czechoslovakia. We had the joy of having Martha over for dinner and spending a vacation day with her, allowing us to hear many stories of her work with CEF and the challenges she faced in trying to work through churches that didn t always share her vision for reaching children. She later moved to the Czech Republic her primary ministry was working with churches to train both children s workers and parents in the way to better reach children with the Gospel. Later, Martha would move to the CEF training center in Kilchzimmer, Switzerland, to train future CEF workers from all over the world. Through Martha, The Chapel was introduced to Sebastian Edelman, a Hungarian refugee who had escaped the Iron Curtain in the 1970s. He literally swam across a river at night to escape and was now serving as a missionary himself with CEF. Myra and I had 62

73 the privilege of having dinner with him and his family when they were living in Vienna. He later became the director of CEF work throughout Eastern Europe with responsibility for workers in many countries of this area. Also serving in the region at that time were Paul and Becky Luedtke. The Luedtkes had moved to Nyon, Switzerland, near Geneva, in the mid-1980s to serve as missionaries with Youth For Christ. Their ministry focused upon students, both Swiss and others from around the world who had moved to the area. That ministry soon expanded to a very specialized ministry to Au Pairs, young women from many countries who come to Switzerland to work as nannies and housekeepers for wealthy families living in the area around Geneva. Many of these young girls suffer not only loneliness and isolation, but also various forms of abuse by families that take advantage of them. During our visit, they gave us an overview of their ministry and the historic background of the area. We visited the church in Geneva where John Calvin preached and did much of his writing. We also drove over to Huemoz on the other side of Lake Geneva. We went there to see the Christian community and study center, L Abri, founded by Dr. Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer s books on apologetics, philosophy, and culture had made a huge impact on many including myself who had come to Christ in the later 60s and early 70s. It was a thrill to walk among the beautiful chalets at L Abri, looking over the gorgeous Alps and Lake Geneva, and imagine Dr. Schaeffer sitting on his balcony writing one of his famous books. 63

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75 CHAPTER 6 Gaining Perspective The missions program at The Chapel continued to grow and expand in As part of our commitment to spreading the Gospel, the missions committee expanded our investment in getting the Scriptures into the hands of people around the world. That winter the committee gave monetary gifts to the OM ships to supply Bibles, for the work of Bible Literature International (BLI) in Israel, and to Bibles For India. The Gideons, of course, was a regular part of our budget as well. In February, the four agencies that were part of the Akron Model (OM, SIM, GMU, and SEND International) came to The Chapel for a weekend of partnership meetings with the missions committee. Missions chairman Howard Williams led the meetings and scheduled missionaries to share in our Adult Bible Fellowships on Sunday and times to meet with any potential missionary candidates. In these meetings, the final partnership agreement was finalized, outlining the responsibilities and expectations that the church and agencies had for one another. As a result, the committee approved placing each of these agencies on the annual missions budget with an annual gift of $2,

76 As Steve and Mary Bucy were leaving for the Philippines in June, future missionary to Japan, Denise Racissi was just coming on to the Chapel staff as a missionary resident. Denise had completed her studies at Moody and was now a missionary candidate with SEND International. In addition to recruiting and sending out our own missionaries, The Chapel continued to grow in its commitment to supporting and training nationals throughout the unreached areas of the world. (This commitment had begun many years prior with support of ministries such as Gregorio Tingson in the Philippines and Paul Pillai in India.) In 1986, it continued as the committee gave gifts to support the work of Christian nationals in Brazil and the Rajasthan Bible Institute in India. We also began supporting Victor and Joy Lao in Taiwan and Francois and Daniel Dossman with the missionary radio station, HCJB, in Ecuador. Also that summer, my role as missions pastor began to emerge. I was already serving on the missions committee, assisting with events and planning and functioning as the staff liaison to the committee. In May, Pastor Larson asked me for a job description for a missions pastor, and in June, three possible job descriptions were provided and revised. By September, just after I returned from my leave of absence, my job description had been adjusted so that 50% of my duties were that of missions pastor. During that year, some significant analysis was done by Howard Williams and the committee concerning the allocation of our missions budget. In response to some questions from the finance committee, we discovered to our chagrin that nearly twothirds of our missions budget was going just to Akron and in the U.S. In looking at national statistics about church missions giving, we discovered that 95% of all missions dollars were going to support ministries in areas already penetrated by the Gospel with only 5% actually going to missions to unreached peoples. As a result of these statistics, the committee set a goal that a minimum of 50% of our budget be spent on overseas missions and 66

77 that 80% of those funds focus on church planting and leadership development. Pastor Larson responded very favorably to these goals and endorsed the vital work of the missions committee and its accountability to the congregation. In fall 1986, we began moving toward having a full missions conference at The Chapel. The committee had set aside $10,000 for it and worked hard to involve many people from the congregation. Many conferences had occurred in the 1970s but had not been held recently. This conference was kicked off with Pastor Larson giving a missions message in all three services on October 18th. That evening, Dr. Walt Kaiser from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, brought a strong missions message from the Old Testament. Missionaries spoke in all the ABFs and met with home groups on Monday and Tuesday. In addition to meeting with missions committee members and potential missionary candidates, the missionaries met with the pastoral staff for lunch and participated in a Wednesday evening missions rally. The impact of the conference was very positive our giving for missions for 1986 ended up at over $700,000. In January 1987, I traveled to Pasadena, California, for training that literally changed my life and impacted the trajectory of Chapel missions. For several years I had been hearing about a missions course called Perspectives on the World Christian Movement developed by the U.S. Center on World Missions. Perspectives was the brainchild of Dr. Ralph Winter of the Fuller Seminary School of World Missions. Winter had served as a missionary in Guatemala and returned to teach at Fuller. There he was greatly influenced by a giant of the missionary world, Dr. Donald McGavern. In 1974, he turned the missions world upside down with a message at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism, sponsored by Billy Graham and attended by some 2,400 evangelical and missions leaders from around the world. In his pre-conference paper and major address, Winter 67

78 argued that the missionary world was ignoring over a billion people in the world who lived in nearly 17,000 unreached or hidden people groups. Instead of looking at the world as being divided among roughly 200 countries, as you would if you were considering the United Nations or the Olympics, Winter explained that the biblical concept of nation was rooted in the word ethne. Used in Matthew 28:19 and many other Great Commission passages, it is the root of words like ethnic and ethnocentric. It refers to what Dr. Winter called people groups. These are population groups that identify with each other because of shared language, culture, customs, etc. By way of illustration, a country like India may be one country with one flag to the United Nations but has within it literally thousands of unreached people groups. To reach them, Winter argued, we must devise unique and creative evangelistic strategies tailored to communicate the Gospel to each people group. Many years earlier, Cameron Townsend, founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators discovered a similar principle. While passing out Spanish New Testaments to tribal Indians in Guatemala, one of them said to him, If your God is so smart, why doesn t He speak my language? That question startled Townsend and propelled him along a path that led him to found Wycliffe. He too had learned to see the peoples of the world through a new paradigm. Just two years after the Lausanne Congress, Dr. Winter and his wife, Roberta, founded the U.S. Center for World Missions in Located on the previous campus of a Nazarene college, the Center was viewed by Winter as sort of a missions pentagon that would house several mission agencies and advocacy groups and become a place where missiologists and others could come to study, research, and write about missions. Among the many organizations, projects, and courses launched by the Center was this course, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. It was based on a course Dr. Winter wrote in 1974 to help 68

79 college students committed to becoming missionaries get a basic missions education. It eventually evolved into a full 15-week semester class covering five major areas: the biblical basis of missions, the history of missions, cultural issues, strategic issues, and growing as a world Christian. I heard about the course, as they had begun offering it on some college campuses and were starting to utilize churches to sponsor and host a Perspectives course for people in their area. So, I went to Pasadena to take this one-week intensive course in order to be certified to lead Perspectives courses anywhere in the country. Normally, to be certified to lead, one has to have gone through the complete 15-week course. But because of my background in missions courses at Trinity and my experience and position working in missions at The Chapel, they allowed me to take this intensive version of the course at the U.S. Center. The only thing they asked as a prerequisite was that I would read the complete Perspectives textbook before arriving for the training. Considering that the book was nearly 800 pages long, I found myself cramming to finish reading it on my flight to Los Angeles. Once I was on the campus of the U.S. Center, I discovered why Dr. Winter called it the missions pentagon. There were agencies such as Frontiers, specialized training centers such as the Zwemer Institute, advocacy groups such as Friends of Turkey, and even a publishing house called the William Carey Library. Plunging into the Perspectives coordinator training, I quickly learned that taking a course that normally meets three hours a week for 15 weeks and cramming that into one week is roughly equivalent to feeding a canary with a fire hose. I think our brains went into overload by the third day. But the impact of this course and the concepts it teaches restructured my thinking about missions and continues to impact me even today. Even as we explored the initial section of the course biblical foundations I was seeing principles and patterns in the 69

80 Scriptures that I had never seen or thought deeply about. Simply discovering that the Great Commission did not begin in Matthew 28 but in Genesis 12 with Abraham was a revelation. Understanding how God s promises to His people to bless them so that they would be a blessing to ALL the people groups of the world really began to turn on some lights for me. Moving on from there, we explored many of the major stories of the Old Testament and noted that almost everyone had a missions component and, often, that missions was the very purpose of the story. Although I had studied missions history and culture in seminary, the section on strategy again began to restructure my thinking and open up new doors in my mind concerning how we think about the task of reaching the world for Christ. One of the simplest and yet most profound insights I received that week concerned the core meaning of the Great Commission itself, as it is recorded in Matthew 28:19. Having been around the Navigators for 15-plus years, I was fairly confident that I knew that the main command of that verse is to make disciples. How surprising it was, then, when one of the lecturers diagrammed the sentence in the Greek for us and demonstrated very clearly that the command of that verse was to disciple the nations. That may not seem like a big deal to the casual observer, but it is huge. Let me explain. That same week I ran into a man who used to serve on staff with the Navigators in Ohio in the 1970s. He told me in all his years of ministry with the Navs, he had misunderstood the true meaning of Matthew 28:19-20, even though it was a core verse for Navigator ministry. He had always thought about it as simply a mandate to make disciples in whatever neighborhood or city that the Lord placed you. He had been practicing this assumption for nearly 20 years of ministry. Like me, he was stunned to see clearly for the first time that the real mandate of that passage was to disciple the nations. Jesus promises to be with us to the ends of the earth, so it became even clearer to us that the mandate of the Great 70

81 Commission was to take the Gospel and disciple all the nations (people groups) in the world. That week at the U.S. Center for World Missions was a turning point in my own thinking and helped me begin formulating the missiology that would bring our Chapel missions program into the 21st century. Already, leading missions thinkers were beginning to talk about completing the Great Commission by the year They were using such phrases as closure and completing the task. Dr. Winter was known for calling it the completable task. He was fond of referring to Matthew 24:14 where it says that Christ will not return until all the nations have heard the Gospel. Since the Bible definitely says that Christ is coming back, he therefore called the Great Commission the completable task. Armed with a tremendous supply of new books, videos, resource materials, and websites, I began to plan to offer the course for people at The Chapel. I decided to use the option of making it an audit-only course so those taking it would not have to pay tuition fees or any U.S Center administrative fees. We held our first course the winter of 1988 with about 25 people attending. Rather than pay to fly in speakers from the Perspectives-approved speaker list, I was blessed to have some local missionaries qualified to speak and utilized the extensive video library that the U.S. Center provided. The course was very well received and we continued to offer it annually for more than 20 years. We offered the course for credit a few times, utilizing accredited schools like Malone and Trinity College to offer the credit. Regardless of what format we utilized, I have been very gratified to see many of our missionary candidates during those years go through the course. At least six couples and most of our single missionary candidates took Perspectives. Along the way, Pastor Lon Snyder, the missions pastor of Riverwood Chapel, took the course and eventually co-taught the course with me for several years. It was encouraging also to see 71

82 several other area churches including Maranatha Bible Church and Christ Community Church of Hudson offer the course as well. To this day, I have never seen a better course or better material on missions designed to educate and equip people to grow as world Christians and become mobilizers for missions in their own congregation. As we moved into 1987, Chapel missions giving remained strong, and we were able to invest in additional strategic, difference-making ministries. We provided major funding for the relatively new Summit County Chaplaincy Service, along with gifts to JAARS, the aviation division of Wycliffe, and to FEBC missionary radio. We maintained our commitment to both the least reached people in the world and working to train national. For some time, we had been hearing about the desperate conditions in Mauritania, a brutal Islamic dictatorship in extreme northwest Africa. Through the cooperation of World Vision and Frontiers, we were able to send Mike Francis of our missions committee on an exploratory medical missions trip there in the spring. Later we gave $10,000 to help with a project there that made possible the sharing of the Gospel in discreet ways. Through this project, we were able to gain a foothold in a country where no missionary could ever get in using a traditional visa. Members of our missions committee continued to go to the national ACMC conferences and came back very excited about the possibilities of adopting an unreached people group and getting the Gospel into closed countries. At that same time, Gorbachev s reforms in the Soviet Union were giving hope that a new openness might be coming to the Eastern European countries if not to Russia itself. Minh Dang was exploring options of reaching the many thousands of Vietnamese working in Eastern Europe, and new ministries were springing up in Muslim countries like Indonesia. So much was happening at this time and so many ideas had 72

83 developed as a result of the Perspectives course and the ACMC conferences that I decided it was time to have a retreat for our missions committee, a time in which we could evaluate our entire missions program, our missions policy, and set some new goals that would lead us into the 21st century. On Saturday, April 11, 1987, an historic all-day retreat took place at Camp Carl. Attending the retreat were missions coordinator Howard Williams, current and past committee members Herb Pyles, David Hoff, David Schipper, Roy Culbertson, Amos Key, Chuck Mealey, and Julius Schipper, missions commission chair Mike Frances, missionary resident Denise Racissi, and myself. I began the day with a devotional on Matthew 28:19-20 focusing on two concepts: 1) the mandate of the Great Commission was not simply to make disciples but rather to disciple the nations; and 2) the word nation actually referred to the ethne or unreached people groups of the world. After discussing both concepts, we spent time in prayer for the future of our missions program. Following that we worked on a working definition of missions. Several options were discussed until Howard Williams read the definition of missions as stated by ACMC (Advancing Churches in Missions Commitment): Any endeavor aimed toward the goal of reaching beyond the needs of the local congregation for the purpose of fulfilling the Great Commission by proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ, making disciples, and relating to the whole needs of mankind, both spiritual and physical. In response, the committee basically adopted the ACMC definition because of its focus upon ministries that reach beyond the needs of the local congregation. There was a basic consensus that missions always had a cross-cultural element to it, whether it was crossing geographical borders or simply cultural ones. Using this paradigm, ministries to international students and refugees 73

84 would clearly be missions. There was also a reaffirmation that we as a church would always be committed to the pattern of Acts 1:8, which tells us to take the Gospel to our Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. The committee expressed concern over the national trend that indicated 95% of the money going to missions was going to ministries in reached areas, with only 5% going for ministries seeking to reach unreached peoples. They also expressed concern that nearly two-thirds of The Chapel s missions budget was being distributed either in the Akron area or within the United States. It was the consensus of the committee that the majority of the people who were designating part of their giving to missions did so assuming that these funds would be used primarily for overseas or cross-cultural-type ministries. To address those concerns we set a five-year goal to see at least 60% of our missions budget focused on cross-cultural global ministries, 25% upon local or national ministries, and 15% upon various support ministries. To that end the committee adopted a system of prioritizing missions endeavors that was developed by Ralph Winter. The classifications of different kinds of evangelism are as follows: E-0 Reaching those of the same culture but already religious E-1 Reaching those of the same culture but secular E-2 Reaching those of a different culture E-3 Reaching those of a radically different culture The committee agreed not to terminate any missionaries but to make changes through attrition, missionaries returning from the field or retiring, and by putting a cap on any new commitments to local or national ministries. No missionary would have their support terminated while they were on the field, but gradual phasedowns might be utilized over a period of a few years until they would be returning on furlough and could raise additional support. As we prioritized areas of the world we did want to focus upon, it also led to identifying the areas we did not want to continue 74

85 in. Over a period of time, we basically pulled out of much of Latin America and Western Europe these countries had the resources within them to reach their own people for Christ. Even if the number of evangelicals was very low, if they had a Bible in their language and a historical Protestant church presence we believed they could be encouraged and, in many cases, trained to reach their own countries. For instance, it was reported at the time that evangelicalism was growing in Latin America at three times the rate of the population. One scholar wrote that the number of evangelicals in Latin America rose from 50,000 in 1900 to 64 million by the year 2000! These factors led to a very important discussion about how churches set the direction of their missions program. Difficult places in the world lack missionaries for a reason churches don t exactly have people beating down their doors wanting to go to Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, or Northern India. They ARE hard, and require a concentrated and determined effort by evangelical churches and agencies determined to take the Gospel to the least reached people of the world. To address this problem, we decided that we would be a pro-active (rather than a reactive) church. We would research the least reached peoples of the world, look for opportunities in traditionally closed countries, and seek partnerships with agencies and movements that would give us access to reaching those who had never heard the Gospel. Being a non-denominational church, this gave us access to many different agencies, several of which had vast experience and specialized in ministries to areas such as the Muslim world and China. We also committed ourselves to looking for opportunities to invest in national missionaries reaching their own countries or people groups. This led to some great partnerships with a number of agencies that were new to us but who were doing a terrific job getting the Gospel to some of the toughest regions of the world. 75

86 A further refinement of our missions strategy was developing a grid that would allow us to evaluate a missionary and his ministry based on criteria related to our own priorities. We looked first at the missionary himself, his training, and his relationship to The Chapel. Just as important was the location and nature of the missionary s assignment. Our top three priorities were Evangelism/ Church Planting, Leadership Development of Nationals, and Bible Translation. The highest priority, therefore, might be a Chapel member missionary doing church planting among an E-3 population in an unreached part of the world. About that same time, the missions world and the leading missions thinkers were writing a great deal about the Window, a term that refers to those areas of the world that fall between 10 and 40 degrees north latitude, from North Africa to Southeast Asia. It includes the heart of the Muslim world, Hindu world, and Buddhist world. More than three billion people live in this region, and yet it has had relatively little missionary work compared to Europe and Latin America. That being the case, we decided to take a closer look at particularly the Muslim world and see if there were any unique opportunities for us to get involved there in a significant way. A very important subject discussed at this critical meeting of past and present missions committee members was that of sending out our own missionaries. The process of identifying, recruiting, training, and deploying your own missionaries is a complex one and not to be entered into lightly. To do it right is costly in terms of time, money, and other resources, but well worth it in the long run. As one missions leader pointed out to me, when you consider the total cost of two years average of raising funds, the one-time costs of moving a family overseas and getting set up with housing and a car, and the costs of monthly support for the first three- to four-year term, you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. Studies have shown 20-25% of all missionaries do not return to the field after 76

87 the first term. In addition to the human toll it takes, it also can be a waste of millions of Kingdom dollars. That being the case, I dedicated myself to learning all I could about missionary preparation and how we could improve candidate training, not only by what we might do as a local church, but also how we could partner with missions agencies, and special training centers to do a better job. As a result of this commitment I went to several seminars, conferences, and workshops exploring the issues of better missionary candidate preparation. A few years later, we discovered the School of Inter-Cultural Studies (SIS), founded by Dr. Dwight Smith, of United World Mission. This organization later changed its name to the Center for Inter-Cultural Training (CIT) and continues to meet on a training campus located in the rural mountains of North Carolina in Union Mills (more on that later). It was encouraging that the missions committee shared such a vision and was willing to move ahead with seeking to send out more missionaries from The Chapel. As we concluded that retreat, one of the main things we were praying and asking God for was to raise up many more sons and daughters of The Chapel who would go out as missionaries. Up until that time, the vast majority of the missionaries we supported had no direct ties to The Chapel. But after we set this goal of sending out our own, it was incredibly encouraging to look back many years later and see that God had answered those prayers. I discovered that over 40 individuals and couples had responded to His call and had been sent out as missionaries from The Chapel over roughly 20 years. A final issue addressed at this important retreat was that of short-term trips, especially by the youth department. One of the difficulties that many large churches face is that of communication. In a church as large as The Chapel, it is easy to find that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Even at a time when The Chapel only met on one campus, we found it was quite common for a youth pastor to hear about an opportunity for a 77

88 short-term missions trip and begin to promote and plan for it without having met with the missions committee to see if this area of the world, missions agency, and missions ministry was one that fit into our priorities and what we were trying to accomplish. We also found that there were many young people in high school and college who heard about missions opportunities and proceeded to apply, be accepted, and begin raising support without having talked to the missions pastor or missions committee to see if this was a ministry we would support. So, after our meeting we established some guidelines for the youth and college departments, along with some specific guidelines for high school and college students that gave them practical steps to take if interested in pursuing a short-term missions opportunity. We simply wanted closer collaboration between the youth departments and the missions department so that we would be involved from the beginning in helping them research and select missions trip opportunities. We set a goal of having at least one annual meeting with the youth pastors to discuss these issues and make sure we were all on the same page concerning youth participation in missions. We also published charts showing our top missions priorities and how we classified different missionary activities. In light of many of these changes, we edited the language of our governing Chapel Missions Policy and created a subcommittee to focus upon unreached people groups. 78

89 CHAPTER 7 A Sharper Focus The year 1987 was a time of transitions for many people. I was now officially giving two-thirds of my time to responsibilities as Missions Pastor. Denise Racissi had just finished her missions residency and was preparing to leave for Japan. Three sets of future missionaries, Tim and Leslie Crow, Terry and Rebecca Lingenhoel, and Lori Long, were all in Bible school or seminary getting prepared. Some of the agencies we were working with were in transition also the World Home Bible League became Mission India and Operation Mobilization was in the process of moving its headquarters from New Jersey to the greater Atlanta area. About that time, we also partnered with Logoi Ministries with a gift of $2,500 to help train local pastors in Latin America. Through their ministries, thousands of pastors who could have never come to the United States for theological training were able to get solid biblical training in their own countries. This philosophy, called Theological Education by Extension (TEE), had been advocated by Ralph Winter many years before and had been used successfully in several areas of the world. A gift of the same amount went to Gospel Missionary Union (GMU) to assist them in training national pastors in West Africa. 79

90 We also began support 10 indigenous pastors in India through K.P. Yohannan s organization Gospel for Asia. K.P. had made a major impact on the missions world through his book The Coming Revolution in World Missions. In it, he argued that the best investment in missions was to support native or national missionaries in their own regions because they already know the language and culture and require much less support than Western missionaries. Although we did not agree with his argument that supporting nationals was the ONLY way to go, this strategy became an increasingly important part of our overall goal to get the Gospel to the least reached peoples of the world. Because of this increased focus upon nationals, we needed to address the subject in our missions policy and in some of our guidelines. We decided early on that we would not send money directly to a national but that our gifts would go through either a U.S. agency or an indigenous national missions agency. Our support of nationals would be primarily for those who were church planting. For those who stayed in a given area and pastored a church we established a basic guideline that we would phase down their support over three years. We believed that after three years, a church should be able to support its own pastor. We also affirmed that this shift in thinking might also have a major impact in the role of our own missionaries in the future. If current trends continued, we believed that the role of Western missionaries might shift more to the areas of Leadership Development, Theological Education by Extension, and Church Planter Training. The November missions conference received the most publicity we ever had in the October edition of Chapel News. Six full pages were devoted to missions, including an editorial by Pastor Knute Larson and articles by Howard Williams and me. Our conference speaker, Ron Cline of HCJB, brought an outstanding message, What to Do until the Rapture. Pastor Larson also wrote a strong explanation of our Opportunity of Faith system of missions 80

91 giving, encouraging people to designate a specific percentage of their giving to missions. As the year closed, Pastor Larson proposed a new committee structure that would result in a great improvement in the expertise we needed to have an effective missions committee. For some time, I had been frustrated by the fact that just when I had a committee member begin to understand all the complexities of the missions world, their trustees term would end and I would lose their services. After mentioning this to Pastor Larson, he liked the idea of having some members of the committee stay on longer and build on what they had learned during their term as a trustee. Dr. Peter Wagner of Fuller Seminary once said it takes at least five years to help a person on a missions committee become a missions pro. This new arrangement for the missions committee would consist of three members from the trustee board and three at-large members. Over the years, I found this was an invaluable change that allowed me to identify excellent missions committee members who then could be encouraged to stay on after their three -year term and provide excellent advice for our missions program. We began 1988 on very solid ground financially, as the Opportunity of Faith giving was strong after the missions conference. The congregation committed more than $700,000, and we set the budget for the year at $725,000. Because of conservative spending the previous year, we also had a carry-over of some $200,000. In light of our growing awareness of and commitment to unreached people groups, the committee allocated $50,000 to a budget line for ministries to unreached peoples. We also set aside $25,000 for disaster relief so that we would be ready to respond when the inevitable earthquake or typhoon would hit somewhere in the world in the coming year. Our commitment to training and equipping nationals continued to grow as we sponsored a national to receive the Haggai 81

92 Institute training. Founded by John Haggai, this organization carefully selects gifted young evangelicals from the developing world to receive an intensive month of training in leadership and evangelism at various training sites around the world. We also gave a scholarship to a Filipino pastor, Efraim Tendero, to be able to attend seminary at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. This was especially rewarding as he was part of the fruit of a Chapelsupported missionary with Send, Chuck Huffstetler. Finally, we increased our support to Paul Pillai and the India National Inland Missions as they were doing an outstanding job in training and sending out Indian church planters throughout the country of India and South Asia. I went on one of the longest missions trips of my career at The Chapel in February We had done several projects in the Muslim world with the mission agency Frontiers the few years prior. Founded by a former Operation Mobilization leader, Greg Livingstone, Frontiers was dedicated exclusively to reaching Muslims throughout the world. I had met them during my time at The U.S. Center for World Missions, and they had opened a regional office in Columbus, Ohio. In late 1987, one of their senior staff, Roger Sorenson, visited me and asked if I would be willing to accompany him on a trip to several Muslim countries in North Africa. I told him that we, too, had some people in the region and that I would only go if we could visit them as well. He agreed, and we worked out a plan to visit Egypt, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, and Niger between February 10 and March 3 that year. This trip was a life-changing one for me because it was the first time I had any firsthand exposure to the Muslim world. In one trip, I would have the opportunity to interact with Arabs, Berbers, Black Africans, and Tuareg nomads. Because this was at the heart of what is commonly called the Window, it gave me 82

93 invaluable insight into the region. It also helped me understand what areas of the world had the greatest need for the Gospel and what opportunities might be available to penetrate those countries that were commonly closed. Our trip began in Cairo and the culture shock hit us immediately. After waiting an hour for our hosts to pick us up (they had gone to the wrong airport!), we drove into a world I couldn t even imagine. Cairo is a city of approximately 15 million people, although some scholars say the population drops by three million every night as people who work in the city during the day leave and go back to nearby villages at night. Yet it wasn t the size of the city that was overwhelming. It was how and where people lived that got my attention. First we drove through the City of the Dead. This area was a giant, ancient cemetery several miles wide where more than a million people lived. Amidst tombs and tombstones, these people lived and raised families without electricity, running water, or any city services. Before I could recover from seeing this community, we began to drive past a massive garbage dump. Our hosts explained there were actually four major garbage dumps, all inter-connected, and that several hundred thousand people lived in and on these dumps. They are called the garbage people and made their living by going through the city s garbage, looking for food or items they could recover and sell. The smell was overpowering and, because of the immense size of the dumps, inescapable. All of the people serving with Frontiers there were secretly using a variety of business and educational visas to be able stay in the country. They were extremely careful about security, and several would not allow me to take pictures of them for fear they might appear in a newsletter or on the newly emerging Internet. To blend in with their culture, this team chose not to meet for worship on Sundays but rather would meet on Saturday mornings or, sometimes, on Fridays, the Muslim day of worship. They met for 83

94 a few hours each week for an intense time of worship and Scripture study. Given the stress they were under living in a hostile culture, and the pressure of always being careful about security, this time of worship was a real lifeline for all of them. Although many Christian workers in Egypt were working with the Coptic Church, Frontiers had chosen not to do so because the Coptics were already nominally Christian. Instead, the team we were visiting was focusing strictly upon Muslims. This necessitated that most of the work of ministry be done secretly and in one-onone settings. When they found people who were open spiritually, they would meet with them privately to share the Gospel and, if the response was positive, to disciple them. Their goal was to plant a truly indigenous, reproducing, Muslim-convert church that could multiply throughout the Muslim community. The differences in the culture there continued everywhere we went. One such contrast looked like it came out of a movie set. In the affluent, tourist area of Cairo, there are several five-star hotels and expensive Western restaurants. Less than 45 minutes from that district is a very secluded area that can only be described as a used camel lot. Apparently, every Friday people from all over Egypt and nearby countries come together at the Camel Market to buy and sell camels. It was like walking through a veil back 2,000 years before your very eyes. The dress, smells, crafts, and customs were all ancient and primitive. On this particular day, nomads from Sudan had brought 200 to 300 camels there to sell. To say the least, this was my Toto, we re not in Kansas anymore moment. One other memory stands out in my mind as I sought to understand the challenge of reaching the country of Egypt. One afternoon when we had some time before our next appointment, Roger and I went through the famous Egyptian Museum. After a couple of hours of being there, we left and sat down to process what we had just seen. 84

95 Do you know what just struck me? Roger asked. That entire museum is focused on death. He was right. Almost everything in the museum was centered around a casket, a sarcophagus, a tomb, or the rituals of burial and death. There was almost nothing about the daily life of Egyptians through the centuries. It struck me how different it is to have the certain hope of eternal life and to know Christ came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. It also reminded me that these people at least believed in some kind of life after death and were concerned about their eternal destiny. It made me wonder how this would all be translated to the modern Egyptian mind and whether they, too, had much of a concern about the afterlife. I left Egypt hoping and praying that perhaps the Lord would raise up a couple from The Chapel who would be called to serve as long-term, cross-cultural missionaries in Egypt. With more than 15 million people and the most prestigious Muslim university in the world, Cairo is one of the most influential places in the Muslim world. Whether it is the million people living in the City of the Dead, or the nearly one million people living in the garbage dumps, there are tremendous opportunities here for churches and agencies willing to take on the challenge. We left Cairo on a flight to Morocco at the ungodly hour of 3:30 a.m. Although sleep-deprived, we were excited to see how God was uniquely working in this country. For many years, Morocco has had close ties with the West, from hosting mega parties thrown by billionaire Malcolm Forbes to providing great locations for Hollywood films. All this against a backdrop of an ancient Arab country that is 99% Muslim. We traveled there because Roger had important, sensitive mail to be delivered to several Frontiers missionaries working secretly in Morocco. As you can imagine, it was not safe to mail any important messages in Muslim countries because there was great risk the authorities would open it and 85

96 arrest the missionaries. What I learned in Morocco was the need for creative, out-of-the-box thinking for those who want to work in closed countries. Many would continue using student visas as they work to learn Arabic or another type as they teach English as a second language. Others, however, chose more unconventional methods. One group was starting a tourist business taking advantage of the large number of tourists who traveled to Morocco each year. Another was starting a company to attract people who wanted to go backpacking in the beautiful Atlas Mountains near Marrakesh. These strategies are sometime known as tentmaking, based on the times that the apostle Paul worked making tents to provide income for his missionary work. In more recent years, it has been called being bi-vocational, or Business As Mission (BAM). The latter usually refers to those who actually start a for-profit full-time business venture in a country with the intent of providing a witness in and through the business itself. Over the last 20 years, we have had a growing number of missionaries using various tentmaking or BAM strategies in various Muslim countries and other nations, like China and Russia. Greg Livingstone, the founder of Frontiers, used to say there are three types of tentmakers: job takers, job makers, and job fakers! Obviously, he would prefer the first two, because they can be done with integrity while still serving the purpose of keeping a missionary in a country and providing a witnessing opportunity. From there I traveled to Senegal to visit Stan and Ginny Smith, a couple serving with United World Mission and seeking to reach the Wolof people near Dakar. Stan had grown up in Vietnam as his parents, Gordon and Laura Smith, served there as missionaries with both the Christian and Missionary Alliance and United World Mission. It was his parents that helped sponsor a Vietnamese pastor, Cang Dang, and his family to come to the United States in They were welcomed by The Chapel and provided 86

97 housing at a home we owned on Hamilton Street. The Smiths were veteran missionaries and were already working themselves out of a job. They were mentoring a Senegalese pastor named Jose Olivia to take over the work of reaching the Wolof people in and around the capital city of Dakar. The Chapel later supported Jose for a while as he began leading this vital work among Muslims. We also gave a gift to help the Smiths purchase the JESUS Film in the Wolof language along with some evangelistic literature. Senegal was quite unusual for a Muslim country in that although it was about 80% Muslim, they had true freedom of religion, and the Smiths actually had missionary visas! From Morocco, I traveled to Mauritania while Roger went to Mali to visit a Frontiers team needing some counsel and encouragement. After a long delay at the Dakar airport and many confusing announcements, we were told that the flight to Nouakchott was canceled because of storms. I only found out later that the storms they were talking about were sand storms. I called one of the missionaries to pick me up and take me back to the Smiths for the night. When he arrived at the airport he said, We call this WAWA. When I asked what that meant, he smiled and said, West Africa Wins Again. Seems like this was a well-used phrase. Finally, after several other flights were canceled for the same reason the next day, Mauritania Airlines sent a plane at midnight to take us to Nouakchott. We indeed flew through and landed in a sandstorm at 2:30 a.m. Although exhausted, I was very grateful to see David, a missionary working with World Vision who was there to pick me up at the airport. If you have never been to Mauritania (and few people have), the capital city can be described like a giant refugee camp. In fact, if you looked at a picture of the city from National Geographic, you would immediately notice that the slums totally surrounding Nouakchott were actually bigger than the city 87

98 itself. There were only a few significant paved roads in the entire country which, by the way, is 50% larger than France. Not only is Mauritania an extreme Muslim dictatorship, but they did not ban slavery until 1981, the last country in the world to do so. At this time, World Vision had a desperately needed child inoculation project going on in the country. Through a partnership with his own agency, Arab World Ministries, David was able to live in the country and work secretly as a missionary. Since he was working with a number of government officials and employing a number of Mauritanian nationals, he had to be extremely discerning about his witness and pray for wisdom each time he spoke to someone. It was clearly a difficult area in which to work but he was already impacting some individuals he knew there. As a result of this trip and my report, the committee approved a gift of $10,000 for the ministry in Mauritania. Also in the country at that time was a team from Frontiers, the Doulos community. Roger had asked me to visit them as they had taken on an extreme strategy of actually moving in to the slums and living exactly like the people who lived there. They had actually taken a vow of poverty! We were able to make contact with them and traveled into the depths of the slum to find their little hut and have dinner with them. If you have ever been in the middle of a third world slum, you will never forget it. The sights, sounds, and smells are overwhelming and difficult to describe. This couple lived in a single room adobe-type structure about 15-by-18-feet in size with a dirt floor. There was no electricity or plumbing. There were even no pictures on the wall because the Muslims around them were taught that any such images were wrong. The couple leading the work there was delighted to see us and had prepared dinner for us. It was a typical Moroccan meal of couscous covered with vegetables and some meat. One of their neighbors, a young man in his 20s, sat to my left. I was a bit nervous because I saw immediately that we would be eating with our fingers 88

99 and there was no really sterile way to clean our hands. All I could do is pray for God s protection since this was an ideal way to catch Hepatitis. Thankfully He protected me and I didn t get sick. As I left Mauritania the next day, I had many questions. How do you effectively develop a ministry of evangelism in a country so hostile to Christianity and with so many restrictions? What is the best way to establish a platform, and who are the best kinds of people to send? I think David was doing a great job given the limitations he had, but I had a hard time visualizing how that work could be expanded. As I told Roger later, I left worried about the couple living in the slums. They had a four-year-old son who looked like he was already at least a year behind developmentally. There were no other Western children there, no school, and little mental stimulation of any kind. I wondered if the price they were paying to do this work was too high, at least for their child. In debriefing, Roger and I concluded that this kind of setting for a pioneer missions work should probably be done by singles or couples without children. My last stop on this very long trip was a memorable one as well. Ralph and Maridee Sauers were Chapel-supported missionaries with SIM in Niger. They were working in northern Niger among the nomadic Muslim Tuareg who lived in the desert. When I arrived in the capital, Niamey, I stayed with their area director for the evening. It would have been at least a nine-hour bus ride to get to where the Sauers were, so, since I had limited time, SIM agreed to fly me to them. The pilot even let me fly the plane for a while during our short 1.5-hour flight over the desert. When I asked him if that was safe, he reminded me we were over thousands of square miles of desert and that there were probably only about three planes in the air in the entire country at that moment. I was relieved! When the Sauers picked me up, it was 112 degrees, the coolest it would get during my stay with them. The hot season had 89

100 arrived and was rapidly rising. Over a nice lunch they explained the Tuareg people were almost 100% Muslim and, because of the conditions of the desert, were nomadic, moving from place to place simply to survive. They are also very unusual because they are the only known Muslim group in which the men are veiled and not the women. They are sometimes called the Blue Muslims since the blue scarf that men wear over their faces often leaves a blue dye on their skin. Ralph has a great sense of humor and decided to have some fun with my name. Since he didn t think Schneider would translate well into Tuareg, he told his friends there that my name was Selek, which roughly translates as righteous one. He then said my full name was Tom Selleck. Years later, he told me his Tuareg friends would ask him, How s your friend, Tom Selleck, over in America? The next day the Sauers took me trekking out in the desert, looking for a particular village where there were several people they wanted to visit. Since they had a driver for the pickup truck they were using, it became obvious that four of us could not fit in a threeseat cab. We drew straws for who would have to ride in the back in the truck bed. Guess who drew the short straw? The first thing they told me was that I had to wear a hat and drink large amounts of water as we drove through the desert. (Did I mention it was 124 degrees that day?) As if this wasn t enough of a physical test, the driver couldn t find the village at first, and we ended up driving about four hours through the dunes that day. Watching Ralph and Maridee in action was both a joy and a learning experience. In this culture, men and women always meet separately, so Maridee met with a group of women under one of the few trees in the area while Ralph and I met with a small group of men in a small, one-room hut. What surprised me was that the hut had an electric line running to the one and only electric pole in the village. In the corner was a very small, college dorm-type refrigerator. Imagine my surprise when our host opened it up and 90

101 offered me a cold Coke! This man was crippled and could not walk. Although looked down upon by the people of the village, he was spiritually seeking and was studying the book of James with Ralph. What I learned was that the Sauers saw themselves as modern-day circuit riders, going from village to village, looking for those who are spiritually seeking and willing to listen. As they built trust in these relationships, they hoped to lead some to Christ and then disciple them so that they in turn could share their new faith with others in the village. It reminded me a little of what the apostle Paul did, moving from place to place and planting churches as he went. I made a list of items they needed literature, cassettes and cassette players, medicine for the Gaumi hospital SIM runs not far from where they live. Burt Long, a missionary that The Chapel was later to support, had started this clinic in the 1950s. On the day I left, the temperature had risen to 135 degrees, a level of heat I had never before experienced. In our final time together before I left for the States, they were deeply appreciative of my visit and the encouragement it gave them. They told me I was the only one from the U.S. that had ever visited them other than their SIM regional director. It was a good reminder to me of the value of these visits and how much it means to our missionaries. When I returned to the States, I gave an extended report to the missions committee, and we raised the Sauers monthly support. Later that year, we had ample opportunity to utilize the missions funds that the Lord had abundantly provided through the generous giving of The Chapel congregation. For many years, the three largest missionary radio organizations, Trans World Radio (TRW), Far Eastern Broadcasting Company (FEBC), and HCJB had worked pretty much independently of each other. Because of their desire to be good stewards of the money that the Lord provided for them and not duplicate each other s work, they began meeting together to see how they might best divide up the work of missionary radio around the world. In the end, they created a 91

102 new global initiative called the World 2000 Project. I presented the details to the committee and we gave a gift of $5,000 to each of the agencies, and raised the amount we were giving to each agency in our annual budget. We also gave to major projects the radio ministries had, such as a hydro-electric plant to power all the work of HCJB in Quito, Ecuador. 92

103 CHAPTER 8 Reaching the Unreached As the number of international students continued to grow at The University of Akron, so did the awareness of the need to reach them at The Chapel. Up to this point we had given some support to a missionary with International Student Inc. named Richard Mendola he was somewhat of a consultant for us. College pastor Mike Dittman had been asking that we find someone who could do this fulltime as part of our staff. As a first step in that direction, the committee approved providing some funds for an intern to work with the college ministry in reaching international students. Fortunately, that summer, one of our Chapel seminary students, Eric Palmquist, had graduated from Dallas Seminary and was already serving as a missions intern. With the support of Pastor Larson, we worked out an arrangement so that Eric would spend 40% of his time working with international students. This arrangement would continue with missions intern Jim Hibbard the following year. In the summer of 1988, a major shift occurred in our missions department. Howard Williams, who had served faithfully as the missions coordinator and chairman of the committee for several years, announced that he and his wife Katie were going 93

104 to work full-time with David Bryant and his ministry, Concerts of Prayer. David had served previously as the pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Kent, Ohio, in the late 60s and early 70s. He then joined the staff of Inter-Varsity and was a very popular speaker for many of their conferences. As one of the leaders of Inter-Varsity, he became very involved in their triannual missionary conference called Urbana. Since 1948, every three years Inter-Varsity had sponsored a conference between Christmas and New Year s that focused on missions at the University of Illinois. I went to this conference myself in 1973, and God really used it to draw my heart and life toward missions. Dave had helped lead this conference and had spoken at it several times. During those years, God impressed the importance of prayer and revival upon his heart. As a result, he wrote a book Concert of Prayer the title coming from the writings of Jonathan Edwards call for God s people to gather to pray for the advancement of the Kingdom. David s book was a call to evangelicals to gather in concerts of prayer for spiritual awakening and world evangelization. The book made a huge impact when it was published in 1984, and Dave began sponsoring concerts of prayer in different cities around the United States. They came to Northeast Ohio twice, gathering as many 6,000 people at the I-X Center in Cleveland to pray. At that same time, Katie Williams was developing quite a prayer ministry herself among women in Northeast Ohio. Eventually she developed a short radio program called Pause for Prayer that was broadcast on Moody radio station WCRF and later on other Moody stations across the country. Having worked with David Bryant several times when he came to Ohio, they found they had a similar vision and wanted to be more deeply involved. They planned to move near Inter- Varsity s headquarters where David lived and would need to raise some support. The missions committee agreed to pick up 50% of their support for the first year 94

105 and then re-evaluate after that. With Howard s upcoming departure, I took over the responsibilities of chairing the missions committee meeting and continued to serve as the pastoral staff liaison for missions. Almost by default, the percentage of my time given to missions went up significantly to the point I was almost full-time in missions by the end of Having a well-informed and dedicated missions committee to help carry the load of responsibilities was a huge help at that time. Each year I would try to get at least one person from the missions committee to go with me to the annual ACMC conference where there were outstanding workshops designed to help local church missions committees serve more effectively. As mentioned earlier, ACMC was a crucial part of the progress The Chapel made in missions in the late 1980s and 1990s. Almost everything I learned about being a missions pastor I learned at both their conferences and by simply spending time with other veteran missions pastors. I was challenged and encouraged by men such as Woody Phillips of Church of the Savior in York, Pennsylvania, Jim Kilgore of Ward Presbyterian in Livonia, Michigan, Doug Christgau of Wheaton Bible Church, and Monroe Brewer of Crystal Evangelical Free Church in Minneapolis. There were several others also, and the highlight of each year for myself was the day before the ACMC nationals conference when all the missions pastors would gather and share what they were learning. The materials produced by ACMC over the years were also invaluable to our ministry at The Chapel. Whenever I went to either a national or regional conference, I would bring back resources to assist my own ministry and also the ministries of other departments in the church. Several times I brought home materials specifically designed to help teach missions to children, youth, or college students. There were outstanding publications that explained how to do effective short-term trips, how to run a missions conference, and even how to write a comprehensive missions policy. The 95

106 book tables were loaded with practical books on subjects such as encouraging missions prayer, how to do a Faith Promise, mobilizing your congregation, and reaching international students. Over the years, I had the opportunity to represent The Chapel at many of the ACMC conferences and often lead workshops on such topics as helping your senior pastor with missions, involving church leadership in missions, and mobilizing your congregation for missions. In the late 90s I had the opportunity to serve on the board of directors of ACMC and also served as its chairman. It was certainly a rich experience. It gave me tremendous insights into missions philosophy and strategy that I might never have had otherwise. Coming from an independent church like The Chapel, it was a great blessing to interact with leaders from so many different backgrounds and traditions. This interaction continued to remind me of the importance of developing partnerships with national ministries within their own countries. Thankfully, we continued to find unique and strategic ways to support national pastors and missionaries in many different regions of the world. This gave us the possibility of being part of some unique ministries in countries and areas that are closed to traditional missions. We were especially interested in finding agencies that specialized in locating and supporting indigenous, national ministries in these hard to reach regions. As we moved into 1989, we discovered additional ways to partner with some other organizations and ministries. We gave a major gift to a Native American mission organization, CHIEF (Christian Hope Indian Eskimo Fellowship). It went toward enabling them to evangelize the Quechua Indians of Latin America using Native Americans from the United States. They were also exploring the possibility of utilizing Native Americans as a bridge to reach the native people of Mongolia. This organization had discovered there were linguistic and cultural ties between Native American groups in South America to those in Mongolia. They even 96

107 took some Native Americans over to Mongolia and were surprised to find that there were uncanny similarities between the two groups indicating there had been migration between the two regions many centuries ago. We also provided support for the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) in Kenya. In the past, a gifted young Christian who wanted to prepare for ministry in Africa would often have to go to the United States for seminary-level training. Too often, that individual would find life in the United States very attractive and not return to their home country in Africa. The NEGST was one of only two graduate-level theology schools in all of Africa and was a very strategic ministry to invest in because it was training the future leaders of many African churches, denominations, and missions agencies. The more we learned about what God was doing in the developing world, the more convinced we were that, wherever possible, we should be working to equip and mobilize national evangelical leaders and churches to reach their own countries and regions. As our missions program continued to grow, the Lord gave us many opportunities to use the resources He provided us through the generosity of The Chapel congregation s generous giving. Our disaster and humanitarian relief fund was greatly needed in the late 1980s as well. With the tremendous number of national disasters that occur every year around the world, it is a blessing that there are several outstanding evangelical relief and development agencies. These agencies may have expertise in working in specific countries or may themselves have a specific focus on dealing with either natural disasters or human suffering addressed by hospitals, orphanages, etc. In a single year, we gave nearly $35,000 to various projects, like helping after a typhoon struck Southeast Asia, for a medical project in Mauritania, an earthquake in Armenia, an orphanage in Haiti, a hospital in Liberia, and flood relief in both Sudan and Bangladesh. For Bangladesh, the congregation gave a 97

108 special offering of $10,000, and the committee added $5,000 from our missions budget. In most of these cases, we were able to channel our gifts through agencies that we already had a relationship with and were able to partner with in significant ways. One concern we began addressing more intentionally that year was the issue of keeping the congregation aware and involved in various aspects of missions. We already had a large missions center with a world map in the main sanctuary foyer, as well as the correspondence racks with aerograms pre-addressed to our missionaries. Through our ABFs and bulletins, we encouraged Chapel members to write to our missionaries we even encouraged each ABF to adopt a missionary so they would receive regular prayer letters and make it more personal. At the committee level, we had several discussions about creating a missions sub-committee just to focus upon missionary care and prayer. As mentioned earlier, a new prayer gathering called Fellowship of the Yoke began meeting monthly that year and was led initially by missionary Bruce Britten. Each month, either a missionary who was home would share about their ministry or Bruce would pick a country or region to pray for. Fellowship of the Yoke eventually changed its name to World Changers and continued for nearly 23 years. After a break, it was re-started in 2015 by Dave and Judy Stump, retired missionaries who had served nearly 10 years managing Manna House, the guest house Operation Mobilization runs in London. In May of 1989, I had the opportunity to go on one of the most interesting missions trips I have ever taken. I traveled to the Far East with Eric Palmquist who, after completing his internship, became a missionary appointee with SEND International. Eric was planning to work with an unreached Muslim people group in the Philippines called the Magindanao. They lived on the island 98

109 of Mindanao, only a few hours from where Donna Schaber was working with another unreached people group, the Maranao people. I decided to make the most of our trip to East Asia, so we made sure to visit Denise Racissi, who was working with SEND in Japan, Steve and Mary Bucy, who were working with SEND in Manila, and Donna, who was working with International Missions. We only had limited time with Denise in Japan because she was still in her first year and was heavily involved in intense language learning at that time. She was living in a SEND apartment in Yokohama, about a two-hour drive by shuttle bus from the Tokyo airport. When she completed language study, Denise was to be assigned to a Japanese church plant with a local pastor. Her role would most likely be to teach English to Japanese women and use that as a springboard for engaging them in various Bible studies or Bible discussions. A particular event from our visit with Denise stands out in my mind even to this day. One afternoon she took us to a Japanese cemetery dedicated just to babies who had been aborted. Japan had an extraordinarily high rate of abortion and many, if not most, women had tremendous feelings of guilt over having one or more elective abortions. In this cemetery, a woman would buy a small wooden statue, write down the name the unborn child would have had, and then place it in the cemetery. It was stunning to see tens of thousands of little wooden statues lined up the various hillsides in this cemetery. It was also a reminder to all of us that there were many women in Japan who were dealing with deep feelings of guilt who needed to hear about the forgiveness offered in Christ. After visiting Denise in Japan, we flew to Manila to visit Steve and Mary Bucy. While there, we were immediately struck by the mass of humanity that is Manila. No one knew if the official population estimate of nine million was accurate, but it certainly looked like most of them were on the road as we crept along one of their main highways from the airport to Manila proper! The heat 99

110 and humidity was overwhelming, and the remnant damage of a typhoon that had hit earlier in the week was evident everywhere. Because there were little or no pollution laws in the Philippines, the black, noxious smoke coming from nearly every bus, truck, and taxi was overpowering. Steve and Mary had completed their two years of language school in Baguio, a town north of Manila. They were now fully engaged with a multinational team in the ministry of church planting that SEND had assigned them. Because there was already a significant protestant church in the Philippines, Steve s role was primarily to train, mentor, and work alongside younger Filipino men who would serve as church planting pastors of the newly formed churches emerging throughout the country. The Bucys were very honest about the struggles of cultural adjustment, especially when they were dealing with full-time language study, putting their children into boarding school, and working through some health issues. Their son, Micah, had even been bitten by a monkey during their time in language school! They shared that SEND s pre-field orientation program and the training they received from Missionary Internship were very helpful, but that there was still the issue of spiritual warfare every missionary faces. It was a good reminder for me to look more deeply into the type of training we wanted all our missionary candidates to undergo before we sent them to the field. Steve took Eric and me to visit Efraim Tendero, a Filipino pastor he was working with and who had once visited The Chapel. Efraim was a gifted leader who had been reached by SEND missionaries and who had studied for the ministry at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The church he was currently pastoring had been planted by veteran SEND missionary Chuck Hufstetler. He was a great example of the value of investing in national leaders and turning the work over to them as soon as possible. At that time, he had two assistant pastors working with him. 100

111 The day we visited they were having a once-a-year comprehensive medical clinic at the church. On site, they had a Christian doctor, dentist, ophthalmologist, and pediatrician. There was even an area for minor surgery in the back. Literally hundreds of people came that day, and in addition to being seen by a health professional, they received some Christian literature and an invitation to visit the church on Sunday. It was a good reminder to us how meeting the physical needs of people can open doors to deal with their spiritual needs as well. One of the highlights of our time in Manila was the opportunity to meet and talk with Phil Parshall, a missionary and author of the book New Paths in Muslim Evangelism. Phil was a leading thinker in the world of evangelical missions and had challenged mission agencies to think in new ways about reaching Muslims for Christ. He was particularly interested in contextualizing the Gospel as much as possible without compromising its message. He wrote about different forms of worship, one s position when praying, how we handle the Word of God, and many other issues that might relate the Gospel to Muslims in a culturally sensitive way. He had previously worked as a missionary in Bangladesh but had become so effective and well-known that he was getting extreme opposition and harassment from Muslim leaders in his area. Because of this, he decided to move to Manila where he could teach and write freely and yet still be in Asia and be involved in stimulating missions work among Muslims in the region. Because we were heading to visit Mindanao to visit Donna Schaber next, we were encouraged to hear Phil was part of a consortium of agencies, including SEND International, seeking to reach out to several different Muslim groups throughout the island of Mindanao. This island had the largest concentration of Muslims in the Philippines and was becoming known as an area of frequent conflict. There were several radical Muslim groups known 101

112 for violence that were demanding either total independence from the Filipino national government or autonomy for the island of Mindanao. Phil was able to give us some good insight into what was going on throughout the region and what some of the primary issues were. In keeping with our missiology, we made an important distinction as we considered the future of our work in the Philippines. Although many churches and organizations were still sending missionaries to the Philippines, they were sending them primarily to areas that had already been exposed to the Gospel or that had a Gospel witness nearby. Being a predominantly Catholic country, the population there had a general understanding of Christianity, although certainly not one rooted in salvation by faith alone. In the 1960s a movement called DAWN (Disciple A Whole Nation) was begun in the Philippines. The concept behind it was simple: To reach a country, you must have a Gospel-preaching church for every town and village or, in large cities, a church for every thousand people. Because the Philippines had roughly 50,000 villages, the goal was to plant a church in each one. By the 1990s, that goal had largely been reached. But there was a blind spot. The movement had worked primarily among the 90+% of the population that was Catholic or Animist in background. There had been little work among the highly resistant and sometimes hostile Muslim population that was located primarily on Mindanao. Further, there had not been much work done among specific Muslim unreached people groups. It was this facet of the work that Eric and I wanted to explore when we were finally able to visit Donna Schaber. Eric and I flew on May 24 from Manila to Cagayan De Oro, a mid-size city on the coast of Mindanao. There, we met Scott Steele, the regional director for Donna Schaber s agency, International Missions. Scott and his family would be flying with us on a Wycliffe plane to a remote grass airstrip close to the village where Donna and 102

113 her teammate, Phyllis, were working. The beauty of the mountains and lakes of Mindanao was stunning. It was hard to conceive that beneath that beautiful landscape was an island wracked by violence and conflict. The drive in the Land Rover back to Donna s village was literally a drive back in time. It was one of those moments I have had over the years where I have been tempted to say, It s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here! There was no electricity in the village because the Muslim rebels had cut all the wires. Donna and Phyllis used solar panels for light and a special nitrogen gas-powered refrigerator for their food. As we entered the village, we could hear drums beating in the distance, which we were told were used to keep away evil spirits. Donna and Phyllis had been working together in a village called Barunao since 1986 and had established an excellent relationship with the people and leaders there by providing health care. Donna, a nurse, and Phyllis, a doctor, were able to work in tandem to care for both the physical and spiritual needs of the village. At the time of our visit, they were just getting over the loss of another teammate, Leah, who was killed in a plane crash the previous December. Leah s family had come for a visit and had left on a plantation plane it crashed upon take-off. It was a tragic loss for all, and Donna was just then getting back into a regular routine of work and ministry. One of the unique realities that one faces when trying to reach people in these villages is that they are basically animistic Muslims. Donna explained that there was both a mosque and a spirit house in her village. The spirit house hung from the ceiling of a small structure and was about the size of a large birdcage. The village believed that evil spirits lived in this house and demanded that the people should put offerings of food into the cage or else lose their protection. At the same time, there was a mosque down by the river in which a local imam would teach traditional Muslim theology, that there is only one God. In a sense, Donna explained, the 103

114 people there were trying to cover all their bases and not make any god or spirit angry. This type of animistic Islam has become more and more common throughout the world. In terms of ministry, one of the challenges that Donna and Phyllis faced was that when the ministry began in their village, there were two couples and three singles as part of the team. The two couples eventually went back to America, and then when Leah was killed, it left the entire load of the ministry to these two single women. Given the limitations they faced, however, I thought they were doing a great job. It was encouraging to see Donna using pictures and flash cards to tell the story of creation and redemption to the many women who were waiting to be treated by Phyllis. At other times, Donna would be caring for a patient and Phyllis would be in the waiting room sharing the Gospel with those who were waiting. One evening during our stay, they decided to show the JESUS Film to people in the village. They had built many strong relationships, and so they chose the home of a woman they trusted and invited neighbors to see the film. So many people showed up that they could not show it in her house they had to put the monitor on the front porch so people could stand in front of the house to watch it! Thanks to a portable generator, they had electricity to run the VCR monitor. The movie literally captivated the crowd. Overall, the formal leaders of the village were very supportive of Donna and Phyllis and made that clear to me when we met them. The two leaders of the village were the mayor and the sultan (the unofficial spiritual leader). When Donna introduced me to him, she told him that I was her imam, the name for a spiritual leader of a mosque. It was the closest word to pastor she could think of. He smiled and gave a long and heartfelt response in the Maranao language. When I asked Donna what he said, she said, He was telling you that I am like a daughter to him and that he wants you 104

115 to know that he will never let anything bad happen to me. What an encouragement to hear! In fact, a few years later I heard that one of the rebel groups had come by the village and told the sultan they wanted to kidnap the two American women and that they would split the ransom with him. The sultan ordered them to leave the village and told them he would have nothing to do with it. I left Mindanao deeply impressed by the resilience, ingenuity, and perseverance of these women. Little did I know that nearly 30 years later they would still be there, continuing to reach the Maranao and other people groups nearby. I was saddened, however, that these two single women were working so faithfully in difficult circumstances, and that we could not find any couples who would come and work alongside them. This seemed to be a pattern in many areas of the world in which single women were carrying an inordinate amount of the workload of missions. My prayer was that the Lord would work on the hearts of others who would be willing to come and work in many of these resistant areas. On our trip back home, an event occurred that had a major effect on world events and The Chapel for many years to come. During our flight, we heard that the Chinese government had cracked down on the student protestors in Tiananmen Square and that hundreds, if not thousands, had been killed. As the world reacted with shock and horror, I began to think about all the unreached people in China and how we were going to be able to reach them given the new realities in that country. In my research during that time, I became aware of two major unreached people groups in China, both Muslim. The Uyghurs live primarily in the far northwest part of China there are approximately 10 million of them. And there are about 11 million Hui people living primarily in the north central and central areas of China. What I didn t know at the time was that in the near future, 105

116 the Lord would put us in touch with some missionaries who were able to connect us with some people seeking to reach one of these people groups. God was preparing the hearts of a couple who would be our first Chapel missionaries into China. When I returned, we were already beginning to focus our attention on the 1989 missions conference, His Last Command, Our First Concern. Our conference chairman, Pete Kesler, was excited about challenging our congregation to pledge $1 million toward missions that year while emphasizing grace giving, encouraging people to give as the Lord had blessed them. During that year we were also in the midst of a very important building campaign to expand our education ministry and ministries to children. The project Capture The Vision involved a $3.3 million addition on the South, or Buchtel Avenue, side of our original building. Incorporating an existing abandoned Boy Scout building we purchased, this project would include three floors of classrooms, a gymnasium, and an atrium that would tie the entire building together. When the campaign was launched in 1987, a radical suggestion was made by one of our missions committee members, David Schipper. When the project was proposed, he suggested that we take 10% of the total money raised and give to missions in order to build some special projects overseas. I have to admit that although I thought it was a great idea, I wasn t convinced that either Pastor Larson or the board of trustees would go for it. Oh, me of little faith! Upon hearing the proposal, Pastor Larson endorsed the idea and presented it to the board as well. With their approval, they came back to me with an assignment to research various needs around the world to which we could give gifts totaling more than $300,000. I was both thrilled and overwhelmed at the same time. The weight of the responsibility and the desire to find the very best opportunities were both great. 106

117 At Pastor Larson s suggestion, we created a Blue Ribbon commission, mostly of current and former missions committee members to evaluate various projects we researched. Early on, we decided to research and invest in projects that were related to training nationals in order to multiply our gifts and having an ongoing impact on the growth of the Church in some of the neediest areas of the world. Establishing this precedence opened the door for us to do similar giving through future building projects as well. In fact, the feedback we received from the congregation was that they particularly liked this component to the building campaign because they knew they were not just giving to a project that would benefit themselves but one that would benefit others as well. Our congregation continued to give faithfully to missions, enabling us to support many strategic ministries around the world. Our controller, Hal Webb, met with our committee about mid-year and told us to expect our income from designated missions giving to increase by 10-20% in the coming year. With this encouragement, we were able to give substantial gifts to help provide additional literature for India and increase support for evangelistic radio program broadcasts from partners like HCJB into Central Asia, TWR into North Africa, and FEBC into mainland China. It also allowed us to respond very favorably to a request from Pastor Larson concerning the new OM Ship, Logos II. When their first ship sank, OM asked Pastor Larson to be on a committee to help locate and fund a new ship for their ship ministry. He also had the opportunity to travel to Europe to teach for a week on the other OM ship, the Doulos. Being very impressed with the OM ship ministry, he urged us to assist them in completing the needed renovations to the Logos II and we were able to give a gift of $10,000! 107

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119 CHAPTER 9 Open Doors Another major shift in world affairs was beginning to emerge in both Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in For several years, the stranglehold of Soviet-style communism over the region was beginning to crack. In Poland, a young labor leader, Lech Walesa, was leading the labor uprising in the shipyards of Gdansk. At the same time, the charismatic Pope John Paul II, himself from Poland, was speaking out for freedom and giving hope to millions of people living in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. All this, of course, was made possible by the new head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. His promotion of Glasnost, or openness, and Perestroika (restructuring the Soviet economy), gave impetus to a vast array of social changes that began sweeping over the countries of the former Soviet Union. A British newsletter said it was like God had pressed the fast-forward button on history. When the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe opened its borders, many missions agencies rushed in. Unfortunately, many did so without a long-range plan. Others had plans but often did not have a good missiological foundation and made several costly mistakes. Along with the evangelical missions agencies, there were some cults and sects that moved in as well. It seemed that 109

120 everywhere our missionaries were moving in, so were the Jehovah s Witnesses and the Mormons. I asked a respected missions leader about this phenomenon, and I appreciate his great insight: When these countries were under the iron hand of communism, you didn t see too many cults operating in the region. Why? Simple, he said. Doing missionary work under the communists was very dangerous. People won t die for a lie. Once it was no longer dangerous, these groups started pouring in. Fortunately, there were many faithful evangelical organizations Operation Mobilization, Navigators, Greater European Mission (GEM), Slavic Gospel Mission, and others that had indeed paid the price and were now well prepared and equipped to take on the challenge of greatly increasing their ministries to help reach the many millions of people living in the Eastern bloc countries. As a result of this new openness, we had some couples from The Chapel who were redeployed from existing countries. One of our own members to go to the region was Eric Palmquist. Prior to this, while serving a short time in the Philippines, Eric became seriously ill and had to return to the United States for treatment. He was advised by doctors not to return to a tropical climate, so he began to look elsewhere for a place of service. Eric had a heart for Eastern Europe during his time in seminary, he served as a summer missionary in Albania with Send International. Returning to that region, Eric was able to pioneer the work of SEND in the country of Macedonia in late I asked him at the time why he thought it was best to move into Macedonia. Because, he said, everyone else is going into Albania! Macedonia was essentially being ignored. Several years later, two single women, Tina Embaugh from The Chapel and Sherri Ens from Canada, also went to Macedonia to serve with the SEND team Eric had started. Sherri had served as a missionary intern at The Chapel while completing her seminary 110

121 studies and was excited to serve in a church planting ministry in this needy region. Others were on the move as well. Tim and Leslie Crow were missionary candidates with SEND in the summer of 1992, following Tim s graduation from Dallas Theological Seminary. Their task was a daunting one as they chose one of the most repressive of the former Soviet Union s client states, Romania. Moving to Romania in the fall of 1992 was like going back 50 years in time. Needless to say, the adjustment for the Crow family was considerable. Very few agencies were working in Romania at the time, although one of our closest partners, Operation Mobilization, was building a foundation for future ministry. To assist them, we gave $10,000 to develop a Romanian Missions Training Center to equip Romanian Christians for ministry. Terry and Rebecca Lingenhoel, who had helped lead our outreach to international students, first moved to Vienna to be part of the OM team reaching Eastern Europe. After about a year in Vienna, the Lingenhoels moved to Budapest, Hungary, to establish a new OM base for Eastern Europe and develop their own ministry there. Ed and Linda Cox had a long history of working with the Navigators in Eastern Europe. Beginning in the early 1970s, Ed and then Linda worked in former Yugoslavia until they could not continue because of visa issues. The next several years they continued working in Yugoslavia and then Bulgaria, all while living in Vienna. Later they moved to the London area and made many ministry trips into both Russia and Bulgaria. Security was so tight in these countries that Ed would sometimes sleep in his car and meet his contacts by taking long walks in a park and reviewing Scripture memory verses. When Eastern Europe finally opened up, Ed and Linda moved to Sofia, Bulgaria, and began a long ministry of evangelism and discipleship among the Bulgarian people. 111

122 As the former Soviet Union began to open up to the Gospel, The Chapel congregation responded generously as they had so often in our past. Our 1990 missions conference had used the theme, Blessed to Be a Blessing, and Pastor Larson used that same theme to challenge our people to be a blessing to the countries who had lived under communism. In response to a special offering, the congregation gave $22,000 above and beyond their normal giving to enable us to invest in some missions opportunities in these lands. Because of their generosity, we were able to provide New Testaments for Operation Mobilization s work in Romania, scholarships for seminary students in Croatia, and a library for a seminary in Moscow. The following year, we were able to fund gospels of Luke and the JESUS Film, for ministries in Ukraine and Moscow. Later we were able to give a gift of $5,000 to the Slavic Gospel Association to provide scholarships for Russian students who were training to be pastors and church planters. It was both exciting and encouraging to be able to have the resources to meet some of the many needs that arose out of these new initiatives in former communist lands. One of the other ministries that was impacted by these developments was that of Minh Dang and the Vietnamese Church. Because of these new opportunities, we supported Minh Dang as he further developed the ministry of evangelizing Vietnamese workers who had come from Vietnam to work in both Eastern and Western Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell, there were nearly 200,000 Vietnamese workers in the greater Paris area and 70,000 in East Germany. We provided funding for training tapes and written materials. At other times, we helped support Vietnamese pastors and church planters who were working among these populations. There were associations of evangelical Vietnamese believers in both France and Germany at that time, and Minh worked closely with them in doing outreach to these workers. Later on, when Vietnam itself began to open up to the West, 112

123 we sent Minh to Vietnam several times a year to train pastors and church planters. Minh himself worked hard at developing key partnerships within the evangelical world to build and expand his ministry within Vietnam. In the area of literature and other materials, he worked with David C. Cook Publishing to provided needed resources to believers. In order to develop better pastoral training, Minh also worked closely with Burnham Ministries, founded by our former senior pastor, David Burnham. Both David and his son Jonathan traveled with Minh to Vietnam to train and equip Vietnamese pastors. This training often had to be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of the government. The Burnhams worked hard to develop culturally sensitive training materials that could work cross-culturally in several areas of the world. Eventually, Burnham Ministries worked with Minh to translate much of their materials into Vietnamese, making them more universally available and usable by the pastors there. Because so much of our work with the congregation in the 1980s emphasized missions through our conferences, seminars, and courses, it began to pay rich dividends. In a relatively short period of time, we found ourselves in the early 1990s with several couples and singles heading overseas in long-term capacities, or extended shortterm with the intention of going long-term. Tim and Judy Walton were training in California and preparing to move to Manila, Philippines, to work with Campus Crusade for Christ. Dan and Jean Enos were also planning for missionary service in Mexico, working among the Tarahumara Indians with Navajo Gospel Mission. Frank and Barb Emrick were leaving to work in Alaska and Siberia with InterAct Ministries. Jim and Marion Moore, who had gone through the Navigator 2:7 training with my wife and I were just completing an extended candidate evaluation with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Upon completion, they planned to serve with Wycliffe in Cameroon, 113

124 Africa. Don and Kathy Ertley were raising support to go to Kenya and serve with World Missions Associates. Dave and Jill Whitten were preparing to work among North African Muslims with Arab World Ministries. Last but not least, Debbie Johnson and Diane Godleweski went to China to serve for a summer with the English Language Institute of China (ELI), and Clint Ungaschick was leaving to work among Native Americans with CHIEF. All of this was wonderful, but with six couples and several singles going, or in the midst of preparation for going, overseas, it put quite a strain on our missions budget. Despite the congregation s generosity, we found that about 90% of our $900,000 budget was now committed to either missionary support or project support. Hal Webb, our controller, met with our committee and some members of the trustee board to discuss how to manage what was in fact a very good problem to have. As a result, we set some priorities concerning our budget and how it was allocated. Although we trusted that giving would continue to be strong and even grow, we implemented a policy that if there was ever a shortfall, we would suspend support for institutions, agencies, and projects, and not for individual missionaries. Therefore, we set a minimum reserve for our missions budget so that we would always have sufficient funds for the upcoming months of missionary support. We also decided that if additional funds were needed to send missionaries out from our own congregation or for special projects, we would go to the congregation and ask for additional giving. That opportunity actually arose in the summer of Because we had an excess of funds that had come in for the Capture the Vision building campaign, we were able to give $14,250 to our ministry partner Gospel for Asia. Another piece of the puzzle of our evolving missions program finally fell into place in 1990 as well. For some time, we had been 114

125 recommending to Pastor Larson that we hire someone full-time to lead our ministry to international students at The University of Akron. Until then we had utilized a combination of volunteers and missions interns to lead this ministry. In 1990, Jim Hibbard had completed his studies at Asian Theological Seminary in Manila and returned to America with both a degree and a Filipino bride, Becky! During his internship at The Chapel, he helped lead the international students ministry, and it quickly became evident that this was his passion. Pastor Larson asked me to write a job description for a Director of International Students Ministry and have it reviewed by the committee of church leaders. In May, Jim was hired as our first full-time Director of International Students Ministries. Under his leadership, the ministry grew rapidly with an average of 135 students attending our Friday night dinner outreach in the fall. Several years later, the ministry continued to experience strong growth as Jim left and a new director, Todd McKenney, took over. Todd was a young attorney in town who was part of our internship program in which students were able to take seminary courses by extension from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Todd had been heavily involved in the outreach to international students and was especially interested in working closer with the Chinese church to reach Chinese students. That fall, a seemingly uneventful meeting took place in my office that would have long-range implications for urban and crosscultural ministries in the Akron area for many years. In September, I met with Jodi White, a member of our Hudson Chapel and a recent graduate of Moody Bible Institute. Jodi had a tremendous heart for children s ministries and had served with Child Evangelism Fellowship at various times in her Moody years. When she came to see me, she was hoping to work with the underserved children living in the poorer sections of inner-city Akron. Unfortunately, when she approached CEF about beginning this work, they were 115

126 not very responsive or encouraging. They were working primarily in suburban neighborhoods and were not willing to commit time and resources to inner-city ministry at that time. Jodi however, was not willing to give up on her vision. I had been becoming increasingly concerned about the proliferation of new agencies being started throughout the United States. I felt there was too much duplication, and that many of these agencies could actually merge and be much better stewards of the funding they received. In light of these concerns, I asked Jodi at least to try one more time to get the leadership of CEF to buy into her vision and sponsor her as she began her work. Although they were willing to let her work in the urban area initially, they were unfortunately unwilling to really commit themselves or the organization long-term to her vision. So, in the fall of 1991, we began our relationship with Jodi s ministry with a one-time $500 gift and later began supporting her at a level of $200 a month. By 1992, it became apparent that a totally new organization was needed to really develop this ministry in such a way that it could be effective and impact the community it was serving. Following in her grandmother s footsteps, Jodi was reaching out to children in the area called Elizabeth Park, which is situated along the little Cuyahoga River where it runs underneath both the Y Bridge and the bridge of the north leg of the Route 8 freeway. She named the new organization Urban Vision and gathered around her a small group of volunteers who assisted in building relationships and ministering to the people living in the Elizabeth Park area. A few years later, she married Rodney Matthews and, together, they continued to expand the ministry to more people and add additional programs. In 2007, the city of Akron began a massive urban renewal program that involved tearing down the old Elizabeth Park housing projects and building new modern housing. This, of course, resulted in the displacement of most of the 116

127 population there, many of whom moved to the North Hill section of Akron. In response to their continued needs, Jodi and Rodney moved their ministry to North Hill. God also provided an abandoned church just off Cuyahoga Falls Avenue for them to use for offices and ministry. Over the next several years, another factor changed the make-up of the population and demographics of the North Hill neighborhoods near Urban Vision s new location. The State Department, working with a secular agency in Akron called The International Institute, had begun settling refugees from Burma in this area. In addition to several ethnic Burmese minorities, there were also refugees from Nepal and Bhutan who were settling there. As a result, Urban Vision had to adapt some of the ministry activities to include teaching English, remedial classes for foreign children, and other related ministries that especially addressed needs of the refugee community. Today, Urban Vision is a much larger, multi-faceted ministry serving both the refugee population and the urban poor. It also hosts Northside Open Door Church, led by one of their staff members, Jeff Smith, a former Chapel missionary to the Muslim world. We continue to support Urban Vision and consider them a vital partner in our commitment to reach the city of Akron with the Gospel. 117

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129 CHAPTER 10 Into the 21st Century The Chapel missions program and structure was beginning to evolve in the 1990s as we prepared for missions in the 21st century. We had already identified many of the least reached areas and peoples of the world. We had increased our study and awareness of the Muslim world in general and the Window. We were increasing our involvement in and support of indigenous national workers in key areas. Our committee had expanded from having just trustees to adding four atlarge members: Mike Francis, David Schipper, Paul Greenough, and Glen Thompson. Amos Key, who had retired from Goodyear, was serving two days a week as our missions coordinator, Barb Flynn was our full-time missions administrative assistant, and Jim Hibbard, who had completed his studies at Asian Theological Seminary, was working with international students. Finally, thanks to the continued generous giving of the church, we looked at our current budget of $725,000 and set a goal of over $900,000 for The 1990s also marked a renewed emphasis upon educating our congregation and seeking to mobilize them for missions. Our involvement in ACMC the several previous years had given us tremendous tools. Several of our missions committee members had even attended these conferences and had begun educating 119

130 themselves about critical issues such as missions strategy, missionary care, and others key areas we dealt with on a regular basis. In order to share some of this vital information with our congregation, we scheduled two key seminars for The first was a Muslim Awareness seminar presented by the Zwemer Institute. Samuel Zwemer was pioneer missionary to the Muslim world in the late 19th and early 20th century. The seminar was a basic introduction to what Muslims believe, how Islam differs from biblical Christianity, and some ideas on how to build relationships with and reach Muslims with the Gospel. This was particularly timely since there were now mosques in Akron and Kent and a new, much larger mosque was to open in the area in a few years. We also had a growing number of Muslim students coming to The University of Akron as international students. The second seminar we offered was Destination Originally designed by missionary author Don Richardson, who wrote Peace Child, this seminar traced the 4,000-year history of the Great Commission in the Bible from its origin in the covenant made to Abraham up until our present time. The leader of the seminar was Bob Sjogren, one of the co-founders of the mission agency Frontiers, which works exclusively with Muslims around the world. Bob is an outstanding speaker and has written several books since that time. In this seminar, we discovered that God s desire to be worshipped and glorified by all the nations is a theme that is literally in every part of the Bible. Church members who attended were really excited about what they had learned, and many got involved in various areas of our missions ministries as a result. One of them, Dave Deshon, eventually became a member of the missions committee and traveled with me on overseas trips on several occasions. We also made financial support available to those who were either pursuing missions directly or simply going to a national missions conference that would expose them to both the needs and 120

131 opportunities for missionary work around the world. A few years earlier, The Chapel had entered into a partnership with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to offer fully accredited courses on our Akron campus. During a visit to Trinity s campus with Pastor Larson, he and I met with then-president Dr. Ken Myers. At that meeting, Dr. Myers urged us to consider making The Chapel an extension site for the seminary. As a Trinity Extension Site, we would be able to offer seminary courses at a reduced cost, thus making it available to students who might not have been able to attend seminary otherwise. Upon our return, Pastor Larson asked me to work on this project. I then contacted a consultant from Columbia International University who had done similar work for Columbia. He helped us prepare all the paperwork and went with me when we submitted our application to the Ohio Board of Regents. We were very grateful when we received immediate approval from the State. These classes covered all the basic Biblical areas that residential seminary students study in an on-campus program. Some of these courses were taught by full-time Trinity professors who flew into Akron for several weekend sessions. Other courses were taught by local Christian leaders who were qualified to teach certain subjects and were available to teach a class on a weekly basis for a semester. This met a truly vital need for our missionary candidates because most missions agencies required a number of hours of formal Bible training. With the combination of Trinity and Moody evening school available locally, our candidates could get a sufficient number of hours to meet their requirements. When they were also able to take the Perspectives course at The Chapel, it was significant savings for our candidates both in time and money. Another opportunity for financial support was the historic Urbana Missionary Conference, sponsored by Inter-Varsity on the University of Illinois campus. Attracting more than 15,

132 college students and others, hundreds of missions agencies and top missions speakers were represented at the conference. Over the years, thousands of college students have made commitments to give their lives to missionary service at the closing session. Because of the unique experience and opportunities that Urbana offered, the missions committee made scholarship funds available to Chapel college students who wanted to attend. As new opportunities continued to present themselves in both the former Soviet Union and the Muslim world, it became apparent that we needed to partner with some additional agencies that specialized in unreached areas of the world or specific religious groups. As a result of this analysis, we began to initiate relationships with missions organizations like Arab World Missions, Frontiers, Pioneers, China Ministries International, and Overseas Missionary Fellowship (formally China Inland Mission). We were especially blessed to come in contact with Partners International at one particular ACMC conference a group that specializes in identifying indigenous, national-led evangelism and church planting movements in the least reached areas of the world. They do very careful investigations and evaluations before committing themselves to helping any movement. Once they have established a formal relationship with the national ministry, Partners provides wise counsel about making ministries more effective and fruitful. They also examine their financial records and try to link them with churches and individuals in the West that might be interested in providing financial resources. Partners International also provides seminars and training for national pastors and church planters. Through our work with Partners International we were introduced to several strategic ministries such as AWEMA (Arab World Evangelical Minister s Association), ETSI (Evangelical Theological Seminary of Indonesia), and a numbers of national church planters working in Vietnam, Kurdistan, and China. 122

133 We have learned a great deal about building relationships between Western and non-western ministries and how to balance trust and accountability through our work with Partners International. We were particularly impressed by AWEMA because it represented 19 different countries spread across North Africa and the Middle East. This area has a population of more than 280 million and is expected to reach 400 to 500 million by the year AWEMA was the brainchild of an Egyptian businessman named Maher who had a vision of uniting evangelicals in the region for the purpose of reaching their own countries and people groups with the Gospel. As you can imagine, in some of the most radical Muslim countries in that region, there were only small pockets of believers, most of whom were forced to meet in secret or in underground churches. In other countries, like Egypt, there was a significant historic Christian presence in the form of the Coptic Church, which represented nearly 10% of the population and millions of people. Much of the AWEMA work involved training nationals to do evangelism and church planting within their own cultures. Sometimes week-long conferences are held in various countries with intensive training packed into a short period of time. Along with these conferences, they have also established long-term training centers in several countries. These were usually in the more open countries and allowed students to stay for long periods of time and learn about both theology and practical issues of discipleship and outreach. The Chapel in Akron and one of our daughter churches, Riverwood, have sponsored some of these schools and the students who have gone there. One of the most exciting dimensions of the AWEMA ministry was an annual conference held in Cyprus or other relatively open countries in the Middle East. At these conferences, security is tight and attendance is by invitation only. Each morning and afternoon is dedicated to a different part of the Arab world, and reports are given by leaders of these areas concerning the state of the Church and the 123

134 progress of evangelism. The reports are given in Arabic, so those attending who do not speak the language, like myself, were given headphones to hear simultaneous translation of those reports. I have attended two of these conferences, and the reports were fascinating they opened a whole new world of understanding for me concerning this region of the Muslim world. When I attended in 2000, I was particularly moved by the report on the Arabian Gulf states, representing six different countries. It was sobering to hear there were barely 1,000 believers out of a total population of about 35 million in these six countries. Persecution was overt and constant in most of them. Almost all of the churches were underground, although a few international churches for ex-pats existed in some of the capital cities. Perhaps some of the greatest and most powerful witnessing going on in these countries was being done by service workers from countries such as the Philippines, Korea, and other Asian nations. One amazing story I heard was during a private conversation with a Christian national from the island of Malta. At that time, Khadafy was still in power in Libya, one of the most repressive regimes in the entire Middle East. Because of its very close proximity, citizens from Malta could actually take a ferry boat or flight into Tripoli. This man had an ongoing ministry to a handful of believers whom he visited each time he traveled there. He said the security was so tight in Libya that he had to go through almost a dozen security checkpoints to exit the airport. He estimated there were less than 15 believers in the entire country. He had met each one of them, but they had never met each other. He said it was safer that way, because if they were picked up by the secret police, they could honestly say they didn t know any other believers. This man s courage in going into Libya and the courage of these believers inspired me to do even more to help these national Christians reach their own people. Thank God for agencies and organizations dedicated to making this happen. 124

135 The historic opportunity to reach the people of the former Soviet Union would also have a profound impact upon the future of Chapel missions. In early 1990, I had made a trip to the southeast United States, visiting several different mission agencies that The Chapel worked with over the years. On that trip, I met Dr. Dwight Smith, the president of United World Mission and former missionary to Latin America. Dwight was a dynamic leader who had great vision and a strong theological foundation for what his agency was attempting to do. One of the sayings I heard him repeat over and over again was as bold as it was clear: Our goal should be that every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth should have the opportunity to hear the Gospel and be part of a local fellowship of believers. The very next year, he had the opportunity to take steps to see that vision realized. In 1992, more than 900 pastors from all over the former Soviet Union gathered in Riga, Latvia, to discuss how to reach their countries for Christ. This was a significant step instead of Western countries and agencies coming in and telling them what they needed, this forum allowed them to address the problems and opportunities they now faced, and to find their own solutions. In the end, there was one primary message they had for the Western church: Help us plant churches! They knew that the most biblical and practical way to reach their respective nations was to plant new churches in every city, village, and neighborhood. Two key leaders from the United States came back determined do something about this Dwight Smith and James Montgomery. Jim had been a missionary to the Philippines with Overseas Crusades and was, at that time, the founder and President of DAWN ministries. DAWN stood for Disciple A Whole Nation 125

136 and referred to the strategy of seeking to plant a church in every city, town, or village in a given country until every part of the country was populated with evangelical churches. This strategy was already finding success in the Philippines where evangelical missionaries were seeking to plant a church in each of the country s nearly 50,000 villages, or barrios. Not long after returning to the United States, Dwight Smith put out a call to key missions pastors around the country in order to share the vision that he and Jim Montgomery had devised to help answer the call of the pastors from the former Soviet Union. I was privileged to be invited to a meeting in Chicago in November 1992, and I went, accompanied by one of our missions committee members, Roy Culbertson. As we gathered in a hotel near O Hare airport, Dwight laid out his vision to us. His most important observation from the get-go was that there was no way we could accomplish this task by sending U.S. or Western missionaries over to plant churches. Even if every Protestant evangelical missionary in the world relocated to the countries of the former Soviet Union, there would not be enough to accomplish this task. There was a need for more than 200,000 churches in the entire region, and a task of that enormity required a new prototype. What Dwight laid out for us in that meeting was a new strategy Saturation Church Planting. SCP, as it was known, was a relatively simple plan of utilizing Western missionaries to train thousands of national believers in all the former countries of the Soviet Union to plant churches in their own countries. The goal would be to see a church for every 1,000 people, or a church for every town and village. It was also critical that, from the very beginning, many of those who received this training would not only begin to plant churches but would also then become trainers themselves. In each church planting effort, the leader would begin talking to those in the new church about how they would be planting 126

137 the next church. Dwight believed that the local church was God s primary agent for accomplishing the Great Commission. By the end of 1993, we had incorporated The Alliance for Saturation Church Planting, appointed a board (upon which I was asked to serve), and were building a consortium of churches and agencies committed to this effort. One of the first challenges both the supporting churches and agencies faced was what to do with the missionaries we currently had serving in the region. If they were to be part of this enormous undertaking, they would need additional training and re-tooling so that they could not only apply these principles but also pass them on to others. With the approval of the missions committee, I began contacting all of our missionaries serving in the region. I also contacted the sending agencies of all these missionaries as well to let them know what we were doing and why. I invited several missions executives to come and observe the training and meet some of our leaders so they could ask questions and raise any issues needing to be addressed. After describing the SCP vision in detail, I informed them it was The Chapel s plan to have our missionaries all take the SCP training, and that we would cover the cost of both the housing and the training. Fortunately, The Alliance had opened an office and training base in Budapest, Hungary, which was centrally located for most of our missionaries. Over a period of a few years, most of our missionaries in the area were able to attend the week-long training and return to their fields of service with some new principles and a fresh vision for the power of Saturation Church Planting. It was not easy, however. In fact, it was almost counter-intuitive to what most people thought about missionary work. Dwight often reminded us that, historically, a missionary would usually measure his effectiveness by what he personally accomplished. In the future, Dwight said, we should not measure a missionary s effectiveness by what he does, but what he sees get 127

138 done! In this new paradigm, a missionary becomes primarily a facilitator who trains and empowers others to plant churches. It was around that time that Stephen Covey s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was quite popular. One of his principles was to begin with the end in mind. In other words, have a clear vision of what you want your objective to look like from the very beginning. Our SCP director in Budapest, Woody Phillips, had a unique way of expressing this. He called it Z thinking. As he explained it, in most cases a SCP oriented missionary would be working with existing churches and church leaders in a given country. Sometimes, however, a missionary would be the primary church planter because there was literally no church in the area he was working. Regardless, when the first church was planted, the missionary would immediately be talking to the people leading that church about the next several churches that THEY were going to plant. That s Z thinking thinking with the end in mind. Our goal was to get into the minds of the new believers in every church that was planted that they were responsible for planting churches, too. Although this movement began slowly because of the need to do extensive training, it did not take very long to begin to see some extraordinary results. After five years, the president of one of the mission agencies serving on our board made what I thought was an astounding statement. He told us that his agency had been in existence and working in Europe for about 50 years. He said that in those 50 years, with all the missionaries they had ever placed on the field, they had planted roughly 500 churches. Through the efforts of The Alliance for Saturation Church Planting, they saw more than 500 churches planted in the first five years! In order to facilitate the training of future missionaries with SCP principles, Dwight developed another training center in Union Mills, North Carolina the Center for Inter-Cultural Training (CIT). I had the privilege of serving on the board of CIT, and The 128

139 Chapel gave substantial funds over the years to help develop the center. Eventually, we required almost all of our missionary candidates to go through CIT before leaving for the field. We found that although they would get very good training during their candidate school with their respective mission agencies, they often did not get specific and practical training in the principles of Saturation Church Planting. A further dimension of our involvement in the former Soviet Union was a connection we developed through Bob Provost, a former Executive Pastor at The Chapel. After serving a few years with Masters College, Bob accepted an invitation to serve as the Director of Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union for SENDInternational. Bob had taken a particular interest in both Russia and Ukraine. He encouraged us to get involved with Ukraine, as they had a very significant Baptist Union of churches there and had a vision for church planting. Although many Western agencies were working primarily in the capital of Kiev, Bob had developed a heart for another large city, Kharkov. Located in the far eastern part of the country (and not far from the Russian border), the people of Kharkov actually spoke Russian and used the Russian Bible. Bob was very excited about the potential growth of these churches and was hoping we could develop a sister church relationship with one of the main Baptist churches there. We were very interested in this concept but wanted to explore it further. In our discussions with Bob, he indicated one of their greatest needs was in the area of children s ministry. Under communism, there were many restrictions on what could be taught to children who were under 16 years of age, and additional restrictions on any efforts of evangelism of children. With that in mind, I invited Norv Brown, our children s 129

140 pastor, to join me on a trip to Eastern Europe and Ukraine in April of On this trip, I would be able to visit several Chapelsupported missionaries. We spent time with Martha Heidinger, who lived in Vienna but was ministering primarily in Czechoslovakia training nationals to take over the CEF work there. We also visited David and Annagreth Bricker who were primarily working with Muslim immigrants in Vienna through a new ministry that OM had developed there. After that, we were also able to visit Terry and Rebecca Lingenhoel who had moved from Vienna and were now working in Budapest. All of our missionaries working in the former Soviet bloc were seeing tremendous opportunities for ministry and were praying for more laborers to come. In order to get to Kharkov, Norv and I had to fly to Moscow and then take a long overnight train into our destination city. While in Moscow, Bob met us along with one of our high school short-term missions teams. Since we were there on the weekend, we had the privilege of attending the famous Moscow Baptist Church where Billy Graham spoke when he visited the Soviet Union in 1982 and That very evening, we all traveled together on the night train to Kharkov. When we arrived early the next morning, we were met by a delegation from the Central Baptist Church of Kharkov. They were overjoyed that we had come and welcomed us warmly. The students were sent in pairs to stay in the homes of people from the church. Norv and I were hosted by a Pastor named Yuri, who was leading a church plant from the Central Baptist Church. A welder by trade, Yuri had been bi-vocational for several years until the church had grown enough to support him. We were a bit surprised to find he lived in a private home after seeing the massive apartment complexes where millions of people lived in Moscow very few were allowed to own their own homes. It was a bit different in Ukraine because they were a separate country before coming under the control of the Soviet Union. Many people owned their own homes, and that was the case for Yuri who was living in 130

141 the home his grandparents had lived in. We experienced their loving hospitality immediately. We were, quite frankly, exhausted and would have been fine with a piece of toast and a cup of coffee. What they prepared, however, was a full-blown dinner, complete with beef, mashed potatoes, vegetables, various side dishes, and a chocolate cake for dessert! We were overwhelmed. We were also concerned we knew they could not afford to provide meals like this for themselves, let alone guests. After a couple of days, we were finally able to ask them what they traditionally ate for breakfast and it was simply bread and jam with coffee or tea. We quickly told them that would be just fine for us, and were greatly relieved when they agreed. We still had to be careful in how we communicated. One evening, in addition to the mystery fruit juice we had been drinking, there appeared two small bottles of Pepsi. When we drank them, they asked us if we liked it. Wanting to complement our hosts, we said yes that their Pepsi was just as good as ours at home. You can guess what happened next. At every meal we shared with them, there were two bottles of Pepsi on the table. One day they gave us an apple at our meal. We complimented them, saying the Ukrainian apples were very good. That night when we went to bed, we found an entire basket of apples in our room! During the next few days, Norv and I led seminars on children s education and discipleship with Sunday School teachers and other lay leaders from about 50 churches in the region. We also participated in an evangelistic outreach the missions team did with the Ukrainian youth at Lenin Park in central Ukraine. Our final time with our new friends was a 2.5-hour service at the Central Baptist Church in which Norv and I both preached. It was a very emotional time for the church, as they had really bonded with the kids in our youth group it was hard seeing them leave. The next day we had a three-hour meeting with the leaders of the Baptist churches along with Bob, representing SEND 131

142 International, and Norv and I, representing The Chapel. We learned rather quickly that the ecclesiastical structure of the various Baptist Unions in the former Soviet Union was based upon the only organization structures they had lived under the last several decades. The Baptist Union had a president, a first vice-president, a second vice-president, and a third vice-president. It was very formal and authoritarian from the top down. The Baptists wanted very much to send their own youth group to visit The Chapel (at our expense!) and do evangelism, but we did not think this was wise. We felt the best strategy was for us to continue to provide training for key leaders in the various churches in the Kharkov region. In the end, we were able to get them to agree to select two pastors and some additional children s and youth leaders to send to Akron the following year in the summer. This paved the way for a continued relationship with the Baptists in Kharkov and for many more opportunities for training for Norv and our children s department. Norv and his wife, Linda, along with several key lay leaders in their department, had the opportunity to go back to Kharkov in 1995 and provide additional training in areas of Christian education so greatly needed by these churches. We also gave a substantial gift the next year, which enabled the Baptists in Kharkov to finish building their new church. Pastor Yuri pastored this church, called the White Church because it was painted in all white on the outside. We were glad to partner with them with the hope that there would be many more churches planted throughout Ukraine and that a genuine church planting movement would develop throughout the country. Around this time, Craig and Carolyn Rucin were preparing to move to Russia as missionaries with Pioneers. Frank and Barb Emrick were preparing to go as church planters to Siberia with Interact Missions. 132

143 Another major development in our missions program emerged in the early 1990s but had its roots in the early 80s and it involved the Grand Canyon! In 1983, Mary Fox had been praying about God s will for her life in terms of career missions. Having committed herself to full-time missions the previous year, she presented herself to the committee as a candidate to serve with Navajo Gospel Mission (NGM). After going through candidate orientation and serving in various ministries on the NGM headquarters campus in Flagstaff, Arizona, Mary eventually became the administrative assistant to the NGM Executive Director, Tom Dolaghan. In 1984, Pastor Larson, and his wife, Jeanine, went out to Arizona to hike the Grand Canyon. While there they stopped to see Mary in Flagstaff. Through that visit, they became friends and returned to see Mary again on a subsequent trip to the Grand Canyon and got to meet Tom. Pastor Larson invited Tom to speak at The Chapel and began some ongoing discussions about how we could partner with NGM in their missions work. Then in late-1988, Tom began sharing some exciting information about an unreached tribal group in Mexico the Tarahumara, an ancient Indian tribe of over 60,000 that lives in the Copper Canyon region of the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Mexico. At that time, Navajo Gospel Mission was spearheading a church planting effort among the Tarahumara, led by NGM missionary Eric Powell. When NGM began their ministry there, they only knew of one small group of about eight to 10 believers among the entire Tarahumara people group. Long- and short-term missionaries going into the region had to fly from an airstrip near Douglas, Arizona, to a small place in the region of the Choguita Valley in Mexico. Eric had done extensive research into the tribe and found they had experienced little or no evangelistic outreach in their history. There had been some work done by New Tribes 133

144 Mission and YWAM (Youth With A Mission), but with little fruit. NGM decided to provide some tangible, physical help at first in order to build trust and open the doors for further ministry. To that end, they had started a medical clinic and were working on drilling wells to provide fresh water for needy villages. A medical missionary, Ken Van Kirk, and his wife were heading up the clinic work. By the end of 1989, Pastor Larson was already suggesting more research be done on the Tarahumara and what it might mean for The Chapel to adopt them. At the same time, a young couple named Dan and Jean Enos had taken the Perspectives course with me and were seriously considering missions as a calling for their own lives. In the summer of 1990, they served with NGM as short-term missionaries working among the Tarahumara in Mexico. By that fall, they came back very excited about the possibility of working among the tribe full-time and long-term. Pastor Larson was also hoping to send short-term teams on a regular basis and make a staff person or lay leader the main point person or coordinator of this effort. Things then began to move fairly quickly. In October 1990, Pastor Larson indicated he was ready to fully support the adoption of the Tarahumara as an unreached people group. He also suggested that Pastor Jay Halley, who also had a special interest in missions, be appointed as the manager of the ministry and lead short-term teams there on a regular basis. The next month (November), he made a formal proposal to our missions committee that we adopt the Tarahumara and plan on building expenses for doing so into the budget. During the winter of , Dan and Jean made formal application to become career missionaries with NGM with a goal of going to Mexico and working among the Tarahumara. In the spring of 1991, a Chapel member with medical training, Brad Orville, made a three-week trip to Choguita to 134

145 research what was being done there and report his findings. In March, he met with Pastor Jay Halley, myself, and Dan Enos to update us on his observations. A primitive clinic had been operating with the help of six Mexican community health workers and a few NGM missionaries who were rotating in and out of the area from Arizona. There were approximately 2,000 people living in the valley there and one or two churches. The report indicated that the medical clinic was an ideal way to establish a presence among the Tarahumara and that it would make things easier for Americans seeking to get visas to work in Mexico. It was also suggested that satellite clinics be established and more community health workers trained to help staff them. Over the next few years, we sent numerous short-term teams to work among the Tarahumara including some with skilled builders. Through their efforts, we completed the main medical clinic and worked on some missionary housing for any missionaries who would be serving there long-term. In addition, an entire team of missionary couples and families went through language school and training before being deployed to work among the Tarahumara people. Our own Dan and Jean Enos completed their language school in Costa Rica and then moved to Mexico to begin their work. As the medical work continued to be critical to the overall strategy, Ken Van Kirk actually enrolled in a medical school in Mexico and graduated, giving him great credibility with the authorities in the region. We later donated funds to build a health clinic for the Tarahumara. This not only provided practical health care for them but also allowed Ken to utilize the clinic to train community health care workers. I was privileged to serve on the NGM board for several years and was able to meet many of their missionaries and field directors. I learned a great deal about the many issues that a mission agency board must deal with and grew to appreciate the complexity of 135

146 working cross-culturally in a country that is not always very friendly to missionaries from the United States. It was a joy to be able to provide substantial financial support for the work of NGM during those days, especially to the work among the Tarahumara, since they were our adopted people group. The ministry there over the years was not without its difficulties and disappointments. There were issues of disunity among some of the missionaries and a few of the couples working among the Tarahumara had to return to the United States. After director Tom Dologhan died, Navajo Gospel Mission went through some substantial changes, including changing their name to Ameritribes. As the ministry progressed, Eric Powell and the missionaries there were working more and more with two indigenous Mexican mission agencies, which again made them less vulnerable to anti-american visa restrictions and other legal obstacles. In the midst of all this, however, God s Spirit was working, and the Gospel was spreading among the Tarahumara people. What began as a discouraged group of believers in the late 1970s grew to more than 30 worshipping communities among the Tarahumara by the end of the 1990s. Although The Chapel is no longer directly involved in the work there, the ministry continues, and a formally unreached people group is being reached for Christ. 136

147 CHAPTER 11 Good Stewardship One dimension of ministry that The Chapel rarely got involved in was the building of churches. In general, when we gave gifts in this area, especially large gifts, it was restricted to the funding of training centers, Bible schools, and seminaries. We generally stayed away from pouring funds into individual churches. In the mid- 90s however, when Minh Dang introduced us to International Cooperating Ministries, we discovered they had a unique plan for building churches that did not create dependence. In their plan, the church needing a building had to provide the land and labor, and the ICC would provide most of the funding for a simple building. As soon as a church would begin meeting in one of the buildings, they would immediately begin giving to a fund to be used to plant the next church. This partnership with International Cooperating Ministries helped build simple church buildings for many of the rapidly growing churches throughout Vietnam. These churches, part of the Evangelical Church of Vietnam, are not only growing but also reproducing themselves throughout the country. Because each congregation that receives a building has to put aside part of its own offering in order to help build the next church within this model, the multiplication of churches is amazing. So, 137

148 when we heard about a donor who would match two-to-one any gifts toward building churches, we were able to give one of our largest gifts ever. It was indeed matched and doubled, and resulted in 15 new churches being built! At the recommendation of veteran missionaries such as Martha Heidinger in the Czech Republic, Terry Lingenhoel in Hungary, and Stan Smith in Senegal, The Chapel also began supporting several key nationals who would be working alongside our own missionaries. These were mature national Christian workers in whom we had great confidence. It was a great investment, because we had the built-in accountability through reports and evaluations we received from our missionaries, yet it was also very cost-effective to support a national worker. We found it to be very good stewardship. Speaking of stewardship, we continued to wrestle with how to best use the funds in our missions budget and make wise decisions about its disbursement. Even as early as 1991, our expected income was over $1 million, plus our carryover from the previous year. Because of our experience of trying to respond quickly to natural catastrophes that seemed to happen around the world with increasing frequency we decided to set aside a maximum of 5% of our budget to respond to these emergencies. That turned out to be a good decision because, in the years to come, we repeatedly had the opportunity to respond quickly when there was an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami. We began to refine the criteria we looked at when evaluating whether we would support a missionary candidate. Normally we looked primarily at the person s training and preparation for ministry along with the nature of their assignment and the target population they would be seeking to reach. We now began to ask additional questions such as the expertise and cost-effectiveness 138

149 of the mission agency, the effectiveness of the candidate s past ministry, and even whether the proposed ministry could be done better by a national. These questions required more homework on our part but were really helpful in being better stewards of the missionary dollars the congregation had entrusted to us. During this time of evaluation, we also reaffirmed our commitment to place a high priority in getting the Gospel to the least reached peoples in the world. We were progressively trying to focus our human and financial resources on those peoples and areas of the world. So few other churches in the United States were focusing on the unreached. Studies done in the 1990s showed that well over 50% of U.S. churches had no real missions program whatsoever. Further, for those who did, the vast amount of the resources spent on what they called missions either went locally or within the U.S. For those churches that did have some kind of overseas missions program, very few were actually working among the unreached. But what motivated us to do so was a simple biblical principle: To whom much has been given, much will be required. We had both the awareness of the need, partners to work with in addressing this need, and the human and financial resources to meet this need. How could we do anything less? Preparing missionaries for the demanding work they would face in the least reached areas of the world was a challenge in and of itself. It was not unusual for people to come to me for counsel about their call to missions without having any ministry experience or training here at home. Many seemed to approach missionary service as simply a change in geography, not recognizing the enormous challenges one faces when dealing with a foreign language, a radically different environment, and a culture hostile to the Gospel. Somehow, they thought that becoming a missionary and going overseas would in one way or another transform them into someone who would be effective and fruitful in ministry. As a 139

150 wise missions veteran once told me, Flying over saltwater doesn t change anything. In order to address this, I developed a missions interest questionnaire that I began to use as a diagnostic tool in evaluating potential candidates. I was motivated to do this not only by my own experience but by a story I heard about Dawson Trotman, founder of The Navigators. Early in his career, Cameron Townsend, founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators, asked Daws (as he was called) to interview potential missionary candidates. In the interview, Daws would ask them about their personal devotional life, their study of the Bible, and their experience in both evangelism and discipling others. Daws often found that these candidates were sorely lacking any experience or skills in these areas. When he shared his observations with them, he would often say something like, What makes you think you are going to do over there what you are not doing over here? One of our missions interns and missionary candidates, Dave Whitten, helped us develop a missionary training program that could be custom-designed for each missionary candidate and yet would be uniform enough that it would cover all the most important areas of life and ministry we considered important. It was divided into three basic areas: Knowing, Being, and Doing. 1) Knowing referred to basic knowledge of the Bible, theology, missiology, etc. 2) Being had to do with one s spiritual life, practice of spiritual disciplines, personal discipleship, and character development. 3) Doing related to one s ability and experience in evangelism, follow-up, disciple-making, and other ministry skills that might be needed in the specific missions assignment for which they were preparing. In terms of knowledge, we were very fortunate to have both Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Moody Evening School both functioning in the Akron area. If a student had not gone to a 140

151 Bible school or Christian college, we were able to direct them to the biblical training they needed without having to move out of the area or quit a job. Once a year, we also offered the Perspectives course, giving candidates an excellent foundation in all dimensions of missions and missiology. For those needing strengthening in the area of personal discipleship and ministry skills, there were a number of options within the church. The best tool we found for basic discipleship training was the Navigators Colossians 2:7 program. The 2:7, as it is called, combines intensive Bible study, prayer, scripture memory, training in evangelism and personal follow-up, and several other areas of discipleship. It consists of six courses usually covered over two years, using a small group format. Those who took advantage of this training often remarked that this was one of the most important and foundational aspects of their preparation because it helped them in their spiritual development and ministry skills. Although some of the doing objectives were met through the 2:7, the cultural dimension was not always there. Fortunately, we had a vibrant international students ministry that allowed many of our candidates to get involved in cross-cultural ministry without having to leave the area. Opportunities there involved such things as Friday night dinners and discussions, being an English language partner, teaching English as a second language, and simply building friendships and relationships with international students. China was one area where we had not actually sent any missionaries. We had supported national missionaries, house church pastors, and radio outreach to China but had not actually sent anyone into mainland China. And the reason is one that is easily overlooked. By the early 1990s the Church in China was growing rapidly and at an unbelievable pace. When Mao Zedong had taken over in 141

152 1949, he kicked out all of the Western missionaries and closed all of the missions-related churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, book shops, and printing presses. Reflecting on this, one of my seminary professors who had been a missionary to China remarked, Poor God. All He had left was the Holy Spirit. Most China experts estimate the number of Christians at that time at about one million. When China began to open up to the Western world in the late 1980s, many were astounded to find that the Church had grown tremendously during the previous 30 to 40 years. Conservative estimates put the number of believers at 40 million. What many did not notice was that almost all of that growth came in the eastern third of the country, where the majority of the one billion plus Chinese lived. In the other two-thirds of the country, however, it was a different story. In both central and western China, there were many different and distinct people groups, often with beliefs and cultures much different than the Chinese to the east. One such group was the Hui people. Numbering over 11 million, they are actually Muslims and trace their roots to the Muslim traders who came to China on the Silk Road more than 1,000 years ago. Known for wearing a white skullcap and following most of the classical traditions of Islam, they are found throughout the country, although the greatest concentration of them is found in the central and western regions. Responding to our interest, a missionary we had supported referred us to another missionary who was working among the Hui in northwest China. After contacting him and getting a favorable response, we decided to try to visit him and see what opportunities might present themselves. In 1996, I finally traveled to China with Dave Deshon and Todd McKenney. After meeting with our missionary, Mike, in Hong Kong, we flew to Langzho to meet with John, the missionary working with the Hui at that time. It was a very strategic city 142

153 because it had a minorities university where many Hui and other students attended. We also saw Uighurs, Zhuang, and Tibetans while we were there. Because the Hui are Muslim, they do not eat pork, and many of the restaurants in that area are run by them and proudly proclaim they are pork-free! They are famous for their noodle shops. What is intriguing about them is that although they are Muslims, they do not generally know the Koran very well and usually follow basic Islamic traditions. This presents a unique challenge to those who want to work among them. What finally convinced us of the need to seriously consider sending a couple, or even a team, as missionaries to the Hui, was the simple fact that there were more than 10 million of them and yet no known church among them. In fact, there were very few known believers among them anywhere. At the time, there was a young couple, Logan and Heather Shellenberger, praying about the possibility of going to China as missionaries. Logan had gone there for short-term missionary service back in 1991, and they were looking at the possibility of serving with OMF (Overseas Missionary Fellowship), formally known as China Inland Mission. Our next step was to meet with a representative of OMF face-to-face and see if they would be willing to partner with us in sending the Shellenbergers to China with the specific assignment of working among the Hui people. As it so happened, the national ACMC missions conference was being held at Wheaton College that year, and OMF was going to send some of its key leaders. I went to that conference and took Dave DeShon with me. Frankly, I was a little cautious about meeting with representatives of a mission agency to make this proposal because, in the past, most of them had not shown a great deal of interest in working with local churches in the area of choosing assignments for their missionaries. Early in my career, more than one veteran missions pastor told me the attitude 143

154 of many agencies toward the local church could be summed up as, Pray, pay, and get out of the way. Fortunately, the experience we had with OMF in Wheaton was just the opposite. During the conference, Dave and I met with two OMF representatives in a little restaurant in downtown Wheaton. As we laid out our vision for reaching the Hui, including the research we had done, they were very positive about our proposal and enthusiastic about working with us. They even mentioned they had been looking for a church open and interested in partnering with them to reach out to the Muslim minority groups in China. They were impressed that we had not only studied the subject thoroughly, but had also visited the region and talked to others who were involved in the work there. To say the least, we were both relieved and encouraged, and came back to The Chapel with what we believed was a green light from the Lord. To our delight, the Shellenbergers became formal candidates with OMF, were approved for support by the missions committee, and went through some additional pre-field training in crosscultural ministry. Once their support was raised, they were sent out by The Chapel as missionaries to China first going to Taiwan in 1997 for three years of language training. After a brief, six-month transition time back in the States, they moved to mainland China in Our project of seeking to reach the Hui people of China was just beginning. Another reality that became increasing evident to us as we went through the 1990s was that the task of evangelizing the remaining unreached people groups in the world was far too large for even the best efforts of the North American Church. Even if all U.S.-based missionaries serving everywhere in the world were re-deployed to the least reached areas of the world, there would not 144

155 be nearly enough laborers to do the job. As we were reminded in Perspectives, God gave the Great Commission to the whole Church, not just the Western Church. Throughout the world, countries that had once been receiving countries began to become sending countries. Nations such as Nigeria, Brazil, South Korea, Philippines, and Ukraine were among the many that were beginning to send significant numbers of missionaries out. To addresses this challenge, the Lord gave us many opportunities to use the resources He provided us through the generosity of The Chapel congregation. We continued to find unique and strategic ways to support national pastors and missionaries in their own region. Bruce Britten introduced us to the Evangelical Missionary Society (EMS) of Nigeria. EMS is a completely indigenous missionary organization that itself was spawned by an evangelical association of churches called the Evangelical Churches of West Africa (ECWA). With Bruce s strong recommendation, we began supporting 10 church planters sent out to several African countries by this organization. We also began supporting key national workers in the country of China. Through ACMC I had met Dr. Jonathan Chao, founder and president of China Ministries International (CMI). Dr. Chao was a true Chinese scholar and strong evangelical leader. He originally based his organization in Hong Kong, but later, after Hong Kong came under the control of mainland China, he moved the offices to Taiwan, where all their records about underground churches and pastors would be kept safe from the prying eyes of China s communist government. Through his influence and great reputation, we began supporting 10 house church leaders in mainland China. We also gave support to some key CMI leaders like James Shao and Ronald Yu who would travel into China and hold secret training sessions with the pastors and leaders of the underground church. 145

156 A ministry in India that we grew to appreciate and partner with was Mission India, led by Dr. John DeVries. After leading the ministry of The World Home Bible League for 10 years, he began Bibles For India (now called Mission India) after discovering a massive need for evangelism, church planting, and literature in that nation. When we first met them, The Bible League had just begun to focus upon an unreached people group called the Yanadi people. We gave a gift of $10,000 to give a huge boost to the ministry among that people group. Later they developed a program of supporting an Indian church planter by providing all of the Bibles and Christian literature he would need, along with living expenses for three years. After three years, he would have to be supported by the church he had planted. The Chapel agreed to adopt one church planter at a cost of about $5,000 a year. Mission India would then send us regular reports about how our church planter was doing and the progress he was making. Also in India, we greatly increased our support for the Indian National Inland Mission (INIM), founded by Paul Pillai. Two of Paul s sons, Ajay and Sujay, are directly involved in the ministry, with Ajay representing the work here in the United States and Sujay helping lead the work directly in India. Because of our commitment to supporting nationals in critical areas, we wanted to encourage the church planting ministry of INIM by supporting 15 of their national church planters. At that time, they were branching out by sending missionaries not only to India but also to several other countries bordering the Indian sub-continent. Their overhead was so low and their ministry so fruitful that it was an easy decision to increase their support. 146

157 Finally, also in India, we added an additional partner to our regular budgeted giving: Gospel For Asia founded by Indian Christian K.P. Yohannan. In his book The Coming Revolution in World Missions, he stressed the many advantages of national workers, like the fact that they already know the language, are part of the culture there, and require much less funding to support themselves. Through GFA we began supporting 10 church planters in various parts of India. We also funded several of their film teams (using the JESUS Film ) and provided literature as well. Our work and cooperation with Partners International continued to expand we agreed to sponsor 10 Vietnamese house church planters throughout Vietnam. Partners had key leaders who would travel to Vietnam from time to time to provide both training and encouragement to these house church planters and pastors. We learned quickly that through Partners good work, we could invest in some of the most closed and difficult areas of the world simply because they had contacts with indigenous national workers who were not widely known in the West. Several years later, when the giant tsunami hit Indonesia, Partners was invaluable in connecting us with local, national Indonesian ministries to bring relief to the most devastated areas of Sumatra. 147

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159 CHAPTER 12 Eternal Impact There came a time by the late- 90s that we were supporting more national missionaries than U.S.-based missionaries. When you consider how little the cost is to support a national missionary with the advantages they have in already being part of the culture and knowing the language, we viewed it as a great investment and very good stewardship of The Chapel s missions budget. We will always value sending our own sons and daughters to the mission field, but what a great opportunity to partner with the worldwide Body of Christ and support both as we co-labor together to help fulfill the Great Commission. Another strategy we utilized to reached the lost was literature. Before the world was networked with cell phones and computers, literature played a huge role in getting the Gospel to unreached people groups. As mentioned earlier, over the years we worked closely with several outstanding agencies including Bible Literature International (led by Jim Falkenberg), the International Bible Society, OM Literature, Gideons, and several other ministries and Bible societies. Through these dedicated partners, we were able to provide funding to get Bibles and Christian literature into diverse places like Burma, Indonesia, China, Iraq, Cuba, and many places in 149

160 the Muslim world. Although there are many creative electronic platforms to transmit the Gospel today, there is still a need for quality literature in many areas of the world. (It is my personal hope that churches and Christians in the West especially will continue to have a vision for this ministry and fund it generously.) In later years, we have been able to get not only the Bible but the JESUS Film and other videos into closed countries through the technology of CDs, miniature jump drives, and even phone SIM cards. In 1992, The Chapel embarked on a new building campaign called Moving Ahead. This project involved completely remodeling the old Christian Science church we had purchased years before. The renovation included a new auditorium with room for audiences of up to 400, a tiered classroom for seminars called the learning lab, a new and well-equipped dining room, and two floors of new classrooms. As we had done in previous building programs, we chose three overseas building projects to help fund by tithing from the money we raised for our own. In general, when we gave gifts in this area, especially large gifts, it was restricted to the funding of training centers, Bible schools, and seminaries. The three projects we chose were all centered on training nationals in strategic locations. 1. A training center for African leaders in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, sponsored by SIM the Evangelical Teacher College/International Evangelical Church (ETC/IEC). 2. A training center and auditorium for the headquarters of Operation Mobilization in Hyderabad, India. 3. A seminary to train Indonesian pastors and church planters in Surabaya, Indonesia. This was a joint project of the ETSI (Evangelical Theological Seminary of Indonesia) and Partners International. 150

161 Each of these projects had a strategic purpose and specific focus that fit well into our vision of helping the Gospel reach the least reached peoples of the world. Ethiopia had been under a communist dictatorship for nearly 17 years and had experienced very little religious freedom. When it was finally overthrown, a new government friendlier toward the West and Christianity took power. The Chapel had been working in Africa with SIM for many years. The churches they had planted had eventually progressed to where they were under indigenous leadership and formed an association of churches called ECWA (Evangelical Church of West Africa). In the same way, SIM wanted to see more churches planted in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa and eventually come under indigenous national leadership. The training center we helped build would serve not only as a Bible school to train future African pastors and church planters, but also as an international church, ministering to both African and Western believers in the Addis Ababa region. We were very excited to discover that the center was going to be in the heart of the capital of Ethiopia. The second project was the new training center that Operation Mobilization was building in Hyderabad, India. OM had moved their Indian headquarters from Bombay to Hyderabad a few years earlier and now wanted to expand from simply having offices and a literature facility to having an actual training center. India was quickly becoming the largest field for OM workers in the world, with the challenge of sharing hope with nearly one billion people. Under the leadership of Joseph D Souza and Alfy Franks, the work begun by George Verwer and others in the early 1960s was beginning to blossom. Hundreds of young Indian people working in teams were taking an Indian version of the JESUS Film along with Bibles and Christian literature to hundreds of villages throughout the country. This training center would be a multi-purpose building in which not only young OM staffers but also pastors and workers from all over India would get training. In the future, it was our hope 151

162 that we could send some of our pastors to this center to help train many of the village pastors who had no formal training but who could profit greatly. The third project we adopted was the brainchild of Dr. Chris Marantika, an Indonesian Christian leader who had graduated from Dallas Seminary and returned to Indonesia in the 1970s. He came back to his country with a vision for planting churches throughout this vast country of over 200 million people, 90% of whom are Muslim. He called his vision Indonesia 1:1:1 to see at least one church planted in each village in one generation. After he founded the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Indonesia (ETSI), he began working with Partners International. The Partners organization was the one that introduced us to the work of Dr. Marantika and ETSI. In 1993, I suggested to our Director of Ministries, Craig Williford, that we travel to Asia and Africa and see firsthand how the projects we supported through the previous building campaign were doing. In putting together the itinerary for the trip, I realized it would be a brutal schedule. But we believed it would be worth it since we would have the opportunity to evaluate the ministries we were investing in and actually meet many of the leaders. Craig even invited a member of our board, John Keim, to travel with us so that another church leader could see what impact The Chapel was making for eternity. Our first stop was Indonesia, via San Francisco and Singapore. We then caught a domestic flight to Yogyakarta, where the main campus of the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Indonesia was located. It was amazing to finally see the seminary and the work we had heard so much about. The ETSI main campus had more than 300 students studying to be church planters and then pastors. In fact, they were not allowed to graduate until they had planted a new church with at least 30 baptized believers. There were also about

163 mini-seminaries located in smaller communities throughout Indonesia. In light of the smaller population base, these graduates were only required to plant a church with at least 15 baptized believers! Imagine if that were a requirement in the United States! When we were approached for help, ETSI was hoping to build a mini-seminary in Surabaya, the second largest city. Surabaya was so strategic because it is right next to the island of Madura, home to an unreached Muslim people group, the Madurese. Although Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world, most of the people there have generally followed a fairly moderate form of Islam. In areas away from the capital, Jakarta, however, there has been persecution and opposition of Christians in many places. One such place was the island of Madura. The Madurese were known as radically committed Muslims resistant to the Gospel and had a reputation of being very hostile, even to the point of violence. Very little work had been done among the Madurese, and it would be nearly impossible for an American or Westerner to move there and begin a ministry. The obvious solution was to train Indonesians, especially if they were from the region around Surabaya, to go to the island and reach out to the people there. We thought this would be an outstanding investment, in partnership with Partners, to see this seminary started to help train Indonesian church planters who might reach these highly resistant people. At the time of our visit, students in Surabaya were meeting in rented facilities no land had been purchased or building begun. There was a lot of hostility and resistance to any kind of Christian school or training center. Regardless, our purpose was to meet with some of the leaders and try to understand their vision and ministry better. Both Craig and I had the opportunity to speak at the main campus and at a church nearby. Without fail, every student we met had a passion to see his country reached for Christ. They knew 153

164 they were part of something far bigger than themselves. Because they already knew the language and culture of the people they were seeking to reach, each student was far ahead of any American we might send to attempt the same ministry. We left Indonesia both encouraged and confident that this was a good investment of The Chapel s resources. From Indonesia, we flew to Bombay (now Mumbai), but not before some serious discussions about the advisability of the trip. When we arrived in Singapore, we received news that there had been a huge terrorist attack in Bombay. Reports said over 200 dead and some 1,000 wounded in multiple bomb explosions in the city. We called the OM leaders in India to get their counsel. As bad as it was, the attack was over and the authorities were dealing with the aftermath. The OM leaders felt it was safe to proceed and had booked us at a different hotel. We made it safely to Bombay and then were on to the new OM headquarters for India, in Hyderabad. Although not as well-known as some other famous Indian cities, the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad had a population of several million people and had a fairly large Muslim population. This new headquarters complex would function as both the main offices and training base for the work of OM in India. It would also have a huge book warehouse to facilitate the shipping of books throughout the Indian sub-continent. In the future, it would contain training facilities to train pastors and future OM leaders, along with facilities to train future nurses and other medical workers. During our brief visit, I had the opportunity to share in the new auditorium. It was a privilege to be introduced by Alfy Franks, and we were touched by his remarks when he told the gathering we were from The Chapel, the church that saved my life. It was tremendously encouraging to see the entire auditorium filled with OM India workers who were committed to sharing the Good News with the over one billion people of the country. 154

165 OM had been involved in ministry in India since about 1963, and there were literally thousands of Indian nationals working with OM by that time. Although the formal focus upon the Dalit people was still several years away, they were already focusing upon the poorest of the poor in many villages and slums throughout the country. Several needy groups of people had been identified along with a nationwide campaign Project Light designed to bring hope and help to nearly 100 million people in India. During this era, The Chapel learned of one of these groups, the Lingayat people, and helped sponsor some people who were working among them. We met with Joseph D Souza, the dynamic young Executive Director of OM India. He graciously arranged for us to meet with his entire leadership team to give us an overview of the multi-faceted ministry they have throughout India. We were really impressed that most of them had been serving with OM for 10 years or longer. They were a very gifted and experienced leadership team. OM s work in India included door-to-door literature distribution, showing an India version of the JESUS Film, and a variety of practical ministries to the poor and sick. Their plans to grow were expansive, and they invited 500 to 700 young people each year to receive training and serve on a summer assignment somewhere in India. Many of these young people would eventually choose to serve full-time with OM as its ministries continued to expand in the years ahead. From India we flew to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to see the training center and church we were helping to fund. Ethiopia is the only African country that was never colonized. The historic Ethiopian Coptic Church claims a spiritual heritage that goes back to the time when the Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon. We were met at the airport by a SIM missionary and an Ethiopian national. Long-time Chapel missionaries Larry and Sandi Dick were serving in Addis Ababa at that time. Before Ethiopia, the Dicks had served in Nigeria, Liberia, and Kenya. They were veteran 155

166 missionaries with a wealth of experience and wisdom to share with us and the younger missionaries who came to serve there. We were able to stay at their home, and they gave us an overview of the project. Larry, who was serving as the administrative director of the SIM work there, had a great grasp on all the details. This project was a dual-purpose facility that would serve as an Evangelical Teacher College (ETC) and an International Evangelical Church (IEC). SIM had worked in East Africa for many years, and, at that time, there were approximately 3,000 indigenous, national local churches with ties to SIM. Because of the influence of Sudan and other Muslim countries nearby, Ethiopia was now nearly 40% Muslim and in great need of trained pastors and evangelists. The ETC would provide that training as well as host the IEC, which was meeting at SIM s offices. It was encouraging to see that about 75% of those attending the church were Ethiopian or African. The location was particularly strategic because it was being built directly across the street from the headquarters of the Organization for African Union (OAU). Many African leaders went there for meetings and consultations, so the opportunity to have influence on these leaders was an additional motivation to build the center. We were particularly excited about this project because one of the most critical problems facing the continent of Africa, both in the political world and the spiritual world, was the lack of leadership. There is an old saying, repeated by missionaries and Africans alike, that Christianity in Africa is a mile wide and an inch deep. Too often, the ministries that developed in African countries were planned and carried out by Western missionaries. The price of that philosophy was an unhealthy dependence on Western manpower and finances. Fortunately, SIM had been one the early adopters of developing African leadership in the countries where they worked. The Kale Heywet Church was founded by SIM missionaries in the 1920s and is now a truly indigenous church of several thousand 156

167 congregations throughout Ethiopia. The Center was such a critical factor in training the African leaders of the future that we wanted to stay in touch and maintain our relationship with it. This pattern was also followed in the 1950s in Nigeria, when a daughter denomination of SIM was formed, the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA). The growth since then has been nothing less than astounding, with more than 5,000 congregations and three million members. Looking back, these projects epitomized the philosophy of missions that we had been developing at The Chapel for several years: partnership. This enabled us to reach people and people groups that would very difficult, if not impossible, to reach with American missionaries. Secondly, it enabled us to invest our resources in training national pastors and missionaries who would carry on the work well into the next century. Thirdly, it was better stewardship of our financial resources because the primary ministries of evangelism, church planting, and pastoring would be done by nationals working in their own region. Valuable lessons learned indeed. 157

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169 CHAPTER 13 Building Partnerships In the last half of the 1990s, we continued to find creative ways to support ministries that were focusing upon the least reached peoples in the world. In 1995, we assisted Minh Dang s ministry by providing support for Vietnamese pastors serving in underground churches. We also funded literature and video projects being used to reach Muslims in Pakistan, Turkey, and several countries in North Africa. The Bible Correspondence Course (BCC), managed by one of our partner agencies in Turkey, was so effective that we put it on our regular missions budget with a $4,000 gift each year. Our commitment to China also continued as we developed a partnership with Trans World Radio (TWR) to ship packages into China containing a shortwave radio, a Chinese Study Bible, and a study guide. These kits were designed for village pastors of small underground churches who had no other way of receiving training. It also allowed them to gather a small group of believers together to listen to solid Bible teaching on the radio. Our gift of $15,000 enabled TWR to distribute 2,000 kits in China. We also gave a significant gift to The Bible League to assist them in providing thousands of Bibles and church planter training to rural churches in China. 159

170 We maintained a strong relationship with the OM Ship ministry because of the incredible impact they had everywhere they went in the world. Although OM currently only operates one major ship, the Logos Hope, they have utilized four different ships since the early 1970s. Their record of touching the lives of people throughout the world has been an encouragement to us from the very beginning. Their statistics at the time of this writing show that since 1970, more than 43 million people have visited the ships during more than 1,400 port visits in 151 nations. People from all walks of life, from presidents and prime ministers to street children and the homeless, have been welcomed on board! With this in mind, from the 1990s through 2013, The Chapel gave an annual gift to assist with fuel costs for the ship. We also began to sponsor two young people from the developing world to serve on the ship ministry for a two-year term. This allowed some young people who would not have been able to afford the cost of serving to be able to do so. From time to time, we also gave special gifts when the ship ministry was in need of Bibles or evangelistic books as they were heading into a particularly strategic region or country. Two of our young people, Josiah Ley and Cassie Moore, were missionary kids with a wealth of cross-cultural experience from living overseas with their families and were able to serve on one of the OM ships. Several years ago, we created a program called One Year to encourage young people to take a year off between high school and college to serve the Lord somewhere on the mission field. In Europe, there is a similar concept referred to as Gap Year often promoted among secular organizations. This program of training and experiencing a variety of cultures and nations of the world has been life-changing for those who served, and some are now even serving the Lord in full-time ministry as missionaries. 160

171 INDIA The enormity of the task in India is difficult to grasp. As of this writing, there are nearly 1.3 billion people living in some 2,000 different people groups. Another major project was presented by Paul Pillai the India National Inland Mission. That same year, they launched a massive evangelistic effort to reach the northern state of Punjab, near the Pakistani border. We were excited to give a gift of $35,000 to this project. Through our partnership with TWR, we also gave $5,000 to assist them in installing a new radio transmitter for broadcasting the Gospel into India. We funded other projects in India during this era simply because, with 1.3 billion people at the time, it had the most unreached people groups in the world. With these kinds of opportunities and challenges, it was clear to us that we needed to have trusted partners in key areas of the world in order to utilize our resources effectively and be good stewards of the funds entrusted to us by the congregation. A great example of this kind of partnership was the relationship we developed with Operation Mobilization as they sought to reach India. One of the largest populations in the world is actually a conglomeration of many different Indian people groups. Called the Dalits, their number exceeds 250 million, and they are part of the caste historically called the untouchables. They are viewed as sub-human by the upper ruling castes in India and are discriminated against in many ways. They are not allowed into any Hindu temple, not only because they are untouchable, but also because of a radical teaching that says the Dalits were not created by God. It was this great need and opportunity that The Chapel began to get involved with as we transitioned into the new century. In January of 1999, Graham Staines, an Australian missionary serving in India, was murdered by Hindu radicals. After surrounding and trapping Graham and his two sons in their 161

172 car, the radicals poured gasoline on the car and set it on fire. This horrendous act of violence sent shock waves through not only the missions world but within India itself. Soon after this tragedy, Indian Christian leaders from around the country met to share their common concerns and discover ways they could work together better. To this end, they created the AICC (All India Christian Council) a coalition of many Christian organizations to help Christian leaders speak as one voice to assist those who are persecuted and advocate for freedom of religion and human rights for all. About that time, I heard Joseph D Souza, the leader of Operation Mobilization in India, speak at a conference about a dramatic change occurring in India and the tremendous opportunity it provided for the Gospel. In November 2001, leaders of the various Dalit communities planned a huge rally and protest in New Delhi. They expected an attendance of as many as one million. Huge numbers of people would be converging on New Delhi by bus and train. Security was very tight the event had already been rescheduled at least once because of threats of violence by radical groups. It was so volatile that, for security s sake, Christians leaders such as Joseph D Souza and K.P. Yohannan had to change their itinerary and take extra security measures. It had also been communicated that a large number of Dalit people were going to protest the caste system. Because of their desire to free themselves from the caste system, representatives of the Dalit people throughout India came to see the leaders of the AICC. In the past, they had approached leaders of the Catholic Church in India and questioned if Dalits converted to Christianity, would the Catholic Church welcome them into their churches and worship services? At that time the answer had been no. The leaders of the AICC made it clear that they would welcome Dalit people into their churches, and they also went a step further. They asked the Dalit leaders, What can we do for Dalit 162

173 people throughout India? The response was clear. For many of them, it was too late to make the kind of massive changes that would truly improve the problems of India s Dalit populations. What they wanted most, however, was for their children to be educated. Many of the approximately 250 million Dalit children were not allowed to go to the government s schools and were illiterate, with no hope of formal education. As a result of this request, the leaders of the AICC committed to helping start 1,000 schools for Dalit children. Operation Mobilization alone committed itself to starting 100. Although a daunting goal, OM worked with partner churches and organizations to raise the funds to make these schools a reality. Ten years later, all of the partner organizations rejoiced to learn that OM had started more than 100 of these schools throughout the country of India. By 2003, The Chapel began raising funds to help start these new schools as well. It was an honor and a privilege for The Chapel, through the generosity of the congregation and individual families, to provide funding towars 10 of those schools. One of the blessings that emerged out of the school (Dalit Education Center) movement was that it led to both an educational and spiritual transformation in many villages. In addition to teachers, these schools would sometimes have a health worker assigned to the area in which the school was located. In time, the families who received much needed assistance from the schools and health workers became stronger and healthier. In many areas that a school was started, people became more open spiritually as well. Also, during the period from 2002 through 2016, more than 4,000 churches were established among the Dalit people by the Good Shepherd Church. This church continues to serve the poor and assist them physically, emotionally and spiritually. Because of the tremendous growth among both the schools and the churches, The Chapel has continued to be involved in 163

174 teacher and pastoral training. In 2006, we were asked by Dr. D Souza to focus our ministries upon the state of Rajasthan. In that state alone, there was a population of over 76 million people. Because of persecution by radicals, however, it was difficult for us to provide assistance to the many people there in need of help. Eventually, OM became involved in not only the school project but also in the emancipation of the Dalits. As The Chapel became more involved in India, we were able to minister through many holistic ministries such as health care, women s rights, micro-enterprise, and the anti-trafficking movement. In 2006, we took a survey trip with key leaders from The Chapel who had expertise in critical areas we wanted to develop. We desired to learn exactly what the needs were related to the Dalit people and to explore how we, as a church, might address those needs. One of those leaders was a retired school administrator who had a vision and passion for helping with both the development of the schools and teacher training. After he and his wife had made several trips to India, he became a consultant for the educator training with OM India. He and his wife gave advice to make sure that the training that the teachers and administrators working in the Dalit schools received was of the highest quality. He gradually became the liaison for all of our partnership work in India. Also, because of our growing partnership with OM, we began to utilize other professionals to consult with OM India in their specific ministries. The opportunity to influence the training of teachers, community health workers, and others, provided many professionals at The Chapel with a chance to use their expertise and gifts. One young woman was a special education teacher and has been invaluable in recent years giving input to the training of teachers from Dalit Education Centers (DECs) to better teach and work with students with special educational needs. Another woman, a nurse with childbirth experience gave excellent input 164

175 concerning the training of community health workers who would be working in the many clinics developing alongside the schools. She had served as a doula, or mid-wife, in the United States and was even able to use those skills to improve the training of the community health workers in safe practices concerning childbirth. As the number of Good Shepherd churches grew, the need for pastoral training grew accordingly. For some time, one of our former pastors has been an excellent resource person with the Good Shepherd Church. He has provided critically needed input and guidance for the training of pastors of many churches throughout the country. At this time, however, there was a critical need to provide biblical training to the hundreds who had no formal training in ministry. Beginning in 2008, we began working with OM leaders in India to set up training modules for these village pastors. Since that time, we have utilized a number of our pastors to give additional input concerning the training of these pastors as well. Before the persecution intensified, the Good Shepherd Church was able to do training in or near the state of Rajasthan where almost all of our efforts have been centered. More recently, they have held the training at OM headquarters in Secunderabad, requiring village pastors to travel long distances by bus and train. Although government interference and opposition has grown worse and outright persecution has been on the increase, the growth of the Church in India has been astounding. There are thousands of new churches starting each year and a growing movement of people seeking to move away from radical ideology. Because the Indian government has made it very difficult for people and organizations outside of India to be involved in training or financing projects, almost everything OM is doing is now under the authority of what they have called the Good Shepherd Church of India. Our hope is to continue to work and partner with them as much as possible as we see the amazing things God is doing. 165

176 MOZAMBIQUE Moving into the 21st century, the other major partnership The Chapel developed was focused upon the country of Mozambique. Through ACMC, I learned that the missions pastor of Wooddale Church of Minnesota, Tom Correl, had developed a deep burden concerning the problem of AIDS in Africa. To address this need, he created an alliance of churches Churches Together to find ways we could partner with relief and development agencies. In 2004, we all gathered in Orlando to meet and discuss some options of how this partnership might work to address the AIDS crisis. In addition to a number of churches, there were also several agencies, including World Vision, World Relief, and some smaller organizations. Pastor Jay Halley and I represented The Chapel at this meeting and spent time getting to know both the churches and agencies represented there. We were impressed by the passion every entity had for this global problem, but were concerned that there was not enough emphasis upon evangelism in many of their approaches. There were more meetings over the next several months, and we found ourselves leaning strongly toward establishing a partnership with World Relief. WR was begun as the relief and development arm of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). They are strongly rooted in the local church and always seek to work through local churches when engaged in ministries of either relief or development. As our talks became more formal, World Relief wanted us to take responsibility for a specific area of the world and to partner with them in developing several holistic ministries that could significantly impact the people of that area. After much discussion, World Relief asked The Chapel and three other churches to focus our attention and future ministries upon an area of southeast Mozambique including the villages of Chaimite and Koka Misava. 166

177 To explore our options and get to know the World Relief work there, we sent an exploratory team in May of Pastor Jay Halley and John Rasnick from our board led that team and were able to personally see the various ministries World Relief was involved with in the region. They were also able to meet some of the key WR staff we would be working alongside if this proposed ministry were to develop into a major focus of our missions efforts. Similar to what we did in India, we began to send teams regularly to utilize their skills and cast a vision for what we were doing in Mozambique. The first short-term team went in November 2006 and focused on Bible teaching. Eventually, we began assisting the believers there with AIDS education, children s education, women s Bible studies, and pastoral training. Medical teams went in September 2007, meeting the practical health needs of many in the villages we had adopted. Several micro-enterprise projects were initiated in 2008 and 2009, seeking to help the people there develop a local sustainable economy. Additional teams went to help with developing discipleship ministries. By 2010, we were developing discipleship ministries using Bible studies we called Spiritual Transformation Groups. These groups averaged about four to 11 people with at least one group per village. One of the couples that really caught that vision and pursued it with passion was Mike and Shelise Boso. Beginning in 2009, the Bosos made several trips to the villages we were working with. By 2011, Jay Halley asked the Bosos to become the recognized coordinators of our ministries there. As they built closer and stronger relationships with the World Relief staff and the Mozambique leadership, they began to plan more extended stays in the country to help assess the progress we were making and evaluate how our partnership was going. In 2012, they spent nearly three months in Mozambique learning the nuts and bolts of the ministry there and how the partners in this endeavor could best work together. 167

178 Although the AIDS issue was the problem that drew us to Africa, there was also an immediate need in the villages we were now focusing upon: water. Clean water was scarce, and retrieving it from nearby rivers was not only a long walk, but also a dangerous task. The villagers told us that in a recent year, many young women trying to fill their water jars in the river had been attacked and killed by crocodiles. In response, we began working with World Relief to build a pipeline that could pump water from a nearby river to one of the villages. By 2009, we had water stations in both Chaimite and Koka Misava. When the pipelines were finished, along with holding tanks and water purification systems, the impact was immediate and profound! No longer were women walking long distances and risking their lives to get water from these very dangerous rivers. Water was also the central component in helping some of these villages become more economically self-sufficient. Up to this time, the people in the region could barely hope to raise enough food to feed themselves. With a pipeline from the river and a simple irrigation system, their entire world was about to change. The task of building the pipeline and preparing the land for growing crops was given to the people of the village of Chaimite. The Chapel and World Relief supplied the materials. Although devastating floods set the project back, once the system was up and running in 2011, the agricultural project became a reality. When I visited one of the projects in 2012, it was amazing to see the crops being harvested in abundance. Beyond feeding their families, the people of Chaimite were now preparing to sell them at nearby marketplaces and even to larger populations in a city a few hours away. This type of holistic ministry has been both practical and thoroughly biblical. Jesus often reached out to people with two hands. One hand represented the Gospel, the other meeting physical needs. 168

179 Over the last several years, there have been many changes to the ministry in Mozambique. Several of our national leaders have transitioned into ministries independent of World Relief they are now working more independently and have developed their own relationships with the people we are seeking to serve. New ministries and economic endeavors are being developed as the needs or opportunities arise. Although the last chapter has not been written, there is no doubt that a strong foundation has been laid there, knowing there is much more to do in order to see the Church grow and flourish. SNAPSHOTS OF THE MUSLIM WORLD One of the most critical facets of missions strategy as The Chapel moved into a new century was finding creative ways to penetrate what appeared to be closed countries with the Gospel. For several years in the 1990s, they were referred to as RANs (Restrictive Access Nations). Several missions leaders, especially those whose agencies specialized in reaching Muslims, were unsatisfied with that negative-sounding acronym. In its place, they suggested they be called CANs (Creative Access Nations). The description caught on, and both churches and agencies around the world sharpened their skills in finding creative ways to place people in these countries for the purpose of sharing the Gospel. Although I cannot use their names, there have been many missionaries over the last 20 years that The Chapel has deployed or supported in these Creative Access Nations. Although Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution in 1979 caused much turmoil, it actually provided numerous opportunities for ministry. In fact, Patrick Johnstone, author of Operation World, said that the greatest Muslim evangelist of the 20th century was Khomeini because he drove so many Muslims away from Islam! One such couple we supported had graduated Dallas Seminary and was seeking to reach Iranians with the Gospel. Because so many Iranians fled after the revolution, they found 169

180 themselves in countries nearby that were, by comparison, more accessible. This couple moved to Tajikistan and had a remarkable ministry among Iranian refugees and Iranian-related people. Later, when the Afghan war heated up in the region, they moved to Turkey where they ministered to the large Iranian immigrant population there. During that same time, a member of our congregation who owned his own business came to me one day and asked if I would like to place a missionary inside Saudi Arabia. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I sputtered, Are you kidding? Absolutely! His company did a fair amount of international business and was opening an office in one of the major Saudi cities. He needed an office manager, but was very flexible in terms of the skills someone might need to fill that position. In other words, he was telling me to find a missionary who could function in that roll, and he d take care of the rest. Fortunately, I knew of three or four missions agencies that specialized in working in Muslim countries. I contacted each of them, and, by God s grace, we were able to place a missionary in the heart of Saudi Arabia. Although this company s contract with the Saudi government was only for a few years, we were deeply grateful that God used this man and his company to open a door in a very closed country. What a great opportunity to go to the very heart of Islam and provide a quiet witness to the hope of the Gospel. One of the harshest and least known Muslim countries is the Maldives, off the southwest coast of India. It is a totalitarian Islamic state in which it is practically illegal to be an openly professing Christian. Because it is an island nation with many maritime issues and environmental threats, it took a special kind of person to be able to work there. Again, by God s grace, we met a missionary candidate who had a doctorate in marine biology and who was able to get a job working on a research project in the Maldivian Islands. In a place we could never send a regular missionary and 170

181 where there were no national Christians to network with, God allowed us to send someone who could be a strong and creative witness for Christ. It was amazing to see God work out the details of this opportunity and open a door that most assumed was closed. Although he had to remain undercover the entire time he was there, he was a powerful witness and could share his faith with local nationals in private. Perhaps the most unique opportunity we have had in the Muslim world in the last 20 years concerns the area of northern Iraq, Kurdistan. Few people know that the Kurds are thought to be the descendants of the ancient Medes mentioned in the book of Daniel. There are more than 20 million of them living in an area that touches five different countries and most of them are without any kind of Christian witness. In fact, there is an old Kurdish saying: The Kurds have no friends but the mountains. History will now show, however, that they have at least one friend. Until the 90s, about the only way we could support outreach to the Kurds was through literature. Through the International Bible Society, we gave a gift of $2,500 to provide New Testaments. During the first Gulf War in 1991, there was a man in the Iraqi army we will call Yousif. He feared for his life as the U.S Army and Air Force quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army that had invaded Kuwait. That fear led him to question his own Islamic faith and his eternal destiny. By God s grace, one of his relatives had come to Christ and gave him a Bible to read. As a result, Yousif trusted Christ and almost immediately began to put his faith into practice. Saddam Hussein, the brutal dictator of Iraq, had used illegal chemical weapons to gas the Kurds in northern Iraq. As a result of this atrocity, 80,000 Kurds had been killed. Yousif had heard about this tragedy and wanted to show the love of Christ by helping them. He began making regular trips north to provide food, clothing, and medicine to those in need. Before long, however, he received 171

182 an urgent message. A neighbor who had connections inside the government came to Yousif with a warning: Saddam s secret police are coming for you and they re coming tonight. With almost no time to prepare, Yousif loaded up his family and whatever they could cram into his car and headed north to Kurdistan. As he continued to grow in Christ, he began to develop new ministries. Within a matter of years, Yousif started several Christian bookshops, a Christian radio broadcast, and several church plants; and he began working on starting three Christian schools for Kurdish children. Because he had found favor with the government officials in the autonomous Kurdish region, he was able to operate fairly openly in all these endeavors. In one city, the U.S. Army was so appreciative of the positive effects of his ministry through schools they actually assisted him in building one. The Chapel became aware of Yousif s ministry while he was touring the United States with Partners International. Yousif spoke at The Chapel and met with our missions committee. As a result of hearing his story and about the growing relationship he had with Partners, we decided to provide partial funding for one of the schools he was building. Later, we helped with several other projects. It was exciting to know that God had provided a way for us to invest in getting the Gospel to an area of the world that would be impossible for most Western missionaries to operate in. An added blessing was that several years later, my wife and I were able to visit Yousif and actually see one of his schools. In 2007, while visiting missionaries in Israel and Jordan, we made arrangements to fly into Irbil, Iraq, the unofficial capital of Kurdistan to meet with Yousif. Our time with him was divided between visiting two schools. One school, in Irbil, was open and conducting classes. The other was still under construction and about two hours away near the Iranian border. It was rewarding to see all these children getting an education from a Christian perspective and being exposed to the Word of God in very creative 172

183 ways. Myra met with a number of teachers for a Q&A session covering a wide range of subjects about improving their teaching for the sake of the students. The under-construction school was almost completed and in final preparations for opening the following year. We were both amazed at the freedom Yousif had to start and expand these ministries and the openness of this area of the country. I asked him about this, and he told me a brief story. As his ministry was growing and expanding, some Muslim leaders were getting quite upset. At that time, he was invited to a dinner party hosted by the acting prime minister of the Kurdistan autonomous region. There, one of the Muslim leaders confronted the prime minister and complained about all the Christian schools and other ministries that Yousif was developing. The prime minister just looked at him and said, Well, we said we were going to be a democracy, didn t we? Looking back, we are so thankful at The Chapel that we could take advantage of this historic and unique opportunity to influence one of the most unreached areas of the world. It was just another example of the Lord using the tragedy of war and the outrageous actions of a tyrant to open the doors of a seemingly closed country. Sometimes the opportunity to penetrate a totally unreached area comes not from war or political changes but from the Lord using natural disasters for His higher purposes. One of the most dramatic ones in history occurred on December 26, 2004, when one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded caused a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people in 14 countries. The greatest impact was on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, and especially the northern part. This region was known as Mecca s Front Porch because of the extremely radical form of Islam that was practiced there. Missions work was forbidden even Christian Indonesians had difficulty having any kind of witness. 173

184 Because of the devastation caused by the tsunami, the Indonesian government opened the doors to Western relief organizations, many of whom were Christian, to come into the country and provide assistance. It is remarkable that very few Muslim countries or organizations came to help, while churches and missions agencies from America and Western Europe were well represented. Among the many agencies sending help were three that we work with closely: Samaritan s Purse, World Relief, and Strategic World Impact (SWI). Kevin Turner, the Executive Director of SWI, was part of just one of the amazing stories that came out of this disaster. Just after the tsunami, he called me from the disaster area about noon one day. I said, Kevin it must be almost midnight there. What s going on? Well, he said, right now we are showing the JESUS Film on the outside wall of the local mosque! That s amazing, I said. How can you do that? What does the imam think of you doing this? Kevin replied, You ll have to ask him. But right now he is sitting in the audience watching the JESUS Film! Because of our long-time relationship with Partners International, we were able to link up with an indigenous Indonesian Christian ministry that moved freely in the area hit hardest. The Chapel took special offerings twice for this emergency and our people gave what was possibly the largest offering ever taken at The Chapel: $170,000! Although a handful of Chapel people who had special skills actually went there to help, we thought it was better stewardship to put the funds in the hands of local Indonesian Christians who already knew the culture and the language and could follow up with anyone showing spiritual interest. Ten years later, we were told that in the area where the tsunami hit, there were no known Christians at the time. Now more than 50 worshiping communities exist in that region as a result of the work the evangelical ministries did in the aftermath 174

185 of the disaster! TRANSFORMATION AMONG TRIBALS Whether it was natural disasters, political revolutions, or seismic shifts in culture, we learned to be ready to act in concert with our partner groups to take the Gospel to the least reached peoples of the world. Although the role of the Western missionary was changing and evolving, there was still a need for the pioneer missionary to go where the Good News had never been preached and establish a new work. As much as we would like to see the missionary simply as a facilitator, equipping local Christians to plant churches and do the work of the ministry, there were still places in the world where no missionaries existed and in which there was absolutely no Gospel witness. One such place was on the Western end of the island of New Guinea. Formerly called Irian Jaya, it is now called Papua, or Western Papua. Steve and Carolyn Crockett are missionaries with New Tribes Mission working in a remote region of Papua with a stone-age tribal group, the Moi people. The Crocketts were sent out by a sister-church of ours in Elyria The Church of the Open Door. Having both grown up on the mission field on this very island, the Crocketts were very resilient people. That very resilience was a critical factor in their longevity in working with the Moi people. By the time Myra and I had the opportunity to visit them in 2009, they had already been there 10 years and had made amazing progress. Because the Moi people lived on a mountain in the middle of a vast jungle, there were no roads in. When Steve and his teammate, Rich, first made contact with the Moi, there was not even a flat grassy area where a small missionary plane could land. That being the case, a Swiss helicopter ministry was used to literally drop them into the mountain jungle where the Moi lived. Although I cannot tell the whole story of how the Crocketts ministry developed over that decade, suffice it to say that Steve 175

186 and his teammate and their families had to begin everything from scratch. After making friends with a few Moi people and developing a trusting relationship, they built their own homes, set up their own sanitation and water system, utilized marine batteries for an electrical system, and made provision for the necessary food and how to cook it to feed their families. In a world that was rapidly changing to using satellites, the Internet, and high-tech methods of disseminating the Gospel, the Crocketts were living among a primitive people doing the same kind of ministry missionaries have done for hundreds of years. They had to learn the Moi language word by word, sound by sound. They had to begin a simple system of sharing the Gospel by stories and drama. They began working on a Bible translation, working on a laptop powered by those marine batteries. They set up a medical clinic and dispensary to help with medical needs among the Moi people. As some began accepting the Gospel message and trusting Christ, the Crocketts began regular worship and teaching sessions to help them understand the Bible and grow spiritually. Eventually they were able to put in a primitive airstrip with the help of The Chapel and other supporters. Myra and I were able to fly in with one of our other Chapel missionaries (and pilot) serving in Papua, Brian Pottinger. The day before we arrived, Steve and Carolyn had a rather dramatic situation to deal with. That afternoon, a Moi woman had given birth to a baby girl and her husband was convinced the baby was not his. In his rage, he ordered his wife to wrap vines around the baby s neck and kill it. The distressed mother only halfheartedly did it, so the baby was still alive and breathing. But Steve and Rich quickly cut the vines off and rushed the baby to the Crocketts house. The little girl had not been bathed yet, so she was bathed and fed. Undoubtedly, the Crocketts had to decide what to do. When we arrived, they were in the middle of this dilemma, and Myra jumped right in to help care for the baby. Over the 176

187 next couple of days, Steve and Rich met with the father, who had previously been exposed to the message of the Gospel. He repented of his sinful actions and agreed to accept the baby and care for her. The Crocketts named the baby Grace and gathered everyone together to pray for her before she was returned to her mother and father. That evening, we, along with the missionaries and a short-term team who was also there, went to the hut of Grace s parents and presented her to them. The whole village was intently watching what we were doing. The entire situation made a strong reinforcement for the father to do the right thing and care for the baby. Steve actually made the father pray for the little girl as we handed her over to her father and mother. A dramatic moment to say the least! In the years since our visit, the Crocketts have sent out several prayer letters that included pictures of Baby Grace, and she continues to grow and develop. The impact of one life that was rescued is impossible to measure, but its influence is felt even to this day. 177

188 178

189 CHAPTER 14 Conclusion: Completing the Great Commission There will always be a great need for full-time, long-term missionaries in many places in the world. Their strategies and methods may vary widely, but the motivation remains the same for those of us committed to the Great Commission. A central conviction that guided many of our decisions in the 1990s and in more recent years was rooted in 2 Peter 3:9, where it reminds us that God is not wanting any to perish but everyone to come to repentance (NIV). With that in mind, we were determined that every man, woman, and child in the world should have the opportunity to hear and respond to the Gospel. According to the missions research group The Joshua Project, there are still nearly three billion people living in more than 6,000 people groups who are unreached by the Good News and without a nearby Gospel witness. In Matthew 24:14, Jesus said, and this Gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come (NIV). We cannot dictate when Christ will return, but we must do everything we can to see that every unreached people group is reached. 179

190 As I stated earlier, Ralph Winter called the Great Commission the completable task. He did so because too many churches and leaders see missions as merely an activity that will go on forever. Too often we talk about evangelism but neglect talking about the concept of evangelization. But evangelical leaders serious about missions are talking about closure. With all of the global church s resources and the technology available to us, we can now talk seriously about completing the Great Commission. Finishing the task does not mean every person in the world has become a Christian. It simply means we have planted enough churches among all the people groups in the world so that there is a Gospel witness available to all unreached people. From the evangelistic revivals that led Carl Burnham to Christ to the amazing partnerships we have developed in the least reached areas of the globe, we have always been a church that was looking outward. In our early days we adopted the motto, In the heart of the city, for the heart of the city. As the reach of our ministries grew, so did our vision. For the last 30 years, we have been driven by the knowledge that God is not willing that any should perish. Everything we have done in global missions has been for the purpose of taking the Gospel to the least reached people in the world. Let us continue to pursue that vision and mandate with passion and faith. The next generation has inherited a wonderful heritage and now they have the joy of carrying on that vision as they continue to discover creative ways to proclaim the Good News of the Gospel to a world that so desperately needs it. Together, we all affirm God s desire and say, we too are not willing that any should perish. Let us link arms and pray for God s continued blessing as Chapel missions continues to obey His mandate to disciple the nations. 180

191 EPILOGUE We are grateful for the many years The Chapel has been focused on building Christ s Kingdom both in our local community and all around the world. The Chapel has a profoundly rich legacy of sending out those who take the Gospel of Christ throughout the world. We are prayerfully continuing that legacy in this new season of ministry under the senior leadership of Pastor Tim Armstrong. Our Global Outreach Ministry remains committed to our purpose of fulfilling our Lord Jesus Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37-38) and his Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20). Our mission is currently articulated by the strategy of what we call the Three Es. We desire to equip leaders, extend mercy, and establish churches. The establishment of local churches is how we can best make a lasting impact in the lives of people we are reaching out to around the world. As a matter of focus, God has led us as a church to concentrate on certain countries so that by His power we can continue to make a great impact for His Kingdom. So we have chosen to focus our global outreach efforts on Cambodia, India, Mozambique, Vietnam, and the Yucatan, Mexico. We desire for our Chapel church family to engage greatly in these areas of the world and see an eternal impact on many lives. We are partnering with excellent mission organizations in each country that are helping us fulfill our global outreach mission. 181

192 Along with our country focuses, we also continue to support and send out career missionaries to unreached people groups. These are places where it is difficult to share the Gospel of Christ and where there is often a very real risk of persecution. However, our strategy is to send out well-equipped individuals to specific difficult areas to build Christ s Kingdom through strengthening and establishing churches. We want to continue the more than 80 years of The Chapel being a missions minded church and reach even more people for the Glory of God. The legacy of Chapel missions will carry on as we send out, support, and proclaim the Gospel of Christ in our local community and all around the world! Todd Schreiner Pastor of Outreach May

193 GALLERY B. R. Lakin Lakin was the evangelist preaching at Calvary Baptist Church when Carl Burnham came to Christ. Bill Denton, Founder of the Furnace Street Mission. Denton was Carl Burnham s mentor, and gave him his start in ministry. Carl & Agnes Burnham Carl founded The Chapel in Dorothea Cedar The first missionary sent out from The Chapel, she served with Sudan Interior Mission, SIM. 183

194 David & Sue Burnham David served as Senior Pastor of The Chapel from 1956 until Mr. & Mrs. Cang Dang Founders of the Akron Vietnamese Church, the Dangs came to the United States in Paul & Annie Pillai Paul founded the India National Inland Mission. The following four women served as missionaries for more than 30 years. Martha Heidinger Martha served with Child Evangelism Fellowship in Eastern Europe and Switzerland. Denise Rasicci Denise served with SEND International in Japan. 184

195 Donna Schaber Donna served with International Missions, Inc., IMI, now Christar, in the Philippines. Sherri Ens Sherri serves with SEND International in Macedonia. Larry & Sandi Dick The Dicks served for nearly 30 years with Sudan Interior Mission, SIM, in Nigeria, Liberia, Ethiopia and Sudan. Later they served at Rio Grande Bible Institute in Texas. Bruce & Carol Britten The Brittens served for nearly 40 years as independent missionaries and with The Evangelical Alliance Mission, TEAM, in Swaziland, Africa. 185 Knute & Jeanine Larson Knute served as Senior Pastor of The Chapel from

196 Craig & Carol Lynn Rucin The Rucins are serving with Pioneers in Russia and Poland. Terry & Rebecca Lingenhoel The Lingenhoels served with Operation Mobilization, OM International in Hungary for more than 25 years. Bill & Sally Dyck The Dycks served with Wycliffe Bible Translators for more than 25 years both in Peru and in the United States. Jim & Marian Moore serving in Cameroon, Africa; France and the United States with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Clint Ungashick Ungaschick has been working with native Americans for more than 25 years through Christian Hope Indian Eskimo Fellowship, CHIEF, Navaho Gospel Mission, NGM and (a third agency). 186

197 Paul & Susie Sartarelli Paul served as Co-Pastor then Senior Pastor of The Chapel from Two additional couples The Chapel did not send but supported for many years: Ralph & Maridee Sauers The Sauers served with Sudan Interior Mission, SIM working among the Taureg people in Niger, Africa. Steve & Carolyn Crockett serving with New Tribe Mission, among the Moi people in Papau, Indonesia. Tim & Michelle Armstrong Tim has been Senior Pastor of The Chapel since

198 Bob and Myra Schneider Bob served as Missions Pastor at The Chapel from 1986 until Our driving force in those years was to get the gospel to the least reached people groups in the world both by sending teams and by supporting indigenous church planters, Schneider said. Bob speaking in India. Myra speaking in India. 188

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