30/10/2011

Please note:

This script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors that were corrected before the radio broadcast.

It may contain gaps to be filled in at the time so that prayers may reflect the needs of the world, and changes may also be made at the last minute for timing reasons, or to reflect current events

Trevor Condy:
Welcome to this service reflecting on the work of missionaries around the world. The work of Christian missions has always been viewed with suspicion in some parts of society. But is this fair or justified? – that’s the theme our preacher Don Carson will explore later.

For 150 years Grace Baptist Mission has been sharing with the nations the good news of God’s grace; that God gave his son Jesus Christ to die so that we might experience personally his totally undeserved love, and that he rose from death to send us to the nations to proclaim his grace.

We begin our service today by singing a song that speaks about the vital power of God’s word to change the lives of people right around the world. Thou, whose almighty word chaos and darkness heard.

HYMN: THOU WHOSE ALMIGHTY WORD CHAOS AND DARKNESS HEARD

Trevor Condy:
Let us pray.
Almighty God, Creator and Sustainer of life, thank you that in your son Jesus Christ you have spoken to the nations of the world. Thank you that, for 150 years, Grace Baptist Mission has shared with different cultures and generations that Jesus Christ came into the world to save us. And as we celebrate today may we hear your Word. May it help us to go on sharing the good news around the world.
Through our saviour, Jesus Christ.

All: Amen

Trevor Condy:
Sonja Donner is one of our missionaries in South America. She’s going to tell us about the work she and her husband have been doing.

Sonja Donner:
The Bellavista Prison in Medellin, Colombia had a dreadful reputation. In a city dominated by drug cartels and mob violence, how could anyone find hope in the Bellavista prison? But medellin is also home to a Biblical Seminary, and some of the students my husband teaches there, have gone into the prison with the gospel over the last twenty years.

The character of the Bellavista prison has been changed as a result. Large numbers of prisoners have come to faith, and a Bible Institute now operates inside the prison, training prisoners for Christian service while they serve their sentences. They even run their own radio station, ironically called ‘The Voice of Freedom’.

Prisoners who have become Christians are the most powerful testimony to the power of the gospel. As we’ve witnessed, the redeeming grace of God can bring light and hope in one of the darkest places on earth.

Trevor Condy:
John McDonald is our Mission Coordinator.

John McDonald:
It’s truly wonderful that today we can gather as a group of churches united in mission.

We started in Tamil Nadu, South India and spent more than 100 years working there. Today many churches remain which were founded, in the grace of God, by our missionaries, and we’re so glad to have Pastor Samuel Devenesam of Kilpauk, Chennai with us today as a representative of those churches. Pastor Samuel will be helping lead our prayers later.

Like so many Christian missions, we have people serving around the world, cooperating with local churches and other agencies. We have workers in Asia and, in particular, in the Philippines supporting church planters and helping bring relief to the poor and marginalised. Our work in Europe extends from the wealthy western countries to the developing former communist states. And then we work in Latin America planting churches and training pastors. Finally we’re glad to be working in Africa.

We have well established and wide ranging ministries in the fields of literature, broadcasting, and pastoral training which allows us to share the good news of Jesus in many more places than we could send missionaries to.

So what next? There are difficult and dangerous places which have not yet heard the good news. It’s our belief in a sovereign, loving God that inspires our missionary activity and we remain as committed to this great work as the founders of our Mission were, sending workers to serve the Lord Jesus in God’s worldwide harvest field.

Trevor Condy:
We’re pleased today to have the choir from Chertsey Street Baptist Church, Guildford with us. They’re now going to sing Stuart Townend and Keith Getty’s song “In Christ alone my hope is found”.

CHOIR: IN CHRIST ALONE

Trevor Condy:
Let’s now listen to the reading of God’s word, the Bible, in the gospel of Mark, chapter 8, verses 31-38. Mark records Jesus telling his disciples about his forthcoming death, and how that must become the model for their lives. It’s read for us by Brian Ellis, who has been a missionary in the Philippines for over 45 years.

Brian Ellis:
Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He spoke this word openly. Then Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him. But when He had turned around and looked at His disciples, He rebuked Peter, saying, “Get behind Me, Satan! For you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.”

When He had called the people to Himself, with His disciples also, He said to them, “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man also will be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
(Mark 8:31-38)

Trevor Condy:
Our next song expresses our hope that, through the resurrected Christ, people from every tribe and every nation can be set free from their sin and guilt. You’re the word of God the Father from before the world began.

SONG: YOU’RE THE WORD OF GOD THE FATHER

Trevor Condy:
We’re delighted to have many of our missionaries with us today. We’ve already heard from Sonja about her work in Colombia. We’re now going to hear from Graham Jones who works in Kenya.

Graham Jones:
On my travels, I met Roy, an unqualified teacher, living in Siaya in Western Kenya. Each month he drank his salary away, but when he came to faith in Christ his life began to change.

Eventually he became a pastor of a rural church but he struggled to make ends meet. We worked through a series of Bible studies called ‘Give us today our daily bread’. Roy began to learn how to farm his shamba, keep chickens and goats, and provide, bit by bit, for his family.

Recently he began a correspondence course, with study days to help him prepare his weekly sermons. He failed the first unit. ‘I did not know what studying was’ he said. But at the second attempt he achieved a credit.

Roy has nearly finished unit 2. He recently said, ‘Now I understand what Mark’s Gospel is about, I’d like to preach it all over again.’ Having learnt how to support his family, Roy is now learning how to feed a church spiritually.

Trevor Condy:
It’s a joy to have Dr Don Carson as our guest speaker today. Don is Research Professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Illinois, but spends quite a bit of time in Britain each year working with church leaders. He holds a degree in Chemistry as well as a PhD in New Testament from Cambridge University. In a moment Don will speak to us but, before he does, we’ll sing our next hymn. Written by William Gadsby, it expresses our delight in our Lord Jesus – “Immortal honours rest on Jesus’ head”.

HYMN: IMMORTAL HONOURS REST ON JESUS’ HEAD

Dr Don Carson:
For many people, the thought of missionary work sounds, at best, painfully old-fashioned. It conjures up mental images of black-and-white photographs, now curled and yellowed. Of intense, well-meaning, men and women in dated dress, imposing their stern Victorian values on the free spirits of foreign shores. Worse, to many contemporaries missionary endeavour is not merely old-fashioned, but positively mischievous. For missionaries are necessarily intolerant people. They invade cultures not their own, and by pushing Jesus and the gospel, they announce that they think their religion and culture are superior to the local one—and that, surely, is the very essence of intolerance. As one recent critical missionary biographer puts it, missionary work is “inherently patronizing to the host culture. That’s what a mission is—a bunch of strangers showing up somewhere uninvited to inform the locals they are wrong.”

So what are we doing in 2011 in Solihull, celebrating the 150th anniversary of Grace Baptist Mission? Instead of celebrating, wouldn’t it be more admirable to hold a service of public contrition and tell the world we’re sorry and will not send any more missionaries?

Christians, of course, cannot forget that during his lifetime Jesus himself trained people to go and herald the good news. Christians remember that Jesus was sent by his Father, he insisted, to seek and save those who are lost. So it is not too surprising that he in turn sends his followers. That’s what our word “mission” means: it derives from the verb “to send.” “As the Father has sent me,” Jesus once said, “so send I you.” Among his last recorded words are these: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” So Christians, understandably, will entertain a high view of those who actively seek to discharge Jesus’ mission.

There are three common objections raised against this Christian view of missionary endeavour. It’s worth reflecting on them before we contemplate the most convincing reason why missionary work is essential.

First, Jesus himself insists, ‘Do not judge, or you too will be judged.’ Doesn’t this mean that if we follow Jesus’ teaching we should refuse to make moral and religious evaluations? Certainly that view is common on the street. ‘I don’t mind Jesus,’ we hear; ‘it’s Christians I can’t stand. Christians run around self-righteously telling people how to live, condemning other religions, sending missionaries off to meddle in other cultures. Why don’t they follow the instruction of the Jesus they claim to serve? After all, he said, ‘Do not judge, or you too will be judged.’

When I was a boy I learned a few of the first principles of interpreting texts. I learned, ‘A text without a context becomes a pretext for a prooftext.’ So I suppose we better remind ourselves of the context where Jesus says, ‘Do not judge, or you too will be judged.’ It’s found in the sermon on the mount. That sermon contains quite a few teachings of Jesus. Here, for example, Jesus criticizes the man who looks at a woman lustfully, on the ground that such a man has already committed adultery in his heart. Here he teaches us not to store up treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal; rather, we must store up for ourselves treasures in heaven, knowing that where our treasure is, there our hearts will be, too. Here he tells us to watch out for false prophets, which presupposes we must make distinctions between the true and the false. Here he insists that on the last day not everyone who says to him ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of his Father who is in heaven.

In all these utterances, Jesus is making moral, religious, and cultural evaluations. He is, in short, making judgments. So after making all these judgments, what does he mean by saying ‘Do not judge, or you too will be judged’? The context shows that he means something like ‘Do not be cheaply critical, or you will be subjected to the same criticism.’ In other words, there is no way on God’s green earth that this command prohibits his followers from making moral judgements, when making moral judgements is precisely what the sweep of his teaching demands that they do. But he does insist that when they follow his instruction and make evaluations and judgments they must do so without cheap criticism of others —a notoriously difficult requirement. There must be no condescension, no double standard, no sense of superiority, no patronizing sentimentality. Christians are never more than poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there is bread. This humble tone ought to characterize all Christian witness, all Christian missionary endeavour. But to argue that Jesus ever wanted his followers to make no judgments at all merely betrays biblical illiteracy.

Second, people often protest, ‘Yes, but isn’t missionary work, indeed all attempts at trying to win another to your faith, terribly intolerant?’ Well, no—not if one operates with older definitions of tolerance. Tolerance used to be understood to be the stance which, while disagreeing with another’s views, guarded the right of those views to be heard. The new tolerance insists that disagreeing with another’s views, saying they are wrong, is intrinsically intolerant. But frankly, that notion of intolerance is incoherent. The Labour Party doesn’t agree with the Conservatives; Marxists don’t agree with Capitalists. Each pair may acknowledge some commonalities, but on many fronts, they differ. Yet each tolerates the other if each insists that the other has equal right to speak and convince others of their position. Intolerance is introduced, not when one says another party is wrong, but only when the views of others are quelled by force or corruption. If missionaries try to impose their views on others by force of any kind, they have lost the richest Christian heritage; where they seek to teach and put their case, all the while loving others sacrificially, they are upholding the highest standards of both intellectual integrity and tolerance.

But the best sanction of Christian mission is Jesus himself. He claims all authority is his, but he speaks not as a cosmic bully but as the crucified Lord. He insists that men and women have rebelled against his heavenly Father, but he joins himself to the human rebels so as to identify with them. He declares they deserve punishment, then bears the punishment himself. He claims to be the Judge they will meet on the last day, and meanwhile entreats them to turn to him, to trust him, and live. If one is going to follow a leader, what better leader than the one who demonstrates his love for his followers by dying on a cross to win them to himself? What political leader does that? What religious leader does that? Only God does that!

And then, in a small piece of mimicry, his followers are challenged to take up their cross and follow him. If one of the results is a worldwide missionary movement, I for one will pray for it to thrive.

CHOIR: WONDERFUL GRACE THAT GIVES WHAT I DON’T DESERVE

Trevor Condy:
As a reflection of the global impact of the good news of Jesus Christ, four of our missionaries will now lead us in prayer. Andrzej Kempczynski is a church-planter in Poland. Malcolm Firth is a church-planter in Riga, Latvia, Jean Ellis works with the deaf in Austria, and Sam Devanesam is pastor of Kilpauk Baptist Church, Chennai in India.

Andrzej Kempczy?ski:
Lord, to you we bring our thanksgiving for the wonderful gospel of grace in Your Son Jesus Christ, which reached us in the power of the Holy Spirit. But Lord, looking at the spiritual condition of human beings all over the world we are sad. We ask that the message of undeserved grace might be preached across the whole world. We pray that you will open doors for the gospel that it may be preached freely in every corner of the earth. We pray that you would raise men and women who will take the gospel to the places that lack it, who will be full of burning desire to proclaim Christ with their mouths and lives, that their voice will go out ‘to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.’ In Jesus’ name.
ALL: Amen

Malcolm Firth:
Heavenly Father, we thank you for those men and women who have left their family, friends and native culture to share the good news of forgiveness and hope in Jesus Christ. We pray for any this day who are feeling lonely, weary or discouraged. You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love. And so we ask you to please refresh them, renew them and restore them by the very message they carry to others. Remind them of Jesus who lived and died and rose again for them. May they not rest in their work for Him, but in what Jesus has done for them. May He be their source of joy, hope, and strength both today and for ever more. We pray in Jesus Name.
ALL: Amen

Jean Ellis:
Dear Heavenly Father! I am so glad that I am able to communicate with you using my voice or my hands. You understand all the languages of the world, but very especially the heart language of each individual.

So today I want to ask you to hear those who are crying out to you in their hearts. They may be living in poverty or be excluded from meeting openly with those who love you through discrimination, oppression or some other human barrier. But for you there are no barriers and you reach out to each of us through the outspread arms of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, I am convinced you are listening to the needs of many right at this moment and will be willing to touch them with your Love.

Bless all those who hear this prayer along with all those who are unable to hear it, as we ask for your blessing in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
ALL: Amen

Samuel Devenesam:
We thank you, heavenly Father, that you sent your Son to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to proclaim good news to the poor. We pray for those in any kind of need, for those who are sick, that you may lay your hand of healing upon them; for those whose lives have been blighted by poverty, and for all who seek to bring compassion and help to them. Please provide work for those who have none, and hope in Jesus to those in despair. We pray for those parts of the world troubled by conflict, natural disaster or famine, and for those who grieve the loss of loved ones. May you guard their hearts with the peace that passes all human understanding. In Jesus’ name,
ALL: Amen.

Trevor Condy:
We finish our service by singing together the great missionary hymn, Go forth and tell, O Church of God awake.

HYMN: GO FORTH AND TELL

Trevor Condy:
Let us pray.

God in heaven we thank you that the good news of Jesus Christ has liberated many people all around the world. Help us to love you more and encourage us to go on proclaiming this good news in all the countries of the world.

And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us and all God’s people around the world now and forever.
ALL: Amen

MUSICIANS PLAYOUT