Welcome to the Plenteous Redemption podcast, where the cross and the culture are on a collision course for discussion. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign The Greeks seek after wisdom, and we preach Christ crucified. Unto the Jews a stumbling block, unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them which are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. Now, here's your host, Thomas Ervin. Welcome back to the Plenteous Redemption podcast. Thank you again for tuning in. This will be another episode on missiological exploration. Our topic this month, deputation. I know, I know. Some of you are shivering in your boots right now. Just the sound of those words just struck fear into your heart. For many, once this dreadful word leaves one's mouth, they begin to shudder in fear. Some may even start convulsing or looking for a safe space to hide. The awful word, deputation. I'm sorry that I even have to say it and put you through such torture. Now, in my own experience, I also had an irrational stigma implanted in my mind regarding deputation, but I was genuinely ignorant on the subject. That didn't prevent me from In the end, my ignorance and my desire for relevant knowledge allowed my wife and me to create a deputation process tailored to our needs. what you don't like about deputation, especially when you don't know anything about deputation, which was my case. And then you're thrust into the world of deputation. You got to figure it out. And it ended up being a tremendous blessing. Now, as we venture into this conversation, the realities and the fears that surround deputation are further complicated, especially today. Deputation can seem intensely fearsome after more than one year of lockdowns, financial instability, social distancing, and political polarization, even within an apolitical institution like the church, right? Apolitical? Yeah. But isn't that the purpose of the new normal? To create a perpetual state of fear, Deputation already comes with immense psychological pressure. That pressure is increased beyond measure in our current dispensation. First, many of the current concerns regarding deputation are naive ideas that are parroted without critical thought. That was my problem. I had a lot of ideas about deputation. I had never sat down to really think it through. And after doing so, I found I'd made a mistake. I hope you'll consider whether you're doing the same or not. Second, the use of COVID as a tool to polarize and control the world is nothing more than excuse. Churches still want to get the gospel out around the world. Churches are still going to give. We've had no trouble with that whatsoever, so we can't allow COVID to become an excuse to not do what we know the Lord wants us to do. Psychological distractions must be overcome through scriptural truth. We must trust God and take Him at His word, and that is our foundation. To a large extent, missions and deputation have become an area of the Christian life where God's people attempt to remove personal agency. Under spiritual headings, people put off what they know God wants them to do until they have peace about it, or a leading, or a feeling, or some other idea that sounds spiritual but is actually removing responsibility from yourself and placing it on God. This idea is revealed when praying where the Lord would have them to go. Then it is further manifest through the deputation process. Rather than planning and preparing, which is scriptural. That's what the Bible says. We just jump off the cliff and expect God to catch us before we crash and burn. Now, praise the Lord, sometimes he does. But this is a costly approach to missions and deputation. We don't need people jumping off the cliff into deputation and hoping that God will catch them at the bottom. It's costing churches a lot of money for you to go through your freefall. and with a little more planning and preparation, we can be a lot more efficient. Then the prospective missionary sets out to raise funds. They have engaged in the deputation process only to find themselves in a place of obscurity to those in authority over them. How will you act in that situation? Is that something you can handle? You gotta be very honest with yourself and ask yourself if you can handle this newfound freedom you'll have on deputation. It's going to require you to regulate yourself. Nobody's going to be following you around, tapping you on the shoulder, watching what you're doing. It is easy to hide and hang out on deputation for years, and many have done it. Churches are unbelievably generous to a person they believe has service to Jesus Christ in mind. For this prospective missionary, deputation becomes an extended vacation. Toward the end of deputation, they may decide to get serious and finally finish, or they find out it just wasn't the Lord's will after all. Do they intend to pay back any of the money they improperly received for their extended vacation or their testing of the Lord's will? Not likely. You should, but not likely. Then there is the missionary who believes that deputation has turned him into a telemarketer. They can no longer have a normal conversation with a pastor. They carry prayer cards in their pockets and whip them out at a moment's notice. They attend pastor's fellowships simply to shove their name in the pastor's face when the pastor's there to be encouraged. Pastors don't go to pastor's fellowships to be sitting targets for missionaries. They're trying to fellowship. They're trying to be encouraged. They're trying to be strengthened, trying to be helped. It's not a time to go around. I went to pastor's fellowships on deputation. I never once went around the room shoving myself in front of people. They're there to be encouraged. Now, the ones who introduced themselves to me and found out I was a missionary, if they asked who I was, if they were interested, we had the conversation. Otherwise, I left them alone. You gotta be mindful and respectful of what's going on. They don't contact churches, they hound them. They are ruthless in their tactics, resembling that of a debt collector more than a godly Christian. This needs to stop. They all will admit they believe God will help them raise their support. But just in case he doesn't, they will make pastors squirm under tremendous pressure. These tactics turn the relationship between pastors and missionaries into that of a cold call salesmanship situation. The pastor hides from his phone for fear that a missionary will blow it up. These things ought not to be so. Then there is the role of pastors. Through my interaction with pastors, I have found that as I watch them with other missionaries, they are simply unwilling to say no. They act as though their answers to the questions must be filled with some sort of spiritual innuendo. Let us pray about it. We will see what the Lord will do. Instead of just saying, brother, we are not interested, or we just are not capable right now, or just no. Now, this is twofold. Missionaries are aggressive because they want to get on the field. And I understand that. And pastors are timid, if you will, because they want to help. But if the church can't help, it's best if you just be honest and upfront and say, brother, we just can't help you right now. Call us next year. We'll revisit. We'll think about it again. We're just not in a position right now to be able to help you. And so, instead of being direct with each other and up front with each other, this cloud of confusion, which we're gonna get to, I don't wanna be repetitive, I'm getting off my notes, but this cloud of confusion is created, and to a missionary who's aggressive, that's like a shark tasting blood in the water, and it just creates this unnecessary relationship between pastors and missionaries. It doesn't have to exist if everybody would just be up front. and keep each other at arm's length until it's time, until you're able and you're capable of bringing people in. So answering with a spiritual sleight of hand just opens the door for confusion. Likewise, missionaries should be respectful of a pastor's response. We have no idea what each church is going through spiritually or financially. It behooves us to receive their answer graciously and move on. You don't hound them like a telemarketer and blow their phone up and pressure them. There's nothing godly about that. That is a worldly tactic that you're trying to apply to a spiritual situation. And that needs to stop. Thus far, though, with my introduction, I have played into the hands of the negative stigma surrounding the idea of deputation. It has some negatives, and some of these negative stigmas are merited, and they should be dealt with speedily. But I disagree that deputation is all negative. I disagree that it's even negative, period. Not all negative, just negative. I don't think that's the case. I think it's mostly a positive endeavor if it's approached and handled properly. I contend it is primarily positive. I disagree that deputation should take years to accomplish. This is a sign of a problem that needs to be addressed. We can create all the spiritual jargon about God's own timing all we want, but if deputation takes more than two years, something is wrong. And instead of blaming God by saying, well, you know, just the Lord knows when he's going to get us there, three, four, five years down the road. There's a problem that needs to be addressed. And blaming it on God is not the solution. You're doing something wrong. That doesn't mean you should quit. That means you need to reevaluate, try to address what it is, and then hit it hard again. And if with a second or third effort it's not happening, God may not be interested in funding what it is you're trying to do. We act as though our decisions play no part in the consequences of our daily lives. Much of the Christian life is very practical, and we deny our responsibility in these matters when we try and spiritualize the situation. We claim that we are not Calvinists, but then we act as though God foreordained our day or our lives to turn out a certain way, as though we had no role in the matter. And we are the problem. Churches are willing to give the money, and God's willing to fund missionaries. So if churches are willing to give and God's willing to fund, but you're not raising the support, there's only one aspect of that ratio that is left to blame. And so we've got to be honest about that. We can't fail at deputation and then blame God or blame churches for it. We've got to look at ourselves. Deputation should be approached with an attitude of constant adjustment. We are responsible for evaluating and re-evaluating as necessary. Make adjustments, move things around, put more effort in. You got to continually evaluate the situation objectively, critically, and be very honest about it. For my wife and me, deputation was a wonderful experience. I set out with a bad attitude toward deputation, and then with the help of some knowledgeable brethren, I learned better. That's important. Continually learning. The Lord helped us finish deputation right around 12 months. During my time of deputation, I did not make one cold call to a pastor for a meeting. The Lord helped me to present myself to pastors in a respectful and meaningful way. If that's not your desire, you should stay away from deputation and the world of missions. The name of Jesus Christ is on the line, and the body of Christ is who you're abusing. I would not want to stand before the Lord having disrespected either one of those. And so, they called me for meetings. Now, I don't say this braggingly. I thank God for His blessing. I did not want to make phone calls. We made our own means of deputation, and it required its own particular form of diligence. It wasn't any less difficult. It wasn't easy. It was a method I preferred, but it wasn't easy by any means. It required diligence. But it made deputation an enjoyable endeavor. We made many friends and got to meet many of God's choicest servants while we were on deputation. We met some incredible people. So this dreaded task turned into one of our most enjoyable ministries. Deputation, like most areas of life, will be what you make of it. Ours was a blessed time. Now, I understand that's a cliche, but it's very true. So before we jump into the discussion with me and Brother Keith, I understand there are problems with deputation, but I believe most of the problems are caused by abuse of the system, by either churches or the individual missionary. There are problems in both directions. It doesn't run in a single direction. And if we were more, if we were all more integral and efficient as to how we approach deputation, I think many of the problems we claim exist would disappear. I don't think it's going to be perfect. No system is, but I've also not heard anyone suggest a better means of missionaries raising their support. I heard one missionary put it this way. In what other way can a missionary spend one to two years on deputation, raising support, and raise a lifetime of support, and then be able to hit the mission field and go? It really is an incredible system to raise monetary funds and go into the mission field and do what the Lord needs you to do, wants you to do, desires you to do, in whatever foreign field you're going to or whatever field, you know, right now we've got missionaries all over the U.S. and they're needed. So I don't think the problem is deputation. I think the problem is, in some ways, the standard approach to deputation or More specifically, the attitude of the individual who is using the method of deputation. The negatives don't have to exist. They exist because of the abuse. And I think if we all thought critically about this abuse and got rid of it, deputation would turn into a very efficient and practical way for missionaries to get on the mission field. And so Brother Keith and I, in this episode of Missiological Exploration, will discuss the idea of deputation in the hopes of providing some practical steps that would be helpful to missionaries preparing to venture out and get it done. Welcome back to another session of missiological exploration. Yes, my favorite word, missiological. Yeah, well, you can't sell people a If you tell people, come to college and study missions, they won't pay you thousands of dollars per semester. But if you say, come study missiology... Well, now see, the college I went to... Maybe we didn't pay that much. Well, the college I went to was free. But if I put it online and I say, we're just going to study missions, they're like, uh, who cares? But if I say missiological exploration, people are like, wow. Well, you definitely threw me when you used that word the first time. Well, in terms of missions, one of the most important aspects in our circles is deputation. And it's funny when you meet people who have a basic grasp of the term, and you meet people who don't. We met a lot of people, they were like, oh, good luck on your mission. Thanks. Yeah, because there's such a, I mean, There's so many different views of what a missionary is out there. Yes, it is. It's crazy. It has become a very skewed term. And I think people in our circles have talked relentlessly about, it's probably not the right term for us. We have adopted it, we use it, whether we need to scrap it and start over, that's all subjective. But It was initially... That term was initially used by Roman Catholic missionaries. That's where it came from. Right, right. And we don't do anything that Roman Catholics do. So here we are. Back to deputation, brother. Yeah. So now deputation though is pretty much an independent Baptist model. Yes. I don't know of any other group or circle or people who use this form of raising funds. And it has problems. I think a lot of people tend to major on the problems, and I did before I got started on deputation. And I believe in the course of this, we're gonna talk about it, but I had a very negative view of deputation before starting. But it was out of ignorance. I mean, I literally had... Before, when Kristen and I were praying about coming to Uganda, I had never even been to a missions conference. Wow. I had... I don't even... I think I had met a few missionaries, but I really had no clue what deputation was, what it was about. Now, my pastor, Brother James, is pretty hard on deputation and furlough. And one of the things I love about Brother James is he always... He has this just incredible ability of telling both sides of any story. I often say he offends both sides equally. He really has a balanced view of just about anything he's put his hand to, but I don't think he has a very balanced view of deputation and furlough. He majors on the negatives of those two. And there are some good reasons to be upset about some of the negatives. But I found when we went through deputation, there are lots of positives, and it really ended up being a blessing. We really enjoyed it. What was your time like on deputation, and how did you... Because it was just you, your wife, and one child, right? Right, right. Yeah. So how did it go? When we think back on deputation, it's interesting because I really didn't... When I went to Bible college, in a college, it was very highly missions emphasis. Okay. You know, deputation was a common word, you know, missions conferences. I mean, it was just, and I really, even though I grew up on the mission field and I went on deputation with my dad as a young kid, I really didn't know the ins and outs of it until I got out there on my own and saw it for myself and saw missionaries come through and things of that nature. I really didn't know there were negatives to it. I thought that was just the way everybody did it. Right. And, and it wasn't really until I got to the mission field and came back on furlough and as time went on, because back in those days, back in the nineties, that was just. pretty much accepted an infant of Baptist. And yes, there were negatives that I look back on now and see, but I didn't really notice them. I didn't pay attention to them. We just had a great, great time on deputation. Well, I tend to be, I guess, different in my thinking than most. In my estimation, the negatives of deputation, I wouldn't agree with most people's definition of the negatives, and I don't know how much of that we'll try and get into in terms of what people say about deputation. My problem with deputation is it seems that missionaries or prospective missionaries are using it as a very expensive model of testing their faith on whether they wanna go out into missions or not, or they're getting very comfortable and hanging out in that realm, or they're, I guess a third possibility from my perspective is that Maybe they start out on deputation, they're not raising the funds needed, and instead of re-examining this whole thing, they just keep – they just stay there for years and years receiving deputations, funds. I think on one side, there needs to be – I think there needs to be a love for it, but on the other side, there needs to be almost a – a love-hate relationship with it, because I don't want to keep doing this, I want to get to the field. And I think that's where a lot of times missionaries, they enjoy the missions conferences, they enjoy being wined and dined, they enjoy the traveling, seeing the country and all that, and so they get themselves into a rut. where there's not an urgency to get this over with and get to the field. A key factor in that is, and this is not a discouragement at all, but When you get on deputation and you start going to these churches, there are a few churches that mistreat you and abuse you, but overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, our churches are unbelievably good to us. Absolutely. And they spoil you. When they find out you were willing to give up your entire life and go serve God on a mission field somewhere, they just completely spoil you. Yeah. And for some people, that's a little hard to let go of. Yeah, it is. You want me to leave and go to Africa when I could stay here and have these people? Yeah. And see, again, along with that, you understand that at the most, let's say, like in my home church, we always have a Sunday to Sunday missions conference. OK. So let's say that's the extent of eight days. So at the most, you're eight days at a church. And so you can be whatever you want to be during that time. And then you go to the next place and be whatever you want to be. And so everyone's seeing you fresh. And so there's not an accountability, if you would, as missionaries are traveling from church to church to church. And so that's, again, a downside that It just causes a person to get into that comfortable – I mean I love driving. I love traveling. I love seeing the country. I mean that was one of my favorite things about deputation. My favorite things about furlough is – I mean – People say, do you come back on furlough to go on vacation? Absolutely not. But intermingled with furlough, I get to see the whole country. And so in that way, it is a blessing. But I think sometimes as pastors, pastors especially, home pastors, they need to continue to keep fire burning underneath missionaries and say, listen, Yes, we've got to do deputation, and yes, enjoy it. That is part of your ministry at this time, but it is not a perpetual ministry. This is not what God's called you to do. Get your support. But how much of that mentality should be developed before they ever leave to go out? And I want to be careful because... I'm basing this on my experience and how we did it and what we did. And this is not always gonna be prescriptive for everybody. And I don't wanna paint with too broad a brush or get too narrow-minded because of my experience. But Brother James didn't call us and say, where are you at? What are you doing? Are you doing what you're supposed to be doing? He had an expectation that we were going to put our hand to the plow and press on and get this done, and get it done in an efficient and integral manner. Because this can expose a great lack of character and integrity in a lot of people, because a lot of money's passing hands. the traveling, getting to see places. My wife and I, and you and we're gonna talk about this when we get to it, is we had a travel trailer. You know, I guess our mentality and expectation was the way that we tried to go about it is we wanted to put as little on churches as we possibly could and take care of as much of the cost as we...we just had the expectation. It's our responsibility to pay the cost. Those churches owe us nothing. Now, if they want to help out and they want to pay for it, praise the Lord, but I'm not going to go in with the expectation that they're going to pay for things, they're going to give me things, they owe me something. I'm going to pay for it unless they step in and do otherwise, and we're going to get deputation done and try to do it in a way that puts as little pressure on the resources of churches as we possibly can. And if that's not the mentality, to some extent... I tend to go in extremes in some things, and I'm sure it could be revised and done in a better way than the way that we did it. But that was our mentality, and I believe God greatly blessed it, and it really helped us. Yes. I do believe pastors should be checking up on the missionaries. How's it going? Where you at? Where you at on your support? Are you making calls? What are you doing to get this going? Well, I think at the very beginning, I think even before the church or your pastor sends you out, as Antioch sent out Paul in Barnabas. your pastor ought to have a good understanding of your character. He ought to have an understanding of your work ethic, of your spiritual nature. And you know, the church at Antioch had no plan or no desire of sending out Paul and Barnabas until the Holy Spirit of God said, they're ready. And these men were already serving, these men were already busy. And I think what's happening is, A lot of times we either go to a missions conference or we go to Bible college or whatever, and we say, well, God's called me to be a missionary, and we just accept that as a blanket statement. And because you say God's called you. Everybody's supposed to jump on board. Everybody's supposed to jump on board. And we're forgetting a very big integral part of sending out is the approval of the local church and determining, is this person ready? And I really think when we get back to that, if pastors would get back to that at the very beginning. Because honestly, when I look back at myself, the idea was get out of college as soon as you can. I even started meetings before I graduated. I follow my dad's advice, my dad's example. He went to Tennessee Temple University, and he had almost all of his deputation done before he graduated from college. He would go out on the weekends and all that, because there was a push. There was an urgency to get to the field. But in so doing, you're doing it a lot of it by your own character, by your own testimony that I'm called without having a home church behind you that have said, we have seen your service, we've observed what you're doing. Nobody did that to me. I could have been anything I wanted to be. I really didn't have a home church that was checking on me and making sure of what I was doing, because I just came out of Bible college. God's called me to Africa. We're going, you know, and that was a decision we made. And looking back on it, I wish, and if I had any regrets, Brother Thomas, in my life was that when I finished Bible college, I would have went to our home church, Capital City. I wish my pastor would have made me. work a couple of years in the church before I got sent out. It would have done so much to my character. It would have been so much to my ministry outlook. And so when I ended up getting to the field, I had to learn so much about ministry and had to learn so much about people that I didn't learn because I mean, I started deputation before college was done. I mean, as soon as we graduated, man, we were gone. And so there was no church that said, we've seen how you've served. We've seen how you go soul winning. We've seen how you teach classes. We see how you disciple. There was none of that. And so, I mean, I praise the Lord that my pastor trusted me, I guess, enough to send me out, but I think a lot of times in churches where we need to get back to Acts 13, and we need to say, hey, because I look at guys in our church like Matt Johnson, missionary in Mexico, and James Hoffmeister, and these guys that took those couple years before they went to the field, And it just honed them into something that I wish I could be. I mean, they're great examples to me. Hey, Toughmeister? Well, hey, you know what? You've got to learn from anybody. Yeah. No, actually, he is. He has such a go-get-it attitude. He does. And that comes back, I believe, to that they spent two years at Capital City before they went out to the mission field. Matt Johnson did the same thing. They served on staff, and they had to get jobs, and they worked secular jobs while they did ministry. And it just... it did something to them and prepared them for the ministry. And that's what I wish would have happened. And so I guess my whole point in all this conversation is just saying, I think pastors need to make sure before they get to the field, are these guys serving? Are these guys ready? Is the Holy Spirit of God speaking to us as a church to send them out? And I think that would solve a lot of, not everything, but solve a lot of the problems that missionaries are having on getting to the field. It's very interesting the way you just described all that. I guess that's essentially how our Bible school is set up. So I went to the DeLand School of the Bible at the Bible Baptist Church in DeLand, Florida. James Knox is my pastor, and we call it the School of Hard Knox. Because first of all, the Bible school is not... You don't get 10 points for putting your name on the paper. My first test what was 100 questions long. The first question was give 15 arguments for eternal security and provide a Bible verse for each argument. That's question number one. Now that's not 15. Out of the 100, that's question number one. And so there is that intensity in study in the Bible, but you are required to work a job, there are no dorms, there's no escape... There's no four-year escape from the world and where you're... This Western mentality of... I'm gonna go to college and live in this isolated bubble for four years where I don't have much real responsibility because people are giving me money to go to school, the government's giving me money to go to school. Our Bible colleges have adopted... We're living with saved people all the time. Yes, we're completely surround... Well, our Bible colleges have adopted the American secular university model, but we've just transplanted it into our own world, like you're saying, where you live in this bubble with safe people, and you don't really get challenged in any way, and you may or may not have a job. And so you get to live in this safe space, and then when that's over... you're treated like a child until you're 18. And then when you're 18, you're like, oh, you gotta be an adult now. I know you've been playing football and going to dance classes and you're just a teenage child at this point. But now you need to start thinking about being an adult because you turned 18, rather than preparing people for that, young people for that entire process. And so then you send them to college where they get isolated from the world and live in this bubble we're talking about. And they get no real, stress and experience from life, and that's kind of what you're referring to. Well, at our Bible school, you don't get to do that. There is no dorm. As a matter of fact, several guys told Brother James, man, if you'd start a Bible school, we'd send our kids down there. So he started a Bible school and they were like, well, where's the dorms? He's like, there's no dorms. They're like, well, we're not sending our kids there. It's like, well, that's not how it's gonna work. Now, then we started talking to him about coming to Uganda. he required us to give him 12 months. We had to make a calendar. And for 12 months, he wanted to know when we were in church, what ministries we were participating in, if we were giving. He didn't want to know what we were giving. He just wanted to know that we were giving. He had this list of criteria that we had to turn into him and Then we had to sit before him and our deacons, which was one of the scariest things I think I've ever had to do in my life. Now, they were a blessing. It wasn't a snake pit where they tortured me, but man, the mental pressure from all that was great. And that was a huge help for me. And that level of accountability, I don't know that he does that for everybody that goes out, but I needed that. Yeah. And I think it satisfied in his mind that, okay, we can send him out. I've put him through this process, we made several goals, we met those goals, and so then we got to the point where our church said, okay, we're gonna send you out as missionaries from the Bible Baptist Church. But it wasn't just, the Lord's called me, so you need to get prepared to send me out and give me money, and it just doesn't... That is a disastrous way to approach this. And we're beginning to see the real fruit of this in our time now. And it's costly, not only in finances, but As missionaries, maybe to a slightly further extent, which is probably debatable, we are the ambassadors of Christ that get sent around the world. And when this is not done properly, we're kinda who people look to as the heroes of Christianity, if you will. I'm not tooting my own horn. I mean, that's how our crowd... That's how I thought of missionaries before, having this opportunity to serve the Lord in this capacity. And when they fail, it has a major impact. And so... Yeah, well, it's... What the problem is, is it's Bible college is sending out missionaries and not churches, and you just can't... A church, you know, when you're in Bible college and you are forced to do A, B, C, D, you have to work on a bus ride, you have to do all this kind of stuff. I mean, it's very difficult to see if this is a person's heart. It's got to be the church. Especially a large Bible college. Yeah, exactly. Because you can get lost in it, you know, and you can do just enough so that you're marking all the boxes, but your heart's not in it or whatever, but everybody thinks you're ready to go. I've been called to be a missionary. I'm in missions classes. And so I just think we got to get back to the church. I think that's the example. We can talk about all the different logistics of deputation that a lot of people can agree to disagree on because it's not spelled out black and white in Scripture. But one thing that is spelled out very clearly is the church is the one that sent them out. And I've always just share a verse with you here, if I could, in the book of Acts. I think it's so interesting. I think it's chapter... Chapter 12 or chapter 11 The Bible says in verse number 22, and the tidings of these things came to the ears of the church was at Jerusalem, and they sent forth Barnabas, that he should go as far as Antioch, who when he came, he saw the grace of God. Okay, so God's grace is moving in the church at Antioch. He didn't come there and see the buildings. He didn't come and see all the nice facilities. He came and saw the grace of God. Now, when you go over to chapter 13, Let's see here, I'm sorry, chapter 14. When Paul is coming back on his first furlough, and I understand what Pastor James says, but even Paul took furloughs. But when he's coming back on his first furlough, and the Bible says he came into Antioch, and the Bible says, and when he preached the word of God in Perga, he went down into Atalia and then sailed to Antioch from whence, He had been recommended to the grace of God for the work which he fulfilled. So you have a church at Antioch that is full of God's grace. God's power is on that church. The Bible says that when Paul was sent out of Antioch, the Bible says they recommended him to the grace of God. He had never This sending out of missionaries is a new thing. This idea of going out and starting churches is a new thing. They couldn't rely on anything but God's grace. They said, hey, the Holy Spirit of God has said separate you and Barnabas. We don't know what you're going to do. We don't know how you're going to do it. We don't have any classes to offer you on this, but we're going to recommend you to God's grace. Amen. All right? Well, then when they're getting ready to finish their first furlough and go on their second term, there Paul's saying, all right, who am I going to take with me? Well, he had that contention with Barnabas. Well, then you come down to the end of chapter 15, the Bible says, and Paul chose Silas and departed. And once again, watch this, being recommended by the brethren under the grace of God. All right? So you have in all the situations, all right, Paul says, I want a new partner. Well, Is this partner serving? Is the church gonna send them out? And the Bible says the brethren of the church recommended Silas under the grace of God, and they said, hey, this man's ready to go. And so the principle of establishing this first idea is, first of all, is the Holy Spirit of God working with the pastor, working with the church, pointing this person in the direction of going to the mission field, and then is the church as a whole acceptable of that. The Bible says the brethren came together and sent Silas out with Paul, recommending him to the grace of God, just like Paul had been recommended when he first went out after he had been served in the church. And so that principle of the church being behind, and I think that is the foundation of deputation. Again, all different kinds of ideas of deputation, but I think that initial foundation of the church and the pastor looking and saying, is this person ready? Is this person qualified? Is the Holy Spirit of God upon this person's life? And when all of that is together, then we can say, all right, we are going to recommend you. to the grace of God. We're going to recommend you to go out and do the work that we believe God's called you to do. And that can only be done in a period of time, whether it's a year in your case or whether it was two years in Matt Johnson and James Hobmeister's case. Whatever time the church needs to be able to observe and see that you're serious about this thing and you're not just doing something in college to please all your peers because everybody else is doing it. I saw so many guys burn out because in our college, and I praise the Lord for that. I went to Oakland Baptist College, and per capita, I don't think any college has turned out more missionaries that have stayed on the field. than that college. However, I saw so many burn out because it was such an accepted thing that you were not in the in crowd unless you were a missionary. Right, right. All right? And so a lot of people had that emotional... And that really is a function of colleges. Yeah. Well, it is to some extent in our churches as well. Brother James was preaching one time and he said... I forget how he said it, but, you know, I've been called to preach now, so now everybody's gotta get in line and bow down to me because I... So that mentality to some extent is in our churches, but there is this idea in universities and in colleges where that the university has kind of drummed up this excitement around, this is what you're supposed to do. But in terms of the utilitarian aspect of, if a church is going to try and raise up young people that they intend to send out on the mission field, why would you send them away to a university, to a college, even if it was a Bible college? And again, maybe this is... stepping over the line into opinionated, but I think it go... Into my opinion, but I think it fits with what you just described. My Bible college was in my church. Absolutely. And during that time, you had to be participating in ministry. So that 12 months was after demonstrating four years of attending Bible school classes, church, participating... Our church is big in street preaching, so we have all the ministry you wanna be a part of, it's available. Now, you're not required to be at all of them, but in the Bible school, you are required to participate in at least one of them faithfully. And so now Kristen and I, we participated in several of them. We just enjoyed it, and that's how we spent time together and got to know each other. And so we participated in several of them. And so after all this time, then our church could say, okay, As a follow-on to your time in Bible school, we want this 12 months of, what are you gonna do now that Bible school's over? Now that we're not requiring you to be a part of all this, we wanna see what you're gonna do. But our churches, the whole point is that our churches, they find a young person that's excited about learning the Bible, and they say, oh, we gotta find somewhere to send you. That is your responsibility. You are supposed to teach them the Bible. Now, if you wanna be an accountant, a Christian accountant, go to Bob Jones and get an accountant degree. But if you wanna be in ministry, there needs to be this grassroots, rugged, I'm gonna put you through the ringer here, I'm gonna take you under my wing, you're gonna... And I think part of the problem is many pastors, they're not ministering to people enough to be able to provide a valid experience for young people who are coming up in their church. Now, Capital City has a... They've got a... I've really enjoyed hearing the concept that they apply. Some of the best newest missionaries, if I can say it that way, that I have met are coming out of Capital City, just, I mean, really solid young men. But they're required to participate in ministry at that church. And then when they go to Pastor Adam Thompson and say, I wanna go to Ecuador, which seems like half your church is going to Ecuador right now. He says, great. As soon as you find someone and train them to replace you here, at our home church before you leave, then we can talk about that. So you don't just take all your resources, which young people are resources that are there for the use and the glory of God, and you're just sending them everywhere around the world and you never get them back and the church just dissipates and dies. Yeah, you have a church form of brain drain. Yes, yes. Where you're sending all your zealous guys out and not replacing them. Absolutely, yes. And if I saw that my home church was in that type of trouble, I'd go back home. I think we have that responsibility to our home church. If it's going to dissipate and fall apart, not that my going back is going to save it, but If you don't have a home church, what do you have? And that's another area where I think missionaries become flippant. If they don't like the level of accountability their churches are giving them, they'll just join another one. And many of our churches don't care. Like, okay, you just joined another church in the middle of deputation or in the middle of your mission field. I don't understand that, but okay. I mean, I know there might be some good reasons at times, but I could not imagine that. With that introduction, currently deputation is taking between two and four years. Two years I could see if you're raising a large amount of funds. If you're going to Japan, whether people like that or not, it takes a lot of money. Japan, if you're gonna go live in a city in Japan, it is unbelievable. I met a young man whose own deputation is going to San Francisco. I would say we need some Bible believers in San Francisco, but it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg to live there. I think he was... It quoted, he was quoted just a one bedroom apartment for he and his wife, a young couple, he and his wife was between two and $3,000 a month. No wonder so many people live in tents. Yeah. So what they're doing is they got a travel trailer and they're going to live in that for as long as they can. Now that's a blessing that they would do that just so they could be there and minister to those people. That's tremendous. But four years on deputation. Yeah. I'm gonna suggest there's a problem there. And it goes in multiple directions. I'm gonna suggest our churches have become comfortable with accepting this, and that's not good. And there is a problem with what's happening with this missionary, either their work ethic or whether they should really even be doing this or not. I mean, I get, you know, I can only suggest broad possibilities because we don't have a specific case to examine, but how long did it take you to finish you and your wife? Now you did this in the nineties. Yes. When there was no internet, no emails, no emails, everything was dialing. Wow. You didn't even have dial or the touchtone. Yeah. Well, I probably had touchtone, you know, so, but that was it. Rotary dial. So how long did it take? It took us 18 months. 18 months. So a year and a half and you were able to raise the support you need. Now, I, I couldn't imagine what you needed back then, uh, you know, in terms of, you know, monetary support, and I'm not gonna ask you what it was, but it was probably on par with what people at the time needed to be able to go on the mission field and do what they needed to do, and it took you 18 months. So my wife and I started deputation February of 2019, and we were effectively finished by December, January of 2020. By February of 2020, Our full support had come in. Now we were waiting to hear back from churches who were going through their various respective processes. And by February, we had exceeded what we needed to come. Then, of course, somebody got a cold and shut the whole world down. So we had to wait, and plus my wife was pregnant with our first child. And so all these things interfered with our finally coming to Uganda. But in terms of finishing deputation, I was no longer... By December, I was no longer calling anyone or... Well, I never called anyone. I never made a single phone call. Well, I made one. I called Pastor Adam Thompson at your... with your... You had advised me to call him and talk to him, but that's the only phone call I made the entire time on deputation. Typically, pastors called me, and we're gonna get into how I was able to get there. It wasn't that I was so desirable that they needed me to come, there was a process that I went through to create that scenario, and we're gonna get into that. But four years on deputation, three years on deputation, you're starting to get really getting problematic. I would suggest that two years or less is really where we need to be shooting for. And when we're going beyond that, maybe pastors and missionaries need to sit down and talk about what's going on because something is... off kilter and needs to be... Needs to be fixed or we need to back up and say, hey, is what I'm doing really what I'm supposed to be doing? Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that. No. If you got excited about going to the mission field and you thought this is what the Lord wanted you to do and it's just not working out, The sooner you realize that, probably the better because this is...we're starting to see churches who don't even want to give...they don't want to give to young missionaries anymore at all. They want to give to people who are back on furlough because there's an established work there and they don't think you're going to disappear in the next year or two and just drop off and not do what you said you were going to do. And a lot of churches are even starting, because of that, holding the support back in an escrow and saying, all right, when you get to the field, it's all yours. But until then, we don't want to put this money into something that's... Now, if every church did that, we'd have a problem, but I understand why pastors are doing that because they're just getting tired of throwing all this money into guys who aren't serious, guys who are not... They don't even seem to have an intention of getting to the field. It's almost like I'm going to do this for as long as I can do it until I milk it for what it's worth. And then, OK, maybe it's not for me. And so I really understand a lot of times. And that's why, going back to what I said before, when you become a missionary based on pure pressure or based on a great emotional decision, and you get out there and you I just, I just believe that so much of it, yes, there is personality and yes, there is wisdom and there's logistics. God expects us to use our brain. Right. But I also believe that if God's leading you someplace, he's going to get you there and, and sooner than later. Yeah. And sooner than later is the key to that. Because that mentality, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but before you move on, that mentality has turned into, well, God's gonna get us there. You've been on deputation 10 years. Stop blaming God for you not being where you're supposed to be. That is a problem. This is not Christian welfare. You don't get to blame God for your Inability to get where you're supposed to be, you need to get this done and move on. Right. I'm so sorry. Well, no, and I was just going to say that there needs to come a point in your personal life where you say, is did I really have a call of God, all right? Was it just making an emotional decision at missions conference? Because I know that a lot of times, I saw a lot of guys that just, good men, made a decision, hey, man, look at all these people called to the mission field, I'm kind of on the, you know, this country looks like it needs the gospel, man, I'm gonna go. And so they do that, and then they get out there and they find out, wow, I don't think this is what God really wanted. But they're afraid that they're going to be branded a quitter. They're afraid they're going to be branded someone that can't hack it. And so rather than admit, hey, maybe I made a mistake. Let me come back to my home church and serve God in my home church. Instead, they try to force it through. And so they're trying to, deputation then becomes something that they're just trying to, endure, hoping that someday in the next four or five years, they'll be able to get it all. And then what you find many times is when they do get to the field, then they find out after four years of being pampered and spoiled and all this kind of stuff, and now you get to the field, and no one's pampering you, no one's giving you love offerings, no one's buying your meals, no one's doing all this kind of stuff, and you've got to start doing stuff on your own. And again, I've seen how many people wash out in their first term, having spent all that time on deputation, only to quit and go home. And it goes back to what you said before, where there's been hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted because we're not getting back to the foundation, the basics of what we need to do when we send these guys out. The home church. Deputation definitely has its proving aspects per character, but that needs to be done before they leave your home church not while other churches are offering their financial support so that your missionary can be trained on deputation. You're gonna learn some things, you're gonna grow through deputation. There are gonna be some wonderful times, there are gonna be some not so wonderful times, that's part of it. But four years on deputation... Now, Brother James, his expectation is, if you go out on deputation and you don't finish, you need to pay back all that money. You need to at least offer every one of those churches to give back the money that they gave you over all that time, because this is... Brother James takes this very... When it comes to the finances of all this, he takes it unbelievably serious. And I think we've gotten to this flipping point because our churches are so kind, we think it's okay to just be... just be flippant with the money that they give us. And they're not just giving us money because they wanna give their money away. They didn't go work all week and all month and all year and give some of them major portions of their income for the furtherance of the gospel so that you can eat at a steak somewhere. They do that for you because Man, they are so excited that you would be willing to go and serve God in this capacity because when you leave that steakhouse and you take off and go across the world, I mean, we're here in Uganda. Just in the past month, we've learned of three major stores or businesses in Uganda that have provided us great service and made life a little more comfortable here. They're leaving. It's over. And we live in Masaka where none of them exist anyways. It takes two hours to get to Masaka, which actually takes you four or five hours, I mean, to Kampala, four or five hours to actually get there just so you can go to a store and get a few supplies and then drive four or five hours back. And that's if traffic is okay. If traffic is bad, it's gonna be six hours to travel two hours. If it's gonna take you four years to plow through deputation, how are you gonna handle a lockdown in Uganda? And how are you gonna handle... It's just all the conveniences, all the comforts, when you come here, it's all gone. It's over. You live in Uganda, Africa now. You live in whatever mission field you're going to. And if it's a European mission field, you may retain some of those comforts, but most of the time it's not. And if you can't handle deputation and get it done in an efficient and timely manner, then what are you going to do on the mission field? And I was fortunate to come and work with you and Miss Sally. What do you do if you're going to a mission field by yourself? I know people who've taken off to places far more primitive than Uganda, and they're on their own. And if they don't have the type of integrity and work ethic necessary to serve God on their own and establish a work from scratch, you know... I think that would have been an area where Brother James would have said, you know, do you really know what you're getting into? If you're going off somewhere by yourself, you know, so we have Brother Steve Holt, who's in Sierra Leone. I mean, that's a pioneering work. He did that on his own. Brother James told him in the beginning, I want you to go, I want you to take a long-term trip. And that's another thing. When you do your survey trip, a week is not enough. Two weeks is probably not enough. You need to stay a month or more to really get an idea of what it is you're getting into and get a view of it. So they went, and I believe they stayed a month or two. And Brother James told them, if you come back and you say, we were wrong. I don't think God wants us to do this. That's okay. That's not a bad thing. That's okay. But you need to get this, you need to resolve this honestly and integrally in your mind upfront. Don't do it years down the road after people have given you thousands and thousands of dollars to go where you're not even, where you're not going to end up going. Right. Yeah. So, yep. And you know, I would, I would even go even to a further level there, you know, when, And I agree with what Brother James says, but I think if you go back to what we were talking about earlier, the foundation of the church, the calling, do we really need a survey trip to determine this is what God wants me to do, you know? Do we really need a In other words, if I'm telling you God's called me to do this, then what is a survey trip, other than just preparing yourself materially, what is a survey trip going to do to either change that call or confirm that call or whatever. I mean, because you get over there, and you look at what's going on, and you look at the lifestyle, and OK, maybe this is not for me. And yet, God may be saying, yes, this is for you. So I would even push back a little bit and say, be careful about using a survey trip to determine a call. And I think once a, and I understand what he's saying, Is this really what you wanna do? And I think that's a part of your pastor's sitting down and saying, are you ready to do this? So before you do this, go check this out. But I've heard guys say, hey, take a survey trip, make sure this is what God wants you to do. And I'm thinking to myself, what? I thought God called you. I mean, why? And that's where we would get into discussions about the nature of what I believe is the misuse of the term call. And I think it has, again, it's being... It has helped to facilitate this Christian welfare mentality. Well, God called me. Well, again, now that means that any objections your home church would have is superseded because God called me. And so the idea of being called, and this could end up going down a long, heated trail, especially for some people watching. Well, Jeremiah was called from the womb, but he wasn't ready. Well, Jeremiah was called from the womb, and the Apostle Paul met the Lord Jesus Christ face-to-face, who told him where to go. Everyone after the Apostle Paul, he directed them where to go. Absolutely. And so when we add this When we put too much reliance on the supernatural aspect of it and not enough attention to what you were saying earlier, the church's role in all of this, it becomes this abusive system, which is exactly what we have. Well, I've been called. You can't tell me I shouldn't go there. I was like, well, why don't you go take a trip and just make sure? Because you might get there and find out, oh, no, God didn't call me to do any of this. I understand. I understand. And we've talked about it. I think we probably share similarities in the balance of all that. It's just that... It is unbelievably abusive, and I think it is adding to the problem that we have. You can't tell anybody anything. God told me to do this. Well, no, he didn't. He told you in what way? You heard him audibly? He said, well, the Apostle Paul... And so then other people, well, I've been called like Jeremiah. Well, your ministry doesn't look like Jeremiah's. So where's the disconnect? Well, again, Paul is called, but he did not do missionary work until the church sent him out. He served in the church. He taught. He preached. He did what a believer is supposed to do. But he was not sent out to the church. He said, I thank my God that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry. So that faithfulness came first. Our churches are sending people out to see if they will be faithful. They're not counting them faithful and then saying, okay, yes, we can see this calling on your life. You should definitely pursue this. And instead, we're just kind of throwing them out and saying, oh, it didn't work? Okay, we'll come back home and We'll just tell the churches that gave you thousands of dollars, sorry. Yeah, I understand. So before we press on to the practical aspects of all this, COVID-19. Now you were home on furlough during 2020 and went in the heat of all this. How many churches were you in during that time? We were in 76 churches. 76 churches in 11 months, 10 months? Yes, 10 months. 10 months, which is moving. I mean, that is a lot of churches. I mean, you were all over the place. It seemed like every time I called you, it was like you were on a different coast or a different border. So how is COVID, in your estimation, going to affect... We're gonna get into the... Immediately after this, we're gonna get into the practical aspects that stem from our experience and what we believe made us successful and helped us. But how is COVID going to affect all of this? Well, when we were back on furlough, my wife and I made the decision. And really, we only had two or three meetings cancel on us that March and the first part of April when COVID really came in strong. But we determined when we went back that we were going to treat furlough as if COVID did not exist. And so I would call pastors. I would not ask them. Are you still having church? Are you still meeting? I would just say, hey, we're scheduled to be with you. Plan on coming. Is everything still okay? because I didn't want to use COVID as an excuse to not come, to keep going. And we found that other than that first March and first part of April there, we found there was absolutely no problem. Now, again, I understand furlough is a little bit different than deputation because furlough you're doing a lot more reporting than you are trying to present yourself for for partnership or support. So I understand that, and I'm not – I know deputation was hit pretty hard. But what I found was that we didn't have any trouble getting into churches. Now, we had all different kinds of meetings. Sometimes we were – preaching behind a Plexiglas box. Sometimes we were preaching with a mask on. Sometimes we were preaching to a computer. So there was all different. We had to adapt in so many different cases. But we had a great furlough. And so we just said, we're going to act ourselves as if it doesn't exist. And then we're going to just conform ourself to whatever the pastor wants. And we'll do what we can. to keep going. And we were able to raise funds for our house up in Caledo. We were able to raise funds for motorcycles. I mean, God continued to bless, and nearly every pastor I talked to said that, and I think a lot of it as a result of COVID, people aren't spending money on frivolous things. Missions was up, you know, in most every church that I was in. People were giving. I mean, so honestly, other than just the, you know, the discomfort of wearing a mask, you know, whenever you're going places or whatever, we just, we had a great time. And we were not, limited in what I felt was our furlough ministry, and we kept a full schedule. And even in the churches that did cancel on us, God filled those meetings. I mean, we just kept a full schedule. We hardly ever had a week that we didn't have a church to go to. Yeah. Well, for us, we had just about... We had only a few meetings early 2020 on deputation. And as I said, I'd stopped calling, I'd stopped trying to schedule meetings. Because you just left from here when COVID started. Yeah. We were in... In January of 2020, we came here. As you were coming home on furlough, we had planned to move to Uganda in June. And I wanted to come with my wife, and that was our second trip to Uganda, and we wanted to get some things established while you were in country so that I could have your help. And so we came, and interestingly enough, we left here and went to Japan. We had a deputation meeting in Japan, which was incredible. The church was very good to us, but we were supposed to fly through Hong Kong. And I was getting concerned because they were... shutting down flights from China, but China had not invaded and taken over Hong Kong yet. And our country allowed that to happen, though we were supposed to be allies of them. That's a whole nother subject. And so I called our... What's the lady's name? The lady that helps arrange our flights. Oh, Valerie. Yes, I called Valerie. And I said, just wanna make sure our flights were still okay. Should we change it? She's like, oh, your flights have been canceled. And I was like, oh, we're leaving in a week. So we had to reroute and we went through Kuala Lumpur instead. And then, and my wife was, we just found out she was pregnant and she's starting to have the morning sickness and all that. And we get into Taiwan and she's like, I think I'm gonna throw up. Like, you better not throw up in this airport. yet you have no idea what they will do to us, so you better hold it." And somehow she did, and we got on that plane and we made it to Japan and got home. And all the meetings we had scheduled, we had maybe a half dozen or more, just slightly more for February and maybe March, and all those pastors called and said, we're not shutting down our church. If you wanna come, you're welcome to come. I was like, we'll be there. And so we went to all those meetings and our plan was to leave in June, but of course that got shut down with COVID. So the reality is, even in the era of COVID, God's people still wanna see the gospel get around the world, and many churches, if not all of them, want you to come. You might have to be flexible and do some things you didn't expect you would have to do, either do it through the computer or with a mask or behind... You preached one time behind plexiglass. A glass box, yeah. It's interesting, the new studies that have come out on all these people who have the plexiglass up. They're saying that when you put that plexiglass up, you're forcing the germs that you put out to stay in that space. And so you make it worse for yourself by putting up. It's so funny. So COVID has just brought about. Worldwide idiocy or you do like our supermarket in town where they just saran wrap around But then they have a little hole that they Have you noticed they won't hand you your change they just set it on the table, right, right Do you know how dirty money is? So anyways, yeah So it's not gonna be a valid excuse to not get things done in a timely manner. It may cause some hindrances, but... Yeah, and I think our types of churches that we go to are gonna be your ones that are gonna fight to stay open anyway. And so, yeah, so... and keep things flowing. There is that just inherent responsibility in the types of churches that we fellowship with, where they believe, no, we can't shut this down, we have to keep going, which is really a blessing to be a part of. Now, you wrote an article for the website Ministry127, and I'll put a link to the article in the various places that I post the audio and video to this. But the premise of the article is to provide some practical steps for missionaries to consider when setting out on deputation. Now again, we've talked about already, I think, in enough depth that people can get our viewpoint on that initial sending out and the responsibility the church has in that. But then there comes just the, how do I do this? How do I accomplish this? Now, I talked about what I believe to be an imbalanced view that our pastor has, and what that has done at our church is it has kinda disconnected us from the world of deputation and even furlough to some extent. And that ended up being a good thing for me, because it forced me through my ignorance of what it was, I'm not in... You said you came up in a Bible school where it was kind of... It was so familiar that... And your dad had already gone through the process, and so you already had a good idea of these things. I had no clue. So it forced me to just create my own approach to deputation. And it was... somewhat unorthodox, and the Lord greatly blessed it. And I thank God, because I did not wanna sit with a phone. I would have if I had to, but I didn't have to, and just cold call pastors and try to get meetings. I so despised that idea. I did not wanna do that. And praise God, He saved me from it. Amen. Now, we talked about how long it took you to finish deputation. It took my wife and I right at 12 months, give or take a few. There was not like a day where we said, okay, it's 100% done, because we had stopped taking meetings. Several churches said they were gonna support us, but hadn't officially told us, and so we were just waiting for all that to come in to find out where we stood, and praise the Lord, we ended up doing very well. Was deputation burdensome or joyous? And I know you talked about that briefly already, but we found it to be. It's just a tremendous blessing. And we did, too. I mean, yes, every missionary will. When you sit around with missionaries, sometimes you tell the horror stories. And the time that you slept with bedbugs and all that kind of stuff. But I would say 98% of every church we went to was just an absolute blessing and a help. And those horror stories are few and far between. you know, those stories discourage you. I mean, because like I said, most churches out there, they want to take care of you. They want to treat you well. And so as you use that word, spoiled, you know, we were in the same way. I mean, churches were just a great blessing to us. And we, you know, when we were out, like I said, with our family, of course, on deputation, we only had our 10-month-old. But for my wife and I, we tried as we went out to what is in the area of the church we're at so that we can have a good time and enjoy ourself. And we went to national parks. We went to state parks. We went to museums. I mean, we had a blast. And we kept our schedule full, but we kept that part of our ministry fun while we were doing it. So to us, it was never a burden. Yeah, I should have tried that. I am a homebody. I wanna be home reading, studying, writing, recording. My wife likes to get out and about and she'd be like, hey, there's this interesting place nearby. No, we're not going. I almost felt... And again, this is my mentality. It's not that this needs to be picked up by anybody else, but I almost felt guilty at times. And it's something I... I never took a nap. I got so tired of missionaries and pastors asking me, did you get a good nap today? No, I did not. What are we doing? What is this? Just a nap? No, I didn't take a nap. I need to get deputation done. I feel like I'm gonna explode if this doesn't get finished. And then I wanna read, I have stuff I wanna study, I need to get in my Bible. There's so many things. I tried to schedule a day that was productive. And not that it's wrong, But this is the problem. When I say not that it's wrong to take some time and go do things, I've gotten to know you well. You have a good work ethic and you balance those things. I'm afraid too many missionaries are hearing it's not wrong to take some time and go take a nap or go visit sites, and they take that as permission to just go do that and put little emphasis on the work side of the day. That is my... I am really concerned about that with a lot of people on deputation. And I can't speak to furlough. I imagine it's not much different. There's a lot of overlap between furlough and deputation. In fact, I intended... I thought about trying to discuss the two. at once, but there was so much to talk about in terms of deputation, maybe we'll talk about furlough down the road, and that's something I don't have any experience with. And again, I've heard your approach to furlough, and I appreciate it, and I think it'd be good to talk about and be helpful to missionaries as well, and so maybe at a later podcast we'll do that. Just the idea of... I was timid about the idea of taking too much time to rest. Now, that is me taking it probably too far in a negative direction in that aspect, and I wish I had done a little bit more for my wife and with my wife. But I have a wonderful wife. She's very patient with me, and she knows. When my mind gets set, we have a task we need to accomplish. I'm not going to veer off that task too far. You probably don't even stop and go to the restroom, do you? You just, we're going to drive and we're not going to stop till we get there. No, no. So now that, that, that would be one, one area where I'm okay with stopping. No, we, um, The way our meetings ended up being scheduled, we always had two or three days between meetings. So we would just take our time and cruise along and we'd stop and get a hotel room in between if we needed to, depending on how far away it was. If it was more than eight or 10 hours, then I would try to get us a hotel room and we'd turn it into a two-day trip. Honestly, we hit deputation hard, but the daily outworking of it was... was a breeze. Once we got the meeting scheduled and we got them scheduled in a good and relevant way, we just pressed on and got it done. It was not overly complicated. So anyways, that's my two cents about taking naps and... Did you get a good nap today? No, I did not. Did you? Did anybody die and go to hell today? One day he's going to get older and he's going to love a nap. Well, I do love naps. I love sleep, love not sleep. That's like one of those things you wish the Bible didn't say. I'll take a nap when I'm so exhausted that my body's like, You're in shutdown mode. We're not doing any more. But I believe I have a responsibility as a missionary here and on deputation to get to that point. And what frustrates me a lot of times is I don't take too many, but every once in a while I'm just... you know, let me take a nap. And then you lay down and you can't go to sleep because you got so many things going through your mind. It's like, my wife says, why'd you even lay down? I have tried just in the past week or so. I was like, man, I'm tired. I think I'm going to try to lay down for an hour. And I go back there and I lay down and five minutes later I'm back up. She's like, what are you doing? I was like, Like I'm doing this study on the remnant and that day, the idea was in my head. I was like, man, I gotta go look at that. So I got up and I went and got my Bible out and began. Anyway, so now number two on your list or number one on your list, number two on mine is buy or rent a motor home. That's the first idea that you mentioned in your article. Why do you believe that is advantageous? Well, several reasons. The first reason is what you find, what I've seen a lot of missionaries do is, and this was not the case with me because I went right out of college, but I've seen this in many different cases where a man is getting ready to start deputation and they have a house that they own. They have a school where their kids are going to school. They're settled, all right? And so what they do is they start deputation and they're trying to hold down two different things. They're trying to go out, get support, but they've always got to come back, you know? And so they're kind of tethered to that location. Right. And so I think that if a person is going to go out on deputation, I think you need to, for lack of a better term, burn the bridge, all right? And say, okay, we're going to go out and we're just going to throw ourself out there. And if you have a house or you own a house and you're able to sell whatever, then take some of that investment and buy yourself a nice motor home or find a place where you can rent it for the time that you're on deputation, because then your home and your house is wherever you are. Right. And you're not tethered to a location. You can go out there and stay out there. And that's what we did. We didn't have a home to come home to. As a matter of fact, in our home church, sometimes they, oh, wow, you're back. It's been a long time. Yeah. And, uh, because we, we just, we went out. And so when you're out there, you're, you're not limited. You're not having to take care of a house. You're not having to worry about what's going on back there. And, uh, so that freed us up to be out there. The other thing was. is what I did on deputation was I never scheduled more than two churches a week. I did not ever split up my Sundays. So what I would do is when I called a pastor, I would say, Pastor, listen, I want to come for more than a meeting. I want to come and be a help and a blessing. I want to get to know your people. And so if we had a Sunday meeting, then I would ask him if it is OK to come on Thursday. If we had a Wednesday meeting, I would ask, is it okay if we come on Monday? And by telling them we have a motor home, he doesn't have to put us up in a hotel. We have our own food. He doesn't have to feed us. And all we need is a place to plug in. And so that enabled us to not just come the night before a meeting, have a service, and then leave after they feed us lunch to go to the next meeting. We really got to know the pastor. We got to know the people. There were several instances where my wife was able to use her sewing ability. We've sewed curtains for churches. She sewed covers for pews. I helped pastors with construction stuff in their churches and just working along. We're here. What can we do? How can we help you? We were able to spend a lot of time going soul winning. with the pastors, visiting people in the hospitals and stuff like that. So it was a motor home, and you can't do that when you're just coming in in a car and you're expecting them to put you up in a hotel. And even with your way of looking at it, you couldn't afford to do that, staying in hotels two or three nights. But a motorhome enables you to come in. You're not a burden to them. They're not having to babysit you. They're not having to take care of you. But at the same time, you're there, and you can spend time with that church, and you can invest your time in that church so that when you leave, you've built a relationship. And later on, when that church is deciding, hey, we've had 10 missionaries in. We can support five. they're going to remember the ones that they built a relationship with. And so I think that was one of the keys that enabled us to be able to raise our support so quickly. And we still just, while we were on this last furlough, my wife got an email from a lady who remembers us helping that church on workday. And it just blessed her that a missionary would be there working with them and helping them. Honestly, the way things are done today, it is simply a come in and come out. And so you're standing up there. And a lot of times a pastor will give a person 10 minutes. What can you say in that amount of time? How do you get to know the people? How do you get to know the church? And so a lot of it, a lot of what I find today is not so much the pastor taking you on because of you, it's who you know. And so we just enjoyed that. Well, we had churches who gave us five minutes in the pulpit and took us on for support. They don't know my pastor, they might have some knowledge of BIMI, that may be a good thing or a bad thing. Yeah, exactly. And so I'm just blown away. So it seems to me that in those situations, that church just has bought into the idea we're supposed to give to missionaries, we'll have one come and just give it to him. We're not really critically looking at the missionary or who he is or where he's from. So for Kristen and I, before we set out on deputation, we set several goals. And we're going to get into more of that as we go through this. But one of them was to buy a travel trailer before we left. Now, you had a motorhome where it's built into the vehicle and the motorhome all one. I forget the different classes and all that. We bought a travel trailer and found that I, you know, and, and I, I don't know what you guys did or how you handled this, but, um, we found that to be a little bit better because we could drop the trailer and disconnect our vehicle. And, uh, when, when we needed to go somewhere, we didn't have to disconnect and take the whole vehicle, but. We always had to do our shopping and stuff before we came in. Yes. Because once we were hooked up, we were there. We looked at that several times, we're like, man, what would we have done? Cause you know, Kristen would get stir crazy and I'd be like, okay, I need to get her out of here for a little while. Take her fishing. Yeah, she loves to go fishing. But let's just go for a drive and see the area or just take some time and move around a little bit and let you... I'm okay with sitting in this little box and reading, but she needs to get out and about a little bit. My wife and I are totally the opposite. Really? I'm the one that likes to get out. She wants to be at home. Yeah. I mean, my wife is unbelievably content. If I never did any of that, she would not have cared. I felt I had a responsibility at times to get her out a little bit and we'd go move around. I was like, how would we even do this? Or if we're going to church, we need to drive from wherever we're parked to the church. If say the church didn't have a place for us to hook up by chance, we got to pack up the whole vehicle and drive. Anyway, so we paid $6,000 for a 1995 Conquest travel trailer. It was owned by this electrical engineer who took immaculate care of it. It was ugly as can be, but it was built like a tank. And We bought it before we left to go on deputation, brought it home, stripped out several parts of it. My wife and I do custom woodworking, so we custom made countertops. I custom made a tabletop. I took out the cabinets and built this shelf to store all my books. The thing turned into a rolling library. So we bought this washer-dryer combo. It worked one time, and it broke. And it was going to cost as much as the washer-dryer combo to fix it. I was like, let's just take it out and put it in another bookshelf. So we put in more books. And so it was unbelievably beneficial for exactly the reasons you mentioned. We noticed several missionaries were struggling because they were having to go back and forth constantly. And as you start to venture further away from home, that just becomes very... Cost prohibitive. Yes, it's not a practical way to do this. And then that's where that idea that, was this church gonna give me enough money to cover these costs? Probably not. Right. And it's not their responsibility to. They don't exist to pay your travel expenses. This is not a business that owes you money for your travel expenses. This is a church. And so our mentality was, we want to create a scenario where we don't have to be dependent on these churches to do that. We will pay the cost. If they help, praise the Lord. We drove one time from North Carolina all the way up to, I think it was Rhode Island. And the church gave us $100. Now, praise the Lord, it was a blessing. We enjoyed the church, we enjoyed the time, but it costs $150 to pay the tolls, much less the gas and the food. Now, what if we had to turn around and go all the way back to Florida when that meeting was over with? It's just not practical to develop this idea that we'll keep a place at home that we can come back to when we need to, and we'll be out on the road. And if you look at, and this is what I always try to do, I always tried to make it, when I set up my meetings, I would say 95% of the time, I never had more than a four or six hour drive. And so I tried to make it to where when we go from one place, we're not crisscrossing and going back and forth. I mean, for example, when we just did our furlough, We never backtracked. We started in Texas. We went out to California. From California, we went all the way to the East Coast. From the East Coast, we came back into Texas. And so if you plan it out a little bit and try to use some logistics so that you're saving money, and then when you're using a motorhome, You say, well, they just use so much fuel. But when you think about all your saving in food, eating out at restaurants, and hotel bills, the fuel is not that much. And another benefit to that is several apps have been created that'll tell you places you can park for free and stay overnight. So if we had a – as I said, we had a – No, we didn't have that when we did. We praise the Lord. I mean, I'm telling you that there are so many resources. If you look it out and figure it out, you can get this done in a very effective way. And so we, if we had to travel, like I said, eight to 10 hours, we would want to stop somewhere overnight. Well, Cracker Barrel will let you park your travel trailer in their parking lot for free. Now you don't get to plug in and, you know, don't spread out tables and throw out a rug and act like you're at home. But if you just need somewhere to stay overnight, you're in your own travel trailer. Um, now we had put, uh, fans and hours that would run off electricity. So when it was hot, we could run the fans. It's not always comfortable. Sometimes it was cold. We bought a little, uh, kerosene heater that we could run when it was, uh, too cold out that we keep it warm in there. Um, but. The idea was not to be 100% comfortable. The idea was to get deputation done, which means making some sacrifices. And so we would sleep in a... Most Walmarts will let you park in their parking lot, but it's usually loud in a Walmart parking lot at night, and there's a lot of people coming in and out. We found that Cracker Barrels were really quiet. They're kind of off, away from where most of the... near a lot of other stores, but they're kind of off on their own in their own parking lot. It's fairly dark at night. It's much quieter. There's not a lot of people coming in and out. And so we would park there overnight and sleep in our travel trailer. We had a water tank inside. We could jump out. And the pump to the water tank was on the batteries. So we could jump in and take a shower and brush our teeth and get back in the truck. Usually somewhere locally. Cracker Barrel will oftentimes will give you coffee for free. Some will make you pay for it, but it's like $2 for a cup of coffee at Cracker Barrel. And so I don't usually eat breakfast, I don't usually eat till after 12, so I would just go get a cup of coffee and we'd get back on the road and we'd go. And then when we needed to stay a little bit longer, there's another app or website called Reserve America. They'll let you reserve a spot online at a state park, and the average cost is $10 to $18 a night. at a state park where you plug in, they have somewhere to drain your tanks, they have everything you need, and if we need to stay two or three days, we would just go do that. Now, if a church offered to let us stay at their church, I wouldn't ask them. That's my mentality. I'm not going to unnecessarily put a burden on this church If they say, where are you going next? Do you need somewhere to stay till then? Then I would tell them. If they didn't, then I just assume it's my responsibility to go take care of this and we'd go find somewhere like that to stay. And so you stay in this beautiful state park. for $18 a night in your own travel trailer with your clothes, your room, your food, your everything. And having a trailer makes that a lot easier to do. With ours, because it was all together, we had to be at the church because there was no way to get there. And what we found, even now we have not used a camper on furlough, but what we have found is that Most churches nowadays have hookups. Yeah, it's becoming more and more popular. Yeah, it's more and more popular there. Yeah, they are starting to really create spaces where you can do that, which is a huge blessing. And again, I'm not suggesting it's wrong. to ask a church to do that. I am suggesting it's wrong for you to expect churches to do that. You should assume it's your responsibility until that church, if that church can provide that to you and you can accept it without abusing it. As we've heard stories of people, they ask a church, can we use your prophet's chamber for a couple of days? And then weeks later, it's like, did you move in or? Right, exactly. There are lots of advantages to having a travel trailer. You don't have to have one to accomplish deputation. Lots of people finish it without it. We had, when we were, when my dad was on deputation, we had a Oldsmobile station wagon. Amen. I mean, it was, had all of our stuff. How many of you were you at that time? Well, there was three of us. Okay. Yeah, my sister wasn't born yet. Okay. So three boys. Yup. And my mom and dad in a station wagon. I'll never forget that. And if you have a, now Kristen and I had an 18 foot trailer. In those days, those station wagons were as wide as his desk. I mean, they were, he was a boat, but we got it done. We had an 18 foot trailer, which was perfect for the two of us. And you may need something bigger than that if you have two or three children and you need a little more space to spread out. But we wanted something small and efficient that would fit in a single parking spot. And it just made life so much easier. Also, part of our customizations, I installed a mini split heat and AC unit on the back end of it. Oh man, that thing was... It was great. Now, you need electricity to run that, obviously. But we'd park somewhere, kick that AC on. Man, it was nice. Now, with ours, my dad had used it because we had bought it from him. And he had used it on his deputation when he was coming. The first deputation was when he was going to Spain. And so then he, after all that was done, then he pastored in the States for a while. Then he won a deputation again. And to come to Africa. And so the second one, he used that motor home. And so we bought it from him. Now he had Alicia and Andrew, my brother, so they were four in it. So when I was able to get it, we took, we did kind of, now I'm not a woods craftsman like you are, but I was able to build closets in it and just outfit it for what you need. They're so customizable. They are. You take the time to do it. Yeah. That's a blessing. And so. Now, your second thing on the list is do not allow yourself to get into debt. Yes. Now, I want to say from the onset what we did and then turn it over to you. We set goals before leaving, before, not after. And that is, I'm not trying to insult anybody's intelligence. But it seems like that should be an obvious thing. And two of our goals were, one, was to get rid of any debt that we had. And we used credit cards. And I believe I had a truck that I had financed. But it was a Toyota. So of course, it sold very easy. Every Toyota Tacoma or Tundra I've owned, I have sold it for. Don't tell me you've owned a Tundra. Yes, I have. Oh man. I love, Toyota. That's my dream truck right there, brother. Tacomas and Tundras are just, there's nothing like them. So, but every Toyota pickup I've had, I have sold it for as much or more than I paid for it. that they're just unreal if you take care of them, obviously, and the way they own their value. So having financed something that retains its value unbelievably well, it was easy for me to sell that and get rid of it. And then any credit card debt or anything, I used them for gas. It was airline miles type stuff. And so we paid those off. And then the second thing is I wanted $15,000 to $20,000 in my checking account that we could use while we're on deputation. That further helped me not to put, first of all, a financial burden on my wife and I, who were just unbelievably stressed. And then we get to relieve some of the burden on churches, because we don't have that expectation that you need to give to me so that I can keep doing this. We could foot the bill, and if they helped out, praise the Lord. And to some extent, they always do. I just didn't want... It's the idea of the expectation that is causing, I think, a lot of problems. If I expect I'm going to pay for it and they expect they're going to pay for it, then it gets taken care of and it doesn't become a burden to anybody, which is, I think, how it should be. But I know of missionaries who take off, they have a house that they owe lots of money on, they have other debts that they owe money on, and they don't relieve themselves of those debts before going on deputation. And man, it just turns into a mountain of stress. Yeah, because you can't... You cannot, if you're starting out on deputation, you can't pay those bills off a deputation. So you've got to keep your job. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to keep your job, deputation at the same time, and what ends up happening, both of them suffers. So I'm in total agreement with you. We're not saying you're not called. We're not saying you're not going. We're just saying, get it paid off. Then you can put yourself wholeheartedly into it. But trying to pay off debt on deputation, it's almost impossible. And I think that the biblical mentality is the Lord Jesus Christ said, if you're going to build a house, you're going to sit down and count the cost. Yeah. And churches should not have to. Pay your debt. Pay your debt, exactly. If you've got yourself in a debt, then work to pay your debt off. And then go out and let churches, as God works on their heart, help you get to the point of getting to the field. But they should not be responsible to pay off your debts that you've had. And so when you, and I love your idea, I did not do that. I think it's an amazing idea, is set back a certain amount of money so that When you're out there and you're living, because starting out, pretty much you're living from offering to offering until you start building your support. And so you've got that set back there to help you to get to the next place. It was a tremendous help. Actually, our first vehicle was a Ford Expedition. We got to the hills of Virginia, and the engine gave up on us. You didn't get out of it what you paid for it? Not at all. Never buy another Ford again. But we had the money. We had already raised some support. We had some money coming in. Plus we had money saved up. We were able to park somewhere, pay for a place to rent. It was actually at the West Virginia, Ohio border. And we parked right there on the river that runs through there. Is that the Ohio River? I think it is that runs through there. Anyways, but there was just this this RV park in the middle of nowhere that costs like $8 a night or something, had electricity, had somewhere to empty our tanks, had everything we needed, and it's right on the Ohio River. And it wasn't like a state park that was beautifully manicured or anything, but it was a nice, comfortable place to stay. And we jumped on Craigslist and jumped on Facebook and started looking for a truck. And I found a... 2002, GMC 2500 that had a topper on the back that we could store our extra stuff in. And it was four by four. It was just a tank. The guy had bought it and bought a travel trailer, never used either one of them. And they were just sitting in his yard and he sold it. We paid cash money for it right there on the spot. And that thing was just a monster. An 18 foot travel trailer did nothing. to slow that thing down. But we were able to do that. I didn't call a single church and say, we need you to send us money. I said, Lord, we have the finances. I don't wanna spend it on this, but we gotta have a vehicle that's gonna hold up. I gave that expedition to Earl Ancrum. He said, I'll take it. I'll use it till the engine blows up. He said the engine blew up two weeks later. Because it was ticking and we're in the hills of West Virginia and it was not going up those hills. And this is a V8. It should be able to pull an 18 foot travel trailer with no trouble. It was not going to last. He said it blew up two weeks later. I was like, well, praise the Lord. I did not want to be going uphill in West Virginia in the middle of absolutely nowhere with no cell service and have my engine blow up. But we were able to do that, praise God, because we had planned ahead of time. And it barely set us back. I mean, the finances came back pretty quickly because of the way we had set up our approach to deputation. Because once you use some of it, as you get offerings, as you get gifts, put it back in there, keep it going. That's what we, on deputation, we determined that By God's grace, we would live off of our offerings. Whatever offerings came in, that's what we live off of. And then whatever as the support would come in, that would accumulate. And so that when we went to the field, our shipping, our suitcases, all of that. We didn't have to, like you said, we didn't have to call anybody for airplane tickets. We didn't have to call anybody because we already had it saved. And I think churches out there, for the most part, are saying, hey, if you need help, we want to help you. But I think it's also a relief to them knowing that a missionary has used some wisdom, saved some money, and he's not having to call everybody for these things. And just, he's got the money there. He doesn't wait until, you know, and just live high on the hog, well, we got this money, let's spend it. And then, well, we got to go, now we need tickets, you know, it's going to cost us $2,000 a kid, you know, and it's just. Yes, I think they're willing to help, but I don't think they should have to do that if we're using our... That's exactly what I'm... That's what I mean by that mentality. If you have that mentality that it's my responsibility and I'm going to manage things effectively, I'm going to be a good steward of what God has given me, then we can honestly take... And now, There are things we paid for, we fully expected to pay for, later churches found out about it and said, we wanna help with that and sent money to recover what we paid. They didn't have to do that, but they wanted to. And that is a huge blessing and we appreciate that. And that's more motivation for me to take less naps and less trips and to stay busy and stay focused. To me, that is... When I think back to what churches did for us on deputation and what they've done for us since we've been here, it is hard for me to take in. It is incredible what churches will do for you, but you need to use that sparingly. You need to be respectful and mindful of that. Don't abuse that. And going back to what we said at the beginning, I think that's one of the things that a pastor or a church, and I use this term, has the right to sit down with a missionary and say, are you in debt? How do you do your finances? Do you continually have a debt? And because that's one of the things I remember my dad one time, BIM, I had to send my dad to or ask my dad to go up to Germany to consolidate a church up there because a missionary had not only gotten a personal debt, but took the church into debt. The government was after Mary. I mean, just a mess. And you've got to learn to live within your means. And you cannot have a debt mentality, you know, because when you come over here, what you'll do is you'll say, well, we've got to have this church built in this certain amount of time. Well, I don't have the money. And, you know, so let me just put it on my credit card or whatever. And you'll end up those finances will destroy your ministry. And so I think it would be very wise for pastors to sit down and say, hey, do you have debt? And I'm not here to condemn you, but just do you have debt? And if you do, all right, how much is it? How long does it take you to pay off? Get it paid off, then come back. We'll talk about sending you out. And get that. And I like your idea of getting that. amount set up, what Dave Ramsey calls an emergency fund or whatever, and putting that back so that you have a little bit set aside so you're not having to totally struggle. It takes a lot of the pressure off of deputation because You know, your wife's running ragged because you don't have a dollar in your pocket. And I have had a few pastors say to me, you know, just a few. Most pastors, when they heard that that was, when they found out, they would sit down with us like this and want to know, so what is your plan to accomplish this? And when I tell them these things, most of them were very impressed with that. They thought that was, man, they were like, man, that is a great idea. I don't know why more missionaries don't do that. And so I had a few say, well, you don't trust God. Okay, well, God said if you're gonna build something, you're gonna sit down and count the cost. If you're gonna go to war, you're gonna sit down and count the cost and make sure that you can finish it. So yeah, I trust God. I trust what he said. I don't... place an emphasis on this idea that I'm gonna jump off a cliff and then I'm gonna put the responsibility on God to catch me before I hit the bottom. No, I'm gonna put on a parachute, then jump off the cliff. As God wants us, as you said a minute ago, to use some wisdom to this. And under the guise of spirituality, We approach these things completely void of wisdom, which is not good at all. This is just kind of a side note here, but it's interesting that many of the same guys who tell you to trust God, as they get older, in their lives, all of a sudden they have no income, they have no savings, they have nothing, and now they're depending on churches to, you gotta take care of me. And it's like, well, why don't you trust God? And it's not an issue of trusting God, it's an issue of using the wisdom that God's given you. So faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. And the word of God gives you practical steps on how to approach your finances. Right. That doesn't change when you decide that it's time for you to go out on deputation. And they need to be respected and we need to be mindful of those things. Now you had mentioned this idea of churches, of missionaries kind of straddling, maintaining a job as well as, is that one of the topics? Yeah, well. It might have just been underneath. Yeah, it was. It was part of this section. So there are two things that we did that were extremely important to me, that were part of our goals. We set these goals before going on deputation. I mean, like two years before, and we began working towards these goals so that there was a process we could end up at when it was time for us to go on deputation, we could say, okay, we're prepared. And so one of them was, we started taking meetings while I was still working full-time. Now, I explained to those pastors, I have not started deputation, but if you want us to come, we'll be happy to come. Here's when I'm available, I'm still working full-time. And that job was a means to an end, paying off debt, saving extra money, buying a travel trailer, outfitting it for what I need when we're on the road, getting a vehicle that can hold up on the road, all these things that I need to take care of before we go. And we had maybe five or six meetings before we finally set out on deputation. And that was a blessing because it helped us to raise a small amount of support. I would say maybe 5% or 10% of our support was raised in those five or six meetings. And so that allowed us some flexibility. you know, to be able to have some support coming in, I opened an extra checking account that that money went into, we lived off my paycheck, we didn't live off that little bit of money that churches were giving us, and so that money went into that account, money that we were saving for deputation went into that account, and we just kind of separated it all before we went out on deputation. Then when it was time to quit my job, now my bosses knew what I was doing. I didn't just surprise them one day and say, okay, by the way, I'm leaving to go to Africa. They knew what I was working towards and had a very good work ethic at work. They spoiled me at work, though it was unbelievably secular. Myself and another brother from our church worked there. I mean, they they loved us, anything we wanted or needed. And again, we didn't abuse that, but because we would show up to work, we would do our job, we were there on time, we did our job well, we applied Christian ethic to our work. When it was time to leave, my boss said, if you need to come back, I will empty my desk so that you can have a spot. He's like, you are always welcome to come back. I thought I was gonna have to take advantage of that when COVID hit, I was like, man, It looked there for a minute like everything was... Like it was all over. But the point is that I know a missionary, he's a good brother. If I knew that he said his name, you would know it. He said, I started deputation when I got fired. Well, probably because what I said before, when you try to do both, both are going to suffer. Yeah, it does. And so that was our approach to that. We used that little bit of space before we started deputation. If a pastor was willing to have us, we came. And if they supported us, we separated that money and kept it aside. And at that time, we had one church who said, well, we're gonna put it in an escrow account. No problem, I understand. And they did. And when it was time to go, they followed our prayer letters. When it was time for us to leave, they contacted us and said, okay, we're gonna send this money on. And that ended up being like, you know, with the amount of support they gave us, which is a goodly amount, it'd be in like $2,500 that we get right there at the end before we leave on top of money that we'd already saved, it's just a huge help. And so that was our approach to that and how we handled that. Did you have a job at the time or were you just full-time in school? No, we were... Well, I was full-time at school with a job and my wife had graduated the year before I did. And so, but we both worked at the same company. And so, we made pretty good money in our last year of Bible college. And so, we were able to pay off my school bills and save, we didn't have quite $15,000, but we had a good amount so that when we set out, we, I mean, we, we pretty much went from my, um, we, I graduated in, uh, 94 May and we were on the mission field in January of 96. And, uh, so we just, we, we hit the road running and, uh, we had. And, you know, I'm not sure if I mentioned this in that article or not, but we, I always tried to stay, you know, five to six months ahead on scheduling. So you can't wait, you know, until you're starting to say, okay, I'm going to set these up because, you know, churches have their schedules as well. And so, you know, before I graduated, I tried to get, you know, I let them know, hey, I'm graduating this time. This is my home church. This is, you know, what we're doing. and so that we could have that schedule to go to when we finish. Yeah, amen. Now, to put the $15,000 to $20,000 in perspective, first of all, I was a communications engineer, so I made good money. I didn't make a lot of money, but we made good money. Plus, my wife and I custom built furniture on the side, and then we bred Dobermans, and then my wife had a job working with her mom. So we had a good amount of money coming in. But secondly, to facilitate that, We bought the travel trailer almost a year ahead of time and moved into it and found somewhere to park it where it would be very inexpensive. And that facilitated our paying off debt and saving that money. We did the same thing. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's- Because we were, I got, we got married right the year before I graduated. Okay. And so we got an apartment. And I was paying for the motorhome to be stored at a storage lot. Oh, yeah. And one day, my wife and I were looking at each other and thinking, why are we storing that over there and paying $300 a month rent here? And so we talked to my brother and sister-in-law, and we just put it at their house and lived in it to finish out. Well, my wife's father had us park it. It was kind of a way for him to spend time with his daughter before he took off to Africa. So he let us park it in his backyard, which, you know, a backyard in the middle of Orlando, Florida. It was a little odd, but it's not exactly camping, but it was a huge blessing though. And those are the kinds of things that people need to think about. The initial sacrifices need to be made so you can accomplish the end goal. So a lot of our With that in mind, a lot of our accomplishing deputations started at least a year before we went on deputation, or more, depending on what it takes to meet the goals you have set up to prepare you. Not trying to figure these things out on deputation, which Well, and we were already used to the motorhome. So we got out, we were just ready to go. And then we took it out. Our first trip, our first meeting, when we first started deputation, was Mountain City, Tennessee, with Pastor Daniel Jones. So we took it straight to the mountains, from Florida straight to the mountains. We were like, oh, man, this is. I had to replace, because when we had the motorhome in the backyard of their house, The, uh, tires in the back were lower to get the, uh, the level. And so what I found out when I pulled it out after having it in there, six months had dry rot on the tires. So I had to replace all my tires. So I took it to, I took our tribal trailer. Like I said, it was a 1995 and we were about to take it on the road and go thousands of miles with it. So I took it to a trailer, uh, trailer. company there in Deland, Florida. And, uh, they did a full inspection and anything that needed to be fixed or replaced, they, they took care of it. And, uh, and, uh, said, no, this thing is built like a tank. You're fine. It'll be great on the road. And it was, it was, it had tandem axles. So it had the double axles on it, which is important, uh, especially when you're traveling to that extent. And, uh, if you blow a tire or something like that, you know, you, you have four tires. I saw your trailer when I was there in Carthage. Did you? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because we gave it to Brother Ron. Brother Ron, Ron Ralph, is a man I love dearly, but that church did so much for us and has given so much to our ministry. He bought our truck and they still have that there. And he said, I'd like to buy your travel trailer. I said, can we just give it to you? So we came back in January. He bought our truck because we were not going on these long-term meetings where we're going to be out constantly. We were going to be kind of coming back and forth, but we only had a handful of meetings left. So our idea was, let's get rid of this big old truck and the travel trailer and buy a small SUV that we could travel in. So we bought a little Honda Pilot. Cornerstone bought that Honda Pilot. So he bought my truck, and he found out I needed another vehicle, and they bought us the Honda Pilot. And then he said, I'd like to buy your travel trailer also. I said, can we just give it to you? No, you're not buying it, it's yours, you just take it." And he said, okay, well, my wife and I might like to use it. It didn't last two months and he gave it to another missionary, which is fine, that's just his mentality. He's just... That's great. They're a very giving church, they've been a huge blessing to us. Amen. the things churches will do for you, I'm telling you, it's overwhelming. And if you don't have the proper amount of integrity, it can turn into a racket. And that's what we want to avoid and prevent. So saving money, no debt. You had mentioned the dynamics of trying to keep a job and maintaining a job and all of that. That's just a little too difficult. Next on the list is building good relationships. Now, this is an area where I... Really? Why are you laughing at this? This is an area, honestly, I'm terrible at communication. I'm terrible at making friends. I'm very standoffish till I get to know you. So this is really hard for me. And so I had to come up with some way to get this accomplished. Put your wife out in front? She's likable and people enjoy her company, so... But now you kind of came from a little bit of... So your dad was a missionary and a pastor, and you came from a Bible school that was heavily missions-minded, and you joined up with BIMI. All of that can help facilitate building relationships, but When it comes to the bare bones, you getting to know pastors and getting yourself in front of them, how did you do that? Well, like you said, my dad had, in a lot of churches, already had a good name. Pastor Thompson had a good name. Our home church, BIMI, for the most part, had a good name, and I mean that in a good way. And then the college that we were at at that time was very popular amongst independent Baptist churches, had a good name. So we had a lot of a lot of things going for us. And so whenever I would call a church and they understood that association in one of those four areas, it was pretty easy to be able to get in, and that was the beginning of that relationship. But again, And it goes back to the motorhome thing. That was what helped us to build the relationships was being able to be in those churches and spending time with those. And that's under this title. You talked quite a bit, you mentioned it earlier about splitting time between churches. And so if you want to reiterate your… focus on quality rather than quantity. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it wasn't an idea of how many churches can we get in, it's an idea of the churches we are in, let's spend time with them and not be in such a hurry to move on. Now, we don't want to outdo our welcome, but be there long enough to where you've built a relationship. And God forbid that a missionary can't say, hey, pastor, let me go buy you a meal. And that's when the pastor's jaw drops to the ground. Yes, we had that experience as well. What? But we did that many times. And it's a blessing. And we would, a lot of times, especially on Sunday meetings, a lot of churches have activities on Fridays, Saturdays, youth activities, because when you're there, when you're able to get there on Thursday, hey, we've got a youth activity on Friday, can you come speak for that? Or we have bus visitation on Saturdays, you wanna come speak to that? So it just gives you More opportunity to be seen, more opportunity to be with the people. They associate your name a little bit more than just someone who comes in and out. You cannot build a relationship just coming to a service and leaving. And don't misunderstand me. I'm not opposed to that. And I think there are times that that may happen. But if you're going to build relationships, and I think that is a key to getting your support in a timely manner, you've got to spend time with them. And be willing, and you can do this when you have some savings set aside. Pastor, hey. Let's go out to eat." And you pay for it, and spend time with him. Ask him questions about his ministry. Ask him questions about... Many times when I would take pastors out to eat and stuff, I ended up finding out more about them than they did about me, just because I took an interest in their ministry. I took an interest in their family and their life. And so it just goes a long way to building that relationship. And I just think it's, again, in our goal of saying, God, my heart's desire, deputation is a necessary evil. It is something that I've got to go through. It is part of this ministry that you've called me to, but I want to keep it at a minimum because my heart is on the field. And so relationships is a very big key in befriending yourself. I could tell you story after story after story of just times that we've spent with pastors. And I remember a pastor in Missouri, Lafayette, Missouri. And going out, and he says, I need to go to the store and get some stuff. Hey, can I go with you? Went with him, bought groceries and stuff. On the way out, they have this little machine where you can pay a dollar or something, and it gives you a dog tag. He made dog tags for all my kids. We have never forgotten that. And every time we go back to that church, hey, remember when you bought those dog tags for my kids? It's relationship. And again, when you show up Sunday night, stay in a hotel, come to the church the next morning, then leave after, You're coming and going, and I don't mean this bad, but you're just another missionary. And so I determined I was going to try as much as I could to build relationship with pastors, and I think God blessed that. We did something similar. My inability to build relationships aside, we decided we were going to put more emphasis on spending quality time with those churches and letting them get to know us, and we didn't split, like you had mentioned in the article, we didn't split Sundays and try to rush from one church to another. Some pastors understand that. They know that missionaries have a go-get-it attitude. Some missionaries have... Many missionaries, I believe many missionaries do. They have this go-get-it attitude and they wanna rush off to the next place. And some of them are understanding of that. But like you said, When you take quality time and... So what we did was we didn't split Sundays. We told that church, if it's okay, we'd like to be there with you the whole day. We'd like to come a day or two early. Anything you have going on in the church, we'd like to be a part of it and help out with it. We were able to help with vacation Bible schools. We had a pastor in Ohio call us. We were in North Carolina. And he says, hey, I've got a children's camp that I'm doing. I really need some help with it. Is it possible that you could help us? And we're like, when is it? Tomorrow. I won't say it. Was that the one you had to drive all night to get to? Yes, we drove all night. I won't say his name. I love him, but he's a special character. But that church still supports us and loves to read our prayer letters and is a blessing because we not only went and helped them, but we drove all night to go up there and help them take part in this camp, and then drove all the way back to North Carolina and picked up where we left off. But we had the time in between to do that. We had the finances to do that, to jump in our vehicle. We left our trailer parked in one place, jumped in the vehicle and drove I mean, it was an eight or 10-hour drive from North Carolina to Ohio, and helped out at this camp, and then drove all the way back and jumped right back into deputation. And we were able to do those things, and that meant a lot to those churches. And then we never did drop-ins. We did it like twice, and it was so awkward. The churches felt there was just this really uncomfortable... We really were there for church. We were not there to impose upon their meeting or their services, but they feel like they need to give you money, they feel like they need to give you time, they feel like they need to... We really were just there for church, but it just creates this really awkward situation because of their experience with other missionaries that are rushing from place to place and not really trying to spend this quality time with them. And so we just decided what we would do on the services where we didn't have a meeting, we would either stay at the church where we were, or we'd go visit a church that was already supporting us, or a church that we already had a relationship with. I can't tell you how many churches who saw us come in their doors and they're like, you doing here?" And we're like, well, we didn't have a meeting tonight, so we thought we'd just come visit you. And they're like, really? Yeah. You just wanted to come see us? And I was like, yeah, we're just coming to have church and see you, say hello and fellowship, and then move on to the next place. And so I despise... Again, this is my opinion, but this this used car salesman cold call, you know, I don't care about you. I don't care about your people. I just want to know if you're going to support me or not. If you are, then I'll give you some time. If you're not, I'm rushing to the next spot because I really don't care about any of you. Right. That is not a good approach or mentality. And just emphasizing that drop in, because, you know, I know that. And you see this a lot, especially in churches in the South, where missionaries will just, they don't have a meeting, so they'll just drop in. I wish missionaries would understand that that really puts the pastor in a hard place. It does. And I would rather just look in the phone book and find a church that has a Baptist on it or something and attend there than to put a church that in the future I may call or want to get support from and put him in a bad position. I remember Pastor Hank Thompson, he was one of the most gracious men that I've ever known in my life. We would have missions conference, and we always had big missions conferences anyway. He'd have 15 to 20 missionaries in the week. And by the time the week was done, he'd have about 30. It's like, where did these guys come from? And oh, we hear a missions conference is going on. Let's drop in. That to me, and this is my opinion, that is very unethical. When you are a missionary and you're out trying to get support, that puts you in a different position than a normal person coming to church. You know, if you have to, if you need to be in church and, you know, then show up five minutes late and, you know, get on the back roads where you're not going to disturb anything, you're not putting the pastor on a pressure that he has to call you up to do something or give you something, do your best. And I love your attitude about that. Do your best to realize I'm not here for me. This church is gonna be here long before I'm gone, and I want to leave a good taste in the mouth of this church when I leave here. I don't want them to say, I can't believe that guy came. Why did that guy show up? We don't want it to be a story. Yeah, exactly. That they have to tell. If you think that for missionaries going into deputation, If you think deputation is a cutthroat, hard sales type business, stay home. Just don't do it. Because we could name some groups that we know of who push this idea of exactly the opposite of what we're talking about. And I've not met a pastor, I've met just a few who don't have this opinion. Most of the pastors I've met when this group comes up, they despise them and want them to stop contacting them altogether because it's, Their approach to deputation is that of a scammer in India blowing your phone up. That's not what deputation is supposed to be about. This is the body of Christ you're approaching, and you need to approach it with a lot more respect and concern. The way that people are gonna know that you belong to Jesus Christ is your love for the brethren. Now, I'm terrible at relationships, but I love the body of Christ, and I do not want to disrespect it, harm it, hurt it, or abuse it in any way, and stand before Jesus Christ and say, but I got deputation done. Yeah, but you made everybody hate you and your organization in the process. And so we just want to avoid that as much as possible. And for the few pastors that will overlook it, most won't. The majority won't. And I think that is one of the areas that could cause a person to, well, I'm not going to call or I'm not going to wait. I'm just going to show up. You may have a pseudo meeting by just showing up, but they're not going to support you because you've left a bad taste in their mouth. They don't want anything to do with you. And so if nothing else, and this is something too, a lot of times on deputation, a church at that time were not able to take us on. But I left a good taste in their mouth, and either on the first term or when I came back on furlough and set up a meeting with them again, they took us on. Because we left, I didn't bad mouth them because they didn't support us. I didn't bad mouth them because they didn't care about our ministry. I left a good testimony, a good relationship, and I was able to come back later on when they were able to, and they ended up taking us on. We have churches who couldn't support us, who wanted to. There's one in particular. They wanted so badly to support us and couldn't. And later, they began giving us $30 a month. That is some of the most invaluable money we get every month, because that church is sacrificing to give us that little $30 per month. I think Christ is gonna so honor that, and so should we. And it's just... It's frustrating to see the... the unethical abuse of the body of Christ, just so you can raise support and go give somebody the gospel. If you can't do it in a godly and honorable manner, then you should not be a missionary. You need to go home and stop abusing people to accomplish your goals. And I would just like to see some of that altered. Now, your next piece of advice, which is... It's one we started out trying to keep, and it just kind of expanded. Now we were able to keep it somewhat tight, but your next piece of advice was to choose three states. And you and I talked about this when we met back in 2016. Right. And you laid out the importance of this, and I'll just quickly tell you what we did. Let me see if I... I guess what I'll do is tell you what we did, how we came to have meetings, and maybe you can talk about how you got your meetings and how you were able to keep it organized the way you do. Like you said, you don't have to travel too far between meetings. So what we did is I didn't call anybody. And this method that I have was born almost out of necessity. I was a communications engineer. I drove two hours one way to work. I would work 10 to 12 hours and then drive two hours home. That meant I cannot make phone calls to schedule meetings. So what I began doing is I just created this email template. And it was very concise, but I put all the information in it that I needed, that I thought that pastors needed or that would be helpful to them. And then I put web links in it to my website. So in the email, it was very concise. It was very simple. All it did was introduce my wife and I. I didn't ask for a meeting. I didn't ask for money. I didn't ask for anything. Now, of course, the desire for a meeting is implied. That's the hope. Sure. But the entire point of the email was to say, my wife and I are missionaries on our way to Uganda, and this is who we are. And I made a PDF booklet. It didn't have 20 attachments in it, which drive pastors crazy. I took all the attachments and put it into a book format and created one PDF. They could open that one PDF and scroll through and see as much as they want. And it had my Bible school background, ministries I participated in, a letter of recommendation from my pastor, a letter of recommendation from you because we had planned to come work with you, and a letter of recommendation from Brother David Brown, our assistant pastor. And then a brief explanation of what we intended to do when we got here. I mean, it was very simple. Sure. I tried to lay it out nicely. My wife made it, and I told my wife when she made it, this is not for women. Don't make some girly little frou-frou book to send out to pastors. Try to make something that would appeal to pastors." And so she did a great job. She made a great little booklet. We started out printing hard copies, which BIM got us a great deal to print, and we found it was unnecessary. We just used the PDF booklet and ended up giving the hard copies away to churches as we went to them if they wanted them. And so I put this email together, I would put my latest prayer letter in it, that booklet, and I think that was it, just a few web links to our website. And what I did was I sat down, I started with Florida, because we wanted to venture out slowly. And I searched every Baptist church in Florida, and at night I'd come home from work, get my computer out, and my wife could do it with me because of this method. Sure. She could log into my email address, I gave her... She would start with Georgia, I would start with Florida. And I searched every independent Baptist church I could find, I would search for their email addresses. I did not approach them on Facebook. Yeah. If you find a pastor on Facebook and you use that as a means to bypass the method he has put together at his church for missionaries to contact him, I don't think that's ethical. I don't think that is a good thing to do. Now, if you do that and it's working for you, that's up to you. And if pastors are okay with it, that's between you and the pastor. I just don't think that's the proper way to do it. I also didn't pray on my pastor. I didn't go find all the pastors. He preaches all over the country. I didn't go find all the pastors he preaches. for and say, I belong to James Knox if you wanted to support me. Now, when they came up in the list, I emailed them, but I didn't go out of my way to prey on his relationships for my benefit. And so I just began searching churches. I would look for their email address on their church website. If we found their email address, I would include them in this email. I would just BCC a large group of pastors and people and send the email out. At first, it was a little scary because we were not getting much response. Over time, my phone began blowing up and pastors began calling me and inviting me to come. And doing it this way, 70% of those pastors told us on the phone, having seen your email and gone through your material, we're going to support you, we just need you to come and present your ministry. And we were like, we'll be there when you need us to come. And because we started in Florida, then went to Georgia, then Mississippi and just kind of Alabama and just kind of worked our way up, I used the Mississippi River as a dividing line and we worked our way all the way north. 98% of our support is from Kentucky, south to Florida, and then a few one-offs here and there up in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, those areas. That was my approach to deputation. That's how we did it. We kept it very simple. My wife could help. She wasn't just kind of hanging out there. So every morning from 8 to 12, we would log into my email address, and we'd sit there at the little table we made in our travel trailer using my phone as a hotspot for internet, and we would just systematically go from Florida all the way up until we got meetings booked. And we had friends who used the phone call method, and they're calling pastors and calling and calling and calling, and they had way more meetings booked than us. They were like, man, what are we gonna do? I mean, they're getting meetings and I'm not. Maybe I should... My wife was like, are you sure you don't wanna make some phone calls? And I was like, let's give it to this date, and then I'll reconsider what we'll adjust." Well, by that date, pastors were calling me, and for the rest of deputation, pastors called me and said, hey, we got your material, this is the date we have available, can you come? And because it's from Kentucky South, we really never had to travel more than eight or 10 hours. It was very reasonable. And it just... I thank God for that, because I didn't have to sit with a phone dialing number after number after number and cold calling and nobody answering the phone and no one returning your calls. And we found it had this... reciprocal nature where a pastor got the email, but months later, he responded to it. He waited till he was ready to start scheduling his meetings, and he said, I got this email a while back. Are you still on deputation? We'd like to have you come. I was like, absolutely. And so it was a blessing. That's kind of the way we did it. It was a very, in my estimation, respectful approach. Sure. And I got a lot of good feedback. Yeah. I've even seen a lot of... I saw this when I was setting up meetings and just confirming. These days, you have to confirm that the pastor is still the pastor of this church. So when I was... In all my emails, it said, pastor. Yeah. It didn't say his name because you don't know anymore. So when we were setting up this last furlough, I would go to their websites, and I started seeing something new that I've never seen before is in their homepage, there's typically a link for missionaries to click on because that's the – appears to be that's kind of the direction – that's how they want you to contact them. Because we found When we started out, we didn't have email. We didn't have internet. We didn't have any of that. So the only way to do was call. And the frustration of just trying to get through secretaries and schedules to get to a pastor. Which still exists. is just, I mean, so you've got this huge database, all right, I called this guy five times, still haven't got through, call back, you know, and it's just frustrating. So if a person can follow that method that you did, and seeing the way that websites are starting to put those links on their homepages a lot of times to have missionaries contact through that, I think that's a lot less of a stressful. Now, it may take a little while to get the ball rolling, like you said, but it's a lot less stressful. But if you, let's say that your pastors ask you to be at the church for a couple of years, start the thing six months before you go out or whatever, get the ball rolling. We found there was about a six month gap there where the phone calls began really rolling in. We got sporadic meetings here and there, but when the phone calls really started rolling in was about four to six months later. And so if you're going to do it this way... And another thing that I did, and this is where it could be improved upon, I think, Once I sent that email out, that was it. I didn't call them, I didn't follow up, I didn't send them another email, I didn't... I am not into multi-level marketing. Now, where I think that could be improved is maybe if missionaries who are better at communication than I am made some sort of respectful follow-up plan. That wouldn't be a bad thing, I don't think. That's all we did. Once I sent the email, I did not bother that church again. I just assumed they either were not interested or just couldn't have a missionary in at the time. And most pastors through email will tell you. On the phone, it seems that pastors have a hard time saying no. They feel almost pressured to give you this meeting, and they think they're helping you by giving this meeting when they know they can't support you. And instead of just telling the missionary, you're welcome to come, we'll give you a love offering, but we can't support you right now. I just need you to know that before you come. Instead, they just say, yeah, you go ahead and come, we'll give you a love offering. And that missionary is not gonna tell you he's traveling 38 hours just for that one meeting, and then he gets there and you give him a $100 love offering, which I'm not... I'm not condemning that. I don't think it's the church's responsibility to pay his expenses, but because of that, the pressure and the lack of proper communication between the two, the missionary's not going to tell him. He just wants a meeting. So he's not gonna tell him, I'm traveling beyond my means. And the pastor is not gonna tell him, we can't support you, but we'll just give you a love offering. And it may not be that big of a love offering. It won't cover your expenses is what I'm alluding to. And so it just creates this inefficient. We found that the guys who were making phone calls, it was a very inefficient way. As they're traveling, they're bouncing all over the place. And oftentimes the pastor they spoke to, couldn't support them necessarily, and just didn't have the heart to tell them that, but told them to come for the meeting anyways. And doing it this way just became an unbelievably efficient way to get it done. And The feedback from pastors, they often said, I really appreciate you presenting yourself this way. This was a huge blessing. And it gave them time to sit back, look at my material. Think about it. And find out and think. Yeah, think through what they want us to know. Not being put on the spot with a phone call. Yeah. It's not high-pressure sales. And I wanna see, not that I have a say in the matter, but missionaries move away from... There's nothing wrong with calling pastors. The high-pressure sales methods of calling pastors, that needs to go away. That needs to disappear. So choose three states. We didn't talk about that much. What's your method or reason for choosing three states? Well, I just... That was the advice that I got from my dad. He, um, because he saw, uh, again, we had a motor home, we were starting out. We didn't, you know, we didn't have a lot. And so we were living on the road. And so by, by taking three states, you could, um, keep your distances shorter, um, not having to travel so far, it's a lot easier to plan it. So we did that. We, my dad had pastored in Missouri for, um, about. four or five years there in central Missouri. So he had a lot of contacts. People knew him in that state. Texas, a lot of churches in Texas, and that was where our home church was. So a lot of people were familiar with our home church. And then California back in the 90s was really blossoming as far as they were just looking for missionaries to support. A lot of churches being started out there. So we basically chose those three churches. And we had, I think, one church in Kansas that supported us and one in New Mexico. But when we went to the field the first time, all of our support was from those three states. And it made it also easy coming back on the first furlough. Now today, because. You're all over the place. We're all over the place. And so, but it just made it easier. It made it more concise. We weren't saying, all right, we got to, because you know, when you first start out. just to get a meeting, you're wanting to party. I mean, I've got a meeting. But I see a lot of guys, even this last furlough, I met a missionary, he had a meeting in Georgia, and then he had a meeting in Texas in the conference I was at, and then he was going to go from there back to Mississippi. And I'm like, how do you do that? I mean, that is, it's no wonder people hate deputation, you know? And so by keeping the states concise, by keeping your location, I never even went east of the Mississippi until- We never went west of the Mississippi. Yeah, until, because I just, I had this idea, and people tell me it was a wrong idea because people are still, I just had this idea that every church east of the Mississippi was overloaded with the missionaries. because of all the universities and Tennessee Temple and Pensacola and all these... Do you still have that mentality today? I don't think so, because now I've had churches call me. I was just on the phone yesterday with one of our supporting churches in North Carolina. the idea was there that, in my mind, that they're overloaded, but, and there may be some cases around, you know, like Greenville, South Carolina or something where just. Where there's 10,000 churches. Bombarded. But then I had, I got a church that took us on for support in Greenville last, last furlough, you know? And so, so it's there, but when we start out, we just determined we're going to stay west of the Mississippi. And, and then we chose those three states and, and, and pretty much, pretty, pretty evenly. I was about, you know, 33% from each, each state. It was pretty, it was amazing how that worked out. But, but that was just on the advice of my dad, something he saw when he, when he went out and just saying, Hey, you know, don't, you know, you've got a wife, you've got a child, you know, don't go from coast to coast, you know, meeting them, you know, it's, because then you become like a James Hofmeister, you know, you become like a James Hofmeister. world. He's all over the world. You never know where he might pop up. He might be outside here in Uganda waiting on us. It would not surprise me if I walked out there and James Hoffmeister was sitting there. That is one energetic guy. Just passing through. So he's got one understanding wife. That's all I got to say. I'm telling you what But that's what worked for us and now in the east states are smaller And so I'm not dogmatic on three states, but yes in the east your states are smaller, but keeping it to an area and then one of the things you had mentioned to me is if if one state like, say, California, begins to fail, your support is spread across other states. If there's some sort of financial depression, you don't... And that's... Again, we don't like to think of missions in those terms, because God blesses us with this support, but you can't assume it's always gonna be there. And being spread out in that way is It's spread out in a concise manner, but it's spread out in such a way that if there is some sort of depression in one part of the country, it doesn't hurt you quite as much as it might have if you were either only in one state or spread all over the place. So next you say to work eight hours per day to schedule meetings. And that is where the... The Bible says there is profit in all labor. If you are working to some end, there's gonna be profit. If you're not, there's not going to be profit. Now, I understand that's oversimplification of that, but for keeping things practical, if you schedule time that you're going to be working to raise support, to get in touch with churches, and to do what was necessary to get meetings scheduled, if you're doing that, there's going to be fruit. If you're not, there's not going to be fruit. And I hope people don't take that as an accusation. You need to examine what's going on with your own ministry. I'm just telling you this was my experience. As long as I was working, God blessed. If I wasn't working, what is there to bless? Yeah, and I don't want you to think or anyone listening that For us, deputation was a year and a half vacation. Because again, I can't take credit for a lot of these advices that I'm giving people because these are advices that my dad gave me. To some extent, same thing we did. But he told me, he said, listen, if you're out there and you're expecting people who work 40 hours a week to support you, you need to put 40 hours a week into trying to get your support raised and do it. Why should you? lay around every day and not do anything when they're doing. And so we would do that. I would get up in the morning and just, in those days, again, we didn't have cell phones. We didn't have email. I mean, the only way you could do it was call. And so our method was I had a packet of information, which I look at now and I'm like, I cannot believe I sent that out to churches. But in those days, it looked great. But I would send out packets of information to the churches, and then I would follow up those packets with a phone call. And I would buy phone cards, because I didn't want to come to a church and say, hey, can I sit in your office and make long-distance phone calls? So we bought phone cards. Wow, long-distance phone calls. Yeah, I know. Isn't that something? But we did. Every day, eight hours a day, we would sit. And here's the thing, Brother Thomas. I never had a week that I did not have two meetings, unless it was a missions conference. Because you just, you stay on that phone, you stay on that phone, you stay on that phone. And we stayed solid. And I just, I don't understand. And again, I realize every person's different. Every area of the States is different. Every personality is different. So I realize we're not all in the same ballpark, but. I don't understand how a guy, I just can't get meetings, I just can't get meetings. There's thousands of churches out there, even independent Baptists, all right? And I just don't understand how that's not possible, especially in the day and age where we can get a cell phone and make as many calls as you want. Unlimited, all the way across the country. Unlimited, you know? And so I just don't understand that. Back in the 90s, we used phone cards. Sometimes a pastor was gracious and said, hey, I know you got to set up meetings. You can have our – I would sit in the secretary's office and I would just make call after call after call. And again, I think God blessed that work ethic because I'm not just sitting there and – you know, hoping that I get meetings, you got to work at it. It takes work. It takes labor. And you're Don't go to the extent, as you were talking before, of becoming a professional salesman. But at the same time, you've got to keep yourself out there, and you've got to have a proactive effort in making this happen. And if you don't do that, then you're not going to get the meetings. And so we did. We tried. eight hours a day calling, setting up meetings, keeping our schedule set up. We try to always stay six months ahead. So I would work those eight hours a day until that month was set up, and then I would spend time finding churches for the next month, and then I would send out packets. And so you've got to be organized, and you've got to have a plan. You've got to have something that you want to accomplish. and then work that plan. And I think you can get it. I think it can be done, even in the day we live in today. Yeah. Well, if you were able to do that in a day when you didn't have nearly the resources or tools so built into just a phone, it's definitely. And just talking about this reminds me of all the, because with those phone cards, you got to dial in that whole number on the card. And then you got to put your pin number in. And then after that, you dial the number and then the secretary says, oh, the pastor's not in. It's like, I had my card memorized. I just type in all those numbers. I was so, that was one of the things back in those days, I'm telling you, I could hug a pastor's neck when he said, use our phone. I mean, wow. Praise the Lord. I can use my phone and not have to dial in a number. No, you just need an internet connection somewhere. All churches have Wi-Fi, they have... We would go sit in to get my wife out and get out and about a little bit, so I didn't drive her crazy. sometimes for that period from 8 to 12 is when we did the phone calls. Now, the rest of the day, I didn't just kick back and do nothing. I was working on the website, I was studying, I stayed productive, as productive as I could. But sometimes we would just go to a coffee shop and you could travel around the country, there's some unbelievably unique coffee shops you can go hang out in, you have free unlimited Wi-Fi. Now, sometimes we were the weirdos in there because everybody had green hair and... And then when you're sitting there doing your work, because we don't have to make phone calls, I can do it all on the computer, and then I get my Bible out and begin to study, well, eyes start turning and you get opportunities to talk to people, people ask questions, they wanna know why you're studying the Bible, what are you studying, what... It just... There's so much that can be done. It could be such a productive time, but you've got to have that mentality. And I thank God I did not have to have a long-distance card and make phone calls over and over and over. Well, and again, following your method is one thing because of the style you set up, but if you're not following that method, you cannot just sit there and say, God, I'm just waiting for meetings to come to me. That's that Christian welfare mentality. Yeah. You have got to get out there and work. And again, don't make a nuisance of yourself, but take advantage of every opportunity you can to get into churches. Now next, as we wrap it up, you said to travel with your family. This is another thing I don't understand. It needs to be said. Why does it need to be said is what I don't understand. I think I went to one meeting without Kristen, and it was because she was supposed to be having a baby, and the baby hadn't come yet. And I was like, I'll go there and I'll come right back. Just don't have the baby without me." And so I drove all the way up to Ohio from Tennessee, had a meeting there on Sunday. And I told the pastor ahead of time, he was adamant that he wanted us to come. I said, okay, I can come, but I can't come with my wife. She is... gonna have this baby anytime." I was like, I'll come, but I might have to cut out of there quickly if she tells me the baby's coming. He's like, no problem, we'd just like to have you come. So I drove, I think it was eight hours up there, had the meeting Sunday. I drove Sunday morning, early in the morning, had the meeting Sunday, stayed the night, drove right back the next day, and praise the Lord, I didn't miss the baby. So other than that, I love my wife and I want my wife and now my daughter. We love to be together. We are never apart other than when I'm out working. I spend a lot of time up here at the office trying to get work done. If I'm going somewhere, I want my family with me. Absolutely, absolutely. And pastors like her, they don't like, no. Yeah, right. But they need to see that, they need to see the relationship between us. It's that emphasis on quality again. I was at a church once in a meeting, And a guy came, he came without his wife, he brought his son, who was probably four or five years old, and his son was just horrendous. I mean, it was just really bad. And the pastor said afterwards, to me alone, he said, between me, you, and that briefcase, I wouldn't support that guy. Because his son was just a terror. As we were getting ready to leave, and all the missionaries, the church is gone, the church members are all gone, it's the pastor and the missionaries were all kind of saying goodbye in the foyer of the church, and this guy's son had gone outside the door, glass doors, and has grabbed the handles, has his feet on both doors, and he's holding himself up there, and his dad is jerking on the door saying, get off the door, get off the door in front of everybody. Wow. Passers need to see that. Like you said, you can show up somewhere and you can be anybody for a short amount of time, but if you go spend quality time with them and they get to see the relationship between you and your wife, the way you order your home means a lot to them. Well, there's two things. Number one, if a man know not how to rule his house, how shall he rule the house of God? If you're looking for a leader in your church based on that, then I think you ought to be looking at the same thing. If I was a pastor in the States, I would not have a person in unless his family was with him. Because I want to see his relationship with his wife. I want to see how his kids conduct themselves in church. Because if God put such an emphasis on that with the qualifications of a bishop, hey, if a man know not how to rule his house, how's she gonna rule the house of God? Well, if you can't see his house, if you can't see his home, how are you gonna know how he's gonna conduct himself on the mission field, all right? The second thing is this, a lot of times the excuse that guys give is, well, I want my kids to stay in school. All right, think about that. You're about ready to go to the mission field where there's no school. You're gonna be homeschooling your kids. What a better opportunity in your own country to learn how to homeschool your kids than why you're on deputation. All right. And so stop using that idea. Well, I want my kids to stay in school. Get them out of that school, get them used to that homeschooling situation so that when you get to the mission field, it's not a slap in the face and like, oh, now what do we do? Now we have to homeschool our kids. You've already had a year and a half to two years of deputation where you've homeschooled your kids, and you've traveled with their books. I mean, again, whether it's deputation or furlough, and I know good men, and I'm I'm not critical of these men, but I know good men, good missionaries, that they do all their traveling alone. But not only in that, but you're setting yourself up to so many temptations. Being out there in the world that we have in a day, staying in hotel rooms, staying around unlimited internet, when your wife is not there, your kids are not there, and you spend all that time alone, you're just opening yourself up to failure. When I look at deputation, I look at that as part of my ministry. And it's not my ministry. It's our ministry. And so if it's our ministry, then we do it together. It's not something I go out and do. So that's what I try to look from a pastor's point of view. As a pastor, what would I want to see? I want to see the whole family as a unit. I want to see how they. Because if you don't know how to control your kid, and I would agree with that pastor. If your kid is that way, you don't know how to control your kid, you're going to tell me you're going to lead a church? You're going to lead people? You're going to counsel them to have Christian homes? come on, you know. And so, and I think another reason why guys are afraid to take their families with them is because of that reason, they're afraid of what their kids will do, you know. And so, if you've got a problem, if you're embarrassed to take your kids with you, now, my kids are kids just like anybody else, all right? They need discipline. But my kids know how to act in church. They know how to conduct themselves around authority. They know how to say yes, ma'am and no, ma'am. And And when they do wrong, pastors know that our kids are just like anybody else's kids, but you can tell. A disorderly home. A disorderly home by looking at their kids. Versus the kid who just had a one-off moment of rebellion. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so for all of those reasons, I think it's just a benefit to... And if I'm a pastor, I want to meet your wife. How does your wife conduct herself? Does she just let herself go? How does she look? How does she appear? How does she conduct herself? Because you can also tell how a man and a woman interact with each other. Is this man really the ruler of his home? Is she ruling the home? Is she calling the shots? There's just so much you can learn from that. And I would ask myself the question, if I'm a pastor, why doesn't he want to travel with his family? Okay? And so there's just a lot of things, Brother Thomas, that—and again, I'm not saying a person's wrong when they don't. I'm just saying there's just a lot of— Far more benefits than negatives to try to look at your family. Absolutely. I think it is suggestive that there could be—not necessarily that there is, but there could be something that is off. And I wouldn't understand that someone who who was adamant about not traveling with their family. And I think most churches today, and I can only base this on my experience, we were in, I want to say, maybe 70 churches, and 65, 66 of them are supporting us. It's a decent amount of experience, but that's not hundreds and hundreds of churches. But most of those pastors want you to bring your family. Their understanding of situations where you may not be able to if you have a valid reason, but they really want you to bring your family. And I think that's reasonable. I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation. I can't think of one time. deputation or furlough, that I went to a meeting by myself. Even when my wife was pregnant, getting close to deliver Shane, we just stayed around our home church there. So I really can't... And that's what we were staying put at that time, because it was getting really close to her having the baby. And this church called and they were They were adamant that we come, and then we came, and nothing came of it. It's like, well... Why were you adamant? Yeah. I mean, they really wanted us... They were really excited. I said, well, let me talk to my wife. I said, I'll come, but I can't bring her right now. She can't travel in this condition. I said, but if I come, it's going to be real quick. I'm going to come up there. And I don't like doing that. you know, because then you just become another missionary rushing in and out. But they really seemed like they wanted us to come. I take that back. There was one time, and I don't even know how it happened, it was BIMI that contacted me and said there was a round robin of churches out in Southern California that they wanted me to be a part of. So I flew out there with another missionary by the name of Dwayne Herron and another missionary, Ron Jackson. There were three of us. And just one was single and the other two of us were married. And then there was another missionary by the name of Brother Gibson who's pastoring in California right now. So there's four of us. And going around kind of a round robin of churches, you know, missions. And so I think we were out there for two weeks. And nothing ever came of that either. Yeah. So there you go. It doesn't work. Yeah. Okay. This is not on the list, but just one quick, we'll make one quick note and then I'll give you, we'll kind of sum up the way you end the article. What about missionary questionnaires? Did you fill those out? What was your experience with those? Any advice concerning those that you would offer? You know, I've heard the horror stories of missionary questionnaires. I don't think I've ever had one. Usually you can read through a missionary questionnaire and kind of figure out what the motive for that questionnaire is. They are very telling. Yes. And so in a lot of areas I try to, you have to be very careful that you, word things properly, because if you don't word it right, they're looking for something. And so if they're emphasizing on a particular doctrine or they're emphasizing on a particular version of the Bible or whatever they're trying to emphasis on, I try to make sure that I answer it very clearly and very concise so that they know exactly what I mean. And many times, I would put in there, I said, there's a lot of disagreement on this. And I think that in many cases in this situation, You're not wrong or right either way. It's a preference situation, but this is where I believe. And so you just gotta be careful. And when you say word it carefully, you mean that you're being very honest about what you believe, but you're... Yes, but explaining it carefully, because I've found that pastors look for key words. It's like I had a pastor one time calling about, do you believe in the universal church? What do you mean by that? Yes and no. Yeah, exactly. I'm not a Catholic, but I do believe in the body of Christ. So I know what he's looking for. He's the Baptist Bride. He either is a Baptist Bride or he's against the Baptist Bride. Yes, exactly. And so you've got to sit down. And so I sent it in. He sent it back. He says, well, I see on your website that you believe in the universal church. And I'm like, On my website? I went to my website and looked under my thing and I talked to Pastor Adam. I said, do you think this... Well... Maybe the way you're wording it, it could be, you know, so I reworded it on my website to make sure I was careful to say what I said, you know. But, you know, so that's why I'm saying don't lie. I mean, I'm not telling people to lie on a questionnaire or tell them what you believe. But in some cases, you've got to be sensitive as to what it is that they're looking for and be very careful about how you word it so that you have a good understanding of what they're wanting. Sure. When it comes to, I've never had a questionnaire where they ask personal questions. I've heard of those. My dad has gotten some of those and he just writes back. My dad's a little more abrasive than I am. He just writes back and says, none of your business. But I personally have never, the questionnaires I've gotten are pretty decent questionnaires. I can't think back to any that, You know, they've asked me, you know, what I believe about dress and what I believe about this and that. And I just answer, you know, carefully, but there's not, I've heard of, you know, what does your wife wear to bed, you know, and things like that. But I've never had any of those. Steve Holt got that question. Yeah. And they got an answer that was probably more than they bargained. He said a smile. Now, Miss Holt is a wonderful lady. Whether she does that or not, I don't know. But he's got that kind of mentality. Because that's an idiotic question. Why would you ever ask anybody, what do your children wear to bed? What is wrong with you? Exactly. And you deserve the ridicule that you get for that. And it needs to be removed. I personally have not gotten anything like that. I didn't get any odd ones. They were all pretty straightforward. I mean, you could tell nearly every... Not all, but nearly every questionnaire was, it seemed to me, a pastor searching for a reason not to have you in. That's what it looked like. They're trying to find something they disagree with you on. Or recently, I've got several questionnaires of... And I thank God every church doesn't do this, because I wouldn't have time to do anything else. But churches want to make sure that the missionaries they're supporting are still doctrinally with what they're doing. Yes, which is understandable. Yes. And so I've filled out some doctrinal questionnaires from churches that say, hey, we love what you're doing, but we're just checking through all of our missionaries, making sure you're still in agreement with what we believe. And so, yeah, I don't have a problem with that at all. Well, I got to where I realized... When I got a questionnaire, I took it very serious, and I really tried to answer them thoroughly and explain my position on it and why. And I mean, I really took them serious, and not one of those pastors called back. It got to where if a pastor, if they scheduled us for a meeting and then asked me to fill out a questionnaire, I would fill it out. If they asked me to fill out a questionnaire in order for a meeting, I just said, pastor, I'm sorry, I found that... anytime I spend quality time trying to fill this out for pastors, and I never get a response back. So I appreciate it, but we'll just move on." And some responded not too happily, like, you know, that's the problem with you missionaries these days. It's like, well... Yeah. Okay. And then some responded respectfully, said, okay, I understand, and we just moved on. It just seemed to me that I was spending time filling these out, and there was no result from filling them out. Now, if a church said, hey, we want you in, but it's just a formality, we need you to fill this questionnaire out, I would still spend quality time on it, because they need to know who I am. Sure. And this is one of the means they wanna use to get to know who I am. Now, if you're using this as a means to prevent me from coming into your church, that's a problem. And churches... When it comes to deputation, we've really been hard on the missionaries. This conversation could go in another direction as well, but overwhelmingly, honestly, overwhelmingly, churches have been unbelievably good to missionaries. Yes, absolutely. There are some issues there that could be discussed, but our point in this is to help missionaries think about some things and think through some things that might help tighten up the deputation process for people who are interested in doing so. So to wrap it up, this has been a long conversation, and I'm thankful that you... I know this takes a lot of your time, and you're a busy man. I'm thankful that you take the time to do this. You end the article by encouraging missionaries to act with a grateful heart. So to give you the last word, if you would maybe sum that up as to what you mean and how that is and why that is important for missionaries. Pastor Hank Thompson, who was my pastor when I was on deputation, he always told me, he said, Keith, when you go out to churches, he says, remember, the worst that you get treated is better than you deserve. And so we tried to always maintain that type of attitude that says, hey, anything that is done good for us, we're grateful. Amen. But if nothing is done for us, we're grateful. We deserve it. Yeah, we deserve it. So we didn't go out with expectations you have to do for me. And so I tried to be over anything that was done to us. And I tried to instill this in our children. To the smallest thing, you make sure you go overboard. Thank you very much. I'm so grateful for what you've done. We would always, whenever we finish, write back thank you notes to the church. If a person in the church took us out to eat, we would get their name and address. We'd write them a thank you note. always doing everything we can to show our gratitude, not going in there saying, okay, why didn't you do this? Because this is what you're supposed to do to missionaries. And so it helped us to have the right attitudes. And yes, missionaries sometimes get together and they share their bad experiences and they're out there and we have fun talking about those things. But as you said, most churches went out of their way to treat me like a king. And, uh, and if you leave with an attitude that is, I deserve that. and not an attitude that says, I didn't deserve that, but I'm so grateful for what you did, then you're going to have a miserable heart. You're going to have a hard heart. And then when you get to the mission field and those things are not there, you're going to be a miserable person if you think everyone has to do for you. Because when you get to the mission field, especially when you get to these third world countries, you're going to find that nobody does for you. Nobody. And if somebody in our church here buys me a soda, you could blow me over with a feather. They don't have money. I'm not criticizing that, but if you live a life that says, I'm a missionary, and so I expect people to do for me, when you get to the mission field, people aren't going to do for you. You can talk yourself on deputation, you can talk yourself into the fact that they want you to come. And you get here, you find out they don't want you to be here. They could care less if you're in their country. And so you live a life of gratitude. And when people do for you, be thankful. Go out of your way to thank them for what they've done. And so it's been a while since I've wrote that, but that's an attitude I've really tried to perfect in our children and my wife. Always be grateful. Always be thankful. Even last night, my wife was going to the hospital there in Dayton, Ohio, just getting some checkups done. Of course, she's back there. She don't have a vehicle. And my parents driving her all over the place. And I just texted my mom and just said, Mom, thank you. Amen. Taking your day to take my wife around. Don't expect things. Don't live a life that just says, because of who I am, you have to do for me. When people do for you, you be grateful, and you be thankful for it. Amen. Well, praise the Lord. Well, again, I thank you for taking the time to sit down and do this. I know these seem to be getting longer and longer, but the feedback from people listening to them and watching them has been tremendous. I think it's helpful and instructive for people. There are lots of long-form podcasts in this format that's just total trash, stuff that Christians should never be listening to. But there are very few people willing to sit down and take this amount of time and talk about something that is important and near to the heart of Christians. And so I appreciate you taking the time to do this. Amen. We'll try not to drag all of them out this long, but I I hope this is a help to people. If you have any questions for me or for Brother Keith, contact us. You can let me know. I can forward on any questions anybody has, and he has been abundantly helpful to my family and I. I know he'll be helpful to you, and if we can do anything to help, you just let us know. Thank you for listening, and God bless. We hope you enjoyed this podcast. You can learn more about our ministry by visiting www.plenteusredemption.com. You can hear more Plenteous Redemption podcast audio at www.plenteusredemption.media. Please comment below if this podcast has been a help to you. Also, inform us of future topics that would interest you. Thank you again for listening to the Plenteous Redemption podcast.