Reform Baptist Mission Services and the Missionary. Now, this is a message that's going to be, in a sense, it's going to sound like policy, because I'm not going to have a Bible verse for every principle. But basically, it's what we've worked out since RBMS began in 1985. And when ARBCA, the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, was instituted in 1997. We absorbed RBMS, Reformed Baptist Mission Services, into ARBCA. And I did find a verse that I think expresses the basic principles. From Amos 3.3, when God is rebuking the people of Israel for how they've been living and why he is far from them, he brings up the idea, can two men walk together unless they are agreed? You have to be agreed to keep working together. And the reason why God was far away from his people is they weren't willing to walk with him. They weren't willing to walk in his ways. So how can two walk together unless they are agreed? Let me give you an overview. RBMS stands for Reformed Baptist Mission Services. It's an arm of ARBCA. It promotes, educates, cultivates, and helps in the vetting process of foreign missionary church planners as we work with local churches. Jerry said yesterday and said well, RBMS has never sent out a single missionary. It's not because we're great slackers, but it's because we understand biblically that mission boards or mission agencies don't send out missionaries. Local churches send out missionaries. RVMS is not a sending agency. It's not a foreign missions board. We've never sent out a missionary. We believe the scripture in our confession teach that the local church identifies, grows, helps to train, and then sends missionary church planters. Therefore, missionaries are employees, if you will, of the local church. Local church issues the forms for the people, not the government forms, not ARBCA. We've had missionaries think that they're employees of ARBCA or employers of RBMS, and that's not true. They had forgotten the basis of their own sending. A local church sent them, and they're accountable to that local church. Your local church, as a member of ARPCA, does work in cooperation with other associational Reformed Baptist churches to pool their resources to get missionaries to the fields of ministry. It's very rare to find a local church that has the resources to do everything necessary to identify, train, get ready, and then fund a missionary to go to the foreign field, let alone two or more. But in working with other churches, you can do a lot more together. Confessional Baptist Churches and Association work together to accomplish much more than any one of us could have done individually or separately. That's an overview. We're going to try to look at three things. What is the goal of Reformed Baptist Mission Services? Most people even mispronounce the name. There's a reason why our name is the way that it is, Reformed Baptist Mission Services, not Reformed Baptist Missions Service. Reformed Baptist Mission Services. How RBMS views and relates to the Missionary Church Planner. In other words, policy-wise, how does RBMS, how does this committee of pastors who serve on the RBMS committee, how do we view the local church missionary planner? And then, how should the Missionary Church Planner view and relate to RBMS? There is a relationship there, and we'll talk about that. First of all, the goal of our BMS Mission Services. Again, some people think that we're being ultra-retentive to say it's not Reformed Baptist Missions Service, it's Mission Services. We assist local churches with the sending of missionary church planners by providing services to them. We're not a mission-sending agency. We're not a foreign missions board. The final say-so does not come from us, in a sense. Now, how the policy works is that, let's say, someone from this church here believes he's being led to go to the mission field, that Robin Eckhart, who's an elder here, is going to be sent to the mission field. the Inuit Indians of Alaska. And so that sounds like a good thing for Robin to do. Anyway, so Robin wants to go to the Inuit Indians. He's already an elder in this church. He's already one of the pastors, so to speak. And they've seen his gifts and graces, and they want to send him. Now, they're certainly welcome to do that, and they can do it by themselves if they want to. If they'd like help, then they would apply to RBMS, and they would fill out a form along with Robin Eckhart would fill out a form. And then a committee from RBMS would interview him and interview the church. Tell us about your experiences. Tell us about preaching. Tell us about your family. Does your wife know that you want to do this? Is she on board? Is she being hospitalized? What's going on here? And then if RBMS said, well, we agree with the local church that this man should be sent out, then we have several committees. We have seven or eight committees. And then we have an overarching committee, the Administrative Council. This name would be passed on to them. Assuming nobody knows of any reason why this man shouldn't go forward, then he would be put forward to the churches, which means our BMS and this local church would send out notifications saying, Robin Eckhart, an elder in the church here in Jackson, Georgia, is being sent out from the church to a missionary to the Inuit Indians of Alaska. And here's reasons why we believe he's a good candidate and why the target is worthy, and we encourage you to make room in your budgets to support this brother and this worthy cause. Now, what happens then? Well, it takes churches a while to get their acting gear and have meetings and have votes and stuff like that. But unlike some parachurch ministries, which now take two and three and four years to raise support for people going overseas on missions, in our case, usually it's done within a year, sometimes less, sometimes six months. Because our churches do want to support missionaries. So the word would go out and local churches might invite Robin to come to their church and explain his call, explain his background, his conversion, give a vision for what he wants to do, and then these local churches would vote on it. Now, there's no obligation, there's no gun to the head of other churches saying, you've got to support this guy because you're a member of ARPCA and we're sending him out. There's not a guaranteed thing. This is not a deep pockets ministry where we have several million at headquarters and we're just wondering how to disperse it all. Rather, local churches support missions, not the denomination or not the fat cats at the office in Carlisle, but rather local churches do. Now, what we had several years ago, we had a man who didn't understand our polity, didn't, he was a Southern Baptist who was part of our, but he got very mad, had a meltdown at a general assembly, and then left the association because he had put forward a project, a missions project, you know, like, I don't remember what it was, but he had some project under the heading of missions he wanted to see forward, and it was a worthwhile thing, and he floated it out there, and nobody else was particularly interested with it, and it came back, It was kind of a bomb. I mean, he got very little support for his idea. And so he had a meltdown, I would say a hissy fit meltdown, sounds better anyway, on the floor of the General Assembly that you guys didn't back me. And you don't keep your word. And we said, well, we never promised you that a particular entity would support you, but that you have the right as a member church to float your idea to the other churches. It's been vetted. This is a worthwhile thing. If the other churches don't want to participate, that's between them and God and you. And it's not our fault. And he said, well, I expected you to fund this because I put it forward. And there's not a guarantee. But now we've never had a missionary, to my knowledge, that's never made it to the mission field for a lack of support. All the missionaries have got their support. Occasionally, projects don't make it. Our goal as RBMS is singular and simple, to plant confessional Baptist churches wherever God gives opportunity. And we're especially looking at overseas. The Great Commission in the New Testament involves going, evangelizing, making disciples, teaching them all things whatsoever Christ taught, and that's usually, that's almost always involved in the context of the local church. The thief on the cross, the Ethiopian eunuch might be two exceptions, but they're exceptions that prove the rule. And so we believe that church planting is the heart of what we're up to. Also, because of what the Bible teaches and in a very antagonistic culture, we believe only men are called to be elders and pastors and only men should be missionary church planters. So we only train and support men for these works. And because we don't have an infinite amount of money, we don't throw money at everything that wants to call itself missions. Oh, you want to teach at a mission school? We'll call you a missionary. Here's 50 grand. or I know one, I visited Nigeria in 1986, and the local denominational missionary was called the blockbuster of Jos, Nigeria, because he was making so much money at that time. The North American mission board or the foreign mission board paid everybody the same whether you were in Paris or whether you were in the boonies of Nigeria and he was banking hundreds and hundreds of dollars. So he started buying VHS back in the day and he had five or six hundred tapes at his place and so the missionaries would come over and check out tapes from the other missionary and take them back to their house. I was like, I don't think I'd call him a missionary. I think I'd call him a problem. Anyway, we only support pastors and their families who are going to the field to be church planters. Now, in most Protestant missions, as you know, foreign mission boards have taken away the jobs of identifying, recruiting, and training missionaries. They've taken this away from the local churches. In fact, like I said in a comment the other day, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a small association of Presbyterians, and also, to my knowledge, the only groups that have local churches sending missionaries, and missionaries accountable to local churches. And like us, they get together and support things. have a friend who was serving in Eritrea or in the Horn of Africa next to Ethiopia for some time. And they work like we do in terms of local churches, sending in money and things like that. But we're the tiny minority among missions today. Everybody else has gone to the mission board model. But what happens is missions work and missions' beliefs get watered down to the extreme because of doctrinal minimalism, which is kind of the order of the day. Missions has become so broad a topic that with such vague criteria that a Christian living in a foreign culture can almost call themselves a missionary. We believe that evangelism, teaching, discipleship, leading to the formation of a local church is our constant and our only aim. We want to plant churches. Now, in the 19th century, they had what was kind of beginning in the 1740s and the Great Awakening, you had situations that were big masses of people came out to hear Evangelist. And I'm certainly not against that. We need revival in America desperately. And many of the people who were converted were already in churches. However, we had problems in the 19th century, a century later, where people who just came to mass meetings and made professions of faith under Charles Finney and others who were told to go home, they really weren't folded into local churches. And statistics, numbers without church membership mean very little. I was a part of a parachurch mission agency which helps to sponsor Expo 72 and Here's Life America in 1976. And if you were an adult in 1976, there was the I Found It campaign that had all the major cities in the United States. And they had TV specials and commercials and billboards and bumper stickers about I Found It. What did you find? Well, it's new life in Christ. And I participated in that as a parachurch worker. And then in Eternity Magazine a year or two later, there's an article by a missiologist that showed that out of all the hoopla that came out of that giant evangelistic outreach, and we were told in-house, well, you know, America's been functionally reached with the gospel. America's been evangelized. But only nine-tenths of 1% of the decisions from that massive thing ever got folded into local churches. I know there's some kinds of people saying, well, if only one person was converted, it's worth it. And that's hooey. Because look at all the perhaps millions of people who thought they became Christians because they prayed the prayer. In fact, I think a person who's well known in the South and in the state of Georgia, Ted Turner, is a classic example. Ted Turner's father committed suicide when he was a teenager. He was sent off to boarding school that probably aggravated it. At boarding school in North Georgia, it was a Christian military school that gave chapel every day with an invitation. And an article in the newspaper about him says he went forward six times, prayed the prayer six times, nothing happened. He even went forward a seventh time for missionary service, nothing happened. And then another tragedy in his life, one of his sisters came down with leukemia that he was especially close to. He goes, this Christianity is a bunch of blankety blank, blank, blank, blank. I mean, these people, do they have any brains? You know, Ivory Soap advertises you drop it in your bathtub, it'll float, so you can find it in the bathtub. Well, if Ivory Soap doesn't float, how stupid do you have to be to keep believing it does? And he said, these people, they walk the aisle, they do this stuff, nothing happens. I've tried it. It's empirical. I've tried it scientifically. I went forward. It didn't work. So he thinks Christianity is a hooey because he did what he was taught. The invitation system in and of itself is not a saving, ministry and how many millions of people in the South are hoodwinked from thinking they're safe because they walked an aisle or they signed a pledge card or they phoned in after the I found it campaign and said I found it too and blah blah blah. So it's been a tragedy really. We're for not only seeing decisions but making these decisions into disciples and then folding them into local churches through baptism, administration of the Lord's Supper and teaching of the disciples all things whatsoever Christ trained his men in. Another thing about RBMS and our self-understanding is this. If you listen to Jerry Slate's message tonight, which is an outstanding message, he talks about the 19th century particular Baptist in England, particular has to do with particular redemption or particular atonement, which we frequently call limited atonement. But it's the Calvinistic Baptist in England who sent out William Carey. And William Carey says, I'm going into one of the deepest, darkest holes in the face of the earth, and I'll go do it, and I'll risk everything to do it. But you men back here in England, you've got to hold the ropes for me. I'll go down into the hole. You've got to hold the ropes. So in RBMS we view ourselves as rope holders for the missionaries that we send abroad into various local cultures. And so we assist the local church in seeing to it that the missionary church planners have the requisite training in both foreign languages if they need it or cross-cultural skills necessary to sustain a fruitful ministry. RBMS does not want to supplant the sending church. It doesn't want to drive a wedge between the sending church and the missionary. but rather we want to come alongside the local church and help augment what they're doing through providing mission services. A rope holder, that's not a bad way to self-consciously see yourself, both as a local church and as a member of a church. To pray for someone, I was talking during a break here about praying for their pastor, and think of, when you pray for your pastor, you're in a sense a rope holder. He's doing a lot of hard work, Pastors and policemen know too much. They get involved in too much. I stopped biting my nails when I became a pastor because you're dealing with a lot of filth sometimes and you don't want to bite your nails. Particularly if you work a septic tank truck, you don't want to bite your fingernails. But anyway, as pastor, I didn't bite my fingernails after I entered the ministry. You need to pray for your pastor and you need to pray for your missionaries. And they fight a lot of the same battles pastors do in the states, but they do it in a foreign culture. How does RBMS view and relate to the missionary church planter? we collect and disperse all funds for the missionary. In other words, churches around the country, let's say we're sending Robin here, he missed that, but we're sending, you felt called to the Inuit Indians of Alaska, the church guy behind you, oh yeah, send Robin up there. And so Robin's being called and going to the Inuit Indians of Alaska, we floated it up on to RBMS, and everybody said yes, and so money's coming in, And it's being collected at the office in Carlisle, and then it'll be sent out as a paycheck on a regular basis. We establish accounts in the ARPCA office. We reserve, receive funds from the supporters. We disperse the funds to the missionaries. We have monthly and quarterly financial reports sent to the missionary. And then quarterly reports are sent to the sending church, and you can see the ebbs and flows of the support for the missionary. We give a list of donors, who's giving what, general financial activity, balances, whatever. And then even pertinent tax forms are sent to the missionary at appropriate times. Why this is important was when I first began pastoring in Atlanta and trying to reform a church, a friend of mine had just come back from eight years of being a missionary church planter in England. And he came back because he didn't know that the way that he was set up was he should have been paying taxes in the states for eight years. And the IRS came after him and said, you haven't paid any taxes in eight years. He was like, oh, I didn't know I was supposed to. And the IRS said, oh, OK, that's fine. How many of you believe the IRS said that? Someone has said, ignorance of the law is no excuse. So his wife had to go to work, and things were very tight for eight years. Well, he worked to pay the missionary, excuse me, the IRS back. We can help with ongoing training and cooperation with Ascending Church. RBMS is aware of training in different places. Even though he's not going with the Foreign Mission Board, there are places that give training for missionaries going into new cultures. If you ever studied cultures and how things work, it's fascinating. I once heard Elizabeth Elliot describe how you learn a language. and in a tribe that doesn't have a written language. And so you pick up a stick this long, and you hold it up, and you point at it, and they go, uh-uh. And you try to understand what they're saying in your ears, trying to pick up all the inflections. And you try to, how would I write that down? And then you take a longer stick, and you hold that up. And is there a difference in what they describe between the shorter stick and the longer stick? You write that down. Then you break the stick. Oh, I don't know what you're saying. And you try to write that down. And then you throw the stick and you write that down. Imagine how long it takes to learn a language that's not written down. And it's very difficult. Well, there are places that you can go to to learn that. We have had some people, not currently, but we've had some people interested in going to places where they had to learn the language and they had to do language translation. There was no Bible written in that language. Just general cultural awareness, how to go into a new culture. For example, I had a bunch of New Yorkers move down from New York to Atlanta, and they were in my church, and they'd stand around before or after church or athletic games. New York affection is standing on the street corner and zinging each other for about five minutes. If you haven't been insulted, they don't like you. But they would do it to Southerners, and we'd go, you know, life's too short to be insulted by a bunch of Yankees. So I took the New Yorkers aside, and they were doing it to me, and I said, I know what you guys are doing, and I appreciate it, but I said, most of the people around here are from a different culture, and they think you're just obnoxious. Really? They had no clue that it wasn't appreciated as affection. Because not everybody picks up being insulted as affection. It's, you know, hey, dear, you look ugly. Oh, hi, thanks, honey. You know, we don't normally have insults as affection. And so you have to learn to get along in other cultures. And there's places you can learn that, and we can help you with that. Not if you're from New York, though. There's no hope for those people. I actually had one New Yorker ask me, how come everybody around here speaks funny? And I said, well, you're the only person who ever says coffee. Coffee. Pass the coffee. RBMS policy encourages the office bearers of the sending church to visit the missionary on the field at least every three years. On-site oversight is mandatory for the well-being of the missionary, his marriage, and his family, the work, and the building of strong ties between the sending church and the missionary. Even though that's been our policy since its inception, it was never really enforced very well. And what happened was, people take the path of least resistance. We'll just send the coordinator over there. He'll just travel over there and he'll see how our missionary's doing and he'll report back. But the Bible says with many counselors comes wisdom and having more eyeballs on the situation than just one person. And the coordinator may have his own biases and he only has one set of eyes. And so for probably 20 years the coordinator was the only one who visited many of our missionaries. Now at my church we did go over and visit our missionaries several times. Me and two other elders went at different times. And we fulfilled this guideline, but a lot of churches would not do it. And like I said earlier, some pastors said, well, I just don't like to travel. I'm not getting any younger. Duh, who is? And they just wouldn't do it. And the missionaries suffered from it. The mission work, I think, suffered because the local church really wasn't that wired into what was happening. And I think the local church missed an opportunity to really help their missionary. How does the missionary church planner, how should he view and relate to RBMS? If RBMS views missions this way, we view providing help to the churches, providing help to the missionary, visiting him on site by encouraging the local pastor to go there. How should the missionary himself view and relate to RBMS? We're an association of local churches. By definition of association, some authority is delegated from the local church to the association. In chapter 26 of the Confession where it talks about the doctrine of the church, that whole chapter in the paragraph 15, talks about churches holding communion together. The churches are to be interconnected. We're not Lone Ranger churches. I had one man who served as an elder in my church for years, and he was constitutionally a loner. And he said, why are you concerned about getting churches together? At one time, we were the only Reformed Baptist church in the state of Georgia, and we were looking to help churches get going. And why do you care about these other churches? And I thought it was a particularly Mr. Magoo myopic question, but I said, if we're the only church left in Georgia, it won't be long before we're gone. We want to see other churches in Georgia. We want to see other confessional reform churches. And so we want to be involved in church planting, and we want to be involved in the mutuality of ministry. But whenever you have an association, if you think about it, you're going to be delegating a certain amount of authority. What do I mean? Well, the local church wants to send a robin to the Inuit Indians of Alaska. They think he's a great guy, he's got all the credentials, he's interviewed by RBMS committee members and they think he's a great guy. Sure, we think, put our stamp of approval on him, we've vetted him, we think he's a good man to support. Okay, and so other churches invite him to come, they start supporting him, we help coordinate with the finances and other things. But this means that a certain, and I don't have a percentage, a certain amount of authority is delegated to RBMS, because we had a say so in sending him to all the churches. If RBMS said no, we think Robin has real issues. And he's back there monitoring my message. This will be a little blips. Whenever I speak his name, it will be a little blips in the tape. This church is not obligated to do what RBMS is. The church goes, well, RBMS can take a flying leap. We think he's a great guy and we're going to send him out. You're welcome to. But we're just not going to commend him to the rest of the churches. What RBMS takes away is what it gives. We give you commendation. We think you're a kosher church. We think you're right on. And we give you the right hand of fellowship. We think you're true Christians. So if we don't agree with what you're doing, the only thing we can take away is what we gave you. We will withhold our commendation. Well, they're getting kind of weird there. And we're not giving you the right hand of fellowship. We're not sure you're really Christians or you're not in the right place anymore. But we have no power to go into a church and change things. We have no power to take away a missionary, take away a pastor, none of those things. But there is a certain amount delegated just when you say, if you're asking us to commend into the other churches, then there's a certain amount of RBMS authority involved in that. We do help in the vetting process. By vetting, that means looking into someone, making sure that they're okay. We don't hire a private detective to do a criminal search. Well, we see Robin was in prison for several years back in the 70s. What's that all about? And so, oh, witnessing too much in the Caribbean, okay. So he was put in jail in the Caribbean. And some of you don't know that about Robin's background. Do they, Robin? That's right. Not only is he going to edit parts of it, I was going to edit my head off, and you will see a headless Like I said, a local church can send whoever you want to go, but if you want RBMS commendation and assistance, there must be a recognition of some authority dwelling with RBMS. So missionaries should view their local sending church and RBMS as two authorities in their lives. I think the local church is the primary one, but RBMS does have some say-so in a missionary's ongoing work. And that was disappointing because we've had missionaries who, as we're going to get into another point here, they changed their doctrinal convictions. They did not inform their local church and they did not inform ARPCA or RBMS. And they just reached their different doctrinal convictions on their own without any counsel. And that's a counsel of despair that will really lead you to bad places. Missionaries are asked to keep RBMS informed as to their heart status, their family health, their ministry update, and anything else pertinent to the field work. They're expected to write a newsletter every two months, a longer quarterly report, and a once-a-year update that we put in the ARPCA update for all the churches to read. They're also to provide a yearly report of the use of all non-salary ministry funds that they received. there to make sure that all support funds are channeled through ARPGA and RBMS accounting system. We've had problems in the past when missionaries have received funds from all over the world, but only reported funds originating in the United States. We had one missionary who got money from Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, the parts of Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand. Canada and the United States, we only knew the amount that he was raising in the United States. He could have been raising a million dollars a year for all we knew, but he was only accountable to us, he said, for the money he raised in the States. And there was a real problem with him being submissive to authority and being a team player. He chose to move on and he's not a part of ARPCA anymore. And he was a good missionary, but he didn't like to be accountable for his finances and what he was actually pulling in. All funds must be channeled through the RBMS and ARBCA office and thereby reported to the sending church so there's proper accounting and accountability. And ARBCA takes a very, very tiny amount of money for administrative fees out of the money that comes in. And you can read documentation about different charities and different missionary organizations and how much money they keep of every dollar you send in. I once worked for a parachurch ministry and they kept 17% of every dollar for administrative overhead. And that was considered great. That was considered very modest. Some of these groups will take 50% or more. One group was taking 70% of all the monies that came in for administrative overhead, and only a tiny fraction was going to the ministry or the missionary. We only take a small, tiny percentage, but that does help with overhead and things in the office, and we know what missionaries are doing. The local church, for example, sets the salary for the missionary, not RBMS. in consultation probably with RBMS, a local church, and say, well, in that culture, for example, Alan Beardmore went to Perth, Australia. Perth is the second most isolated major city in the world. The most isolated major city in the world is Honolulu. It's 6,000 miles to the nearest town of any size. So everything has to be imported. Everything is expensive. Perth is very expensive. It's on the far west coast of Australia. You've got to go 1,500 miles to the next bit of civilization. So it's a very expensive place to go to. Just like if you wanted to be a missionary in New York City or Paris or London and live in the city, you're going to need to raise a lot of money just to have a small apartment. But somebody needs to work that out. If you go around saying, yeah, I'm raising $2.25 a year for missionary work. $225,000. No, $225,000. You're kidding, really? Well, those are the kind of things that you've got to spend time thinking about. Do we want to spend $225,000 sending a man to minister in downtown Paris? Is there a French Reformed Baptist that we could help support for a whole lot less money? Or is this something we've got to swallow hard and do because it's so stingingly expensive to minister there? Anyway, we sent Alan Beardmore to Perth, and he's not making buku money, but it was a lot of money just to send him and get him situated over there. But those are the things we need to know and work on ahead of time. As I said, missionaries are to notify their sending church as well as RBMS should their doctrinal commitments change. You know, the missionary is already at a distance from his sending church, he's at a distance from RBMS, and our spiritual integrity demands that Before he changes his conclusions that he needs to meet with his sending church, I mean, those are the people he grew up with, those are the people who helped him grow and develop and who spotted his gifts and encouraged him. It would seem like integrity means that you should meet with your local church and say, I've been hit with this, I'm struggling with this, what do you think? And also, if he's wise, he would probably want RBMS input, too, because there's pastors who have answered many questions and could probably help him. So the sending church and RBMS are the ultimate authorities under the chief authority, Jesus Christ. and they must always be viewed as such. When missionaries become laws unto themselves in the mission field, bypassing their sending church, bypassing their commending and supporting churches, the spiritual harm is usually the result. We had a case recently in a debacle that we had in Antarctica of a couple of missionaries doing just that. They just kind of went off on their own. They informed their sending church They informed RBMS that they had changed their views without any desire of counsel or even wanting to debate it. We've reached this conclusion. You guys are wrong. End of story. And it wasn't very pretty to watch it. And people, as one pastor, Dr. Fred Malone, said to me, he says, you know, people have faithfully supported this one man for 25 years. and this other man for almost 20 years. Wouldn't you think they would at least owe it to them to talk with them, to face-to-face have a sit-down and tell us how you got here? But they just got us, I don't know, I won't say what they got. But anyway, they're not with us anymore. But there's a lack of integrity by failing to interact with their sending church or the RBMS, the people who both, in a sense, called them, sent them, commended them, supported them, They owe it to them, and they owe it to the idea of getting many counselors. In the Bible, there's the phrase that is frequently quoted, with many counselors comes wisdom. I've heard people cite that, but then how they go about doing it is odd. I want to find five people who will agree with me on what I want to do. And it's not even that. It's not even, it shouldn't be, what it should be is, here's the situation I'm facing. Here's the scriptures that I understand which would bear upon this. Is my understanding of these scriptures in light of this situation, do you think my understanding is correct as my handling of scripture? Because ultimately, it's not taking a poll of what your best friends think, it's what God wants you to do, but the idea is have people who know the scriptures fairly well give you feedback. Now this is a loony interpretation of this verse, that'll never work. And so, well, you know, you need someone to tell you that. But the idea is not to find your five best friends to agree with you. It's to find five people who will give you objective input on what the scriptures teach in regard to the situation you're facing. And so our BMS views itself as helping local churches get the men there, keep the men there, spiritually helping to minister to them as they can, providing training along the way. New things come along, new books come along. I'm a book guy, so I like to send books to people. Good ones, when they come out, we'll send them to missionaries and church planners and to our chaplains. But we view ourselves as helping the local church. We're not trying to supplant the local church. We want to come along in the best understanding of what the word parachurch might mean and help the local churches with their missionaries. That might be a record for me. I'm done. Anybody have a fork? We'll stick a fork in it and we're going to have Q&A? Okay.