Well, welcome. It's great to see everybody here again and great to see our college students back and safe. Today we are going to be doing a special Sunday School presentation on short-term missions in particular. So I'll say a little bit more about kind of our schedule coming up in terms of Adult Sunday School for this semester. We've already had one special presentation a few weeks ago from Bennett Weathered on a ministry of our Presbytery called Matron Conference and Retreat Center. So that was in early January. We're doing a class today on short-term missions, opportunities, and then next week I'll be doing a special one-off class on hospitality, just something to kind of encourage and remind us of why we do hospitality, what that can look like, and how we can continue to be hospitable as a church. And then after that we'll be beginning a new study on the Westminster Confession of Faith. So I'll be talking more about that at the end of our time today. Let me go ahead and start by just handing out an outline. Caleb, if you could start passing that around. I've got 40 copies. I don't know how many folks are in the next room, but if we can maybe share some, or if we need to make more copies, someone could go to the back and maybe make a few more if necessary. But this gives you kind of the roadmap of what we're going to be doing this morning. Before I dive into that class though, let me talk about why we are doing this. The session wants to especially be emphasizing the work of missions and opportunities for us to participate in that work of missions as a local church in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and part of our denomination. Over the years we've had a number of folks who have grown up at the church who have gone on to serve not only in ministry here in the States, but in ministry overseas doing short-term missions, medium and long-term missions opportunities as well. So today what we want to do is talk a little bit about missions in general, the impetus for missions, why do we do missions, but then particularly what I'd like to do is to talk about short-term missions and to kind of cover two things. I think it'd be helpful for us to think about what makes for a meaningful short-term missions trip. What sort of a framework that we should have as we think about missions. And then specifically, and this is part of the purpose of this class, is to highlight some opportunities that exist for short-term missions. And we're going to be looking at... Oh, hello, myself. We're going to be looking at... a website that the denomination has put together to help identify opportunities for short-term missions in the OPC. So that'll be kind of where we want to get to at the end of our class, and there's some specific resources that we as a church want to make you aware of as you think about opportunities for short-term missions as well. So let's go ahead and dive into our class this morning. So the first thing we should think about is what is the impetus for short-term missions? And we could even shift that question just to be a little bit broader. What is the impetus for missions as a whole? Why do we, why should we pursue missions, support missions, and pray for missions? Let me just throw that question out to you. How would you answer that question? Yes, Elizabeth. Yes, it helps us to view the world as God views the world, to see the importance and priorities of others. Great answer. What else might we say about why we do missions? Yeah, Liz. Yes. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. In fact, we can kind of put those two things together, and I think the two impetuses, whatever the plural of that is, whatever the motivation, there we go, for mission is really God's command. He tells us to do it, and God's character, and both of those things are important, aren't they? that as we think about the work of missions, of going and making disciples, going and proclaiming the gospel, going and seeing the kingdom of God expand as churches are planted and sinners are saved, that flows from God's command, right? God tells us to do that in the Great Commission and in various passages in the Bible, but God commands it because it flows from and reflects His character. That's kind of what Elizabeth was saying as well. So we go because Christ commands us to go, we send because Christ commands us to send, and Christ commands this because that great commission is a reflection of the mission and heart of our triune God. Now, we could actually spend a lot of time on this In fact, there's a whole kind of discipline within theology and ministry called missiology, where people are thinking about and talking about, why do we do missions? Where does it come from in the Bible? How does the Bible develop this theme? What does it look like to do mission work wisely and well? But this is actually one way of sort of telling the whole story of the Bible. through the lens of God's mission. Just think back to Genesis 1 through 3, and what we see is that God creates all things, and He creates man to bear His image and have fellowship with Him, and He puts man in the garden, in Eden, to extend His kingdom and His rule and His reign over all things, so that the whole of creation might redound to His glory. That is God's purpose in the world. But then sin comes and ruptures that purpose. It opposes that plan. And man who is made to be God's prophet, priest, and king in creation gets set against God and is in rebellion against him. And so all peoples, all nations are under his just judgment and wrath. That's the sad story of the Bible. But then what drives the story forward is God's mission to magnify His glory and bring a people for Himself. And when we see how God begins that, we see, as we talked about last year as we looked at covenant theology, He begins that in a particular way by putting His favor upon Abraham, setting aside a people for Himself. So flip back to that very familiar passage, Genesis 12. and listen to how God frames what He's doing to Abraham and what He wants to do through Abraham. So could somebody read for us Genesis 12, verses 1 through 3? And as we listen to this, listen for the missiological aspect or implications of what's going on in these verses. Could somebody read Genesis 12, 1 through 3? Yes. Okay, thank you. So what missiological language do you hear in those verses? What is God telling us about what his mission and purpose is in terms of the history of redemption? Yeah. Yes, yes. So God is saying, I'm putting my favor on you, Abraham. I'm going to, from you, this barren man with a barren wife, bring forth not just a child, but a family. And that family will then become a nation. But that nation will have a particular role to play. Well, what was Israel supposed to do? Not everybody at once, just once. Well, think about some of the language that we find in the prophets, for example, that Israel is supposed to be a light to the nations. You know, if you look at the back of your Bibles and you see the map of kind of where Israel actually sits in terms of the ancient world, you see that they're kind of sitting at the crossroads between all these great empires and nations on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Everyone and everything passes through Israel. It's part of why, from a geopolitical perspective, there's been so much conflict and so many wars there because It's at the center of that part of the world. It's at the center of the ancient world, and God puts his covenant people there. Why? Because they were to be a living representation of God's purpose, and God's plan, and God's character in this world. They were to be living out a life that would be attractive to those around them. Now again, at this point in redemptive history, it's a more limited purpose. God is not sending out missionaries every time in the way that we find, for example, in the book of Acts, right? There's movement in redemptive history. But even in the Old Covenant, even in the Old Testament, we see that God is setting aside his people not only to bless them, but so that they might be a blessing to the nations. And just think about how we've seen that play out even in the book of Joshua, where God is bringing his people into the land to bring judgment on the nations. What's another thread that we've seen running through the whole story? That even in the conquest itself, God is using that to bring Gentiles in. And that's something that kind of runs through the whole story of the Old Testament. And then when you come to the New Testament, what do we see? That Christ comes to minister first to the lost sheep of Israel, but in his ministry, in his life, his death, his resurrection, and his ascension, what does he then send out his church to do? Go and make disciples of all nations. That would have been a surprising kind of statement to hear. They would have expected to hear, go and make disciples of my people, right? Go and bring Israel back. But Jesus says, yes, that is true, but of all the nations now. It's the picking up and the fulfilling of what God had promised way back in Genesis 12 to Abraham, that I will bless you And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. And that's the story of the New Testament, isn't it? That we see then the divisions between Jews and Gentiles, barbarians, Scythians, slavery, breaking down as the gospel moves forward and the nations are brought in to the kingdom of God. Here's how Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians chapter 4. This is just a great passage to meditate on and to memorize. 2 Corinthians 4. verses 13 through 15, Paul says, since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, I believed and so I spoke, we also believe and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake. so that, as grace extends to more and more people, it may increase thanksgiving to the glory of God." That's our mission, that's our motivation, that's our purpose. John Piper has very famously said, missions exist, because worship doesn't. In other words, our motivation for missions is that there might be more people to give glory and thanksgiving to God, that as the grace extends to more and more people, it may increase thanksgiving to the glory of God. That is why we go. to bring more people into fellowship with Christ so that Christ may get the glory that is his due. That's why Paul in this passage says, I'm pouring myself out for the cause of Christ and for the cause of the gospel. And of course, how does the book end? in Revelation? What do we see in that heavenly host? That it's people from every tongue and tribe and nation who have been brought in to the kingdom and glory of God. The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So that is the kind of biblical framework for the work of missions. The impetus then for missions, we could say, is God himself and the gospel itself. Christianity is a necessarily evangelistic missionary endeavor. That's not true of all world religions, but it is true of Christianity, the one true religion, because that is woven into the very character of not only God's mission, but as a reflection of his character itself. So much more we could say about that, but anytime we think about missions, remind yourself of that big biblical picture of what drives and motivates our work in missions. But today what we want to talk about is the work of short-term missions in particular. What should our framework be for short-term missions? And what do we mean by short-term missions, right? Well, if you've been in the church You've probably heard different missionary presentations. If you've been part of any denominations, they probably have had mission works that they promote. And you'll know that there's different kind of categories of work that's done and different types of workers who may go. When we think about a missionary, what do we most often think of? Well, we think of somebody, maybe an individual or a family, who, you know, sells their house and their car, and they move over to somewhere exotic to us, in a different part of the world that speaks a different language, and they go and they spend years, or maybe even a lifetime, working amongst the different people, learning a new language, learning a new culture, and seeking to preach the gospel and care for the needs of those there. And that's mission work. And of course, that is mission work. But there are kind of other types of mission work that take place as well. There may be people who go and they serve for six months or a year, coming alongside those existing missionaries. Or you may have short-term teams that go to do evangelism, or help with different mercy ministry and needs, or to help train local pastors. So there can be kind of cross-pollination, culturally and internationally, through this mission work. And short-term missions is something that you could see going all the way back to the Bible itself. So there's a gentleman named Darren Carlson who wrote a series of articles about 10 or 12 years ago on short-term missions for the Gospel Coalition. I'll share some of those in my shepherd's voice this coming week. But he talks about short-term missions and he asks, you know, where did short-term missions start? Are there examples of this that we see in the Bible? And listen to how he kind of thinks through that question. He asks, are there examples of this kind of ministry in scripture? Examples could include Jonah's short stint to Nineveh, Jesus sending his disciples in Matthew 10 and the Seventy Disciples in Luke 10 on short-term trips. You might also cite Priscilla and Aquila who shared their faith and planted churches while traveling on business. Paul, the great teacher and church planter, spent a significant portion of his ministry on the road. Certainly committed to mission over the long term, Paul seemed to operate through short-term strategies with his longest stays in Ephesus and in Corinth. So clearly, Carlsen kind of concludes, we see several strands of itinerant work in the Bible. So do we see short-term missions in the Bible? I think in an important way we can say yes, in the sense that we see God working not only through kind of lifetimes of ministry that people give to the work of the gospel, but even in short and concentrated periods. God is able to work through short-term missions to magnify his name and build the church. In fact, we think about Paul, who's kind of the model missionary. He's the great missionary, pastor, apostle, who sort of sets the template for all of mission work, and yet Paul was not just a missionary who went from one place to another and kind of spent his life there. He was traveling around. He was doing evangelism. He was planting churches. He was training up leaders, and God, of course, used that in mighty ways. But when we think about short-term missions, short-term missions trips, well what do those often look like in our day? How might they be similar to and how might they be different from what we see Paul doing for example? Well, if you think about a lot of short-term missions today, it's often sending large teams of people, and often very, very young people, for a week or two to the other side of the world. Now, you don't see that happening in the first century, and you don't see it happening in the 13th century or the 19th century. You really only see that kind of short-term missions trips taking place from America in the 1950s and 60s. And over the last 50 or 60 years, we've sort of seen that type of missions unfold. Now, why would that all of a sudden start happening in America in the 1950s and 60s? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. For most of human history, Travel is difficult, right? It's where we get our word travail from. It's not easy. And it takes a long time to get from point A to point B. And if you can get from point A to point B, you're not going to be taking 60 14-year-olds over to do something. You're going to be much more strategic and much more focused in how you use your resources. Well, in America in the 1950s and 60s and since that day, what you have is coming together a couple of things. First, it's actually possible for someone to get from one side of the world to the other in a day or two, which is astonishing to think about. Additionally, you have in America a church that's tremendously wealthy. We kind of compare ourselves to ourselves. We don't walk around thinking, I'm such a wealthy, rich person. But when you compare yourself to the average person throughout history, or even the average person throughout the world, virtually all of us would fall into this category of being wealthy and comfortable and well-off. And so churches have the resources to send large teams overseas to do all sorts of work. And that is something that has really grown and expanded over the last several decades. It's hard to get kind of exact numbers on this because there's different ways of kind of counting and reporting things. But no matter what numbers you look at, what you'll find is that there are millions of Americans who have gone on missions trips and millions who go every year. And the cost to send Americans on short-term missions numbers in the billions of dollars. So as we think about short-term missions, what I'd like us to think about is something that I don't think we often think about, which is what makes for a meaningful short-term missions trip. We can see in the Bible, God can use short periods of time and his people going for short periods of time to do big things for the kingdom. But, of course, that doesn't mean that every short-term missions opportunity is as wise as the other. How can we steward the resources that we have in a way that can be meaningful in the long term? And so I want to kind of walk through just a few principles or things to think about. And these are—a lot of these are not thus saith the Lord, okay? So I'm going to kind of give that caveat here. It's sort of trying to think with sanctified common sense about how to best use the resources that we have. I would frame this as a stewardship question. And so I want to share kind of eight guidelines or principles to help us think through what makes for a good short-term missions trip. And I've taken these from Darren Carlson, who I mentioned earlier. So as I said, he wrote a couple of articles about 10 or 15 years ago on short-term missions Where did it come from? What are some downsides or problems with ways that we often do it? How can we do it well? Which caused quite a stir when he published them. And I'll share those with you in the From Your Pastor section of The Shepherd's Voice this week, so you can sort of see his thoughts on that. I think it's generally helpful for us to think more deliberately about, okay, how do we do short-term missions? But he lays out a couple of criteria for what what we can do to help make sure that our missions is meaningful, especially in those short-term ways. So here's the first principle that he gives. He says, take short-term trips to meet crisis needs. So this is something that can be very practically helpful. You know, especially we've seen this with hurricanes or wildfires in our own country, or we think about people overseas who are dealing with natural disasters and catastrophes. Sending over teams of people to help can be very meaningful in those contexts where long-term workers are overwhelmed. There's more than they can do, and they may need people with particular training. They may need nurses or construction workers or whatever to go and help. That's a very meaningful type of support and partnering of churches together, even internationally or across state lines. So that's one kind of trip that can be very, very helpful. A second principle that he gives is that churches should invest in long-term workers first. I think this is very important. So he says, you know, if you're a smaller church with a missions budget of $12,000 and you're sending a short-term team for $40,000, you probably have things backwards. Our missionary endeavors should focus on long-term, sustainable work centered around established church works and missions overseas, and short-term teams that we send should be partnering with those. That's one of the kind of principles that's going to come out in a number of these guidelines, that we're not just thinking that if we as Americans drop down somewhere for a week or two, that that will be transformative for the gospel. at the same time don't think that can't be but the way that it will be effective is if we're partnering with an ongoing and long-standing work and if we're going over to serve that work right so that's an important kind of principle he talks as well he Number three, if you're interested in poverty alleviation, understand what that should look like. And he recommends, he says, read everything by Brian Fickert. I don't know if you guys know who Brian Fickert is, but he's one of the authors of a great book called When Helping Hurts. Does anyone? read that or seen that. Really, really helpful book. Our deacons use that in their diaconal training, and he's done a lot of study along with others on how do we meaningfully care for the poor and care for people's physical needs in a way that's biblical and wise and sustainable, and he talks about that both in the context of in our own lives personally, as local churches, but also in the context of missions, because there's a lot of money that can be poured into situations, but it's not spent well. It's not spent wisely. It's not done in a way that addresses problems. Sometimes it creates or exacerbates problems. So again, the emphasis here is be humble, be slow, be willing to listen before we sort of jump in and say, we know what you need, and we're going to give it to you, like it or not, right? So being wise and being humble about those things. Similarly, he talks about, you know, if you're building something, some building project, make sure that that's happening, again, with that local participation. It's not just the team that's dropping in and doing something, and then there's no ongoing work. Fifth, consider sending smaller groups of the church's most experienced, godly, and skilled members. Some of the most effective trips are elders and their wives going to encourage missionaries. So this is something that our presbytery does and did recently. We had, just at our last presbytery meeting, a report from one of our pastors, Chris Cashen, who pastors in Lanham, Maryland, and he and his wife had gone over to Uganda. They had spent three or four weeks there and had visited with and encouraged and prayed with the missionaries who were there long-term, and then Pastor Chris was able to teach a kind of intensive course at the theological school there. That kind of thing isn't often what we think of when we talk about short-term missions. but it should be. That kind of thing is very, very meaningful and very, very helpful. His sixth principle is, if you are sending younger people, teens and college students, send smaller numbers to work with a veteran missionary who wants to disciple them. And here's how he kind of puts his rationale for that. He says, the key word for the young short-termers shouldn't be impact, but rather learn. I think this is really, really important. It can be tremendously valuable, and I'm sure many of us could probably attest, if you've gone on a short-term missions trip, it can have a huge impact on you as a person. It can allow you to have a connection to not only that particular missionary and mission work, but kind of to all missions and mission work. But our understanding as we're going over should be that what we're going over to do is to learn and to listen about how God works around the world and how God might be calling us to serve in that work. So our rationale should not be, you know, we're going to go over and transform this area in our 10-day trip here. doing VBS, but rather, okay, I'm going to come and serve this local ministry in some way, but with an eye towards my own discipleship and discerning of a call down the road. And that's often where short-term missions can be so helpful, is they can translate into long-term mission work. So think about how we can find missionary opportunities that, again, lean into and move towards long-term work. And that's kind of what his last principle summarizes as well. He says, if you're working outside the sphere of people who will be there long-term, especially national leaders, your impact will be minimal. So, stepping back from that, what are we looking for in terms of short-term missions? Well, it's not just saying, how can we get a bunch of us over here, over there, to do something for a couple of weeks? We want to be wise stewards. We're often talking about spending a lot of money, and you have to weigh, is it wiser just to give that money directly to the missionaries, or to empower them to hire people to build something or do something? Should we be sending a small team? Should we be sending experienced people or young people? A wise missionary process will kind of sift through those different factors and seek to steward resources well. And the orientation will always be one of humility and of service. So it's saying we want to serve, so that means the American church is not necessarily the ones who should be putting together these teams. We should be responding to needs that local and national leaders are saying, hey, we would love to have a team come do x, y, or z, rather than us saying, hey, we want to send a team to do x, y, or z. And so as we're doing that work, we want to have an eye towards the long term, supporting and empowering the work of long-term missions, and even as we're going over ourselves, especially if you're younger, go over, but with an eye towards how God might call or equip you to serve in the long term. And part of why I go through that is because all of us are called, and I'm going to kind of point out some ways in which we can do this, all of us are called to be involved in this work of short-term missions. Some of us will be involved by going, some of us will be involved by sending and supporting, giving money, and of course by prayer as well. And maybe especially when you're thinking about what trip would be good for you to pursue, whether that's going on yourself or funding someone else to go on, it's helpful to have some of those principles in mind, to realize that God can and has worked powerfully through the work of short-term missions down through history. But of course we want to be wise in making sure that we're doing short-term missions trips that are going to make an impact as well. And so how can we find opportunities for short-term missions that are healthy and are balanced and can make a meaningful impact? What opportunities are there for short-term missions? Well, that's what I want to spend the next 15 minutes kind of sharing with you, and I'd like to show you a website Ethan's going to pull up. You've got the link there on your handout. This is actually a website put together by our denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. If you go to opcstmshorttermissions.org, You'll get to this website, and this is a tremendous resource. So they've got a lot of videos and testimonials and articles talking about some of the things we've already been discussing. Why do we do missions? How should we do missions? What makes for good short-term missions? But this is also the place that I would point you to go as you think about, is God calling you to pursue some sort of short-term missions opportunity? So if you scroll down a little bit, you'll see first off this roadmap to missions that they have here. And this kind of lays out the different steps to going from where you are right now to potentially serving on the field in some way. They talk about investigating, initiating, raising funds, preparing for your trip, preparing yourself, being on the field, and post-trip. One of the things I like about this is that you can tell they're recognizing that a large part of the work that needs to go into a missions trip happens before and after the missions trip. That it's partially our own discipleship growing and learning as well, and they've got resources to help you with that. So we won't do this right now, but if you wanted to sort of see more of, you know, those different steps and how you can move from, again, where you are now to potentially serving, you can click on the read the map and it'll kind of take you to that. But if you go back up to the top, You'll see up at the top bar, Ways to Serve, so if we could click on that, this gives a list of short-term missions opportunities that our denomination is making available to those who may want to go or may want to serve in some way. Part of why I point you to this is not because this is the only place where you can find good short-term missions trips. There's lots of great missions organizations. MTW has a very extensive missions team and short-term missions opportunities. You can go to... Sorry, MTW is Mission to the World. I always forget. As a native-born Presbyterian, I just throw around these acronyms. So Mission to the World is the missions sending agency of one of our sister denominations, the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA. They're our big little brother. So they're younger than us, but they're about, I don't know, 10 times our size or something. And they send out hundreds of missionaries all over the world. They have lots of short-term missions opportunities. That's another great place to go and sort of see how might I be able to serve. But the thing I really like about the things here is that all of these missions opportunities I'm going to share with you are ones that I think really fit and reflect some of the guidelines and priorities we've talked about. These are things that local churches on the field have asked for American teams to come over and do particular things. So it's being driven not by our desire to go somewhere cool or fun, but by the needs of the local church. and often there are some both short-term, maybe week-long or two-week-long trips, but also longer trips that we can do as well that can be even more meaningful in terms of discipleship and in terms of ministry. So if you scroll through this, you'll find I think there's like 14 or 15 different opportunities in Africa, in Asia, in Europe, in South America, in North America. One of the things right at the top that you saw was disaster relief. You know, we've seen these different hurricanes coming through. There are opportunities to give towards or to go, especially if you have kind of hands-on skills, to go and help people recover from disaster needs that have taken place. But there are a number of mission opportunities I'd like to highlight. The first one is actually this cross-cultural missions training. So maybe we could click on that. So this would be, if you are someone, especially a young person, 18 or older, who is wondering if you were called to missions, or thinking that you are called to missions, I would really encourage you to think about participating in this. So this is coming up May 17th through June 14th, 2025. It's nearly a month. But what it is designed to do, it's actually designed to help reformed young people specifically discern what it means to be a missionary and whether or not they might be called to be a missionary. So if you kind of scroll down, you'll see that this is a nearly, it's a month-long opportunity kind of broken into for pieces. So you have a week of boot camp at the front end where you come together in Mexico. This is run by a URCNA, a Dutch Reformed missionary down there. And you have a time of cross-cultural education, language and Bible training. You're kind of being together as a team. And then they send you out in the second week to have a week of kind of cultural immersion where you're living with a local Hispanic Christian family. continuing to do language and Bible training and morning sessions, leadership training, just helping you to get a feel for what kind of things does a missionary do. And then the last two weeks are field trainings where participants are sent to different Latin American countries to work alongside existing missionaries and pastors. So again the whole point is sort of giving you a chance to sort of come alongside and get a window into what does it look like to do missions in a cross-cultural context and to actually do that to some extent yourself. And then there's a few days of debrief at the end to process what you've learned together. That's a tremendous opportunity. Again, if you're just sort of wondering, am I called to this? You know, going somewhere for a week can be a great blessing, but spending a little bit more time can help you to kind of get a sense of that. So that would be one opportunity I would highlight. If we go back to the main page and Scroll down to, let me see here, so you can see a number of these opportunities, but Boardwalk Chapel Summer Staff. So let me highlight this. There's actually kind of two pieces to this one. So first off, how many of you have heard about the Boardwalk Chapel? Okay, only a few. How many of you have been to Boardwalk Chapel? Okay, another few. This is an incredible ministry that our denomination has. Years and years and years ago, they were able to buy a chapel on the boardwalk there in New Jersey. It's a huge tourist destination, lots of people there. And throughout the summer, teams from all over the U.S. will go and do evangelism on the boardwalk, and you can talk to some of those who are raising their hands who have been. We've sent teams in the past as a church, and there's both staff who are there more long-term over the summer, who are putting on worship evangelistic services every night, training teams to do one-on-one evangelism on the beach and on the boardwalk, but also then teams that come through for a week at a time, often of young people. So this is, again, a great opportunity to come and learn How do you share your faith? How do you start these conversations? How do you talk with unbelievers? And not just sort of doing it in an abstract academic setting, but getting out and doing it. So much of, especially evangelism, you learn by doing, and this gives you the opportunity to do that. So in terms of opportunities, There's opportunities for individuals or teams to go, but there's also opportunities to go and serve on staff. So maybe especially for some of you college students, you're looking at this next summer, wondering what you should be doing, this is one thing to consider. Why not spend a summer in Wildwood, New Jersey, serving with this ministry? If you scroll down, you'll see that there's a wide range of of ways that you can serve. So that could be going to help evangelize and lead teams nightly on the boardwalk doing evangelism. They also need people just to come and help care for the homes where the teams stay, do grocery shopping, cook meals. That kind of thing is very helpful and valuable. Anyone who's gifted with music to help lead in worship or drama. people who have AV and tech skills. So there's all sorts of opportunities to use your skills to serve in this mission. I will say again, as I said, we've sent teams to the boardwalk in the past. That kind of got interrupted. That rhythm got interrupted with COVID, and then one of the churches that we used to partner with is no longer around. So all of that kind of disrupted some things, but we are hoping to get that rhythm back going, and don't quote me on this, but I'm hoping we could maybe begin going again this next year, having teams, and kind of get back into that rhythm, because it's, from all that I've heard, just a wonderful, wonderful ministry, and I'd love to experience it myself, but that would be one more kind of long, medium-term opportunity that I would highlight. If we go back to the this main one, scrolling down just below this, you see Team Japan. So we have missionaries and have had missionaries in Japan for many, many years as a denomination, and there's opportunities to come for up to three weeks over the summer, help in different ways. Again, see what work is going on there, and then if you go back to the listing way down at the bottom, There's opportunities for a longer term, more like a semester at a time, to serve doing English as a Second Language teaching in South Korea, right at the very bottom. So there's a more long-term, August to December opportunity as well. Now, we've scrolled past a lot of other things there, okay? A lot of those are really worth checking out. A lot of those are going over and helping with VBS, or doing English camps with existing OPC missions in places like Hungary, or Colombia, or Uganda, or Quebec. There's also opportunities to participate in what we call Churches Helping Churches. So you may have like a church plant, let's say, that has 40 people, and they say, it would be great if we could do a VBS as an outreach to our community, but we just don't have the manpower to do it. Well, Churches Helping Churches is a way for us as a denomination to say, well, we could bring 15 people and we can put on a VBS with you, right? We can help kind of augment your manpower so that you can do this outreach. There's all sorts of opportunities domestically and internationally to engage in this work. So I just point you towards this website. Look through these opportunities. There's some amazing things here and maybe things that God is calling you to go on or to be sent on. But of course, as you find perhaps a mission, one question that immediately comes up is, how do you fund that mission? And I wanna just mention something here about some opportunities that we wanna make available as a local church. And we're specifically looking to help get people on the field who are thinking about that more long-term mission calling, but wanting to kind of get some experience, you know, go spend a month. or three weeks somewhere, perhaps in one of the kind of opportunities that I've highlighted in some way. And so just a word about how the OPC funds missions, because this is one of the things that's different from many other denominations. So the way that the OPC funds missions in general is that all of the long-term missionaries, you know, that we pray for on Sunday mornings or that you see in New Horizons or that come and give presentations for us, all of those are 100% funded by the denomination. So in a lot of denominations or churches, it's just sort of a missionary has to kind of go around and like build a support network from a bunch of different churches and then go over. In the OPC, if you are called to a mission field, the denomination says, we will make sure you're provided for. So the denomination directly funds all long-term missions. Now there are other categories, you know, missionary associates who may just go for a year or short term missions like we've been looking at that are funded in a more kind of grassroots way. So if you were interested in going on one of these mission teams, you know, you should come talk to us as elders. You should. reach out to the folks at Denomination, and then be asking people to help support that work of missions. So that's funded in a more kind of grassroots way. Now, KCPC, as a local church, is part of this work of sending out missionaries. So if you look at our budget for 2025 that we just approved, we have about $62,000 that is set aside to go outside of our local ministry here. So about 17% of our budget for this year is going outside of our church to support outreach and ministry beyond our borders. So some of that goes directly to local missions organizations like the Pregnancy Crisis Center, or we give funds to help support scholarships at different reform seminaries, but a lot of those funds as well are going to our presbytery and our denomination, which is what funds all of these home missions and church planting things, all of these foreign missions, making these short-term missions opportunities available. So we as a church, you already are supporting and participating in this broader work of missions that we're talking about. But one of the things we wanted to do to encourage us as a local church to not only be sending, but also going, is the session has set aside a fund of $5,000 to help send people from our church on missions opportunities. And again, specifically what we're thinking of is not so much just being able to go for a week somewhere and do a VBS or something, that can be valuable, but especially helping those who are thinking about long-term missions get that experience and expertise. So if you look through these opportunities and you see one of these missions trips that's maybe two or three or four weeks long, or maybe it's a semester long or something like that, and you think, I'd be interested in pursuing that. come talk to myself or any of the elders. We'd love to talk with you about that sense of call, help you discern that, and there may even be some funds available to help make that trip possible. We really want to be, again, intentional as a church about being on mission, because as we kind of started with, that mission is not kind of an optional extra for the church. It's not something that some Christians are called to do. who are like really serious Christians, it's part and parcel of our mission as the church. It flows from God's command, and it flows from His character, and so we want to take that seriously. And whether you have funds to give or the freedom to go or not, all of us can and should be involved in short-term missions and long-term missions through the ministry of prayer, through the ministry of encouragement, and every single one of us can be involved in that way as well. So I hope that that is maybe kind of exciting and inspiring to you to look at some of these opportunities and think about how you could maybe be involved. Any questions before we wrap up here? All right, well, thank you for your time. And again, if you have questions or thoughts, I'm happy to talk. You can also go to the website here and reach out to the folks at the denomination. They're very accessible and helpful. I'd be glad to talk with you. Before I end our class, let me just say something about our Sunday school schedule coming up. I had something in the Shepherd's Voice this last week kind of outlining our roadmap for the upcoming semester. I'll be sending that out as an email as well later this week, so if you didn't see that, keep an eye on your email, and I'll have this all in writing for you. But as I said here at the beginning of the semester, we're doing a couple of sort of special one-off Sunday school classes. We heard about the Machen Conference and Retreat Center, we've talked about short-term missions opportunities, and next week I'll do a special class on hospitality. But after that, we want to begin a study on the Westminster Confession of Faith. Westminster Confession of Faith is what we hold to and believe as a faithful summary of Scripture as a church. So if you're an officer of the church, a pastor, an elder, a deacon, this is what we agree to teach. And so we want to teach it. We want to talk through this wonderful kind of summary of the faith, this survey of the Bible together as we work through that study. So that means it's going to be a bit of a different study than we sometimes do. There's not like a book with chapters that you need to kind of read through as part of that study. It'll be, you know, sitting down and going through, you know, most of the chapters in the Confession are a few paragraphs long. So we'll be working through those few paragraphs, seeing how it summarizes the Bible, and talking about it together. If you would like something to help with that study, though, we'll probably be using this study guide called Confessing the Faith by Emily Van Dixhorn. Her husband, Chad Van Dixhorn, is a seminary professor down at RTS Charlotte, and he wrote the book on the Westminster Confession of Faith. He's probably the world's leading expert on the confession, and he wrote a kind of commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith called Confessing the Faith. That's a very, very good resource. You don't have to pick that up, but it would be a good one to have on your shelf. But his wife then went through and put together kind of some study questions to help Sunday school classes or small groups kind of work through the content of the confession, and it breaks it up in more digestible ways. So we'll be following the kind of divisions that she uses in the book, and probably using some of those questions as well. So if that's the kind of thing that sounds interesting or helpful, you can pick up a copy of that. We'll start that mid-February. So again, keep an eye on your email, and I'll send all the details later this week, but that's what we're looking forward to as we come into this this new year. So thank you for your time and attention. Let me go ahead and close us with a word of prayer. Our God and Father, we thank you for your heart, for your people, that you have ordained that your church should grow and expand and include people from every tongue and tribe and nation, and that your commitment to that is so great that you are willing to send your son to die on the cross, to pay for our sins, and to draw us to himself. And we thank you, Lord, that we have the privilege of not only being the saved ones, but of being the sent ones, of being those who are able to go out and cross lines of nation and tongue and culture to support the work of the Church and advance the cause of missions around the world. And I pray, Lord, that perhaps from this class this morning, There would be those who would go, even this year, to be involved with this mission that you are unfolding around the world. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.