Since I've already had you standing there, we'll let you remain in your seats while I read verses 19 through 21. John 20, 19 through 21. And the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut, where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst of them and said unto them, peace be unto you. And when he had so said, he showed them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord. Then said Jesus to them again, peace be unto you. As my father hath sent me, even so send I you. We had a series of lessons some time ago on the subject of missions. I was trying to make that study as practical as possible, not dealing just with the theory and the theology of taking the gospel into the uttermost parts of the world. I was trying to be as practical in the application of missions as I could be. In the course of those lessons, I noticed many ways in which modern mission work is not as scripturally based as our brethren sometimes think that it is. I have the hopes of publishing those lessons one of these days. Confuse other people, not just you. But it hasn't happened so far. And maybe one of the reasons for that is because we might have another lesson or two which ties in with those earlier ones. And such is the case this morning. Let's consider more seriously the subject of indigenous missions. Let's start with a couple of definitions. The word missions, as I pointed out just a couple of weeks ago, is not a biblical term. It's not unbiblical, it's not anti-biblical, but we don't find the word missions in the word of God. So most people, most Baptists, picture missions as the implementation of the Great Commission. Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. The words of Jesus, Mark chapter 16, verse number 15. Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Matthew developed that commission just a bit when he quoted the Lord Jesus. Go ye therefore and teach all nations. baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, then teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And lo, I'm with you always, even unto the end of the world. And then in the book of the Acts of the Holy Spirit, sometimes called the Acts of the Apostles, In the book of Acts, we see several God-called men going out from their churches into the world, leading people to faith in Christ and then organizing those new believers into congregations, which we call churches. Something we don't often consider seriously enough is that despite the Greek language, which was throughout the Mediterranean, despite the Roman government, which was throughout the Mediterranean, the ministry that Paul and others had among the Jewish diaspora, the Jews scattered throughout the Mediterranean, something that we don't often consider is that Paul and his teams went to a variety of different cultures to present Christ. People of various backgrounds. Macedonia was very different from Galatia, which was considerably different from Syria, where Paul began his missionary work. And Syria was very different from Judea and the city of Jerusalem. Paul tried to begin his work in the Jewish synagogue, wherever he went. The Jews had been scattered, there were synagogues all over the place, and usually he went to the synagogue and there began to address the Jews that the Messiah had come. Sometimes there wasn't a synagogue there. And almost always, shortly after he arrived and pointed to Jesus and said, there is the Messiah, they kicked him out. And then he would begin to deal with the Gentiles who were in that community. Those Gentiles in this community were different from the Gentiles in this community, in their culture, in their language. in so many other things. So Paul had to adapt his ministry to the people that he was addressing. Paul teaches us that ultimately, missions should be the planting of churches filled with those newly saved people. But as I say, the new believers in one community were often very different from the believers in another community, depending on their culture. To that word missions, I would like to add the adjective indigenous, which we use every day, I'm sure. Essentially indigenous refers to something that is native, something that is local. In other countries, Canada, wherever, another word might be aboriginal or aborigine. We don't use that in the United States very often. Indigenous can be applied to all sorts of things, animals and plants. dress codes, languages. For example, an indigenous plant is one that is growing or living naturally in a particular country or climate. It is native to that region. Palm trees are not indigenous to North Idaho. Although you might find one once in a while. The Tasmanian devil is an animal that's indigenous to the island of Tasmania. The platypus is indigenous to Australia. Australia is the platypus' original home. It's his only true home. So how does the word indigenous apply to missions? The truth is, it does so only indirectly. because Christianity initially was, and it still is, an imported faith. Basically, there are only two religions in this world, beginning with Cain. There's the satanically inspired religion of man, which has evolved into a thousand different forms and shapes. And then there is the worship of God through the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the way it is. We have a vast number of religions and we have the one true faith. It might irritate a lot of people, but that is truth. That's the way things are. Man in his corrupted condition, ruined by Adam's fall, will never worship Jehovah, never worship the Lord, without God's intervention first. It's contrary to his nature. We'll not do it. The only reason why any of us have ever considered trusting and serving the God of the Bible was because the Holy Spirit intruded into our souls and lives. And those of us who know Christ can look back and say, yeah, I see that. The person outside of Christ will not see it until that happens to him. And this was vividly displayed in the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. He had no intention of worshipping God through Christ Jesus until the Lord came along and slapped him between the eyes and said, here. And things changed for him. Until the Lord regenerates, there is nothing in us except spiritual darkness. Well then, if the worship of God is not indigenous to the soil of humanity, how does that word apply to missions? It comes after the fact, so to speak. Once Paul or Barnabas or some other gospel minister carries the faith of Christ into an un-evangelized region, what he should do is see to it that the churches he establishes become native to that region. Basically, indigenous missions means that churches started by American missionaries in the Philippines or Peru or Patagonia should not be little clones of American churches. Just as they shouldn't be required to worship God in English, there are other things that they should not be required to do that we do here. They shouldn't have to sing out of our hymn books. They shouldn't have to play to the accompaniment of pianos and organs. They can do very well with a guitar, perhaps. They don't have to use offering plates, as those natives bring in their chickens and grain to give to the Lord's work. Remember, the churches in our country today do not look like the churches in Ephesus or Corinth that we find in the Bible. Doctrinally, yes, but culturally, no. Consider the biblical pattern. The Lord Jesus was a missionary of God the Father. He established missionary beachheads in Galilee and Judea, leading a few dozen people to saving faith. Then he started, then he organized a church, ordaining a dozen men to act as leaders and evangelists. And he said to those men, as my father has sent me, even so send I you. After establishing that first church, Christ stepped back and encouraged that church to reproduce itself. The first missionary to Judea, Jesus Christ, then retired from the field and went home. You could say that, in a sense, from that point on, that church was intended to be indigenous, growing naturally in the soil of Judea, prospering in its own way, but under the ministry of the Holy Spirit. That is what we're supposed to see today anywhere in the world, everywhere in the world. Have you ever considered the cultural differences that existed between Paul and Timothy? We could pick others, but Paul and Timothy. Paul was a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He was the epitome of proper Judaism before he was saved. What about Timothy? His mother was a Jewess. His father was a Greek. He was a half-breed. And you can be sure that despite the influence of his mother and his grandmother, dad kind of molded Timothy to some degree as well. He was a Galatian, not even from Tarsus as Paul had been. The difference between them was at least as great as an English-speaking Cherokee and you. I don't see any difference. Well, there's a difference. I assure you, there's a difference. The difference between Paul and Timothy was, you wouldn't understand this illustration, The difference between an English-speaking Canadian and a Quebecois. Citizens of the same place. They're not the same. They're not the same. We know where and when Timotheus entered the history of missions. It was probably during Paul's first missionary journey through the middle of Galatia that Timothy was saved. On his second journey, in Acts chapter 16, there was this young disciple. And Paul said, come join our team. And he did. Timothy, because of his cultural background, had access to a world that ultimately hated Paul. Hated Paul because number one, he was a Jew, and number two, he's this radical cult of the Jews, these Christians. Timothy was not. Oh yes, he had some Jewish blood, but he was culturally a Galatian. When people were ready to stone Paul, they might have been a little slower in considering, let's stone Timothy as well, because he's one of us. Paul is not. Timotheus was indigenous to Galatia and the province of Asia, and like Titus, he was definitely out of place in Jerusalem. Remember what happened when Paul took Titus to Jerusalem? All kinds of problems. As such, Timothy had a different kind of evangelistic ministry in Ephesus, the surrounding region. After Paul and his team evangelized the city, or an area like Macedonia, as quickly as they could, they ordained elders in those churches. Who were those new church leaders? Did Paul leave Timothy or Titus in Philippi to pastor that work as Paul moved on? He did not. As Galileans or Asians, Timothy was out of place in Macedonia. That was different than Galatia. The new believers in Macedonia may have been thoroughly happy to have Paul there and Timothy and Titus and Silas and all of the others, but the unbelievers perhaps not so much. limiting the evangelistic outreach that the missionary team could have had. Does the Bible ever speak of a Jew or a Judean pastoring any of the churches outside of Judea? Not that I recall. Paul practiced what we might call indigenous missions. When churches were established, they became congregations of Macedonians or Greeks in Achaia. And even though some of them were Jews by blood and some of them were not, they were still from Corinth or Philippi. Later, Paul wrote to Titus, for this cause I left thee in Crete that thou should set in order the things that are wanting and ordain elders in every city as I appointed thee. Who were the elders who were ordained on the Isle of Crete? They were Cretans. They were natives of that place. This is one aspect of indigenous missions. Indigenous missions forms itself or illustrates itself in three areas. Self-government, self-support, and self-propagation. One of the books that I have most recently read that deals with the subject of missions was written by a former Presbyterian missionary. He declared himself to be a strong proponent of indigenous missions, but he was limited by his denomination. His definition of self-government is not the same definition that I have for self-government. He may have wanted people in Korea, where he served to lead the Korean branch of the Presbyterian denomination. But he didn't believe in the autonomy of each local congregation. Those congregations had to listen to the Korean leaders of the denomination. That's where I disagree with this man. Our church, technically, has the word independent in its title. We are the Calvary Independent Baptist Church. We believe in church autonomy. There are no bishops, there are no presiding presbyters, there are no denominations who can tell you who you must choose to be your pastor. No one can tell us how to spend our offerings. No one can tell us you must support this missionary and you must not support this missionary over there. These are our decisions. We're autonomous. We decide whether or not to install air conditioners. We decide whether or not we need to pave the parking lot. Yes, no. The same independence should be instilled into every new church, whether in Canada or in Kenya. As quickly as possible, the members of that new church in Thailand or Argentina should be given the same opportunities to make decisions that you and I make here in the United States. Just because they have recently been or they are considered to be a mission, this should not mean they are incapable or not permitted to make decisions for themselves. It is demeaning. It is disgusting to think that a Filipino Christian is less capable than an American Christian at anything. Sure, they'll lean heavily on the missionary who's recently led them to the Lord, but it should be that missionary's plans to step back as quickly as possible to let those converts in that new church make decisions. Should that native church spend money, which they probably don't have anyway, on flush toilets when at their homes they all have outhouses? Missionary may think so. Is there anything wrong with splitting these pews and having the ladies over there and the men over there? There's nothing wrong with that. And if it has been in their culture for a long time, the missionary better not come in and say, no, we believe that we all should sit together. You should have your families with you. And then the lost man who has been raised in this culture for the last 300 years, he's a really old guy, comes in and he sees the lack of separation and he's offended and he leaves. Why should we demand that sort of thing which has nothing to do with the presentation of the gospel? The members of native churches should be given the opportunity to make many kinds of decisions. And indigenous missions seeks to give each of those congregations that responsibility. And indigenous missions means independency when it comes to finances. Indigenous missions are self-supporting. They should be from day one. Let's say we're talking about a country with a very low standard of living. Right now, and it's been true for a number of years, I mean many years, 10 or 20 years, The international poverty line as determined by some indeterminable individual is $1.90. $1.90. That is supposed to be what it takes for the average person in the world to buy his food and anything else that he might need to live on per day. I think it's per day. Should have checked my sources a little better. Okay, the missionary comes in, he has four kids. There's no way that he's gonna live on $12 a day with this situation, and that's fine. He should spend whatever he needs to spend on the maintenance of his family. But if he starts pumping two or three hundred dollars a month into the economy of a little group of believers, which is not used to that kind of income, the damage may become irreparable. Chocolate cake. We had a very rare chocolate cake earlier this week. Chocolate cake is poison to the person whose barely alive after 20 years on this earth because all he can eat is rice and a few vegetables. It would kill him. Let's say a missionary comes to town and finds a building to rent for $100 a month. Wow, compared to what it was at home, this is a bargain. So he takes up his missionary income and he makes an agreement with the owner of this property to give him $100 a month to allow the missionary to build a church in this facility. First, where in the Bible do we have an example of that sort of expense? It is unbiblical. We never see Paul going out and renting a building and saying, all right, we'll put up our sign now and we're gonna have a church here someday. Is a church essential to the establishing of a church? Is a building essential? It's not even essential here, let alone anywhere else. And second, what happens when that group grows and becomes a church and it's time for the missionary to move on? The owner of that building is going to say, look at all these people, I'm going to charge you $300 a month. And these four people who are living hand to mouth, day after day, who have no extra income whatsoever, will not be able to pay that $300 a month. They couldn't pay the $100 a month. They become bound to the money that is sent from the United States through that missionary. But it's gone. They are not financially indigenous. That church has become an ecclesiastical colony of the United States. Paul's work in Philippi is an example. The first group of believers met in Lydia's house, rent-free. Or they went back out and met under the trees there by the riverside, the way they first met. Not once in any chapter in Acts or in Paul's epistles is there any indication that the missionary took his own money to finance a building or any other particular need. If, as in the case of Philippi, the number of believers grew, then at the same time their financial resources grew at the same rate. They are not living on the poverty line in Philippi. When Paul moved on to Thessalonica, he left without creating a financial void. They missed him. There was a void, but it wasn't financial. Financially and physically, what they had during the missionary service was what they had when he left. That's the way it should be. The church in Philippi did whatever they could with their own budget, quite independent of Paul or the church in Antioch. Let's say that Paul taught the people in Philippi to tithe. There is no indication whatsoever that he ever did. But let's say that Lydia, the Jewish, Jewess, who grew up with the Old Testament law, tithed. And she encouraged her friends, these new believers in the church, to tithe as she did. As the congregation grew, and there were 10 families in the membership of the church, with that income, those 10 families should be able to support another one of themselves, to pastor the church, for example. But more likely, that first pastor continued in whatever occupation he had before. And yes, perhaps the church augmented his income as best they could. And in many places, the support he received wasn't financial at all, it was food. That was just 250 years ago in this country. Or maybe the people wanted to invest their little bit of income in buying some property for a future building. I'm not saying they did. I see no indication of that in the word of God. For a short while, Paul might've been there to advise them, but now he's moved on. There's no one there to say, yeah, you really don't need to do this. Spend your money somewhere else. If they wanted hymnals, if they wanted to buy newspaper ads, if they wanted to buy Bibles for everyone, they didn't go to Barnabas and say, would you give us some money so we can buy some hymnals? The principle we see in God's word is that each congregation was financially independent from the start. And if the church in Berea wanted to send money to help Paul down in Corinth, they did it and that's all right. It was their choice. Paul didn't tell him what to do. It was their choice. They were indigenous in that they spent the money they had and they weren't in any way tied to the church in Syria from whence Paul and Silas came. Throughout my ministry, I've heard missionaries begging American churches for money to build buildings on the foreign field, to buy sound systems that they could use in that church that they had just established, to buy cars and bicycles for the native preachers that they're sending out. In many cases, the local people didn't know they needed these things until the missionary said, oh, wouldn't it be good if you had a bicycle? Usually, it's a mistake to create a need that doesn't exist. And it's always a mistake to create a welfare condition. Always. It's not being mean to say that a mission in Borneo doesn't need to have all the things that we have here. They're not going to have air conditioners in Borneo. And they're not expecting air conditioners. What if one of those people came to visit us and, whoa, it's cold in here. I live in Borneo. That church doesn't need an air conditioner down there. Everybody just sits next to the other person and sweats. It is. It's not being unkind to teach those people to trust the Lord to supply their needs. Isn't that what I'm supposed to be teaching you? Trust the Lord. Don't run to the government and get a loan to put air conditioners in the building. If the Lord gives you money to do it, then If checking with him, we find it to be his will, then we go ahead and we do it. And it's our decision based on the leadership of the Lord, not anybody else. The third aspect of indigenous is self-propagation. This is what most recently provoked me and pushed me into this lesson. The winning of others to faith in the Lord Jesus and a membership in one of his churches is a responsibility that every church should have and every member in those churches should recognize this. But I will reiterate, not everyone has the same calling or the same ability. Not everyone is called to preach. Neither is everyone gifted with the ability to walk up to a perfect stranger and speak to them about their need of Christ. In fact, very few of us have that. But we all can love one another and we can prove our discipleship and brotherhood in the way that Christ taught us to. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples. That ye love one another. Now back to this idea of indigenous missions. Who is better able to witness in a black neighborhood in the southern parts of the United States? Me or Daniel Pearson? Everybody knows the answer to that if you know who Daniel Pearson is. He's got a little darker skin tone than I have. We both may speak the same language, we may declare the same doctrine, but I guarantee that that lost black man with the kind of prejudice which is being spread through the United States right now is going to be far more interested in what Daniel has to say than what I have to say. It's just a fact. That's the way things are. It shouldn't be, but this is the reality. A couple of years ago, Brother Silvers and Brother Fulton and I went to the funeral of a Cherokee preacher that we all knew. I had met the man in Oklahoma and I was really impressed with his ability to preach. This was the blind fella who, he just did a tremendous job with the word of God, passed away. As several of the Indians rose to speak about the man in this memorial service, I noticed that neither Scott nor Austin moved. I was not seated with them, I was across the aisle because of the limited seating. They didn't want to say anything, so I stood up, the fool that I was. And I said some good things about this brother who had passed away. And let's just say that the reception that those Colville Indians gave to me was on the slightly cool side. I'm trying to think. I don't know that there was another white man in the service other than the three of us. As an outsider, as a white man, they didn't appreciate my intrusion into their memorial service. You and I, living in our isolation, don't realize how much anti-American prejudice there is in the world. We think that everybody loves us. We're so generous. We're so hospitable. We give so many government dollars to all of these countries around the world. How can they not love us? just finishing a book written by a Christian man native to India, I learned that this is not true in that country. And he said it's not true in most of Asia, where half the people of the world live these days. He said that his own people want to evangelize India, but they can't as long as white missionaries are there. And this is his statement. Our people won't listen to us, an Indian. The communists and Muslims tell them that white missionaries are spies sent out by their governments as agents of capitalistic imperialists. We know this isn't true, but newspaper reports tell us that some missionaries are getting funds from the CIA. We Christians love American missionaries, but the only hope we have of evangelizing our country is for all white missionaries to leave. When I'm identified with that white missionary, I lose my rapport with my neighbors. What if all white missionaries left India? What would be left? indigenous missions. Picture an evangelist working in Central Africa or Indonesia or India. Those places were colonies of Europe until recently. And the word colonization is a cuss word to those people. For decades, the government and the press in that country have been anti-American. More and more people have been saying that white-skinned people are out to colonize this country religiously. Who's going to be more effective in spreading the gospel in those countries? The American or the man with the skin and the clothing and the speech and the cultural mindset of the people in that country? Even when it comes to money, in many societies, when it appears that someone has more money than someone else, there is a resentment, automatic. It used to be when the missionary and all of his money comes in and builds a whole compound in some Asian community, people looked and said, wow, this is great. They don't do that anymore. What was once envy has now become more spread jealousy and resentment. Why do you have all this money and I live on $2 a day? I don't like that. People in India or Central Africa think that American poverty, what we have here that we call poverty, looks luxurious to them in their poverty. The resentment that exists in half the countries of the world limits our missions. But it does not exist when the evangelist is a local man, when he is indigenous to that region. That Indian believer to whom I just referred wrote, even though my homeland has 16 major religions and 1,650 dialects, each representing a different culture, it is still relatively easy for an Indian to make a transition from one culture to another. And it is also true that in among American Indians, that man whose funeral I attended, He was a Cherokee up here in the Colvilles. And the Cherokees and the Choctaws go and they minister on the reservation in Oregon. It's easy for them to go from one culture to another. More difficult for me to do that, for us to do that. Where was I? That Indian fellow went on. In fact, almost anyone in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, Sri Lanka can relatively quickly cross-minister in a neighboring culture. But that is not something that the American missionary can do. Indigenous missions means equipping those new converts in Macedonia and Myanmar and Madagascar to share the gospel with their neighbors. But sadly, Many missionaries for the last hundred years have made the people that they bring to Christ dependent upon themselves rather than dependent on the Lord. They promise them American personnel and money and gadgets and for a while they supply these things. But after they have created a dependency upon this American culture, they die, or they go home, or the government says, you cannot be here. And then what happens to those people that they've created dependent? At that point, the native believers are left treading water. And they either drown, or they leave the pool. The principles of indigenous missions are important. and they are biblical. They make sense. And we need to seriously consider them when it's time for us and we have the opportunity to support another missionary. It needs to be in our minds. Thank you for staying with me. We'll let you take a break.