The best missionary is the Bible. You will notice from the Frontline Fellowship logo, our badge, all the way dating back to 1982, the sword, the word, and Africa. Bible-based, Christ-centered, Africa-faced. That's been the vision of our mission from the very earliest. Our vision was to put feet to our faith and be a Bible-based mission. The best missionary is the Bible. The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough, and it's never considered a foreigner. Those are the words of William Cameron Townsend, one of the outstanding missionaries of the 20th century. William Cameron Townsend was one of the most influential mission leaders in the 20th century, and you'll see why in a moment. Born in California in 1896, raised in a Presbyterian church, he was inspired to join the student volunteer movement after hearing Mishni John Mott speak at the Occidental College in Los Angeles. In 1917, as William Townsend prepared with hundreds of thousands of others, millions of others actually, to join the army and to participate in the great war to end all wars, as they called it at that time, He was challenged by missionary on furlough to make the great commission his priority and go to the mission field instead of to the battlefield. What a good decision he made. He departed for Guatemala August 1917 with a Bible association that sold Spanish Bibles in the field. He had almost completed his first year of service in Guatemala when one of the Cachico Indians approached his table, looked at the Spanish Bible, and asked, If your God is so smart, why doesn't he speak my language? Cameron was shocked to learn that although this man lived in Guatemala, he is one of the 200,000 Catrico people who spoke no Spanish. The cutting comment of this Indian so troubled Cameron that he dedicated the next 13 years of his life to translating the Bible into that language. He then began an organization known as Wycliffe Bible Translators, named after the morning star of the Reformation, Professor John Wycliffe, who first translated the Bible into English. Maybe you noticed Indemisa wearing a t-shirt with a simple word on it the other day, lolod. Well, the lolods were the Evangelists, the field workers of the Reformation, sent out by John Wycliffe to preach the gospel, to read the scriptures, to sing the scriptures in the marketplace. Because they sang the scriptures, they were called the Lollards. And like Christians throughout the ages, they took that term, meant to be a term of derision, and took it as a badge of honor. In 1937, Cameron Townsend opened up Camp Wycliffe in Arkansas to train young people in basic linguistics and translation methods. Two students enrolled in the first summer. Imagine having a camp and two people come. The next summer, they had five men attend. I mean, that's massive growth. That's 250% growth on the first year. When you start small, you can only have impressive growth from there. From these small beginnings grew the worldwide ministry of Summer Institute of Linguistics, SIL, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the Wycliffe Associates. I mean, this is one of the greatest missionary movements of the 20th century. It's been my privilege to speak in their devotions at the headquarters in Florida as well. No cultural group is considered too small. No language too great a challenge. Today, thousands of mission workers are engaged in Wycliffe Bible translation projects. Now, I might add, when people hear some of the size of some of these groups that they're translating the Bible into, some people say, is it worthwhile translating the Bible in that group? And it just so happened that the person saying this was a person who was Afrikaans, with French Huguenot name. And so this missionary from Wycliffe said, so how many Huguenots came to the Cape in 1688? And he said, 300. And he said, and how many descendants do they have now? And, well, in fact, a full quarter of the Afrikaans bloodline are French Huguenots. So would you despise a tribe that's a small number, maybe a few thousand? He said, are they worth it? But think how many there are going to be, multiplication through the years. It's an important perception to understand that numbers, I mean, how big was the church before the day of Pentecost? 120. Don't despise the days of small beginnings. William Townsend has been credited with launching the new missions frontier, which no longer focuses on reaching continents, and island countries, but on every distinct ethnic group or people group in the world. You see, the first wave of the modern missionary movement was launched by William Carey. William Carey launched the first faith mission ministry, or the first denominational mission I should say, back in the 1790s. And so his was the particular Baptist Calvinist society for the propagation of the gospel amongst the heathen. Bit of a mouthful, but that was what they were. And so he launched the modern era of missions, and they were denominational missions. And soon you had the London Missionary Society for the Congregationals, You had the Presbyterians launching a people and society for the propagation of Christian knowledge for the Anglicans and so on church missionary society for the Church of England as well and so on but Then you had in the 1860s was launched the inland missionary groups starting with China in admission interdenominational missions faith missions and then you had African land missions that anterior missions and so on so you now had a the inland missions, because the first missions, of course, started on the coast, as you can imagine. But now the third wave of missions was this launch by William Cameron Townsend. People groups, to every ethnolinguistic people group. And this is where we are right now. Now, this is a 2015, so it's a six-year-old, stats on the number of languages likely in need of Bible translation with no active program yet in place. And these are representing 165 million people worldwide that would be represented by these languages. So at the moment, 98% of the world's population has a Bible, New Testament, or Gospels in their language. But although there's 1,700 ethnolinguistic groups that do not have the Bible in their own language, they might have access to a second language, a trade language, but in their language it doesn't exist yet. And so Wycliffe is focusing on those groups for the Bible to be in their language. Jesus Christ focused on ethnolinguistic people groups in the Great Commission. When our Lord commanded us to make disciples of every nation, the word used in the Greek is ethni. make disciples of every ethnic from where our word ethnic comes from. The Great Commission is not merely to take the gospel to every one of the 222 countries or states in the world, but to each of the at least 12,000 ethnolinguistic people groups in the world. Unfortunately, many people today are confused about the concept of nations, because there's a group of state representatives in New York calling themselves the United Nations. They're neither united nor nations. In fact, most of them have no legitimacy at all. UN members are mostly gangsters with flags. The UN is today the largest collection of unelected dictators, mass murderers, drug traffickers, and human traffickers on the planet. A biblical nation is an ethno-linguistic people group of a shared faith. The scriptures make it clear that the Hebrews remained Hebrews even after 480 years in Egypt. They never became Egyptians. We're not geographic accidents, we are demographic descendants. And therefore, the Bible makes it clear that gospel must go to every nation. And there's an emphasis, even in heaven, that people of every tribe and language and people and group will be gathered, worshiping the Lord in their own language. The scriptures emphasize that all the families of the nations of the earth are to sing the praise of the creator in every language and tongue. It matters. They won't all be there singing in Latin. or Hebrew, or Greek, every language, every tongue. Revelation 5 is done, and they sang a new song saying, you are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain and have redeemed us by your blood out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation. Interesting that even in heaven, the person's tribe, tongue, language, and nation will be significant. And so you may look at a continent, and you may think of it as just one block. But even in Europe, you've got the Celtic, the Italic, the Germanic, the Balto-Slavic, the Indo-Iranian, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, and Anatolian. There's different ethnolinguistic people groups within Europe. Europe's not monolithic at all. you can break it down, you can see the different related groups and languages and tongues, and from an ethnologist point of view, it becomes more interesting. Now when you get to India, there are hundreds of ethnolinguistic people groups in India, and we need to bear this in mind, and they were over the years many different nations, and the only reason why there's a common Indian country today is because the British made it part of their empire. Before that, there were different groups. You know, Bengal was a completely different country from Tamil and so on. Now, this is the way the AU wants us to think of Africa. You've got 55 states, and that's Africa. But many of these countries don't make ethnolinguistic sense. Many of the wars in Africa have come from trying to force Muslims and Christians or animists together in the same country, and people of different calendars and alphabets and different languages and religions. And this has created wars, like in Nigeria and in the Congo and in Sudan. And so we need to understand, rather, the ethnolinguistic people groups and draw boundaries accordingly, recognizing the different people groups. And many of the boundaries in Africa don't make sense. You've got sometimes literally a latitude. decided the Berlin Conference of 1885. And so the Vambo people half live in Namibia, and half live in Angola. And half speak Afrikaans or English, and the other half speak Portuguese. And half drive on the left-hand side of the road, and half drive on the right-hand side of the road, and in a different time zone, even though they're north and south of one another. And the Chichewa people are parceled out between Zambia and Mozambique and Malawi. And the Shungon people are half in South Africa, and half in Mozambique, and so on. And a lot of the boundaries don't make sense. And so from a missionary point of view, we think ethno-linguistically. And this is how you plant churches. You think of ethno-linguistic people groups. It's not enough to say, oh, There's a church in Amsterdam. Well, that's great if you happen to be Dutch and reformed, but what about the Vietnamese boat people? What about the Moroccans? And I have been in the Netherlands and in Belgium at meetings, and I have had more Middle Easterners than Belgians or Dutch people attending the services. People from Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan and Turkey and Morocco and Algeria and Libya and Egypt. in a Christian meeting, Christians, actually, in this case. But they can't be comfortable in a church that doesn't speak their language. It might be how they get saved, but how they get discipled. At some point, you're going to have to think of building an ethno-linguistic people group congregation. Similarly with Nigeria. And Nigeria had a vicious civil war from 1967 to 1970, when the Christian South of the Biafrans seceded from the Muslim-controlled North. And what a brutal war that was. And tragically, although Biafra had by far the best army and were overwhelmingly winning in the field, but Britain and Russia and China and the United States of America poured in the aid and France to help the Muslim dictatorship suppress the Christians in Nigeria. And only South Africa gave aid to the Biafrans. shockingly. It was to see the communists and the capitalists working together to help a Muslim dictatorship crush the Christian aspirations of Biafrans was brutal. And so when you look at Africa in broad terms, you can see a very distinct development of different types of language groupings in big, broad circles. And those cut across boundaries, because the boundaries often are not made with consideration of people's ethnolinguistic people group, let alone their shared faith. And so this might be a more realistic And by the way, do you notice how the Western Cape and Northern Cape are very distinct ethnolinguistically, where Afrikaans is, for example, overwhelmingly majority language here, as opposed to the rest of South Africa. So you can see different groupings, and obviously South Sudan has absolutely nothing in common with Northern Sudan and so on and so forth, and that's why the boundary had to be redrawn there and so on. So these are just some of the ways of us understanding the mission field. As examples of how demographics have changed and present challenges to missionaries, consider this. Do you know in Detroit, that's where they made motorcars, Detroit. There are a quarter of a million Arabs living in Detroit and 40,000 Iraqis living in Detroit. Now a person might be in Detroit and they think, I wish we could do something to take the gospel to the Muslims in the Middle East, but that's so difficult, the mission field's so far away. The mission field's next door, they've moved into the suburb where you live probably. Do you know there's a million, more than a million Japanese living in Sao Paulo, Brazil? Sao Paulo, Brazil? What on earth are Japanese doing there? A million of them? In Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city of eight million, 10% of the churches are Korean speaking. Who knew? In Marseille, France, a city of two million inhabitants, 31% come from Africa, almost all Arabs. I mean, can you imagine 30% Arabs from North Africa, from closed countries, mind you, living in Marseille, France? In Minneapolis-St. Paul's, which I have been to frequently and ministered in, there are 136 languages and more than 70 ethnic groups represented. More than half a million of the people living in the twin cities of Minneapolis are immigrants. Vast amounts of Muslims, huge amounts. It's a massive mission field. There are now more Buddhists living in the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul than assemblies of God and herons in the whole state of Minnesota. There's twice as many Muslims living in the Twin Cities as Assemblies of God adherents in the whole state of Minnesota. There are more Bulgarians living in Chicago than are in the capital city of Bulgaria. I've ministered in the capital city of Bulgaria in Sofia. Well, now you've got more people who are Bulgarian living in Chicago than there are in the capital of Bulgaria. Can you imagine? You know, we all knew Chicago was kind of run by the Irish. We knew Chicago was very Irish, but Bulgarian? Really? But many people can't see what's right there next to them. I mean, the blindness of people. You can just imagine here, this ranger saying, now if you look over there, far in distance on that bush, you might see a lion, but they can't see the one right next to them. World missions is no longer across oceans and deserts and mountains. Many nations have moved into our own neighborhoods. It's called globalization or globalism. It's a reality. Some mission frontiers are no longer that geographically distant, but culturally different and literally in our neighborhoods. For example, Do you know Somalia is a closed country? Somalia is a restricted access area. Somalia in 1993, they killed the last pastor, burned the last church. And there was a report just a few years ago that of the eight known Christians in Somalia, they'd all been stoned to death that year. Another year, I heard of 12 Muslims who'd convert to Christ being stoned to death or killed in other ways in Somalia. No known organized church in Somalia. And do you know, we have large numbers of Somalians in the Cape Peninsula. In Mashapumalele, in Hrebo, In Wellington, I've met them. I mean, they've got shops all over the place. The Somalians are all over, in Cape Town. So it could cost your church a fortune to get a missionary up to Somalia, and who knows how long he'd live. But you can reach Somalians safely and legally here in Cape Town. And how many churches even have thought about it? We have, in the Cape Peninsula, Burkap. When I grew up, it was called the Malay Quarter. And I've got my Muslim evangelism introduction over here. Very colorful, interesting part of the Cape, living on the slopes of Signal Hill and Lion's Head. And most people are not aware there's, I don't know what it is now, but when I was going in with the founder of Life Challenge Africa, Gerrit Niels, there were 11 mosques in this little area. There's probably more mosques by now. Some of these mosques date back to the 17th century, literally, 1600. So this is a Muslim area. In fact, it's so Islamic, you could go in and you could do a film and people would think you're in the Middle East. There's parts of it, decor and the whole setup there and the culture is very different and unique. Well, in Burqa, you will find people from Saudi Arabia. you'll find people from Pakistan. It's absolutely extraordinary. Now, the Malays originally came from Malaya, and what today is called Indonesia, because that was also under Dutch, and the Dutch treated the troublemakers, they would have called them the revolutionaries, the political rabble-rousers, anyone that fell foul of them, they shipped their troublemakers to the Cape, so that they couldn't cause trouble in Malaya or Dutch East Indies, as they call them. Of course, they didn't think about what they might do over here in the Cape, just like the British used to take all their criminals and problems, people that they didn't like, and they shipped them off to Australia. So it was the same kind of idea. And so, as a result, we have got a Muslim mission field every bit as needy as Saudi Arabia or Somalia or Yemen or Syria right here in the Cape. And you don't have to travel far. You don't have to get a plane ticket. You don't need a visa. You don't need inoculations. You can go and reach part of the Muslim world right here in Cape Town. Now of course there's Muslims in other parts too, but this is a very concentrated area. In fact, I don't know, Hunter could confirm, but I don't believe there's a single Christian congregation established in the Boko. This is a solidly Muslim area. And you would think after all these years we'd have one Christian congregation or so in there, or several. I don't think there is one yet. And this is a very strong Muslim cultural grouping and we should Reach out to them. They've got some old mosques with some phenomenally interesting history. In fact, Borkop is a fascinating area to go. And some people, in fact, I would say more tourists go to Borkop than evangelists. which is a sad commentary, but this is a mission field, and it's one that we certainly plan to go to as part of any GCC, and God willing, we will be there, and seek to evangelize these people. Now, on top of Signal Hill, you have the highest place of worship in the Cape. Muslims like the high place. They like the symbolism of this, and this mosque, it's built over the grave of some important sheikh, Imam in the past, and it's a very popular place for weddings to take place too. But that is on top of Signal Hill. And again, it should be a reminder. You can see it when you're on top of Table Mountain. You look down on the top of Lion's Head, you can see this place, and it really should be a reminder to pray. But if you don't have eyes to see this, you should have ears to hear. Almost anywhere in the Cape Peninsula, you can hear five times a day, the call to prayer, the Islamic call to prayer. And that should remind us of the fact we have a mission field on our doorstep. District 6. Another reminder, this is in Athlone, one of the biggest mosques you will get in the Cape Peninsula as well. And even facing St. Martin's Lutheran Church in Gardens, you've got a mosque right on the other side of the road. So our Great Commission manual and our handbook has a section, chapter, just on the Bible is the greatest missionary. The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Here we are, right there, in the southernmost tip of Africa. We're at the outermost part of the earth. We're at this mission-sending area, this mission-sensory country, and surrounded by mission fields. To reach these many nations, we need the word of God in every language. The Lord gave the word. Great was the company of those who proclaimed it. Gospel literature is our key. The Lord gave the word and great was the company of those who published the word of God. The written word can go where and when the human voice cannot. The car passing by at a traffic light and you can offer it to them or at taxi ranks. Literature is the most cost effective way of proclaiming the gospel. Getting out to the beaches. getting out to the marketplaces. It has no passport or visa problems. We have visa problems. Literature has no visa problems. It doesn't even need a passport. It knows no fear. We may sometimes be intimidated when we're sharing the gospel with Muslims and people of other religions and so on, but the literature has no fear. It never loses its temper. It doesn't matter how much you provoke the literature. I mean, we might get provoked and be tempted to lose our temper, but the literature will never lose its temper. We might get tired. The Bible says that we will reap if we faint not, but the literature never tires. And even when we sleep, the literature can be working. The literature is never discouraged. By the way, can I just draw your attention to the fact that Arabic starts on what we think is the back, on the right side, and they read from right to left. Now, isn't it interesting that in most of the Western world, people read from left to right, but most of the Eastern world, they read from right to left. And so, in a sense, all our reading towards the center, Jerusalem, where the gospel came from. Just an interesting observation. Literature can tell its story over and over again. It can be read when people are most attentive. It is seed being sowed, and word of God will never return void. It can be received and read and studied in secret. In some of the most restricted access areas, the Bible, gospel literature, can speak without an accent. Now we speak with an accent. Not that we think we do, but others think we speak with an accent. But the Bible, in their language, will speak in their accent. It never compromised the message. It doesn't forget anything. The written word is more permanent than the human voice. We go home, the literature stays and continues to work. A drop of ink may make a million think. And that's why investing in literature is such a wise investment. So then faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Do you have gospel booklets and scriptures to distribute to those that you encounter on a daily basis? Just carrying some literature with us. enables us to sow seed wherever we go. For I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes. Are you regularly giving gospel booklets to your friends, coworkers, neighbors, and strangers? For the word of God is living, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discern of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Stock up on spiritual ammunition. We're involved in a world war of worldviews. This is a battle for hearts, minds, and souls. What we do now will have consequences for eternity. So shall my word be that goes forth from mouth. It shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish what I please. It shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it. Gospel tracts are not just bullets, spiritual ammunition. They can be guided missiles, especially Bibles. And so whether we're in the malls distributing gospel literature, and we've had some magnificent opportunities to open up book tables and charity displays at Cavendish Square, going on Women's Day, setting up book tables, distributing tracts in the malls, distributing thousands of tracts on a given day. We managed to distribute New Testaments to people who fill out our spiritual well-being survey, questioning people, Basically taking them through the EE and where the master questions and we've had the privilege of playing with some in the marketplace now We've invested in literature we get Many containers coming here one year. We actually had 11 containers and On a slow year, we might have only four containers. It's an average of six to eight containers. That's 20 foot containers with an average of 17 to 18 tons a container. And these Bibles, books, world missionary press, gospel booklets that we've been able to stock and supply and receive and be able to deliver, ship to people. Obviously, this sort of always reminds me of this eye. It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God kind of thing. Now, fitting that container into the narrow gate, it sort of reminds you that we've got a narrow gate to go through. And it's magnificent when you think how much work is represented in these containers, how many people did the research, and the writing, and the printing in the first place, and then the donating, and the shipping, and the delivering, and the collating in Eagle's Nest, and then shipping them out to us, or World Missionary Press, getting them printed and translated into different languages. And these materials come to us by the ton. We don't take this for granted. These are valuable resources because these Sunday school packs, these Bibles, Bible study materials, these resources are able to enrich so many people who are praying for these materials. And yes, we've sometimes got to do this in the rain and you've got to make a plan, but we've received these at any time and we don't have a choice whether it's going to be in the rain or in good weather or bad. But sorting through the literature, getting the materials to where they need the most, designating them, categorizing them, this is a lot of what goes on here, all under the watchful eye of our oldest inhabitants here, Florence, 17 years old, God willing 18 years this coming October. And so under Florence's eye, hundreds of tons of literature have come and gone at stores. And sometimes we had all the men in the field, and we've only had the women to move the tons. And this is Frontline Jim. You know, who needs a gym membership when you can work at stores? You can literally move tons of material. I mean, this is meaningful weightlifting. Handling the word, taking up good doctrine, and building up our muscles at the same time. Hopefully, we will stretch our mind as well. WMPs, World Missionary Press Gospel Booklets, As you know, 5KGs has 550 gospel booklets, 50 pages each. I mean, that's a great, excellent material. And that's been the backbone of a lot of our ministry from the very first mission across the border to Mozambique, taking world mission requests. And these Sunday school packs, very much appreciated. The study Bibles that we receive. Whether these Bibles are secondhand, whether these are new books, whether they need to be sorted through, whether they need to be sifted, categorized, designated, this is a vital part of the work, sorting through books and Bibles and ensuring that these will get to the people who most need them, will best appreciate them. will apply them the most. And so it's our task to be able to very carefully categorize where necessary repair. And then we get some really nice old technology. I remember when I was converted, Sunday schools actually still used these, where you'd have the film would literally be fed through this, it was like a stripper film, and that was the slides, and it had the books that the Sunday school teacher would read out what the messages for each slide or each picture. So this was a Sunday school tool system. And we've got some in our glass cabinets there, part of a history to just remind us some of the old technology that comes here. And it has, in many cases, end up to field, but we keep a representative example. And so to try and organize and categorize and be sure that we've got these at the right time when people come here, we've built lots of shelves. And we've still been building shelves because this is what Colin's office looked like at one time. But it changes because the books come and they go. And this is something people don't do as much these days, and that's a mailing. For many people, their main contact to the mission used to be hard copy mailing back when a post office was responsible. And in caring for pensioners and prisoners in Zimbabwe and pastures, we would put together these boxes with love. And there's always going to be literature and New Testaments or Bibles in that we are able to deliver to people in great need in Zimbabwe in particular, who need encouragement, who need spiritual input, who feel alone, who feel forgotten. And so these are some of the great resources that have come to us. and given another lease of life. Of course, we publish and print many of our own tracts, too. But a lot of the tracts that are donated to us, maybe they were used by church and now the church has folded or the church has moved or the church has finished the outreach and they just donate what was left over to us. Well, we're glad. It doesn't matter where it comes from. It's going to end up in the field and it's going to end up with people who need it the most. Along with a bookshop with the brand new materials for the homeschoolers, we've also got Bibles that are donated. Now, this is a special project, Bibles in Indigenous Languages, which in partnership with George Verver, we've been able to provide thousands of indigenous Bibles to people all over as far away as Sudan. And sometimes we have these containers arriving where they're palletized, and that's a whole lot easier to handle, but then you need to get a Forklift. It would be nice to have our own forklift, but at the moment, we still have to rent them every time they come. One day, I hope we'll have our own forklift here, which will make that a whole lot easier. But in the meantime, it's also nice when the floor doesn't collapse. We've had it before when the floor's collapsed, and then you can't pallet jack, and then we get a winch from the bucket, and we start to winch the things along, and we've got to build up the floor, which has collapsed in the container. So there's always a way. Innovation. It's necessary. And it's a good thing that Colin knows how to handle forklifts, but I think many more of us must get our license in it too, because hopefully we'll have our own at one time. When we have a truck arriving here and they need waterproofed on the back of a flatbed truck able to go up to Zambia or Zimbabwe or Malawi, 32 tons, and we've just got to get this all ready and waterproofed and up. Along comes this double axled Penteclican. We've just got to load it up, and there's no cover. This has got to endure all the weather, so we've got to be thorough. This is why wrapping up a little WMP packs that we carry through the rivers in our New Orleans forest night hikes, it's a good preparation for the real deal of getting roughly a ton on each pallet up there and whether it's being loaded in the dock, shipped off. But all this is part of literature ministry because the best missionary is the Bible. Whether we've walked it in to Angola, to churches where they don't have roofs because the church building's been destroyed by the communists, where the only Bibles they had were in tatters, where we were able to give people Bibles. I've heard people say, this is the greatest gift anyone could have asked for, the Word of God in their own language. I've been praying for five years my own copy of the Word of God. And World Missionary Press Gospel Booklets delivered to Zambia and Malawi. students at Back to the Bible Mission, different books donated by authors that we're able to entrust to schools and Bible colleges like Covenant College up at Petioka in Zambia, or our own books like Biblical Principles for Africa, Translator French being delivered to the Congo where we had our largest biblical worldview seminar ever, 3,000 people at Lubumbashi, the old Elizabethville. Our books have ended up even with cabinet ministers, like Minister of Home Affairs, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the President of Zambia, Minister of Education, and many others. And here's often where it starts. This Bucky, I think, Daniel, you were on the maiden voyage of this in 2011. By God's grace, Bill Bathwin managed to raise the funds for this, and we were able to, with this Bucky, since 2011, so this year it's been Ten years since we've had this vehicle in the field, it's gone a long way, many times to Sudan and other countries and back. And you can see some of the countries on the side. I think we need some fresh flags to replace those stickers. Some of them look quite the worst for wear. But World Missionary Press gospel booklets are the mainstay. This is the first step in sowing the seed of the word of God. It's all scripture, 50 pages if you count the covers. and the Broadway Narrow Way posters. Also great putting these up in schools, in churches, Sunday schools, and in different languages as well. The Bible is still the heart and soul of this work. Teaching it, preaching it, and delivering it, and putting into people's hands the Word of God and good Bible teaching material. The best missionary is the Bible. All of our work needs prayer. We need to mobilize more prayer, more concerted prayer, more focused prayer, as we seek to get the word of God behind enemy lines where it's illegal, smuggling Bibles, like in this case, into Stan. By my best statistics, we have smuggled in 950,000 Bibles and New Testaments into Sudan since 1995. 950,000. Now that's not counting the many that we've taken into Mozambique and Angola and the Congo and other places, but just Sudan, 950,000. Bibles and Bites is one of our prized projects of getting hundreds of bicycles that we've donated to people, along with Bibles. So Bibles and bikes, putting wheels under the word. Walking them across rivers, delivering them to churches, sometimes driving through, this mud was called the main road, and this is a typical Sydney's bridge, which is why we actually have to have a snorkel at the side of our engines, for the engines to breathe underwater. I've driven through with the water up to my chest height, and that's high lift, This vehicle was a land cruiser which Bill Bathman bought with his own funds in Cape Town and drove overland at age 71 up to Sudan to donate to the church in Sudan. We wouldn't normally be able to afford a land cruiser, but that was back in the year 2001. And so, many times in the field, chaplaincy work, training teachers, textbooks for teachers, handbooks for chaplains. These are the people at the other end receiving the word of God. These are our evangelists, our disciples, makers. These are the teachers. These are the pastors, our good friends like Jeffrey Kiyanga, Bishop Bismarck. These people getting the study Bibles, working on the ground. When we come home, they continue the work in the field. Many times you have to smuggle Bibles behind enemy lines into the Nuba Mountains, at one time the most remote and inaccessible and dangerous mission field on the planet, but by God's grace, now in a ceasefire and with peace. But this is back in 1998, smuggling into Sudan in the Nuba Mountains, and you can see the trail of 250 porters carrying these boxes of Bibles two tons of bibles, one ton educational materials, another ton of agricultural tools and seed, including 16 blackboards for the schools who were going to get established up there. You can see the difference between the dry season and the rainy season in the New Mountains. You'll also notice that just about all the people doing the carrying here are women, because to the men, women carry the heavy loads. That's shocking. Shocking. I've been trying to teach him chivalry for a long time. But under the Christian flag, as the book of Isaiah says, Isaiah 18, that beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, a tall people, a smooth-skinned people of strange speech, that a banner will bring offerings to the Lord, that a banner will be raised for the nation to see a trumpetful sound and you will hear it. God is going to do something of unique worldwide significance in Sudan. And it's been a joy and a privilege for us to walk from one side of the Nuba Mountains to the other, screening the Jesus film, preaching the gospel, delivering gospel literature, giving them Bibles, agricultural tools, seed, educational materials, ensuring that they are given the best mishri, the mishri who stays with them, who speaks in their language without an accent, and letting them know that they're not forgotten, they're not alone, to see their testimonies, their stories in books like Faith and Defiance Sudan. And while we've been ministering amongst these people and giving them libraries and the man in the box who speaks my language, for many people who are illiterate, Gospel recordings has been the answer. Audio Bibles and audio Bible teaching materials, and we've got an example here, the hand-cranked or solar-paneled powered tape recorders called the Gospel Messengers, or the man in the box who speaks my language. We've delivered hundreds of these in the field, encouraging and equipping, empowering, evangelists, who will then be able to collect an audience anywhere. Because it's so visually interesting. It's got music. It's got interesting stories. It just grips them. Nine hours of Bible teaching tapes going from Genesis to the Book of Acts. And this is the Bible media or gospel recordings backpacks they provided. And I said, do you mind next time not making it a day glow yellow? Could you make something a bit more camouflaged? Brown, please? Something like that. a gray even, but anyway, this is the first one. The thing about it is it's waterproofed, and we proved it in the field, it was waterproof. To minister in the 1040 window where the gospel is illegal, where it was extremely dangerous at that time, where we were able to share the gospel with Muslims using film evangelism, you can see the 60 mil projector balanced on the rocks. And notice how all the people have their third leg, their hiking stick. I learned from the Nubans, when you hike, you should have a hiking stick. Have your third leg. Very helpful in the dark, especially on the descents. Balance, but also to test, is that stable? Is it a hole? Is it shade? Is it a rock? I mean, it's hard to tell in the dark. But I actually, in some ways, enjoyed the 16 mil Jesus film more, which was more complicated. But we got to preach five times at each showing, because you had four reels. So you did the introduction, and then between each reel, as the reels were being changed, you could stand up and preach and emphasize what was going on with that reel before you'd go on to the next one, and then at the end. And it was actually a wonderful opportunity to use the Jesus film as a stepping stone to communicating the gospel to the people. And so this has been a very major part of our work. And generally speaking, we've left the kit that includes the beautiful screens, which can be seen from both sides, and the speakers and so on, in the field with the people, equipped a new evangelist, and then we've got new ones. And the Jesus Film Project of Campus Crusade have donated quite a number of these full film kits to us, including the stands, generators, the whole thing. Hymn books. causing a thousand tongues to sing, to deliver to the people hymns in their languages, has been a wonderful, wonderful privilege. And the Krongu people, I was at a... It was called Kikawi, Global Consultation World Evangelism. It was a major missions conference held up in Pretoria back in 1997, and I was in the missions executive section where we met down the road, and it was led by people like George Verver, you know, top missiologist, Patrick Johnson and others. Well, George Verver's in charge of missions mobilization. He had a file up there of unreached people. He said, Cronger, unreached people, Nuba Mountains. Peter Hammond, do you go to Nuba? You take to Cronger, and he flung the file to me, Thank you, George. And so next time I went up the Nuba Mountains, I said, I need to find some people of the Kronger, Pastor So-and-so and Evangelist So-and-so. No, no, the unreached people, the Kronger. Yes, Pastor So-and-so and Evangelist So-and-so. Kronger, Kronger people. Yes, K-R-O-N-G-O, there you go. But the unreached people. No, 70% of Kronger people evangelize. Really, yes, and in evangelical churches. No jokes. What do you need? Bibles. We don't have any Bibles. Well, how do you get the gospel? Well, it so turned out that the Sudan United Mission missionaries who had worked amongst them until 1962, and they'd all been expelled from the country after that. They'd almost finished the New Testament, and they were kicked out of the country by the Islamic government, Sharia law and all that, in the 1960s. And so, these Australian missionaries finalized the Congo New Testament, but it was never allowed to go back into the country. And so, When I learned about that, and I discovered these vast amounts of Kronger people from the file, and going up there, this was the Kronger Bible. It was still on the old duck, duck, duck manual taper. Forget electric tapers, long before that. Forget computer, nothing. So there's no disk. Now, I had these full-scap. This is the old full-scap size pages. You can see a copy of this, the red New Testament, in our cabinet downstairs by our reception. And I just said, let's scan it as it is. I don't know anyone who can proofread in Krongo. Let's just take what the Mishnis did in the full-scale size, and we will print it and take it in. And so here these Bibles are being received in the Nuba Mountains. 40 years after missionaries were kicked out of the country. And you see the size, very unusual size for these new testaments. And this is the pastor and evangelist of the Kronger people, of this unreached people's group who happened to be 70% Christian. And so I was able to report back. that it seems the Holy Spirit hadn't filed his reports with the U.S. Center for World Missions and the Joshua Project and Unreached Peoples Group because they weren't informed that the Kronger were no longer an Unreached People Group, but they didn't have a Bible. But because of that file, I was able to put the Bible or the New Testament in Kronger in the hands of the people who were the fruit of those missionaries who were probably with the Lord by now. The ones who did the work back in the 40s and 50s and were kicked out in the 60s, they didn't know, I trust they've been informed by an angel in heaven, that their Bibles have now been delivered. Others sowed, plowed in rocky ground, weeping as they were sowing. And then we just come and we have the privilege of delivering and seeing the harvest. It's a privilege. And Daniel and Hunter were part of a wonderful privilege of delivering tens of thousands of Bibles into the Nuba Mountains in recent years. And you can see some of this in the film, which you'll see one of these days here, Missions to Nuba Mountains of Sudan. Just phenomenal. This was impossible. When I was working in Nuba, you couldn't have assembled schools like this. It was completely illegal, dangerous. There were bombing. It was torture. People would be hiding in caves in Nuba Mountains. But now schools are gathering, literacy rates skyrocketing because of the blackboards and chalk and books that we took in. And so now, magnificent privileges, hundreds of thousands of Bibles and books have been delivered in the New Mountains just in the last four years by God's grace. And so I can say without a shadow of a doubt, in our experience, the Bible is the best missionary. It does so much deeper work. It continues to work when we leave. Our job is to get the Bibles into the hands of the people. Here we were delivering the first Bible in Moro language to the people in Moroland, and we were bombed on the Sunday morning that we delivered it. We were just a short distance away from where the Bible translation, the Canon Ezra Lowery was buried. And how much more important could it be? The Bible is a message of life and death. Some people love the word of God so much they're willing to die to advance it. Others hate the word of God so much they're willing to kill to stop it. And here we are at the church that was bombed with the evangelism explosion clinic that I was running there, and by a tree that was blown over in the bombing. And this commander said, the Bibles of the Christians are more powerful than the bombs of the Muslims. This happened to show the power of God. You can see some of the shrapnel that was thrown around us in the glass cabins here, and also one of the big pieces out by the meetings here, area. This is another time, another place. This bomb did not explode. If it had exploded, it would have taken the place where we were meeting off the map, the church compound, but it didn't explode. Jesus Christ is building his church, and the gates of hell shall not, cannot prevail against it.