Overseas missionaries are still very much needed. The title of this year’s conference of the Grace Baptist Mission was ‘Here Am I, Send Me’. No punches pulled there!
The meetings took place this year at the Friends Meeting House next to Euston Station in London on Saturday 29 October. It is a convenient place to travel to and people came from all over the country in their hundreds to this challenging and very uplifting day. There was a plethora of seminars given by serving missionaries from Brazil, the Philippines, Poland, France and central Asia, as well as reports concerning radio work and outreach to Asian communities in various cities in Britain.
Need to pray
The nuts and bolts of a call from God to the mission field were examined via a video interview with Graham and Sally Jones who work in Kenya. The challenges of what is required to adjust to a new environment once you land in the field were laid out. Jason Mufitt, who works on the Amazon river in Brazil, emphasised the responsibility for both the missionary and the sending church to ‘pray God’s will into reality’.
Ian Flanders shared something of his research into relating the gospel to Africa. Interestingly, he has identified a similarity between African tribal religions and cults and the outlook of the Prosperity Gospel. This is why so many poor people on that continent are taken in by and fleeced via the Prosperity Gospel. There is a need to specifically counter such things with the biblical in gospel. Ian’s recent book, The Gospel African Soil, was available on the day.
The main speaker at the evening rally was Luke Jenner, who pastors in Halifax. He is a young man, but spoke boldly and with great maturity from 2 Timothy 2.1-10. It was a thrilling but hard-hitting message and you could have heard a pin drop. The two main thrusts were: 1. ‘Here am I, send me’ commits you to hardship as a way of life; 2. But Jesus Christ connects you to the resurrection as the power for endurance. Jesus both sustains (the risen Christ is never tired, nor tired of us!) and reigns (the fulfilment of the OT promise to David of an everlasting kingdom). This was not lecturing, it was passionate preaching which moved and lifted many hearts.
