Pray4Yueyang

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” Isaiah 6:8

“Here Am I” by Mercy Me.

Source: Desiring God blog - John Piper

There are things we can do to help our kids love the nations and the cause of Christ, even though a heart and calling for the Great Commission is ultimately something only God can grant.

1. Pray for missionaries as a family. We keep a stack of prayer cards on the dinner table and rotate through them during mealtime prayers.

2. Read missionary biographies to your children. The stories of Hudson Taylor, Adoniram Judson, William Carey, Gladys Aylward, and other missionary pioneers are captivating ways to orient a child’s heart on the most important things in life.

3. Draw the whole family into supporting missionaries financially. Teach your kids from a young age that being a good steward of their money involves channeling resources toward the the cause of Christ in missions. Older kids can donate some of their lawn mowing and babysitting money. Younger children can earn money doing chores around the house which can be set aside for missionaries.

4. Find your child a missionary kid pen pal. Many children of missionaries around the world would be delighted to get mail from a child their age in their parent’s culture. Your child (and the whole family) will learn valuable insights about living abroad through the eyes of a child. Additionally, when the missionaries visit your church, your child will already have a relationship with the MK and will be able to include them more easily.

5. Entertain missionaries in your home. Inviting missionaries over will be as much of a blessing to your family as to the missionaries. Host them for dinner or for a whole furlough. Build or buy your house with this in mind.

6. Take risks as a family. There are ways to live life which help children grasp the reality that discomfort and suffering are normal and rewarding parts of the Christian experience. Volunteer at a rescue mission; house a single mother; move to the inner-city.

7. Affirm and nurture qualities in your children which could serve them on the mission field. As your children grow in knowledge and skill, encourage them to think about how they could use their gifts in missions work. Then, if God says, “go,” release them to go!

8. Teach your children to be world Christians. Don’t expose them to only the American perspective on news and realities around the world. Go out of your way to make them more aware than the average American Christian about geography, world history, and the plights and perspectives of people across the globe.

9. Read missionary prayer letters to your children. Ask them questions about the content and look up facts about the missionaries’ location on the Internet.

10. Use missions fact books and resources such as Operation World, the Global Prayer Digest, the Joshua Project, and Voice of the Martyrs (VOM). Kids of Courage is the youth-oriented arm of VOM and offers activity books, spotlights on the persecuted world, and more.

Most of all, pray every day that your kids will develop hearts that mirror God’s compassion for the nations and love for his glory in them!

Do you have any ideas to add?

Sometimes our best intentions can create more problems than they solve.

This relates to missions as well (or should I say “especially”!)

When in another culture, whether it’s for a week or a summer or for a few years, we don’t have the cultural insights that locals do, so it is imperative that we defer to their judgment in matters of security and cultural sensitivity.

If we are going to effectively communicate the gospel to the people of Yueyang, we must strive to remove Western cultural distinctives from the message and present the simple truth of the gospel. Quite often, we approach the task of spreading the gospel with the best of intentions, but when we don’t take care to avoid our tendencies for ethnocentrism, we sometimes do more harm than good!

Today is International Women’s Day and a great time to take a look at the serious issue of abortion, worldwide.

When looking at what is being done by Christians to reduce the abortion rates, it’s easy to believe that abortion is a major problem / challenge only in America.  Easy, that is, until you gain some perspective;

46-50 million children worldwide lose their lives to abortion each year.

Abortions in the U.S. and Canada amount to 3% (1.4 million) of abortions worldwide.  That means that the remaining 97% of abortions occur somewhere other than North America. People don’t often connect the cause of missions to the problem of abortion, however, we believe the success of missions can dramatically impact the abortion rate.  When a society is transformed morally, far fewer unwanted pregnancies will occur and when they do, the decision to abort will be weighed much differently than in a society that does not cherish the life of an unborn child.

Are you serious about abortion?  Do you want to have a hand in saving the lives of children who’s mothers are on the brink of getting an abortion?  Get involved in missions.  Pray, Give, Go.

Want to know how you can make a difference in Yueyang?  Write us and let’s have a conversation about it!

Mouth To Ear (M2E) Evangelism - it works!

These stats are a couple of years old, so I’m not sure which direction (if any) they have moved to in 2007. However, it is rather disturbing to me, hopefully it is to you too!

Last year, Southern Baptist families received income totaling an estimated $300 billion and gave an average 2.5 percent of it to their churches, which allocated 93 percent of their receipts to local spending. Of the 7 percent passed along to Baptist state conventions, an average of 35 percent is sent to the Southern Baptist Convention, which allocates 50 percent of Cooperative Program receipts to international causes. The result is that, out of every $100 in Southern Baptist family income, about 8 cents is invested in overseas missions through the IMB.

I came across an article that speaks to future of Christianity, taking into account the dramatic changes taking place in China right now.

I suspect that even the most enthusiastic accounts err on the downside, and that Christianity will have become a Sino-centric religion two generations from now. China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East.

China, devoured by hunger so many times in its history, now feels a spiritual hunger beneath the neon exterior of its suddenly great cities. Four hundred million Chinese on the prosperous coast have moved from poverty to affluence in a single generation, and 10 million to 15 million new migrants come from the countryside each year, the greatest movement of people in history. Despite a government stance that hovers somewhere between discouragement and persecution, more than 100 million of them have embraced a faith that regards this life as mere preparation for the next world. Given the immense effort the Chinese have devoted to achieving a tolerable life in the present world, this may seem anomalous. On the contrary: it is the great migration of peoples that prepares the ground for Christianity, just as it did during the barbarian invasions of Europe during the Middle Ages.

The full article can be found here: Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia; By Spengler

We hope and pray that the Holy Spirit continues to move among the people of China. We pray that this movement will spread throughout all of Hunan Province and Yueyang City - giving every person in Yueyang an opportunity to hear and understand the gospel message and the freedom to follow Christ.

Will you pray with us that the Holy Spirit will be poured out in Yueyang in a mighty and awesome way?

What are your thoughts on this issue?

What would China look like if it were shaped after the image of God?

This video was produced a few years ago by the International Mission Board of the SBC and it has a fantastic message.

The run-away success of the iPod and the unprecedented hype surrounding the release of a new “revolutionary” mobile phone by Apple Inc. started me thinking about the way we view missions in our modern era.

The simple, functional, and clean design of the iPod has made it a run-away success that has dominated the market with no serious competitors. Sometimes simple is good, sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes it’s just easier - maybe even too easy. Do we sometimes seek to ‘over simplify’ our view of the world and the lost?

When is the last time you thought about the fact that over 90% of the lost people in this world live in North Africa, Central, East, and Southeast Asia? Do you realize just how desperate people in those areas are for Jesus and how unlikely many (most?) of those people are to ever hear about Jesus without the radical obedience and sacrifice of ordinary Christians and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit?

Too often I think we try to simplify the “missions” feature in our Christian “iWalk”. We give a few bucks for the missions offering or we occasionally read a missions newsletter and spend a few minutes in prayer - but do we feel ANY obligation for those who are dying and going into eternity separated from God in far-away places like Yueyang, China?

Would you open your mind and your heart to a ‘revolutionary’ change in how you view and approach missions? Maybe God is calling you to serve as a witness among the lost in one of the most unreached places in the world. Maybe God is calling you to radically change your prayer habits - to pray for the lost in Yueyang like you ACTUALLY are heart-broken over their lostness?

We would love to talk with you about how you can become involved in reaching the lost in Yueyang, China.