A Bible and a Passport

I said I would take the next few days and blog about each point in my summary of the Every Nation world conference, or EN.07. Here it goes. . .

We are called to the ends of the earth.

Sometimes I wish I could lead a big-city mega-church or a small-town community church. In either case, my only concern would be my city or my community—then my life, my ministry, and my mission would be simple.

As valid as that may be for some pastors, it is not what I am called to do. I am called to lead an international church, a global church, a mission church. We are called, not only to our immediate community, but also to the ends of the earth.

It doesn’t seem fair. Why do some of my pastor friends get to led single-city mega-churches, with seemingly no global responsibility, and I have a church that has to mobilize, send, and fund mission teams, missionaries, and compassion projects all over the world?

Ends of the earth. Every nation. Great commission. World missions. Unreached people. Sounds exciting . . . and expensive.

Every nation—that’s a lot of plane tickets.

I don’t know how I knew it, but somehow I knew from day one that our church, Victory, was called to be a missionary-sending church. As soon as I met our first University-Belt disciples, I suspected that Filipinos would make great missionaries. And I was right.

We started in the heart of Manila’s U-Belt, but our calling went way beyond reaching Filipino students. (Click HERE for a brief history of how our church started in Manila’s U-Belt in 1984.)

From the very beginning we told new believers that they would need a “Bible and a passport” if they were serious about being Matthew 28 disciples. They would need the Bible in order to know God, and they would need the passport in order to go into all the world and make disciples.

We have always been a praying church, a house of prayer for all nations. In the early days, we constantly prayed that God would send workers into his ripe and not-so-ripe harvest fields. And, we prayed that we would have the privilege of being some of those workers.

Even though I think it would be less stressful and less expensive to only focus on one city and one community, I am honored and thankful that God has called our ministry to the nations.