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Is there a shortcut to success when sending out missionaries? In this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman, and Matt Rhodes discuss Rhodes’ book No Shortcut to Success. They start their conversation by explaining common new mission strategies and the problems that come with them. They emphasize the importance of professionalism in missions, encouraging missionaries to study scripture, learn the local language, and engage in deep discipleship. They define church planting movements and explain why discipleship is often slow and hard to quantify before wrapping up with advice for pastors sending out missionaries

• New Mission Strategies
• Why Is Professionalism Needed in Missions?
• What is a Church Planting Movement?
• The Slowness of Discipleship
• Advice for Pastors Sending Out Missionaries

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Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Jonathan Leeman:

Hi, I am Jonathan Leeman. Yes, good to be here tonight. Thank you. Washington DC

Mark Dever:

And I’m Mark Dever. Calm down, Jonathan,

Jonathan Leeman:

And welcome to this episode of 9Marks Pastors Talk.

Mark Dever:

I guess. Thank you. How did you get all these people in here, Jonathan?

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, sound effects are fun.

Mark Dever:

I dunno what you’re talking about. And please edit out him using sound effects

There Are No Shortcuts to a Healthy Church

Jonathan Leeman:

And 9Marks exist, believe it or not, and spite of that intro to help pastors build healthy churches. Amen. And you can learn more about us at 9Marks.org.

Mark Dever:

You now what I always say about that? There’s no shortcut always. There’s no shortcut to success when you want to see a church being healthy. There is no shortcut to success.

Jonathan Leeman:

Man, that is a smooth transition. We’re looking at a new Nine Marks book called –

Mark Dever:

Interesting. Why do you have to throw these things under the bus? Why don’t you just go with it rather than calling attention to it? Sound effects shortcut. Come on, man.

Jonathan Leeman:

Hey, here’s the notes. You

Mark Dever:

Leave,

Jonathan Leeman:

You go,

Mark Dever:

No, no, no, no, no, no. You’re so gifted at this. I’m just

New Mission Strategies

Jonathan Leeman:

Helping you. No short to success. A manifesto for modern missions by our special guest, Matt.

Mark Dever:

Matt Rhodes, who’s no friend of mine. I say in the forward, but Matt, I certainly didn’t mean that to offend you, brother. Have we spent time together?

Matt Rhodes:

No, we just met about five minutes ago on this call.

Mark Dever:

Right. So when I wrote that a year ago that the author is no friend of mine,

Jonathan Leeman:

That’s the very first sentence forward. The author is no friend of mine.

Mark Dever:

I was not saying that in any negative way. I was just wanting people to understand I thought this book was so good that although I don’t even know this person, I wanted to commend it to people so that they would read it.

Jonathan Leeman:

And so you grab it and send it to Matt and the rest is history.

Mark Dever:

Yeah, he didn’t know I was even writing it for it. I think Brooks sent me the copy of the book to read and so I read it and thought, oh, this is really good. And so then I just voluntarily wrote a forward to it and then sent it to you guys hoping it might be useful.

Matt Rhodes:

And at that point, you are no friend of mine either, but we may have a chance to get to know each other.

Mark Dever:

Amen.

Jonathan Leeman:

Marcus, this is a common practice of yours to presume that people want forwards from you for their books and you just send

Mark Dever:

Them out. Wow, that’s a good question. Like J.I. Packer, do I just make an industry of writing forwards to books, right? I don’t think so.

Jonathan Leeman:

No. Matt, thank you for being with us. Matt is out of San Diego originally, but he’s been in Northern Africa for the last 10 years as a missionary. Anything else you want to say about yourself, Matt? Give us a sense of who you are. Married, kids?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah. I’ve been married for the last two and a half years before heading to the field. Actually. I had worked as an epidemiologist for the previous eight years and it’s only been in these past couple of years that people have learned why they should be listening to epidemiologists.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. So this, you’re a second career guy, missionary guy.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah. I always knew I wanted to be on the field, but it took me a long time to get there, partly because I was pursuing training at that point and partly because I really thought I was going to be using my public health background in the field, but that never happened.

Jonathan Leeman:

Now you say at the beginning of your book you wanted to write this book. This is your first book, correct?

Matt Rhodes:

Yes, it is my first book. And I never thought it was going to turn into a book.

Jonathan Leeman:

Just what started? Just some articles, just I’m writing stuff down that I’m feeling passionate about, and lo and behold a book pops out. How did that happen?

Matt Rhodes:

Well, in the missions organization that I work in, I saw some things that made me uncomfortable. And as I talked to people, I found I wasn’t able to express what was making me uncomfortable.

So I started by writing a few essays. My wife will tell you I am the second most concise member of our marriage. And so I tend to work better on paper when I can kind of cut down and edit what I’m trying to say.

Jonathan Leeman:

So your wife’s saying you’re long-winded.

Matt Rhodes:

She says I’m gifted with syllables. It’s a kinder way to put it.

Jonathan Leeman:

Your wife ever said that. Mark?

Mark Dever:

Yes.

Jonathan Leeman:

You say at the beginning of your book, Matt, that you wanted to write this book in response to new missions. What are new missions and why do they need a response?

Matt Rhodes:

Good question. In the last 20 years or so, there’s been a new set of missions methods and basically, the proponents of these methods have promised that their methods are going to bring unreached people to Christ in larger numbers than ever before and a lot faster than ever before.

And so we see new methods appearing in all sorts of disciplines. But there were two things about the new mission methods I think that really were, that caused me concern. First of all, there’s enormous pressure to use these methods and in a lot of major mission organizations, nothing else is being taught right now to missionaries.

And I’ve seen people pushed off teams for not wanting to use them. The second thing was that as I was learning about a lot of these methods, I and others around me realized that they weren’t all they cracked up to be.

Why Is Professionalism Needed in Missions?

Mark Dever:

Well, in fact, the new methods you’re talking about, one of the things you would characterize them in your book is sort of amateurish as opposed to professional. Now John Piper made professional a bad word in brothers, were not professionals back in 99. But here you’re using professional in a good sense, meaning responsible and worth work to prepare.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, and I think that’s something that Piper would agree with too. Piper was part of founding Bethlehem College and Seminary and so he, he’s he’s pro training, but I think in his book, what he’s trying to speak against is the sort of slick professionalism that helps you climb the corporate ladder of ministry.

Mark Dever:

So how are these new mission methods amateurish?

Matt Rhodes:

Well, they focus almost entirely on speed and numbers. And so you’re trying to build a church as quickly as you possibly can. Often I’ve seen people do this without trying to even learn the language of the people they’re trying to reach.

So historically missionaries assumed that you couldn’t work among a people whose language you didn’t know that this was just sort of a basic professional responsibility. And historically too, I think missionaries have assumed that it takes time to disciple people. In a lot of these new methods, churches are expected to replicate every few months.

Jonathan Leeman:

So just to connect the dots for us and ask you the same question you kind of just answered. Explain the title. No shortcut to success.

What is a Church Planting Movement?

Matt Rhodes:

Right. I think my contention was that shortcuts are being taken. Jesus disciples, his apostles for three years, and these methods are basically telling people to go into a people group whose language they might not know.

And within a few months, not only should you have planted a church, but they should be starting to plant other churches. And so shortcuts have real fallout.

Jonathan Leeman:

Mark, you were a historian before you were a pastor. Is he right? Is this really new what he’s calling new missions? Are these new missions?

Mark Dever:

Well, I think what he means is it’s dominant right now. I don’t think Matt’s meaning is to make the claim that there are no historical precedents for any of these things. So from the revivalism of the 17 and 18 hundreds to the insider movements of the 1980s and 1990s, there has long been a tendency among evangelical Christians to think we can find sort of golden keys that will allow us to be just like the individual Pentecostal or charismatic may feel like there’s a way you can hopscotch your head in sanctification personally, individually.

So evangelists and missionaries will sometimes feel like, ah, this method that I’ve discovered is the way to a movement taking place. Is that fair, Matt?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, it’s a silver bullet and things are going to happen overnight. They never believed could happen.

Mark Dever:

Golden keys, silver bullet.

Jonathan Leeman:

I want to go back to this idea of professionalism because something I noticed when you sent this book to us, we read it, liked it, and sent it out to a few other people, as I often do, say, Hey, what do you think of this? Give me some feedback

Mark Dever:

By that. Jonathan mainly means his daughters.

Jonathan Leeman:

One thing, one objection that came up is people not liking the fact that you use this language of professionalism as a good thing. And I went and looked into fished into the John Piper’s book. Mark mentioned that brothers, we are not professionals and I assume a lot of reformed reader types out there, will sympathize with that.

At one point he says, professionalism carries the connotation of an education, a set of skills, and guild-defined standards which are possible without faith in Jesus. Professionalism is not supernatural. That’s you quoting John, right? Do you disagree with Piper?

Matt Rhodes:

I think professionalism, is like any other virtue. You can pursue it on its own apart from the Holy Spirit and apart from any other virtue and then it becomes an empty thing. But there is a way to be professional, to do our job well as Piper has done, he has written books only after doing a lot of theological research and that is his professional responsibility, but he’s done that through the Holy Spirit and the Spirit is inhabiting his work.

Jonathan Leeman:

What are some of the professional skills that you’re saying missionaries should have?

Missionaries Need to Know Scripture

Matt Rhodes:

So missionaries need to know the scripture. Well, if they want to plant churches, they need a nuanced understanding of scripture. I think the skill that I see that’s hardest to acquire is mastery of language and certain cultures in the countries they work in for an English speaker to learn a non-European language can take you years and years and it’s nose to grindstone work. And we all want a way around it, but there aren’t ways around it.

Jonathan Leeman:

But surely nobody disagrees with that. Everybody knows missionaries have to go in and learn the language and spend a few years, four or five, six hard years studying. Everybody knows that, right? Why are you saying that

Mark Dever:

Not true today?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, you would assume that, and I think people do, but no consistent language learning is being overlooked in a lot of missionaries being sent out. Missionaries are sometimes given a year or two of part-time, language learning, and they get to about the level of a six or 7-year-old in the language. At that point, they’re pulled out of language learning and their ability plateaus.

Jonathan Leeman:

How can I train and disciple people to share the gospel and raise them up in the faith if I don’t know their language? That doesn’t even make sense.

Matt Rhodes:

And I would argue that you can’t. The spirit is at work in human things like our ability to communicate in human languages. And if you’re discipling someone, you may be taking that person through really complicated issues like family problems or marital issues. And if you don’t speak their language with nuance, you’re not going to be able to do it well.

Mark Dever:

So Matt, have you in your career as a worker overseas, seeing Christians come in this way you’re describing is not very good in a way that’s amateurish, unprepared, unprepared in the language, let’s say. Have you seen very much of that happen?

Matt Rhodes:

Oh yeah. Unfortunately, I see it all the time. I think we see more missionaries now than when I left for the field who are starting to really pursue professional skills. But my wife and I just last year, there’s a large town just a few miles away from us where there was a missionary who believed that he had started a church, but he did not speak the local language and he had not met any of the people in the church that he believed he had started except for one and he was ready to baptize them.

Jonathan Leeman:

So the idea that missionaries should have these skills of knowing the Bible really well, knowing the language of the people they’re talking to, that is a contentious assertion in many missions communities. True.

Matt Rhodes:

It has become one because I think people oppose that to relying on the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn’t need you to know the language of the people that you’re working with, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t need you to know the Bible. The idea is the Spirit will speak to people directly when he needs to.

Mark Dever:

Are you seeing this Mark? Yeah. Matt, isn’t this behind the whole idea of the move in the eighties and nineties of some organizations away from say a William Carey guy or a John Peyton guy to a strategy coordinator who may not even live there or know the language, but wherever they are, they’re studying that people group and they’re majoring in trying to figure out avenues into that people group. Is that accurate?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. In the eighties and nineties, there were a number of countries that people just thought were unreachable. And so they were looking for ways that we could, well, because these countries were so close to missionary presence, they were thought to be unreachable.

The question was how can a missionary from outside the country work in one of these areas? We started seeing what were called nonresidential missionaries. They weren’t going to live with people, but somehow they were going to get the gospel to them and oversee their maturing in the faith.

Mark Dever:

And not only that, but they would want to see church-planting movements happen.

Matt Rhodes:

Absolutely.

Mark Dever:

And can you describe for people listening to what a church planting movement is, that’s a technical term actually. It’s not just putting three English words together, it’s the actual term of art, church planting movement.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, that was a term that we first saw about the year 2000. So these non-resident missionaries started reporting some just really explosive results from the work that they were doing. Now, they weren’t in the country, living in the country to oversee what was happening, but what they reported was that churches were planting new churches which were planting new churches.

And basically what the literature was telling us was that if a new church within six months didn’t give birth to another new church, it wasn’t a healthy church and this wasn’t a movement. And so movements could expand just exponentially. You’d see hundreds of thousands of churches in a couple of years reportedly,

Jonathan Leeman:

Mark, I’m reading Thessalonians one and I’m seeing the gospel coming to them with power and them having effect and Macedonia and a Kayah and across national borders. And I look back at Acts and how Ax describes Paul showing up, and it seems like he’s only there for a few weeks, and so maybe he’s there for a month and they accept the gospel and then within, I dunno how much longer when he writes the book, they’re impacting others.

Why is it unreasonable? So if I’m the average pastor and I hear what Matt just said, but then I’m looking at Acts and Thessalonians, I’m like, what’s wrong with that? Why is it unreasonable to expect you to be planning another church within six months of birth?

Mark Dever:

Yeah, I don’t think it’s by definition unreasonable. I think it’s abnormal and unlikely. And I would just say that you’ve got all kinds of evidence for work that creates false results that you’re going to be aware of yourself in your own ministry or watching friends or churches at the same time or the time you’re around right now.

And so all of those things help us to then understand the problems with someone like the church planning movement stuff that Matt’s talking about here now and all the rapid multiplication things where you simply go for this total number you can turn in and no one’s thinking carefully about the local church and about how the local church is, is the integrating center of what’s going on as Christianity expands and erupts and flows down to and out to new areas.

The Slowness of Discipleship

Jonathan Leeman:

So, Mark, you’re against rapidity.

Mark Dever:

I am against thinking that I can make sure of rapidity

Jonathan Leeman:

And therefore moving carefully.

Mark Dever:

Yeah, I can’t even ensure the salvation of people that I know and love right now, let alone in a tribe halfway around the world where I don’t speak their language. That’s just not something that’s in my ability. Now, I do have the ability to try to train, like Matt said, to go and speak to them and get people to support me and go there and speak to them either temporarily or in a longer-term capacity.

But even then what I’m doing is just like what I’m doing here with my church, trying to preach to them in such a way that men and women come to Christ. And I can’t tell you any given Sunday that I know this person or that person came to Christ. So the kind of work we’re called to do is necessarily sheep by sheep and it’s slow. Matt, what else would you add to that?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, I would add as well, that Paul does go in and out of some cities really quickly, but if you look at Paul’s ministry in the book of Acts, he only leaves cities when he gets kicked out when he can stay for three years in Ephesus, he stays for three years when he can stay in Corinth for a year and a half. He does that. And frankly, these are churches, he’s planting his churches mainly from Jewish synagogues.

And so a lot of these people, have a living relationship with the living God that they’ve had since childhood. So unreached missionary situations. Now we don’t have any of those advantages that Paul had.

Jonathan Leeman:

I want to go back to the question of numbers here, Matt, in your chapter on professional missionary, you said it against several problems in missionary communities today, including an overemphasis on speed, overdependence on silver bullet strategies as we’ve talked about oversized role to short-term mission troops, an overweening skepticism of intellectual preparedness.

And that really brings us to your conversation about movements and the numbers game. What’s your concern with numbers?

Matt Rhodes:

Numbers are one-dimensional. Numbers evaporate. We’ve seen this with some churches in the states that grew very quickly and then fell apart equally quickly. And as I’ve looked at some of these numbers overseas, the numbers are there on paper.

The people aren’t always there especially when missionaries are blowing into an area and blowing out and they don’t know the language well, they haven’t spent the years to be able to really know the people who they think are coming to Christ. They don’t know what’s happening and they can’t know what’s happening.

And so numbers are just, they’re a very one-dimensional measure of what God is doing in any church. And we’re even cautioned in the scripture against pursuing them too much. David is judged for numbering Israel, but we have this fascination with him.

It might be sort of an American thing, I don’t know. But we want to see thousands of people coming to Christ every year because that seems like a way to validate our ministry.

Advice for Pastors Sending Out Missionaries

Jonathan Leeman:

So this is a question for both of you then. What advice are you giving to the pastor who’s sitting there or the church missions committee person and they’re seeing these reports coming back from mission agencies with this number of people converted churches, planted people baptized.

How do I process those? Are you guys telling me to be cynical about them? Are you telling me to be a suspect? Are you telling me to, how should I process it? Matt, that’s for both of you.

Mark Dever:

Yeah. Matt, what do you think first?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, cynical is sort of a negative word. I would say be responsible. You shouldn’t be sending your young men and women out to propagate churches in a way when you don’t know if it works.

And you shouldn’t be sending, frankly, your church dollars or church support to support things that you don’t know if they work. So you need to inquire and if you see something that looks pretty unlikely, hey, God can work in unlikely ways, but your questions should be encouraged.

I think often when things happen overseas, we tend to feel that the spirit just moves in different ways overseas. And I think a lot of pastors, it can be very intimidating to challenge a missionary because people in the congregation are going to look at the pastor and say that the missionary has given up so much for Jesus, what have you done? But as a pastor, it’s your responsibility,

Mark Dever:

Dr. Dever. Well, I was just going to say, Jonathan, in your role as an elder at your church, do you do this kind of questioning of potential missionaries?

Jonathan Leeman:

We like to get to know our missionaries. We’re not getting mission reports with so many numbers from them. We rather have a relationship with them. We get to know them. We have them tell us how things are going on the field, but I don’t get a report as such. But those are individual people we’re getting to know. That’s not an agency reporting as such.

Mark Dever:

Such.

Jonathan Leeman:

But I want you to answer that question. How do you process those?

Mark Dever:

Well, I think you have to realize, first of all, the Holy Spirit can do that. And there are remarkable accounts from the Book of Pentecost, book of Acts, Pentecost in the book of Acts to the evangelization of Korea in the last century and a half, where you see exponential growth in a way that even the most optimistic church planter would not graph out and plan and guess is going to happen.

So you have to begin by saying, first of all, God does things like this. Second of all, then you need to say, okay, the organization that I’m working with, what is their understanding of the gospel? What is their understanding of conversion?

Do they practice a kind of church-centered mission? Are they seeing churches established? And those churches then give credibility to the claims of the number of people who said they’ve been converted to Christ and who’ve been baptized and are now members of the church. Well, at least if they’re there regularly in worship, that begins to give us a, that we can trust that part of those numbers.

Jonathan Leeman:

I remember the story you told of some guy in a southern town telling you, we’ve planted this age. Tell that story and point to your question.

Mark Dever:

Yeah, I taught a class years ago at a seminary. I was back there some years later at a conference. One of the students in that class was now pastoring a large church near there, and we had lunch.

And I said, so how’s it going? And he said, great. And I said, so good. So last year, how was last year? He said, oh, good, normal year. I said, okay, so what’s normal? He said, well, we saw like 200 people baptized.

I said, 200 people. I said that’s like as many as were baptized in the Great Awakening came to Christ and we’re converted. That’s amazing. I said, is the town different? And he just looked at me like I was crazy.

He said, well, no, this is pretty normal. He had a few thousand people in his church. And I said, well, of those 200, how many of those would be young people?

Mark Dever:

Let’s say younger than eight. Eight or younger children? And he said, oh, that’d be probably 80 of them. I said, oh, okay. So 80 kids affirm what their parents believe, which praise the Lord. I hope they’re true saving affirmations.

We don’t know that. And I said, what about older than eight, say for the next 10 years up to age 18? He said that’s probably another 40 of them. Okay, so now we’re, that’s 120, so now we’re at 80 and Oh no, I said that up to age 12.

And then I said, what about teenagers? He said, probably about 40 of them. So I said, okay. So now we’re at, where they were reaffirming Mom and Dad’s faith. Now we’re at 40, so now we’re at 40 baptisms.

I mean, all those other 160 may have been true, but I don’t know. But I can understand social peer pressure reasons those numbers happen, and we’ve seen that in Baptist churches in America for the last century.

Mark Dever:

So then we’re at 40 baptisms for the last year. That’s great. I said so those are 40 adults, 40. That’s more than one a month. That’s like two or three a month becoming Christians. That’s awesome.

He said, well, no, no, most of those weren’t conversions. Probably half of them are people just coming from other churches that hadn’t been baptized as believers, but they’ve been believers for a long time. Said they needed to be baptized to join our church.

I said, okay. I said, about how many of those? He said, probably about 20. I said, okay, so we’ve got 20. Okay. I said, still 20 people. 20 people who come to know Christ’s Praise in this last year.

That’s a wonderful thing. I said, how are they doing? He said, well, I don’t know. I don’t only know any of them. Some of ’em come to one service, some of ’em come to the other when I ask him if they attend regularly.

He said, well, I just, honestly, I can’t tell you. I dunno, and I just saw there the way that number 200 can hide so many specific stories and so much of the reality of Christian ministry, and I assume this is the kind of thing that you’ve experienced in Africa, Matt.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah.

Jonathan Leeman:

You have a story in the book about Sudan.

Matt Rhodes:

I was in Sudan shortly before this number was released, but one of the proponents of these new mission methods claimed that there had been hundreds of churches planted in Sudan through his ministry and in Sudan. We had a close missionary community, and so I had no reason to believe that this number was true, but we all knew what was happening in each other.

Mark Dever:

Because you would’ve heard of it.

Matt Rhodes:

Because I would’ve heard of it, and so I assume that he was sincere in posting this number. He had heard it from someone who had heard it from someone, but that number shouldn’t have gotten through. These are things that we need to be verifying,

Jonathan Leeman:

Brother. Chapter three, you go on to identify several problems. We don’t have time to discuss them. Now you talk about an overemphasis on rapid growth, your version of teaching O Coast and the person of peace, huh?

What’s that? I want to look into that obedience-based discipleship promotion of new believers to leadership, and chapters one through three really are your criticism, and we haven’t even gotten into this conversation,

Mark Dever:

Which is his analysis of the current situation.

Jonathan Leeman:

That’s right. The entire part two, which I hope maybe we can come back and have a second conversation, is then your positive construction of what missions should look like. So one to three chapters three are the critique, but then you give us four to 10 positive correcting our course. You call that section, and as I said, maybe we can talk about that. Thank you for your work on this. To conclude.

Mark Dever:

Well, I do want to just say, I think that, no offense, Matt, I think the first half of your book, the first third of it, that part one is probably more important than the second half. I think the second half is good.

I like the second half, the longer half pastor, if you’re listening to this and you just want to read part of this book, I would tell you to grab it and read all the intro stuff and read those first three chapters because that will give you Matt’s concerns about what’s happening with your mission dollars right now that you are getting your church to give.

And I think if you can understand what the challenges are, then whether along with Matt or other ways, you can figure out ways you redress that and lead your church to address that. But I’m concerned we literally have hundreds of millions of dollars from American evangelical churches every year that are kind of going in the wrong direction.

Jonathan Leeman:

Do you have a copy of the book with you right now, Matt?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, yeah, I do.

Jonathan Leeman:

I’d like to conclude this time with reading Time with Matt Rhodes. Can you read them for us, just to conclude, I think they’re such encouraging paragraphs, the last two paragraphs or the main two paragraphs on page 21.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah. Yeah, I’d be glad to,

Jonathan Leeman:

And I think that’ll give the readers a sense of what you’re doing and this book in general.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah. I can’t promise results. Those are still in God’s hands. I can’t offer shortcuts or magic formulas. There are none. But while there’s no one-size-fits-all roadmap to success, there are key guideposts along the way.

In this book, I’ll describe a spiritual path for missionaries to follow. I’ll show how it wove through the ministries of great missionaries of the past, and I’ll describe what it means for missionaries today.

It can be painful for missionaries who have invested so much to question their approach to their work, but it will be worthwhile if it sharpens them in their efforts to reach the lost. After all, I’m writing this book for the lost for those we hope to reach using every means within our grasp, but I’m also writing for the missionaries who have given up so much for the cause of Christ.

I want their efforts to succeed. In my career overseas, I’ve been consistently humbled by the quality of the men, women, and even children. I’ve had the privilege to work alongside many of whose shoes I’m not worthy to untie.

If these insights contain some grain of truth, if they’re not simply my own personal mission fad of which I too will repent in another 10 years, then I hope to bless these great men and women.

Jonathan Leeman:

Amen. Love the spirit of that brother, and you’re consistent, I think that gracious, meek, and humble throughout the book, so thank you for your work and thanks for this conversation.

Mark Dever:

Thank you, Matt.

Matt Rhodes:

Thanks so much for having me on.

Mark Dever:

Jonathan, I guess this means that you shouldn’t judge things by how popular they are.

Jonathan Leeman:

I like the applause, though. Maybe I need to repent.