Pemex Explosion

Some of you may have heard of the recent explosion in the Pemex main offices in the Pemex offices complex in Mexico City. Pemex is the official Mexican Petroleum company, which is state owned.

As best as I remember, there are about 36 deaths from this explosion (up to now).

The news media as well as the official government sources are all repeating the same thing, it was methane gas build up that caused the explosion. I live in Mexico City, and we know people that work/worked in that building.

A picture from Pemex Explosion

I am no bomb expert, but it is obviously a bomb that caused the damage. I list my observations here:

1) The destruction done points to some kind of powerful explosive, i.e. dynamite or C4 or something similar.

I have seen 60 liter propane gas tanks on fire. The explosion basically makes a fireball, and throws the shards of the tank in all directions making shrapnel. The damage is very distinct. In this building, the building is steel and concrete, and the pictures we are seeing on TV is of a hole blown in the floor and ceiling, somewhere around 60-80 feet across with extensive damage extending probably 500 yards in all directions.

Pemex tower

We saw pictures on TV of the damaged area, and the concrete floor (about 8 inches thick with reinforced steel rebar) was completely gone, with the rebar picked clean by the explosion. The picture at left is of ANOTHER area where the floor was gone. The one I saw in the news on the day of the explosion was easily 60 yards by 40 yards across, where the entire structure had collapsed.

Again I am not expert in explosions, but in these buildings, a gas explosion carries everything out the doors and windows, and rarely will it rip through concrete floors 8-20 inches thick pulverizing the concrete. We see some of that in the photos, but any explosion will cause that kind of breakage of the building structure. The point is that a gas explosion will cause burning, and most of the time (in what I have seen) the burning will last for a while, making the walls black, and igniting all combustible materials. We see none of that in the photos. Actually it is hard to find anything burnt in the trash they are removing.

Although I am no expert here, but the amount of gas necessary to do that kind of damage would have to be very great, perhaps 1000s of pounds of gas. Surely somebody in the building would have smelt that before the explosion. Nobody. The gas that people said they smelt was AFTER the explosion, not before. I am not 100%, but natural gas is odorless. All forms of commercial gas products carry a chemical that makes people able to smell it. So this points to a gas line breaking AFTER OR BECAUSE OF THE EXPLOSION, not one causing the explosion.

A picture from Pemex Explosion

2) A gas explosion “burns”, and a bomb explodes.

The basic fundamentals of a gas explosion from build up of gas is a fireball. Normally, there is a tremendous amount of scorching on the walls, and combustible material (papers, plastics in the offices) are burnt.

What we see in the photos is rarely anything burnt, and everything out of place. This would indicate to me that most probably it was a bomb.

3) There were not the burns a gas explosion would have.

From what I have seen and heard of (which it is somewhat typical here in Mexico where propane gas is delivered in 30 liter tanks that often leak), that when a gas tank explodes or leaks rapidly, that there is fire ball. Typically these people near it when it happens receive third degree burns over parts or all of their body. Most of the people who were injured were released within a day or two, which is not gas burns. The government said that most of the injured were injured from blows of flying objects, not gas burns. So again, the evidence seems to point towards some kind of bomb (at least to me).

4) The valley of Mexico has no methane gas seepage through the ground.

This excuse or reason for the explosion is just ridiculous. In 25 years, I have never heard of even a concern about methane gas coming up through the ground into the basements here. Never has there been any news of this that I can remember. Never has there been any similar explosion. A flash fire from this kind of gas build up would be at least something to give credence to this theory the government is advancing, but reality is that the valley of Mexico does not have this phenomena that could enter as a viable reason for the explosion.

CONCLUSIONS AND RAMIFICATIONS

Although we cannot be 100%, it would appear that somebody set off a bomb in the Pemex tower. An employ said he found second bomb in a second adjacent building, and it was deactivated. Of course that never got into the press. It was amazing to hear the Attorney General of Mexico “reassure” the people, “The explosion was caused by an accident, and we are going to get the people responsible for this.” What? If it was an accident, then how is their guilt assigned? Things just don’t add up.

My opinion is as follows, yes it was a bomb. The details above would cause a lot of reasonable doubt on methane gas build up. Yesterday (February 7) they are changing the story to say that there was a gas line going into the boiler complex that provides energy to the building, and that is what caused it. (Even the government has a hard time with the methane gas seeping up through the ground theory, because that too will cause panic here.)

So we go down the merry trail of Mexican government lies yet once again. I am not a conspirator theory proponent, but the stories the Mexican government comes out with are just humorously unbelievable.

WHO DID IT? AND WHY?

These are the questions most pertinent in our minds if we assume (which this is an assumption, nothing is proven either way) that it was a deliberate bomb.

1) There was nobody claiming “they did it.”

This is the strange thing if it was a terrorist plot. Living here in Mexico City, I would give my perspective. The chief opponent of the Peña Nieto government would probably be the PRD and Manuel Lopez Obrador. Personally I doubt they had anything to do with it. The PRD has separated themselves from Obrador’s Morena movement, which is pushing to become its own political party at the moment. So this would kill any popularist support if they did such a thing, and they claimed it. So I doubt very seriously they had anything to do with it. Honestly, and without belittling Obrador (personally I kind of like him, although I don’t know what to do with him myself), I doubt Obrador has the brains and planning to pull of something like this. This is more profession.

The Zetas. These are a trumped up semi-military group that are connected with the drug lords here in Mexico, and basically they are not what they are thought to be (in my opinion). Although they are promoted as a rebel political group with guns, they seem likewise incapable of pulling off much. Obrador manufactured a “meeting” in the Zocalo in D.F. with over a million people (buying them lunch and giving them a T shirt and $50 dollars if they would come), so Obrador has more power than the Zetas in my opinion.

The Drug lords, like Chapo Guzman. These people are possibles as far as who has done this. But there is a great problem. Pemex is basically a worker for Mexico, funding a tremendous amount of the annual government’s budget. A strike at Pemex, is a strike at Mexico’s pocket book. Anybody that disables or cripples Pemex, even for a few weeks, costs Mexicans income. That point would make me think, no Mexican would be behind this.

So who? a foreigner. Who is out there that would do this? My money would be on the french woman, Florence Cassez, who was recently set free from Mexican jail when Peña Nieto entered office.

See Accused French Kidnapper Freed from Mexican Jail

What happened here is that she was a kidnapper operating in Mexico. There were people who she (and her gang) kidnapped, and were later released that positively IDed her as being their kidnapper. Those eyewitness testimonies are not heard apparently. She was released “on a technicality” that the police did something wrong in apprehending her (which is entirely believable also). But if we examine this a bit more, her release was 8 years after her trial. Why now? Because Calderon wouldn’t allow it, and now that Peña Nieto is in office, he apparently put the ball into motion as soon as he officially won.

The electoral fraud that was so apparent with thousands of people (7 million dollars dispersed according to  proceso.com.mx which they promised them that the cards had $500 pesos / $38 US dollars on them, but in actuality, most only had $200 pesos/$15 US dollars for around giving a sway vote of around 460,000 votes to Peña Nieto) receiving a debit card from the banco Monex (french?) would come into play here. This was not the only fraud in the recent election, but it was the grossest. (As a footnote, the Mexican Federal Election Commission let the election results stand, and they will study the case, which they fined the PRI for doing this, so it just boils down to how much money do you want to pay to get into office down here. Manuel Lopez Obrador on the other hand is taken to the IRS and accused of spending too much in his campaign. The Peña Nieto campaign didn’t claim this 7 million dollars and Obrador didn’t have these kinds of allegations against him. Go figure!) This Bank Monex, is suspected of being a money laundering operation (www.marxist.com) and is under investigation by the USA and Spain for said money laundering. The Marxist.com article links them with the likes of drug lords, Arellano Félix, los Beltrán Leyva, Zhenli Ye Gon, etc.

So I suspect that the French paid for Peña Nieto’s campaign fraud, in exchange for the French woman, Florence Cassez, to be released. She was, and she has expressed her “disdain” and “dislike” of the Mexican people because of this. “She is innocent.” And the french government received her like a returning war hero. People here say they saw her kill people (kidnapped person), and they testified against her in her trial, and their testimony is somehow wrong. The Mexican government even went so far as to express the idea of prosecuting the Mexican police involved in this case. That was squelched quickly though. We don’t want those guys opening up and telling all.

So who did the bombing?

I would guess that the amount of T-N-T to that damage as far away from the source as it did, you would need maybe a small desk full of it. Since it was a building under surveillance, and with “tight security”, one asks himself, how did they do it? You don’t just drag a big box of explosives through that kind of security unnoticed. Which leads me to think that some kind of military explosive was used (small and compact, and also very powerful). The drug lord’s here as well as political opponents of the PRI government don’t have that kind of thing. The french military does.

Things don’t make a lot of sense, but let’s just say, it most probably was not methane gas that caused the explosion, but if enough people are paraded in front of us, saying that “it was gas” “it was gas”, maybe everybody will believe it!

Our situation here is that we observe these things, and then we ask ourselves, where is this Mexican society going? Things continue to get worse, and the “solutions” offered us seem to be worse than the problems they are supposed to fix. Whoever did it (if it was a bomb), they don’t like Mexico, and they don’t like Peña Nieto. If it was natural gas build up, there are literally hundreds of thousands of buildings in Mexico City sitting on top of a natural gas bomb? Waiting for the next tremor to open a crack and seep up and cause explosions all over the place? We will wait and see, but as time goes on, the ridiculous nature of these explanations continue to get worse and worse. They cannot cover up the facts very well.

As to the most recent morph of this, it was not methane gas, but a propane gas line going into the boiler building of the Pemex tower complex. Wow! Can we not get something more believable? Electric power plants use diesel guys, not propane gas. Diesel just does not hardly even burn (needs high pressure to burn well) and will not explode like that. A propane gas line coming into the building? Very few areas have underground propane gas lines because it is dangerous with the temors we have constantly (well that is really a lie, because it is not because of the danger, but because they develop leaks constantly with the earth’s shifting, so the gas company would spend too much money to fix it all the time, i.e. economics). At least we have entertainment to wonder at.

When I was young back in “the dinosaur age”, I felt the call to missions. A large part of that call or divine pull in my soul came from reading books by missionaries about missions. In these books, the dedication of these men and women who went to the foreign mission field “BY FAITH”, an expression which simply means that there were no visible means for doing what they did, just a divine call, and a strong conviction that God would provide the means for every mission he sends a servant to do.

We read about missionaries in those olden days going for 4-7 years without any support checks arriving, and in those days, and many of these missionaries lived lives that did not see much fruit by way of multitudes of people, buildings, cash flow, and such. But they were faithful workers, that stayed on the field of service, and worked even when there was no money.

My observation is that there was a calling, a dediction, and willingness to work the work of God without much financial income to speak of. Their reward was in heaven, and really they didn’t expect much on earth. Basically, the idea was to hold body and soul together, i.e. pay for rent, clothes, and food, and hopefully medicine if and when needed.

These missionaries don’t exist any more. Maybe they do, but in the missions of today, they are a very few of the many that in missions, and all the new missionaries going out are not of this caliber. What happened? What killed real faith promise missions? Money.

The worse thing that could ever happen to missions happened. No, it was not compromise on an evangelical front, where Fundamentalism was destroy and contaminated. No, there were no government persecutions that stopped true missions. No, the workers did not give up in frustration and go home because of the hardships of missions. (Some are still out there.)

What happened is the United States of America “system” got involved, and we threw money hand over fist at missions. Churches (some) started giving great sums of money to missions (some missionaries only), and this is killing missions. I am only a single missionary on the battle lines, but I would like to take a shot at explaining what happened, and what is wrong.

Faith Got Lost in Missions

First of all, faith got lost somewhere in all the shuffle. I lived the last edge of anything looking like faith promise missions. I started out under a mission board, and they had “health insurance”. At that time, it was just a bank account where each missionary deposited $15 dollars a month into it, and they submitted their medical expenses if they were larger than what they could handle, the mission board would send a little help from that fund. The mission saw the great need to hire a retired Insurance man, and all that went away, and they started charging about 10 times that for medical insurance.

Setting aside “what they did” because I think they were just “looking around at what everybody else (other mission boards) was doing”, and they copied them. The trend was there in all mission boards in other words. But the faith element was slowly being stolen away from us.

My point is that when a Christian says, “I don’t know how I will pay my medicial bills, but God will provide,” well, that is faith. What happened is that churches didn’t like missionaries “begging for money” using trumped up situations to get it. There was great abuse (still exists) on many missionaries part in being covetous, and using situations to “get money.” The vehicle broke down, my wife is sick, we had 5 souls saved this week, but could have had 50 if we only had another $5,000 dollars this month.” These kinds of abuses were very hard on the churches, because first of all, they came from their cherished missionaries, so to ignore them was difficult. Secondly, they bleed the churches dry. Once a few started doing it, most started doing it.

There is a point somewhere  in all of this that we go out and see people saved by our own efforts, and those people who are saved and growing under our ministry should be supporting us (their firstline ministers), our works, and our crises.

The “Good ole boy” system has beaten Missions to Death

I have had a habit of basically getting an old used car (ready for the junk yard) and driving it until literally the pieces are falling off of it. I have a constant need always to get a vehicle that works and is faithful in our travels and work. That has never materialized in 25 years of missionary service, and we are just adjusted to that. To us, a “new car” has 100,000 miles on it.

In a missions conference one time, I was allowed to come. At the beginning and end of the conference they had 30-35 missionaries and their families march down the aisles with flags from their respective countries, and it was a grand thing. As has happening many times before, I felt I was being “used” by the church to promote their own “thing” and not missions, much less my work. I was given 5 minutes to tell of my work, and a display in an unused hallway. I stayed the week of the conference, and the ladies fed us well. Churches like social activities like this, because they too eat well.

But at the end of the conference, I was talking to the pastor about any possibility of support, and he unilaterally said no, that none of the missionaries at the conference were going to be taken on by the church, only one that they already supported was going to be continued as “their missionary”. They pushed faith promise missions hard, and the church presented that their donations was going to “missionaries like these fine folks.”

I found out in the conference that this couple were the pastor’s nephew, and they were going to Africa. The conference was a fund raising project to raise $30,000 dollars to pay for their shipping container to send the frig, stove, washer, drier, dish washer, and house hold furniture to Africa. Another $20,000 was being raised for their air fare.

I needed a new car and I was hoping to get $1000 dollars from the conference to help in that search, but alas I got $50 like the rest of the missionaries. I am glad for the $50, because it cost me $100 in gas and hotels to get to the conference. At least I got something.

The point I am trying to make here is that there is a “system” within modern missions, and it is designed to grab the money, and keep anything (scraps) from getting out to anybody that isn’t in the good ole boy system. I identified this as “the good ole boy” system from the south where I grew up. In this system, my friends, and my friends’ friends get everything, and if I don’t know you, you are automatically rejected no matter your qualifications. Without getting into the good ole boy system, money is hard to come by.

When the Holy Spirit is just wrong

It has come to my attention in the past, that in a few occasions I have had dear friends of my family, friends of mine, and people that I knew “outside of” the missionary deputation thing that confided in me. It was very disturbing and disappointing to me when in a supporting church, a man that was giving me $100 every couple of months or every 6 months told me he couldn’t do that anymore because the pastor found out about it, and rebuked him for it. According to what he told me, the pastor says the church gives me regular support, and anything extra should be put into the church’s general fund, and eventually that will “trickle down” to David. There were two men in that church that told me the same thing. I never said anything to either of the two men that were helping me. At the time my total income from all sources was around $800/month. I was dying economically, and this is what pastors were doing “to help me”.

On the flip side, the church paid that pastor a very generous salary and bonus package, and they built million dollar buildings and paid them off in a matter of less than 2 years.

In another church, the pastor said that they would take up a free will offering, and whatever comes in is mine. Last missionary got $20. After the service, the pastor went with the men to count the money, and came to me afterwards as I was putting up my display. A lady came up interrupting him, and said she was in the nursery, and couldn’t come up, and had a check for me. She had made it out to the church, and opened it up. It was for $50. The pastor quickly took it, thanked her, she left, and gave me my offering check for $35 while stuffing her check into his pocket. He said, oh, that is included in this. He insisted after the service that I stand beside the man taking up the offering in the back of the church, and I saw several $20s, $10s, and a $50 bill.

What my observation here is that pastors just don’t want some missionaries to get money. They fight against us it seems. Maybe they are “a few rare birds”, but I thought we were on the same side? Apparently not. Money is the issue in all of this. It was not so much the loss of the money that upset me, as the identification of a pastor being my enemy when he should have been my friend, my supporter.

In all of this, the moving of the Holy Spirit is denied it seems. Normal Christians cannot discern a valid giving objective or not. Pastors have to overrule. My experience is that many Christians have very little discernment when it comes to fakers and true ministers, but somehow, it would seem that the Baptist rule of priesthood of the individual and soul liberty should enter all this somewhere. (All these cases were in Baptist Churches).

Another observation here is when I started out and needed a new vehicle (as always as I mentioned above), and I put that in my prayer letter one month. The mission board rebuked me for that, that I was begging for money. On the one hand, they nailed the problem of missionary beggars very well, but on the other hand, I needed a new vehicle. They stopped me from raising more than $550/month support (in 1983) and said I had 100% of my support and should go to the field. As a missionary, I wondered, if I am not to mention my needs and the fight I am fighting in them, why send them out in the first place?

Another issue here is exactly how do mission boards promote missions? Because they soak up a tremendous amount of missions funds. What do they offer in return? Having living for half of my ministry under a mission board, and the other half under a local church board, the local church board does exactly what the mission board did, but for free. The mission board on the other hand made repeatedly bad decisions in things involving me and my ministry, and they insisted that their position is already right, even when they sent a divorced evangelist to us with their recommendation, when that was against their own policy. Never an apology is heard. If their discernment is wrong (obviously over years of cases, you just know they were wrong and out of God’s will in what they told you to do), and they soak up your potential support, and they really don’t help you get more support, then what good are they? They cause more burden and damage that good. The classic laughable situation which I have seen probably a half dozen times of a missionary having marital problems, or an affair, and they direct him to “a professional” (i.e. a local church pastor) for counseling. If they are the great help, where was the preventative stuff? Where is the dirty nasty counseling and preaching to those who need it? They sluff all that off on pastors (which they are not). Experts that know nothing, but assert their expertise.

At the same time I was trying to replace my vehicle, I heard of ABWE mission board, that they were needing to move their offices into a new complex, and they were raising 1 million dollars for the new building. There is where all the money in going, in building office complexes and paying secretaries’ and executives’ salaries for mission boards. That is missions giving. Somehow Christians have been convinced that investing in that is better than giving a few out in a foreign country money to go door to door and tell the unsaved about Christ. There is where Satan is killing missions.

I often wonder and observe these mission board executives, and I ask myself, do they go out witnessing door to door in their home church, or do they just run around the country “promoting missions”, and yet when home, hardly even attend a church much less be active in one. As a missionary pastor, I preach normally 4 times a week, and yet I am the novice in all of this and they are the experts. These guys get one sermon and preach it over and over again in different churches raising money. Millions of dollars are spent by God’s people on “missions”, and this money pays salaries of people that in some cases aren’t even saved, and in most cases, do all their “ministering” in an office, and never actually tell anybody about Christ. I wonder how many are actively pastoring a local church, or have successfully done so? I notice that many missionaries that cannot get much of a group of people raised up on the foreign mission field, or pastors that church hop for a while often end up on the staff of mission boards. How can they direct or help missionaries when they don’t even know really what it is, much less do it well. You don’t want failures and dropouts making executive decisions do you? That is what you get in most mission boards.

Getting back to “when the Holy Spirit is just wrong”, I really thought about the way modern missions has formed. We use the good ole boy system for approving missionaries ignoring the point that God’s Holy Spirit could direct on an individual basis. I was a part of a mission board. I have observed that this “system” produces a great turnover in missionaries. These people are not leaving because of lack of money nor because of hardship of the ministry, they are leaving because of personal sin in their life, and this the system didn’t “catch”  it. Their prime examples of missionaries are often the ones who fall hardest. The filtering process of mission boards is just not working. Why? Because they are more interested in missionaries that “play ball” with them, that a followers of the board, than are ministers of God.

In the end result, why do mission boards exist in the first place? So that we have “intelligent” missions, and spend the money the best that we can. How about spending the money the way the Lord wants? No, “we do not need more people in foreign pagan countries telling people about Christ” they tell us, we need them pushing paper in some office in the US, making a nice salary, working in a million dollar complex. This is killing missions. This is the same problem US churches have, because it is “their own way” of doing ministry, and the work of true, real evangelism and expository preaching just isn’t a priority any more. Christianity is quickly dying in the US.

Some people are not cut out for the roughness of aggressive evangelism on the mission field. They should not in the ministry then. So they get a job in a mission board, and this is the problem, dilution. Satan by swelling the “missionary work force” with hundreds and hundreds of people that could not give a clear plan of salvation if their life depended on it, and much less will they actively go out and do that, he dilutes the funds for all missionaries. The bottom line here is very simple, we do not need all these “support ministries”. We need the money to pay for food instead. How difficult is it to receive a check for a missionary and deposit it into his bank account? Mission boards presume that every donor needs a thank you for every gift. That gives their paper pushers work to do. That also allows the mission board to soak off more money from the missionaries funds.

What I note here, is that the Holy Spirit is first of all rebuked in all of this, and secondly, He is treated as a demon (when He moves on an individual to give, it is wrong). I say that because God can no longer guide individual Christians to give to the needs of God’s servants. Yes there are crooks out there masquerading as missionaries (and pastors). But the bottom line is, the good ole boy system is not biblical.

Churches and individuals need to sit these ministers down and get to know their workers and where their investment is going. That is hard work. But besides that, God’s people need to pray over where they give their money. There should be respect for the Holy Spirit moving, and issues and needs should be heard, even though they may be refused. What is going on is that when the good ole boy system missionaries and mission boards need something (be that $1000 dollars, or a million dollars), that gets promoted and churches give big time to those “needs.” But the actual people doing the work don’t get the same treatment. They are branded as beggars, and looked at with scorn and are rejected from anything.

Shysters as Missionaries, and Disobedient Churches

A proud dad asks his son, “Son, you mom tells me you want to be a missionary when you grow up.” “Yea dad, that is what I want to be.” “Why do you want to be a missionary?” “Because I want to be rich, do nothing for it, and be lazy all the time.”

I mentioned about about some missionaries using bleeding sob stories to get money. I remember a missionary here in Mexico sent me his prayer letter for some half dozen months. In one of them the engine in his car broke down, and they were winning 20 kids to Christ every Sunday with that van, and he needed $3000 to fix it (in the 1980s). In the next prayer letter, his wife had contracted a disease from eating contaminated food, and she might die, and he needed $5000 for medicine.

That one struck me hard, and on my limited income at the time, I decided I would try to send them something. I was new to Mexico, in my first year, and asked a Mexican pastor about that disease. He told me that the medicine for what she had was given away by the government for free, and if you wanted to buy it, it cost like $3 US dollars in a drug store. My lesson was that some people are just crooks at heart. They are covetous.

In another strange case, I knew a pastor of a local church. They had about 150 people when I first met him. After 3 years I went to the mission field and lost contact with him. He had about 350 people by that time, had built a new building (2 in fact) and had started a Bible institute in his church. After a few years, I heard he had left that church to go to the mission field, to “make the big money.”

It completes baffles me when I see reliable sources (the missionary himself in a prayer letter to his churches) state that their income is $7,000/month, and their work fund is $5,000/month (back in the 1990s). What happened to faith missions? These guys spend more time in the US raising that money than actually doing any ministry on the foreign field. Do they have people? Yes, because they give away a lot of stuff, and on the Sundays they do that, the church is packed with 5,000 people. The rest of the time there are 3000, and when the missionary is in the states raising more money, they have 200, mostly paid staff or Bible institute students. That is success? I don’t think so. But that is what so many churches are pumping their money into.

One pastor tried to convince me to join his mission board, and he used one of his missionaries as an example. This guy in Brazil was grossing $10,000 monthly (1999), and another $5,000 ministry fund. He had 10,000 people in his church. I read the newsletter that that group put out citing this information in a public forum for their supporters (for the whole mission board).

I told the pastor the guy is a fraud, and unbiblical. He didn’t like that and asked me why? Very simple. Didn’t you send the missionary out to start a real church down there? Yes. Doesn’t that include an autonomous structure as a goal? yes. Why don’t they support their pastor like up here in the states? But the people are poor was his reply. If these poor people who drink 2-3 cokes a day, sacrifice 1 Coca-Cola (about $1 anywhere in the world), they could fully support their pastor. They sacrifice a coke every 2 months, and they take care of his ministry fund. Why don’t they do that? Because they are there for the photos the pastor takes back to the US to raise money with. They come for the freebies, and they don’t deposit anything in the offering plates.

If persecution comes, this 10,000 person church will disappear overnight, and probably 30-100 of them are real Christians, and the rest will become whatever is easiest.

The point here is that the American style of missions is killing missions instead of completing “the mission”. Money is at the bottom of it all.

Let me share with you a little conclusion I made from studying the Greek word “Apostle”. This is the concept of being sent on a mission. It includes equipping the ambassador, as well as directing his activities toward accomplishing a mission (missionary). Getting that firmly in the mind, read…

Rev 2:2 I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars:

Was there any problem with the NT churches recognizing who was Peter, James or John? No. The confusion here is not in recognizing one of the 12, but apostles like Paul, apostles of the churches sent out to start more churches through evangelism and church planting.

God rebukes many and commends this church for their “intolerance” of fake apostles (missionaries). The church “tried” them (examined very carefully and profoundly their works) and found some were “liars”. They presented a ministry worthy of financial support, interest, prayers, etc., but this ministry was invalid, a fake, a fraud, like Hollywood movie set. That being the case, they were rejected by these churches, and God commends them on their discernment.

When missionaries are automatically accepted because of some accrediting organization or group (mission board, Christian school, or fellowship), this is exactly why this system is pushed. There is no close individual examination by churches, they delegate it out. There is where missions has been filled with fakers. People who soak up all the funds for the most part, and do nothing, or do works that are propted up by Madison Avenue modern worldly promotional ideas and methodology. Ask yourself and your pastor some hard questions about your missionaries.

How do your missionaries get their people? 

Is it through trickery, give-aways, or other methods that is not simply a clear plan of salvation? For the Hyles people here, is repentance a central part of the plan of salvation or is saying some magical Mickey Mouse enchanted words, and you go to heaven, and nothing more matters about your Christian life?

How much money does your missionary make (all incomes)?

It is totally fair to ask the missionary to defend his income. What do the people get for what they give him? Where is he spending his money?

What exactly does he do as a minister?

If you are giving him money to do something, get him to tell you what he does, and how often he is raising funds. Both past experience, and present activity should point to somebody who is more concerned about ministry than money. The requirement of “not coveteousness” is repeated many times in the Bible as a requirement for a minister. Hardship, working without, these are strong biblical qualities. Judas had his hand in the money bag. He was overly concerned about money. That is a bad sign.

How flexible is your missionary as far as where he goes for his money?

Many of these guys will go into Southern Baptist Churches, Pentecostal Churches, and other churches that are very different from your doctrine. Is that acceptable?

How do we put the faith back into faith promise missions?

I think the answer here is to stop the flow of money to missionaries who are banking it and getting rich. Churches need to see the presentation of needs and praying for these needs as the way God has chosen for missions to work. That means that churches and individuals need to open their hearts on a case by case basis, and not just dump their mission funds in a good ole boy system.

Faith is the belief in things not seen.

Faith Missions is men and women missionaries going out “WITHOUT SEEING THE MEANS AT THE MOMENT.” They go in faith, and God’s people respond to their needs. Many times they only tell God, and God’s people back home respond. That is going away, and we need to demand that our missions works with churches and individuals sacrificing, but also our missionaries not going out with all the means in their hands. They need to exercise they faith, and this works by praying and presenting needs, and God’s people somewhere responding.

Dear Friends and Supporters,

Our personal support continues in decline in general over the past 5-7 years now. We are trying to write more churches, but things are still generally closed. It is my observation that the United States is following the same trends as England did, and even with the economic problems, when things get “back to normal”, these economic drops simply help Satan to attack missions. Eventually, there will be other countries sending missionaries into the US because the churches will either be closed or they will dwarf (as many denominations are experiencing this now) because as an organism, (1) they do not reproduce more churches, and (2) they do not replace their own bodies as these people die off.

In line with this trend, I would take a look at this article on the subject:

New Research: Attendance and offerings up for most churches in 2012 from Todd Rhoades.

In this prayer update, I give an update on our main church work, as well as our two mission works, one in Puebla, and the other in Chalco. I explain the details of how Satan is attacking our work for the Lord in each of these three places.

Prayer Letter of David and Tule Cox, Mexico City, Mexico
December 2012

Dear praying friends,

We continue to fight in our work here inMexico City. Since the summer, we have started two mission works, one in Puebla (about 2 hours from our house) and another in Chalco about a half hour and still in the city. The work in Chalco is in the house of Joel and Erica, and we have between 9 and 14. Joel and Erica (who are also attending our main church Sunday AM) were already saved and asked us to do a Bible study in their home for them and their neighbors. I am teaching that Bible study on Tuesday nights. While it is only a 30 minute drive for me, it takes them an 1 ½ hours to get to church on Sundays in public transportation. We have had two men accept the Lord there, and one of them was in the Santa Muerte (Holy Death cult). Francisco accepted the Lord, but only came to that one study. They are having demonic experiences (black outs, bleeding, etc.) with their son, so we would request prayer for Alexis.

InPuebla, we are meeting in Gabi’s sister’s (Catalina) house. Gabi and Rustico attend with us. Satan has attacked this work also. On Halloween, Catalina’s husband (they are divorced) showed up about 3 hours before the study, and took Catalina’s three children to the graveyard to honor their dead parents. The children, Hector, Juan, and Dulce (single mother) all live with Catalina and are partaking of the Bible study. It was disappointing to see them all go off with their father to Catholic celebration. In all there are about 12-15 inthat Bible study.

Marco Antonio from our church is holding the Bible study. I took it over for a month (November) to give him a rest, and I was there when Enrique took Catalina’s kids off. I tried to talk to Enrique, but by the time we got there they were getting into the car to leave, and he wouldn’t even say hello to me. It was depressing to say the least. These people are very ignorant, just followers.

The first of December I turned the study back over to Marcos, and Enrique showed up again, and Marcos led him to the Lord. Since that time, Enrique has been talking to his sister, trying to get her to come to the Bible study, which she hasn’t as of yet. Aurora (Catalina’s married daughter) is coming with her 3 small children, and she is fighting and wanting a divorce from her husband Joaquin (he is an alcoholic). We are working with them, praying and counseling them. Now Marco Antonio is having problems with his wife (she doesn’t want him to go, even though she attends our church and is saved). So Marco Antonio is going to give up the Bible study at the end of December. None of the other men are offering to take it, so I will probably have to take it myself. They meet on Fridays at 2:00PM, and sometimes don’t get back until midnight or later. Our church here on the field is paying the gas money and tolls involved.

Our main church still has around 30-40 people on Sunday mornings, but things are down there also. Julio (a widower that married again about 7 years ago) is having extreme problems with his wife Mari, and it looks like they will divorce. I am totally against divorce and counsel people so, but Mari attends a Pentecostal church, and quite frankly, they are extremist crazy people. She has totally refused most all the obligations of wife towards Julio. She leaves early in the morning and goes to be with her daughter and son, and sometimes doesn’t even tell Julio where she is going nor come back for 3-4 days at a time. Julio is left to defend for himself. She refuses counseling with me, and her pastor sees the situation as that they should get a divorce (so she can marry a Pentecostal) or Julio should become Pentecostal.

We continue to have new people slowly come through the church. Since we have returned in October, we haven’t been going out on Saturday visitation (Bible studies causing us to scramble all week), but even so, God has given me about 6 people to witness to in the Bible studies or in our main church, and 4 have accepted the Lord. We would like to see these new people come, but it is a fight. Likewise our church is under attack, and the women have become distant and do not participate much. We have breakfast and church meals, and they don’t come (in fighting and jealousy). Please pray that God would change their hearts.

A new family, Edgar and his mother and wife and children have started coming. They faithfully attended a Pentecostal church for about 15 years, and their pastor started doing unacceptable things (Edgar didn’t explain what), and they decided to find another church. They are attending with us now. We had a wedding the last Saturday of November with Luis Ramos and Lolita. Luis is about 73, and Lolita 65. We have had some of our regular members not come, which is depressing. Between work, and getting discouraged for personal reasons (fighting between husband and wife), they come sporadically. We would request that you pray for our church.

We continue to labor here inMexico City. Kelsie, our daughter, is studying her last year of high school inOrlando, and we have paid for her plane ticket home for Christmas, so we will see her soon. Both Tule and I continue with our “old folks diseases”, but under control mostly.

I continue to put out material on the Internet, and we have people downloading this literature all over the world. It amazes me that a Christian inChinawrote saying that he downloads everything I put up in English, and uses it in his ministry. Likewise we have regular correspondence with people in Bible institutes in Africa andSouth America. I also get emails from people who read my books and tracts, asking counsel or saying that they appreciate what I am doing in sharing these things for free. We are praying about charging for some of these, because we are getting more and more requests for these studies in paper and ink, and while we will continue to offer them via the Internet for free, some people would rather pay for a paper copy than download it and print it themselves (some studying are long).

Our financial situation continues to be tenuous at best. With Kelsie wanting to go to college next year to study medicine, and with our support base slipping as churches continue to reduce what they give us, and inflation creeping up on us, we barely make it through the month each month. God has given us a small income from the websites, and that represents probably what 2-3 churches would give, so I am hoping that with printing paper and ink books, we can add to our income.

We would like to wish you one and all a blessed holiday time.

In Christ,
David Cox

This Ministry Update in Microsoft Word: 2012-12december-cox-prayer-letter.doc

Summary

Young Families and Youth in our Services

I always seem to analyze things in my life, and sometimes God uses this activity to teach me and guide me. Recently we returned to the US for a couple of months of furlough, and we were traveling and stopped in a place on a Wednesday night that we didn’t have a supporting church near there. So we got a hotel, and I saw “Baptist Church” in front of the hotel. It looked okay so we went over there for Wednesday night prayer meeting. Turns out it was a Southern Baptist Church. In general, I don’t go to or want support from Southern Baptist Churches. There are doubtlessly some very good Fundamental  churches in that group, but my contention is that without separating from the bad in the convention, a church has to accept their cooperative efforts and work with these liberal and bad churches. So I am not endorsing the Southern Baptist Convention by my remarks here, but I simply commenting on what struck my mind to start working and mulling over things.

Let me add, they had an evangelist preaching the last night of a revival, and he presented the plan of salvation simply, and I appreciate and agree with his sermon, it was very good. The people in the church were extremely pleasant and kind to us.

What got my mind to thinking was the absence of any young people. My wife and I are 54, and we were the youngest people present (beside Russ my 16 year old son). Perhaps those with children and teens didn’t come because it was a school night, or perhaps they even had some activity elsewhere in a member’s home for them, I don’t know. The impression that I got was very clearly that if this church doesn’t reach out to younger families and the youth, in a short 10-20 years, the church will be memberless.

This caused me to reflect over our own failures in reaching our youth in our church in Mexico City. We have tried to have activities, Sunday School classes, and other such things to reach our youth, and in general, they don’t come to church in time for Sunday School, and they are “bored” with both church and any youth outings we provide.

As far as getting the teens to church for Sunday School, I have talked with our parents, and they blame the teens for not getting up in time. I blame the parents. The teens blame the Sunday School for being boring. So there is plenty of blame to spread around for everybody.

But the real reason for this problem is that our world is teaching teens and adults that you just don’t have to do anything that is not “fun”. If you physically are somewhere where things there are not “fun”, then escape into your mind, and pick up your favorite electronic device (a.k.a. smart phone, mobile gamebody, mobile TV, mobile movie watcher device, etc.) and escape from boring reality.

School now has to be “fun” for students to do well. Everything has to be electronic or computer, with vivid graphics and bold action. We have allowed ourselves to be slowly taught that work is bad, and play is fun, and there is a way to only live “fun” and play. If you browse websites that promote Christian youth ministries, everything is oriented towards making things “fun” for the teens. That is the competition, and that is where churches have to go to “keep the youth”.

My observation here is that this concept is baloney. Nowhere in the Bible does God present pleasure here on earth as any kind of real basis for Christian life. Pleasure is a totally different kind of thing in the Bible than what is in our modern culture, and we need to understand this and work to teach this to our people.

Pleasure for a Christian should be the following: 1) fellowship with God. This is seen as our salvation, which is to physically and socially live with God in heaven. 2) fellowship with other like people like ourselves (true, vibrant Christians). This means that there should be pleasure in our minds and hearts when we come to church to socialize with fellow believers. I don’t know if the problem here is a poisioned church membership which gripes and grinds against each other instead of encouraging and loving one another, or a lack of recognition of this socializing that it should be “pleasure” for us.

3) Another clear idea of pleasure or “joy” should be over the salvation of lost souls. Why we don’t feel this pleasure is really weird, because it would presume that we don’t value our own salvation very highly. This as a mark of unhealthiness is seen by churches and Christians a) not emphasizing evangelism, b) not expending their lives and resources for it, c) not actually doing any evangelizing, d) not even being interested enough to know how to win a soul to Christ.

4) Another clear idea of pleasure or “joy” is that of obeying God’s will and walking in it. It is extremely hard for a true Christian to walk in God’s will and not in the ways of the world. Sometimes I think that maybe none of us are saved, because the world is really deep down in our bones, and we just all are purtrid and unholy. I take comfort in remembering that God’s knows the evils of this world, and takes into consideration our human weakness.

But what really makes me reflect on these things is that a concept of a “healthy church” is one where people are happy when they are in church. We have probably visited around 800 different churches in our ministry, and we have seen all kinds (most Baptist and Bible Churches though). Those churches where they open the doors an hour before the first service, and a lot of (usually elderly) people come and read their Bibles and pray before services strike me as being extremely healthy. Also those where the pastor is going to take us out to eat afterwards, and we are still waiting to close up an hour or more after the service because the people just don’t want to go home, but stand and talk. It frustrates us and pastors sometimes, but boy is that a good sign. As a contrast, I note a church or two where the place fills up half of the total attendance 20-30 minutes into the preaching service, and a dozen people leave during the closing prayer. Where are they going that is so important? Everybody has to be first in line at the Sunday restaurant? This is also seen in a total “turn off” of people at 12:00 noon on Sunday morning.

Vitality in our Churches

The idea of “vitality” is that of life. In the present article and context, this means spiritual life. Do our churches really have vitality? Let me offer some thoughts.

First of all, no church that cannot perform what is necessary to survive as a church has true vitality. For example, a mission church is still surviving by the offer of life from some outside source. Many mission churches meet in a rented hall or home by somebody who is paying the bill for that. The church from its own offerings is not self-sufficient.

Another thought here is reproduction, and that being the individual reproduction of members, and the reproduction of entire churches (church planting). Many churches today are just dying and withering up into nothing. I visited a church years back in South Carolina around Bob Jones University. They were in that “orbit”. What struck me was that on a Sunday night we were meeting in their auditorium which easily seats 2000 or more, and there were less that 30 people there. They filled the first 2 pews of one side, and they didn’t even cut on the lights for the rest of the auditorium. That church has seen better days obviously.

But my question is where are the evangelistic efforts today? I see churches doing all kinds of silly evangelism projects. I label them silly because they are all “indirect” in that they do not directly present the gospel clearly and openly the unsaved in the place where the unsaved live and work and move. Biblical evangelism has to be a clear presentation of the Gospel to the unsaved where they are (and this is basically outside of the local church).

I remember hearing of a church that used an outside group to come in and have a teen outreach (note, note evangelism) of a “War” where there were two sides, and the games and activities were oriented towards competition one team against the other. This is common with summer camps, only this was a traveling team that went from church to church doing this. They invited unsaved intercity kids to this church, and when they came, everybody was happy. They played their games, and then had hot dogs and hamburgers afterward. When the organizers tried to get them settled down for a devotional time, the inner city kids went wild and it ended in a food fight with the churches facilities being trashed with food and soda thrown all over the walls. The unsaved kids were invited to a party, and they were deceived, because the church wanted to slip in a religious on them, and they rebelled at it. In analyzing the events, the pastor and men of the church who were there concluded that “they” as a church lied to the kids about the purpose and nature of the event. The outside people running this show (supposedly a great Christian ministry launched from a Christian College) said that that is how you do this. “Lying” and decept is how we do the work of the Lord? This is common in modern ministries, and it is because we have left the biblical pattern of how to do ministry.

A healthy church does not wait until a yearly revival to do evangelistic work. It is vital, so it is constantly reproducing. I remember in my home church when growing up, that on Sundays when the pastor would preach an evangelistic message, my dad and several other men (there were about 2-3 always with another 3-4 who would come up if needed) that were on the side aisles, and if people came forward, the pastor would speak with them, and then hand them off to these men who would counsel them or give them the plan of salvation. By my count there were probably 8-12 (some were in the choir) that could clearly give the plan of salvation. Today I see churches where I seriously doubt the pastor can give the plan of salvation without stumbling through it.

Vitality in reproduce of Christians, souls for Christ, is about all of this becoming second nature to a large majority of the adults and teens in the church. As a teenager, we went out evangelizing door to door. At Christian Summer Camp we took a day off from camp (usually Thursday or Friday) after classes the days before that to go into town and witness. Today the ministers in charge of churches and Christian ministries can hardly get through a presentation of the gospel. What is happening? Satan is so distracting us with “other good things” that we have lost out on the primary, essential thing of Christianity.

Teens going to theme parks or playing “fun games” is not important AT ALL! Teens who personally know Christ and can bring other people into the kingdom of God is a core objective of any healthy church. Ditto that for adults. So where are we as far as being a “healthy church”? Life is singularly seen in the ability and action of reproduction of itself. Death kills others. Which are we? Do we cause life in others or do we influence others in other ways which is not clearly spiritual regeneration?

When we talk about reproduction of ourselves as a church, modern Christianity has clearly fallen on its face again. I used to have a practice when I visited churches looking for support to look at their missionary boards. There I would count how many of their missionaries were into direct evangelism and church planting ministries. Maybe I am jealous because I do that and want everybody else to do that, but frankly, it is discouraging to see how many million dollar organizations are on these boards today, and the total lack of real missionaries.

Either people making aprons with Bible verses on it, or signs in yards, or some “ministry” that exists which supposedly encourages others spiritually, but there are not direct evangelism in these ministries. Their relationship with local churches is very distinct. They draw their own vitality and life by draining the resources of local churches. The idea that these ministries could one day become self sufficient from their own people is impossible. Take for example a Christian Radio Station. Yes they are nice. But is this really missions? Some stations clearly present the word of God and the gospel, and I laud them for that. But they are always dependent. They live by people giving to them instead of to a local church.

My observation simply is this, where in all of this mixture and disaster of a mess is the reproduction of local churches? We must demand that ministries we support as well as our own churches and lives are 1) directly presenting the Gospel to the unsaved (while admitting that this is valid in any church service also), 2) pushing the local church to be a strong, vital, healthy organization.

“Health” for a local church is translated into 1) lots of members that are vibrant, real, strong Christians that participate and support that local church. 2) funds sufficient to do the ministry that they undertake. 3) efforts, interest, and resources spent both locally in the locality of the local church as well as at a distance (think missions here) on the same mission they have (direct evangelism, and planting local churches).

The question comes up after reading my strong statements, “David, are you against any other kind of ministry?” No, I am not. My understanding is that there are two very different things which have incorrectly merged. First of all, there is the local ministry of a local church. Paul makes mention of all the gifts of the spirit in his epistles to the Corinthian church, and this is very obvious that Paul’s concept of a vital and healthy local church is one where many members are exercising their gifts in and through the local church, and many of these ministries were actually outside the building of the local church. That is very much biblical.

Secondly, there were missionaries. The only missionary example we have with authority is what is offered us by Scripture. We have to deposit Paul’s missionary ministry as the authorized example God gives us. Paul went from place to place directly presenting the Gospel clearly to the heathen. Where there were people saved, shortly thereafter Paul organized a church, and left other missionaries to build it up.

But observe, 1) the local ministries DID EXIST, but these people worked secular jobs, and were not fulltime supported by missionary funds of the church. 2) the local ministry was a part of, under the direction and control of a single local church, and was a way for Christians in that church to use their abilities for God.  That means the “ministry” did not exist outside and separate from that local church. 3) These ministries appear to be oriented inside a local church, or from a local church, and they never took on a life of their own. Here I would note that  today, a mission board, a summer camp, a Christian university, a Christian radio station, etc. can have millions of dollars invested in their infrastructure. For every dollar you put into a building, you reduce what is available for full time ministers to live and do evangelism and spiritual edification (local church stuff). Yes buildings are probably necessary, but no, everybody shouldn’t have their half a million or millions of dollars building. The idea is that they need heavy investment of money. Where does it come from? Local church missions funds. Some churches at least try to balance home missions 25% foreign missions 75%. Most churches just let it go however.

In Paul’s comments about ministries in his Corinthians epistles, we see that these ministries and ministers were tightly intergrated into the local church. We never see any extra-church or para-church group or ministry recognized nor instruction given for them. That means they either didn’t exist or were not very prominent in the scheme of things.

It greatly disgusts me today that in general Christians cannot give to a minister, like a missionary, or a local church. It is as if they feel it is somehow improper or “below grade”, and they need to write checks to an organization. I have even heard arguments that without an organization over a person, the ministry is really a false prophet kind of thing. Churches have to have a denomination over them or they are wild (loose canons), and that kind of independent church is just a cult. Independent missionaries that are not under a local church are labeled as bad, rebellious, or dangerous. What mission board was Paul under? In Philippians, Paul commended the Philippian church that they sent once and again to his needs, and that NOBODY corresponded with him in giving to these needs except that church. The church at Antioch from which Paul was “sent out” (actually the word is “divorced”) didn’t send money to Paul at first? Yes. As a missionary, I observe that rarely will churches or individuals donate towards a large need that I have ($5000 for a newer car), but willingly will they donate $10,000s of dollars for a new million dollar mission board complex, or a building in some ministry somewhere. The money is there, the ideas in people’s heads is where the problem lies.

Healthy churches simply are churches that are reproducing themselves, both individually as evangelism of the unsaved to be Christians, and on an organizational level, church planting. Let’s just think a minute. If we say every good and healthy being reproduces itself from its own energies, Christians have to reproduce Christians, local churches local churches, radio stations radio stations, Christian camps Christian camps, Christian universities Christian universities, etc. then isn’t it interesting how each of those things draws resources to reproduce themselves?

Christians have to witness to the unsaved for it to work. This is biblical and takes no funds at all really to do it. Churches reproduce themselves according to the biblical pattern of missions. Both of these have biblical president.

When we talk about these other Christian ministries, none of them have vitality in themselves to reproduce themselves. They all want local churches to pay for their reproduction, and for their own existence. Now that it is common for Christian ministries to charge for their services (a practice never seen nor endorsed in Scripture), the gouging of Christianity for “ministry” is the way everybody is thinking.

We are just messed up in our minds in Christianity. God designed all of this to work, work well, and accomplish His will, and there was never any “charging” or merchandising (like the false prophets commonly do) for true biblical ministry.

Life is the Production of Fruit

We need to address fruit production in all of this. A healthy church is a church that is highly active and motivated in producing spiritual fruit. This is seen very accutely in good works, but it goes much more beyond that. A healthy church is a church that is also involved in promoting and executing spiritual character.

Prayer for example is something that is very healthy, although there is unhealthy prayer. I have heard many a person pray 10-15 requests for themselves, and never get beyond their own needs. We should pray for our own needs, but spiritual maturity is to lift up your vision from your own needs and ministry and work for the needs of others. Financial aid is probably very essential in this, but it is not and should not be where we begin nor the majority of what we do for people.

Care, concern, interest, and involvement is what is seen as spiritual fruit. People reaching people, resolving their spiritual and physical problems. That should be a very discernable and strong force in a healthy church.

This should not come from a works salvation type of thing, but rather because people love Christ, they change their character to become caring and serving people. When there is an abundance of this in a church, it is a good sign of vitality in its people. Carnality and contention are the signs of an unhealthy church.

Life is the Attack and Defense of itself from Dangers

Another issue here is very simply, the church has a focus and definition of itself. It stands on the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and its people are defined as people of the Gospel. They live the Gospel. Likewise they are defined by what they oppose.

It is sad to see churches today that have no “guts”. They are afraid of what is “politically incorrect.” I see occasionally pastors that refuse to use illustrations because of copyright concerns. I have had churches ask me to affirm that my prayer card is not under copyright of some photo studio. (My image is under my copyright. Don’t know how somebody else can have any say over my own image.)

But the point is that the healthy church takes definitive stands against worldliness and carnality in our society. While the majority of the evangelical denominations are caving in to practicing homosexuals as active members and ministers, women preachers and pastors, and other such things, the healthy church takes a stand against these things. They are prohibited and wrong as per Scripture, and the healthy church doesn’t have a timid or weak public position about them.

Where are Churches “Going” Today?

If we look at the direction that churches are heading today, and we compare that with the local church as planted by the teachings of the New Testament, we find a great discrepancy between the two. Whereas the NT church was on fire giving the gospel actively and forcefully to the unsaved in the public forum, our churches today hardly even have a clear presence and presentation of the gospel within its own doors. It is simply not important to modern Christianity. They want to include everybody as “brother” and make no demands as to what is a real Christian. People can live in open sin, and still be a church member, a church officer, or even a minister.

We see the NT church pattern as one that was actively serving Christ and the body of Christ, working towards evangelism and effecting the image of Christ within its membership by edifying teaching of Scripture. Today churches focus on entertainment, fun, pleasure, and feeling rather than being. In a NT church, what was important was how you lived the image of Christ. The “being” concept was overwhelming. The being caused you to act and work in a certain way that pleased God.

Today everything is about feeling, and everything is oriented towards causing a certain “feeling” in the membership. We want to “feel good”. In the NT churches they denounced sin, and stigmatized individual members of local churches that refused to give up their sin. They were “disciplined”. That was as much a part of NT church life as anything else. Being excluded from communion because you did publicly renounce your sin nor produce sufficient evidence of a change to satisfy the church that you were truly following Christ. In today’s modern churches, discipline is non-existant. That is because it “goes directly against the grain” of a feel good orientation of the ministry.

When we consider that the NT church was busily working against the near approaching Day of Christ’s return, we see that this was a motive to exceed all boundaries as far as what a person can do. Extraordinary effort was given to the ministry, and great sacrifices were common. Today, the real ministry of evangelism and church planting (edifying the saints so that they can do the work of the ministry, which is living a godly example and winning people to Christ) is set aside for social issues like feeding people, building houses, and other things. It sad that the church of our generation has been given greater resources and “abilities” to  do things for God, and has done less than any other generation since the church started.

Summary: An explanation of how to use a feed reader to keep up-to-date with our activities and minister.

If you regularly pray for missionaries, sometimes it is hard to keep you with their needs and activities. You want to make that easier. Many missionaries (myself included) have sent out emails to update their prayer supporters with news of their ministries and fields. Many times these emails “get lost”, either en route or simply they get lost once they enter your email program because it is identified as SPAM.

Let me suggest that you should use a RSS Feed reader. I have Chrome as my Internet browser, and when I type a feed URL (typically a regular URL with “/feed/” added on the end), I get a prompt for an automatic installation of a feed reader to use with Chrome. I chose RSS Feed Reader. I clicked on that option and it installed. (read whole article to see rest of how to install and use it)

Let me show you how my feeds of my website show up. Once installed, you click on the three orange arcs.

Here you see the image after you click on the orange arcs on the menu bar of Chrome (remember you have to install this first).

These are the feeds that I have installed. If you click on one of these “Missionary David Cox – Mexico” for example, you should see something like this.

These are the last x number of posts in that feed. If you enter just the general website URL, i.e.

http://www.davidcoxmex.com/feed/

Then you should get a list of every new post on the website in reverse order (latest is at the top). Hint: To uninstall or configure RSS Reader, right click on its icon on the icon bar, and then select uninstall, or configure.

The configure option should bring up a page like this in the browser.

This configuration page has my two feeds, one for the entire website, and another one for just Prayer Updates.

To delete a feed, click on the “X” on the far right of the feed line.

To configure a feed, click on the name of it.

Here you can configure how many feeds appear in the pop-up box (see above). The line to do this in this image is “Posts to display”.

By doing this, you can see all my posts, or just my prayer updates.

Again, the URL’s for the feeds are:

http://www.davidcoxmex.com/feed

This is for anything I post on my website (which includes some general missions articles, articles about Mexico, mexican culture and life, etc.).

http://www.davidcoxmex.com/archives/category/prayer-updates/feed

This is for just my Prayer and Ministry Updates.

This is an update to our ministry. I talk about our two mission churches, and our main church as well as other prayer requests.

We just finished a 2-5 month furlough to the states to carry Kelsie to Orlando for her last year of high school, and also to visit our supporting churches. We are planning on making another furlough in the Spring to try to visit new churches and the rest of our existing churches.

Our trip back to Mexico started after our last service in Missouri, and our engine light came on. We stopped on Columbus Day at some garage that was open, and we have transmission issues. We traveled back to Mexico City with the light on, and both Thursday and Friday we had times of about 2 hours where we could not get the car over about 50 miles per hour without running the RPM to 3000 or 3500, so I kept it slow. But we got back okay.

We really need to get a new(er) vehicle, because this one has 180,000 miles and is beginning to have a lot of issues with the transmission, motor, A/C, etc. So I am starting a Car replacement fund, and we are asking our supporters to please donate extra to us, and mark whatever extra you want as “Car Replacement”.

We were very pleased Sunday (yesterday) to get back to our church and find all of our regulars still attending faithfully. We only had one or two that haven’t been too faithful. The men took turns in preaching, and it was a little burdensome on some of them because they are normally preparing a sermon or study every week, but they liked it. It got them really involved in the ministry this time it appears.

The mission in Puebla continues to grow with about 18 adults and 8 children. We will try to get a lady to go with us to teach children’s classes while we have the adult Bible study Friday nights. Marco Antonio is teaching the class, and he is very happy doing that.

Erica from Chalco also came Sunday night, and she has asked us to begin a Bible study in their home on Tuesday nights, which I will begin teaching that. This week will have our first study with Erica’s family (4) and a neighbor lady and probably will have around 7 people all total.

Our ministry continues forward, and we are hoping that we will have some combined services from time to time with the mission works, or our people would go out to Puebla to witness and work and fellowship. There is still a lot of work to be done before we start Sunday morning services, but I think that might be a possibility by next year. The work in Chalco also has a lot potential because it is in an area where there are a lot of apartments, and a lot of people. We will need to go door to door to canvas and invite people to the study.

We would also that you continue to remember my daughter, Kelsie, as she studies in Orlando her last year of high school. Please pray for God to guide her as to what career to take the following year in college, and please pray that God would provide for this college education by way of donations or scholarships or both. We have barely made ends meet each month for years now, so we have no retirement, and much less a college education fund for our kids.

I would also ask that you pray for our financial situation as I try to get deputation meetings to present our work in new churches this coming spring. We have to go back to Orlando for Kelsie’s graduation, and we are going to try to do deputation for 2 months before her graduation.

I continue to also work on my websites, and I am starting a new one which is a Bible institute on the Internet. I am making courses for it now, so there is not much to see, but I will keep you posted. This will be two websites, one in English and one in Spanish.

First, an introduction of who I am for those coming to this page from a search. I am a missionary living in Mexico City for the last 25 years. I am not a political analyst, but I am observing what anybody here in Mexico can see. There is a tremendous controversy brewing here in Mexico over the results of this election, and truly, there is a dark cloud over the country of Mexico as Mexico tried to discern (and believe what one side or the other tells them) what is the truth of this election.

Besides discerning really what happened, there is the next step, what to do about it. If there was fraud, then by law there should be a repeat of the election, and in actuality, this would be a ground-breaking step for social justice (presuming there was fraud and it is clearly proved to be such as to throw the election outside of its otherwise probable outcome).

The first of July of 2012, Mexico held their presidental elections. Below are the election results which have been officially acknowledged.

http://www.electionresources.org/mx/president.php?election=2012

http://computos2012.ife.org.mx/reportes/presidente/distritalPresidenteEF.html

There were four candidates running, and in reality, Quadri had so little following that he can pretty much be discounted. From what I have seen of his party over the years, I am amazed that he even got what he got!

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Summary: This article is my view of why some of the way we do things in missions today is just wrong.

Topics are:
1) Missionaries are distanced from church people.
2) We expect missionaries to put on a song and dance show for the church people, but the churches never let them actually do what is their ministry.
3) We are locked into a Madison Avenue mentality that says, only with spending a lot of money can you do anything serious.
4) We have distorted and destroyed biblical spirituality.
5) We are experts at missions, all the while never “producing” or “reproducing” ourselves.

Our modern missionary model is greatly flawed because:

1) Missionaries are distanced from church people. They are very limitedly allowed to even speak, much less teach and preach. They hardly ever are long enough in town to go out witnessing and really build up the local church they asking funds from. I, as a missionary, wish that a pastor would ask me to come stay at his church for 3-4 months and go out door-to-door witnessing and to teach Bible studies in his church. Make a difference in that local church for even a short period of time, and let his people get to really know me as a minister. I would even go out without him to do evangelistic work. That is what is my duty and ministry as a missionary. If churches had steady streams of workers, not visitors, then maybe some of our churches would have additional funds to help missionaries.

2) We expect missionaries to put on a song and dance show for the church people, but the churches never let them actually do what is their ministry. Let me say, it is great to have good music, but music doesn’t get people saved, but entertains. Missionaries should be soul-winners, and teachers. Make your missionaries teach and witness, and see how they hold up.

3) We are locked into a Madison Avenue mentality that says, only with spending a lot of money can you do anything serious. Missions is about a spiritual activity which is much more on the spiritual side of things than pure economics of buying and selling. Yes, missionaries need money, but please note how far we are from the NT. Jesus had no buildings, no support group (except the disciples which abandoned him in his hour of need), and most of all, Jesus’ ministry was done in the open, in the public places, with volunteers! To make it clear, everybody involved in Jesus’ ministry lived from donations of whatever came in, no set salaries, nothing guaranteed. Note also Jesus’ ministry was seriously “crippled” by a lack of any promotional methods except word of mouth, and Jesus ministry generated its fnancial support from the satisfaction of people served by Him. The rule of iron I see here is that the people who support a minister should be the same people to whom he ministers. Some may say the exception is a missionary on a foreign field, and I accept that, and I receive donations from others to my ministry, but the rule should be a priority in our thinking.

Money should go principally into salaries of people we sit under and hear from week to week, or ministers who have spent considerable time teaching and exhorting us over the years, and have moved to the mission field or elsewhere to labor. The rule still stands.

4) We have distorted and destroyed biblical spirituality. Spirituality is being like Christ, and we would (should but don’t) judge a spiritual minister worthy of financial support, of our prayers, and of following his teaching and ministry ONLY IF HE IS LIKE CHRIST. Christ was humble and NEVER BRAGGED ABOUT HIS OWN TALENTS OR ACCHIEVEMENTS. We force our missionaries to break this biblical, spiritual principle in order to get any financial support, i.e. they must come bragging about their achievements instead of churches with money seeking out ministers they personally know and have heard minister to them to give these men of God donations. No wonder everything is messed up. Satan is the father of spiritual pride, and any missionary today that doesn’t “PUSH HIMSELF”, i.e. prayer cards, prayer letters, promotional material, ad nauseum, simply will starve to death. 1 in 1,000 churches send money to somebody they think is a humble missionary (if they can find one like that). What qualifies a minister as worthy of your prayers and financial donations is not his moral example, but his self promotion and haughtiness (but in a “spiritual manner”). How does that work? I am a missionary, and I have never figured that one out either. I am quiet and humble, and I don’t even get noticed in a missions conference, and if I have a service and don’t push my ministry, then the people don’t even care what happens to me, just get him out of here.

5) We are experts at missions, all the while never “producing” or “reproducing” ourselves. If you look at modern missions, 90% of what is going on is not involved in spiritual reproduction, but rather, spinning of our wheels. When we focus our efforts on medical missions, on social mission projects like food banks, and a tremendous amount of similar “ministries”, these things really do not reproduce ourselves. My concept of “myself” is a soul-winning, obedient Christian that worships in a local church each week, and I drag my converts and contacts into that ministry as forcefully as possible. Missions today (90% of it) doesn’t do that. There are not new converts being formed, and there are not new churches being formed. We segment everything, and those doing soul-winning don’t connect with any local church, but rather throw their converts to the wind, and they end up in cultish and false doctrine churches. Those who disciple and teach don’t evangelize, and since they don’t have new Christians (recently saved) coming in, they grab old Christians that have been around for years, and start them off as new disciples, and even then, these older Christians seldom get their own spiritual life in order. The focus has to be a singular person (minister) and spiritual activity that combines all into one, i.e. a true missionary.

This blog article is my thoughts on missionary dropouts. I saw an interesting article here, Dropouts-Burnouts-Forceouts-Never-Should-Have-Goneouts, which I will use as an introduction to my thoughts on the subject.

Introduction

Let me begin by saying that it is extremely expensive to get a missionary on the foreign mission field working. Besides the years of personal and educational preparation that the missionary himself has to shoulder, once he “officially begins deputation” the costs are shared or shouldered mainly by local churches and the people of God. This “business of missions” should first of all be understood to “NOT BE A SECULAR BUSINESS”. Although many aspects of missions is like a business (money funds the activity on the foreign field, there are workers, there are acquisition of funds, fund raising, promotion, etc), the basic thrust of missions is spiritual, and cannot be reduced to simple business economics.

Because of the high cost of getting Americans to other countries, fluent in the language of that country, acclamated to the culture of that country, and working the work of God there, we need to be very concerned about missionary drop out. The article is entitled, “Dropouts-Burnouts-Forceouts-Never-Should-Have-Goneouts“, so let me begin there. A dropout is somebody who says they are called and going, but never make it. The preparation and actual final steps before leaving the home country are too much for that missionary. A Burnout is a missionary that actually gets on his foreign field of service, and then cannot support the stress and demands of living there and comes back home. The Forceouts are missionaries who are on the field, but come back home because of health, money, etc concerns, a decision not of their own making really. A “Never-should-have-gone-out” is a concept the author of that article makes which is valid. These are people who simply are not missionary, and probably not even ministerial material and never had any business being in the ministry, much less on the foreign mission field. These people basically are people that see some advantage in being a missionary, usually money or income, or the lack of close supervision, and therefore they enter missions for alterior motives.

The purpose of studying Missionary Attrition is to do everything possible to stop good ministers from leaving the field, and to prevent bad missionaries from absorbing the limited funds and energies.

Let me explain my position here. I have been a missionary since 1984. My opinion is that Satan has swelled the ranks of missions with probably more than half of these people not being real missionaries, and they are just there to absorb the funds and energies (and prayers though praying for them seems pretty useless as these people are not working the work of God).

Good missionaries are normally not good businessmen nor good fund raisers. That is because their focus is on the ministry, not on business. Unthinking and unspiritual churches that give the greatly limited missionary funds that are out to missionaries on the basis of what shines is good. (Not everything that shines is gold though). So instead of stopping missions, Satan dilutes the life source (missionary donations by churches), channeling the majority of these funds into supermissionaries who simply pay unsaved nationals to pretend to be pastors, and these national “churches” are simply propted up frauds. Take the US money away from them, and they fold overnight and no longer exist. The majority of their operating budget is from the US.

Causes of Attrition: 1. Spirituality

I agree with the author here. Having had dealings with literally dozens and dozens of missionaries over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of these people simply are not even saved (view which I repeat towards many pastors which I have presented our ministry in their churches).

The issue of salvation is the most serious issue of all. An unsaved person cannot possibly do the work of God, but only causes disgrace and destruction to the real work of God. You may be shocked by my observation but for a moment, acept it, and then consider a few verses.

In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul gives his great defense of his missionary (apostolic) ministry. We must remember that Acts 1-2 lays down the requirements for one of the twelve as having traveled and witnessed the events of the life of Christ from his baptism through his ascension. Paul simply wasn’t anyway a “one of the twelve” apostles. His apostleship was that of a missionary apostle.

In  1Cor 9:1 he argues “have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?” as if this somehow validates or justifies Paul being consider one of the Twelve apostles, but again, Acts removes any possibility of Paul being conisdered one of the twelve apostles. The phrase is also used to understand a person seeing Jesus in the sense of being saved. Even on Emmaus road, Paul did not “see” anything because he was blinded.

So why would Paul defend his missionary ministry with the “I have seen Christ” concept? Because this is apparently a very real issue in missions, at least in supposed ministers of God who go between churches raising money for their ministry.

Rev 2:2 I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars:

Again this is a very strange verse when you seek to understand it. Why would there be any question as to who are the 12 apostles? There should not have been any doubts as to their identification. But here Christ identifies a group of people as “apostles” (missionaries or people sent on a mission to complete), and these people are liars. In what sense would a missionary be a liar. In what sense are they evil? Simply put, these people that Christ condemned are people who present themselves as missionaries, yet their professed work doesn’t check with reality, and they work evil.

When you hear of glowing missionary reports where the missionary goes out for his first four years, and starts 6-7 churches in those years, and each one has 500-2000 people, ask yourself some questions:

1) If he is so successful on the field, what is he doing here raising funds from US churches? Why don’t these mission field churches take on his total support?

2) Is it really normal and natural for a ministry to do so much so fast? If he has national workers doing this, where did they come from? In the US, a church plant may take 5-10 years to get 50 solid members. To train an assistant pastor who is immature and inexperienced, you need probably 6-7 years, and to get a really good balanced, and experienced pastor, that may take 20 years. We normally think seminaries for this. So a missionary can raise 6-7 churches, more than a dozen ministers to run those churches, all in 4 years? The facts don’t check with reality in the US religious environment, which the base church members being people who grow up in good churches and in Christian families, so even less likely will Muslims, Catholics, or pagan people produce so much, so good quality, in so little time.

The point of the article is that so many missionaries that we send out are simply having tremendous spiritual problems of their own to endure and survive the difficult situation of being a missionary. Add to that the many missionaries that aren’t even saved, and we have a mess.

2. Relational Skills

Another real problem they identify is the relational skills problem. The article’s view is the need for team ethics and vision in working in mission groups. My experience has been that in most cases, missionaries break off from any interaction one with another because of relational problems. This extends to their not working with other national churches, and even within their own work, they have relational skill problems.

Let’s face facts here. To actually get to the mission field and actually get to the point of doing missions work, you have to have a really thick skin, hold your breathe and endure a lot, and just plain be bull-headed or pig-headed. Things will never “always go the way you want” and the real missionary has to forget about perfection, and deal with reality. He makes his ministry work by shear force of his own will. He does without, sacrifices, and makes himself content with whatever God gives him in order to continue forward with his mission.

It disgusts me to see pastors in the US jump from church to church, ministry to ministry, because of what is really minor problems, or their own personality problems they have with their own people. In the real world, with real ministers of God, we have to change our goals and aspirations to what God is doing in our ministry, and we need to be the ones to adapt, love when people are unloveable.

The “spiritual weakness” of any minister to handle these personal problems with people (be they other missionaries, be they people in their own church, or even interfamily problems) is a guaranteed failure element.

3. Ministry Skills

Okay, let me just describe my view of the article’s point here as “baloney.” We don’t have problems on the mission field with “talent” in how to do what we are to do. This is NOT THE PROBLEM PEOPLE! The problem is that we don’t have a clue about WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING!

The end goal has never been more lost than in the minds, concepts, and aspirations of young missionaries going to the mission field. This is because US American Christianity is clueless as well. The only way to clarify this is by defining things clearly, and setting biblical goals, and seeking biblical methods to reach those biblical goals.

1) God’s Work

God’s work is 1) the salvation of souls. If this doesn’t happen first as a priority, and happen constantly as a habit, then whatever you are involved in is purely a social work, and it is not the work of God. Therefore, any minister claiming to be a missionary which is not actively and constantly involved in soulwinning, simply is a liar, a fraud, and a false minister of the gospel.

Today we have overloaded missions with about 80% “support” missionaries, and 20% evangelistic and church planting missionaries. The reality is, these support missionaries absorb probably close to 90% of the funds available, and choke off anybody doing “real missions”.

We do not need full time $100,000/year income missionaries to fly airplanes. I can get to anywhere in the world paying national (pagan) pilots to fly me there. Most of the time, land access is available although much slower. Why do we have to fly in, speak 1 night, and fly out to wait 2 weeks in a nice city house to do it again? What happened to living among the people you minister to?

The issue is very simple, we MUST EVANGELIZE, every minister and Christian, and we do it always. This is the heartbeat of Christianity, and we are in dire heart problems.

2) God’s Goal.

The second extremely important element here that causes missions to blur into nothingness if it is missing is what is the goal of all we do. The Calvinist-Reformed will quote, “do all to the glory of God”. I am sorry, but I have heard that line to extent to make mad. NO! God’s goal is not some fluzzy, blurry, undefined thing! God’s Goal for us is for us to be as Christ is. Christ’s character and morality is to be imposed in our lives.

Specifically, we are to be totally absorbed in the work of God the Father, which is reaching the world with the gospel. The entire objective of the church is to get this instilled into people. We focus on the method and goal understanding that this is just a further extension of the first point, evangelism.

The reason why “all to the glory of God” is what people want to take as God’s goal and their goal, is because when you make it blurry and undefined, then each individual can define their own personal and ministry goals for whatever they want.

Missionaries say they are serving God by teaching against abortion on the mission field, by serving food to the hungry, by healing the sick, by doing all kinds of mundane and silly (vain, non-spiritual) activities, and they all say, “My ministry is such-and-such, and I am doing it for the glory of God.” No! Glory to God is to obey His will, and ministers and Christians who build their world view and ministry view without doing the hard things are weak and sick Christians. They will be highly prone to depression and giving up.

There is a place for learning skills and talents, and the article does focus correctly on the place for this, the local church. We have robbed this essential ministry from the local church, and we assign it to Christian Schools which don’t have a clue as how a local church really functions. They work by dictating rules to their faculty and students, and that is not how real life churches work. Churches in failure often work that way.

3) The Church is the center of the Work of God

What so many missionaries and Christians miss is that Jesus Christ founded the church of God, and this is “GOD’S METHOD OF DOING GOD’S WORK”. I often hear people tout the “local church is broke” horn, and they redefine ministry to exclude the local church (except to suck local churches dry of missions funds to finance THEIR NON-LOCAL CHURCH MINISTRIES!). Many times they redefine a local church to be “something else” like any group of Christians.

Let me clarify. In the NT, a local church was ONLY a local group of truly saved people with a specific set of doctrinal beliefs who regularly met on Sundays to worship God, teach the Word of God (by a pastor-teacher), who took up offerings for the financial needs of the Work of God, and had officers (pastor and deacons). This local church had the Lord’s Supper periodically, and did baptize their new converts, and this reflects that their main spiritual work was evangelism.

Anything anybody wants to call a “church” (like AWANA clubs, or some other Christian clubs, home Bible studies, home study groups, cells, etc) that doesn’t have ALL of the above elements, IS NOT A CHURCH! Perhaps the most important element above is that this “church” has to be self-supporting. What they do as ministry has to be limited to what they personally can pay for (both ability and desire). You will never find the concept of a mission church being funded by a home church in the New Testament. In fact, I don’t find the concept of a “mission church” as being used by missionaries in the NT. Every spiritual group that Paul started was a “church” from the first service held. There is no such thing as a “mission” that is under the control and financial support of a mother church. They may meet in somebody’s home at the beginning (what they can afford), but they are independent units from their birth.

4. Training

Basically the article “cops out” on this point. Their viewpoint is that one single person cannot be a missionary alone. I understand their viewpoint (most of their member missionary societies take this same position).

The necessary training for a real, biblical NT missionary is local church “MINISTRY” training. You need to study your Bible, and do that a lot. You need a tremendous amount of biblical knowledge to be a minister. But, in the end analysis of things, knowledge is not what will get you through to a long term ministry on the mission field. You cannot teach and preach without knowing what is true, but the talent or skill that is essential and so many missionaries ruin their ministries for lack of is simply, how a local church functions.

NOTE: No matter how many pastors these Christian schools drag through their doors to teach their students, you do not learn these church ministry skills in a classroom situation, but rather, in a local church dealing with local church ministry problems. You will only learn this “being fulltime in the ministry” in a local church. It is my recommendation that every missionary work 2-4 years in a local church full-time. You must deal with the day-to-day ministry problems, and especially deal with people problems of the members, of working with addicts, with the sick, elderly, one-parent families, divorce situations, parent-child rebellion problems, etc.

That is where you will learn your needed skills. Every situation is different, but patterns begin to become clear, and a young minister needs to understand those patterns and seek to learn how the Bible addresses them.

5. Church involvement

In truth, I find the article being very hypocritical here. This article is written under the EFMA/IFMA group of mission boards. If ever there was a force to break, limit, or restrict church involvement, it is the entire mission board movement. The reality is, what they say is “churches need to get involved in missions”, but what they mean is, “churches need to give US more money”.

The promotional line of mission boards is that “a mission board does missions better.” Better than what? Better than local churches. The very issue of church involvement is against mission boards doing everything in missions except paying the bill for their own ministry.

Mission boards want local churches to supply the personnel, pay for their education (church members-parents of these young people), then pay for the administration and infrastructure of their mission boards, pay the daily costs of their overhead, and then pay for their missionaries, and then they come around again for extra special missions projects.

When a missionary “fails” and comes home, both the school that “educated” him as well as the mission board that chose him and sent him and supervised him, both disavow any relationship with him. His failure was because of his own personal spiritual life, and this is attributed to what the local church failed to do in his life, i.e. “pass the buck”.

I have personally seen what mission boards do with these “failed” missionaries, and they cut all relationships at light speed. They don’t even think to get them home before they are on their own. The missionary’s family is likewise orphaned even if they had nothing to do with the failure. Anything from moral collapse, nervious breakdown, to health failure, the mission board will summarily “dump” these workers as if they owed them nothing. They are the “local church’s responsability” now.

I will agree, they always were the local church’s responsibility, and the mission board presumed to invade this biblical relationship in an unbiblical construction of modern man, “improving” on God’s design, making things “easier” for the local church, but in the end when their designs fail, they dump everything bad back in the local church’s lap, and everything good that we are to be proud of, is because they are missionaries under “our supervision” (like that is what makes the missionaries succeed.

The truth of the matter is, mission boards handle missionary finances, taking a larger and larger cut of that income (besides running in competition with them for mission dollars). That they do, but not all that well most of the times. I have yet to see a mission board “with their head screwed on right” about finances. What they tell the missionary is his goal is so ridiculous it is pitiful. In my early years (1980s), mission boards low-balled it so that they missionaries starved to death. After the mid-1990s, they got on the game with high-balling support levels, and then skimming off the top, from the middle, and from the bottom. Mission boards make money off of missionaries in every way possible.

The reality is, Americans are just too educated, and have too high of a life style to be good missionaries. Those are the facts of life. Wherever they go, they spend too much money, they live too high with a very high standard of level of living (causing friction, envy, and separation from the nationals), and these issues cause them ministry problems. Any national worker that works for them either 1) wants the same standard of living (which the missionary won’t give him, and the national church cannot), 2) he resents the income discrepancy.

There is no solution here EXCEPT that the missionary agree to live like the nationals as much as is possible. That means that the new missionaries go to the field with a couple of suitcases of clothes and that is it. It is ridiculous that missionaries spend $50,000 in shipping containers to places in the world where they have Walmarts with furniture imported from the US. They take wasking machines, video centers (not just a TV), microwaves, ovens, refrigerators, etc, when none of the US stuff run well on irregular foreign electrical currency (which national factories of these things build in special electronic circuits to protect from spikes, brown outs, or radical fluctuations). The point is, the modern US missionary wants to live like a rich person, and there is no way he can tell poor people that Christ sacrificed all to fulfill the will of God, and they should too. Hypocrite! Where is the missionary’s self-sacrifice in all of this?

Getting back to the article’s line of thought, I think the missionary-local church relationship is extremely indictive of a missionary “staying at the work” or “giving up”. When a missionary “feels” that he has a lot of support from local churches, his work is more pleasant, the problems less severe, and everything goes better.

This support I am talking about is not money deposited in his checking account every month. It is real people who read what he writes, and initiates correspondence with him about his problems, his needs, and being interested in him. I know some churches send us birthday cards, and anniversary cards. That is nice. But it is more important that pastors write missionaries regularly (every couple of months) asking how the ministry is going. What is going on with them. It needs to be more than a standard “canned” letter. The pastor needs to give his opinion, experiences, advice, or at least, “we are praying for you”. There are churches that don’t even have an email address that the missionary can write to them with to get in contact with them. Many churches change pastors, and never advise their missionaries. Some churches make even calling them impossible with unlisted telephone numbers, and other such non-sense. Pastors, if you are so concerned about your privacy, get out of the ministry!

There is no reason why a church cannot have people email their missionaries every month. Yes, it would be nice to see a little more income when we are sick or have special needs. I know a lot of missionaries that if you just read their prayer letters, they live from one financial crisis to another from each prayer letter. For those people, cut them off from everything. They are just trying to squeeze money out of their supporters, and everything they say becomes suspect of being a liar, or blown out of proportion. But there are regular missionaries who have bad months, and churches should give more to those needs. Today, churches want mission boards to force missionaries to have “emergency funds” so that none of that every comes across to the people, and they can read the missionary prayer letters without fear of their good church people wanting to send something extra to the missionary. I have been in that situation before, and my response to it as a missionary is why are you sending me anything in the first place if giving to a missionary “puts you out”?

6. On-field care

Again, the article is promoting its mission board based concept here. The on-field care is what “mission boards do for the local church and missionary.” Again, this is a lot of baloney by the article’s author.

I am an independent missionary. I don’t have “anybody over me” except God and my home church that handles my finances. Some pastors have even dropped my support when I left a regular mission board for this situation (as a personal conviction). My answer to them is that I am a pastor. If they are a pastor, what organization is over them to keep them from grabbing a prostitute on the corner, or going out and buying a pint of whiskey? Nobody. Their own church may have a church board over them (I believe this is unbiblical, “pastor” governs, that is the concept, not the pastor is governed).

I have personally known missionaries that both had a drinking problem and had a prostitute problem. In these cases, they were people I was very familiar with, their wives knew of their problems, and they were under mission boards. In one case, the guy was area field director of his area missions for the board.

In none of these cases where I have seen this happen, was their any missionary board oversight that prevented it, detected it when it happened, nor tried to aid the families after it came out publically. The missionaries themselves resigned or made self-declarations and just walked away.

Being many years under a mission board, this supervision doesn’t work. Why? Because it is a competitive environment, and while you are a missionary with the board, you still are not “one of them” most probably. By that I mean, they will dump you if you mess up, and they will pressure you to leave the board if you are not a “perfect little missionary” according to their concepts. Being human around these people are impossible, because everything they see wrong in you, they jump on, and use to rebuke you. It is just unnatural to share anything with the board. If you do (mostly new missionaries do this), after you get sharp stinging rebukes over things that really needed no rebuke, then you never share anything else with the board again except if they absolutely HAVE TO KNOW. This is the way of life for missionaries.

Anybody can hide their vices for a 3 day visit from a mission board rep. When some co-worker sees something wrong, then they will believe whomever is the highest in “the pecking order”, those in good with the board can do no wrong, and if you are a missionary with problems with the board, then you can never be right, have a correct judgment or attitude, and everything you do and say is just wrong, even though they will not rebuke you for everything, they despise you. This is the truth of mission boards. They support themselves using missionaries and local churches. Their ministry comes before anything else.

When I see a mission board keep a missionary that fell into sin with another woman for a couple of years, giving him counseling, finding him a “pet position”  like they do for their washout favorites, then I will believe maybe they have changed. But I don’t see that happening. In the end, there is no such thing as a mission board that “shepherds” their personnel on the field. A local church pastor has the abilities to detect problems, get to the truth, reveal and resolve spiritual problems. An administrator is clueless. These people trip over themselves trying to even pretent to care. A secretary sending a birthday or congratulations on the new baby card is very administrative. A phone call to people, even if it is 5 minutes, is a caring shepherd’s way of showing he cares.

These things cannot be quantified, qualified, packaged, programmed, and set on auto-pilot. This is what administrators do. They decide what is the minimum that we can do to acknowledge that our workers “exist”, a card on their birthday, then they get everybody’s birthday on a list, and program a secretary to buy a box of birthday cards, and her job is to send out the cards every time one is due.

If you kid had a birthday card service send you a card on your birthday stamped from some such service, would it mean anything to you? No. Neither does all that administration and oversight really mean anything to the missionaries.

The cold, cruel, brutal truth is that you are out there all alone, and besides God’s comfort and maybe a mom or dad who really cares, nobody else really does. When the supporting churches’ pastors and people get involved on a personal level, writing, talking, and not just wasting the missionary’s time, but actually getting involved in what he is doing, then he feels he is not alone. That is a tremendous factor to keep him working on the field.

In this, I should make mention of the dynamics of inter-missionary problems. First of all, the team concept is null and void. It doesn’t work. Why? Because there are always veteran missionaries who do all the “good stuff”, make all the important decisions, and get the easy and desired jobs. The new guy checks the mail, cleans the bathrooms, etc. In mission board situations, these new guys get very discouraged because they enter a work being told what the team’s leaders want him to do, not what that particular missionary feels God has called him to do. That is the great deal breaker with team missions. The missionaries are not equals, but rather there enters a “pecking order” of who is in charge.

On another side of this dynamic are the churches. Poor is the new missionary who gets to the field and send back his prayer letter saying this month I cleaned the church every week, washed the team leader’s car, carried out his garbage, dealt with a drunk that the team leader didn’t want to deal with, etc. His supporting churches all want to drop his support. In general most churches don’t send money for “lackies” (people who are other people’s menial servants). So team missions doesn’t work on so many levels it is pitiful.

Modern missions are splitting into basically all independent missionaries, each with his own valid ministry, and mission board team missions, where these other missionaries come into the field situation knowing they are not a real missionary, they just teach the missionary kids. As such, these menial servant missionaries end up refusing to learn the language or culture, want to live like they did in the US (only better), and they don’t witness nor participate in the ministry except “in their own special ministry and calling.” Many of these people don’t attend the national churches even if it is in English or they learn the language, and the people on the field don’t understand how these American missionaries can have hired servants at their beckon and call. (I don’t understand this either.)

7. Evaluation

Again the article goes off in mission board style missions, and they insist that only when a mission board is involved giving administration and oversight then can missions be done right. Baloney. What are they evaluating? What are the norms which these missionaries are to be compared to? An evaluation is a fraud if there are no set norms by which the testee must comply with. That is basic educational principles in testing. If neither adding nor subtracting nor multiplying nor dividing are “goals,”  then anybody can pass the test by just putting their name on the paper. Likewise you cannot except elementary school kids to understand calculus.

So what are the norms that all missionaries should be judged by? Faithfulness – that is easy, faithfulness to the mission board or group is identified as faithful to God. That is the way it works in the US right? Good Doctrine – sign a doctrinal statement, and because they sign a doctrinal statement, they MUST BE GOOD! (I have heard missionaries in Mexico, Americans, tell Mexicans wanting to be missionaries, that they need to accept any doctrine of any church they visit, and that they will never get their needed money without visiting Southren Baptist and Pentecostal churches. This guy said, just agree with their doctrine, sign their doctrinal statement, and then do and teach whatever you really believe!).

What we should use as the norm, is the image of Christ. Paul defended his missionary ministry with “are not you my fruit?” (1Cor 9:1). The present of fruit, real fruit, not bought fruit. Anybody can raise up a church of 1000 people in a few months by giving away foods, free medical and dental care, etc. Those churches exist only as money flows from the US to it. When a true church is raised up, it is self supporting, paying its own bills, and paying its ministers, including the missionary. A real prudent “tip-off” is when the missionary says he doesn’t receive a cent from his national church he is planting. That is because it is ridiculous for him to do so. They have 1000 people with incomes of $100 a week ($10/person/week tithe is $10,000/week), but the real offering is like $50 total if that much, and the missionary has to put in $5,000/month into the church to just keep half their members coming. That being the case, he is pumping his US supporting churches hard for money, and he doesn’t want them to think he is getting anything from the work on the field.

Evaluation must mean something. What does evaluating your missionary mean? What action is taken after evaluation on failure or success?

The lack of evaluation “by an official mission board” should mean your church cuts off that missionary. That is the point of mission boards evaluating.

As a pastor of church evaluating your missionaries, really, where do you go with the evaluation? Cut them off? Continue giving? Rebuke them? Complement them (more money)? Consider Noah, working so long for the Lord, faithful, but no results. If Noah was your missionary, and you evaluate him with a simple evaluation form like the mission boards suggest, what would that lead you to do with him? Cut him off right? But if he is with a mission board, and they “vouche for him” that he is a good worker, then you take their word for it.

This enters into the need for people in the states to go to the mission field and see the work first hand, meet the missionary, and the people he is working with. Please don’t send your unspiritual rich folk to come with a bad attitude and complain about the water. Send ministers, people most concerned about that missionary, and let them evaluate the spiritual life of the missionary.

8. Closure

I understand that the article wants a “soft landing” for the older missionary, retiring. Personally I am 54, and have no retirement. As a missionary, I really feel sensitive at this point, but I have mixed feelings. Not having sufficient income over the years to really make me a nice retirement fund (my retirement fund right now would not support us even 1 year), I would like to retire somehow, go somewhere less conflictive, and live the rest of my life in pleasure. Being a missionary, I gave up those thoughts a long time ago, and I never see anybody in the Bible “retire” except to heaven. So I will work until Jesus comes or calls me home, or simply I cannot do things.

The issue is very difficult. On the one hand, missionaries “live” on a month to month basis by income from donations. Having that money “come in” means you can live a more or less normal lifestyle. Retiring means, many churches will immediately drop you, and some will not. Those churches that “drop you” will give your donations to some other missionary (good thing), and those that “retain you” will keep those mission funds tied up probably for 20+ years when you are least productive.

I think the idea of retirement is the problem here. To stop working is a luxury except for the sick, and to reduce work load is much more desireable.

The church’s part in all of this is that they need to be loyal to their missionaries. When this loyalty is felt, especially when that feeling is backed up by real sacrificial investments by the church, such as a missionary house on church property, perhaps a modest ministry in a stateside church, and the missionary slowly goes back and forth from the US to the field for a few years and eventually settles down in the US ministry/permanent housing situation, then the missionary is more likely to work without thinking “this is eventually a dead end, and I will have to go stateside, find a secular job, and work for a retirement.” This is a constant consideration for elderly missionaries, and many not so elderly.

That is where the article ends, but I would also make some other observations about missionary attrition.

Calling and Obedience

The bottom line in a missionary fulfilling his ministry on the foreign mission field is a combination of two factors, his personal calling and obedience. First, many missionaries are not called to the mission field, are not even called to the ministry, or not even saved. That is my conclusion from my own experiences with these knuckleheads who come to Mexico and then give up, and from what I come across talking with other missionaries in mission conferences in the US. If they never should be on the field, it is most probable that they will not last.

The obedience of the individual is also a very clear dynamic in all of this. The individual must be called, and he must obey that call. When you hear exiting missionaries going home, they complain of the food, the culture, the diseases in their country (don’t eat in the street and you won’t get so sick), and other issues that very simply, a called and obedient servant would never use these excuses. To go on a mission and obey that mission’s directive means you pay the price personally. Paying the price means personal sacrifice and hardship, and if the missionary is not saturated in that mentality of personal sacrifice and  suffering personally, then he won’t last long.

The indicators of defective missionaries on this issue is that 1) they want very high income, 2) they make a lot of demands for “creature comforts” typically dragging dozens and dozens of US hardware, furniture, office items, kitchen items, washers, driers, etc. with them as “necessities”. 3) They complain a lot about their country, often presenting “unique” and “wierd” things in their country of service. Every missionary has “culture shock” the first term, and they will return with these wierd photos and stories. They basically are “fill-in” material because they don’t have anything real to say about their ministry and efforts, which they try to hide with cultural things. After 4-5 years, these things should decrease, and they should talk about their ministry, what they have done, what they wanted to do and failed to do (valid comment not to be taken as a negative against them), and what they want to do in the future.

In the end analysis, the “sufferings” of a missionary become null and unimportant because he realizes they are part of his work for Christ, and he shouldn’t complain about them, and they are trivial beside what Christ suffered for us.

Family Disasters

Many good missionaries are called and obedient, but still come home because of family disasters. By this, I mean the usual problems here are sexual problems between husband and wife, or with others if the missionary is single. I have seen some of these upclose and personal. A missionary family came to my church on the field when we were with a missionary board (they were under the same board), and they left the ministry after less than 1 year on the field because the man ran off with a Mexican woman. I have dealt with this first hand.

The bottom line here, is that the calling and obedience have to be firmly planted in BOTH HUSBAND AND WIFE. In the majority of these cases, the man has sex with another woman, and when pressed, his wife will admit that she was not allowing him to have sex with her for some time. You cannot disobey God on the issue of sex without incurring serious problems.

Indicators here are difficult to detect. The bottom line, if you drop all the mission board supervision baloney (everybody has their guard up when visitors come), most couples, even Christians, and even missionary couples, fight and have problems from time to time. The key element here is not the absence of fighting, but the issues over which they fight (major problems or petty stuff), and how they resolve these issues (not talking to each other, cutting off each other sexually). We are humans, admit it, and we are prone to err. In these things, we must insist (1Jn 4) that the mark of a truly saved person is the constant abiding presence of love in their life, and that everybody forgives as they truly want God to forgive them, not 99% but 100% of the wrong done is forgotten. With those two issues firmly planted in a couple’s marriage, they will probably work out their problems.

Health Disasters

I am cautious about these missionaries who come home because of health problems. Yes, many of them “catch” something on the foreign mission field, and their health is ruined. I suspect many get too much into the “culture” and eat and do things which not even the nationals should do (like eat on the street in street stands). In some cases, being a minister of the gospel, you are invited, and in order to not offend, you should and must eat in somebody’s house, and you get sick from that. I would pity these missionaries and help them as is possible.

There is another class of missionary “wash-outs” here, and that is the nervous syndrome missionaries. The few that I have seen like this is simply because the stress of their situation was impossible to bear. I don’t think most people understand these situations, and they are not things that you can talk about in public very easily, but sometimes spouses have severe vices that they hide, or other sins, and the pressure of being in that situation that doesn’t get treated much less resolved, and the constant abiding of that stress causes a “melt-down”. Many of these situations are stress within the home, and many are stress within the ministry, mostly between missionaries, or between missionaries and mission boards. Some missionaries get fed up with the junk that goes on, and just leave mission boards altogether, and become independent, and from the great number of missionaries doing that in the 1990s and 2000s, we can deduce that this ministry stress is a rampant. These people are not leaving the ministry, they are leaving their problems, i.e. mission team situations and mission boards.

Financial Disasters

I think a good many of these financial disasters that cause missionaries to go home are basically a failure on the missionary’s part. In today’s missions, a missionary has to be a fund raiser. Paul, Luke, Timothy, Titus, Peter, etc. never had that problem. That is because today’s missions has broke drastically from the NT concept. The short of it here is that these missionaries cannot get income, so they call it quits because economically continuing forward becomes impossible. Some elements here are typically, the wife (one of the two, wife or husband) cannot take the financial pressure (i.e. their desired standard of living is more than what their income allows), they are not willing to make changes, they are not willing to return to the US to raise more support, they are willing to change their affiliation, group, or mission board, etc. The key element is “they are willing…”

Let’s face facts, in the majority of third world countries where missionaries labor, some people make a “good living” with $700/month or even $1000/month. They make due somehow. A dedicated, called, and determined missionary cannot but help to notice this, and if he changes his lifestyle to be like these people, he can survive, but he is not willing to pay the price. Of course, if he is with a mission board that “skims off the top”, they will not allow him to live making $1000/month and their share is $300, plus he is to give them his tithe (as many mission boards do). They want him to make $5000 a month and their “cut” is more agreeable to them, $1500/month.

The second key element here is that these missionaries refuse to obey God’s Word and examples. Paul received more from the church of Philippi from the beginning of his ministry. Paul planted that church, and it was “on the mission field”, and they faithfully gave from the beginning of Paul’s ministry. Apparently the church at Antioch that sent Paul out didn’t give at the beginning of his ministry. So the whole concept of a sending church that supports the missionary seems very “flawed”.

Probably the church at Antioch took up a very large offering to help Paul, let’s say enough for his group to travel, work, and survive for let’s say 9 months to a year. Paul’s group worked teaching Christ’s teaching in Matthew 10…

Matt 10:9 Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, 10 Nor scrip for [your] journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat.

I have wrestled with that verse for years, and I still cannot understand how you can evangelize house to house and live off of that. But obviously from Christ’s principle “the workman is worthy of his meat,” and Paul’s like comment in 1Cor 9 about a worker is to be paid by those who receive the benefit of those labors, that God’s plan is that our support as missionaries should very quickly come from where we labor, i.e. the church on the mission field should be supporting us in an increasing percentage as we labor on with them.

The consequences of accepting this deduction are extremely important. Let me explain some of them.

1) There are invalid “mission projects”. All the junk ministries that churches typically support with missions dollars like Bible schools, Christian camps, Christian political action groups, etc. are not missions. They should be all separated from the missions concept entirely, and the missions budget should remain complete, and a minor amount given to these “other good things” but which are not true missions. Missions is witnessing and organizing the converts into churches, and the missions budget should go entirely into those ministries undiluted. People can do those things, but they should not be soaking up missions funds.

2) The only valid out of house ministries are missionaries which evangelize and plant churches like the NT example. I hate to be so persistent and hard on this line, but this is essential to Christianity, and people simply don’t understand it. The salvation of souls (preaching of the gospel) is what got us saved. The heartbeat of the local church is soulwinning. And the work of God is squarely centered on evangelism. The whole idea here is circular, we evangelize and get the converted from that evangelism into our local churches which in turn are the ministers that evangelize further, and Christianity grows. When people get sidetracked into “good things” that are not the best, then all our energies and efforts get diluted until they completely disappear.

Any local church that doesn’t focus on evangelism as its number one priority is not biblical, including any missionary’s ministry. This is what those we consider missionaries in the NT did, like Paul, and we cannot move the emphasis from this without destroying the Work and Plan of God.

Getting back on topic, when a missionary goes home for lack of finances after serving for some years, my question is where is his local church on the field in all of this? We all hear the same lame story, my people are poor, and they cannot help me economically. But these same missionaries brag about their church has several hundred. My understanding of Scripture is that the first financial priority of any church is not missions, but the paying of the salaries of those that minister in that local church. I find that squarely planted as the normal, and the only economic priority, and as what Paul defended in his own ministry and what Christ imposed as our law, a laborer is worthy of his salary, and it should be a worthy salary.

Having declared that, we must understand that the economic well-being of YOUR MINISTER is YOUR RESPONSABILITY as a church. You should fulfill that before anything else. NT churches met in houses (free rent), and Paul spoke of the Macedonian churches that out of extreme poverty they gave generously to Paul’s missionary work. I don’t know how representative that was of their income, but 1) a mission church work giving to their missionary is very biblical and follows the biblical norms and standards, and 2) Paul labored in that church, and in a sense, they were paying their dues to their minister.

Let me plant a really radical plan and suggestion.

Let all our churches write all their missionaries and tell them, they are cutting off all of their support. From now on, they are working on a different mission plan. When they find a new missionary going to the field, they interview him. If they like him, he comes to their church for 3-4 years to work as an assistant minister or pastor, preaching, evangelizing, etc. They have housing for him, and they give him for his personal needs (very little, just enough to cover the basics). He works in that situation in evangelism and teaching. If he cannot work very well, they ask him to leave. If he shows great heart, that personal touch, and great personal effort and energy in the ministry, then after a couple of years they do like Antioch, they separate him into the foreign mission service.

When they separate him, they give him money for 4 years (dispensed monthly). In those 4 years, he has the task to go wherever is called to work (but cannot go on raising money in the US), he witnesses, evangelizes, and does whatever he can, but his mission is to get a small group of 10-30 families saved and coming to his local church. He teaches tithing to these people from the beginning, and after 4 years, they take over his financial needs and support.

In actuality, the biblical model is even more different. Paul and his team of helpers returned to Antioch, and set up in a normal ministry there after their first missionary journey. In other words, they went out, did what they could with what God gave them, and when the funds ran out, they came home and worked secular jobs and worked in their local “sending church” forever. The idea we get from Scripture is that while they took that attitude, God moved on their hearts to repeat their missionary journey, and the people in Antioch (or Paul’s mission field churches) funded them again.

The singularity of their mission seems to come through even though it was repeated. Paul left churches standing when he came home after the money ran out. There was no “disgrace” on Paul’s part because of that coming home. It was like it was part of their plan. They never had the intention of being a constant financial drain on the Antioch church nor any other church.

We need to extremely emphasize this significant detail of the Gospel account, and that is Paul never did deputation! Think about it. We have no record that Paul visited any church asking for money, support, presenting his ministry, or even prayers. What he did do was to minister in Antioch. The people where he ministered, always people that he built friendship and love with through preaching and teaching to them, and most of all, by actually leading them to the Lord, were the people who supported him.

See Flawed Modern Missionary Methods

If you look at the typical missions budget of even a small church over 4 years, this is feasible and doable. Each missionary has the idea of becoming self-supporting (from his church on the field) within a very short period of time. He has no more financial relationships with churches in the US, and the US churches can “send out” missionaries at a constant rate.

The charlatans that are just raising “easy money” in the guise of “ministry” will go crazy over this plan, and they will have a fit. Responsibility is in each man of God and the local church that pays his salary. They discern fraudulent or sinful activity, they cut off their financial support of him, and he goes broke.

For those missionaries who are adventurous, after 5-6 years on the field, their mission church sends them (with a salary equivalent to 4-5 years) to start over again. Because their existence is due his efforts as a missionary to start a church plant with them, and because so many of their members were won to the Lord by this man, then they continue to support him once he leaves that work. The NT model seems to be constant missionary financial support came from churches ON THE MISSION FIELD that Paul had established as HIS PERSONAL MINISTRY, and they continued to support him as their spiritual father (keys here, he won them to the Lord personally, and he organized them and taught them, or discipled them).

This plan seems to fit the biblical model much better than what we have today. It is so sad to see our present missions situation. Missionaries have to be professional “fund-raisers”, and they have to constantly leave their work on the field to return to raise more and more funds. As a missionary and pastor of a local church on the mission field, you cannot do much to establish the people and organize a church in 4 years. After 10 years, things begin to take solid form. Few missionaries wait 10 years between furlough. That is economical suicide.

But modern missions are full to over-abounding with fakers and frauds that are just making shows for the purposes of raising funds in the US. These people live more in the US than on the field most of the time. Their interest is in money, not doing the work of the Lord. This is seen by how high they set their financial goals, with many missionaries setting goals upwards of almost $10,000/month as their “needs”. They disguise this with different “funds”, like a work fund, a national worker fund, etc., but if you add all these up, they are taking in a large sum of money. What is there to show for that? What can a pastor really do if he is only preaching in his church for 2-3 months out of the year? This is where you can detect these guys. They present themselves as “not pastors”, but as missions organizers. Their main work is not evangelizing, preaching, and teaching, but rather, missions strategist. That means they get the money, and they spend the money, and that is their ministry. Of course, of $10,000/month, $2,000-$3,000 typical goes into their own retirement, and another $5000 for their personal allowance, and there it goes. The actual ministry expenses is very minimum, and they need even more that $10,000/month because that becomes trivial after they finish slicing and dicing their personal desires from it.

In Ezekiel, God rebuked the bad pastors of Israel because they were greedy dogs that only had eyes to consume and take advantage of the sheep. That was true in Ezekiel’s day, and that is true today.

When we look at missionary attrition, we see a define plan of Satan, saturate the field with many “missionaries” that are not doing the work of God (evangelizing and organizing churches), and starve out the true missionaries driving them home. Is nobody paying attention to what is going on? Are ALL THE US PASTOR’s totally deaf and dumb? Are there no “dogs to bark” the warning as God rebukes in Ezekiel? Apparently not. The majority of US pastors like things the way they are.