(The min­istry of David and Tule Cox, mis­sion­ar­ies in Mex­ico City, Mexico)

An overview and Descrip­tion of Ministry

Our plan

Our main work is our local church. Accord­ing to my con­vic­tions, we labor as I feel God has laid out the mas­ter­plan in the New Tes­ta­ment. Basi­cally the plan of God for mis­sions is that a min­is­ter in a local church receives the call from the Holy Spirit to take the Gospel to some area where there is a great need, and few or no work­ers. God has called Tule and me into Mex­ico City to work.

Many mod­ern mis­sion­ar­ies think the plan of God is for camps, Bible insti­tutes and uni­ver­si­ties, Chris­t­ian radio sta­tions, etc. I firmly believe the only valid work of mis­sions is evan­ge­lism and church plant­ing. You have to do that, and you have to do both of those. Every­body else out there depends on local churches to exist, and suck dry the mis­sions funds doing good things that won’t make the return on the money. Only a local church planted on the for­eign mis­sion field will even­tu­ally be self sup­port­ing, self prop­a­gat­ing, and self gov­ern­ing, (an indige­nous local church) which should be our pri­mary goal.

Our Goal

When we speak of a “goal”, our goal is to accom­plish what God wants of us. We only know that gen­er­ally, that is, God wants us here work­ing the plan of God, an indige­nous local church. Some­times we have to mop the floor, take out the trash, take care of the babies, and do just about any­thing to make the church work. We as lead­ers of this church will do all that gladly. None of it is out­side of our “nor­mal duties”, but we don’t stop the rest to just have a Chris­t­ian day­care or something.

Our “Main” Ministry

Cen­tral in all of this is my preach­ing, teach­ing, and evan­ge­lism. As pas­tor of our church, I per­son­ally set the exam­ple of going out every Sat­ur­day morn­ing for 3–4 hours in door to door evan­ge­lism. I can­not preach for oth­ers to do this if I myself am not doing it. It is not with­out its costs. We live in a trop­i­cal cli­mate, and the sun is bru­tal on fairskinned Amer­i­cans. I use sun blocker, but frankly, every Sat­ur­day after­noon I come back with a headache and feel­ing bad until Sat­ur­day night some­time. I also have dia­betes and high blood pres­sure, and there is noth­ing like argu­ing a half hour or so in the street with a Jehovah’s Witness.

On the good side, our tract min­istry has been a result of these weekly activ­i­ties. Because I have to argue with peo­ple on the same issues time and time again, I have sum­ma­rized and pol­ished the bib­li­cal argu­ment in a lot of these cases, and made it into a tract.

On our preach­ing and teach­ing, I con­tinue to preach most of the ser­vices in our church. Some­times I let one of the men teach the adult Sun­day School class for 2–3 months, but find­ing good lit­er­a­ture is dif­fi­cult, and basi­cally if I have to write it, I may as well teach it. Recently (March 2010) we started two Sun­day School classes, the Youth, and the Inter­me­di­ates. Like­wise I could not find accept­able lit­er­a­ture for these, so I am writ­ing it every week for both classes.

In a typ­i­cal week, I preach through a book of the Bible on Wednes­day nights. Half hour teach­ing, half hour pray­ing. We have preached through 1John, Hebrew, Colos­sians, Eccle­si­astes, Proverbs, etc. so far. I also preach Sun­day School (adults), the morn­ing wor­ship ser­vice, and the evening wor­ship ser­vice. When I preach through series or deal with dif­fi­cult to under­stand issues, I have found it very help­ful for my peo­ple to make the sermon(s) into a book for­mat and give it to them at the end of the series or ser­mon. Some­times I just make the ser­mon into a tract for­mat (1 page front and back). At times I also have a dis­ci­ple­ship class either Sat­ur­day or Wednes­days. I also have men’s prayer break­fast once a month, and some­times preach in the women’s prayer break­fast. We have started a 1–2 times a month teach­ers class before the Sun­day evening ser­vice. So our lit­er­a­ture min­istry has blos­somed and bloomed from the needs and dynam­ics within our min­istry here in Mex­ico City.

Addi­tion­ally I coun­sel our peo­ple. Many times peo­ple in our fel­low­ship bring me per­sonal prob­lems that they want help with from the Bible. As such I tell them what I see from the Scrip­tures. Like­wise with time this kind of repeats itself, so I have put a great amount of this basic coun­sel­ing into the form of tracts and books.

So as you can see, I am busy preach­ing and teaching.

Exten­sions to our Ministry

We have been able to bless the peo­ple of God away from our own local church min­istry. Some of our peo­ple moved away from Mex­ico City, and asked for me to my ser­mons on the Inter­net. In deal­ing with issues, and the needs of peo­ple away from our local church some­times, I have found it very ben­e­fi­cial to make web­sites on the Inter­net so that peo­ple can down­load my mate­r­ial from places out­side of Mex­ico City. This is help­ful when our mem­bers live in other cities and ask me for help on a topic. I tell them where to go, they down­load it, and I don’t have to write long involved help/counseling let­ters. In time many of our peo­ple have just gone to these Inter­net sites first, down­loaded what they needed and not even con­tacted me. Also other peo­ple uncon­nected with me, our church, or our min­istry stum­ble across these pages and like­wise get ben­e­fit from them. We have down­loads from all over the world now, and I reg­u­larly get emails thank­ing me for my mate­r­ial from Eng­lish, Span­ish, and even other lan­guage groups.