EMQ

In June, 1996, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling upon its churches to direct “energies and resources toward the proclamation of the gospel to the Jewish people.” American Jewish community leaders reacted with howls of alarm. Some in the SBC appeared to break rank.

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.

A college friend of mine who became a physician was turned down for missionary service because he flunked the board’s physical exam. He had only one kidney. Another board, however, accepted him for work in Zaire, where he served with distinction for 35 years.

Many mission agencies, including my own (CBInternational), want to send more missionaries to the frontiers. But relatively few American missionaries are doing evangelistic, church-planting work among the world’s 3.8 billion non-Christians, followers of non-Christian religions, living in non-Christian lands.

In a sense, the apostle Paul played and planned like Michael Jordan.

This is a side bar to the article “Is Planting Churches in the Muslim World ‘Mission Impossible?'” in the April, 1997 issue of EMQ.

Visit Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and you’ll see an enormous digital clock. It proclaims to the world how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds are left until Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997. While there is no corresponding clock in the prosperous, freewheeling British colony of 6.3 million people, alarm bells have been ringing for some time.