EMQ

Mark 13:10 and its more frequently quoted Synoptic parallel, Matthew 24:14 (“This gospel of the kingdom shall be proclaimed throughout the entire inhabited earth for a testimony to all nations. Then shall the end come.”) are part of the great Olivet Discourse of the Lord Jesus Christ.

While visiting the Buddhist temple in Kamakura, I came to one gate beyond which an exquisite garden beckoned to me. It seemed to exude the peace for which one can grow starved while living in Tokyo. Unfortunately, on that day I could do no more than snap a slide while standing beneath the gate, for a sign forbade entrance.

Scripture tells us that we must look out to the harvest fields, but before doing that, it is often most helpful to take an inward look. The inward look should signify a frank, honest, realistic appraisal of our missions – including past accomplishments, present program and work – and then whether plans for the future are adequate for our part in completing the Great Commission.

The letters you write for wide distribution at home are essentially prayer letters, even if they do take on a different form from those you send to the inner circle of prayer helpers. In another sense, they are newsletters, giving information as a stimulus and a guide to prayer. A newsy letter is a good letter.

The Congress on the Church’s worldwide mission was convened in Wheaton, Ill., April 9-16, 1966. It represented the response of evangelicals to the tension and crisis precipitated throughout the world chiefly by theologians and ecclesiastics within the Ecumenical Movement.

"Is this all that can be done?," I wondered as I thought about the small, struggling group of evangelical university students, facing the onslaughts of dialectical materialism, aggressive communism, and renewed Catholicism.

0ne of the most provocative and stimulating attempts in recent years at appraising present-day missionary methods is that by Dr. Donald Anderson McGavran, former missionary to India and now dean of the new Fuller School of World Mission and Institute of Church Growth, Pasadena, Calif.

After a week-long missionary conference in his home church, a missionary wrote to the chairman of the conference:

“It was great to be back in the home church again, and to have the opportunity to tell what God has been doing in Indonesia. I do share your concern about the lethargy in the home church.

In many ways man is “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and perhaps in his capacity to communicate he is primarily “the crowning work of all creation.”1 With little conscious effort he sends and receives messages at a dazzling speed.

Tbe prayer meeting at Woosung Road was dismissed, and as the people began to leave, we finally clasped each other’s hands. I had heard of him, but now in the summer of 1927, in Shanghai, at China Inland Mission headquarters, we met. My wife Isobel had made his acquaintance previously in Vancouver, B.C.