Reading: Video Transcript - The Opportunity to Grow

Okay. We're ready now to go into the last step of constructing a missional vision. In the land of India, by the way, we very-- well, we won't ever take a person into the training program who answers a question in the wrong way. And the question is this. How many churches do you want to plant? If he or she says anything less than 100, we won't let them come into the program.

What we're trying to do is establish a vision for you. Here in the United States, a vision of how your neighborhood can be totally transformed in a very unique way, how your neighborhood can be changed through the formation of little neighborhood prayer and bible study cells - people coming together praying for your neighborhood.

"Ha," you say. "Man, we've got health problems. We've got gang problems. And you're talking about forming,"--

Wait just a minute. Yeah, I'm talking about forming prayer cells. Do you know the definition of a miracle? A miracle is when you face an impossible situation like we have in our country where there's so much gang violence, so much difficulty, so much murder, where there's all of this stuff. It's in neighborhoods all around the world. It's an impossible situation. We face it, then, with an irrational solution. And what's that? It's prayer and bible study.

You say, "That's kind of nonsense."

Yeah. It's nonsense. To the human being, it's nonsense. But let me tell you something. How did God get two million people across the Red Sea? Did he give instructions to Moses to build a bridge? He did something totally irrational. He said, "Moses, stick your rod over the sea and I'll part it."

How did Joshua conquer Jericho? Set up cannons all around it? No. He said, "Walk around it once a day. On the seventh day, go around it seven times, toot your horn, and the walls will come tumbling down."

What about David? David? Yeah. Remember? There wasn't a soldier that would go against the giant Goliath except for this little 13-year-old boy with a slingshot. How does God want to change our neighborhoods whether they're here in the United States, or Canada, or South America, or Africa, or China, or India? How does God want to do it? He wants to do it his own way. And his way is not our way. His way of working is not our way of working. His thoughts, his way of thinking is not our way of thinking. He wants to do it miraculously.

Let me tell you a few stories, a few stories that have shared in this book called Why Pray, of what happens when you saturate an area with prayer. I think, first of all, of a huge apartment complex in California. This was a rundown apartment complex with a lot of crime. And so, a church in the city decided to do something about it. So they rented an apartment, moved a family into that apartment, and that family would pray over that huge apartment complex with 200 units. And they had other people come. But they really saturated the apartment complex.

Then God led them, at a certain point, to call on all of the homes. There were 199 apartments that they called on. And they said, "We've been praying for you." About half of them opened the door and let them come in right away. They were so overwhelmed by it. There was only one negative person in that whole thing.

At the end of the year, the owners of the apartment complex approached the church, and they said, “Your prayer home, your house of prayer in this apartment complex has saved us so much money in lowering crime rate and vandalism that we are prepared to give you a free apartment now in any one of our or all of our apartment complexes, because it will pay us if you move somebody in to pray.”

We've seen this happen in shopping centers. In one of the seminars I was doing, it's just so funny. I had a lady just raising her hand. She wanted to talk so bad and so finally I said, "What's your story?"

"Oh," she said, "We adopted this shopping center at Christmas time, and we started to pray for it."

And I said, "Pray for a shopping center?"

"Sure," she said. "We walked and prayed at each one of the stores, and asked God to bless the owners of the stores, and to stop gangs, and to stop shoplifting. And she said, "About halfway through, we were approached by the mall rats."

I said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What are mall rats?"

And she said, "Those are juvenile delinquents. And they came up to us,"-- and this is a story in the United States, folks. "They came up to us and said, 'We know who you're praying to. You're praying to Jesus. We're praying to Satan. And we know Satan's going to win.' And we just smiled at them, and we said, 'No. Satan isn't going to win. Jesus will win.' As we went into the first of January, the owners who had given us permission to do this every single day, came to us and said, 'You cannot believe how much crime dropped, how little shoplifting we've had because of your praying in this shopping mall.'" Every time you saturate an area with prayer, it's going to grow the seed of God's Word.

Let me tell you one more story. This one is out of India. It's one of my favorite stories. It's about Daniel. He went to one of our church planting schools, and I had an opportunity to preach in his little church of about 100 people maybe two or three years after he graduated.

I said, "Daniel, tell me your story."

"Oh," he said, "I worked here in this village for 10 years.

I said, "Oh. How many converts?"

"None," he said.

I said, "What did you do? What's your method?"

He said, "I stood around and preached and hollered at the people and told them they were all going to hell."

I said, "Why?"

"Because most of them are prostitutes and drunkards."

I said, "It didn't get you anywhere, did it?" I said, "What did you learn in church planting school?"

He said, "I learned to stop preaching. And I learned to start praying."

And I said, "Tell me about your prayer experience."

"Well," he said, "I, and the few Christians that I had with me, began to pray seriously for this village. And we did prayer walking around the village so that people knew we were praying for it." And he said, "The village is controlled by a priestess who is a faith healer."

And I said, "Well, how did you know when God had bounded the amount of spirits that were keeping this village?"

"Oh," he said. "That was very simple. The faith healer, the priestess's husband was sick and he was dying and she couldn't heal him. So she came to us and said, 'You're praying here. Would you like to pray for my husband? See if your God works.'"

"Oh, yes," we said.

"Oh."

So we went and prayed in Jesus' name, and of course, the man was healed. Then we prayed some more and turned to her and said, "Would you like to be delivered?"

You see, in India, people know when they’re demon possessed. And she said, "You can't get these demons out of me."

"Oh, yes, we can. We can't. Jesus can. And we prayed for her, and the demons left her."

And I said, "Well, where is she?"

And they laughed and they said, "She's standing right behind you."

I turned around. Here's a gray-haired lady grinning from ear to ear, who had found freedom from fear, freedom in the Lord Jesus Christ because they had saturated that area with prayer.

Now, this is the key, people. It's one thing to put the seed in. But if you plant corn like in the Sahara Desert, you probably aren't going to get much. You always need to irrigate. You always need to pray. And irrigation is the very first step in growing the crop. Irrigate the field before you even send Freedom from Fear out or before you make any contact, like the story of Daniel in India, or even like the story of the shopping center, or the apartment complex. And I can go on and on. This little book took me about 20 years to write. It's 40 meditations on different things about prayer. And one of the most important things is this concept of continuous prayer directed at a specific area. Because when you turn the spotlight of God's love on a specific area, then the demons are scattered.

The second thing that you have to do is fertilize with hospitality. Okay, so let's take the instance of this church that got 50 responses to the mailing of Freedom from Fear. So they sent out 50 Guide to Happiness - or 52. I don't remember exactly the number is. What's your next step?

A church planter had told me that he had planted three churches on a simple basis - hospitality. Unless people are willing to invite others into their home, you're not going to get anywhere. So now, you've got 50 people studying the bible. What do you do with those 50? Go to them and preach the Gospel? No, no, no. You invite them over to dinner. You make friends with them. It doesn't have to be for dinner. It doesn't necessarily have to be at your house. Anything that's culturally appropriate - take them out to a restaurant or go for coffee somewhere. But somehow, start hospitality. And open yourself to them. And don't invite them to church right away unless that's what God is leading you to do.

People around here in the United States have got their guard up. If they want to go to church, they've got the opportunity and they're not coming. What they're longing for is that their neighbors be neighborly, and to invite them over, and to have a good time.

Now, once you've established a friendship with them, the third thing is to start growing them with Bible study, using four questions and the four devotionals.

By devotionals, I mean this - the Why Pray, which we've used in our church. About 80,000 of these have been published so far, and it's just going all over the world. It was originally written for India under the title Does it Pay to Pray?

And then the second one is Why Give? That book, Why Give, deals with what it means to be born again. And the definition is very simple. To be born again means that you've changed from a selfish swamp dragging everything into a living river where everything flows out. These are wonderful books that you should go through in your small group before you get into this program totally.

Start with Why Pray and learn how to float scripture verses in your mind so that when you have a problem, you can listen to how God is guiding you with that problem through that verse. We've got all of this set down in Project Philip, and you can write in for it. But you grow them with bible study and using four questions and four devotionals.

The four devotionals are about prayer, and about giving, and about peace that passes all understanding in Psalm 23, and about building a self-image. We'll go over that again in just a moment.

The four questions are very important, and I'll get to that in a second. Let me just finish this first. The fourth thing is the harvest. Organizing them into a neighborhood prayer and bible study where you're doing these devotionals and you're doing selections from scripture. And then, multiply those neighborhood prayer groups as was done in Calgary. It can start and go almost spontaneously where you get the spontaneous expansion of the Gospel.

Now, I mentioned four questions. Some of you will be very frightened. "Well, I couldn't teach the bible." You don't have to teach the Bible, people.

I learned these four questions from a dear, precious friend of mine, Dr. Gene Davis, from Portland, Oregon. During the 60s, Gene had a lot of hippies coming through Portland and he'd put them up in his garage with the understanding that if they were going to stay there, they had to have breakfast with him in the morning.

Then Gene would give them a bible - each one would have their own copy - tell them where to turn, what page number. And he said the price of having breakfast is that you're going to have a bible study. Well, that was fine. So he'd have them each read a verse. And his bible study was built on four questions. He would start sitting back by saying, "Tell me what you like in this passage." Well, that question just about blew them out of the water. They were all ready to have it crammed down their throat. And here, this strange guy, this veterinarian is asking them what they like in the passage.

He said, "You’d lose it for about an hour." He said, "Man, did they like that question." It dignified them. It enabled them to talk. There's no right or wrong to this question, people. You are saying to somebody else, "You're important." It's a whole different way of studying the Bible with a non-Christian. They've got their defenses up. Here you come. They're going to argue with you. You're not arguing. You're just saying, "Tell me what you like in this passage and we'll talk about it."

So you write down all the suggestions that all the people make, and you put it kind of together if you want, organize it and say, “Well, this is the general theme of what we found out. Isn't this fun?” When you do it together, you've got all different views. My wife and I have taught this back and forth across the United States and in other countries. We taught it in Kenya to missionaries there. It just works wonders.

The second question is what don't you like or don't you understand? This too has tremendous psychology built into it. Gene has said to me over and over again, "If you don't give them a chance to tell them what they don't understand or don't like, you're never going to deal with it. Doubt has to be brought out of the closet and deal with it." And he said, "This was so wonderful. It gave them such freedom. Well, when we did this, this just about spent most of the time."

You get down to, "Okay. Well, summarize. What did you learn about God? What's your impression of God? What has he done?" And so, you write that down.

And what should you do? "What practical good is this lesson? Is it going to change your life?" And when you come back, you can quickly review these questions before you go on to another passage of scripture. You can pick your own passage of scripture. You don't need any more bible courses. You can use them obviously. We have a ton of them on the Website of Project Philip. You can use all kinds of them. But you don't need them. If you have these four questions, folks, you can get a neighborhood bible study going like you've never had before. Just so very exciting.

Well, that brings us to kind of wrap things up here a little bit. Missional vision is systematically saturating a specific geographic area with the seed of eternal life, watering it with love and prayer with the goal, the result of setting up, reproducing, transforming, worshiping neighborhood prayer and bible study groups. Those spread.

Roland Allen wrote a book called The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, and I've taught this message over and over again. This is what we're seeing in India. I've seen it in Hartford, Connecticut. I've seen it in various places in the United States. When God works in a specific geographic area touching all of the people with his Word, moving out so that they, in turn, are bringing it to their relatives and they, in turn, are setting up little cells everywhere.

And what we do in this final little diagram is help you understand that the whole concept of missional vision in a slightly different way you can easily remember. It's an opportunity to sow, go, and grow. But here's a little deeper explanation of it. It's E + E = E². What does that mean? It means that you need to start with the experience of knowing Jesus Christ and then add the explanation and do that in a small group.

What is the experience of Jesus Christ? What does that mean? I came across this so beautifully in the Mombasa, Kenya among Muslims. And I've tried it here and it always works. There was a missionary there who showed me how he was doing it. He was training the nationals to - National Christians - to go to a Muslim home and say, "We're here to pray a prayer of blessing on your home."

"Oh."

"May we do that in Jesus' name?"

And these Muslims were agreeable to that, so they came in, prayed a prayer blessing in the home in Jesus' name. Then they said, "Why don't you use Jesus' name in your prayers for the coming week and we'll come back and see what's happened."

"Okay."

So they did that. And there was a tremendous revival. People were coming to Christ over, and over, and over again. Because experience led, not the explanation.

They experienced the power of Christ first and this is what's so terribly important about us, that we get this thing straight, that we go to our neighbors. We're not cramming a whole bunch of stuff down. If we are studying the bible and learning about it, then it's an experiential way.

And we're coming together with fun, and food, and friends. And we're praying together. We're praying in unexpected income. That's what Why Give is all about. You know, God's independently wealthy. He doesn't need our gifts, because they all come from him, to begin with. And so you pray in unexpected income for this particular project. You can do it anywhere in the world.

In our small group in the church, I led them last year to do it, and we had more fun. The crazy ways in which God gave money to do this particular program to buy the courses was just awesome. A lady sold old sweaters on eBay. She bought them for $2.00 and got $52.00 for one of them. And the stories just went on and on.

So you'll experience prayer. You experience God's leading in prayer and listening in prayer. You experience how he gives you extraordinary opportunities and money. And you'll experience new levels of trust as you study Psalm 23. You'll experience a whole new - I haven't even touched on that - a whole new self-image as you look at yourself as the dwelling place of God. These are the experiences that you have as a small group. You start with that as Christians, and that's what you spread in these bible study groups in the neighborhood. The experience of prayer, the experience of getting money to give and having opportunities, the experience of trust, the experience of looking at yourself with a whole new image and beating depression.

Then the explanation of these things comes through the Why Pray, Why Give, Why Fear and Who Do You Look Like devotionals along with the selected biblical passages. And out of that you get the results where you get a small group that is where you're irrigating them. They begin with sending out the letters, and you get those people, and you pray, and you fertilize, and you grow, and you use these particular questions.

Still, we have these materials available for you online. Discussion books, Why Pray, Why Give, Why Fear, and Who Do You Look Like an introductory bible studies Freedom from Fear, Guide to Happiness, and a book called Great Bible Truths. You can go to the Project Philip Website, look this up, and we'll be happy to help you get a project set up anywhere throughout the United States and, frankly, anywhere throughout the world. Let's bow in prayer.

Precious Savior, we come to you now at the conclusion of this. Help us just to think, again, in terms of the opportunities that you are setting in front of us to sow the seed of your Word, to go into the field, to get out of the church, to stop thinking we've got to sow seed in the barn, to stop thinking that we have to get people into church or into a crusade, to know that the way in which disciples are made is through hospitality and love. And it all centers in the homes. Guide us, Lord Jesus. Direct us. And help us, then, to grow and multiply the crop. May we, in our own country, see a spontaneous expansion of the Gospel like we have seen in India, and China, and Africa, and Latin America. Oh God, you're bringing so many people in. We beg of you today for revival in the West as well. Guide and keep us in your tender care for we ask it in your name alone. Amen.