The Pilgrim Church: A Disciple-Making Community - Ken Miller | CGS 2021

So I'll begin with a quote from a non-Anabaptist, Rod Dreher, and his book The Benedict Option. In that book, Mr. Dreher calls for Christians in modern society, he says, to enter into strategic withdrawal. And the idea is that serious Christians could no longer live business-as-usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative communal solutions for us to be able to hold onto our faith and our values in a world that's growing ever hostile to our values. And then he says we would have to make a decisive leap into a truly counterculture way of living Christianly, or we would doom our children and our children's children to assimilation.

Now, I quote this fellow not to agree with his theology; he's Eastern Orthodox. But I quoted him to just comment that as a modern social commentator, Rod Dreher seems to get what those in the Pilgrim Church have long understood, that to nurture a positive biblical culture in the middle of a pagan society, we kind of have to live apart from the mainstream. The choice is either to intentionally work on developing a countercultural biblical society or be assimilated into the society around us. That's the choice.

So I have basically four sections I want to try to cover, and I don't know if we'll get through the whole thing, but I should have underlined the main points: definitions, and then further down the page, examples. Then I want to take a look at Anabaptism and Missions, the third main point, flip the page, and counsel for church planters and church leaders, and we'll see how far we get. So first of all, let's take a look at the definitions: the Pilgrim Church as a disciple-making community. So the Anabaptist vision, according to a Robert Ramsayer who writes an essay in this book, Anabaptism and Mission, and this is a book I would highly recommend, by the way.

It's a collection of essays put together by a Wilbert Schenk. So Robert Ramsayer says of the Pilgrim Church that to be a Christian, one can have only one Lord Jesus Christ, and that being Christian means being His disciple. And being a disciple meant being called out of this world, whether that world was North American, Latin American, African, European, Asian, or Indonesian. And he says, "Whether it's an Eastern or Western world makes no difference. Christian disciples live in a state of alienation from the natural societies in which they find themselves."

And that's a description of the Pilgrim Church. And here's how Jesus said it: "I have given them Thy word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world even as I am not of the world." The foundation of the Pilgrim Church: Jesus' teachings on the alienation that happens between God's people and the world. And here's the Pilgrim Church, as Paul described it in 2 Corinthians 7 - you can turn there if you like - we're trying to define or put some descriptions to this idea of the Pilgrim Church. Sorry, this is a relatively new Bible. 2 Corinthians 7, it says there in verses 14 to 18 - excuse me, it's chapter 6 - "Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness?

And what concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath He that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? For ye are the temple of the living God, as God hath said, 'I will dwell in them and walk in them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.' Wherefore, come out from among them and be ye separate," saith the Lord, "and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and you shall be my sons and daughters," saith the Lord Almighty." The burden of this talk is to call us to a Christian separation, a communities that are countercultural according to Jesus' teachings, and within the context of those communities to seek to make disciples.

Now, here's the Pilgrim Church as described by Peter, this familiar verse in 1 Peter 2:9-11: "But you are a chosen generation or a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people or a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." And I'm kind of mixing in the ESV here. "Once you were not a people, but now are you God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul." And here's what Paul said about the Pilgrim Church as being a community of expatriates, that is, people who live in one country but whose citizenship is another country.

He says in Philippians 3:20, "But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ." So we have the Pilgrim Church separated from this world, people whose citizenship is in another country even while they live here in a nation called the United States of America or Canada or some other nation. Now, disciple-making community, here's what Ramsayer says again from this book: "The Pilgrim Church is made up of people whose allegiance has shifted from allegiance to the institutions of human society, shifted from that to faithfulness to Jesus Christ. Such a group is truly the people of God, the marks of peoplehood, the cultural traits which its members hold in common and which distinguish them from those who are not of this people - excuse me - are the marks which come from following Christ and His teachings and the teachings of His apostles."

Page 182. It was 1932 just as Hitler was coming into power. And here was a brother by the name of Eberhard Arnold who ended up then with his wife starting the Bruderhoff communities. And he understood the strategic position of the Pilgrim Church. And here's what he said: "They got kicked out of Germany, by the way, and eventually his people adopted non-resistance and a modest way of life and pretty much an Anabaptist understanding of salvation." And he said back then, "Everything is going to pieces. The world is going to pieces. It is crumbling and rotting away. It is going through a process of disintegration. It's dying. And in these fearsome times, through the Holy Spirit, Christ places the city church with its unconditional unity right into the world.

The only hope for the world is to have a place of gathering, to have a people whose will, undivided and free of doubt, is bent on gathering with others." And soon after he wrote this, the Bruderhoff was kicked out of Germany by the nation ruler, Adolf Hitler, and they formed communities now all over the world. And he says, "The church can be compared to a lantern. The light shines out through the glass to all the world. And the rays of light - I really like this - are the brothers and sisters sent out on mission. They are messengers of God, messengers of light, angels of light, apostles of light, light rays of the gospel sent out by the light of the church to gather others into the community."

So the mission of the Pilgrim Church is to reach out into the world with the light and bring others into this place of gathering, this new nation, the people of God whose allegiance is to Christ alone. And how does discipleship happen within communities like this? Those of us who may have grown up in this kind of community might take this for granted. But it happens kind of like this: through baptism, through teaching and preaching of the word, through fellowship, through prayer, through the Lord's Supper, through exhortation and encouragement, through rebuke and correction, through confession of sin and of walking in the light, through collective application of scripture, mutual submission in the rhythm of community life.

In all of these ways and through many of these ways, repetitively, we become disciples. We become more and more like Christ. This is where disciples are made over the long haul. And of course, it all begins by the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ and His death on the cross and resurrection that's a given. All right. So let's talk about some examples of a church at one with society. So go back to Rwanda. In 1994, many of you might remember what was going on in 1994 in about a 100-day period of time. An estimated 800,000 to 1 million Tutsi and Huti died in that civil ethnic cleansing that went on over there. Mostly the Tutsi people died there.

And what we forget what we tend to forget is that at that time, Rwanda was considered to be one of the most Christianized nations in the whole world. 90% of the population of Rwanda at that time identified as Christian. But in 1994, Christians slaughtered their Christian neighbors with machetes and hatchets. And this is a terrible, horrible, and complicated story. And what makes it even more tragic is that have you heard of the East African Revival? It began in the 1930s and spread across Africa. And it began here in the nation of Rwanda.

And 60 years later, in that same country where the East African Revival began, Christians were killing one another. And what went wrong with Rwanda's kind of Christianity? Now, go forward to the year 2000 and go to Kenya. And there was a brother by the name of William Ondayo.

And I love this brother. I only knew him for about four months in that short time that our family lived in Kenya. But his quiet, gentle life has made a big impression on me. And I've thought about this, dear brother, many times since in this story, and just thinking back and remembering his gentle, sweet nature that was transformed by the living Christ blesses me right now as I think of him. And he's still the same, only he's grown in the Lord. So he's now a deacon at the Reboard Church. And back sometime shortly before we met, his daughters went to the village well to collect water. And the man in charge of the well did not like his daughters because they were the daughters of a man who went to a Pilgrim Church.

And his association with them was a negative mark in the man who owned the well's mind. So along the line at the well, his daughters waited in line for their turn to fill their containers. Now, as I remember the story, when his daughters got to the front of the line and they pumped their containers full of water, the man who owned the well took those jugs of water, dumped them out on the ground, and gave them back their empty containers and sent them back around to the end of the line where they would have to wait another long period of time. And they went home crying.

And when they got home, William got fired up. The old William came back, and he was filled with the spirit of fighting. And he went off to that man's house intending to give him a good thrashing. But while he was on the way, he began to remember what he had been taught from the Sermon on the Mount about loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you and despise you. And the spirit of God got a hold of him again. And he went around. He turned around, and he went back to his house. And he got a couple of kilos of his precious maize and took it over to the man's house and gave it to his dumbfounded enemy.

I love that story. Those are the kinds of marks that you expect to see from the counterculture, the traits of Christ's disciples, the marks of the Pilgrim Church: not fighting and violence and killing one's enemies, but a radical love that turns the other cheek. Now, if you go back to 1782 and you go to Eastern Ohio, Moravian communities of Gnadenhütten and Schönbrunn - some of you've been there, I suppose - David Zeigsberger, many others, missionaries from those early Moravian communities, they worked with the Lunappi Indians, and many were converted. And several communities were established. And these warring First Nations people embraced the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of non-resistance. And they were discipled in the ways of Christ and in the ways of the apostles.

And these people laid down their tomahawks, and they became non-resistant. And they taught these people things like a modest dress and, yes, even covering for the ladies. These were First Nations people.

And they established a biblical culture that was separated from their former culture and also that was distinct from the American culture of its day. And I think that church planters and church builders that are interested in the Pilgrim Church would have a lot to learn from the stories of those early Moravian communities. And I would say that Peter Hoover's book, Behold the Lamb: On the History of the Moravian Church in the Early Days, at least, has impacted me greatly. So what happened then? So these Indians were converted to Christianity, the Kingdom Christianity. And since they refused to take sides either with America or Canada or, I should say, Great Britain in that war at the time, they were non-resistant.

So both governments viewed them with suspicion and suspected them to be sympathizers with the other side. So what happened? In the fall of 1781, these Lunappi Indians, these pilgrims of the Pilgrim Church, they were forced to relocate by the US military.

But by the next spring, their people were going hungry. So some of them sort of sneaked back into their homeland, into Eastern Ohio, to harvest their corn that was still in the field. Well, the US militias surprised them and rounded up a bunch of them and accused them of raiding white communities, which they were innocent of. And the soldiers caught these people, voted to kill them, 96 of them. And when these people, men, women, and children, followers of the Lamb, heard about this, they requested a period of 12 hours or so to prepare themselves to die. So they put the men in one building, the ladies in another building, along with the children, overnight. And those dear believers spent that night preparing for their death through singing, prayer, and encouraging one another.

In the next morning, those American soldiers brought them out. They stunned them with mallets. And then they scalped and killed 96 of our brothers and sisters in this way. This was the US militia, Gnadenhütten, Eastern Ohio, and the name is House of Grace. So my question for those who are interested in church planting and in church growth and in building the church is: What is the difference between the Rwandan Christians of 1994, William Ondayo in 2020, and going back to those Lunappi believers in 1782? What is the difference in the kind of community and church that they represented? I think I can tell you the difference. William Ondayo and those First Nations, Lunappi believers, were both part of disciple-making communities that put Jesus' sermon, His teaching, at the very center.

They were separated from this world, and they were living in countercultural communities who were taught the way of Jesus' radical love and example. And it took time. Those Lunappi believers did not put away their tomahawks overnight. And William Ondayo did not learn the way of non-resistance overnight. They learned that by being part of disciple-making communities where Jesus' radical love and His forgiveness was taught over time through coals-of-fire activism, as it's been called. The difference? Now, in Rwanda, church and society were not separated, but they were closely knit together. And there was a man by the name of Timothy Longman who wrote a book, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda. And he says, "Rwandan Christians did not contribute to the genocide due to a nominal faith.

Instead, something in the nature of Christianity in Rwanda made it unwilling or unable to restrain genocide." And he says, "As such, Rwanda's Christian leaders cultivated an atmosphere where good, practicing Christians could kill their neighbors without feeling that they were acting inconsistently with their faith."

Now, that is so shocking. But I suggest that this happened because the values of Jesus' kingdom were mingled, fatally mingled, with the values of the Rwandan nationalism and eventually nationalism and tribal loyalty won out over Jesus' kingdom. And it is shocking. But now, I might say something a little strong that might seem a little strong in the United States of America. But is that any less shocking than the fact that leaders of many American churches cultivate an atmosphere where good, practicing Christians can kill the enemies of America without being inconsistent to their faith? And from the beginnings of this republic, that has been so. In every war, in every American war, countless believers - and there have been many such wars - have been commissioned by their churches to go and kill the enemies of America or do whatever it takes.

And I think this is because the interests of the United States of America and the interests of Jesus' kingdom have gotten tragically and horribly conflated. And when push comes to shove, the interests of the American Empire win out.

Now, we shake our heads over that. But my dear brothers and sisters, before the non-resistant, separated people of God should point their fingers, they should consider Jesus' words about the meaning of contempt and hatred and division and murder among brothers before they point their fingers.

And we, too, have much to repent from.

You see, that world, that mixture of the world and Jesus' kingdom doesn't only happen out here. It can happen right here. So let us examine ourselves. Let's talk about my third point now is Anabaptism and missions. And I've got some blanks to fill in somewhere along there. So I want to talk about the fact that many of us have probably grown up in conservative Anabaptist communities. And probably many of us have, at some point or other, yours truly included, we've kind of reacted to our background to some degree or other. And we get disillusioned by the quirks and by the inconsistencies and failures of God's people. And a lot of times, people who look on or those who joined the membership process from not within, who didn't grow up with the Anabaptist worldview, they look on, and they're both fascinated and frustrated.

They're both excited and exasperated. And they like our radical way of life but also turned off by the inconsistencies. So we who grew up are also the same way. But I want to say that there is much to praise God for. For one thing, we have not taken part in the American militaristic intervention or international missionary imperialism. And what I mean by that, we've not been part of the wars, military inventions, and we've not been part of the thing where the military goes in first and then the missionary follows, the same military.

And we want to say that where our mission methods need correction and growth, we want to only acknowledge it. But the churches that are scattered here and there around the world - and there's several hundred of them outside the United States of America, I think, a couple of hundred at least, maybe several hundred. I don't know - but those types of churches that are seeking the Pilgrim Way, they're requiring from their members a radical kind of obedience to Jesus' teachings that would seem like radical discipleship compared to much of what you see in the mass movements. So we have that. And we have a strong spirit of community, which trait is helpful in relating to other church groups around strong group cultures around the world.

We do things as a group, like the Muslim people do, the Hindu people do, and many other non-Westernized groups. We like to do things as a community. We like to work together as a strong group faith community. And I think this is one of the reasons that a friend that I have, who used to be part of a large missionary supporting endeavor, supported several thousand missionaries around the world. And he's an evangelical Protestant. And he said to me one day he said he thinks that maybe the Mennonite people or the Anabaptist people are among those that are best positioned to reach the Islamic people for Christ. And part of that reason was because of the strongly knit communities.

And then finally, the last bullet point there, I think that some of the strengths that we have is the capacity for Holy Spirit anointing. That's probably our strongest potential right there, the capacity for Holy Spirit anointing because with all these other things, but without that, it's a dead thing, and it's lifeless. And we don't want that. But if the Holy Spirit can get a hold of a people, whoever they are, regardless of their methods, things can happen. So that is a strength by the grace of God that we have from God to be anointed by the Spirit of God. And it can happen if we seek Him.

So what sets us apart? We're set apart from the God and country evangelicalism, at least I trust that we are. And this set apartness is not just historical culture or ethnic markers, I think. I think what sets us apart by the grace of God in all and we want to say this in all humility. But there is a certain understanding of the Gospel. To be truly saved, you must be a follower of Christ and a particular understanding of what it means to love our fellow man. It is better to give one's own life than to practice violence against others.

And then you flip the page, a particular way of understanding the structures and the systems driving modern society, and our perspective on the world, on the systems, if you want to say, the educational system, the world of the arts, the world of finance probably, the world of entertainment and music and education.

We say that those systems and structures are under the influence and control of Satan and the evil powers, and a certain way of looking at the future. Jesus is returning, and the end of the world and judgment is at hand. And then finally, one of the other things that we have that is, I think, a positive thing, but not least, it's a brotherhood hermeneutic or a way of interpreting scripture. We seek to interpret and apply the scriptures in a community of brotherhood. We apply them in a communal sort of way, at least to a degree.

And the mission impulse that started our movement is not dead, I don't think. We have a lot to learn. And I was in correspondence with Brother Mark Yoder, who spoke here this morning. And I have not ever met him yet. I didn't get to meet him today. But some time ago, he sent me a letter. He's been a lifelong pastor, missionary. And I think he's 64, 65 years old now. And what he said then, he said, "I really am only a learner. I have so much to learn, but I enjoy the work and am glad to have a small part in his work. I get all excited about this subject of church planting. This has been my life and the passion of my life."

And there are many, many like him. And there are people like him in this room. So praise the Lord for the Anabaptist people and the related groups in the Kingdom Church. There are many things that remain, things that need to be strengthened and built up. So just last year, I was in Ireland, and we were in a church there that is a Pilgrim Church. And it was a delight to be with those brothers on a Sunday morning. So a Polish brother had devotions no, I'm sorry. I think the Polish brother led the singing. The German brother had devotions. A Ukrainian brother led the Sunday school class, and an American brother brought the sermon. So this was a great Kingdom, cross-cultural, countercultural experience.

Sometimes, we call ourselves the quiet in the land. And to the extent that that's true, I think it's mainly because we need to get a fresh vision of what happened outside Jerusalem there on that hillside just before Jesus went back to heaven. And he said, "All authority is given unto me in heaven and earth." And there was a time when our people, in the period from about 1525 to 1575, they were we could call them the thunder in the land. Did you know that? We were not the quiet in the land back then. They were the thunder in the land. The Anabaptist people were the first missionary and church planters coming out of the Reformation.

I think you could say that. The reformers did not immediately evangelize, Luther and Calvin and all of them, because they believed in the church-state unity. And so basically, if you were a citizen in their particular region, well, you were a Christian. So no need to evangelize, essentially. That's oversimplifying it. But initially, this movement that was later called Anabaptist spread like wildfire. And it was kind of like a mass revival movement. And that's why the civil authorities took such extreme measures to crush it. William Carey finally went to India about 200 years later. That's where the Protestant missions is known to have started. So I think it's a great idea for the Anabaptist people to study their own heritage when it comes to missions and church planters, planting.

But we went from being the thunder in the land to being the quiet in the land. And we were hounded by persecution, came to America, set up our lovely communities. While people like David Zeigsberger and the other Moravian missionaries, they established countercultural communities among the First Nations people. And we have much to repent from. We have become the quiet in the land far too often. But in the last century, the American Mennonites started waking up. And as it relates to the world of church planting and mission activity, this awakening happened about 100 to 120 years ago. And the question is, why did they wake up? And as they woke up, where did they get their mission methodology?

Did it happen because the Anabaptist people rediscovered their missionary heritage? Well, that was back in the days before there was so much study done on what happened back in the old country. But it's probably true that the 20th-century Anabaptists largely picked up their mission impulse and their mission methods from the modern Protestant mission movement. And this is the argument that Theodore Slayball makes in his book, Gospel versus Gospel. But the important point to this is that not only did the American Mennonites pick up their missionary impulse and their methodology from the Protestants, they picked up elements of the Protestant Gospel along with it and with far-reaching effects, many of them negative. So we have to be discerning on the methods that we use.

So we should develop church planting resources that reproduce the Pilgrim Church around the world and call for radical obedience to the Sermon on the Mount. That's the burden of my message. And I'm encouraged to see that happening on a number of fronts. So I want to talk about three motivations for those early Anabaptist missionaries that I gathered from my limited studies. Number one, they were convinced that the end of the world was near. They thought that the end of the world was at hand and that the judgment was about to happen.

They really did. And a lot of complex reasons for that. Society was crumbling. There were war going all around them for many, many years. And they thought that the end of the world was at hand. And so like Paul, they were persuaded by the terror of the Lord to persuade men.

The other thing that really helped this movement spread was missionary organization. You might remember the martyr synod where they had a gathering. I think it was about 1527, where a bunch of Anabaptist leaders got together. And they divided up Western Europe for the proclamation of the Gospel. And all but maybe two of those people were dead within like five years. And here's what a Wolfgang Schaffeli says out of Anabaptism and Mission, "The chief carriers of the activity were the ordained ministers and elders who traveled from place to place, winning new adherence to the movement." There were people who ordained as missionaries within their home country who traveled to bring the Gospel.

What if we would do that in our churches? What if we would ordain a brother and his wife, maybe a couple of single sisters, a couple of young men, send them out from our congregation into the inner cities and have them proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom? What would happen if we would take this a little more seriously? The testimony of ordinary members. I'm going to read something from this book. By the way, I recommend this book, Anabaptism and Mission, if I haven't yet until now. So I want to read something about the type of message that they preached back then.

I'm going to read part of a paragraph. "The ordinary members participated actively in the spread of the Anabaptist faith. Ordinary laypeople, craftsmen, peasants, servants solicited their fellowmen to attend the meetings, to change their life, to accept baptism. They had something that they were impelled to do. The Gospel was carried on in aggressive and emphatic offer into everyday life. The sacred area inside the church buildings disappeared as the only place where salvation is mediated. And the offer of the message of repentance became possible everywhere in the workplace, in the field, in the house, or on a journey." They were talking about the Gospel and the need to repent everywhere they went.

There's many more things we could say about that. I want to close with a few points, a few, should I say, points of counsel for church planters and church leaders. And we'll just go down through this list rather rapidly. Keep the vision of the resurrected Christ in front of your eyes.

Yielded to his authority, surrendered to his will, committed to his teaching. We can step out in faith, and we can make disciples just like he told us to do. Yes, we can. I like Mark's rendering of Jesus' words to his disciples when he first called them. He said in the book of Mark, "Follow me, and I will make you to become fishers of men." And keep the cross in front of your eyes.

The risen Christ gives us power, but the crucified Christ keeps us broken. And I'm going to suggest that we reread and read and reread the book of Acts on our knees until you are convinced the same things could happen today.

Discover the Anabaptist heritage of missions. And I have a list of papers that were written by various Mennonite scholars in this one excellent resource. If I haven't yet recommended it, I recommend Anabaptism and Mission. So we have many modern-day Anabaptist church planters and church planting resources. And we're here at one of those events. And if you haven't yet, I'd encourage you to go to anabaptistperspectives.org and listen to Brother Ernest talk about how you can have Bible studies with the unreached.

Study the mission methods of like-minded groups throughout history. And I've mentioned some of those groups already. Do not compromise or water down or use do not compromise the teaching or New Testament doctrine. Do not make the narrow gate wider than it is. And do not neglect discipline.

Let's talk about this whole thing of we don't have time to go there. I want to go on to the third bullet point under do not compromise the teaching or New Testament doctrine is the veiling. I would like to focus on one specific application to the New Testament doctrine. I have heard that there is some thought among modern Anabaptist church planters or missionaries that, "Well, I can teach on the subject of the woman's covering, but I'm not sure that I can require it.

I'll teach it, but I'm not sure that I can require it." And I ask the question, how is that not a compromise of New Testament truth? Has a disciple truly learned from his teacher in the biblical sense of discipleship if truth is taught but not obeyed?

And number nine, under the next bullet point, do invest for the long haul. So many of us have heard of the Welsh revival. It took place back in 1904, 1905, somewhere in there under the preaching of, was it, John Evans? And the revival that took place there was remarkable in that people came under such heavy conviction that the Spirit of God literally forced them to the ground. And there was some extremism, but there was also genuine repentance. The jails emptied, and the saloons emptied, and the crime rates went way down in the country of Wales. And there was remarkable transformation of the culture. But have you heard of the squelching of the Welsh revival? So I remember there's a dear brother in Ireland that we got to know when we lived there as a family about 10 years ago.

This brother's name is Hugh. And he used to be a vicar in the Anglican Church. And his parish was the area where the Welsh revival took place over 100 years ago. He preached, and he conducted services in the sacraments of the Anglican Church in Ireland in those places as an Anglican priest at the time. And he's now joined the Pilgrim Church in Dunmore, East Ireland. And on one of those occasions, he got to know this older woman who ended up being the daughter of one of the singers that went along on John Evans' revival campaigns. She would sing during the service when the Spirit of God fell and converted people, and this revival broke out.

She was with that movement. And he talked to her about this. And she seemed somewhat embarrassed to have been associated with the mother of one of the singers of John Evans. And my brother Hugh went on to tell me why he thinks this is so. The Welsh revival died out within a generation, and society pretty much went back to normal, well, I should say, to the old ways in less than 20 years. And do you know why? My brother Hugh thinks it's because of World War I. Within about 10 years, many of these boys, young men and older men who had been converted to Jesus' kingdom and were being taught the ways of his kingdom were confronted with a question of loyalty.

Are they going to be loyal to Jesus' kingdom and his teachings, or are they going to be loyal to Great Britain and the war going on in Europe? And unlike Eberhard Arnold and his group, they chose to side with the nation of this world.

And when push came to shove, the nation of this world once again won out. And the Welsh revival was squelched. It died out. And that's very, very sad. And today, you go over there, and there's just a few church buildings and maybe a few embarrassed people.

It didn't last. Why? I think one of the major reasons is because this revival movement failed to stand with Jesus' teachings, failed to separate itself into a countercultural way of life based on Jesus' teaching and on his life.

Do invest for the long haul. This takes time. And we have the example of Sanford Yoder and the Nicaraguan churches. And one of his sons was here before lunch speaking to us. Do not focus on numbers of converts.

Continually seek humility. I see this trait in the lives of the long-term missionaries that I know. Their idealism has been tempered through trials. Let not him that puts on his armor boast like the one who takes it off.

Study and capitalize on the Anabaptist strong group community ideal. Seek to use indigenous methods of applying scripture. And I think Brother Deo is here and will speak to us more about that. And last of all, do not neglect the nearest mission field, and that would be your own family and your own church group.

I want to close with a short story about a dear friend, a friend. He's not so close to me anymore, but he grew up in my church. This all happened within the last about eight years, eight or nine years.

This man and his wife felt called by God to minister to an animistic people group in the southern Philippines, right in the area where the leftist guerrillas are. Long story short, they moved into a village. The road hadn't even been built into the village as of yet. They were able to make friends with the mayor of the town a few miles outside of this village. And he helped them get back in, get established. They bought a piece of property.

It was a coconut plantation. They expected to live out their days there. So they moved back in there, and then the guerrillas went on the warpath. And they murdered one night many people in a neighboring village. They murdered the mayor who had helped them get back to this area. And Floyd knew that his own life and the wife and family were in danger. But he didn't know what to do. So he stayed until finally it was time to harvest the coconuts. And he drove off. By then, they had built a road back to the village with a load of coconuts going toward the market in the nearest town. They ambushed the truck. He got out.

They took him and slammed his head against the pavement until his skull cracked. And they kind of left him for dead. Somehow, policemen came along, and they took him to the town. He was hospitalized. He was a very, very ill man for a long time, very frail. And now he thought his life's investment was gone. There was no going back into the village, and everything he invested was gone. He hadn't yet really brought anybody to saving faith and all was lost. He was very discouraged living in a house there in town. And one day, one of the villagers heard that he was living in town and came to see him and over time came to see him some more and struck up a conversation about the Gospel, spiritual things.

Floyd, one day, he asked Floyd one day, "Would you be able to tell me more about this grace you were telling us about back there?" "By all means." And eventually, this man came to Christ, and he taught him how to preach the Gospel back among the villagers. More people came to Christ. And eventually, all this time, they had a cell phone outside. They left one cell phone in the back. They were able to stay in communication. And eventually, 40 or 50 believers came to Christ and were baptized. And there's a church back there now. And Floyd has never gone back. He had to stay in the Philippines for a couple of years until his head injury healed up enough for him to be able to handle the cabin pressure in the airplane coming home.

This is one story, one single story of a man who was gripped by the mission of the Gospel and was driven to give his life. How many more are there like that in this room? May God give us the vision of his kingdom. And may he give us a vision of the Pilgrim Church and a vision of a separated people and that this is the context in which disciples are made.