The Vision for Church Planting in Latin America - Dale Heisey | CGS 2021

I'm well aware that many of you gathered here today might have a general interest in this topic of church growth. Some of you might have a more specific interest in Latin America. There might be fewer people here that have serious intentions to do something about a ministry in Latin America.

And so though I was asked to speak on this subject this morning, a spiritual vision for Latin America, I will be presenting some things that might be a bit more specialized or detailed information for those who would really be interested in following these introductory thoughts and taking steps into that direction. So if you have a notebook there, if you're writing some things down, we would like to give you some things to consider that might help for that.

And so a spiritual vision for Latin America, that's an interesting title because Latin America is perhaps a summarized way to refer to the Spanish and the Portuguese language and cultural influence in the Americas. Of course, there were Native Americans present when this European influx arrived.

These Indians, as most people call them, not the best word to use, were perhaps more Romanized than what they were Latinized, speaking of the religion that was imposed upon them. That imposition was rather forcefully done.

The Spanish horse and cannon and musket were much more powerful than Indian runners on foot and their stone age tools.

So the explorers and the conquerors from that Iberian Peninsula in Europe did some novel bit of bartering in the New World, exchanging the Catholicism that they brought for the gold that they sought.

The effect of this early conquest can be keenly seen and felt even today.

America as such, Latin America, is not mentioned in the Bible apart from the generic reference to every kindred and tongue and people and nation found several times in the book of Revelation.

Interesting to note that upon their release, their escape from prison, Felix Muns, Conrad Grebel, and George Blairuck said, "Speaking to each other, let's go to the red men across the sea." That's not in the Bible, but it's an interesting part of early Anabaptist history.

But the Apostle Paul had a spiritual vision for the Latin people. I'm going to read about that. You might have a Bible there. I'm going to read you from verses 20 through 29 in Romans 15.

This was his vision for the Latin people. "Yea, so I have strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ is named, lest I should build upon another man's foundation. But as is written, to whom he was not spoken of, they shall see, and they that have not heard shall understand.

For which cause also I have been much hindered from coming to you, but now having no more place in these parts and having a great desire these many years to come unto you, whencewhere I take my journey to Spain, I will come to you, for I trust to see you in my journey and to be brought on my way thitherward by you, if first I be somewhat filled with your company.

But now I go into Jerusalem to minister unto the saints, for it hath pleased them of Macedonia to make a certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem. It hath pleased them verily, and their debtors they are; for if the Gentiles have been made protectors of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister to them in carnal things. When wherefore I perform this and have sealed this fruit, I will come by you unto Spain.

For I am sure that when I come unto you, I shall come in the fullness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ."

Paul carried in his heart, as we read it here in these verses, the "into the next towns" burden of our Lord Jesus. Now, if you don't know what that means, what I just said to you, you'll find the answer for it in Mark chapter 1. You might turn there quickly.

Now, read here verses 35 through 38, the "into the next towns" vision of our Lord Jesus. "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.

And Simon and they that were with him followed after him. And when they had found him, they said unto him, 'All men, seek for thee.' And he said unto them, 'Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also; for therefore am came I forth.'" So it's not just a matter of staying in one place and saying it, saying it, saying it. I remember when this Brother Harold Kaufman there, who was kind of a pioneer missionary in Latin America down in Guatemala, he was an electrician by trade.

I heard him say one time that he used to put a lot of light bulbs in a house when he wired a house, but he never put them all in the same room. And so there's a matter of spreading this thing out. You don't just do the same thing over and over again and say it to the same people and attend the same service with the same ones, and nothing ever happens. Jesus said, "Into the next town."

And I will say this though, it's not my subject. Brother Mark has this later on, and you've heard an introduction to it already. But if you've never had the privilege of giving the gospel message to someone who never heard it in their life, it is a great joy that cannot be replaced by any other blessing to share the gospel with someone who absolutely has never heard it.

And we have some like that members of our congregation at home.

It's a tremendous joy.

Now, not all the towns or peoples have been reached in Latin America. There are still pockets of the 1040 Windows down there. I remember I was sitting in a restaurant, little soda there, little restaurant, little cafeteria in Cusco, Peru. And there was a missionary there that had a good bit of experience among those Quechua Indians in Peru. Sitting there, he told me something, and there was a napkin there on the table. I pulled this napkin out of its holder and took a pen out of my pocket and started drawing a map as he was talking, giving us a 1040 Window about the sides, a little bit larger than the sides of Cusco itself, from Chalhuinca to Cusco to Arequipa, a very large area of the Andes Mountains completely unevangelized.

I made up my mind I want to go in there, visit that place, see what that is like, what is going on in there. We had the privilege of doing that. Difficult to get in there. We had the privilege of doing that. These 1040 Windows, as you know, refers to the largest population in the world between the 10th and 40th degrees north parallel in Asia.

You have a lot of countries, a lot of people stacked in that area which are unevangelized. That's called your 1040 Window here in missionology. But there's a 1040 Window over the place. And Brother Ernest just told you a few moments ago that there might be a very, very small 1040 Window about two and a half miles from your house.

And there are places around the world and cities where there just simply is not a gospel witness, and that's what we refer to as the 1040 Window. And there are places like that in Latin America. I don't know, Brother Mark, how many more places like that there might be in Costa Rica.

I think I know of several places that would be that way.

Now, the unreached places—and I'm not asking you, we're not talking about a spiritual vision for Latin America should you come down and buy a house beside Brother Mark in Chichagua. There'd be nothing wrong with doing that. But I'd like to consider you and urge you today to think about the places where people have not heard, the Jesus vision for the next towns, Paul's burden to not build upon someone else's foundation so the day that they're not heard might hear, as we've heard already in this introduction.

But I must tell you that the unreached places are unreached for a good reason. The unreached places are the hardest places to reach. And we have things to face these days in extending the church into cultures like this that the Apostle Paul never needed to worry about.

He never had anyone stamp his passport. He never took a COVID test to go anywhere. And recently, we tried to get into a country. To get into the country, we had to have two masks on our face and a plastic shield in front of that.

And then besides that, you have to prove to somebody that someone knows that your blood is not filled with mosquito bites. And so you had to verify everything. We got all that done, got into that country, had approached—that was just about a month and a half ago—and preached there for a while. It was an outstanding time. That was in Latin America, by the way. But we have things to face today that they didn't have then. We travel one place to another. We have language difficulties. You know, in Latin America, there are many, many languages. And you might think if I knew Spanish or Portuguese, I would have access to a lot of people, and you would.

But many of you unreached ones do not speak either of those languages. Or maybe very few of the people do. I'm going to tell you why some of the unreached places are hard to reach. We're not going to master on minors or major in minors here, but it's an important thing to consider. And I was asked to tell some stories along with this presentation, and I'm afraid that that might have to wait till next year because I see that clock is doing its timely duty up there.

In some areas of the country, some areas of the world, it is nearly impossible to enter.

Close to new residents coming in or to foreigners, only temporary permission. You can get a 30-day visa or a 90-day visa at the most. And getting residency in a country these days is not as easy as it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago.

In some countries, it's very, very difficult to do, and that includes Costa Rica.

So that makes it difficult. Paul didn't face that.

Another thing we have is language barriers. We talked about it. That would be bad enough, except to realize that for some of these languages that we should be reaching, there is no translation. No one has gone there to document, to put a phonetic system together, to try to decide some kind of an alphabet.

There is no Bible, of course. There is no dictionary. In our public accounts in Costa Rica, we had several brothers sitting there for a period of time there in our ministry there, putting a dictionary together for the Young Indian Nation there in northern Nicaragua.

That would have been then, if that was done, and when that got done, the first dictionary ever made in that language. Spanish, for many of these situations, will be a bridge language to take you from English into a cultural tongue, a native tongue.

And so you need to know the Spanish or the Portuguese to be able to get into that, but your target language is something else. And so I would certainly urge you to do what you can to learn one of those languages, Spanish or Portuguese, while you're waiting for the opportunity to find your final location.

Another problem that you have with the unreached places—why are they still unreached? Some of them are very, very remote, difficult to reach, difficult for many reasons. I mean, I've traveled—I've walked for several days through jungles before we made it back far enough to find the villages we were looking for. Not everyone's willing to do that.

I remember one mission that told me, as they found the location, the country of Nicaragua, they said, "Well, Brother Dale, we're very, very happy for it. It's only 20 minutes away from the airport. Thank you." Many other people made that decision too. And probably churches all over the place in that location. But there are places that you cannot get to that are only 20 minutes from the airport and places where there are no landing strips.

And so that remoteness—there are altitude problems. When you talk about South America, you have mountains running the whole way down through the Rockies and through the Sierra Madres of Mexico and through the Andes in South America. They run through Costa Rica too, Central America. But when you get down into the Andes, for example, it's extremely high there. And we have this altitude sickness. And we sent a missionary family in there, and they were there for three months trying to get the sick husband out of that place. And they couldn't get him out. They couldn't get him to safety. They couldn't get him to health because he's in this high valley. And the only way out is by land, and you have to go up higher yet to get out of there before you start going down the other side.

And she knew he would die if they took him any higher than he was. So he was there for three months before they were able to get him out of there. Almost every one of the children in that family died. Everyone was extremely sick. And then he came to me when he got back to America, and I was up here visiting at that time. He said to me, "Brother Dale," he said, "I'm very, very sorry, but I don't think any Americans can ever live where we have been."

And I talked to him for a while, and that man turned around, took his family right back to the same place where he was.

That's why they're unreached places. And then there are tropical jungles, and they're insects to no end. And some people don't like snakes.

There are difficult places to reach. That's one of the reasons why. Another reason is the hostility. And the brother referred to this with that young lady that a year ago made some discoveries of light and truth that she didn't know before. There's hostility in that nation where she lives, and there's some of that in Latin America too.

These people just do not want to hear it. They're not going to have you there. You represent something different. And the powers that be, be it in the church or in the community and the civil government, are not going to have that presence there. And yet these people need to hear, and they're those who are willing to risk the comforts, risk the safety to bring the gospel to such places.

Some tribal groups do not permit outsiders.

I was in a local national tribe. They have their own tribal leaders. They're in tribal government. They're in tribal territory. We were in there in a home. We were eating some rice. The man had a little portable radio sitting on his table.

The announcing that was going on that radio was in the tribal language, the national language of that location. And all of a sudden, the man who was sitting there, I couldn't understand what they were saying. I know some words in that language, but very few. And I couldn't understand the conversation that was going on on that radio. And this man became very stiff. He said, "Listen to that."

And there they were announcing from one of the towns outside toward the edge of this village where the radio station was broadcasting that there were two strangers, two foreigners into the community there. And the people should look out for these two men, and you get rid of them and get them out of here. They cannot be in our territory. We are announcing and urging all of you Indians to get these two men out of here.

And I was one of those two. And the other one was a brother of a young man sitting right here. His name is Dwayne Nizer. That man's name was Dwight. That was Dwayne that was with me there. So we had to get back out of there and several days to get back out.

And how we planned to do that? There's hostility in some of these countries. They don't want you in there.

They want to maintain their private. And some of this is not because they're against religion. Some is because of the fact that they are being abused. They're being commercialized.

Their resources are being expended. So they want to keep foreigners out because of what they need for their tribe, for their people, for their food, for their nation. They want to keep that.

Of course, there are other things that could happen in some of these unreached places. There's paganism, of course. In witchcraft, there's voodoo. There are all kinds of things to overcome. Catholicism is not always easy to penetrate. Liberal Catholicism is easier to work with. We have a lot of that in Costa Rica. There's no doubt of that.

But none of these things that I mentioned are the main reason why there are unreached places.

If you're paying attention to me this morning, you should be asking yourself a question. "Well, Brother, tell us." Then Brother Dale tells us. If this what I gave you is not a long enough list and not sufficient to help you understand why there are unreached places, then why did you say that's not the main reason?

The main reason is sitting here. It's not there. It's here.

It's as simple as that.

That dedication, that love, that devotion, that sacrifice, that surrender.

But it's not only that. I'll take a step further. And now we should pause here. We should preach a sermon on that subject right there. We shouldn't let that go. We shouldn't just bounce off of that. That's not just a little bump in the road.

When you find two people willing to make that sacrifice, two families, show me two families that are willing to do it, they say, "Yes, we'll do it. Send us. We'll go."

I have one family that we sent to Latin America, to a distant, remote, difficult place. And I was trying to find out if this couple was qualified, if this young family was spiritually conditioned to take on this assignment. So I gave them several tests.

And one of them was I told them—I told the wife. She was standing there. She had her arm on her hand on the shoulder of her husband standing beside her.

I said, "Mother, I can't promise you a house. I don't even know if you will have an address. The missions you need to do there, the tasks that you're going to do, it's going to be going from place to place. So I'm not really sure how permanent your home is really going to be when you get started with this project."

She looked at me. She said, "Brother Dale, as long as he can be along with me, I'm at home." That's all she said. "I'm sorry," I said, "you go. There's no reason to keep you here. Go." And they're still there. They're still doing it.

But when we have several families willing to take that risk and do that, to make those adjustments and sacrifices, and they get there and have trouble with each other and fellowship breaks down and tensions begin to rise and you watch from a distance and see that the work is dissolving, these are major reasons why there are still unreached areas. We need to work on that as churches.

So I was sent a series of questions that I was supposed to answer in this session while I'm here. Is there a need for more churches in Latin America? How would you answer that, Brother Mark? I've already answered that question, really, because there are still unreached areas in Latin America. And if that's the case, then there's a need for more churches.

There are people groups in Latin America that have not been discovered yet. After I made one of my first return visits, after coming back from the country of Peru, I was in Costa Rica only a short time, and I read in the newspaper that a new group, a new tribal group, was discovered in the Amazon.

They had never run into white people before. The group was very small. They had their own language, different from all other tribal languages down there. This was a discovery that just was made. That's still to be done. There are still groups like that. Are there more needs for more churches in Latin America? I don't need to say any more about that.

There are two considerations. You have these 1040 communities that never heard the gospel at all. And along with that, there are many, many communities with a much larger geography that never have had a program church witness. And Costa Rica could still use more churches in that regard.

And there are cities. And there are still countries in Latin America where we don't have one congregation established in the country. We have a group of brothers in our community right now who have been considering beginning some work in Panama. We needed to just help me down there. Panama is real close to Costa Rica. We've done very, very virtually nothing there. There have been some exploratory trips. We've done very, very little there. There are many needs in Venezuela these days. It's a very tough country. But the opportunities there are very great.

It'd be an excellent place to consider, and we can go on with that. That answers the question. Is there a need for more churches? There are. And then they ask me, "How can we tell if there's a compu blanco? How can we tell if there's a field that's ready for harvest? How can we tell if there are people out there that need to be harvested? How can we tell?" Well, there are several things that can happen there. Sometimes you get requests from people themselves to come. That does not happen very often.

That did happen in Ural Peru down there where Life and Light Publishers out there in Farmington, New Mexico, had sent a lot of Bible correspondence courses down there. And they found a geographic area where a lot of their people taking these courses were living in a certain area. And this request kept coming. So they sent four families down there from Farmington, started a congregation there in the Valle de Ural, north of Lima.

And it was amazing what that did. That's how that congregation was started. Their request came from there. When you look at the poverty and the privation that's going on in Venezuela right now, that constitutes an outstanding field where people are well, wealthy, satisfied, have what they want.

Everything is going well for them. And a material thing, the gospel does not penetrate there. As Jesus told John the Baptist, two messengers that met him out there, he said, "The poor of the gospel preached unto them. The poor want it too."

That's why Venezuela is an open door these days.

The work that we've started among the Miñanos is happening in a very usual way. We had someone who was traveling from a bus, on a bus in Nicaragua, and sitting beside this Miñano Indian boy. He didn't know it then. They started a conversation. This boy could speak Spanish too.

They started a conversation. That resulted in this young man inviting a brother from our congregation to come back to his community and visit. As you don't get into those communities without invitation. And so that invitation led to a series of events.

And that's how the work began among those people. And so you remember the words of Abraham's servant who said, "That I was in the way, and the Lord led me." That doesn't say it quite that same way in Spanish, but in your Bible it says that. It is true. And you heard it already this morning that the person who's not willing, not available, not asking, searching, not thinking about it, not praying about it, not asking God Dale to lead him to it, that person does not find very many opportunities. He has no idea what's going on. He lived all day, all night, all week, the next five years, and with very little consciousness that there might be some other place, things to do.

But there are others over here alongside of him, someplace down the road, who's in the bedroom praying early in the morning. He's running through information he can find. He picks up newsletters when they become available. He is searching this thing out. Those people will find out if there's a call coming from a field before others will. And so again, we're in one of those two categories, all of us here this morning.

I remember Jack Hiles said many years ago—this was over 50 years ago he said this. He's not living anymore—he said, "If you wait for a burden before you lead someone to Christ, it'll never happen." He said, "I have a suggestion for you. While you're waiting for a burden, go out and win a few.

And the best way to get a burden for Latin America is do just that. Go out there and tramp those jungles and climb up those steep mountains there in the Andes Mountains with a backpack on your back and your hands locked together behind your back so you can stand, the lack of oxygen to walk up the hill, and visit those villages and sit there and eat what they eat and sit in their little stoops and go into those little stone houses with dirt floors with guinea pigs running around inside and see if something doesn't happen to you while you're in there. I will tell you, you'll not come back the way you went.

You get the burden by being out there doing it.

Do requests come for a Pilgrim Church witness? Well, that has been briefly answered. And I won't say much more about that.

There's probably no such thing as a steady stream of requests coming for a Pilgrim Church plant in any particular place in Latin America. Probably not. But several things do happen.

You know, if a church is over here and they have—there's some members there and they've got family over there and over there and over there, and that family extension sometimes provides an opportunity and a request. That has happened to us. It's happened in Costa Rica. It happens in other places.

With things like MCO out there before you got there, Spanish school curriculum already on the field, Life and Light Bible correspondence courses, the Torcha de la Verdad in some of those areas, that has opened the door for opportunities. And so the thing to do there is be in touch with some of those public-ish houses and some of those groups and committees of people that are sponsoring these works to find some more information about that. Letters that might come in, requests that might come. Requests come in interesting ways like this too.

In Costa Rica, one day, a father of five children came to see me. He said, "Brother Dale, we have—" he did call me Brother Dale. I'm just simply Eugenio down there. He said, "I don't know what's wrong. I don't know. We—" But I began to ask him, "Could you come to our house and talk to my family?"

So I went to his house. I didn't have any idea what to expect. His wife is kind of a dama of the town there. She's kind of a, you know, a little bit prissy and a little bit up and up. And she should have had a little bit more material on her skirt than what she had. She went out to the kitchen and got a towel and put it over her lap as we sat there in her living room.

This man who is not much more religious than Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer said to his children, "This man is going to tell you something as you need to hear. You listen." And he never did tell me what he came for or what his trouble was. He had marriage trouble. The family was not doing well. He had difficult relationships with each other. I learned that later.

So I was being able to speak to his family. And requests like that do come.

But the secret of making contacts lies more with us than it lies with them. I'd like you to remember that.

Whom could you contact to become acquainted with or even to visit a Latin American church plant? And there's no way I can give a complete list here. Brother John Krupp is down there in the Amazona, down off the mountains from Peru, down towards the Brazilian side down there where the waters all flow together to start forming that great big river, the largest in the world, the Amazon.

He's living down in there with another family. I would contact someone like that. If you want to work in the Yandina of South America instead of in the Amazona, I would contact someone like Levi Martin down there at Strasbourg, Virginia.

I'd get in contact with someone like ABT. They've got work in Colombia. Dara Whitmer will be here this weekend. They have Gerrit down there in southern Mexico. I would talk to people like that. There is now a witness in Brazil, in Argentina, in Chile, in Uruguay, in Peru, in Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Colombia.

But in many of those cases, there's only one congregation that we relate to that's in some of those countries.

As we're sitting here today, there's one congregation I know of that is sponsoring soup kitchens at 12 different locations in Venezuela.

The country of Peru, interestingly enough, is receiving a a stream of refugees coming out of Venezuela, coming into Peru. They're going to Colombia, as you know. They're coming into Peru now. The village where I just was a short time ago has over 5,000 Venezuelans living there. If you want to know whether there's an open door there or not, I could answer the question by giving this illustration that on a Saturday noon, a Venezuelan family, a refugee family, wanted us to come to their place for dinner. They had a very, very poor house.

They came over here with just about nothing. Some of them, only the shoes that they were wearing and the clothes they had on their back, the only clothing they brought with them, no blankets or dishes or tools of any kind.

These people have virtually nothing. When we got there for this dinner, the surprise to me was that there were 25 other refugees there. We ate dinner with some 25 Venezuelans. I don't know where all this food came from. It was an outstanding time. These people wanted to hear. They wanted to—and this whole group of people came to the church services while I was preaching. It was an amazing opportunity.

And so I came home from Peru with a burden for Venezuela in my heart. Do you understand how that goes?

You have Nicholas Robertson down there via Serrano in Bolivia. You have Titus Pichi, who is working over there near Lake Titicaca in Puno. I would contact people like that. We do not have all of Costa Rica covered. There's hardly any witness among us in the Central Valley at all where 70% of the people live in Costa Rica. We have no churches out there, really.

There are probably people right in Costa Rica that live where the torch is printed that have never seen an issue of it. Don't you think so, Brother Mark? What are the qualifications for working in Latin America? That was another question that I was asked.

There's really only one. I've already referred to it.

Same qualification you would need to go anyplace else in the world to serve. But it is true in Latin America that there's a broken heart. That is the kind of a thing you can face, any kind of problem there is, without being upset about it.

When the word frustration is not part of your daily experience, you can accept a loss, a privation, a no, a closed door, and you just simply look at the next one for the next one. Someone told me a couple of days ago that he has this poster he has at his house.

And on there is a picture of a door. And it's like a person in a hallway looking at this door. And the door is shut. He wants that door open, but it's shut. And down here is a little caption under this door. It says, "While you're waiting for God to open the door, praise Him in the hallway."

And when you and I learn to do that, we can stick our face to the empty fire barrel and sing the doxology. When nothing can upset us, we'll be able to accept any kind of thing that happens and be peaceful about it. Until that happens, I would suggest we stay on our knees until we get there.

Really? That's not only a qualification for a missionary that's going to one of these remote and difficult places to serve. I'm not quite sure other churches in America are going to survive if we don't learn to do that.

That's the qualification right there.

I would suggest—and you can't do this because she died in 2015—but I suggest if you'd like to know what a qualification is for working in Latin America, you visit with Elizabeth Elliott. And you remember that she is the well-known wife of Jim, who was killed in '56 when their daughter was only ten months old. Valerie.

Elizabeth spent the first missionary year of her life in 1952 and '53. She was married then toward the end of that year. She was in a lonely Ecuadorian village among an Indian tribe known as the Colorado Indians. And she was there with a purpose of coming out of SIL to formulate some kind of a vocabulary, some kind of an alphabet for this language.

If you read what she had to do to get that done, how she prayed for the Lord to provide people for her to help her to do this, people that knew the language—she knew Spanish—the language she was trying to learn. And the denials and the backsets that she faced time after time after time. And the story there—and she wrote in that book—is not to make you cry, but the worst was this, that after she had a suitcase filled with charts and notebooks full with words, and she had an alphabet put together, and she had all this additional work done for the purpose of helping someone then pick up this material and start translating a Bible into this language.

When this was taken back to Quito to the city, the suitcase was lost. It was never discovered since. And everything she did for an entire year was gone.

And what did she do? She turned right around after her husband died. Went right back there and served in the same place. That's the stuff that Latin America needs. I talked to Elizabeth Elliott for a while to see how you get that way.

Of course, Catholicism is going to be prevalent wherever you go. You should be acquainted with that and be acquainted with handling it. Eugene Naida has probably written the best anthropology of Latin America that has ever been written from a missionologist's point of view. And he has things in there that any Latin American person should, or interested in that area, should study.

He explains to you all kinds of things in there, the concepts towards work, towards money, towards religion. He talks in there about the Latin family. He tells in there the importance of a grandmother. As you recall, Brother Mark, that when that grandmother, the Paniagua grandma, not the—not this—this one, the old girly, when she was converted, you know the effect that had on the Paniagua family. And you get that one. You have now access to the hearts of everyone down through the generations. And we are looking forward in the next ten years, Brother Mark, to baptizing the fifth generation of that family into our churches.

The fifth generation, Mark, is being born in Marseille right now and other places.

That's all in that book.

And he also takes your stepfather, gets you out of the Latin culture, goes into the Mesoamerican culture, the natives there, Native Americans, and talks about how they relate to this whole thing. It's an outstanding book. I would suggest you get a hold of it and read it. You don't need to memorize it. Study it.

Of course, you ought to know some Spanish if you're going to go there. I'm supposed to quit, so I don't know if I should give any of these concluding remarks.

But I just want to say this to you: Call to missions. Am I called? If God would call me, you know, if God would call me, I think I'd listen to it, you know? I think I'd have—I think I'd allow God to say something if He called me.

And you say to me, "What we're doing in our home is we've been asking God for the Mass of the Dunedin Call."

I'm going to take that rug and pull it right out of your feet. You're like an English standalone. Are you ready to go? You grab a hold of something.

The Mass of the Dunedin Call only comes to one person. It's the man who's already out doing it. Paul was already in the mission field. He's already doing the service. He's already going from place to place. He was already preaching the gospel. He already made the sacrifice. He's already left the Jewish background. He was already out with the Gentiles.

All God was saying was, "La la macamba, no. Cusali." That's all God was doing.

When God wished—God gives Mass of the Dunedin Calls those specific directions. Not to the ship that's sitting in the sea, sitting in the harbor. That's a safe place for ships to be. But that's not what ships are for.

And sometimes it's not even safe to be there. If you don't believe me, check around Pearl Harbor and see what you think.

So we need to be out there where the call of God comes.

It came to my wife and I in a very simple way. That's just one more call. This has happened many times. But one unique step in our lives happened on the first day of the year, January 1, 1989. We decided to set that day aside for prayer and fasting. We're going to stay on our faces before God until He shows us some things He has for our lives. It was a very difficult time for us then. And during that day, several unique things happened. Very special things happened.

One of those things was that New Tribes missions from Sanford, Florida, sent us a roll of mission posters. I found later that a converted Jewish girl that we had met some months before asked them to send that to us. They got there on this very day that we were fasting and praying.

I opened up these posters. I pulled them out and looked at them. They were all kind of interesting. And there was one there that I couldn't put away. I couldn't put it aside. I still have it. I couldn't lay it aside. There was a map there of the Western Hemisphere, and up here is the United States.

And there were these big letters written across there, taken from a Bible verse of Acts. "You have been in Jerusalem long enough." Jerusalem has nine letters in it. The middle three letters of Jerusalem are USA. And those three letters stood out in red, white, and blue paint. "You have been in USA long enough."

I had no idea what that was going to mean to me. I had no idea what God was going to do for that. But then the prayers turned directly to that. If that's the case, then God shows the next step. Phone rings.

A stately gentleman that I had never met, I didn't know him. His name was Sanford Yoder. He was on the other end of the phone. The rest of his history, I being the way. I wanted to. I was willing to. You were willing to. Paul was willing to. And God sees that and knows that, finds you and places you. And He knows already where that should be. But before you buy your plane ticket for Quito, Ecuador, or for Cusco, Peru, the neighbor, two and a half houses down the road.

May God bless you this morning.