In this edition of News from the Fields, I’d like you to imagine that you’re on a cross-cultural journey. You’ll travel to Turkey to join pastors for a Portable Bible School Teacher Training seminar, getting an inside look at how preaching is taught. Then, you’ll get on a flight for India to meet several of our ministry leaders through the eyes of ER friends Frank and Jenny Zartman. Your journey will continue to Nigeria where you’ll hear from Mawo and Janet Abaya, before traveling to the UK and Pakistan. Your final stop will be visiting teachers of the Freedom Child Centers in India, returning to your home with their testimonies fresh on your mind.

Throughout this reading journey, I hope you’ll be encouraged about the ways God is moving through the faithfulness of these brothers and sisters in Christ.

Yes, we believe it! Some may call us fanatics, but we truly believe that Jesus is the only way to heaven (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). That’s why we’re determined to do everything we can to reach as many as possible with the love of God and His offer of salvation (1 Cor. 9:22b).

Because we believe it’s a matter of life and death (Romans 6:23) Evangelism Resources is doing everything possible to make disciples (Matt. 28:19-20) who will make other disciples (2 Timothy 2:2) where the need is greatest (2 Cor. 10:16).

In 2023 we helped fund the training of over 51,000 witnesses to take Christ’s salvation to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).

Have you ever been surprised by God? For example, seeing someone come to Christ after you had started to wonder whether they would ever believe? Or seeing someone physically healed despite your doubting prayers?

Habakkuk had that problem. He was asking God why He wasn’t listening, why He wasn’t saving His people. Then, surprise of all surprises, God told Habakkuk that He was going to answer his prayer by using the godless Babylonians to bring God’s judgement upon His people, Judah. In these last few years, God has surprised us here at ER. Let me tell you briefly about it.

Evangelism Resources is getting ready to celebrate another year of God’s leading, provision and blessing on our church-planting and discipleship/leadership-training ministries around the world. We’ve been impressed recently at how God’s Spirit is moving in new places and in new ways that we never could have imagined. The earth is truly being filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, one region after the next.

It is a truism that anytime the kingdom of God advances in territory formerly controlled by the devil, the spiritual warfare is never easy. There is always resistance and there are often casualties. We’ve seen this in Nigeria and India and elsewhere. Prayer is the key to overcoming the opposition, and even then it is a mortal struggle!

Evangelism Resources’ mission statement is “Mobilizing Disciples to Accelerate the Harvest.” We want to evangelize as many of the unreached as possible and to equip them to become disciples and disciple-makers so that they can accelerate the harvest among their own people.

To do this, we provide training through our Schools of Evangelism (SOEs), Portable Bible Schools (PBSes), Mobile Schools of Evangelism (MSOEs), Great Commission Challenge Camps (GC³s), Inductive Bible Study Seminars (IBSes), and WIN (Women’s Impact Network). This is the mobilizing. We focus on the last and the least-reached people groups, especially in India and other countries in the 10/40 Window, in order to complete the mandate of the Great Commission left to us by our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the harvest.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:17, the apostle Paul wrote that believers should pray without ceasing. How do we interpret this? Does it mean we must literally pray all the time? Is this for every individual Christian? If so, how do we do that when it’s time to sleep, go to work, or take care of our families? Perhaps it means, rather, to have an attitude of prayer without ceasing—refusing to do anything, to make any decision, or to launch out into any venture until we have consulted with God in prayer.

To really understand what Paul was saying, we can look at Jesus and see how He did it. Jesus was in constant communion with His Father. He ate, He slept, and He ministered, but in every detail He consulted God.

Readers of this newsletter are familiar with the 10/40 Window, that area of the globe from the 10- to the 40-degrees latitude lines where Jesus’ name is hardly known. Evangelism Resources ministers in some of the darkest recesses of that zone, partnering with indigenous church-planting missions in India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan. Those four nations alone are home to nearly half the world’s 7,400 “UPGs,” Unreached People Groups that have almost no Christian witness. We thank God for the amazing opportunities He has given us to shine His light and to make disciples who make disciples in Southeast Asia, even as we pray for even greater harvests there.

Meanwhile, for years we’ve looked at the spiritual darkness of another major region in the 10/40 Window – North Africa and the Arab world – and prayed that God would open a door to our “evangelism resources” there.

Each year the directors of our Schools of Evangelism (SOEs) submit progress reports and testimonies from current students. Last week Odisha director D.B. Hrudaya sent in his report and 50 testimonies, each one a clear and simple witness of God’s grace and love. In every case students referenced wonderful turning points in their lives.

Interestingly, exactly 50% of these students came from Christian homes and 50% did not. This is a change from nineteen years ago when I first began traveling to India and a clear majority came from Christian backgrounds. I believe this turning point is a result of our emphasis on reaching the unreached and indicates significant inroads into Hinduism and other religions in India.

Evangelism Resources is taking God’s salvation where it is not yet known. We do this primarily by coming alongside local missions in regions where Christ’s kingdom isn’t yet established. We encourage and support them with grassroots leadership-training materials and other resources, helping them make disciples who will make disciples to brightly shine God’s light in the darkness.

ER’s first International School of Evangelism (SOE) opened in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1985. A second school was opened in Nigeria about five years later and from there ER’s ministries jumped to India, Bangladesh, and beyond. Today ER supports 38 SOEs in fourteen nations and in fourteen states of India.

The darker the room, the more brightly the light will shine.

I’ll always remember growing up in Congo (DRC). My missionary parents would often take my two brothers and me with them on weekend evangelism trips. Sometimes, when the village had no church, I could feel an oppressive darkness, a claustrophobic heaviness. I was always happy to return home to Kinkonzi, the mission station on a hill, with its huge church, a Bible Institute with 50 men preparing for ministry, an elementary school with hundreds of Congolese students all dressed in uniform, and a busy hospital and nurses-training school. Kinkonzi seemed full of light to me.

In the early years following the death of Mohammed, the Muslim world expanded westward, gobbling up Christian regions across North Africa and on into Spain. Constantinople fell in 1453, and by 1529 Muslim armies were said to be “knocking on the door of Europe” when they were stopped outside Vienna. Efforts to take back this land and convert the Muslims took place over the centuries, in some cases through direct military action, in others through adopting the Muslim lifestyle and learning Arabic to love them back into the fold of Christ. However, very little was accomplished until a better idea surfaced – Prayer.

About 30 years ago a concerted and ongoing effort was launched to pray for Muslims during Ramadan, Islam’s annual month of fasting and introspection.

There are currently more people outside God’s family than ever before.

Does that bother you? It does me!

In a Sunday evening service during my senior year of high school I experienced God’s compassion and presence so powerfully that my life would be forever changed. I determined to do everything possible so that everyone might know His glory as I had!

It was eleven years of schooling and training before I finally became a full-status missionary. The following four years of planting and establishing churches in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, were wonderfully rewarding! But then health needs necessitated a return to the U.S., and my time in Africa ended.

The November/December issue of News from the Fields has on occasion combined Thanksgiving and Christmas. That’s exactly what we’re doing this year as we highlight an exciting new outreach in India called “Gathering the Neighbors.”

Tradition says that the first Thanksgiving was held by the Pilgrims in 1621—exactly 400 years ago—when they gathered with the Wampanoag Indians to thank God for the successful corn harvest. Sadly, this is one of the few recorded moments of harmony between America’s original inhabitants and the European settlers.

A similar but different kind of gathering of people from different backgrounds is taking place today in Odisha State, India.

“…And let us not be weary in well doing; for in due season, we shall reap if we faint not.” - Galatians 6:9

This scripture notes two things which can keep us from finishing well – weariness and fainting. This weariness is not tiredness. Rather, it is a loss of heart, evidenced by the sigh that escapes when something difficult must be done. The fainting, well that’s what the sigh or the weariness leads to – giving up.

Last month we wrote about several saints who finished well. How did they overcome the temptations to weariness and fainting? First, they maintained fellowship with God. Second, they kept their focus on the cause of Christ. They knew what Christ wanted and they did it. These leaders remained steadfast to the end because they never lost sight of the goal.

How does one finish well? I am convinced that we finish well if we continue to our last breath doing what He has ordained us to do. And as God gives us strength, we will often find that our later years are more productive than our early ones. In his late 70s, Willys shared with me that he had accomplished more in the last ten years of his life than he had in the first 60. This idea of accelerating as we finish is the motivation behind the 2T22 initiative to double the disciple-makers trained in 2019 by 2022. Though the global pandemic may have slowed us down, the game is certainly not over!

One director, sharing what God has done, was moved to heights of glory and concluded with one word: “Hallelujah!” Swept up in the rhapsody of praise, I found myself singing, “. . . ruined sinners to reclaim; Hallelujah, what a Savior!” The old hymn celebrates those who’ve been redeemed, who’ve come to faith, and the many they are bringing with them.

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"What teenage American living in a small town like Hays, Kansas would ever want to learn Chinese???" 

I asked myself that question when I was 17, walking the halls of my high school—blind to both my presumptuousness and the irony I was falling headlong into. 

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Forty-five years ago the first issues of News from the Fields were filled with exciting projections about providing thirty tents for thirty major African cities. Willys Braun, ER co-founder, believed that over a five-year period almost a half million people would come to faith in Christ through those tents. It would be economical, it would bless all churches, and it would push forward the completion of the Great Commission.

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