Spurgeon quote

“In the great day, when the muster-roll shall be read, of all those who are converted through fine music, and church decoration, and religious exhibitions and entertainments, they will amount to the tenth part of nothing; but it will always please God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. Keep to your preaching; and if you do anything beside, do not let it throw your preaching into the background. In the first place preach, and in the second place preach, and in the third place preach."

"Believe in preaching the love of Christ, believe in preaching the atoning sacrifice, believe in preaching the new birth, believe in preaching the whole counsel of God. The old hammer of the gospel will still break the rock in pieces; the ancient fire of Pentecost will still burn among the multitude. Try nothing new, but go on with preaching, and if we all preach with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, the results of preaching will astound us."

Don't miss this great opportunity!

If you are a young person that wants to know what God has in mind for you then you should be in touch with us at BCWE or Vision Baptist Church. God is opening doors for young people to make trips all over the world every summer. You can make plans now for next year for Ireland, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Morocco, China, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Atlanta, and I am sure that I am forgetting some where.

Read here to find out about the plans for North Africa and know how to get in touch with Tyler Masters for next year!

How do you deal with adversity?!

How do you deal with adversity?!

This is a great article for missionaries as they face the stress and adversity of the mission field. Be sure and read it and also subscribe to the Vision News

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quote

“Jesus did not say that the whole world should go to church. Essentially, He said that the church should go to the whole world.” Greg Laurie

Be sure and check out the Vision News

Creationism a threat to human rights?

This came through on the World Magazine blog. Since I think that teaching Creationism is very important on the mission field and in the states as well I thought you might be interested in reading this.

And in the "evil will become good and good, evil" department, the Washington Times reports:

Europe's primary human rights body will vote on a proposal this week to defend the teaching of Darwinian evolution and keep creationist and intelligent design views out of science classes in state schools in its 47 member countries...

A report for the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly said the campaign against evolution has its roots "in forms of religious extremism" and is a dangerous attack on scientific knowledge.

"Today, creationists of all faiths are trying to get their ideas accepted in Europe," it said. "If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights."

It is the belief that men were created by God in His image that generated Western ideals of universal liberty, women's rights, and democracy itself. The authors of the above report are the Left's "useful idiots," leading Europe's "human rights" toward ideological suicide. Posted by worldmag at June 25, 2007 07:38 AM

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YOUR DISPOSITION ON DEPUTATION

by Missionary Tony Howeth



It has been stated that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to those things and their consequences. There is much truth to that in life and especially concerning Deputation. I am sure none of these are original! I learned or heard them from someone else but have been very much personalized over the last 16 months. I pray these will help you as you serve our Lord on Deputation.



D – Discern why you are on deputation. If the total focus of your time, travel and teaching is to get money you will be sorely disappointed when no love offering comes your way. You are given the opportunity to stir, motivate and encourage others about the greatest thing ever and that is world evangelism. Would you rather have a “good love offering” or have a young man surrender to the call to preach? If God can’t use you to minister to the lives of people on deputation, what makes you think that He would use you to minister to others once you get to the field?





E – Educate yourself as to your responsibility. Many missionaries complain of being on deputation for so long yet they have been in relatively few churches. The question is not how many months have you been on deputation but how many churches have you been in? I have met brothers who have been on deputation for a year and a half and have 30% of their support. That is not the problem, the problem is that they have only been in 75 different churches….that is only one new church a week! That is the problem! All of us will have to go to around 200 churches….you must decide how quickly you want to do that! Call, fill your schedule, write letters and learn how to present your ministry. Try to average 12+ meetings a month and once you are in a church present your work by God’s grace in such a way that they will never forget your name and the field you are going to. Again, learn how to do a calendar, make phone calls, schedule your meetings, present your work, carry yourself, talk to pastor’s, etc. God will do His part…will we do ours? Be careful not to blame God for something you were responsible for.





P – Protect your family time. You may have to get up earlier or stay up later but your family still needs you. I have been in full time ministry for 16 years and have never experienced the strain on my marriage and my family like deputation has done. My personal opinion is that when I pastored, I carried in all inside and on myself. Deputation takes its toll on everyone. There is no shielding the children from the scrutiny, long drives, dead services, etc. On deputation it wears on everyone and no one has the opportunity to be oblivious to it. Safeguard your marriage and children. Sir, it may be your attitude is not what it ought to be because the attitude of your wife is not what it ought to be. As the man helps your family to have the attitude they should and you will be surprised how it will help your attitude.







U – Understand you are not in competition with other missionaries. When you go into a conference they are not your enemies, they are fellow- soldiers. Stop comparing your love offerings, monthly reports, gifts, meeting, etc. to them. It is amazing how quickly your attitude can change when you find out another missionary got twice the love offering you did or scheduled a meeting after one phone call when you have called the same church a thousand times. We need to learn to rejoice with a missionary family when God has showered down blessings on them.





T – Thank those who assist you on your way. Write a thank you letter for the pastor giving you a meeting and then send him a thank you card after the meeting. (Your card could be post cards from your field to remind him of where you are going.) Thank individuals who invest in your ministry. Do not ever take someone’s sacrifice to help you for granted no matter how meager or humble it may seem. Attitudes are ruined on deputation when we think we deserve their time, money and help. Expect nothing and be thankful for everything.





A – Admit your own faults. Deputation is an opportunity for God in heaven to have His way in and through your life. Stop blaming the churches, pastors, children and wife….look in the mirror and admit there are things in your character that need a touch from God. Be man enough to say, “It is my fault.”, “I am sorry.”, “I was wrong.” Instead of, “What could the church have done differently?” Ask yourself, “What could I have done differently?”





T – Try not to get into needless debt. Be careful of taking the check or cash and putting all your expenses on a credit card and blowing the money at the same time. Financial pressure can ruin your day…make sure you did not bring it onto yourself. Keep a handle on what is coming in and what is going out. Many on deputation get a bad attitude over money they think they should have gotten but it may be God saw they were not a good steward of what they were getting so why should He give them more?





I – Insist on times alone with God. There are times when ones schedule is very demanding; it is then that you must seek first the kingdom of God . Refuel your life in the Word and in prayer. If you are working as you ought, you will constantly be giving to the spiritual needs of others. Be very careful that the Word of God does not become ordinary in your life. Let it truly be your life to quicken your spirit each and every day. Most of the time a bad attitude comes from not walking close to God.





O – Obey the Pastor. He has graciously allowed you to enter the church God has given him the responsibility of and to preach in his pulpit. Stop grumbling how you think he ought to treat you and honor him as the man of God. This is not about “what is right” but about you having a disposition that is pleasing to God. I can not control the how or the why of a pastor degrading me but I can control my mouth and heart toward him. Be careful that you do not train your children to bad mouth the man of God because one day the man of God they bad mouth may be you. Follow his time schedule whatever he gives you take two minutes less. Be a help to the pastor and his church….as you help the church one day when the church is able I believe the church will help you.





N – Never judge how your meeting will go with a church based on the testimony of another missionary. If theirs went badly then you will go in thinking, “This is going to stink!” (and it probably will because of your attitude.) If theirs went really well and the church helped them in a major way, you will be disappointed if they do not do the same for you. Then your family gets to put up with your sorry attitude all the way home. God is going to do different things, in different places with different people. Let God be God when you go into a meeting and see what He does!



By no means is this all inclusive! These are only a few areas that you will deal with that has the potential of changing your focus and ruining your disposition on deputation. Men if we fail on deputation, what will we do in language school and starting churches in a foreign culture? May God use deputation as a foundation to build a great work all over the world through Missionaries just like you!

Cleaning out the closet

Let me invite you to read this blog on the Vision News. I think all missionaries should be an example in modesty!

“Don’t wait for your opportunity, make it.”

“Young men and women, why stand ye here all the day idle? Was the land all occupied before you were born? Has the earth ceased to yield its increase? Are the seats all taken? The positions all filled? The chances all gone? Are the resources of your country fully developed? Are the secrets of nature all mastered? Is there no way in which you can utilize these passing moments to improve yourself or benefit another? Is the competition of modern existence so fierce that you must be content to simply gain an honest living? Have you received the gift of life in this progressive age, where in all the experience of the past is garnered for your inspiration, merely that you may increase by one the sum total of purely animal existence?

“Don’t wait for your opportunity, make it.”

Orisen Swett Marden

The Guidebook for Taking a Life

The following article was taken from the New York Times

I wanted you to read it because we took the Our Generation Leadership Conference to a Muslim temporary mosque and were told that Muslims to not kill innocents and that a Holy War only goes on as long as both parties want it to and if one says that is enough then it will be over. Apparently there is a great contradiction in this article and what our "teacher" said. It was mentioned that he was just being political and I believe that this proves that to be true.

We were in a small house in Zarqa, Jordan, trying to interview two heavily bearded Islamic militants about their distribution of recruitment videos when one of us asked one too many questions.

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Bejar

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Ali Haider/European Pressphoto Agency

PERMITTED? Amid the chaos of car bombings, like this one in Baghdad in 2005, some can discern rules.

“He’s American?” one of the militants growled. “Let’s kidnap and kill him.”

The room fell silent. But before anyone could act on this impulse, the rules of jihadi etiquette kicked in. You can’t just slaughter a visitor, militants are taught by sympathetic Islamic scholars. You need permission from whoever arranges the meeting. And in this case, the arranger who helped us to meet this pair declined to sign off.

“He’s my guest,” Marwan Shehadeh, a Jordanian researcher, told the bearded men.

With Islamist violence brewing in various parts of the world, the set of rules that seek to guide and justify the killing that militants do is growing more complex.

This jihad etiquette is not written down, and for good reason. It varies as much in interpretation and practice as extremist groups vary in their goals. But the rules have some general themes that underlie actions ranging from the recent rash of suicide bombings in Algeria and Somalia, to the surge in beheadings and bombings by separatist Muslims in Thailand.

Some of these rules have deep roots in the Middle East, where, for example, the Egyptian Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi has argued it is fine to kill Israeli citizens because their compulsory military service means they are not truly civilians.

The war in Iraq is reshaping the etiquette, too. Suicide bombers from radical Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups have long been called martyrs, a locution that avoids the Koran’s ban on killing oneself in favor of the honor it accords death in battle against infidels. Now some Sunni militants are urging the killing of Shiites, alleging that they are not true Muslims. If there seems to be no published playbook, there are informal rules, and these were gathered by interviewing militants and their leaders, Islamic clerics and scholars in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and England, along with government intelligence officials in the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

Islamic militants who embrace violence may account for a minuscule fraction of Muslims in the world, but they lay claim to the breadth of Islamic teachings in their efforts to justify their actions. “No jihadi will do any action until he is certain this action is morally acceptable,” says Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident who runs a leading jihad Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, in London, where he now lives.

Here are six of the more striking jihadi tenets, as militant Islamists describe them:

Rule No. 1: You can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt.

The Koran, as translated by the University of Southern California Muslim Student Association’s Compendium of Muslim Texts, generally prohibits the slaying of innocents, as in Verse 33 in Chapter 17 (Isra’, The Night Journey, Children of Israel): “Nor take life, which Allah has made sacred, except for just cause.”

But the Koran also orders Muslims to resist oppression, as verses 190 and 191 of Chapter 2 (The Cow) instruct: “Fight in the cause of Allah with those who fight with you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors. And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out, for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter. ...”

In the typical car bombing, some Islamists say, God will identify those who deserve to die — for example, anyone helping the enemy — and send them to hell. The other victims will go to paradise. “The innocent who is hurt, he won’t suffer,” Dr. Massari says. “He becomes a martyr himself.”

There is one gray area. If you are a Muslim who has sinned, getting killed by a suicide bomber will clean some of your slate for Judgment Day, but precisely where God draws the line between those who go to heaven or hell is not spelled out.

Rule No. 2: You can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.

True, Islamic texts say it is unlawful to kill children, women, the old and the infirm. In the Sahih Bukhari, a respected collection of sermons and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, verse 4:52:257 refers to Ghazawat, a battle in which Muhammad took part. “Narrated Abdullah: During some of the Ghazawat of the Prophet a woman was found killed. Allah’s Apostle disapproved the killing of women and children.”

But militant Islamists including extremists in Jordan who embrace Al Qaeda’s ideology teach recruits that children receive special consideration in death. They are not held accountable for any sins until puberty, and if they are killed in a jihad operation they will go straight to heaven. There, they will instantly age to their late 20s, and enjoy the same access to virgins and other benefits as martyrs receive.

Islamic militants are hardly alone in seeking to rationalize innocent deaths, says John O. Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University. “Whether you are talking about leftist radicals here in the 1960s, or the apologies for civilian collateral damage in Iraq that you get from the Pentagon, the argument is that if the action is just, the collateral damage is justifiable,” he says.

Rule No. 3: Sometimes, you can single out civilians for killing; bankers are an example.

In principle, nonfighters cannot be targeted in a militant operation, Islamist scholars say. But the list of exceptions is long and growing.

Civilians can be killed in retribution for an enemy attack on Muslim civilians, argue some scholars like the Saudi cleric Abdullah bin Nasser al-Rashid, whose writings and those of other prominent Islamic scholars have been analyzed by the Combating Terrorism Center, a research group at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

Shakir al-Abssi, whose Qaeda-minded group, Fatah Al Islam, has been fighting Lebanese soldiers since May 20, says some government officials are fair game. He was sentenced to death in Jordan for helping to organize the slaying of the American diplomat Laurence Foley in 2002, and said in an interview with The New York Times that while he did not specifically choose Mr. Foley to be killed, “Any person that comes to our region with a military, security or political aim, then he is a legitimate target.”

Others like Atilla Ahmet, a 42-year-old Briton of Cypriot descent who is awaiting trial in England on terrorism charges, take a broader view. “It would be legitimate to attack banks because they charge interest, and this is in violation of Islamic law,” Mr. Ahmet said last year.

Rule No. 4: You cannot kill in the country where you reside unless you were born there.

Militants living in a country that respects the rights of Muslims have something like a peace contract with the country, says Omar Bakri, a radical sheik who moved from London to Lebanon two years ago under pressure from British authorities.

Militants who go to Iraq get a pass as expeditionary warriors. And the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not violate this rule since the hijackers came from outside the United States, Mr. Bakri said.

“When I heard about the London bombings, I prayed that no bombers from Britain were involved,” he said, fearing immigrants were responsible. As it turned out, the July 7, 2005, attack largely complied with this rule. Three of the four men who set off the bombs had been born in Britain; the fourth moved there from Jamaica as an infant.

Mr. Bakri says he does not condone violence against innocent people anywhere. But some of the several hundred young men who studied Islam with him say they have no such qualms.

“We have a voting system here in Britain, so anyone who is voting for Tony Blair is not a civilian and therefore would be a legitimate target,” says Khalid Kelly, an Irish-born Islamic convert who says he studied with Mr. Bakri in London.

Rule No. 5: You can lie or hide your religion if you do this for jihad.

Muslims are instructed by the Koran to be true to their religion. “Therefore stand firm (in the straight Path) as thou art commanded, thou and those who with thee turn (unto Allah), and transgress not (from the Path), for He seeth well all that you do,” says verse 112 of Chapter 11 (Hud). Lying is allowed only when it is deemed a necessity, for example when being tortured, or when an innocuous deception serves a good purpose, scholars say.

But some militants appear to shirk this rule to blend in with non-Muslim surroundings or deflect suspicion, says Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, the general director of Lebanon’s internal security force who oversaw a surveillance last year of a Lebanese man suspected of plotting to blow up the PATH train under the Hudson River.

“We thought the story couldn’t be true, especially when we followed this young man,” General Rifi said. “He was going out, drinking, chasing girls, drove a red MG.” But he says the man, who is now awaiting trial in Lebanon, confessed, and Mr. Rifi recalled that the Sept. 11 hijacker who came from Lebanon frequented discos in Beirut.

Mr. Voll takes a different view of the playboy-turned-militant phenomenon. He says the Sept. 11 hijackers might simply have been “guys who enjoyed a good drink” and that militant leaders may be seeking to do a “post facto scrubbing up of their image” by portraying sins as a ruse.

Rule No. 6. You may need to ask your parents for their consent.

Militant Islamists interpret the Koran and the separate teachings of Muhammad that are known as the Sunna as laying out five criteria to be met by people wanting to be jihadis. They must be Muslim, at least 15 and mature, of sound mind, debt free and have parental permission.

The parental rule is currently waived inside Iraq, where Islamists say it is every Muslim’s duty to fight the Americans, Dr. Massari says. It is optional for residents of nearby countries, like Jordan.

In Zarqa, Jordan, the 24-year-old Abu Ibrahim says he is waiting for another chance to be a jihadi after Syrian officials caught him in the fall heading to Iraq. He is taking the parental rule one step further, he said. His family is arranging for him to marry, and he feels obligated to disclose his jihad plans to any potential bride.

“I will inform my future wife of course about my plans, and I hope that, God willing, she might join me,” he said.

Deputation Tips

Do not miss the new blog that Tony Howeth has started called Deputation Tips. It will have a lot of information that will be very helpful to you in your ministry. You can sign up for it via email or through your reader.

Click here to go to Deputation Tips by Tony Howeth