2022 FIRE Midwest Regional Fellowship The Beauty of Christ (Session 3)

Specifically, some of you are friends with, either personally or on Facebook, Jim Eliff, who's the president of Christian Communicators Worldwide. And he's doing well, thankfully. He's had a little bit of health stuff going on, but he's just back from ministry in Southern Arkansas with pastors.

And so I'm really thankful for that because it's been a bit of a challenge for him the past five or six months. I think the best thing, if you're interested in Christian Communicators Worldwide, who we are, what we do, go to our website, which is ccwtoday .org.

You might write that down and just check it out later, flip over there quickly, realize I don't want to look at this anymore, or you may want to stay there and see it. So ccwtoday .org. We are really about encouraging the church, teaching, kind of have itinerant teaching ministry, stuff that we do.

We do some writing, and you'll see some articles there where we're about training church leaders, both in the United States, but also around the world. And really love that. We've been in some churches for what we call Bible intensives, and it's just hours, Friday evening, holiday Saturday, of inductive Bible study, really leading groups of people, either leaders or men, or men and women, whatever, in just a wonderful time of highly interactive inductive Bible study.

So you may read about that there as well. They're called Bible intensives or Bible intensive retreats. So ccwtoday .org. We also, I have a table back there, and there are books there that you might notice are free.

So we have, for decades, charged for our books, which makes sense. There's a good reason for ministries to ask for a little bit of money for books that they write. And we just have decided for this season, however long it is, that the Lord's provided, and we want to give our resources away.

So we hope they're helpful resources, and, you know, now these things, these books do cost a little bit, so we hope you won't just pick up a book and just set it on the shelf. So we really would like you to, if you're going to pick up a book for free, or go online and you can order a book or books, only pay shipping and handling.

We have to pay that person, who happens to be my daughter, who does that. But still, you'll get the books free and just pay for the shipping and handling. We hope you would either read it or strategically distribute them.

So for example, I mean, you know, a couple of his books have been distributed by the hundreds of thousands in English alone. They've been translated in multiple languages, Pursuing God, Wasted Faith, and guys are getting these and using them for evangelism, and we're happy for that, to just give them to you for that purpose.

One book I really hope you'll pick up, this is our newest book, and I wrote this book, and it's about John Wycliffe, a Bible man in England when there was no English Bible. And I tried to write it in a way that it wasn't very boring.

So that's hard sometimes, the church history. Tried to have some application there, and really, hopefully it'll be inspirational. You can even read it with your families as well. I think kids can understand.

An amazing story. He was a Bible man. You know, the first English translation of the Bible from John Wycliffe. And then there wasn't anything until Tyndale, and that was quite a while later. An amazing, amazing thing to read about, and hopefully inspirational.

So again, you can get those books on the book table. Check out our websites, ccwtoday .org. Finally, please pray for one of our team members, and in particular, his wife. Cole Farney was a pastor in Kansas City with us, but he was also part of this ministry, and he had to move back to Sterling, Kansas with his wife, who is unbelievably ill.

She's in her 30s, dealing with, some of you knew Jordan Peterson's thing, akathisia. Perhaps have heard what he came out of. I mean, I just was re-looking at this. Rachel put this list together. This is akathisia every morning.

There are no words to describe this except hell on earth, she says. Nothing makes me want to die more. Burning, crawling, itching skin. Grief, the sense of loss. Everything good in my life constantly overwhelms me.

Morning cortisol adrenaline surges. My brain has been hijacked and imprisoned and is being tortured relentlessly. She's in agony constantly. Physical agony, mental agony, and Cole has gone from, he is a really good Bible teacher.

He was the most pastoral among all the pastors in our church, and he has just, he just can't do any of that now. He just is taking care of his very ill wife, and she has been like this for multiple years now.

And some of you know this situation and get the updates from Cole, but we would just really appreciate for you to pray for Rachel Farney and also to pray for Cole. He is doing some things for the ministry.

He's able to do menial tasks, financial stuff, and work on the farm for his dad. But otherwise, here's a brother who has tremendous gifts to write and to teach the Bible, and he just hasn't been able to do it.

He's been in a deep, deep valley. So pray for Cole as well, thank you.

Well, good afternoon, brothers and sisters. I wanna just say first off the bat, I do not normally wear this. So this is, as you can see up on the screen, my wife and I and our children are preparing for gospel missions in the nation of Iceland, and this is called a Lape Pesa, which is essentially the traditional Icelandic wool sweater.

It is very itchy, it is very warm, but I thought it would be helpful for you to see. So as I mentioned, my name is Dale Keller. I am not a part of a fire church, but I am a friend of LaRue Baptist Church.

Pastor Andrew is a dear brother, a dear friend of mine. We've been connected for a long time. Seen each other through quite some difficult ministry experiences as well, so I'm so appreciative for him as a brother.

Before I begin to tell you a little bit about our ministry, I wanna read the passage that Pastor Dana preached from last evening. I thought it was so pertinent to the topic of missions. Reading from Psalm 96.

Oh, sing to the Lord a new song. Sing to the Lord all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name, and tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all peoples.

For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him.

Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. And that's what we go, as we go not only to our neighbors, but to the nations and take the gospel to foreign lands. We are proclaiming that there is one only true God who made the heavens and the earth.

So before I begin, I wanna tell you a little bit about Iceland. If you're anything like me, up until two years ago, the only thing I could have told you about Iceland was that Iceland is green and Greenland is icy.

It has something to do with Vikings, and that's about it. That's what most people know. One of the first questions I usually get, and I'm just gonna answer it right off the bat, is no, we are not going to live in an igloo.

I cannot tell you how many people have actually asked that question. So geographically, Iceland sits right on the Arctic Circle. It's just this little hunk of volcanic rock that's floating out there in the middle of the North Atlantic all by itself.

Here's a map of what Iceland looks like. So as you can see, there's nothing here in the middle. That's because that is all glacier, mountain, and volcano. So every community in Iceland is a coastal community.

Most of them are small little fishing towns. And the capital area, which is Reykjavik, which is right over here, that is where most of the population of the nation live, which is where we are also going to be ministering when we get there.

Because it sits on the Arctic Circle, there's a picture of Reykjavik. Population is about 136 ,000 people. So kind of just to give you a mindset, so it's equivalent to the size of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

I'm from Michigan. I don't know if that helps all of you. It helps me. So the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, but the population is right around 375 ,000 people. Which is a quarter of the size of the county that I live in.

So it's a very sparsely populated nation. And because it sits on the Arctic Circle, mid-summer, if you're familiar with Alaska, pretty similar, mid-summer they experience 24 hours of sunlight for about two months of the year.

And then in the winter, of course it's the flip, they get about three hours of sunlight in mid-winter. So that's a whole climate challenge that we're gonna have to deal with and to face. Iceland was settled by pagan Vikings around the year 864.

They got fed up with their king from Norway and they got on a boat and said, we're getting out of here. Landed on this little rock and said, I guess this is ours now. So they settled. And pretty quickly, what was interesting is that Catholicism actually arrived only about 150 years after Iceland was settled.

Of course, if you know anything about the history of Europe, national conversions usually were done at the point of the sword, unfortunately. And Iceland was no different. The king of Norway set his missionary sites on Iceland and sent some of his comrades to go and to bring the faith to the Icelandic people.

And they essentially said, you either convert or we're going to invade and take over. So the chieftains at that point in time figured it was in their best interest to stay in power and by doing that, they should probably convert to Catholicism.

So it was a national faith that was adopted. Once the Reformation in the 1500s, of course, swept through Europe, Iceland also was reached with the Reformation, came to Iceland around the year 1538. But again, unfortunately, most of those conversions to Lutheranism were done at the point of the sword.

Those who wanted to remain Catholic were beheaded. And since then, Iceland has been officially Lutheran about the year 1550 to the present. So the state-sponsored religious body in the nation of Iceland is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland, which is about 63 of the population, are still members, registered members of the church.

And of course, if you know anything about any denomination that starts with Evangelical Lutheran Church of, it's usually not evangelical, it's barely Lutheran, and it doesn't really present itself as a church.

And unfortunately, the ELCI in Iceland is similar. So all throughout the nation in Iceland, every community has a little church building in them. Many of their communities are actually named after their churches.

So they're all over the place. They're beautiful, just little historical buildings, and they're empty shelves. There's no congregations, there's no pastors. Someone I was talking to earlier said they were going through Germany, and they said it's very similar.

They're basically museums to a bygone era. So a lot of Europe is that way, and Iceland is no different. So when we think about the Icelandic church, they have strayed very far into secularism. Just to give you kind of an example, back in 2020, at the height of COVID, they thought the best thing that they could do was kind of to wave the flag of secularism.

So in 2020, their children's Easter Sunday school program had a transgender Jesus in it, which kind of tells you all you need to know about a church when this is what they're putting out for their children in the church.

Likewise, just a couple months ago, after the reversal of Roe versus Wade, a coalition of Icelandic bishops got together and essentially said that the Bible is pro-abortion, and if you disagree, you're part of a cult.

So again, this is just painting the picture of what the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland is like. And of course, as goes the church, oftentimes so goes the people. In a recent national survey, those aged 30 and under who participated, not a single person in Iceland said that they believed in a creator God, exactly 0 .0%, which is hard to believe considering if you've ever seen pictures of Iceland, the landscapes are beautiful.

God's creative hand is so present there, and so just that denial of what is clearly evident before them. Atheism has been on a very quick rise, especially amongst the younger generations, and it's not so much hardened atheism like we think about, it's more so, like in America, we're facing, of course, a growing group of nuns, religious nuns, people who don't care, or apotheism is what it's being termed now, just people who don't have any concern or any care for life's biggest questions.

The other thing that's taken place recently is a resurrection of Norse paganism in Iceland. Of course, this is mostly cultural heritage, but there's a growing movement of what's called Ásatru, Norse paganism, which was officially recognized as a recognized religion in Iceland in the 90s.

So that's actually gaining a lot of speed as well, people returning to their Nordic roots in order to participate in that. So as we think of how people perceive themselves religiously, sociologists look at five different aspects of how this comes out in personalities.

The first one is, of course, self-identification. How do you identify as an individual? Most Icelanders will still identify as Christian because many of them, most of them, are still members of the state church.

Babies are immediately baptized upon their birth, and they are then registered members of the state church. So you're baptized as an infant, and that's about it. That's the extent of participation. So public practice, as I mentioned, they're baptized, they're married, maybe, that's not a very common thing that happens anymore, and then they're buried.

So after a baby is born, that's usually the last time and they'll step foot inside a church until they pass away. So that's the public practice of people in Iceland. And so, of course, if that's the minimal public practice, then private practice, there's essentially nothing when it comes to Christian faith.

And Icelanders, they are very intelligent, very educated and well-read, and so there's a lot of materialism within the Icelandic mindset, very minimal belief. And so the importance of religion, then, is essentially, it's just cultural.

It's what you do. If you can imagine, if your grandparents have been members of the state church their whole lives and they want you as their grandchild, you have a new baby, they're like, please, get our kid in the state church.

And so it's really that family pressure. That's the only reason that the state church basically still exists anymore. So what does Iceland need as gospel missions go forth? So first of all, obviously, Iceland is substantially post-Christian.

It's right around .03 evangelical, which, because of the population of the nation, comes out to about 200 people in the entire country that self-identify as Bible-believing Christians. So clearly, there's a huge need there and a huge lack of true Bible-believing Christians.

There are approximately right around three churches in the entire country that actually preach any semblance of the gospel, and all three of those are within the capital area. So every other town and community around the nation, they don't have a single faithful, biblical, local church body in them.

So that's, of course, a huge need as well. Clearly, the state church presents a false gospel, which can only offer a false sense of hope and security. So there's a huge need there for the gospel to go forth as well.

And then the other thing, which is no surprise, is that there's a huge lack of theological education for church leaders. One of the elders of the church that we're going to be partnering with when we get there, he went and sat in on the first introductory class of the religion department at the University of Iceland, and he was informing us that the first thing that they say when you sit down in this class is that if you've come to learn anything about scripture, Christ, or creation, you've come to the wrong place.

I guess at least I appreciate that they wear their cards on their, like, you know, they put all their cards on the table. But that's, you know, there's no wonder why the church has drifted this far into secularism.

So when we think about the Icelanders, they have this unofficial slogan, which is stettaredist, which loosely translates into English as everything will work out in the end. If you can imagine a people group that has been in survival mode since they've basically existed, whether it's a volcano going off in your backyard, whether it's, you know, the sheep are being decimated by wild animals, a plague, a famine, whatever it may be, the Icelanders have been in survival mode since their very beginnings.

And so they've adopted this mindset of everything will work out in the end. You could say hakuna matata. You know, we will make it through no matter what happens. And as believers, especially as Reformed Christians, there is a whole lot of truth that we can recognize to this statement, right?

Romans 8 talks about for those who, you know, love God, all things work together for good. God is in control, God is sovereign, and everything truly will work out in the end. But when you remove any mindset of faith or Christianity or anything gospel-minded, when you remove that out of the equation, you have to fill that hole with something like, why is everything going to work out in the end?

Why do you believe that to be true? So what's interesting about Iceland, it is a land of contrasts, darkness and light, fire and ice, it's called the land of fire and ice, glaciers and volcanoes. So it's a land of extremes.

Just to kind of paint that picture for you. So I'm not sure how you do this, but apparently every year, there's some organization out there that measures world happiness. I'm not sure how you do that, what the equation is for that.

But almost without fail, Iceland comes in at the top five of the world's happiest people almost every year. Last year, they came in at number three in the world for the happiest people. Iceland consistently comes in at number one on the global peace index.

They're the only nation in Europe that has never been in a war, and the only nation in Europe that doesn't have a standing army. So it's a very peaceful, very happy. Excuse me, they also are well known around Europe as being one of the best places for women to live, because they have the highest level of gender equality in the workplace as well.

So you would imagine if they're this happy and they're this peaceful and they're this equal, okay, we're good to go. So the other issue is that in 2020, and Iceland consistently also comes in at number one in the world for the highest consumption of antidepressants.

Now, how you put the happiest, the most peaceful, the most equal, and the most oppressed all together in one equation, and I'm not entirely sure how you do that, but that just reveals the state of the spiritual need of the Icelandic people.

And so this is really the challenge of ministry in a context like Iceland. It's a people group that don't see a need for a savior. They're apathetic about life's biggest questions, which we all seek to answer.

And Mark chapter 10, if you're familiar with that at all, that's the story of the rich young ruler who comes to Christ. And what's the first thing he asked Jesus? He says, what can I do? What can I do to inherit eternal life?

He doesn't say, you know, how do I inherit life? It's what can I do? And Christ very quickly reveals the flaw of his very beginning question. And of course, we know the story ends with the rich young ruler going away very sad because he had great possessions and great wealth.

And this is the Icelanders. They see no need for a savior. They're apathetic about life's questions. And so that's the challenge of how do you bring the gospel into the world? How do you bring the gospel into that type of culture?

So of course, how did we get here? Right, that is now that we know all of this background information about Iceland, the next question people typically ask is like, now how on earth did this chunk of rock come onto your radar?

And truthfully, it all started in the year 2020. We all remember it well. And in the midst of the pandemic, my wife and I, we had just moved out of a ministry position. I was serving as a pastor at a church in Northern Michigan.

And we had just moved down to the Metro Detroit area, which is where we live now. And because it was 2020, we all seem to find a little more free time in our schedules. And so I figured, why not? Let's read a book about the Black Plague.

It's topical, it's 2020. So as I was reading this book about the Black Death, the author made this comment. And she said, if I was alive during the Black Plague, I would have wanted to have lived in Iceland because it never even made it there.

And then she just kept on going. And it was like this light bulb went off in my mind. And I thought to myself, first of all, where is this place? I had no idea where Iceland was. I couldn't have pointed it out on a map.

I had nothing, no context for what it was like at all. But it was just this like a pebble in your shoe. I kept thinking to myself, has the gospel even reached it? Where is this place that the plague that wiped out 50 of Europe never even made it?

Has the gospel reached Iceland? What are the state of the church in Iceland? And that just continued to fester and to grow. And we started to do research and everything. And if you Google what is the state of Christianity in Europe or in Iceland, the first thing that it will say on Google, excuse me, is that 90 of Icelanders are Christians, which of course, if you know anything about world history, you might say, oh, I don't believe that at all.

That's exactly what I said. I don't believe that there's any nation in Europe or in the world that's actually 90 Christian. And so it didn't take very much digging to find out all these things I just shared with you about the true spiritual state of Iceland.

So at that point in time, we had just become members at our church in Auburn Hills called Five Points Community Church. It's not named that on purpose, but it's very good that we're a reformed church because that'd be awkward to be called Five Points Community Church and not be reformed.

So as my wife and I were sitting down for our membership interview with two of our elders, they began to ask us, what was our passion in life? What sort of ministry did we wanna get engaged in? And we began to tell them a little bit about Iceland and God laying it on our hearts.

And one of the elders was sitting there just smirking this whole time. We're thinking, well, this is strange. And at the end of sharing all of this with him, he smiles and he says, well, I have some good news for you.

He says, I'm the head of the missions committee. My family is all Icelandic. And my wife and I have been praying for 30 years that God would send a family to Iceland. We're like, okay, God clearly brought us to the right church.

We must be at the only church in Michigan, if not in the US, that has an Icelandic elder who is over the missions board. So we got connected with Reaching and Teaching International Ministries, which is our sending agency.

And very quickly we got connected with the Iceland Project, which is a church planting network there in Iceland whose vision and goal is to see churches planted all around the nation. So the church that we're going to be joining is called Lofstafan, which just means upper room.

And this little church has quite a story. So one of our brothers this morning shared that their church basically began as a Bible study in their living room. And that's exactly how Lofstafan started. So Gunnar, that strapping young Viking guy right there, he is one of the pastors.

He was the planting pastor. He was the planting pastor of Lofstafan. And when we first met him, he explained to us that he grew up, he said if Benny Hinn and Joel Olsteen had a baby, that was his father in Iceland.

He grew up in the number one prosperity church in Iceland. And that was his context. That's what he thought Christianity was. So when he became 18, he said, I want nothing to do with this. And he came to the United States.

And he became an associate pastor, actually at a church here in the States. And after about three years, he realized, wow, I've never actually been a Christian. So he thought, I should probably not be doing this.

So he stepped out of ministry and then started going through some training and some discipleship and then actually, truly came to faith in Christ. And then he just winds up, he just so happens to wind up at a church in Virginia that had already been praying about planting a church in Iceland.

But they had no clue who was gonna go do it. They didn't know who was gonna be willing to do it. And in walks this kid who, he ended up going through theological training. They discipled him, grew him.

He went through an internship there. And they looked at him and they said, you need to go back. And he said, there's no way I'm going back. And they said, well, you're the guy. God is calling you back to Iceland.

So he and his wife went back to Iceland. Gunnar essentially posted a post on Facebook and said, we're gonna start a Bible study in our living room. And if anyone would like to join us, we'd love to have you join us.

And Frithberg and Kristine were the only other two, the only other family for the first year of this church that faithfully came to this Bible study in their living room. So the first year, it was just two families praying together, studying God's word, sharing their faith as much as they could.

And now Lovstafan has grown to about a membership of 40 people with over 12 different nations represented. So it's, I mean, it's a small church, but it's actually the third largest congregation in the nation as well with 40 members.

And it's just incredible to see this little beacon of light in this nation of darkness. They also sponsored the only ministry to university students in the nation, which is just an incredible way to spread the gospel to the nations.

So Lovstafan is the only church right now in the Iceland project. It's the only one in this network of churches. So it's not really a network yet, but one of the elders is actually going to be leaving.

He and his wife and a couple other families are going to plant another church within the next year. So we praise God for that as well. So our journey, our goal as a family to get there, we're aiming to get there by June of 2023.

That's our vision and our hope. We've committed to a minimum of three terms of service in Iceland, which with our agency, a term is four years. So we've committed to 12 years of a minimum serving there in Iceland.

Our first term is going to be primarily focused on learning the language and adjusting to the culture and learning the mindset of the Icelanders. Their language, which is Icelandic, is an extremely important part of their culture.

So we're gonna be, of course, doing as much as we can to learn the language. My wife and I are both going to be taking university classes as we continue to pour into our church as well there. The second term, our focus is going to be on, the goal is for me to be an elder of Lovstafan and to continue to receive ministerial training.

And then our third term, our vision is for my wife and I and another core group of believers to launch out and to plant another church wherever the need is discerned at that point in time. So ways you can pray for us.

Some of these may be obvious, but first of all, praying for Iceland. Pray for the faithfulness of the young community of believers that are there, the small community. As you've seen, it's hostile to Christians.

It's not a persecution issue, but Christians all around the country are considered to be bigoted. They're considered backwards thinking, you know, not up with the times whatsoever. So it's a very, very hard climate to be ministering in, especially as such a small community.

Of course, we'd long to see the repentance of the Icelandic people en masse. They say that two baptisms a year is essentially a revival. So it's very slow work, but that's, of course, what we long to see.

Naturally, they also need a lot more help. Iceland is not on basically anybody's radar, understandably, so there's so few laborers there and we truly do believe that the harvest is ready. So pray for more laborers to go and to be willing to take a part in the ministry.

And then, of course, their long-term goal, their hope is to become a mission-sending force themselves, to see Icelanders taking the gospel to the nations as well. So continue to be praying for that.

And how you can pray for us, we ask that you would pray for patience in this season as we are very excited to get there, but we also don't want to lose sight of the forest for the trees. You know, we want to continue to invest in our church as long as we're here in our community, in our neighborhood.

So please pray for us that we would be patient and trust God's timing. Protection, this has been already a season of highs and lows. There's been, you know, great opportunities, but also just doubt and distractions.

So pray for protection for our family from that. Grace, and between my wife and I, as well as with our raising our three young kids, not exactly the point of life that we thought we would be heading to the missions field as we have three kids under the age of four.

So we're, you know, we need continued grace poured out upon us as well. As I mentioned, we want to continue to be faithful while we are here. So faithfulness in our ministry and in our community. And lastly, just that we would continue to find avenues of building a strong support team, both financially and prayerfully, that of course, that is how we get there.

So just be praying for that. This is the last slide, I promise. This has essentially become our family's life verse, John 1, 5, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. As we consider a spiritually and physically dark nation like Iceland, we're comforted and we are assured of the fact that the light of Christ will shine in the darkness.

We know that as, you know, it's not just a maybe, that's a promise. We know that when Christ comes back and when the saints are gathered around the throne, there will be men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation.

And we know without a doubt that Icelandic will be one of those languages praising God. So that's our heart and that's our ministry and thank you for your time.

That's it. Wow, it worked.

It did.

I want to say, to start off, a big thank you to Steve. I just met the brother yesterday and a good audio-visual sound person is a gift to a church. So you are blessed. You are blessed. That was me.

That's why we don't make big egos. We all hide in the back.

That will teach me to just, I know, that'll teach me to shift my foot, right, as I'm in the middle of introducing myself. This is my first time to visit a fire conference. It is my privilege and my pleasure to fellowship with all of you.

My name is Craig Thompson. I am with Cary International Pastoral Training, a missions organization that provides training for pastors around the world. And it is my delight to be here with you today. I am first time here, but Cary has been here in the past.

It's possible, at a former conference, you might remember a colleague of mine, Paul Hudson. He sends his greetings. He is on his way to Uganda later on this month. And actually, we'll be seeing a short video in just a few minutes about my latest trip to Uganda so you can get a flavor of what Cary is all about.

But you may want to know a little bit about me. You may not want to know a little bit about me. That's fine, too. I was sitting in the back and I was hearing Steve present his ministry and then Dale present his ministry.

And I was like, man, they both did such a great job. I feel really bad for the guy at the end. Did you have one of those wonderful little clicky things? That would be wonderful. Once again, thank you.

My official title with Cary is international trainer, but I am not James Bond. Little bit about me. I've been married to my wonderful wife, Ricky, for 26 years. We grew up in Southern Ohio. After attending Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I said to the Lord, I'll serve you in ministry anywhere, but if you can keep me in New England for a while, that would be wonderful.

So for almost 10 years, we served a small Baptist church in North Central Vermont. After that time, we served a church in Pennsylvania and spent some time serving a church in Michigan. And about May of last year, the Lord opened my eyes to possibly considering joining Cary.

Didn't even know they existed. And the more I spent time on their website, I'm like, this is cool. I could do this. And I really knew it was a possible leading from the Lord when I told my wife about it the next day, and she said, you should apply.

Never expected that. She has been supportive and encouraging. So I served as a solo pastor for about 18 years. Started with Cary last, so that Cary exists is because of the great training for pastors in Iceland.

That's true around the world. 85 of churches in the world are led by men or women who have received no formal theological training. And leaders from every non-Western region say their number one need is leadership training.

And that's why Cary exists. That's why Cary exists. The founder of Cary, a man by the name of Bob Pinheiro, in the 90s was taking a mission trip to Romania. And while he was visiting in a hospital, seeing ministry opportunities in this hospital, he saw a man standing not too far away watching as every move.

1990s Romania, he was a little unnerved by that. The next day he's at an orphanage, and as he's seeing ministry needs in the orphanage, he sees that same man with more men gathered around and they're watching as every move.

So he plucks up his courage. He says, why are you following me? They said, sir, we know you're a pastor. We're pastors too. We just wanna know how it is to do what you're doing. And that is how Bob Pinheiro became aware of the need.

And so 25 years ago, he began this humble effort to meet the leadership training needs in Romania. And that has grown over the last 25 years into Cary. Named after William Cary, the first modern missionary to India.

Our mission is to train spiritual leaders that shape the church and influence the nations. What do we do? We provide Bible college and seminary level courses to pastors in nations that don't have easy access to that type of training.

It might be persecution in the nation. It might be poverty. There might be reasons. There may not be an institution that's providing quality training. We bring college to them. We bring seminary to them.