Interview with David Meade of Propempo International

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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October 10, 2020

00:03: Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
00:07: This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
00:15: Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
00:21: Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
00:24: Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
00:26: My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
00:29: I'm coming to you again from the Southeast Regional Conference of the Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals here in Daytona at Crosswalk Church of Daytona under Pastor Mitch Pridgen.
00:41: He is our host this year and I'm very thankful to have spent the last day and a half with very good friends, ministers in the gospel.
00:49: And I have one of those friends with me today.
00:51: His name is David Mead and he is with ProPempo International and he is also on staff as a pastor and elder at Faith Bible Church.
01:02: And if you've listened to our podcast, you've probably heard me interview Pastor David Kratz.
01:06: Well, David, I'm sorry, Pastor John Kratz.
01:09: David is on staff there with him.
01:11: David, tell us about yourself.
01:13: Well, it's my delight to be with you and your listeners today.
01:16: Thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit about our ministry.
01:20: From an early age, I was saved in my family through family devotions time and raised by Christian parents.
01:29: I went to Bible school with the idea of becoming a missionary to a completely unreached area of the world.
01:36: And God answered that prayer over time by taking us to a tribal group in the Philippines that were known as headhunters and very backward in many ways by worldly standards.
01:48: They were animists and demon worshipers and God just did a fantastic work of grace through the gospel of Jesus Christ in that over the course of 10 years, there were 100 churches planted and they had their own Bible school in the vernacular language.
02:05: We just saw the Lord do amazing things far beyond anything we expected during those years that we were there.
02:12: Then we came home basically to help and to lead churches and missionaries to doing that exact same thing.
02:19: How do you go into really tough, challenging circumstances and environments and cultures around the world and plant churches that are indigenous that are going to stay there and continue preaching and teaching the gospel and the word of God? Amen.
02:35: Amen.
02:36: And that is such a vital work and such a work that is often overlooked.
02:40: Going to places where nobody else wants to go.
02:44: We hear a lot about missions trips where people go spend two weeks in a place and they don't really get involved with the lives of the people.
02:51: They go dig a well or something and you guys were there living and ministering with them and that's amazing.
02:59: Tell me this, David, your group is called ProPempo and that is a word that not many people are familiar with.
03:06: Tell us what it means.
03:07: Thank you for asking.
03:08: ProPempo is a really key word in missions in the whole New Testament.
03:12: It is the Greek word transliterated into English, ProPempo, and it means to send forward or to send in advance, to send ahead, to send to the edges, if you will.
03:23: And it's the word that Paul used when he asked churches to send him out.
03:27: It's the word that's used consistently for furthering the gospel by sending out key prepared workers for the gospel into areas that have not had the gospel.
03:38: It's a word that's used in 3 John.
03:41: I'm going to read that passage.
03:42: It's sort of the culmination of all of the uses in the New Testament where John is talking to a church and he says, It's a faithful thing you do in all your efforts for these brothers, strangers as they are, who testify to your love before the church.
03:57: You will do well to send them on their journey in a manner worthy of God, for they have gone out for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles.
04:06: Therefore, we ought to support people like these, that we may be fellow workers for the truth.
04:12: That little phrase, send them on their journey in a manner worthy of God, is the term ProPempo.
04:18: And it sort of points to the church as the center of the witness of the gospel around the world, the agent of God to fulfill the Great Commission.
04:26: And the church is the sending authority.
04:30: And that's what we teach and preach in churches and to missionaries every chance we get.
04:35: Awesome.
04:36: Awesome.
04:36: Now, when you say the church is the sending authority, your goal then is to raise up churches to send their missionaries out.
04:44: Tell us how.
04:46: Let's say this.
04:47: Let's say a church came to you and said, we don't know how to start our missions program or our missions program is in a is in, you know, we we've been doing things for years and we feel like we're spinning our wheels and we're really not being effective.
04:57: What would you say? Where would you start? We get those questions all the time.
05:01: And I'm I'm just excited to hear those questions.
05:04: They say, our missionary map looks like a shotgun blast, not a rifle shot.
05:09: We don't really know what we're doing.
05:10: We're not even sure about all the people that we support.
05:13: How can you help us? My primary audience is really church leaders.
05:18: It's pastors and elders of churches who want to be more biblical, more strategic, and more effective in their world missions.
05:25: It typically means that they are on a track, and we can help them with that, toward raising up missionaries out of their own congregation, seeing that they're really well trained and have the right expectations of field ministry, so that when they get on the field, they can stay for a long time.
05:42: We're talking decades, a lifetime.
05:45: To be in place, in the vernacular language, teaching the scriptures accurately, and sharing the gospel in a way that indigenous churches are produced and reproducing.
05:57: That's what we want to see happen.
05:58: We get connected with missionaries who want to have a good sending church.
06:03: We go in and train the church leaders on how to be a good sending church, or church leaders, pastors that want to have an effective missions ministry and really don't know what it's about, because they've never had any specific training on that.
06:18: You mentioned the thing about the shotgun blast.
06:20: I think that's a fairly accurate description.
06:24: A lot of churches support a lot of missionaries, probably don't even know who they are.
06:28: They have a missions budget that gets divided between however many people.
06:33: You would encourage a church like ours.
06:36: We have a small church of less than 100 people on Sunday morning.
06:40: Would you encourage us to focus in on one area, one missionary, or maybe two? How would you give us advice? Brother, for your church, your size, I would say learn about what your church relates to best and how your church is wired.
06:56: It may be that you have some ethnic composition in your church that favors a particular area of the world to go to.
07:03: Look for pioneering kinds of ministries, not just institutional ministries, but going to the edges, planning churches where there haven't been churches before, preaching the gospel where it hasn't gone before.
07:14: And yes, focus on fewer rather than more.
07:17: Focus on the relationships and make that an ownership responsibility of your church and your people to know them well, to love them lavishly, and to support them well.
07:31: And when you do that, there is such a dynamic.
07:34: The whole church understands missions better.
07:36: We've had people at our church say, we've been in many churches before.
07:40: We've never known and loved and understood the work of missions better than having this smaller number of missionaries that we are intensely involved with.
07:51: Amen.
07:51: Amen.
07:52: And when we think about that smaller number and thinking about what you're saying, that really would depend on the size of the church too, because with you guys being, I remember Pastor John saying it was several hundred members.
08:03: You can do more.
08:06: That's absolutely right.
08:08: But there is still nothing that surpasses the view of having skin in the game.
08:13: That means having somebody from your church actually recognize or tapped to be trained to go to the field and raised up through the church and sent out from the church.
08:24: When you have somebody that's part of the family of the church going out, everybody knows and loves them intimately and really well.
08:32: And they know all their foibles as well as their strengths.
08:35: They are praying for them with such intensity.
08:37: It's just, it makes a big difference.
08:40: What do you look for? And this may not be a question that's easy to answer.
08:45: I'll let you decide how you want to answer it.
08:47: What do you look for in a person who may say, I think I feel God calling me to missions work? What are the immediate things that you're looking for? Well, the same kinds of things that you would look for in a church leader, really.
09:03: Number one, about the calling, which is important.
09:07: That's validated and verified by the church.
09:09: A person doesn't just lay hands on themselves.
09:12: Amen.
09:13: It is validated by their activity, their experience, their skills in ministry in the church.
09:20: And that's other people can see it as well.
09:22: Oh yeah, this person seems to be called because they're actually doing the stuff.
09:26: Not just because they say so.
09:29: We want them to have conviction.
09:31: That means understanding of the Bible.
09:33: We want them to understand Bible and doctrine and have a framework for that.
09:36: Whether that is informal or formal training, everybody needs to get that before they go to the confusing culture of the field.
09:44: They need to have character.
09:46: That's 1 Timothy 3 stuff.
09:49: And it's Titus 1 stuff.
09:50: The same way you would recognize a church leader in your church, that's the way you recognize a missionary.
09:55: They have to have that kind of character.
09:57: They have to have actual competence and ministry skills.
10:00: You don't say that they suddenly become evangelists and disciplers just because they land on foreign soil.
10:07: There's no 747 gift.
10:12: Taking an airplane and getting somewhere and all of a sudden having.
10:14: They need to show that they actually have competence to do the stuff that they're supposed to do on the field.
10:20: And that can include language learning.
10:22: In addition to that, we want them to have cross-cultural capacity.
10:29: Just because people say they want to be a missionary, maybe they've got stars in their eyes and they haven't really experienced other cultures.
10:36: So they need to experience other cultures here locally, not just because they happen to like Taco Bell or something like that, right? So they need to have those kinds of things in mind.
10:49: And that's what you're looking for.
10:50: You're looking for that and a track record of that going on before you actually lay hands on them and set them apart for the field and send them off.
11:00: Well, brother, I know you probably have a million and a half horror stories, things that you have seen done really bad.
11:08: And I know you wouldn't want to drag anything out that would be too negative.
11:13: But what would you say is some of the things that churches are most commonly doing wrong in regard to missionary work? Other than what we have already said, maybe by scattering themselves too wide.
11:26: I'm thinking along the lines of missionaries being neglected, things like that.
11:30: But what are some things that maybe I'm not thinking about? Well, I'll go back to the qualifications that I just mentioned and kind of walk through.
11:39: But if those are pretty solid, the two things that cause missionaries to leave the field permanently, the attrition aspects are, number one, lack of accountability with their sending church.
11:52: So even if they don't come from your church, you ought to develop such a relationship that you can ask the hard questions and you can get beneath the skin and find out how their walk with the Lord is, how their relationship with their wife and kids and their neighbors and their friends are, how their relationship with their team is.
12:08: Really, the accountability with the local church, the sending church, if you will, is one of those super key things.
12:15: And churches just fail.
12:17: They transfer.
12:18: They say, we're going to give that over to the mission sending agency or to someone else on the field, and they don't take ownership of it.
12:26: And then the missionary loses and the church loses in that equation.
12:30: The other thing is improper expectations, having wrong expectations.
12:36: A lot of young people particularly think the mission field is going to be grand and glorious, and they have some kind of silver bullet from the Lord that's going to give them all kinds of results.
12:45: And we're talking about hard fields that, humanly speaking, apart from the grace of God, they are not going to see fruit.
12:54: They must see God's sovereignty in it all, and they must have the right kind of expectations when they get to the field.
12:59: It's going to be hard.
13:01: It's going to be tough.
13:02: If they have the accountability relationship, the church can put an arm around them when things get really tough, and there may be even tragedy on the field, but put their arm around and say, you know what? You're going to get through this.
13:14: Our God is bigger than this, and he can get you through, and you can stay, and we're going to help you.
13:19: Those things are things that churches tend to be very weak on, and part of it's because they haven't seen that God has given the local church the ownership.
13:29: They leave it in the hands of a missionary candidate who says, I've got this, when they really don't, or a mission agency that says, we've got this, and they really don't.
13:40: They just don't have the dynamic of a living body of Christ that has the relationships with them.
13:46: So church, stand up, take ownership.
13:48: So Pro Pempo, you're not standing between the missionary and the church.
13:52: You're trying to help the church connect.
13:55: Correct.
13:55: We are not a sending agency.
13:58: We can help a church decide what is the best sending agency for their guy and their field that they want to reach.
14:05: We can help them do that.
14:06: We've helped lots of churches do that, but we're there to strengthen the church.
14:11: Amen.
14:11: Amen.
14:12: Well, Brother David, I am so thankful that you've shared with us today and with our listeners, and what I'd like to do before we close is I'd like to do a couple things.
14:20: One is if someone would like to get a hold of Pro Pempo and would like to get a hold of you, if there's a church listening, maybe there's a pastor, or maybe there's a family in a church, and they know that their church is struggling with missionaries and how to better support them, how can they get a hold of you directly or through the ministry? They can email me at davidpropempo.com, but they can go to propempo.com.
14:43: We have tons of resources there.
14:45: We have hundreds of articles that walk people through their level of missions involvement and church leadership.
14:53: We have hundreds of things there, including a lot of PDF documents that are free, videos, things like that that'll help them out.
15:00: We have a really cool online diagnostic tool called the Church Missions Profile.
15:05: Awesome.
15:05: And anyone can take this, any church leader, anyone representing missions from their church can say, how are we doing? One of the failures that churches often have is they measure themselves by what they did last year in missions.
15:17: Instead of looking at a more objective scale, this gives them an objective and biblical-minded scale to assess themselves.
15:26: And then at the end, it comes out with 15 pages of consultant recommendations of how to move yourself up on the scale in all those areas.
15:35: Wow.
15:35: And that's all at your website.
15:37: It's all available online.
15:38: Just go to Church Missions Profile.
15:40: It'll probably pull it up.
15:41: And if you Google that, if you go to propempo.com and look at resources and Church Missions Profile, you'll get there.
15:46: That is awesome.
15:48: And I understand you just started a podcast.
15:50: Tell us about your podcast, and then we're going to close.
15:52: Podcast is called Missions on Point.
15:54: It's weekly.
15:55: It's only 15 minutes.
15:57: I don't aspire to be as great as Pastor Keith in doing his podcast.
16:01: But we're taking some key missions topics, and the next ones coming down the pike are four in a series of pastoral leadership and missions.
16:11: So we deal with some very basic things.
16:13: The ones that are online now are about biblical definition of missions, as well as some other key topics for church leaders.
16:21: Awesome.
16:22: Well, again, listener, if you're out there, if you're a pastor and you need help in the area of missions, I want to recommend David to you and Propempo.
16:28: And maybe you're a church member and you know that your church is struggling.
16:32: I want to encourage you as well.
16:34: This is a ministry that certainly has been a blessing to me over the years, and I know it can be a blessing to you as well.
16:39: Thank you again for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
16:42: I'm Keith Foskey.
16:43: I'm the pastor of Sovereign Grace Family Church in Jacksonville.
16:46: And if you're in the Jacksonville area and you do not have a church home, we want to invite you to come and be with us this coming Lord's Day.
16:52: We have Sunday school at 930 and we have worship at 1030.
16:56: Again, David, thank you for being with us today.
16:58: Thank you, Keith.
16:59: And again, listener, thank you for listening.
17:02: My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.
17:04: May God bless you.
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17:24: As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
17:30: All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
17:36: He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
17:43: May God be with you.