Lessons in Listening 2 — George Verwer

We do praise you and thank you for this opportunity just to be here and just this place that you've provided, this unique country where we can come together from surrounding lands and be here together.

Testing the Spirits Behind Our Dreams

We believe this is a significant meeting in terms of your work here in this part of the world. Really help us now to understand what you want to say to us from your word. In Jesus' name, amen. Now, some of you were listening to me last night and you have to listen again this morning.

This will not be the normal practice for the time together. Generally, I'll just be sharing once a day, but we've just made a slight change yesterday so I could have that one opportunity yesterday to share.

Some of you have just arrived and we really want to welcome you. We will give names now as we're also making a tape. One of the requirements to be able to attend this session was that you went through the nine tapes of the last session in Putwal or you were there.

Some of you have probably not been able to do that, probably didn't even know that, but communication down to the grassroots level in India doesn't always work. But I have a very clear set of notes of everything from Putwal, thanks to Steve Davis, so that I don't repeat things.

Some of the things I said there I think are more important than what I'm going to say here, but I'm going to try to avoid repeating them to any great degree. And I trust that perhaps in time I do have a set of those tapes with me.

You will be able to listen to them. It's interesting that one of the things I emphasized most in my first message last time was my burden to see people have a really proper diet of food on the teams. It's interesting because that's been one of our major discussions here.

And I knew, of course, I had mentioned it, but I didn't know that it was one of the main things I had mentioned at Putwal. I think you're going to find this morning's little talk quite different and challenging.

One of my greatest challenges is to be able to come up with material that's new. Some of you have been around a while. You've had 100 Verwer messages. If you add them all up, including tapes, and just the thought of having to listen to me again, I'm sure must ring a few boredom bells in the back of your head.

But you take up the cross and press on. And you're here. I'm going to share with you this morning something about this thing of testing the spirits. And I want you to turn with me to 1 John chapter 4.

1 John chapter 4. Forgive me, I'm still at times preaching from the authorized version. And I'm a fanatic believer in distributing, especially to the unconverted, the most modern translations, even if they have what evangelicals may consider a few errors, because I think when unconverted people read some of these translations, it results in their minds hundreds of errors.

But I won't get into that this morning. I'll read from my authorized version. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

By this know ye the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God. And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.

And this is that spirit of antichrist, of which ye were heard, that it should come, and even now already it is in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.

There's a number of other scriptures that come to my mind, especially how it explains that the enemy sometimes comes in sheep's clothing. This whole area of discerning the will of God, of knowing when the Lord is speaking and when our own ego is speaking, is a huge area of challenge.

No matter how long we have been Christians, we find it an enormous challenge to know the will of God, especially when it comes to big decisions. And I thought I would share with you this morning, in the way of the spiritual lesson tied in with scriptures, the story of Charles Blair.

You probably know that two of the most outstanding writers in the Western world are John and Elizabeth Sherrill. Anything they touch in writing usually goes quite far. And recently they have produced a book with Charles Blair called The Man Who Could Do No Wrong.

This book has slowly made its inroads into OM. I don't know if it's gotten this far yet. Has anyone read that book in this part of the world? Harley Rollins was reading it and just about jumping through the telephone.

The Lord certainly ministered to him about taking it a little easy on the Georgia warehouse project through this particular book. And it's just been published in Great Britain. You probably don't know the name of Charles Blair, and that's not so important, but he was one of the leading evangelical pastors in all of the United States.

Written a number of books, his articles were in all the magazines. We had some ex-OMers involved in his huge church, Calvary Temple in Denver, Colorado, where hundreds and hundreds came to Christ and many thousands gathered together.

And Charles Blair built this church through a system of borrowing money and then had a vision from God, he felt, to build a huge giatric center. I think that's for older people, isn't it? This huge older... old people's home, old people's center, I think it was a very elaborate thing.

I don't know that much about the plan. Things began to go wrong. Eventually he could not pay back his loans, and he was soon in prison. It was one of the largest scandals among Christian leaders that America's had in the past decade.

It was flashed across the Denver papers, and the name of Charles Blair was mud. I don't know if he was ever able to pay back all these people. I guess I have to read the book and see what happened. Through this came a very honest, a very unique and honest evaluation of failure.

And that's what this book is about. How he failed, why he failed, what he learned through that failure. And I just got this little excerpt, I don't even know where I got it, but I found it just so helpful, called Lessons in Listening.

I don't even know if it's exactly taken from the book. It looks like it is. And the headings provide an outstanding little message that I think the Lord can use in our midst. Let me just read this first part.

I'm going to read quite a lot of this, and then comment on it. I don't believe that God has us go through either success or failure for ourselves alone. That's something good to remember, isn't it? My experience happened to come through attempting to build a geatric center.

But the things I learned could apply equally well to anyone in the act of building. A young couple building a home, a career woman getting started, the officer of an organization. All of us are in the process of creating.

All of us can face some variation of the temptations which beckoned me. And so, I spent time reviewing what happened at Calvary Temple. The process of transformation is still going on. I appreciate him saying that.

I have not achieved complete permanent release from old habit patterns. But I have some hearing aids that I didn't have before. And then he talks about some of the hearing aids. Some of the things that he feels he should use now to really determine what God's will is.

What God's plan is. The first one he puts down is linked with the scripture that we just read. Test the spirit behind your dreams. The Bible tells us to try spirits to see if they are of God. 1 John 4 .1, which we just read.

To this day, I am confused as to whether that original vision for life center, was the name of the place, came from God or from my own ego. Seen as guidance, it appeared to have lots of confirmation. But there were persistent Christian voices challenging this.

It's a difficult area. Another major scandal in the United States last year, and maybe the year before now, was the bankruptcy of the Lagos Publishing House. This was probably more embarrassing than the Charles Blair thing because the Lagos Publishing House represented the miraculous more than any publishing house perhaps that's ever been launched.

One out of every four books they published was about the miraculous. God doing anything, everything, answers to prayer, healings. I think some of you know their publications. 50 of them quite spectacular.

And the story of the Lagos Publishing House and its bankruptcy is just baffling. It's just baffling. But again, the leader of that felt he had a word from God. And even his own board of trustees could not stop him in his plan to launch a daily Christian newspaper in the United States.

It's interesting that Charles Blair brings out at the end, beware of prior successes. And it does seem that the downfall of many Christian groups comes due to prior successes. For example, in OM, the thought that since we launched two ships successfully, a third ship would just be quite easy.

I would consider that an extremely dangerous move as I think most of you know. And I think you will be happy to know that there is an absolute moratorium on any third ship. The bigger crisis is whether two ships will be able to continue at the present time.

So previous successes sometimes can lead to failure. That's what happened with Lagos Publishers. This daily paper didn't go. He kept borrowing money. He was sure the Lord was in it. And people, I don't know if you are aware of how people, gifted people, can put the screw and the pressure on people to give money.

People mortgage their homes. People give everything they have. And then when it goes bankrupt, they don't get anything back. Many lost their life savings. They lost everything they had. I don't know how much that was true in the Charles Blair case, but it's certainly true in a lot of these big bankruptcies.

There has been a significant number of major bankruptcies among Christian organizations in the Western world. That happens, of course, when you keep borrowing. And, of course, you eventually have to pay back.

You can't pay back. You get more desperate. You borrow more. This is how some of the governments, how the Mexican government has been operating. About 50 of the governments of the world are operating and a very high percentage of them are bordering on bankruptcy.

Of course, in this gigantic world, somebody seems to manage to come up with another loan and the World Bank gets together and hatches another program. If we got into that, I think all of us would be just really amazed.

We don't want to get into it. All right, his second hearing aid, hearing aid number one, test the spirits behind your dreams. Remember Tozer's little outline of things you can use to test the spirits.

Unity Between Husband and Wife

You've all had messages on that. Let's go to number two. Unity between husband and wife. The primary person to question my dream was Betty. She objected with gentleness because this was in her nature.

But I never doubted her position. We were not in accord. Today I would not dare violate the injunction of Ephesians 5 .21. I thought it would be good to look that verse up and read it in its context. Ephesians 5 .21.

Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord. The husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church.

And he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it.

He writes here. I already read the first part of it. We were not in accord. Today I would not dare violate the injunction of Ephesians 5 .21 that we be submitted one to another. It's interesting that probably some people would not connect verse 21 with verse 22.

They would feel that the teaching about wives and husbands only begins at verse 22. He feels it's all linked together. I think it's important to realize of course that our wife isn't only our wife. She's still a person.

She's still part of the body of Christ. She still has the ability to get guidance from God. And so I would think that he has a good point there. I never really prayed through this major project with Betty until we were of one heart and one mind.

I never really submitted my dream until we reached the place where we could say it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us. Acts 15 verse 28. So he is pointing out here that he moved ahead with this project without his wife really being of one heart with him.

It's a complex area. And probably more complex in the Eastern world than in the Western world, at least for some people. Probably also more complex in certain churches. There's a great variety of teaching in churches, even churches we are linked with, about the place of woman.

But I am sure most of us, I hope all of us in O .N., will never just manipulate our wives into doing that which we feel is God's plan, especially if it's against her conscience and if she is really seeing spiritual red lights.

Now often in the United States, and it's true here I'm sure as well in some cases, the wife actually even has more education and has maybe even read more widely and might even be more involved in the church life or as involved as the husband.

Seeking Spiritual Peers and Honest Correction

So even more so she would have a lot of insight. Thirdly, the third hearing aid, seek a body of spiritual peers. The word peers is not so widely used in some places. Spiritual equals, people who are of equal stature.

If he was a strong man, then it would mean men of strong spiritual stature. The protection a husband and wife provide each other can be extended or supplied. For example, the unmarried person. By entering into relationship with a small group of men and women committed to lift one another up regularly to the throne of grace.

Such group, such a group, provides not only support, but crucial in any time of building, correction. Now woe to any of us who get in a place where there's no one living close enough to us and who's got enough courage to correct us.

This is something we've emphasized in OM for a long time. Provide needed correction. This is what makes spiritual peerage, a new term perhaps for some, not age or education or social position, but willingness to speak the truth in Christ.

Willingness to speak the truth in Christ. Probably a very difficult challenge because we all know situations when spiritual peers have not, in their effort to correct, not only spoken the truth. The truth is not always easy to find.

But it's interesting that in Lagos publishers, the board of directors felt definitely they must not go ahead with this project. Some of them resigned in protest to the project and this man still felt he must go ahead with the project.

I don't know how much of that we have in this case with Charles Blair. Are your co-workers, and this is really a strong, valuable point to contemplate. Yeah, number four. Are your co-workers a completion of yourself?

Are your co-workers a completion of yourself? Or simply an extension? Ideally, in any Christian undertaking, there will be as many facets of Christ's personality represented as possible. If I am called to leadership and find helpers who are simply echoes of myself, I double my strengths, but I also double my weaknesses.

Now that's probably a little bit more meaty than we might want to grasp in one reading, so I'll read it again. Are your co-workers a completion of yourself? Or simply an extension? Ideally, in any Christian undertaking, there will be as many facets of Christ's personality represented as possible.

If I am called to leadership and find helpers who are simply echoes of myself, I double my strengths, but I also double my weaknesses. And of course, one of the great problems in Christian work is that when the Lord is really using us, we tend to meditate on our strengths.

Why do evangelists so often get in trouble? Probably 50 across the board, evangelists. They just seem to be the most vulnerable. We've seen them knocked out. From Charles Templeton, who was considered greater than Billy Graham and became the reprobate of the day, right up to Hal Lindsey, who was wiped out through immorality, excommunicated from his church, and fortunately, praise the Lord, is back walking with Jesus today, even though it may be with a new wife in an incredibly compromising, confusing situation.

But evangelists are vulnerable. And one of the reasons is because God is working through them. And they see tremendous things happen. You can't believe the things that some people say. Even to skinny, weak little evangelists like myself, the letters, the compliments, the things they say after the meeting, the introductions, the man of God bit.

I mean, it really... If you aren't tied very much to the soil and have had your tail kicked in so many times you'll never forget it, by others of a more sane nature, some of that could really get to you, especially if you're isolated.

Then when that man who's seen a lot of successes is criticized, it's very difficult to handle. He's unable to handle it and keep it in balance. The greatest strength in Billy Graham, in my study of him for 28 years, more actually, the only Christian I studied much before I was converted, it seems to me that one of his greatest gifts and graces, it's a grace more than a gift, his ability to handle criticism.

If you're unable to handle criticism, you're going to have a long life of suffering. You're going to get suffering anyway. But you'll get even more. So that's a beautiful point. And I praise God that many, many years ago in OM we turned away from just producing people who would be echoes of ourself.

It went even extreme at times to be anything that appeared, like George Verwer would be considered almost the cardinal sin of the movement. Beards popped up everywhere because I was against beards. All kinds of things took place as the brothers made sure that they weren't just little carbon copies of George Verwer.

And of course, people like Dale Roton in the work from the very beginning and many others, in no way were they sort of little echoes. That doesn't mean we never had that problem. We could debate the subject.

Any subject we talk about, we could debate as to when that actually takes place. And I would be very slow to accuse some poor new brother of just being a total phony. I had someone hit me once after preaching at Moody as a young Christian.

It just came really heavy. Ah, you're trying to be like Billy Graham. You sounded just like Billy Graham. I mean, it certainly was never in my mind that I was trying to be a little Billy Graham. If anything, I probably got in trouble making sure I went a different direction from the man I was converted through.

Who knows? Maybe I missed a major aspect of what God would have me do in evangelism because the last thing I wanted was to be some kind of evangelist with a lot of publicity and great meetings and all that kind of thing.

Not that I was against other people doing that, but I didn't feel that was my way. Of course, when I was first converted, I was immediately thrust into big evangelistic meetings and I gave invitations and I gave people copies of Peace with God when they accepted Christ back in the high school.

You know the story. So naturally, people who are new, I mean, they put all this together. Anybody who has a meeting gives an invitation. He's trying to be Billy Graham. And it is incredibly difficult at times to know how to react to criticism.

Not all criticism is from God any more than all your ideas are from God. You have to be able to sort it out. That's why you need more than one counselor and more than one peer that you can consult with and pray with.

Prayer Over Human Reasoning

And even then, you won't probably have a total answer. Well, that's something to really give thought to, isn't it? Fifth point, I spent too much time reasoning and not enough in storming heaven. Too much time reasoning and not enough in storming heaven.

When time is short, the most important way we can use it is in prayer. Praise the Lord. In any crisis, there comes a time when human logic is worthless and we need the tools which are available to us as the children of God.

More than usual doing must be balanced by more than usual praying. I repeat, more than usual doing must be balanced by more than usual praying. It's an amazing confession. I think one of the things about his book that has really impressed people is very, very honest appraisal.

Not a hyper-defensive type of book at all, what people have told me. But a very, very honest appraisal and that's what that seems to communicate. And how true it is. And even as we come here together, though we don't have some new massive dream to launch, we still desperately need that time in prayer.

And I hope that there can be a lot of spontaneous prayer in some of our rooms. Our rooms are better for prayer almost than this room where we're going to practice this Juan Carlos Ortiz eye-open type of praying.

It's been going quite well. But we can have prayer cells often in our rooms. We can have prayer two by two because we're trying to emphasize personal fellowship. And it's just a beautiful testimony, especially from the nation where prayer has been so tremendously neglected because of the enormous power of money, because of many, many very gifted people, because, I guess, of many, many factors.

Impatience, Discernment, and the Need to Grow Through New Ministries

Prayer is so often neglected. And then his sixth point, impatience was my biggest problem. Impatience. I simply couldn't wait. Today I have committed myself to a new route. When my timing is sorted, I will divert my restlessness to prayer and do nothing until I have a clear directive from God confirmed by the body.

Then we will put our feet where He has trod. Now, in OM today, of course, for some people, the movement will seem a lot slower. We have a new vision every month of fairly major proportion coming within OM.

New nations, new plans, new ideas. Recently a group in Mexico when Brother Dick was not there sat down and drafted up, I think, 25 major points of change they wanted in Mexico. All they need is perhaps a million dollars and a couple of really super dedicated, committed, longer-term Mexicans and maybe a hundred other answers to prayer and they'd be off and running.

The problem is OM is not just Mexico. OM is 35 nations if we count sending countries and receiving countries. I don't know if you know that terminology. It's not the best terminology because receiving countries are also sending.

Some are in transition. We've been trying to convert Mexico from a receiving country that is receiving workers, receiving finance, receiving the thrust of our evangelism. That's where we're going to. They're receiving countries, receiving people.

We've been trying to shift that from a receiving country to a sending country. And when the peso went from 20 pesos to a dollar to 120 pesos to a dollar, it seemed that everything we had attempted for years was just sat back completely unless we could totally alter our financial policy, a subject of great debate within OM.

India is definitely a receiving country. You have received more overseas personnel than any nation in all of OM. But you also are to some degree a sending country. First of all, within India you're sending.

People are being sent from Kerala to Rajasthan. So that's sending. And some have gone out on Lagos to witness other countries. Others, of course, outside of OM have gone to places like England and different parts of the world in small numbers to carry the message, usually to your own people.

There are a couple of beautiful exceptions. Cross-cultural activities. I think of a brother, I think it's Pamar, working in Kenya in Mombasa who is working among the Muslims. Is he just working among the Indians though mainly?

Probably mainly among the Indians, but still it's a tremendous ministry that the Lord has put him in there. We try to keep in contact with him. I would just really ask you to pray that especially in some of our international meetings, and that will include the one we're going to have in the next two days as the coordinators from the subcontinent meet together here, that we really would have wisdom.

We can't emphasize everything. We just can't. I think if you'll study this Charles Blair situation, you'll study the Lagos publishing situation, you'll study a lot of other situations, you'll see that people who got in trouble, they overextended themselves.

They overextended themselves. And in Christian work, one of the main things you must have is communication. We hope to eventually produce a list of ministries that had their catalyst or their birth in a sense through this same stream of what God was doing, traced back to the prayers of that elderly lady.

And it will be quite an amazing list. But I think it's so important to see that this is a part of the way that God works. God led Greg Livingston out of the work, not through any great division, not because he was purged from the leadership.

You know, this isn't the Communist Party. Purge people from the leadership. It's just nonsense if people think that. It's clearly the Lord's guidance. Greg was sure he should leave. Actually, before he ever came on Lagos, you remember when he was on Lagos, he was convinced he should leave.

And I said, look, go one more year. Old Bavarian manipulation maybe. I don't know. But I met him in Colorado and I really put the screw on him to try Lagos. I thought, Lagos, that will fit you fine. It fit him like a woman's bathing costume on a giraffe.

And he just never, never worked out. And it was so clear, the Lord was leading him out. Sorry about that. You got to come up with something original, don't you? Some of you have too vivid imaginations.

And it's so thrilling to see God's hand upon Greg. I won't repeat what I said two days ago just about the way the Lord has led Greg. Greg is only one of a hundred. He's more known. Greg's the kind that easily you can see where he is.

But there's another hundred who, more than a hundred, but I'm thinking of a hundred who, you know, are really in significant ministries. There's the other sense where everybody's ministry is significant, right?

The person who's unknown and they're praying behind the scenes. So I don't put one above the other. But I think you know what I mean. And I believe, as we saw last time we were here, that OM is already in India, stretched to breaking point.

We cannot add more numbers. We cannot add more major thrusts in more states. So we must therefore, if we're going to grow, if we're going to continue to see explosive and great things happen, then to some degree we must be ready to hive off.

How have churches grown? One of the main ways churches grow is when there's quite a big church and a group are willing to hive off. You know that word, hive off? They're willing to move off into another part of the town and start another church.

Now sometimes they maintain a very close link with the mother church. Other times they go their own way. Many of the assemblies started or that were once in relationship with Pak Singh, they've hived off.

Especially when they drew up their constitution and took over the property. There were some more stubborn types that decided they weren't going to sign their property over to the Hebron Fellowship. Their wife bought the property anyway and they decided to keep it in their own name.

Property and the property crisis that those assemblies hit was the greatest disunity and cause of disunity their movement had almost ever experienced. Property often is. But through it, new things happened and the church kept growing.

A lot of the church growth in Britain today is through division. And some of the division isn't very pleasant. Now you have two sides of the argument and I don't want to go too far down this road. Number one, all carnality, anything that's sin, it's wrong.

You cannot justify it. But that doesn't mean God can't use it. And many, even ugly divisions, we haven't had too many of those in OM, but even ugly divisions, God has overruled, brought into being two living churches instead of one.

And he was able to add more to those two churches than he was able to add to the one. One of the reasons, people are people. You know, one of the men who's influenced me lately, I can't say a lot because I'm so, I'm influenced already by so many people, I don't think anybody can come along anymore and have a lion's share.

They're all just going to have a little bit. But one of the men who's influenced me in the past years is Ralph Winter. I'll have to tell you more about him in another session. But this man is unique. And he has influenced missions almost more than any single man.

Probably it would be difficult to know how much of it we can trace back to others because he's an amalgamation of a lot of different thoughts, different people. People like McGovern and so many others.

But I was in this IFMA missions conference and some of the older missions were saying what a problem it is with so many new groups coming on the scene and there's confusion. And they were sort of emphasizing it's better to have the bigger movements and it's more efficient, there's less need for duplication of office staff.

You know, it's the argument Scripture Union used to give in England when we arrived. And of course, some of those arguments are valid. Bigger organizations, they can. They can have tremendous advantages.

Ralph Winter got up to speak and completely attacked this theory. This was at the IFMA, that's the big mission association in America. Most of those missions for a while, the first 10 years, were fairly skeptical about OM.

So Ralph Winter said, oh, it's interesting now that it's taken you people 25 years to accept Operation Mobilization. You know, some of them slumped down into their seat. And then he said he personally still believed in the Sandlot mission.

Now, whenever you hear me speak, you get a course in American slang, or other slang, Bavarian slang. But the Sandlot, you know what we mean by Sandlot? You know, when we were little kids in the States and if your family didn't have a lot of money, there wasn't a big park nearby and you wanted to play baseball, in Britain it would be cricket, you just found any empty piece of ground.

There used to be an empty piece of ground near Alfie's house in Bombay. Actually, I think that was a proper field, so that would be too luxurious. Just any piece of ground, and you just have your baseball game, your cricket game, whatever you were playing, right there.

It was a very small operation. The press wasn't there. There were no spectators, except Johnny's dog might be running around. And so this was, I never heard this term used, the Sandlot mission. The small operation.

That's what OM was. OM was a Sandlot operation. Three people got in a beat-up van and drove several thousand miles to get out a few tracks and a few Gospels over a long period of four weeks. That was it.

They returned to college. And God somehow took it from there. And I pray that OM may spawn a whole host of Sandlot missions. They don't have to be big things. They don't have to have a lot of publicity.

We may not even know about them. In fact, many of the individual ex-OMers who have graduated from OM, a term I like to use here in India. We can't get away with that in the West. We're still just ex-OMers.

But the graduates, many of these people, they're operating Sandlot missions. They're planting little churches. They've got a little literature operation. Some of them are even publishing tracts. Things are happening.

And it's exciting. And the only way ahead for OM is to hive off. Let people hive off. Now, the Lord has many ways of doing this. He allows differences in ideas. There's so many different ways to think and still be a Christian.

Isn't it wonderful? All of you learned over the years you don't agree with me on everything. That's great. But there comes a time when your thoughts may be so different from the way OM is driving that you'll just feel more comfortable if you can get with a group that's more like-minded.

I suppose you want to go into a big church planting ministry in Nagaland. There's a lot of response up there. Some of you could go up there and just blink your eye and start a Sandlot mission. There's a lot happening in Nagaland.

And I know some exorbitants have gone up there. But, you know, I'm praying about it, thinking about it. As an international body and because of our commitment in so many parts of India, we really don't feel God wants us to plant churches in Nagaland.

But we'd be thrilled if somebody goes and launches an effort in Nagaland. So catching the vision is one thing, but then getting the battle plan is something else. You may have a vision, but the battle plan may not be to carry out that vision within OM.

It may be to carry that battle plan somewhere else. John Furwerda had an unbelievable... I mean, if there was ever a dreamer and a guy with visions and ideas in the Middle East, it was John Furwerda. And we just felt, after a lot of prayer and discussion, that it was better for this to take place outside of OM.

One of the reasons for this was that when it gets out of OM, it can get new, unique, stronger financial roots. You know, the OM roots are already being tapped to breaking point. We need new roots. This is why it's so beautiful now that Quiet Corner has got under Caponry.

Rather than Quiet Corner directly relating back to OM as its grandfather, it's relating to Caponry. And Thomas went to Caponry almost before he joined OM. Well, he's with us some, and then he went to Caponry.

And this means that when Thomas Henry takes a trip to the States, he gets in churches that we don't get in. He presents the Indian vision in a place where they maybe never heard it before. And so this gives new roots.

And if the work on the field... Try to get this. If the work on the field is going to go on, there needs to be new roots. And when something is born within OM, though we try often to help it, we also try to challenge it to get new roots.