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  • TIBM in the News: The Purpose of the Lord

    Here's an article that appeared in the Illinois Baptist back in May 2008.

    ‘The purpose of the Lord ... ‘
    ILLINOIS BAPTIST VOICES

    By Cody Lorance, Pastor, Trinity International Baptist Mission, Glen Ellyn

    “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.”  Prov. 19:21

    The goal for this recruiting trip at a small Evangelical college in the Southwest was to look for summer missionaries to join our church planting efforts in Chicagoland.  In particular, I was searching for students ready to spend their summer working with Hindus, Muslims and other immigrant peoples who now live in the Windy City.

    But God seemed to be saying, “I know you have your plans, but be on the lookout for mine.”

    The first day of recruiting was going well when I noticed a number of South Asian students on the campus.  How great, I thought, to have an Indian Christian work with us this summer among Hindus.  So, I began to talk to these students, and realized the Indian students I was meeting weren’t followers of Jesus.

    “The purpose of the Lord . . .”

    Here I was at a staunchly Evangelical school encountering Hindus from some of the least-reached people groups in the world.  These were the people who lived in my neighborhood, that our team was engaged in outreach among year round.  By the end of the day, I had met a dozen or so Hindus from northern India and Nepal.  We had talked about food, cricket, and Indian culture.  The connections were going deep, fast.  Four guys in particular seemed most interested, and asked if I would eat dinner with them the next evening.

    As the dinner approached, I sensed the unfolding of God’s redemptive plan.  I asked some fellow believers to pray, because I felt I would have the opportunity to share the Gospel.

    It was indeed an amazing night.  I had never been around Hindus who seemed so eager to know about Jesus Christ.  I was able to explain the gospel at length and answer questions about sin, shame, Satan, the cross, salvation and more.

    I prayed for them as we parted and gave them gifts of a Jesus film DVD that also included the Gospel of Mark in their language.

    The next morning I met with two of the students, Pratik and Jayesh, who said they had already watched the Jesus film and wanted to talk further.   We went to a lounge area and began to talk about salvation and following Jesus.  I discerned a genuine faith taking root in their hearts, so I asked them bluntly, “Do you believe what I’ve told you about Jesus?  Are you really ready to begin following Him now?”  Pratik confessed honestly, “We don’t understand everything it means to follow Jesus, but we believe – we want to follow Him.”

    With only minutes to spare before class, Pratik, Jayesh, and I bowed our heads, and they committed to following Jesus as their Lord and King.

    Before we said our final goodbyes, I asked Pratik to talk to Nil and Krish (the other two who had been to dinner with us) about our prayer time that morning.  He said he would.

    The next day Pratik sent me an email telling me that both Nil and Krish had also prayed to begin following Jesus!

    I’m still pretty flabbergasted by the trip which wasn’t what I expected.  Praise God for His incomparable and unstoppable purposes!  Please pray for these four young men, and pray for the hundreds of millions of Hindus the world over who still live in darkness.  May God deliver them and may God raise up these four believers to be powerful witnesses to the Hindu world.

    Cody Lorance is pastor of Trinity International Baptist Mission, Glen Ellyn, and an Illinois Baptist missionary planting churches in the Chicago area.

     
    © 2010 - Illinois Baptist State Association

    Friday, February 5, 2010 (No comments)

  • The TIBM-Cape Town Challenge

    Take the 5-Point TIBM-Cape Town Challenge!

          Fresh back from my trip to the US-Lausanne pre-congress meeting, I had a chance to offer a report, words of encouragement, and set of challenges to the TIBM family this past Sunday night in our house church gathering.  I’ll admit that in my excitement, it was difficult to present things in an organized fashion, but I think that most people got the idea.  Well, I won’t rehash the whole report here, but I did want to outline the five-point “TIBM-Cape Town Challenge” that our team/church is taking on in 2010.  This is our way of preparing for the 3rd Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization and engaging in a work that we feel may be the defining Kingdom-work of our generation.

         Wow, I’m really tempted to just go on and on here, but I’ll restrain myself.  Let me get right into the challenge and ask you to join us in this.

    1.      Read, study, teach, and memorize the book of Ephesians

    All 4,000 on-site participants are being challenged by the Lausanne leadership to soak in Ephesians in the months leading up to Cape Town.  We are also being asked to teach it and preach from it in our various mission contexts and even to memorize it.  The official Cape Town 2010 study guide for Ephesians is simple and helpful.  You can download a pdf for free here.  At Trinity, we just finished a multi-year study of spiritual warfare that had us focused a lot on Ephesians 6.  Nevertheless, we’ll take up this challenge and take a significant amount of time in the book this year.

    2.      Prayer for and memorization of all nations

    The 3rd congress will be the most diverse gathering of Christians the world has ever seen.  Some 4,000 delegates from 200 nations will come together to pray, worship, commune, and discuss the most critical issues of our time.  The leadership of the US delegation has specifically asked us to pray for all these nations and to memorize their geographical locations on the earth.  This challenge was quickly amended in the recent Dallas meeting to, “Well, just do all the nations.”  So, I’ve begun to do so and invite you as well.  To pray, I am using a tried and true resource called Operation World that, fantastically, is available online for free.  Just go there and click on “pray today.”  Do it every day.  To memorize the locations of all the world’s nations, I’ve been using a geography quiz site that works well, is free, and is actually helping me.  You can check it out here.  Again, try doing one quiz every day.

    3.      Study the Lausanne Covenant

    The Lausanne Covenant is a document that resulted from the 1st Lausanne congress in 1974 and has served as a “rallying point” for evangelical Christians the world over who are passionate about the “whole Church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.”  It is something of a statement of faith, but one that is fundamentally grounded in the missional calling and nature of God’s people.  One of the most influential documents in the history of evangelical Christianity, it is something that I want to lead my team in studying, understanding, and interacting with.  There are some terrific resources available for free on the covenant including the actual text itself as well as a study guide entitled For the Lord we Love by John Stott that can be helpful in an individual and group context.  I plan to do personal study as well as to lead TIBM in corporate study of the covenant.

    4.      Fully engage the 6 crucial issues of the congress

    The 3rd Lausanne Congress is not being convened simply because we haven’t done it in a while, but in response to a global outcry from Christians who see that God’s Church is facing a number of extraordinarily difficult challenges.  AIDS, postmodernism, Islamic fundamentalism, the southern shift of the church, and other weighty issues are matters that simply cannot be ignored. The passion of Lausanne 3 is to gather the leaders of God’s worldwide church to earnestly seek the will of Christ through prayer, repentance, worship, communion, study, and conversation.  Our hope is to come away from the congress with an Acts 15 kind of declaration, “It seems good to us and to the Holy Spirit that the Church . . .”  In particular, through a multi-year process of prayerful and informed discernment, six crucial issues have been put before us.  These are:

    ·         How do we make a case for truth and the uniqueness of Christ in a postmodern, pluralistic world?

    ·         How do we articulate and demonstrate the power of the gospel in the midst of suffering and strife?

    ·         How do we respond redemptively to religious fundamentalism – Islam and Hinduism in particular?

    ·         What should be our priorities with respect to the unfinished task of world evangelization?

    ·         What are obstacles to world evangelization within the church and how can those be addressed?

    ·         How should the Church in the US partner with the Church in the rest of the world?

    So then, the challenge is to prayerfully and studiously, thoughtfully and actively, locally and globally engage these six critical issues.  I believe that any local church or Christian organization in the world today that has a truly global vision will be able to find significant points of intersection between these issues and their local ministry.  So, I have decided to seek to make the work of Lausanne 3 the work of TIBM.  Here are a couple concrete ways we plan to engage these challenges.  First, I am calling upon the TIBM family to engage in the growing global conversation around these issues that is being hosted online by Lausanne and Christianity Today.  You can do that too by going directly to this site. I believe that God may have tremendous plans for this site.  Engage now.  Secondly, TIBM will be using a number of our Sunday night house church gatherings to focus on these issues.  We’ll take time to unpack each of the 6 issues and then prayerfully discuss them in our group.  In particular, we’ll frame our discussion with these questions:

     ·         How does this global issue impact and intersect with our local ministry?

    ·         How is God calling us to engage in this issue globally? How is God calling us to engage in partnerships around this issue?

    ·         What things make our involvement challenging?  Hopeful?

    ·         What resources do we have for the wider church and what resources do we need from the wider church concerning this issue?

    ·         What concerns should we bring before the Lord regarding this issue?

    5.      Develop a Strategy for Mobilization and Prophetic Leadership

    Cape Town 2010 is not an end in itself.  It is, Lord willing, the beginning of renewal, reformation, and recommitment for the global Church.  Those who engage in the work of Lausanne 3, have the responsibility to mobilize, equip, call, and lead the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.  As the Lord speaks to us in global community about these 6 critical issues, we then must speak to those in our spheres of influence.  We don’t know now what that will need to look like.  However, we know enough to pray and prepare ourselves for a work that will continue long after the Cape Town delegates have gone back home.  So, pray now.  And consider now how God may be calling you in leadership and in service around this work.  How should your gifts (teaching, giving, prayer, administration, service, mercy, etc.) be put to use to support the work of Lausanne right now?

     

     

     

    Tuesday, February 2, 2010 (2 comments)

  • TIBM in the News: Gateway to the Ends of the Earth

    Here's a recent article about TIBM as it appeared in the Baptist Press in 2009.

    Chicago: Gateway to the ends of the earth
    GLEN ELLYN, Ill. (BP) | Cody Lorance doesn't knock.  He just pushes the door open and ambles into the department.  A little girl runs to hug him and the rest of her family filters into the room to greet their guest.

    They give each other a traditional South Asian greeting – the palms of their hands pressed together in front of them – but what they say in Nepali is anything but traditional: “Jay Masih,” which means “Victory to the Messiah.”

    Lorance is a church planter in Chicago. Since 2005, he and a five-member team have been working among immigrants in the city. Since they started meeting as a house church four years ago, they have seen the Lord pull together congregations among Nepali, Ethiopian and Karen people who live in rundown little apartment buildings scattered around Chicago’s western suburbs.

    Lorance makes himself at home, dropping casually onto the couch and peppering family members with questions in their heart language. He asks how jobs are going, talks about plans for a block party, and learns a family member has bought a car that may not have had all the appropriate paperwork to go with it. A young woman brings him a steaming glass of tea that gives off an aroma of cardamom, and Lorance sips it appreciatively. He will sit and chat with the family for hours.

    He may be a pastor making a ministry visit, but he’s also part of the family.

    Back on the street outside, Lorance gestures at the nearby businesses and homes.

    “This is a white, upper-middle-class neighborhood, but these little apartment buildings are chock-full of refugees,” he points out. “So many church people pass by every day and have no idea what’s going on here.”

    The refugees come from all over the world, and some churches are reaching out to them in ministry. Most of the visitors, however, don’t spend the time necessary to develop a real relationship with the refugees.

    “This is not a superficial, drive-by ministry. You’ve got to be willing to move beyond the American 30-minute visit,” Lorance said. “You’ve got to get past the first cup of tea and eat a couple of meals with them. It takes three-hour, six-hour visits. You have to get to the point where you run out of the Nepali phrases you know and they run out of English – and you still stay with them. You become more a part of their lives – a fixture, a part of the family.” 

    ‘GATEWAY TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH’ 
    “Chicagoland” is a gateway to the ends of the earth, Lorance said. Its 9.6 million residents speak a couple of hundred languages – 147 officially documented by the public schools – and many of those are the heart languages of overseas people groups that have never heard the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ.

    The work Lorance and his team are doing is helping forge a new path for North American missions – a path that leads directly into unreached people groups overseas, said Keith Draper, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Baptist Association.

    “When the International Mission Board tells us the first church among an unreached people of the world could begin in Chicago, we are overjoyed and looking for partners,” Draper said. “Cody is doing that kind of groundbreaking work.”

    What began as a house church in 2005 was followed by an Ethiopian congregation in 2006 and an English As A Second Language ministry and Karen congregation in 2007. The Ethiopian group spun off a daughter church back in Ethiopia and the Karen from a daughter church in Rockford, Ill.

    The Nepali congregation began meeting earlier in 2009. They have baptized 18 so far this year, including 12 reflecting rare instances of high-caste Hindus publicly declaring their faith in Jesus alone as Savior. 

    UNEXPECTED OPEN DOORS 
    Lorance sees the Lord opening doors with refugees in the most unexpected ways.

    He was working in partnership with Exodus World Service, a refugee ministry based in Bloomingdale, Ill., to help refugees from Burma’s Karen people group. The first family he met had been commissioned by their refugee-camp church to start a church in the United States when they arrived.

    “We have prayed a lot and ... started a home Bible study two years ago and have gone from house to house as others arrived,” Lorance recounted. “We had the first worship service here in December 2007 and a few months later helped start a church among Karen refugees in Rockford that had 300 in attendance for its first anniversary service.”

    One Wednesday evening, Lorance walked into a Karen home to lead a Bible study and found four people waiting who were definitely not Karen. Two Karen teenage girls had met some new neighbors and invited them to the Bible study. The neighbors, who were Nepalis from Bhutan, came even though they wouldn't understand what was being said.

    Lorance, however, had focused on Hinduism during his graduate studies and was working at the time with the South Asia Friendship Center in Chicago’s Little India. He was able to greet the visitors in Hindi.

    “I had been preaching to the Karen church about missions. They have neighbors from all over the world and I had been locating people for them on a map,” Lorance said. “The two girls invited their new neighbors and from that simple act of reaching out we now have a congregation of 70 Nepalis, many of them new believers. It started with a simple invitation.”

    That Nepali congregation is the only organization in the city for Bhutanese Nepalis, Lorance added. When a new family arrives at the airport, the Nepali congregation picks them up and takes them to a home where they enjoy a Nepali meal. They help them get moved into an apartment, work with them on getting the necessities of life in America, and the next Sunday members of that new family usually are in the congregation’s service.

    “It’s amazing,” Lorance said. “Eighty percent of the Bhutanese Nepalis in our county are in church with us on Sunday, even if they are Hindu.”

    In a city the size of Chicago, with its millions of lost souls, the opportunities are boundless to see God replicate the kind of Kingdom advance Lorance and his team are experiencing, said Charles Campbell, who directs church planting initiatives for the Illinois Baptist State Association.

    “We need more Codys to come to Chicago,” Campbell said. “My prayer is that as people see what he is doing, they will catch a vision for coming to Chicago and joining Illinois Baptists in the work there.”

    You can learn more about the mission of the Chicago Metropolitan Baptist Association at their website, chicagobaptist.org.


    Friday, January 29, 2010 (No comments)
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Focus on Cape Town 2010. In this edition of RV, we feature a video introduction to the 3rd Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization to be held in Cape Town, South Africa next year.  Please be in prayer for the work of Lausanne III that has already begun and pray for the role TIBM will be playing in this historic congress.

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