Missions on the Frontline
a ministry of WorldVenture
To, Through and With the Local Church
|
LISTEN HERE
SHOW SUMMARY Joe Warring, WorldVentures Sr. VP of U.S. Operations, lays the foundation of partnership with the local Church to accomplish the Great Commission.SHOW NOTES MOF_2010_07_07_JoeWarring-web_nvr.mp3 |
SHOW TRANSCRIPT |
|
JOE WARRING: Thanks, Hans. Good to be here.
HANS FINZEL: Joe is the Senior Vice-President of U.S. Ministry Operations here for Littleton. That’s a pretty big job and you are relatively new to WorldVenture so welcome. You know you have kind of an interesting background and we thing we love to do on this show is to help people understand you can be involved in missions from any walk of life.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: You know sometimes people get the idea that I have to be a seminary graduate…
JOE WARRING: Right.
HANS FINZEL:… or a Bible school graduate. That’s not true, is it?
JOE WARRING: Not necessarily.
HANS FINZEL: Not necessarily. How… Tell us a little bit about your background and how you eventually gravitated to the cause of global missions.
JOE WARRING: Amen. Well, God gave me some interesting experiences and a lot of diversity in what I’ve done in life. I started in business and for 17 years I was in various executive and leadership positions and business. Some were Fortune 100 companies and 2001 I decided to, like Paul, stop kicking against the goads and move into a call that God put on my life and do ministry. I became a pastor and a church planter and eventually in the process of that really began to develop an understanding for mission and the role of the local church, the role of individuals, the power and the impact of mission mobilization in the world and that became a real passion and vision for me.
HANS FINZEL: Can I just ask you about this? You went over it real quickly…
JOE WARRING: Sure.
HANS FINZEL: … but I think a lot of people listening maybe think God’s calling them to, you know, to have more impact.
JOE WARRING: Sure.
HANS FINZEL: Especially people who are not, maybe in their 20s’s, but you know maybe mid-career.
JOE WARRING: Yeah.
HANS FINZEL: And you passed over that real quickly. Was it hard to leave the business world and to move into the ministry world?
JOE WARRING: Sure, absolutely, yeah.
HANS FINZEL: What was that like? How did you…
JOE WARRING: Ah, the sorted details. Well…
HANS FINZEL: Yeah.
JOE WARRING: You know God began to speak in my life about being involved in ministry. It took me seven years to move from when I knew God had called me to be engaged in ministry to actually work through that process of submitting to that calling.
HANS FINZEL: So you were a little bit like Jonah, huh?
JOE WARRING: Yeah, very much so. I mean I was running from what looked like a Nineveh calling. How do you do that? How do you go to seminary? How do you engage? Do you need to do that? Those were all the issues that I had to wrestle through and God brought me through that. So I encourage anybody listening, if God is telling you and you feel that call, you can do it. There’s a process like I had to go through of kind of a dying to myself; a dying to my vision and conquering the fear of how and what do I do? And one of the things that really excites me about being at WorldVenture is that we are intentionally trying to reach through the things that we are doing; people that want to be engaged that way. Business people, teachers, folks who are engaged in “normal life” that don’t see themselves as “missionaries” or “apostles to the world” kind of thing. You can be involved; you can be engaged and we want to help make it so; that you can do that.
HANS FINZEL: Absolutely. We are living in an age where actually the professional missionary is not really what we are looking for.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: We’re looking for teachers, medical people, business people, construction people, engineers, artists.
JOE WARRING: There’s always going to be the role for the person that is called to be the church planter out in the middle of somewhere that is a difficult place that needs that background and needs to have that kind of preparation. But the world is changing; it’s a flat world now. The need and the aid and the opportunities have now multiplied in a manifold fashion. You know, in the past 20 or 30 years it has shifted – the access that you have and the need that’s there for people to get engaged and so now it’s a holistic approach to what we are doing and missions as we know has been redefined to be a much wider, bigger tent in what that means. So that’s what we are looking for.
HANS FINZEL: If you are listening and you are interested in coming in the tent…
JOE WARRING: Yeah, that’s right.
HANS FINZEL: …one place you can go is to our website WorldVenture.com and if you look under the tab SERVE you will find over 500 opportunities right now to serve with WorldVenture.
JOE WARRING: Praise God.
HANS FINZEL: That’s for a short-term opportunity or longer-term, whatever God leads you to do.
JOE WARRING: Yep.
HANS FINZEL: Let’s talk about the church, Joe. Why is WorldVenture so passionate about the local church here in North America?
JOE WARRING: Well, we’re committed fundamentally and our values and… But also I think as importantly practically, we know that it’s to, and through, and with the local church that the call to missions has come. Uh, biblically, practically, in our expectations - everything we do therefore is kind of wrapped around that idea. Instead of looking at ourselves as we are the solution to taking the Gospel to the world, we look at ourselves as more of a catalyst; a servant partner that seeks to come alongside the local church to help it develop its visions; to help it find the new channels of connection in the missional activity and then to help empower them do that along with us as we go. Um, without the local church, Hans, we can’t do mission. We can’t make it happen ourselves; we can’t snap a finger and simply create things. It’s got to be through a very tight and transparent partnership with our local church partners. We value them highly. Everything that we do in our operations in the U.S. is geared around them. Every missionary we have on the field is absolutely dependent upon them for their prayer; for their support in all those ways so it is a fundamental underpinning of everything that we do.
HANS FINZEL: Our vision statement at WorldVenture is, “We see people of all nations transformed by Jesus Christ, through partnership with the church.” And that last statement, “…through partnership with the church,” I’ve always believed that the Great Commission was really given to the local church.
JOE WARRING: Yep.
HANS FINZEL: Not to WorldVenture, uh, so our role is really to help the churches do missions effectively around the world.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: How are some ways… By the way, you can go to our website, WorldVenture.com, and there’s another tab there called CHURCH CONNECTIONS. How are some ways that we can help local churches? If you’re out there listening and you say, “Man, our mission program is so old-fashioned,” and I see a lot of churches that I go to and they say, “You know, we’re supporting 40 missionaries at $15 a month and it’s just meaningless.”
JOE WARRING: Yeah, you’ve got the map downstairs with the PolaroidsTM and the yarn string and…
HANS FINZEL: Yeah, and nobody is really connected.
JOE WARRING: You know, I tell you, we know that that’s true and, of course, we’re joking. We love and appreciate churches that are engaged. Um, the sad part there’s a whole lot of churches out there that don’t even have that.
HANS FINZEL: They don’t even have the yarn string?
JOE WARRING: Not even that stuff. And I think in the ways, to answer the question, that we can help, um, churches that have an advanced missional program we can still engage and help them as well. One of the key resources that God has given us at WorldVenture is our people. I’m humbled to work with some of the folks that are on my team because as I jokingly say, they’ve forgotten more than I even know about mission work and church ministry. I’m a pastor… A lot of our folks are former pastors and many have a lot of mission skill and so… And experience and so I think the core thing that we can offer the local church is experience. To be able to speak into the realities of missional engagement means and we’ve got the kind of folks that are a part of our team that can say it and speak with a kind of validity that’s not just about “I can tell you what happens overseas” but they’ve got an understanding of what the local church pastorate is like in America; the challenges of that -- the bandwidth. You know, so if you’re a pastor out there you know what I’m talking about. I would love to be more involved in missions but I’ve got all of these other things that are going on as well. I may not have the budget; I may not have the time; I may not have the people, I don’t think, to be really be engaged that way. I think that’s the sweet spot of where we can really help because we have the people; we have the experience and we can come alongside of the local church through those people; through training that we offer – structured, organized training programs that are geared not just for the pastoral staff but for the people of the church to get it, to understand and grab a missional vision and see how they can be engaged as well. When we do those things we are kind of preparing the ground for the harvest that comes after because when it comes time to engage, whether it’s through a business-based mission approach or through our Journey Corps approach for young people to go on a one to two-year engagement, or folks that are really feeling the popcorn factor and start popping in their pews and people start saying, “Yeah, God’s calling me,” then we’re right there to be able to help them and help you walk through that as well.
HANS FINZEL: In case you’re just joining us, this is Hans Finzel and you’re listening to Missions on the Frontline and I have as my guest today, Joe Warring, who is our Senior Vice-President for U.S. Ministry Operations here based in Colorado. Our website is WorldVenture.com and if you have a church that you’re involved with and you need some help, go to our website and look under CHURCH CONNECTIONS. One thing we have is this great seminar called Design Your Impact. We’ve run into a lot of churches that love to pray for their missionaries and we thank God for that, and they love to pay for their missionaries and they do that, but we’re seeing a whole revolution of churches that want to do more than just pay…
JOE WARRING: Yeah.
HANS FINZEL: … and pray. They want to participate.
JOE WARRING: Amen. Amen.
HANS FINZEL: And that’s where we really want to come in. Let me ask you. Back up just a second because I’ve run into church that say, you know, the day of sending missionaries for America is over and we need to take care of our own backyard…
JOE WARRING: Yep.
HANS FINZEL: … and missions is just the neighborhood down the street. Why should a local church be engaged in international missions?
JOE WARRING: Yeah.
HANS FINZEL: From your point of view.
JOE WARRING: Yeah, I get it. Um, and I’ve heard that as well and I confess as a pastor…
HANS FINZEL: Because you were a pastor at two different churches.
JOE WARRING: Absolutely. And as a pastor in northern Virginia I had asked myself those same questions. Certainly I think the valid missional model for the local church is the biblical model – first to Jerusalem, then to Samaria, then to the ends of the earth. And I think that the local church does bear the responsibility to be making sure before you’re engaging overseas that you are modeling something of a cross-cultural outreach and evangelism in your own area. We know from experience that if you are doing that as a church, man, your impact in what you do when you go into an international setting is much more effective because your people are engaged; you understand it’s part of your DNA that’s there. However, that said, I think that the idea that I cannot be engaged overseas missionally in a cross-cultural environment until I can do some of these other things, I think too often is an excuse. One of the things that I did as a pastor was – although I still struggled with these things – I made sure that into the DNA of our very church was a missional commitment from the get-go so that if I was tempted to be overcome and overwhelmed with the realities of our needs in our local area, we still had it built in that our commitment to an international, cross-cultural mission engagement was there. I think one of the key reasons why that’s important is because it keeps the church – it keeps the congregation – focused outside of themselves. And the reality in the church in America and in our culture that we’ve got to be aware of is it’s very easy to stay behind those four walls and get focused on us. We talk about needing to get out and evangelize and often we are doing those things but there’s something powerful about keeping your eyes into a completely different world-wide perspective that helps lift the local perspective as well. It helps lift evangelism programs that you are doing in the cross-culture outreach; it raises awareness that’s a real value. Um, there’s nothing, I think, more powerful to instigate local, missional outreach by your congregation than having people be able to experience what God’s doing in other places around the world and say, “We can do that right here. We can be involved with that there and we can do that here.” We talk a lot about the church here reaching the church there. We’re also interested now to understand how the church there is impacting the church here because the fact of the matter is, the church in Africa, the church in China and Asia, they have a lot to offer us here and we are really interested to see how God begins to move that synergy back and forth as we engage. So there’s all of that potential that’s there and that’s why as a local congregation – that vision – we can be involved. We do need to be part of this. The body of Christ is one around the world and we’ve got to be connected to that somehow. Where we’re at we’ll connect based on the level we can connect with but we need to be connected and we want to be here to help you connect.
HANS FINZEL: If there’s anybody listening that by perhaps is disappointed with their church, I can’t imagine that anybody…
JOE WARRING: No.
HANS FINZEL:… would be disappointed in their local church but, what we don’t want to do is export the weaknesses of the American church…
JOE WARRING: Yep.
HANS FINZEL: … and what you said really struck a chord with me, exactly why it’s so powerful to have people from the church over there come over here.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: If I were going to describe the missional church that’s really cranking on all eight cylinders for missions, and we have those that we are in partnership with, I would say that one of the key elements is a strong partnership with a particular country…
JOE WARRING: Yep.
HANS FINZEL: … and a particular group of people. I’m thinking of one of our churches in Basking Ridge, New Jersey that has a long-term commitment to Senegal.
JOE WARRING: Yes.
HANS FINZEL: And they regularly have their people go to Senegal and they regularly have Senegalese come to their church. They change pulpits.
JOE WARRING: Yep.
HANS FINZEL: And you know what? I think that whole partnership has done more for the church in New Jersey than the church in Senegal.
JOE WARRING: Absolutely. Um, I had a wonderful experience in Ghana with the Bible Church of Africa, which is a strong denomination – an evangelical denomination there – and met with their leaders and talked about this idea of their impact on the church in the U.S. And the first thing that they said to me is, “Well, what do you think we bring to the table?” We had never kind of been asked that question and God gave me the words to say and I passionately believe this. “You African brothers in this room, you bring a faith that is, compared to us, tried in poverty which gives it a different depth that we don’t even understand. Many of you, particularly in northern Ghana, have a faith that’s been tried by persecution, which is another thing that the American church only can theorize about, although we’ll see how that folds out in the next 20 years here. You come from a culture that is much more relationally-based and family-based; much closer, frankly, to the culture of the Bible than to the culture we have that’s here.” Um, if we can bring that faith-perspective into the DNA of the church in America, I think revival could break out. I think the lift that that can bring and the power that that can bring to the church in America, is going to be a growth dynamic. It’s going to fundamentally change the perspective that we have as American Christians to what God is doing around the world and how our faith is defined. That excites me! As a pastor and as a mission leader that kind of juice makes me excited because I see God being able to move that way in really profound ways that will kind of knock us out of our perspective and open up our viewpoint. Not as American Christians, but as citizens of the Kingdom of God as it’s moving here in the world. That’s the perspective we want to keep. That’s the vision we want to have as followers of Jesus Christ.
HANS FINZEL: Amen. That’s why we don’t want to be an island.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: You know we talk a lot about short-term mission trips on this program. Everybody I’ve ever talked to on our program that is on fire for the Great Commission and missions, that fire started with a short-term mission trip.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: And you realize – you know I think we think naively – we have so much to offer them but I find out it changes our lives when we go rub shoulders with people.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: I think you’re absolutely right – people that are in poverty.
JOE WARRING: Yep.
HANS FINZEL: Persecution; they are paying a price to have church.
JOE WARRING: Yeah.
HANS FINZEL: They are paying a price to be believes and it creates a whole different kind of Christianity.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: That’s exciting.
JOE WARRING: That’s right. What really excites me is that when we come face-to-face with our brothers and sisters in Christ in these contexts, not only does it strengthen our faith but I think it also helps us define the how. How do we engage? What is our role? To refer to the earlier question in kind of the “red herring” - the days of white faces from America going into these places is over. There’s argument about that and I’m not, frankly, qualified, I think, to bring that one to the ground, um, but things are changing. But what is key is that if we don’t know them and if we are not in relationship with them, we won’t know how to engage them in an effective way. God uses different pieces of the body, you know as the New Covenant talks about. Each is maybe an ear, an eye, a hand, a foot. All that makes the body whole and move and, man, this dynamic of us engaging that way, I think, begins to open up for the first time, a whole new reality for the church around the world but particularly in the United States. One of the things I wanted to kind of emphasize, Hans, in talking to the folks that are listening now, beyond the – and behind the accusation that, “Well, maybe missions has changed,” and also related to the idea of, “If I’m not a theologian I can’t be involved,” – you know, one of things that we are very interested in instigating is the idea that if you are sitting in your local church, if you’re a business person, if you’re engaged in teaching, we can create these channels of connection for you to be involved in missions. That may not mean that you come and become a full-time missionary. It may mean that you just become an advocate partner of WorldVenture right where you are. And in that sense you can be directly involved and engaged in all that we are doing. It may be as simple as you picking up the phone or sending an e-mail to refer somebody to us; that you may hear something in your local church or in your context of a need to be more missionally engaged. Well, guess what? You are our partner; we value you, and we’re here to help meet that need. So when you hear those things and if you are engaged or you see an opportunity that comes, we want you to be engaged in this network of connectivity that we want to build around the world. In that sense, you as an individual can help change the world for Jesus Christ. And that’s what we want to instigate.
HANS FINZEL: We do have a new emphasis called Business as Mission, which is under your domain.
JOE WARRING: Yep.
HANS FINZEL: And we are seeing so many business people get excited because now they are using their business skills…
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: … to do ministry. In Mozambique, for example, we have an operation with 8,000 hens that are laying eggs…
JOE WARRING: Yeah.
HANS FINZEL: … and it’s really a job creation for Mozambiquen young men who want to be pastors but they have no way of getting money.
JOE WARRING: That’s right.
HANS FINZEL: But recently we sent a group of business people over to Mozambique to help that entire operation of 8,000 hens and I learned that a hen lays an egg every day.
JOE WARRING: That’s amazing.
HANS FINZEL: I didn’t know that. It’s like, I’m just thinking, “Well that’s a lot of eggs to deal with.” And these business people were so helpful in price-structure…
JOE WARRING: Yeah.
HANS FINZEL: …distribution, marketing, uh, just so many things and see, a lot of business people don’t know how much we need their skills.\
JOE WARRING: Absolutely. I think one of the keys to missional movement right now and many of the things that we are engaged in, is not just sharing the Gospel or planting churches, it’s enabling and empowering for sustainability. In many cases that’s education but in other cases that’s economics so how do we empower our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world who, in many countries that they are in, don’t have opportunities to get education and don’t have opportunities to participate in the economy. In fact, in many cases, those opportunities are taken away when they proclaim their faith in Christ. So how can we leverage the resources that we’ve got to help teach them -- to use the old phrase -- not just to “get the fish” but to be fishermen and create it? And we want to take it to the next place and say, “We want to help you build a fish farm.”
HANS FINZEL: Yeah, that’s right.
JOE WARRING: So you can seed your own lakes and do that…
HANS FINZEL: Yeah.
JOE WARRING: Because we have this passion and vision of saying, “If we can help our brothers and sisters in Christ create economic stability for themselves in a Christian perspective - understanding stewardship, why they do business, who they serve in that business – then we can begin to create a model where they are then turning in funding their own missional engagement, their own local church, and they become independent of us and begin to see themselves now as being a center of impact – an epicenter of impact within their own country. Not only to preach to the Gospel but now to generate their own economic and educational background and awareness and equipping to have that impact right there. That is something that we are very engaged in. If you want to learn more about that you can go to our website, as Hans as given you, or go see TransformationalVentures.com and that’s where all of our Business as Mission stuff is available and you can learn all about it and get engaged and our team there would be glad to help you learn more and find out how you might be able to be engaged in business-based mission activities around the world.
HANS FINZEL: Again, that’s TransformationalVentures.com. Thanks, Joe. I hate that we’re out of time already…
JOE WARRING: Ah, that’s okay.
HANS FINZEL: And if anybody wants to continue to dialogue with you, you can write us at Frontline@WorldVenture.com. This has just been a great program. I appreciate having you on today.
JOE WARRING: You’re very welcome. Praise God.
HANS FINZEL: Thanks for listening today. This has been Missions on the Frontline. We’re here to expand your vision and make you aware of new and exciting ways you can be involved in missions around the world. And again, visit our website, WorldVenture.com. There’s all kinds of tremendous resources and again, we want to serve the local church. I’d love to hear from you. You can write me at Frontline@WorldVenture.com. This has been Hans Finzel. See you next week on Missions on the Frontline.
Comment
© 2012 Created by Chris Wynn.
You need to be a member of Missions on the Frontline to add comments!
Join Missions on the Frontline