Coffee With A Missiologist

This is Hans Schile from the Finishing Well Podcast. On Finishing Well, we help you make godly choices about Medicare, long-term care, and your money. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and choosing the Truth Podcast Network. I want to talk to you a little bit about your plan, not just for you, not just for the little neighborhood you're living in and your little family, but for the whole world. How is God going to use you to fulfill His great commission, not omission?

But I have to talk about this with this man of God in a coffee shop. You'll hear the music. I don't even know what kind of music this is. French probably. You'll hear the French press in the background. You'll hear all kinds of things. Okay, Scott Sundquist, you've been all over the world, but bring everyone in here with us. What do you see? Where are we right now?

Well, where we are right now is we're in a restaurant, and we've all made contact with our waitress who's from Brazil. And she had Yeshua tattooed on her arm, and so we found out that she attends a church that we're going to try to connect with and kind of disciple some of the people in that church. But that's a matter of attentiveness. We want to be attentive wherever we are to see how is it God might use us today? How is the spirit working around us? And that comes from our being made in the likeness of Jesus Christ. Jesus was sent from the heart of God to connect our hearts with His heart. And so we're invited to participate in that beautiful work and all that we do, whether we're working in a restaurant, whether we're working in a seminary, in a church, or a public school teacher where I started out, started a little Bible study at a public school when I was 21 years old, right out of college, and God led about eight people to faith in Christ. But I'm an evangelist because somebody came and spoke to me about Jesus. I was in a fairly liberal church growing up and didn't really know about a personal relationship with Christ. But our church was going through a split. And so this family invited this guy out to come and talk to us about Jesus. And I'll never forget, he said one day, we've been meeting five weeks and there's just the eight of you. Why aren't you inviting your friends?

See, he was an evangelist. That's why you meet in a Bible study, to invite other people in. I said, Well, we've got something good going here. And why would we invite other people?

They might mess it up. Because I was very selfish. And so he said, Well, what do you think it means to be a Christian? And I said, Oh, well, you're born in a Christian family, and you go to church, and you know, you do Christian things. He said, Oh, so you think if you're born in a garage, your car? I said, Well, that's kind of silly. No, I don't think that.

Well, you think just being born in the family makes you a Christian? I don't know. He said, Remember, Jesus offers to everybody a question. I mean, I'll never forget this. I was 16 years old, and I'm much older now.

16 years old. And he said, Jesus, when he came to earth, he offered everybody a question. I said, Yeah, that's right. What's the question? The question is, will you follow me or not?

And if you haven't answered the question, the answer is no. And so you need to, at some point in your life, answer that question. And I went home that night.

I remember that very night, November 1970. And I thought, wow, that's what I want. I want to follow Jesus. And so I just rolled over in bed and said, Jesus, I want to follow you. You ask.

I don't know what it means. I confess that I need you. So save me, guide me.

You know, what should I do? So I opened my Bible next to my bed. I don't recommend this.

Please don't tell your heroes I'm not recommending this. But I opened my Bible. Luke 962.

No man who puts his hand to the plow and turns back is fit for the kingdom of heaven. You never forget that. The rest of my life, I hold on to that. So to this day, I'm thinking about connecting with people. I'm thinking of our seminary planning churches in New England, the least evangelized area of the United States. That's the great joy that we have in life. And that's the voice, the encouraging voice of Scott Sundquist, who is the president of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. And you're like, wow, that's what a seminary president sounds like.

But you really have this passion for souls. Every time I've just, you know, I've just met you in person for the first time. Dad loved talking to you. And Dad called me right after he met with you last week. He said, you got to meet this guy. You got to meet with this guy.

So this is an answer to Dad's prayer and his encouragement. You wrote these two books. You've written, published two books.

You've got a lot more in the can, I know, or in the process. But why church, which is a real challenge for missiology and identity, I guess. I want you to talk about that. And then the shape of Christian history.

How would you summarize these two books and kind of like your big idea in both of them? Start with why church. That's a good question. I visited about 25 or 30 churches in the L.A. area when I took a job out in Pasadena, California, and I was appalled at how simplistic the worship was and how little of the great tradition, the church and all the richness of the Bible came through churches. And so I said, I could write a book on church to help people figure out what this is all about, because we're just sort of imitating one another. We come and we sing for half an hour and then we take an offering and they have a message and then we sing and we leave. But there's so much more to the Christian faith and the worship of connecting with one another and prayers of confession. And the prayer of confession was missing. I mean, the basic way we come to faith in Christ is we admit we have a need.

The basic Christian prayers save me. And it's not there in the worship services. So I went through and I said, there's an easy way to remember what church is about is basic body movements. Come stand, kneel, sit, go. And so you have to read the book to find out what that's all about. But it ends with go because churches are called to Christ and then sent by Christ into the world. And any church that doesn't have that warp and woof that in and out like the two piston engine, two stroke engine.

You know, you're you're not living into the real Christian faith. And that said, by a seminary president who also travels the world, your passport is like a giant dictionary. It's so thick.

Tell us about Dr. Sundquist. This next book, which you just put my hands. I'm very excited to read it. The shape of Christian history.

And at the top, there's I guess the subtitles up here. Continuity continuity and diversity in the global church. What a topic. What's the passion behind this?

Where do you want this to take people? I spent about with a friend of mine, Dale Urban, we spent about 10 years writing about the history of Christianity from the time of Jesus resurrection up to the present. And in doing that, I realized that many publishers don't want to use adjectives or descriptive words. They don't want to make sort of like moral ethical decisions about these things. They want sort of just the facts. And I thought that's not what church history is about. If you take a look at the history of Israel, there are tremendous lessons in there. Why do we have all these stories of David and failures and so forth? Why do you have this great story of Nehemiah and the boldness of Zerubbabel? So we can learn from that. And we need to learn from history. And what I realized is in the early church, Christianity was different, completely different from the ancient philosophies and religions.

Just one simple way. They had no value for patience. Patience was not a virtue in the ancient world.

Isn't that amazing? It is a central virtue for Christianity. Patience. Another thing in the ancient world and most cultures in the world, they view everything cyclically, that everything is going to kind of grow and develop and then it will just be a great fire and you start all over again. So there's no hope in that. As a matter of fact, in Tamil language in South India, there's no word for hope. Because in Hinduism, it's all kind of recycling come back. The worst thing you can say to a Hindu is oh, you're going to be born again. They say oh, not again. But in Christianity, you'll be born again. Well, it's only once.

And then it's forever and it's beautiful. So Christian history is different from the history of other religions. It's different from the history of a bank, a business or something. And it has a pedagogical imperative to make us more like Christ. Wow, from a coffee shop, French roast French press this place he found this spot and you made a beeline like we met in your library, which is in the Salem center beautiful library for Gordon Conwell in the Salem center at all of these great Christian radio stations here in Jacksonville that I'm a part of they carry they're brave enough to carry this show on 91.7 FM Jacksonville 91.3 FM Brunswick and 91.9 FM St. Augustine and then 200 other gracious affiliates to carry Thank you AFR Thank you Wilkins Thank you Salem Thank you Truth Network stations brave enough to carry this show.

Thank you Scott sunquist for coming on tell us what God's doing real quick. Gordon Conwell, your passion for equipping people in the Word of God and spreading the gospel worldwide to talk about that real quick as we get out of here give it give your give a shameless shout out to the seminary because everything you're saying is very encouraging to me and I know will be to our listeners. Gordon Conwell is at the precipice of diving off into a phenomenal future because of stronger finances than we've ever had scholarships for international starting a PhD program, having cohorts in Ghana. And leaders so that seminaries can get accredited there.

A new cohort for demon in Chinese for Chinese scholars in Korea for Korean scholars. So there's a number of new places and ways that we're working on the things I'm most excited about is we're going to have a cohort of 25 church planners in New England, that in three years, they'll finish a two year degree, and have planted a church. So I can see that every two or three years will be planning 25 churches in New England, so you can pray for us about that, so much missions out there to be mad about. Maybe not enough missions actually when you still have 2.5 billion on planet Earth that have never heard the gospel.

You have maybe 7800 language groups you'll have to correct me on that that don't have the Bible in their own language friends we have four or five Bibles we're not even reading them. Dr. Sundquist your passion for church planning you know this is God's plan a how important is this from the seminary president level all the way down to what you just said is music to my ears, and especially for all the people who are coming at seminary and there's some other good seminaries out there too I mean you guys have a good coalition of folks but your passion for folks getting plugged in and planting those churches, all over the world. Yeah, we would like every student to come out with excitement and zeal about reaching out finding ways of connecting that's what I'm teaching I was asked to teach a course down here in January and Jacksonville and I chose evangelism, because I would like every student to think about how am I living my life so making connections with my neighbors with the people the restaurant the people the grocery store, because the world desperately needs Christians with those kind of virtues of forgiveness of patience of gentleness to point the way to the loving Christ, the world needs it and so it's how wonderful it'd be to think that people with the best education are also the ones they're making the best connections of love. And this through seeing a tattoo on a young lady's arm in a coffee shop someone we've never met before challenge everyone as we leave here about the importance of sharing the gospel and by the way you can get this whole podcast you can share it everywhere truth is available that you can be encouraged into our guests this segment has been Dr. Scott sunquist author, President of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary man of God father grandfather, but number one he opened this show with evangelist missiologist which definition of missiology, and why we should share our faith as we wrap up quick. Yeah, to be a Christian is to be one who proclaims the good news of Christ to the world those who are called to Christ are sent by Christ, the person who comes to Christ and stays there because he has half the truth. And so the great joy and the completeness of our life is to look back after. Well I'm an old man now I could easily have retired to look back and look at those disciples those lives that were changed and churches that were changed, because we stepped out and said something about Jesus to lift up the name of Jesus in the world is one of the most beautiful things, it's most fulfilling thing, and it makes us most fulfilled and most of the May God, the way God intended us to be. This is the truth network.