The Audacity To Obey - Don Ellsworth

We talk with Don Ellsworth about building a church missions strategy that stays centered on Jesus while adapting to fast-changing realities. We explore how to steward budget and people so the whole body participates in reaching the unreached and serving the vulnerable. 
• Don’s journey from worship pastor to missions pastor and why the shift feels natural 
• deeper convictions about the gospel and disciple making driving the work 
• frustration with church bottlenecks that keep everyday believers from engagement 
• why engagement is harder than writing checks 
• a practical allocation framework for local and global stewardship 
• pursuing trusted partnerships instead of taking every request 
• leveraging vocational skills for mission impact including protecting vulnerable children 
• guardrails focused on unreached and vulnerable in the city and worldwide 
• gateway cities as a local pathway to cross cultural ministry 
• prayer walking and shared life as preparation for overseas sending 
• guidance for discernment through prayer and one-step obedience 
• books that build a foundation for missions and wise helping 
• bottlenecks like pride, territorialism and unawareness plus a pathway to engagement 

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Transcript

Revelation 7 And The Unreached Gap

SPEAKER_01 0:05

In Revelation 7, John shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people, and language, standing in the throne room before the land. Yet today, there are still over 7,000 unreach people in the throat. My family and friends have been on the journey of home and home with me.

Meet Don Ellsworth And His Shift

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Unreach Podcast. Dustin Elliott here today, hosting with the OGDE as my guest, Mr. Don Ellsworth, our missions pastor at our local church, Austin Ridge, former worship pastor who just celebrated 25 years with our church. Congratulations. What year approximately did you switch from worship to mission? Okay. Is that math right? So maybe 13 years ago. Okay. So then for listener context, when uh Brittany and I got to the ridge was 2016. So you had been in that role for a couple years. And then as listeners know, I got into Pastor Brad's discipleship group, spent 18 months going through the Bible with him and a small group of guys. And then some things stood out for me that were kind of mission-oriented things, even though maybe not the term itself, which we're going to talk about in a second. And uh and so then I got to meet uh right after we got married, um, I met with Don, Brittany and I met with Don, and we were like, hey, we're really into this um I this concept that, you know, Jesus hasn't been named everywhere yet, and there's places that still haven't got to hear the good news, and there's places that don't have healthy churches, and we really want to figure out a way to get involved in that work. And that's kind of how our relationship started. We came and said, we want to start something, and you said, Well, well, hold on, don't start something. There's another family here that just was in here. They're they're they want to start something. Why don't you all join something? Join something. Start something together. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

That was a good introduction.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

All right. So maybe just give the listeners background for you, other than what I just shared.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yeah, I grew up in a Christian home, grew up in a ministry home. I came to Christ, made a very conscientious decision, I believe, at the age of five, baptized a couple years later. But I remember uh my mom leading me to Jesus and uh uh obviously young, but um uh grew up knowing more about Jesus as the years went along. I didn't know much, but I knew enough. Just continued to grow in my faith. Wasn't intending to go into local church work. I grew up in high school. I worked in a hotel as a dishwasher in a catering department. So I was gonna go do like hotel management. That's what I was going to college for. Hospitality. Yeah, hospitality industry. My dad worked at a college at the time, and so he told me that was the scholarship plan at the time. So I went to where he taught and got free tuition, and that's where I fell in love with ministry local church and have been in the local church ever since. So was a worship pastor for 20-some years, uh, came to the ridge as worship pastor, uh, transitioned into missions, like we said, about 13 years ago. A lot of overlap in those things. People look at you and say, that was so different. How in the world did it get there? And in my mind, it's just like it's just a little shift in a minor direction. Worship pastor, we're trying to get people connected to Jesus and you know, worshiping the Lord. And the ultimate goal of missions, as Piper says, is the worship of Jesus ultimately by the nations. And so it wasn't a big shift for me at all. Having grown up in the church, I've seen church, I've seen missions, I've seen church politics, I've seen church, you know, all of the things. And so um, my desire in that shift into missions was, hey, let's do this, let's do it right, but let's do it in a way that is not traditional or just fall into old ways of doing things that may or may not be effective. And so that was a driving force for me and excitement. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

So let's challenge the status quo of traditional missions in the Western church, if you will. I have some goals for today. I don't usually list these out for the listeners, but I I just kicking off season six, and we've done this for a little while, and Clint and Amber are here, and we were talking earlier about like who's our listener base. And we've got obviously uh a lot of people from local churches, uh, several that are, you know, that are on the pastoral side, uh, a lot that are sitting in the pews. We've got people that are that are full-time missionaries, people that work at sending orgs, people in 130-something countries have listened to the pod now. And so the listener base here is going to hear this approach from a very seasoned veteran missions pastor, a goal. How do you measure local versus global, right? And and allocate resources. How do you operate as a missions pastor in a kind of a Western church that a lot of people would say everything is missions? And so, how do you define what is your lane? And how do you convince the elder board? And then from there, the the church at large, what is your lane? By God's grace, we have a nice budget here. You've got a pretty broad spectrum of allocation to different ministries that range from everything from hunger and homelessness to fighting trafficking to you know traditional church planning, translation, etc. How do we allocate? That's kind of what I'd like to cover. So maybe other churches hear something new that they could incorporate in how they think about it. Yeah, that's about a hundred questions right there. Yeah. Well, you said you had a lot. You said this is amazing. He walks in here, having done this for so long, and says, I have more questions today than I had five years ago. And that kind of that kind of took all of us back. Like, really? Because you're kind of the guy that we think should have a lot of the answers. But this thing is changing so fast. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Yeah. I mean, with that long list of questions comes deeper convictions also. Okay. Let me just start there just to be clear.

Why Missions Is Still About Jesus

SPEAKER_00 6:10

This is still about Jesus. This is still about the gospel. This is still about the church stepping into its role of being the the body of Christ. I mean, literally the hands and feet of Jesus to represent him and his ways to the community, to the world. And so there's a deeper conviction about the subject matter, and that is Jesus. That is the gospel. It is go and make disciples. It's a deeper conviction about how Jesus wants to use all of his people for the work to be done. As a pastor, I get frustrated at the bottlenecks that pastors and churches create for their people to be involved in Great Commission work. We could talk about that for a couple of episodes, maybe, but um, season six.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

We're going to talk about the bottlenecks of missions.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

You know, I think that um, yes, the pastor's job is to equip the saints to do the work of ministry, but we need to equip them to do the work of ministry, not just with the tools of ministry and the knowledge of ministry. And so I think that the convictions are deeper. And those are the that's the short list of deeper convictions that I have. The questions are in methodology, style points, you know, the how-tos. It's also, to be honest with you, we're a larger church, and so the the questions come in how like our church, I don't know what the numbers are. Our church has more than doubled since I've been in this role, right? So and it's about to arguably double again within the. I'd say it's probably quadrupled since you Well, since I started at the church for sure, but like even yeah. But just even in the next year or two, it could double again. And so a lot of my questions are logistic questions on how do you do that in a church. And it's not just sending money out. Like the money part is easy. You mentioned our budget. Praise God that we have a generous body that we get to do quite a bit financially more than most, and that doesn't get lost on me. And I'm honored and humbled to be able to help steward that. But that part is relatively easy. The difficult part is engagement, getting people to be aware and to care, and then do something about it.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

As we're going to challenge the status quo of tradition, and I don't mean tradition as in going back to biblical history, but just tradition of the Western church in our lifetimes, and maybe a couple before that. Business guy, he goes and he does his work, he gets a paycheck, he ties 10% to the church, and then the church is the varsity Christians, and they go do the ministry and the missions, right? And that is so not all that we have been called in to do. There's so much more. So as you're talking about equipping and preparing and encouraging and, you know, giving opportunity to actually be the hands and feet because we're all called to be biblically. And you're talking about doing that in a growing church, but also in an evolutionary changing mindset. Right now, you just got back from a trip. Maybe this is a good real-world example. You went to go support one of our mission partners. You went to, is it Southeast Asia?

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Philippines. Yeah. And who went with you? Like, let's just talk about that. Yeah. We partner with them because they are doing things that Jesus would want his people to do to protect children that are the most vulnerable population in the world from online exploitations. We took people from our church that care about that, but that can also do something about that. So we took lawyers, we took advocates, we took legislative leaders from the state of Texas that are all part of the ridge. Let's find the people that are passionate, let's find the people that have the giftedness within the body of Christ to effect change. We expose them to what God is doing in that place, and their lives are upside down and asking a lot of questions about what's next, and we're going to meet with them soon to help answer those questions prayerfully.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

Love that. Our friend Steve Richardson at Pioneers wrote a book called Silver and Bold. And I think it applies to this couple that went on the trip with you. And it's talking about this concept of, you know, retirement, which is not really a biblical concept at all, as as you know, because you've we've known each other a long time, but it's it's for Levitical priests and nobody else. Everybody else, you're supposed to run all the way through the finish line, right? But they went on this trip with you because they're at a certain age where they're probably not going to work full time in the vocation they're in now, and they don't want to go collect seashells and and play golf every day. They want to be used effectively. So they went with the purpose of due diligencing the next chapters of

The Hard Part Is Engagement

SPEAKER_01 10:55

their life. Right? Yep. How cool is that?

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Very. Yeah. And as a pastor, obviously, uh, my heart as a shepherd, you know, is I love to see our people asking those questions. And just the honor that it was for me that they approached me and asked me for help in navigating that journey with them. That's a huge, huge honor and it's a huge stewardship.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Love that. Yeah. When you're talking about allocation, I'm going to challenge you a little bit here, but let's just say if we had $100 and that was our mission's budget, okay? How do we think of allocation? Do we think about it locally and globally? As in this much goes local, this much goes global, or do we think about it in terms of this much is hunger, this much is homelessness, this much is is trafficking, this much is church planting, et cetera? How do we break that up?

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Historically, we would take probably sixty to seventy of those dollars and move it globally and thirty to forty locally, with the mindset that we can mobilize our resources better locally, which includes people. So we can get people to do stuff easily, more easily locally. And then uh generally speaking, dollars go further overseas and so two parts globally, one part locally.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Roughly. Yeah. And and because you're the local church, the rest of the church budget is going locally. So so you're not you're not missing uh if you look at the total allocation of the resources. No. Okay, so now of the part that's global, how are we thinking? Are we thinking j geographically, or are we breaking it into the set kind of those those categories that I just listed? How how do you think through that part?

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Aaron Powell We more pray through it, not to sound overly spiritual, but we really are asking the Lord, okay, what are what are the connections that we have? What are the things that are front of mind that you have had on our heart over the recent history? Um, what are the opportunities that you have in a knowing and strategic way have put in front of us? And we'll pursue those, and and that's where our money tends to land. So it's not geographic. It does, if anything, categorically, it gets addressed by accessibility. So again, we've talked about this before. Where are the unreached? Where are their um bigger opportunities to leverage resources to bring access to the gospel? Our stewardship is for Austin Ridge Bible Church, you know, not the church down the street. And so for us, we just seek the Lord and say, Lord, what do you want us to do? What are we good at? What do we have resources to allocate in this uh in this area? What are the trusted relationships that we already do have that allow us to go into another relationship with a sense of confidence that we know this is going to work out because we're friends with these people and so on. So we we don't intake, we pursue the partnerships that we want to have. So I want to I want to give you a little encouragement.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

2016, we meet with you, then we go meet with Heath and Tabby and and Jonathan and Anne, and Bless Starts, Light the World, big event that December, right? We had this goal of raising $250,000 and giving $50,000 away to five different organizations. We had our little categories, right? You seeded us with $25,000

Allocating Money Local And Global

SPEAKER_01 14:06

that first year to help us with our event and give us a little credibility, right? That that Austin Ridge Bible Church was behind what we were doing. Do you know how much God has given away through Bless since that $25,000 seed? $15 million. That's how effective you were in connecting people and encouraging us and guiding us. And by the way, you encouraged us to go through perspectives, which Heath and Tabby did and I did, and that's how we met Todd Arendt. And that's of course a lot of people here know that's how all this got really into hyperdrive if you meet the Todd. But man, how cool is that?

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yeah. Yeah, that kind of gives some perspective to 3060 hundredfold, right? Doesn't it though? Yeah. Doesn't it though? I don't know what those numbers are. You can probably figure that out. No, no, no, no. I do math in my day job. I don't have to do math here.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

No, I just I just want to be encouraging to you because I know our story is one of many.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

One of the things early on when I came into this role is I'd already been at the church for 12, 13 years, and so I knew Austin Ridge, or I had a sense of what its DNA was. And one of the things I learned was that we are stewards of not just our own personal lives and our families and our own resources, but as pastors, we are responsible as stewards of the resources of the body that he's put us with. And one of the things I learned early on was just way beyond my experience, but just the caliber of folks, the type of folks that we had here, entrepreneurial, generous, all of these things. But the entrepreneurial part was a surprise to me. And within the first couple of years, by just being able to encourage people, like I didn't even do anything except show up to a meeting with those famous chairs in my office, you know, that just said, Hey, I have an idea. What do you think? And I'm saying, you know what? That seems good. Go for it. I have no idea what you're talking about, but give it a try. And we had within the first, I don't know what it is, I'm kind of making up numbers, but they're not too far off. Within the first five years of that time, we had like seven different organizations that were founded by people in our body. And all of them, with the exception of one that merged with another one, I think all of them are still functioning today. And bless is one of them. You know, it's like, I have no idea what it means to be an auctioneer. You know, like, goodness, what's that? Like, you know, how does that work? And look what God did.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Okay, how do we process this idea of gateway cities and people from unreached people groups that move to Austin's and Chicago's and New York's and Dallas and Houston and et cetera? And I know some of the local stuff you do is prayer walks. So you'll go to a part of a neighborhood that's predominantly another uh religion and just go visit with people and then invite them into community and invite them to come check out church, invite them to a meal. How do we process that?

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Mm-hmm. So many ways. Yeah, I think that for us, some of our guiding our our guardrails are the unreached and the vulnerable in our city and around the world. So our purpose statement is God's passionate pursuit of all people compels us to reach the unreached and serve the vulnerable in our city and around the world. And so these categories of unreached in the city and unreached in the world, the vulnerable in the city and the vulnerable around the world, is kind of these guardrails that we use to help explain God's heart for the unreached and the vulnerable. By the way, the vulnerable is not a typical missions department terminology, I don't think, but it is as much on the heart of God for His people from day one. Sure. And so we just decided to codify it to some degree within the missions department to make that part of what we do. But I mean, I think one of the things that we realized early on was we were taking trips and and partnering with organizations overseas among the unreached. It was like, okay, there's a little bit of the way I worded it, it was a little bit of an integrity issue of, you know, figuratively, but nevertheless kind of stepping over that same group of people in our own city to go overseas to do that. Right, right, right. And so it's like, wait a second, they're right over there. Exactly. And so it wasn't like, oh my gosh, like a lot of people look at it and say, well, we can't do stuff overseas because the need is so strong here. Like, well, no, Jesus calls us to do all of it, the and, you know, Jerusalem, Judea, and, and, and. So we decided to just kind of address that relationship. So we already had some relationships uh with some ladies that were teaching English to Afghan refugees in a portion of our city. I mean, a couple, and we just prayed and asked the Lord and talked with these ladies as well. Is there something here that you want to build off of? Long story short, the answer was yes. And so a relationship and a ministry uh founded in that predominantly Muslim part of the city was officially birthed, and it's evolved now to where we are actually sharing that ministry with another church in town that has literally moved in to that neighborhood to be a physical 24-7 presence. Praise the Lord.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

And then that's big C, not little C.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

That's not four walls. Now that's

Guardrails For Unreached And Vulnerable

SPEAKER_00 19:10

eight walls. One of the biggest things that excites me about uh that whole ministry is when you go down there, you don't know which church the people go to. Like of the Christians that are there, like what church do you go to? Like, oh, I just don't know. And so I love that. That's a secondary win in my mind. We don't have to write up contracts, we're not fighting over territory. I think that we just have kind of worked into it in a way where, like, hey, here's the gifts and the unique skills that you have, here's the unique gifts and skills that you have. They're unique enough to where it just works together and it's so much bigger and better. So that's that's how we approached that particular one and how we got to that place.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Okay, I'm gonna chase a rabbit because the most popular episode from season one and arguably the most popular episode we've done in five seasons, you were also on as a guest when we commissioned a young woman from our church to the nations. It was incredibly, incredibly impactful and cool. And she honed her skills in preparation for going to the Middle East through this ministry of prayer walking and spending time and even living in this community. So she got to understand the culture much, much better. She got to, if you think about if y'all have ever heard this episode from season one with Kate, it it's mind-blowing because she says, Well, look, you might get invited to dinner, and dinner may start at nine o'clock, and it may go for four hours, and you may not get home till one. You may invite somebody else to dinner, and they may not show up because they won't say no, because that would shame you, and it's honor shame, and so they'll say yes, but then they won't come and they'll tell you something came up, and like she just got to learn real-world experience before she was sent. Yep. That's an incredibly effective side tool to doing local and global together.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

Yeah, and that same story just got replicated last year with another family that lived in a second house that we helped rent down there that just got uh commissioned and is now overseas getting ready to serve among the unreached.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Praise the Lord.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Yeah. We may have to get them on the pod. Yeah. It's developed into so, so, so much more than we ever could have asked or imagined. My colleague, who's also named Don, uh, reminds me of the anniversary of our time down there, and uh it was just this last spring. And when I just kind of rewind the tape, you know, and think about where it was and what we were hoping for then. Can't even can't even begin to tell you.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

So if someone's listening and they're like, you know what? There is more I can be doing. What what what else should they be doing?

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah, I mean, first of all, pray. And I don't want to sound cliche ish, and I mean that with all my heart. Ask the Lord. You know, like what is it you've why did you put this in my heart? And then just ask him to show you the next slide. Step, show you the next layer, you know. And so in my experience, first of all, pray. In my experience, the second thing would be to just keep your eyes open and be active of looking for opportunities that will scratch that itch. You know, it may not be the thing, but learn what the pathway is to that thing. You know, I in I I say this all the time to people that I'm talking to that are asking about the will of God in this and what's what's the thing I should be doing. I want to change the world, da-da-da-da-da. Like, well, okay. But the will of God is like a staircase. I'm downstairs, the will of God is upstairs. From downstairs, I can't see upstairs very well. I don't have a clear picture of the color of the walls or you know what rooms are up there. But what do I do today? I could take a step. What do I do tomorrow? I could take a step. I could choose to meet with my pastor. I can choose to follow up on the website of that organization that stimulated some of these ideas in the first place. I can go find someone in my city that take a step. And you know where this is going, but every step you take, you get a little bit clearer picture of that second story. The proverbial will of God, right? Or whatever it is that you feel like the Lord's calling to you. But just do the simple things, do something today that will take a step. It's not sexy, it's not glamorous, it's not five steps at a time. Can God do that? Yes, he can, and he does, but my experience is nine times out of ten, we're taking a series of one-step steps that are easy and unglamorous, and then eventually we wake up in this day, a month, a year, five, ten years later, where next thing you know, you're standing on the second floor and you have this clear picture of what God's calling you to do.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

How does it feel? How does it feel to operate your life in the will of God, to align your life to God's will? Peaceful? Peaceful, joyful, purposeful, affirmed.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Yeah. Not easy. Joyful, you know, joyful's not happy necessarily. James 1. Consider it pure joy when troubles of any kind come your way. Yeah. But there is a sense of like even here, this is helpful for me. Because, you know, I live in the day-to-day drama of all the stuff that we're doing. And it's hard work, you know, and relationships and you know, opposition and all the stuff. But just being able to sit sometimes and remember, you know, from where we've come is obviously a helpful thing. But there is overarching sense of joy. Affirmation. Affirmation and pride are kind of interesting things. Like it's easy to be prideful about the stuff that you do and fight that danger of taking credit and look at me type of a thing. But affirmation, I don't know that it's not a fruit of the spirit, but there's the sense of affirmation. Like, no, I am doing what God made me to be and to do. And there's joy in that. And so that's what I mean by affirmation. And I think that is a Holy Spirit, God-given thing that spurs us on to what's next. I love my job. It's intoxicating, too. It is. It's a feeling you can't recreate through any worldly substance or source. Trevor Burrus, Jr. So I love my job. And people ask me, well, then are you going to retire? I have no idea. I have no intention of I may retire from the church, you know, I may resign my job and do something else, but there is great affirmation and joy. The stories that you told, you know, people like Heath and Tabitha, the Blessed Thing, other organizations that we've seen that happen to, my team, like and just even seeing our staff come together and use their gifts. They're doing things that I could never do. And I hire people at things that are better at things than I am. And we're multiplying.

Gateway Cities And Prayer Walking

SPEAKER_00 25:30

We're, we're my goodness, I could go on. It it's just it's joyful. That's what you do on a podcast, by the way. You can go on and on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

So there's great joy and affirmation in what we get to do. I want you to think about book recommendations. I'm going to start with one and let you think. But as your uh the audience is processing this, I think it's very helpful to have a general idea of what folks you'll meet from other major world religions believe. You know, what is their modus operandi? And uh Todd Aaron wrote Abrahamic Revolution. Abrahamic Revolution starts out by going through the mission of God, which by the way is episode one all-time of the podcast, or episode zero, I think we called it. Um, but then he has a chapter on each other world major religion and kind of what they think and how they operate. And it is so helpful if you'll read that book and get a baseline knowledge. So when you're in the line at the grocery store or you're in a cab or you're however you encounter someone and you find out that they're Buddhist or they're Muslim or whatever, you've got a starting point to kind of say, like, you know, tell me about your experience with the Quran. Do you read it regularly? Are you are you practicing? Are you serious about your faith? And what stands out to you and what do you find interesting? Just ask great questions. It's amazing what happens if you just engage someone and ask great questions about their faith or lack thereof or why they don't believe or do believe what they do. What other books could people consider reading to kind of get a better grasp on this?

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Yeah. There's a few that pop in my head. One is Piper's book, Let the Nations Be Glad. I mean, you can't walk away from that book without a very clear and compelling and beyond motivating understanding of God's heart for the nations. It's biblical, it's thorough, it gives the basis for missions. I love when helping hurts, you know, is helpful just from a broader standpoint of how do we engage with people in a helpful way. There are good strategies in there, but it's also good to kind of like check your heart. That heart that sometimes thinks that I have the answers, I, as an American, have the right methodology and how to do this. I think it challenges.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

Give a man a fish versus teach a man a fish kind of concept.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

I think that's a a great one for a lot of reasons. Another good book that I like uh is called Across the Street and Around the World. It's written by a missionary worker named Jeannie Marie. She has experience in the field, overseas, among the unreached, and now is mobilizing. She does a great job. I think the book is in three sections. Uh kind of talks about Todd's book, like that part of that general here's the need kind of a thing, but also how to engage currently with nations in your community, but then also talks about like, hey, what does it look like if God's going to call you overseas? And so it's kind of a full package deal, but it's very practical. Uh, I've recommended that a number of times as well.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

That's great. Going forward, so we'll kind of start to land the plane here. What are you, I guess, let's say, most excited about for the next five to ten years? And maybe what what are the biggest those challenges or bottlenecks that other people listening are probably also aware of, and maybe any ideas of addressing? Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

The thing that I am most excited about is addressing the uniqueness of our times and how our church can address that need specifically. How do we address uh the use of technology? How do we address just an increasing move to the urban centers? How can we address the uniqueness of who is at the ridge to help engage in those those needs? I'm most excited about those things. Sidebar on those is how do we engage our business community in that work beyond just writing a check? How do we leverage them to get into places as disciple makers to see God's kingdom come in hard-to-reach places around the world? A second demographic that we're super excited about is our young adults. I I don't even know where to begin, but God is at work in our nation among young adults, and I would s even say internationally, but in our church, we have a number of young adults that are asking a lot of really, really good questions, are highly mobilizable. Oh, I like that term. Mobilizable. And they're ready to go.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

And so those are the things I'm probably most excited about. There is something going on with this younger generation, no doubt. Like the one right before them kind of dealt with the rise of social media and how do I process all that. And I think the generation right after them that's coming out and like kind of seeing the pitfalls of all of it and kind of seeing a different strategy or purpose and how they could be useful. I don't think it's changed. I think I've been guest lecturing at University of Texas for 19 years, and and 19 out of 19, if you ask kids who wants to be a part of change in the world, making the world a better place, they they all do. But the way that they intend to go about that is is changing in this generation.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Yeah. Yeah, I I love the 20-somethings that the Lord has put in my life that are asking really good questions and are truly listening for the answers. You've got younger people that are arrogantly trying to just go off and do their own thing, but then you've got a lot of older people that think they know it all, and young people are idiots, right? And so it's like, how can we get both of these groups of people together that are asking good questions and willing to listen? Uh my current D group is a bunch of 20-somethings, and sure I'm leading it, but I'm facilitating all of us learning together, and I am learning from them. Not just terminology and jargon, which is hilarious in and of itself, but I'm learning and being convinced of the thing. That's totally sus, Don. Right. But I'm learning, you know, I'm in being convicted, you know, by their passion and their simple audacity to obey. And then the bottlenecks and the issues. Let's talk about that for a second. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I I think bottlenecks, uh systems, traditional mindsets. This is the way we've always done it. I I think also like on an

Calling Works Like A Staircase

SPEAKER_00 31:45

internal heart level, pride always shows up, you know, and there's the arrogance of territorialism. We alluded to that about like churches just failing to work together for whatever reason. And there are sometimes there are good reasons. Like as a church, there are reasons why I won't partner with another organization or another church, and there are legitimate reasons for that. But to not do it because our name isn't prominent or it wasn't my idea, or we, you know, we gave money to it, therefore it needs to have our name on it. That stuff drives me nuts. I think that uh another obstacle is ignorance. And I don't necessarily mean that in the negative you're stupid way. I just mean it in a sense like we're unaware. That might be a better word. We have these terms that we use, that we consciously use, uh, that we're trying to move people from unaware to aware, to interested, to concerned, and to engaged. And so our events have a label on them. Is this an awareness opportunity? Is this an engagement opportunity? What does it look like? And we acknowledge that we need to move people out of ignorance. So moving people from unaware to aware is huge for us. And sometimes that's all it takes, right? Like, hey, go on this trip with me, or come on mission Sunday and just hear a story from so-and-so from X part of the world. And for so many people, it's just like I had no idea.

SPEAKER_01 33:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

You know, and so the Spirit of God takes that and just blows wind in that sail sometimes. Sometimes we need to take a hand and just keep moving them on to how to get engaged in that. But yeah, for us, those are those are the obstacles we're dealing with. How to, we're still working a lot of those things out. I would say just for anybody, for any church any size, ask Jesus for a burden and for him to put that burden on your heart and then ask him, what is our stewardship of how we engage in that burden? You know, if we're doing ten things because we're a larger church and have the resources to do it, that's fine. But for any other church that might be smaller and just be overwhelmed by those things, what's the one thing we can do? Take that step. Take that step and uh just watch what the Lord does. What we're doing is is totally of the Lord, and it's way more. Again, 3060 hundredfold. Again, above we could ever ask or imagine, you know, yes.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

I think one of the struggles that you see in every nonprofit, churches included, is the budget. How do you get your share of the budget? How do you grow your share of the budget? And that's always going to be a thing, right? It's always going to be an issue and a bottleneck. The concept that God owns it all, and we're living in his abundance, and what you've done with your budget by inspiring and encouraging and allowing for all these other groups to pop up has been that multiplier effect outside of the four walls budget of this church. Right? And going back to season one and on the whole conversation we're all having about about resources and where are the resources going, and 98, 99 cents of every dollar goes to reached people groups, goes to parts of

Books Young Adults And Bottlenecks

SPEAKER_01 34:55

the world that are have access, at least to the gospel, have access to a local church, have access to the Bible in their heart language. And like our life's work is largely trying to not, you know, we're never going to flip that to a 99-1 the other way, but let's move it from one up those next steps to two and three and four and five and six. And I don't think we even have to get to ten before we actually are going to have seen this work essentially completed. And when this work is completed, talking about this word missions, what is the result? What happens when missions is complete? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

Jesus comes back, all of the people that he made of every nation, tribe, tongue, language are in a place where we are celebrating our Maker and our Savior. And uh we get to celebrate not only the fact that we got included in that number, which by the way is stupid, ridiculously cool. No doubt. That I'm in. But that we got to participate. You know, I think the joy of being able to be in the presence of God with all of those nations. I mean, scripture talks about the nations will be there and in their uniquenesses. It doesn't just become this one big blob up there. There still is the uniqueness of every ethne that God made in that. I mean, that's what's that's that's what's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

Bring it on. Bring it on. Amen. So you know we always ask the the guests to pray for the listeners. You know, just consider the audience as you're thinking about praying here. People from different churches, people from missions orgs, people that are frontline missionaries, people on all sides of all ponds, and

Prayer And How To Respond

SPEAKER_01 36:40

let us have it, man. Bring it on. Let's pray.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Let's pray. Let's do it. Oh, Jesus, thank you. Thank you, first of all, for the patience that you have had with us to bring us to where we are today. We're grateful for your kindness, your mercy, your grace, your justice, your holiness, all of those things, and how it's expressed to us. And we are want to thank you. I thank you for this podcast and for the way that it catalyzes so many around the world, Father, to think differently, uh, to be encouraged, um, and to be challenged in the things that you have called us to do around your word and specifically the Great Commission. Jesus, I ask your blessing on those that are listening to this podcast, that are in the field and that are at the work, whose hands are to the plow in one way, shape, or form of seeing the unreached reached. And Jesus, I ask that you would encourage them. I ask that you would affirm within them any skills, talents, stewardship that you have entrusted to them to do the work and to be encouraged. And it bless them with affirmation, with peace, with wisdom, with vision, with resources to fulfill that purpose. Father, I pray for those that are at that work that perhaps are struggling and maybe aren't in the right place anymore, or maybe should be moving on to something else. Father, there is joy in moving from one thing to a next to the next when you are in it. And so, God, I know the human condition enough to know that there are people out there that are wrestling with what's next. And so, Father, either affirm them in what you're doing or move them and give them joy in that move. I pray for those that are listening that are still trying to figure this whole thing out. Like, what is my part in this? Jesus, I see the scriptures and I know and understand that you have called us to do these things. But Father, I pray that you would help them to have the courage to take a step. It may not be a sexy, glamorous big step, but take a step towards something, Father, to get engaged and to be involved or to learn, just to become more aware. And so, Jesus, we pray that you would work in the hearts of everyone, including myself, who is listening today, Father, to be a part of the mission that you have called us to. And Jesus, we want your name to be known. We want those that don't know you yet to know you. And so we pray, whether that's across the street or on the other side of the world, Jesus, raise up workers for the harvest. We are asking diligently and passionately, the Lord of the harvest, that you would raise up more workers to see that harvest met and fulfilled. So we'll trust you for these things. We want to have ears that listen to your voice above everybody, every other voice. We want to have eyes that see you uniquely and to see people as you see them. And we want to have hearts that obey when we see these things and hear from you. Pray these things in Jesus' name. Thank you. Amen and amen.

SPEAKER_01 39:37

Thank you for listening to Unreached. Our sincere desire is that what you've heard today will cause you to see the mission of God differently and your role in it more clearly. If this adds value for you, and we hope it does, would you please rate and review the podcast wherever you listen? Also share with your family, your friends, your church, your life group, small group, D group, wherever you do life. And if you want to connect with us, find us on Instagram at unreach podcast or email us at unreachpodcast at gmail.com.