Mark's Blog

Project Germany team in Woodward home for training (Fall 1979)

I’ve heard Sherrylee tell the story many times of how I was sitting in the bathtub and had the ideas that became the core of the LST philosophy, but I think that is creative memory—mainly because I am a shower person, not a bath person! Here’s my version of the genesis of LST’s core philosophy.

Sometime before we left Germany in April 1979, I read a short article from Glen Jones, missionary in Kiel, Germany, about the power of the Word itself based on John 20:31:

“But these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

I asked myself if I really believed this to be true! And I didn’t know the answer because my experience was all about teaching people what the Word meant, explaining, clarifying, and supplying the missing historical, linguistic, or logical information that they needed to really come to faith.

Even if we believed that the Word was powerful, how were we ever going to get German skeptics to read the Word? With the exception of a few true Seekers, we knew that the masses were not open at all to reading the Word!

This was then the moment that God put all the pieces together! What could we offer the Germans that they really wanted? We could not count the times while living in Germany that people had sought us out to practice their English or to help them translate something important to them from English to German. So what if we offer to help them with their English language skills??

The question that every service ministry faces, however, is how to move from loving service to the Gospel story that produces faith! (This is such a difficult question for many ministries that they simply avoid answering it, sometimes even rationalizing the need for that bridge to faith-sharing as unnecessary. I think that is rowing with only one oar—but that’s a topic for another time!)

Sherrylee and I talked a lot and decided in the fall of 1980 to try something completely new—at least we knew of no one else doing anything similar at all. We decided to recruit a team of college students to go to Germany with us for eight weeks. Instead of moving from city to city in short campaigns, they would stay in one place to enable them to develop stronger relationships with the people they would be talking with.  They would be a small group (4-6 people) rather than a large group, so that they could function more as a “family” rather than as a tour group and so they would not be such a burden on the small German churches that they would be working with.

Members of LST First Team: Valerie Kinnell and Chip Kooi

But the riskiest part of this experiment was that we were going to ask the German church to advertise free English conversation classes and see if anyone would respond. It was very important to us not to trick people into using the Bible, so we had people respond to the advertising by calling a member of the local church who was instructed to always tell them that this group would be using the Bible as the textbook for these conversations.  That’s where we had no idea how Germans would respond!!

In the fall of 1980, Sherrylee and I recruited ten students from Oklahoma Christian, several of whom had been a part of the Project Germany group that we had led under Ralph Burcham the previous summer. We meet with these ten students weekly throughout the school year, sharing our experiences and knowledge about the German culture and training them to open the Word and release its power in a relational and non-confrontational way.

One team worked in Braunschweig with the Gemeinde Christi and the other worked in Bremen, Germany, both German churches that Sherrylee and I knew well. The teams lived independently, cooked for themselves, rode public transportation, and made their own schedules—all of which was pretty new strategy for campaign groups at this time.

The first signs that God was doing something new and wonderful were that there was an amazing response to the advertising and many, many people called, seeking help with their English.  The next amazing discovery was that most of them expressed surprise that they were going to be using the Bible as the conversation guide, in fact, they always asked why; nevertheless, most of the people agreed to register for the program in spite of their skepticism!

At first our workers tried to just open their Bibles to Luke’s Gospel as the conversation guide, but this really put many of their early Readers (our new term for the people who participated with us!) off, so we decided to cut sections out of Luke and make a little worksheet  with a few little exercises for them each time they came—and this made all the difference! They had no problem reading the same biblical texts if they were part of a workbook of some kind.

But would this be an effective strategy? The most common opening statement by every person who came that first year was, “Thank you for offering to help me with my English, but I want you to know that I do not believe that anything in the Bible is true! Is that OK?” That’s when we learned how important it was to serve them unconditionally by helping them with their English, forcing us to believe even stronger that the Word was powerful enough to break through this unbelief!

LST First Team Members Galen and Larale Rawlins (1981)

At the end of this first summer, we came back to the States and told our friends who had sent us that we had seen a miracle! We had seen skeptical Germans read the Bible every day for weeks with our students. The numbers had grown as the summer progressed, not diminished—which we did not expect—because the Germans loved their experience.  They even asked who would continue the program after the Americans left, so we were able to introduce them quite naturally to the local American missionaries.

But the real miracle was that some of those same people whose opening sentences were so defensive and skeptical had been touched by the living Word. Now at the close of the first year, in answer to our prayers, the most common summary of their experience that we heard was “I came only wanting to know English, but I got so much more. Now I also know Jesus!” And a few added, “And I believe!”

They had been changed, and we were changed—and Let’s Start Talking was birthed—although we didn’t know it.

Next:  The 1980s — Genesis Expanded!