Mark's Blog

Tonight September 25, 2010, is the 30^th Anniversary Let’s Start Talking Celebration Dinner—and this is the last in this series of blog posts on the history of LST.  It’s been fun remembering all the days, but I’ve been reminded of a few things from writing down our history as well:

• “The horse is made ready for battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord.” Proverbs 21:31 We have made many, many plans for how to start things, how to improve things, what to do next, where to go, who to work with, how to fund things, but rarely do things go as we planned. You are either frustrated because you can’t make things happen—or better, you are thankful that God is in control!  The verse above does not say, don’t prepare; rather, we are reminded that God’s Way is the best way, so hurray that God took the steering wheel out of our hands!!
• “A friend loves at all times” Proverbs 17:17 – We are still friends with some of those very first students—who at the time were just 10-12 years younger than we were. We don’t see Amy or Pete or Lisa that much anymore—but I would do anything for them, and they would do the same.   Many of the adults who began to go with us in the 90s are those we visit and sit with at lectureships—even travel with occasionally—because we love each other.  The average age of the people on staff has always been about 30 –and we are dear friends and love to do things and have fun together.  People come and go in your life, but those you serve the Lord with are your brothers and sisters forever!
• “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5 Our work for 30 years now has been with that which is unfamiliar. We’ve worked in countries we didn’t understand, with cultures we didn’t understand, with people who thought differently from us. We have always tried to be wise and use good judgment—but I know that it is not our wisdom or intelligence or experience that has created a good work or kept it on course. God alone has provided  all that is good. Sherrylee and I have been the recipients of His mercy, and have, in the process, learned to trust Him even more!
• “The harvest is plentiful.” Luke 10:2 – I’m pretty well convinced that people are receptive all over the world and that we are very foolish to try to decide on our own who is and who isn’t receptive. It’s like being a day trader and trying to pick the stock that is going to make us money today. I’ve never been in any country where there weren’t  more people to talk to about Jesus than you could accomplish in a lifetime! I’m OK with having places where certain people can work better because of the way God wired them up, but I believe God is loving and seeking in all places, and we should be sowing and seeking –and sometimes harvesting in the same places where God is!

Well, I’m committed to getting back to shorter posts, so I’m going to stop and make breakfast . There is really just one story that counts, only one story that gets us up every morning of our lives:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life!”

Read Full Post »

Did you know every fourth person you meet could be from China?  Yes, every fourth person in the world is Chinese—and God loves every one of them so much that He sent Jesus to live and die for them! That’s why Let’s Start Talking goes to China.

The first recorded attempt to introduce Christianity in China was in the 7^th century, with other mission efforts following in the Middle Ages. Some believe that these efforts failed to take root because they went first to the leading and royal families and never won the hearts of the common people. Whether this is true or not, the current spread of Christianity in China is certainly a grassroots event. This is why LST has been so effective in China.

Mark, Sherrylee, and Steve McLean on first site visit to China

In 2002, we were approached by a Korean American minister whose Korean parents and brother’s families had decided to adopt the city of Qing Dao as their mission site.  The elderly parents and the brother’s family had already moved there. Together they had spent two years getting permission to open a private language school, which they called Dr. Paul’s – after the Apostle Paul.

They had been offering Korean, but they wanted to offer English as well, so they approached us about bringing teams over. They could not—or did not want to use the Bible in their public classes, which might have attracted the attention of the officials, so we decided to offer the one-on-one conversation classes with visiting Americans as a voluntary supplemental opportunity. We hoped to accomplish several things, including making their school more attractive while at the same time planting the seeds of faith into the hearts of those we read with.

Sherrylee and I, along with Steve McLean, made what is called a site visit in LST jargon in February 2003. Steve and his wife Val had become some of our best friends and best LST leaders. When we had tough spots and needed the very best, we would send Steve and Val!

On that trip, all we saw was opportunity. I had expected to find something similar to Russia after the fall of Communism—rather drab and dismal and with everyone highly suspicious of each other. Instead we found bustling, wealthy cities—and the Chinese people we met were friendly, outgoing, and unafraid. They did not act like nor did they feel like an “oppressed” people—something which made them much more open, I believe.

We went to the famous Chinese circus one night in Beijing. Foreigners must buy VIP tickets, so we paid something like $15 dollars for them, but what surprised me was that there were only about ten foreigners in the large  center section of the large auditorium and probably 3-400 Chinese people over on the side in the non-foreigner section, making us feel pretty strange.

Sherrylee decided to help break down the Great Wall, so at intermission, she walked over to the aisle that ran up the Chinese side of the auditorium where some children were sitting. She commented to the parents how cute the children were—but they spoke no English, so–typical Sherrylee—she opens her purse and pulls out our grandkids pictures to show the children.

Of course all 300 of the Chinese had been watching her the entire time, but when she pulled out the pictures, it was just too much, so it seemed like all of them jumped out of their seats and came down to where she was so they could see the pictures and meet this friendly, foreign lady! They were smiling and laughing and just loving that they had this unexpected opportunity to interact with us!

Chinese Students interested in English

All of our teams that have gone to China since the first team in 2003 have found this to be true. I got to be a part of the first team LST team to China, but about the third day into the project, I got food poisoning and spent three or four days pretty sick. I had my first visit to a doctor that did acupuncture on me. I guess it helped; I did survive, but I don’t go to Chinese buffets here at home quite as much as I used to! (As far as I know, no one else from LST has ever had food poisoning in China!)

Over the next three years, LST was approached about working in several other Chinese cities: Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, and most recently, Xiamen—a beautiful city most Americans have not heard of. Since 2007, LST has sent several hundred people to serve in China.

Since there are no “hosting churches” in China, we tend to work with either Americans living there or with established house churches—or family churches as they prefer to say.  We have rented apartments in most of the cities, since our only other choice would be to stay in hotels, which is a much more expensive option.  But having the apartments also lets LST send teams year round to these sites, which provides much more continuity—a kind of follow-up built into our work there.

Usually our teams make contact with Chinese people at what are called English corners, which are just gathering places and times for Chinese people who want to meet foreigners who speak English.   In this very public setting, they ask questions about everything from geography to politics—and often about Christianity. This opens a door quite naturally so that you can invite them to contact you and answer their questions while helping them with their English.  After that, it works like every other LST project in the world.

Alva von Heimburg and Julie Squire with Chinese Readers

In several of the cities, LST now works with American Christians who are working there full-time—several of whom first went to China on LST!  I’m being a bit cautious with names because some places in China have more government intrusion than others. Most places we work are working quite publicly.  In fact, one of the great American families living there now told us to quit giving the LST workers we sent so many precautionary instructions about security in China—because the Americans were making the Chinese Christians afraid and hindering their witness.  I think they were right!

To go into all the world does mean to go to China. But the Chinese Christians are going into all the world also—so it may only be a season that we Americans even have a role in China. We are blessed and improved by having the opportunity to serve there.

NEXT:  The Next LST Chapter

Read Full Post »

Sherrylee and I have always wanted to take LST into the Muslim world—but we didn’t know how. We needed a Russian church to show us the way!

Tim Brinley and Sherrylee on our first visit to Antalya, Turkey

Nobody has more adventurous ideas nor is any bolder than Tim Brinley, whom we first met in Moscow.  As I mentioned in a previous post, he and his mission team had really become the first long-term missionaries from churches of Christ in Moscow just a few years after it opened to Westerners.

He had done mission work, however, in Turkey back in the 1970s and still had a real heart for the people of that country.  Partly to teach the church in Moscow to be missional and partly because of his passion for the people of Turkey, he proposed to LST that we allow him to take a group of Russian Christians to Turkey where they would do a version of LST, not with English, but in the Russian language.

Sherrylee, who hangs right in there in boldness with Tim, said absolutely not—UNLESS he agreed to let us bring a group of American Christians to do a joint LST project in Turkey with the Russian Christians—which he gladly did.  So the plans were made for the summer of 2002.

Turkey is a totally Muslim country—but is secular by law, which means that they have a strong separation of church and state.  One of the phrases we heard most often that first year was, “Tell Americans to come. We are not Iran!”  The combined Russian/American LST team had nothing to fear, even though our presence and our work made some of the Turkish people around us a little nervous.

Tim chose to work in a beautiful tourist city on the Mediterranean coast called Antalya—or Atalia for those familiar with the missionary journeys of St. Paul. We advertised with flyers in windows and at the university. We also put a big ad in the local newspaper for an information meeting at a well-known hotel.  Many people came. All were told that while we helped them with their English, we were going to use texts from the Bible—stories of Isa, the Quran’s name for Jesus.

Overlooking the Antalya Harbor

For two weeks, we had regular LST reading sessions all over the little pension where we were staying—even on the roof. Daily the call to prayer would interrupt us from the many minarets in our section of the city.  We were careful, but not fearful at all. In fact, we loved the people we met—and they loved us.  Love really does cast out fear!

The third week was a little trickier. An article came out in the local paper with a picture of our group warning the people of Antalya that we were trying to lead their children astray!  Even our Turkish Readers were shocked at the inaccuracies. After that, local policemen walked by almost every day just to look in—just to check.

One of our Readers, a local shopkeeper, began to be mildly harassed by the other merchants on his street: “Are you going to become a Christian?” they would ask him.  He hasn’t yet, but we are still in touch with him. Pray for him.

We followed this same pattern of reading and advertising openly in Turkey for the first two years and read with over 200 people, but after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the attitude toward Americans abroad was so bad that we had to work more quietly.

Instead of open reading programs which we could no longer advertise for, we began sending internships to Antalya, i.e., young people with long-term desires to do kingdom work abroad together with a teacher/sponsor. They would study the Turkish language and culture, visit mosques, interview local Christians and Muslims—and read Luke with anybody that they met personally.

One of the first four interns is in Laos now, but two of the first LST interns currently live in Turkey and are spreading the Good News  full-time. Pray for them all.

For the last two years, LST has partnered with Oklahoma Christian to send hybrid groups to Antalya, part study abroad and part LST groups.  Just because it is not easy to know the best form for work in difficult countries, this does not relieve us of the responsibility to be there.

Bob and Donna Carpenter interview Turkish man in Antalya.

I believe Turkey to be a very important country, that it serves as the front porch for going into the rest of  the Muslim world. It was not easy in Turkey during Paul’s day and it is no easier now; occasionally now there are roadblocks, but we have not yet been stoned or beaten or shipwrecked like Paul, so I’m thrilled that we have been able to continue working there, trying to be ready for every door as God opens it to us.

NEXT:   China!

Read Full Post »

In addition to all the excitement about Let’s Start Talking abroad, a new development in the U.S. also changed and challenged us.

FriendSpeak for US Churches

In the early 90s, probably 1991-92, Danny Corbitt called us with a very interesting idea. He was the campus minister at the University of Texas at Arlington, and he was looking for an evangelistic strategy that he and his Christian students could use to reach out to the huge number of international students on their campus.

After talking for a little bit, we both realized that what LST was doing abroad could easily be replicated here in the states, so he invited Sherrylee and me down to Arlington to train a group of his students to do LST on their campus. We did a Friday night and Saturday workshop with them, basically covering LST’s core philosophy of letting the Word be the teacher while the Worker is the illustration.

They launched this program with great success. When Danny left campus ministry a few years later, the work was picked up by the Park Row Church of Christ which is just off the campus of UT Arlington and  still very active. This was the genesis of what today we call FriendSpeak.

FriendSpeak is the domestic version of Let’s Start Talking. For many years, we would train churches or campus ministries whenever called, but it was not something we really offered or talked about very much.  By the end of the 90s, however, it was becoming clear that this was a great opportunity, so we began structuring our offering more. 

Today, Ben Woodward, directs just the FriendSpeak branch of LST. “The World is at our doorstep, and we are ready!” is the message. He trains 30-40 churches each year to reach out to their non-English speaking neighbors and on their campuses., something our churches are realizing more and more is a great need in our diversifying communities.  Many churches, like the Prestoncrest Church of Christ in Dallas, have 50-75 international people coming each week to read the story of Jesus in English with one of their members who is trained to do FriendSpeak.

Another new effort in the later 90s was what we called FriendsCamp. We actually got this idea from the churches in Antwerp and Eindhoven who conducted a weekend retreat together at the end of their LST projects, thinking that it would be a good time to build relationships with the new Readers that the LST team had worked with.  As God would have it, one of the Dutch Readers was a wonderful young man, truly searching for God, and at this weekend , he said things like, “I’ve never thought Christians could be happy people, but I see that that is not true!” or “I have been brought up in a Christian country, I thought, but I did not know Jesus was like this!”

Ruud was baptized shortly after this retreat. He then went to the Corby Bible School in England and has been a youth minister and a servant of God from that day forward. His experience showed us the value of these retreat environments, so we created a project-type that we could offer to mission sites, where LST provided a camp team to come in and do an English camp, including small group reading sessions from the Word.  FriendsCamps also offered a one-week option for US Christians who could not get more vacation time, so it was good for LST as well.

The End of One Phase and the Beginning of the Next

LST 1982 -- Everybody!

The statistic that keeps astonishing me is that in 1989, LST sent 58 workers; by 1999, it was 325 workers. You can imagine what that kind of growth did to our budget, to our staffing needs, and to the time demands—especially on Sherrylee and me. This growth also brought serious challenges with it!

By 1999, LST had a small staff of about 10 employees, a mixture of full-time and part-time.  Our budget had grown to over five hundred thousand dollars/year. Oklahoma Christian continued to provide us office space and many other amenities, although we now had to pay for our telephone and internet service.  Nancy Moran, who had been LST’s primary travel agent for many years, had to give us up because we were too big for her.

In fact, being too big was a problem for the Dayspring Church leaders as well. Still a church of 150 or so, they were nervous about the responsibilities of overseeing a ministry of over 300 people, a budget that was three or four times larger than the church budget, and all the liability that went with all of the above.

Dayspring first asked us to form an Advisory Board, which would help the elders oversee this ministry. This first advisory board helped formulate the mission statement that is still our guideline. It helped us evaluate new options as they arose and they began to help us set fiscal policy. Among the first members of the Advisory Board were Bill Adrian, former Provost at Pepperdine, and Pam Money, wife of Royce Money who then was president of Abilene Christian University. Sherrylee and I were very thankful for the advisory board and their help with the leadership of the ministry.

By 1998/99 though, the Dayspring elders asked us to find a new sponsoring church. We approached the two large churches in our part of Oklahoma City, but neither of them felt like they were in a position to take LST on either. So we contacted Roger Dean and Mike Bell, two elders of the Richland Hills Church of Christ in Fort Worth, Texas, who had just gone together to Moscow with an LST group from that church the summer of 1998.

2001 LST Staff who moved to Fort Worth at Staff Retreat

Within two weeks of making the proposal to RHCC, the elders basically said YES, if we can make it work. They sent Dale Brooks, then the minister of finance, to do due diligence. Then a group of elders and ministers came to Oklahoma to visit with Sherrylee and me personally.  We talked through all of the issues surrounding the transfer of LST to RHCC, and I think we both came away from that visit feeling like God was creating a wonderful new marriage.

In October, 1999, we were introduced to the church in their Sunday assembly as a new ministry of that church.  By the fall of 2000, we committed to move the ministry and ourselves to Fort Worth, which we did in the summer of 2001.

Leaving our friends in Oklahoma and our work at Oklahoma Christian after twenty-two years there was not easy, but it was the right time! God was ready to do more with Let’s Start Talking and we needed a new place—closer to a bigger airport!

Read Full Post »

LST Team in Moscow

In the euphoria and surprise of the collapse of Soviet domination, Scott Lambert and some Pepperdine students approached us in the fall of 1990 about sending a team to Russia. We said Yes, let’s try, so I made inquiries and found a brother in Alabama that was arranging visas into Russia.

I visited Moscow in early 1991 to see if LST could be a part of the new story being written there. The stores still had nothing in them—including GUM, the large shopping center on Red Square. Lenin’s body was still in the mausoleum. We carried pencils, pens, and cheap calculators to tip people with for their services. People were thrilled to eat bananas, they took two scoops of ice cream on their cones because they could, and they still only had their version of Tang in their vending machines.  Not much had changed in the few weeks since their doors had opened wider, but the people were open and eager to hear what Christians—and everyone else—were saying to them.

Just a humorous aside:  our Alabama brother got bent out of shape by the visa picture of one young man on the Pepperdine team, who had longer hair and what appeared to be an ear ring—a clash of Alabama and California church cultures.  Fortunately, we determined that the supposed earring was really just large ear lobes and the student agreed to cut his hair, so we were able to keep him on the team and get him a visa.

That first year 1991, LST sent seven Pepperdine students, accompanied by the campus minister Scott and Kim Lambert, along with four Oklahoma Christian students—and Philip Woodward, our 16-year-old son, who had done LST virtually every year of his life with us and was eager to be out on his own. What a way to start!

We made an agreement with a local school to work after classes each day. In exchange we brought them basketballs and playground equipment.  Because there were no grocery stores recognizable to us, hardly any local restaurants, the team ate most of their meals at the old soviet-style hotel where we stayed—where we had the same dinner every day for the entire six weeks.  Well, not quite the same! The first few days, they served  us caviar with each meal, but very few of the workers liked it, so they quit eventually.

We had lots of readers—and they were very open to the Word! Many had never read the Bible and had only the information about Christianity that the Communist Party had fed them . Most had never met Americans and were very curious about the west—for better or for worse.

Because of the lack of variety in our hotel meals, the team did often go to the one McDonalds that was opened in Moscow. You could get a Big Mac, fries and a milkshake for about 19 cents,  so it was a pretty good deal! We had to be careful, however, because our Russian readers could not afford to go there with us!

Although there were people who had been baptized, there was no regular meeting of churches of Christ in Moscow prior to our team’s arrival. We made arrangements with the school to use their auditorium on Sundays and began meeting regularly as a church in the city. I remember preaching through a translator on the first Sunday, but what really stands out is the request of the Russian Christians to video the service, so they could remember what to do when we were gone.

That church continued to meet until it was subsumed into the thriving work which still continues in Moscow,  started by Tim Brinley and Gary Jackson a few years later.

The Japanese Miracle

Oklahoma Christian University had had a long relationship with churches of Christ in Japan. Through that connection two former LST workers John and Kelly Osborne took jobs teaching English in public schools there for a couple of years. During that time, they talked with the church in Mito, Japan, about hosting an LST team.

The Japanese leaders were very cautious though and were not easily convinced that Americans could really help their aging and struggling churches.  Finally, in 1992, the church in Mito, Japan, issued an invitation to LST to send just one team—only four people and only for four weeks—that’s all.

Although excited about the prospects, it did present us with a dilemma:  do we continue to start with the story of Jesus in Luke in a country that is totally non-Christian?? After a lot of struggle, prayer, and conversation, the conclusion was that God had blessed this approach for 12 years, so let’s not change it now. We still believed the power was in the living Word!

Joe and Glenda Watson agreed to take two Pepperdine students and do this pilot project, knowing that no one had ever done anything like this in Japan before.

God did His work: 75 Japanese people signed up to practice English and read the Bible with our team. Fifty of them continued after the team left, reading with the Osbornes and other American Christians in the area.  In the first year, 12 of these Readers were baptized—the most baptisms that the Japanese Christians had seen in many years.  This is why the Mito preacher, brother Suzuki described the first LST project as a “Japanese miracle!”

Japan has continued to be a place where LST has sent many workers. We have worked with seventeen different Japanese churches, encouraging the work in a place where most people do not know Jesus at all!

Next: The 90s – Eastern Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa!

Read Full Post »

Oklahoma Christian University - First Home of LST

Just before the end of the 1980s, several things came together that allowed Let’s Start Talking to grow from 58 workers in 1989 to 325 workers in 1999.

First you have to understand our organization for the first decade—none! It was just Mark and Sherrylee and the kids! We were members at the Dayspring Church of Christ in Edmond, Oklahoma, and the ministry we did fell naturally then under their oversight. The church contributed to the work, but it was just 150 members, so mostly they prayed for us and watched our back legally.

I was teaching English full-time, coaching kid’s soccer, working on my doctorate, and leading at church. Sherrylee was being a mom, eventually going to work at a dental office, then working as an assistant librarian in an Edmond high school.

In 1989, we asked the Dayspring elders if Sherrylee could become an employee of the ministry, which they approved. Then we asked Oklahoma Christian if we could clean out a small storage room on the second floor of the library and use it for an office—which they also graciously allowed! They even allowed us to be a part of the telephone and the emerging computer network—all of which were great advantages to us—and all at no cost initially.

About the same time, Oklahoma Christian added an Engineering program and brought in either semi-retired or retired engineers from industry as the first professors. Among these were Lynn and Martha Nored, Jerald and Verna Lee Parker, and Joe and Glenda Watson, great men and women of God as well as outstanding leaders. Both of these families immediately sought us out and desired to serve with LST.  These families provided a level of maturity, leadership, and vision that added immensely to the ministry’s potential.  (I’m so glad to say that they are both still involved with LST today!)

With a little more structure and with additional leadership, I believe God was preparing the ministry for opportunities undreamed of in the previous ten years.

The world saw the fall of the Berlin wall in late 1989. The collapse of the Soviet Union began in 1990 and so did the work of LST in the countries now open to us.  As American churches began to fathom the opportunities in Eastern Europe, they also realized that almost no one was prepared in the languages of these countries. Working through interpreters who had no knowledge of Christianity—sometimes even biases against—was not really an adequate solution either.

LST Team in Moscow

LST had been working in non-English speaking countries for a decade, so our telephone began to ring with invitations to go very early into Yugoslavia, Russia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Other ministries bought our materials, imitated our strategy (or some version of it) and so a great deal of the early work done in this whole region was using the desire to learn English as the point of contact with people who had been cut off by and indoctrinated with godless Communism for almost half a century.

Each of these eastern bloc countries has its own extraordinarily interesting story, but I’ll save that for the full history some day!  I will give you, however, the story of our work in Mother Russia!

Next:  To Russia and Japan and the ends of the Earth!

Read Full Post »