State of Missions in Ethiopia

All right, well, good morning, everyone. This morning, we have the the opportunity, as most of you know, I was in Zambia and then Ethiopia this summer and got to share with you about that trip. And I was invited to go along with by Anthony Mathenia, who's here this morning to share with us specifically about the Addis Kadan pastor's training that he's initiated when he was a missionary in Ethiopia and has continued to coordinate even though now he's serving as a pastor in Radford, at Christ Church Radford. And so he's gonna just share some of the history about how he, what he was doing then, how he got connected with Conrad and Bayway, and then with HeartCry Missionary Society, and then what's happening with the training today and what the vision is for the future and how we can, Lord willing, be a part of that. So, with no more to say, this is Anthony Methenia. Good morning. It's good to be here with you all this morning. I have jotted down some notes primarily because I have about 45 minutes to tell you about the last 15 years of my life, and it's easy for me to get sidetracked. So I'm going to try to walk through just a number of specific things. I'm on the board with HeartCry Missionary Society, and the work that I began in Ethiopia just as a missionary sent out of a local church has now been absorbed or enveloped by HeartCry Missionary Society. So I'll begin kind of giving an overview of HeartCry. Many of you may be familiar with HeartCry. Paul Washer started HeartCry 26 years ago while a missionary in Peru with the International Mission Board. The society, the organization exists primarily to glorify God through the establishment of local churches. We function as a partner or a facilitator, a go-between if you will, between churches primarily here in our country or individuals and families and indigenous churches abroad. The specific calling is to partner with churches of like mind and like practice for the establishment of mature and autonomous local churches. some specific convictions that we operate by as a missions organization, and I'm just going to breeze through those quickly. If I say something that triggers a question, if you'll hang on to that question, my plan is to stop in sufficient time to allow anyone to ask anything. The first essential conviction is that missions is an impossibility apart from the power of God. We are absolutely utterly dependent on His power to change lives. The gospel will not go forth apart from the work of the Lord, the supernatural power of the Spirit regenerating individuals. Second, the Scriptures alone are sufficient for the work of missions. They are the source and the standard for both doctrine and ethics, also for ministry. They're inspired, they're infallible, but they are also sufficient. It's all we need, no matter what culture we find ourselves going into. The Scriptures alone are enough. Third, which will be the topic of our time this morning, prayer. Prayer is a necessity. The impossible work of missions can only be accomplished through the power and wisdom of God. Therefore, prayer must be at the forefront of all of our missionary endeavors. Not only that, a true gospel must be proclaimed. If the gospel is indeed, as Paul wrote to the church at Rome, the power of God for salvation, then the preaching of the gospel is the great means and method for doing missions. We have to seek to avoid any other means or methods. Also, fifthly, we must have a strong conviction that the gospel transcends all culture. The greatest need of all men of every culture is the clear proclamation of the gospel. There is no special needs area in the world that somehow needs something other than the proclaimed gospel of Jesus Christ. It is sufficient. In thinking about that, number six, superficial evangelism is one of the great obstacles to missions. Non-theological preaching, gospel films, these things are no substitute for the biblical exposition of the gospel. Seven, the primary work of missions is church planting. There are many gifts and many callings in the body of Christ, but all of them work together on the mission field with the primary goal of establishing biblical churches. It's one thing to do mass evangelism. That's quite another to establish a biblical church with a strong, firm foundation that will last. Eight, the autonomy and centrality of the local church. We work in partnership with indigenous churches, with their leaders, with their missionaries. But it is our non-negotiable theological conviction that each local congregation is independent, autonomous, and directly accountable to and under the headship of Jesus Christ. HeartCry is not a supra-ecclesiastical authority. It's a society of like-minded churches and individual believers working together to fulfill the Great Commission. Nine, incarnational missions is essential. There are some effective non-personal means of communicating the gospel, but there's no substitute at all for a man, a family living among a people and teaching the gospel to them, living out his or her faith before them in the same way that God sent his son to dwell among us. The way that the Apostle said it, we saw his glory before our very eyes. And lastly, true missions is costly. Amy Carmichael, the famous missionary to India, explained that missions is no more and no less than an opportunity to die. Any advancement in the kingdom of Christ into the dominion of the devil will be met with warfare. It's an opportunity for us to come and to die. Now, I work with Art Cry, I mentioned serving on the board and overseeing some of the administrative aspects of the work, specifically in Africa. I was converted to Christ almost immediately after graduating from university. in 1999. I was raised in church, in a Southern Baptist church. Many of you are familiar with Bible Drills. When I was little I was in Bible Drills. Three year state winter. I lived in Tennessee at the time. So I was raised in church, had a lot of head knowledge, but was unconverted until the age of 22. Almost immediately when God changed my heart, there was this desire to teach, to explain, to talk to other people about what had happened. The man who was humanly influential in my conversion had a friend that he had gone to college with who had started a small mission in Ethiopia supporting native pastors. He was a former IMB missionary. He saw so much work could be done among the locals, and so he started supporting them. As a result, he connected me with this friend. We formed a bond. He sent me to Ethiopia to live with a family that he had met, an Ethiopian family. So the summer of 2000, about 16, 14 to 16 months after I was initially converted, I lived in Ethiopia that summer for two months with a family of 11 Ethiopians and fell in love with the culture and was overwhelmed with the needs. among the churches regarding the kingdom of Christ there. I came back home at the end of that year, enrolled, I had started some part-time seminary classes already. I enrolled full-time. I got married the next year in 2001. I continued making trips both in 2002 and in 2003, continuing to attempt to establish partnerships with the long-term goal of moving there and living there. I felt confident from that first trip that my hands needed to be in the work there in some fashion, but there were some things that I needed like training and experience, a wife, and so I came back. I got married the next year and started seminary and went on staff at a church. So it all seemed simple. In 2004, I was back in Ethiopia a couple of times. One of those was adopting my oldest daughter, Ellie, who's now 10. Back when adoption from Ethiopia was simple and fast and cheap, comparatively speaking. It was a seven month process, a third of the cost that it is now. It's not so easy anymore. 2005, moving forward in the timeline, I moved to Addis. So everything I had been working for and looking forward to happened. I moved to Addis in the fall of 2005. Addis Ababa is the capital city of Ethiopia. worked there for several months, about six months, and then I was back in the United States because of a friend's medical condition, ended up bringing our family back for what was supposed to be a short trip. And the first Sunday back I was playing pickup basketball, blew an ACL, had to have total reconstruction, which forced me to be in the States for six months for therapy, which during that time I ended up meeting Paul Washer and several of the other guys who worked for HeartCry. I knew of them and had benefited from Paul's preaching previously, but I actually met with them at a conference that they were at. I had a mutual friend and so we began talking more about the work in Ethiopia, even about the possibility of me working with HeartCry at the time. And I just said, No, thank you. I have a work in Ethiopia. And I went back to Ethiopia. And upon arriving back a few days after Christmas in 2006, I went into an office of some friends that I had known from living there the previous year. at the Ethiopian Addis Kadan Baptist Church. This is a denomination, a Baptist denomination, that was started by the Southern Baptists, by the International Mission Board, back in the eighties. Some of you who are more mature will remember back in the eighties when the drought produced the famine and all of the famine relief was going on there. Well, as a result of the Baptist work there, basically dumping food out of the back of airplanes, they ended up witnessing to some people in the northern part of the country who were converted and they didn't know what to do with them. They were unfamiliar with the lay of the land. Religiously, they didn't know of any good churches to send them to. So what was born out of that was a local church that eventually blossomed into an entire denomination. That's the Ethiopian Addis Kadan Baptist Church. That's where it began. It's now almost 100 local churches throughout the country. And they invited me to come and partner with them. I said to them that day in the office, speaking with Ermaus, who was then the president of the denomination, the acting president, I said, I don't have any money. I have very little resources at all, but I can teach and I can bring in teachers. Do you have any kind of program that we can partner together with? And he sorted through his computer there for a few minutes and then he said, how about this one? And it was a program that they had dreamed up of going into 36 different areas throughout the country after training 72 missionaries, sending them out two by two and planting churches in some of the lesser reached parts of the country. Some estimations say that more than 85% of the country is still unreached. which is surprising from a distance, but it's not surprising when you're on the ground there. If your definition of the gospel is the biblical one, then much of the country is still unreached with the gospel. So that began the partnership. I took their program. The words I used with them was that I tweaked it. I threw it out and started another one. But what it looked like was very similar to what they were doing, primarily with the training portion, inviting in pastors and hope to be pastors and want to be church planters and inviting them in for modular style training every other month, every quarter, seeking to work through a full systematic theology, establishing them in the biblical truth so that they will be prepared to go out and pastor churches. That happened in the beginning of 2007 and it began that spring, happening every other month. It was only early fall or late summer when our visas ran out, the two-year visas that we had gotten in 2005. So we had to come home. The plan was to be here a couple of weeks, renew the visas, and get back over there. However, almost immediately upon arriving home, we got a phone call from a crisis pregnancy center. There had been a little boy, actually three of them, born three months prior and there were no waiting families for them. We had started the process to adopt from Ethiopia again while living there and so we had a home study. Those of you who are familiar with adoption, we were just sitting and waiting basically. So we pulled everything from that agency and gave it to this agency and In five weeks, I had a son. He was three months old at the time. That's Isaac. He's now seven. He was born in 2007. Adopted in October And that required six months in the United States in order to get the adoption finalized, to get him a passport so that he could travel back with us. Which required, in the meantime, me going back and forth to continue these trainings that I had begun. So every other month I would travel over, do ten days or two weeks worth of training, and then come back. In the midst of one of those trips, in early 2008, while I was in Ethiopia, headed back, my wife at the time and two kids were in a car wreck in Memphis, where we were stationed at the time in Memphis, Tennessee. My wife was killed in the wreck. So now I'm a single dad with just turned four-year-old and a six-month-old who's in the process of being adopted. Again, if you're familiar with adoption situations, the home study is all invalid now. I don't have a home. I don't have a car. I don't have a job. I don't have insurance. I'm not married everything's irrelevant on the home study however it's a church-based crisis pregnancy center and they said we'll just look away from all of that and we think the judge will be okay so I ended up finalizing the adoption and adopted my son as a single dad so all of that went well even throughout that next year Obviously, everything that I had planned for has now come to a crashing halt. It makes no sense for me to go with two small kids and live in Ethiopia and attempt to minister. I can be a full-time dad in America and that would be enough. It would be impossible for me to go there and attempt to do all of the training and teaching and traveling that I was doing previously. I did, however, make several trips, three more in fact, that year. to continue the work. I had some guys come along beside me, some good friends who had been there teaching before, half a dozen or so guys from my local church. I was in New Albany, Mississippi at that time at a church there serving. And we continued to go back and forth and keep the work going. And it was during that time that Paul Washer and the guys at HeartCry had kind of watched my work from afar, and now they were reaching out because they didn't want to see the work go down. At that time, I thought, okay, let this work die. I'll see what's next for me in life. But they didn't want to let it die. They kept calling, offering to do whatever. Eventually, put me in contact with Conrad Mbewe, who on the trip in January of 2009 ended up flying up from Lusaka, Zambia to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and spent a week there. just sitting and watching, witnessing the training that we were doing, and immediately he was hooked. He realized that it's a goldmine, what had been opened up to us there, the opportunities that this denomination had given us to come in and teach and train and begin new churches, Lord willing. So I began a partnership with the Reformed Baptist of Zambia in January of 2009. In March of 2009, I married to Hannah, who is now my wife. She grew up in the church that I was sent out of as a missionary, so she had watched my previous wife and I come there to that church as just a couple. She watched us go through the adoption process, and she watched us go off to Ethiopia and come home and adopt again, and then watched the whole tragic accident and the healing process. She had witnessed all of that and knew that I had nothing to offer. I was unmarried, had been married before, had lived in Africa, didn't own anything, didn't have a job, didn't have insurance, and she still wanted to marry me. So the partnership with the Reformed Baptists in Zambia turned into an informal partnership as well with HeartCry Missionary Society and so then instead of me traveling over doing all of these trainings I was still traveling over but I was using the wealth of wisdom and knowledge that is in among those Zambian pastors that are Conrad's peers So I began meeting two Zambian pastors every two or three months in Ethiopia and we would go out to the village areas and gather the pastors together and teach them for a period of a week, ten days, sometimes two weeks, sometimes doing a week in one place and then driving a couple days to another place and teaching another group of pastors. and that has continued from 2009 all the way until now only now I don't have to go with them. Once I went six or eight times I was able to turn it over to them and though I still do a little bit of behind-the-scenes logistics for the most part I have very little to do with it. It's primarily the work of the Reformed Baptist in Zambia. However, there's a great need that continues to arise. Even yesterday, I was reading a report. Two Zambians were in Ethiopia last week, a week and a half ago, teaching. And I was reading their report. And every single report is screaming the same thing. We've got to establish something that's more long-term. It's kind of a drop and bomb every two or three months. But there's no one on the ground to put the pieces back together. We're dropping in, destroying their foundations, messing up the whole paradigm that they've been taught as far as how to do ministry in church. But there's no one on the ground, the incarnational missions, that essential conviction that I mentioned earlier. There's no one there. And that's what we're praying for. That is the great need for God to establish that. either an American or a Zambian, those seem to be the obvious options right now for someone to go and live there and plant a church and be a part of the local work there, offering continued training to local pastors but also establishing a church so that they can see that the theology that's being taught and proclaimed isn't theoretical, it isn't Western or British in the case of the Zambians being colonized by the British. In 2010, one year, year and a half after I married again, Hannah and I relocated to the New River Valley. So I live in Christiansburg now. And I moved there primarily to get rid of this Ethiopian work completely and finally. So I thought, I'll move there, I'll live the sight, heart, cry, I'll help them with the Africa work for a little while, I'll move on, and when I leave, I'll leave the Ethiopia work behind and they can take it and run with it. That was my plan. I moved in, I applied for jobs, no one called. Eventually, The people there at the church said, you know, we need some help setting up chairs and rolling out speaker cable and setting up stands and someone to pay the rent, the building we were leasing. And I said, OK, I think I have enough time. I can do that. And one thing led to another. And now a pastor. So I set up the chairs really good and they asked me to preach. And it's all history. I've been there almost four years. Actually, I've lived there for four years. I've been pastoring for almost four years now. continuing to work in Ethiopia, going back every year, every year and a half, sometimes twice a year, continuing to oversee the work, to encourage, to look for ways to continue to make progress. In the midst of that time, we did Adopt, again, my wife and I adopted a little girl who was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, again through a crisis pregnancy center. My wife was in the room when she was born, so a lot of people ask, how old was she when you got her? About 45 seconds. So, it was a little country hospital in Jonesboro, Arkansas. My daughter is only two right now, she'll be three next month. And that hospital was sold at the time. It doesn't even exist anymore. They've already built a new one. But immediately after she was born, I got a text that says it's a girl. They had told us it was a boy, so it was a shock. Everything was blue. I got a text that said it's a girl, and then I saw her walking down the hallway with the baby. That's how behind times the hospital was. They didn't care. They just gave her the baby, and she was walking down the hall into the nursery. And then to continue following up, kind of meshing all of this together, in January of 2013 we were having a series of Wednesday night prayer meetings there at the church in Radford where I pastor. And there were a number of ladies who were expecting in the church and we tend to pray for them every time that we have a prayer meeting. And I also just added to the bottom of the list to pray for those who would like to conceive and have a baby. So, you know, that's where my wife and I were. We had three kids. We still longed for God to bless us in that way. And since I'm the pastor, I can make out the prayer sheets. I put it on there. And, you know, the next month we were pregnant. And Simon turned one on Thursday. He's my youngest. So I have an 11-year-old, a 7-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a 1-year-old at this point. Which brings us all the way to 2014 and I met Ben this last year and I talked to a number of people in the church because of different circumstances over the past few years since I moved to the area but I met Ben and he traveled with us to both Zambia and Ethiopia and in order to see the work, to see HeartCry up close from a distance and to talk more about opportunities on the ground in Africa, specifically in Ethiopia. And the work in Ethiopia, if I had to describe it in one word, I would say potential. It has amazing potential because of the guys at the head of the denomination. They have just welcomed us in and given us free reign. I mean, Ben can tell you he was there. He sat in the meeting with the main guy in the denominational leader who said, you know, we have these, this mobile Bible school going on right now. What can you do? Well, I can send teachers and we can pay for them to come and and do whatever. Can we establish an English speaking church in the country? Yes, you can. I mean, it's the door is wide open. The resources are plentiful. What we need are people that are willing to get behind it and push the work in order that it will get established so that it will no longer be this drop in and bomb every couple of months but it will be someone living there on the ground functioning in a local church that will serve for lack of a better way of describing it even as a model church so that people can see these are not theoretical theological principles but they are real biblical foundations for how to live and function within the kingdom of God If there's anything I would like to leave you with during this time, it's that. A burden to pray that God would do that. That he would move in people's hearts to do whatever it takes to establish a God-centered, Christ-honoring work in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that would then sprout and give way to a number of other works and other ministers could benefit as a result of this work being there. Now, with all of that said, surely I left some stone unturned or piqued someone's interest. Are there any questions that you all have? Yes. Yes. A typical evangelical church, even those who would be of the conservative Baptistic persuasion, they have unfortunately been affected hugely by the charismatic movement and the prosperity gospel. So if you can imagine a bad mix of prosperity and charismania, that is what the typical church looks like. Even the more conservatives. I mean, the Addis Kadan Baptist Church, the way I describe it, is it's the best place to start Comparatively speaking, okay, it's not I mean if they were in an ideal situation There would be no need to work with them We would help them in the way that we do the Zambians to reach out to others But we need to come alongside they realize their need we want to come alongside and help them So it would look a lot like some of the more Pentecostal charismatic loose Evangelical is a very gracious word to describe them. Yes, but not without questions and some difficulties. Typically, they will welcome anyone to come and teach because they see it as an opportunity to receive resources from the West, which is both good and bad. It's good for us because we can get in and teach. It's bad because the next week they may have someone teaching exactly the opposite. Which is one of the reasons that we need someone on the ground to continue following up, making sure that the principles are being applied and lived on. Sorry. I have seen time and again questions come up as a result of teaching the sufficiency of Scripture, the sovereignty of God in all things. The questions are there. You can see the wheels turning. And they're willing to learn. They're willing to look at the Scriptures. But the struggle comes from, I see it in the Scriptures, but we've never done it that way before. Or I see that this is what the Bible says about salvation, but I've never heard it taught like that before. The goal is to have something established so that they can see it, implement it, and taught in that fashion, and lived upon. Is that helpful at all? Yes? No. The laborers, plural, is what we need. We need laborers. There are qualified people, obviously, but none who have come up to me and said, I'm ready to go. Either from Zambia, and they know the need is there in Zambia, and less people in America know about it because I spend a lot less time talking about the ministry now that I'm pastoring full time. Ethiopia has been kind of set on the back burner for me personally. I'm still always working in it. I don't have the opportunities to go out and preach and talk about the work in this fashion. Could you flesh out specifically what that qualified laborer or laborers look like? Is it all this type of laborer? Are there multiple types of laborers that you need? What is it specifically that you're looking for? Yeah, as HeartCry, Our conviction is that the missionary, the church planter, the pastor, the elder, the bishop, all those terms in scripture, save missionary, which is not a biblical term, all should be elder qualified and gifted men. Now, that doesn't mean those are the only people who should go, but if there's going to be a church established, that's a necessity. So initially, it would make no sense to send a group if no one met that qualification. That qualification has to be there or you're not going to be able to function as a biblical New Testament church. And I mean, when we're talking about the qualifications of an elder or a deacon, other than able to teach, it really is the qualification that every Christian man ought to meet. The qualifications that are there are not some super spiritual thing. You ought to be a godly man and that's what's described there. That's what Paul describes to Timothy. The difference would be for the deacon is the willingness to serve and for the elder slash pastor would be the ability to teach, to handle the scriptures. Not necessarily from the pulpit even. Sometimes it may be in a one-on-one setting or the counseling chair, we might call it. Does that help at all? Yes. Sure. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is right in the center of Ethiopia. Ethiopia has a population, it's the second most populated country in Africa, second to Nigeria. They are pushing about 90 million people and approximately 10% of those live in the capital city of Addis Ababa. So 8 to 9 million people in one city. It's a fairly large city but it's also very densely populated. The religious landscape of the country as a whole is about 40-45% Ethiopian Orthodox. which is Eastern Orthodoxy. You may be familiar with the great schism that happened in Christianity in the year 1054 when the East and the West churches divided. The West went to Rome and the East went to Greece. You have the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics. That was that great divide. Then out of Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation happened and Eastern Orthodoxy has remained the same. It exists in a number of different countries. Greece, Russia, Armenia, Ethiopia. So the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is the primary and national religion there. An easy way to describe it would be similar to Catholicism, though there are some real distinctions. In fact, there were seven primary distinctions when they divided in the year 1054. One of the easy ones to remember that stands out, if you go into a Catholic church or into an Orthodox church, it was an argument over the icons or relics that you can worship, oddly enough. If you go into a Catholic church, there are statues, three-dimensional ones. If you go into an Orthodox church, it's only paintings, two-dimensional ones. So they divided over whether or not you could worship two-dimensional idols or three-dimensional idols. I'm not I'm not making this stuff up, OK? They have on paper a very strong theology of Christ and his deity. Unfortunately, that ends up swinging so far in order to make him God. They also deify Mary. only God can beget God, is their simplified logic in that. So then not only do you have Mariology, but all the other sanctology, and in that way it's very similar to the Catholic Church. So it ends up being a religion without the gospel, ultimately. They believe that those who are born into a family that's in the church, they're Christians, nothing else matters. They're baptized in the church as infants, and that's enough. On the other hand, that's about 45%, 30 to 35%, and this is growing at astronomical rates, would be Islam. When I first went there, Islam made up less than 10% in 2000. So if you look at Ethiopia on a map, they're surrounded by all the countries that you hear about in the news all of the time. And so they're infiltrating in, the money's coming in from Yemen and Saudi Arabia and other places. Somalia So that's growing fast now Among the Muslims that are there. They are not very hostile at this point It's wisdom it's the way they take over a country they come in and they don't raise a fuss until they have the majority and then they Put the squeeze on but most of the persecution there's a lot of persecution among the real believers in Ethiopia and the majority of it comes from the Orthodox and rather than the Muslims. In fact, it's not uncommon to find an Orthodox married to a Muslim, which proves that both their religions are debunked. Does that help at all? That's kind of the landscape. Among professing evangelicals would be probably 15 percent, and that's using evangelical loosely, professing evangelicals. Among those who would be Bible-believing, Bible-practicing evangelicals, it's going to be closer to five to seven percent within the country. And it's, other than in the capital city, it's divided very clearly on a map. Large areas are orthodox, like the entire north almost is predominantly orthodox. And then the southeast is predominantly Muslim. Obviously, with the city being kind of the melting pot of the entire country, you get a good mix of all of the different religions. Ethiopia, unlike any other African country, was never colonized by a Western country. And they're very proud of that. I think they missed out on a lot as a result. Unfortunately, though, one of the problems is there's 75 languages and 280 some odd dialects within the country. So it makes it difficult to minister to them. You go to Zambia, to South Africa, everybody speaks English. They speak the tribal languages as well, but they speak English as well. 10% of the people in Ethiopia speak English. Amharic is the national language, but the majority of the people speak Oromo. So it's very interesting, to say the least, with all of the different languages. Most of the time, if you meet an Ethiopian, Amharic is going to be the language that they speak. If they're from the far north, it's going to be Tigrinya. If they're from just outside the city, it'll be Oromifa or Oromo. Did I hit all of your questions? Yes, sir. There is still some, and it mixes in, interestingly, with Orthodox Christianity and with Islam. Outside the city, animism, they tend to mix it in, and it becomes a big, nasty, syncretistic religion. Any more questions? Yes. I don't see as many as they think there are. So if you're an evangelical Christian in Ethiopia, you may be in a different denomination, but you're probably looking similar to each other? From the outside, they would argue against that. They would say, no, we're really different. When we would look in and say, you're not as different as you think. In fact, there's a joke that they often tell when they there's one denomination that's really proud because they're a large denomination. So that I don't draw attention to them, I'll just use Southern Baptist, because you all are Southern Baptists and I used to be, so we can pick on them. I often joke that I was Southern Baptist before I got saved, but that was true with most of us, right? Because we grew up in the church. I was Southern Baptist a little while after I got saved, too. I'm not saying that you're not Christian if you're Southern Baptist. I'm pro-Southern Baptist. You can imagine three guys talking and one guy says, Are you a Christian? And he says, No, I'm Orthodox or Catholic in Ethiopia. And another one says, Are you Christian? Yes, I'm Christian. He says, Are you Christian? No, I'm Southern Baptist. I mean, that's the kind of distinction that they make. They would never describe themselves as just Pente is the derogatory word that's been attached to them, short for Pentecostal, which means evangelical. It doesn't really mean Pentecostal. And so rather than just saying, yes, I'm Pente or I'm an evangelical Christian, they go all the way to the specific denomination and kind of take pride in it. The percentage of Christians around 12 to 15 percent of the 90 million. So if you get those figures in your head, hopefully that will leave a sense of the massive need. Anyone else? The primary need is for those who are able to preach and teach. That is primary. However, like in all third world countries and first world countries, there are still ongoing needs and other opportunities. But that's the primary long-term need. That's what we as HeartCry, for lack of a better word, specialize in or emphasize is the need for an existing local church. You can imagine here trying to reach the community without the church. How long-term it would just be shooting yourself in the foot if you're just passing out meals or setting up dental clinics. If you aren't establishing anything long-term, even if you're witnessing to all of those people, what are you going to do with them? It we have to have the church and unfortunately in our culture. We no longer look to the church as With the kind of primacy that we ought to I mean, it's kind of a byproduct of them You just everything else is primary and the church is secondary now according to the scriptures the only institution that God established for us to be a part of Together is the local church. It has to be primary and if we give our our attention there, it will then blossom into these other ministries and they will be far more effective and have a far-reaching and longer-lasting effect if we'll give our attention to establishing a biblical church. So that's our goal, that's our emphasis in the way that we have chosen to do missions. There are numerous other needs and there are lots of good people filling those. We've chosen to pick this small niche and give all of our energies there. Yes? I don't know of a specific reason. I think when the time comes and God provides someone, it'll be obvious why the delay. Sometimes it can be overwhelming for me to think that I've invested 15 years there, lost a lot in the process. But I have to rest in God, trusting that He knows what He's doing. Conrad's probably the one who's beating the drum the most Out there, but obviously he's beating it on African soil. He's not really stirring up people here As much so Yes Yeah, I can answer that personally for me. I definitely can't impose that on anyone else. For me, I was in a church that was not faithfully preaching the gospel as a child. Definitely there were some people converted during those days. Why the Lord allowed me to live in self-righteousness and self-deceit for so long, only He knows. I'm sure it has something to do with what He had called me to and allows me Quite a bit of patience, probably not as much as I should have with other people who are living in that state even now. You know, I can look back and think God could have rescued me earlier and saved me from a lot of heartache and my mom from even more heartache, but he didn't. He used my mom's, you know, faithful witness and prayers to eventually convert me. which is great. Not everyone has the opportunity I had, but there was a time in 2008, that spring, I was visiting with friends that I hadn't seen on a regular basis since the year 2000, so eight years later, and I was able to sit down with this family and they told me that every single week they and some mutual friends of mine that I had run with previously that had then been converted were meeting together on a weekly basis and praying that I would be saved. And I never knew it until eight years later. So there are a number of things like that encouraging things to see and you can see how God has worked all things according to the counsel of his will. Which, and I'm going to say this again in a few minutes, does not mean that we sit back in passivity, waiting on Him to work out all things. So I would say, I wouldn't blame God for rescuing me so late. I would say I was stubborn and unrepentant and happy in my sin. Yeah, culturally, they have a huge emphasis on family. I mean, they are very, very relational as a people. And they typically have large families, especially those who don't live in the city. And they really love on their kids, invest a lot in them. I enjoy being around Ethiopian families. I like that relationship. I'm not, by nature, a very relational person. I'm an extreme introvert. I hate speaking in front of people. In college, I skipped the class, public speaking, and the professor just gave me a C for turning it in on paper. It's really unfortunate that now I'm doing this. but they have a decent view, and within the church it tends to be pretty good, but it's more cultural than biblical. The reason that is, is because they have biblically influenced society at least before this the influx of Islam happened because of the Orthodox Christianity it's very Old Testament heavy but still I mean the Old Testament is more strict regarding family than the New Testament so they end up being fairly strict and when it comes to family and so they have a lot of benefits and in the fabric of their culture in which to build off of so I have often had to stay there whenever I'm attacking something specific about their culture to say I'm not against their culture at large. I'm only against their culture where it's against Christ. And I have no desire at all to go anywhere in the world and promote Western culture unless it's a place where Western culture pleases Christ. And then it's not because it's Western, it's because it's pleasing to the Lord. That's the most difficult thing as an overseas missionary is to not go and influence them with anything of your culture, but only go and promote Christ and proclaim Him and Him crucified. I mean, the culture is so much of who we are. It's just woven into the fabric of our being. It's hard to let it down. But as we go in and humble ourselves and willingly listen to them talk, it becomes easier for us then to drop all of our idiosyncrasies and stuff and just preach the Bible. Yes? My question concerns your testimony personally. You mentioned that you didn't accept Christ until you were 22 years old. At that time that you were in the church, Yes, I thought I was a Christian. I made a profession at an early age and was baptized, and assumed that I was, and then eventually proved by lifestyle choices that I was not. And then I was rescued. I left that part out. I professed as a young child. You said that the first priority is to establish a church. The Ethiopian Eschadon Baptist Church, the denomination that we've partnered with, has in their plans to establish a Bible college and seminary. And we have offered to provide teachers for that as they become available. Yeah. So that's in the works already with this denomination. And it's part of the bigger scheme of, I mentioned the doors are open. I mean, it's endless. The opportunities are absolutely endless for people that want to go and just pour their lives into the work there. Fortunately, the Lord has given me a lot of favor with the Ethiopian people in general, but especially with this denomination. And some of it has to do with my time there of living among them and working really hard to learn the language and the culture and to not offend them like missionaries had in the past and to just ask the hard questions. you know, make some tough choices at times. They watched me live. They watched me go through loss. They watched me still stay committed to them. And the Lord's just used all that. And he's given me wonderful favor with them. So I'm hoping to continue taking advantage of that. So when they open up doors, we want to run through it. And most of you are probably thinking, well, why don't you go there? Yeah, it's a good question. I am incredibly convinced that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do right now, pastoring where I am, training up young men and older men as well to go out regionally and around the world to preach. I mean, it's a hard battle. Before I came to Virginia during that summer of 2010, there were five different places on our radar. where we thought we would go as a family, and Addis Ababa was one of them. But the New River Valley ended up being where we landed. I thought it would be short term, and then I would be on to one of the other four places that I had, but the Lord had other plans, and so we've staked our tents and hope, hopefully, Lord willing, we'll be there long term. So, yes. Previously, Christchurch-Radford now. Yeah, that's a long question or a long answer. Your question is not long. It would take me a while. I've been influenced primarily by a small group of men, some dead and some living, And I've benefited greatly from these men. I've attempted to kind of absorb from them all the benefits of their lives and their ministries and trying to flesh that out in the local church. What I've tried to do is look into the scriptures to see, OK, what does the Bible say that we ought to be doing as God's people when we gather together, particularly? And I've just thought to not do anything else. Whatever the Bible says that we're going to do, we just seek to do that and let the rest of it fall by the wayside, which sometimes is difficult for people to swallow. But my goal is that whoever comes, my hope is that whoever comes to visit and whoever stays, they won't come because we have this or don't have that, but they will come and stay because Christ is honored there because he shows up among us and the person in power of his spirit that he continues to unite our hearts together to fear his name. And that's our great desire. The struggle for me a long time was, okay, am I called to Ethiopia or am I called to pastor in America? And finally I decided, you know what, those are not battles to be fought. I'm committed to the glory of God and to the furtherance of his kingdom. I need to know where he wants me to do that. So I don't see it as a battle no longer in my mind of should I go or should I stay. The battle is am I going to get up and live for Christ today with all that I am in the context that he's placed me and pursuing with my whole heart and attempt to lead other people to do the same, trusting that he's going to send some far and leave some near. So that's not an exact answer. I'm glad to follow up with you on that with more specifics, though. I'm pushing the time. I don't know if they're going to be waiting for us out there, if I'm going to be reprimanded from the get go. I'm losing. OK. I'm just going to pray for us and then we'll go to worship. Our Father and our God, we thank you this morning for the gospel. We thank you that Christ has come to establish your kingdom here on earth and that he has sent forth men and women to proclaim this message in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and even to the ends of the earth. And Father, we do lift up the nation of Ethiopia to you and we pray We pray for our brothers and sisters who are there. We pray that you would be with them, that you would be strengthening them, that you would be using them to faithfully proclaim the truth. And Father, we pray for the Addis Kadan denomination. And we thank you for this this wide door that you have opened for Anthony and for Conrad and Bewe. for others to come in and to come alongside these believers and to help them to grow in their knowledge and understanding of your word. And Father, we pray that you would indeed raise up and call out men, that you would send them, that this work would be furthered and would be established. Lord, help us to have wisdom. In recognizing those who who you will call, help us have patience and trust in you. Lord, we thank you for providing the resources and all that we need. Father, we also lift up. Anthony, and we pray for him and his work in Radford pastoring. We pray that you would help him to do so faithfully. We pray that you would be with him this morning as he preaches to us. Lord, may we all be edified through your word. We ask these things in Christ's name and for his glory. Amen.