Getting Laymen Involved in Missions

by Gregory J. Rummo

I had the opportunity to accompany Dr.Roy Seals, BIMI South America Director, on a whirlwind missions trip through the country of Venezuela. It was a great experience that allowed us to visit many different kinds of missionary work, including the tribal work of the Vernoys in the tiny rain forest village of Chajurana, the larger metropolitan ministries of the Arces and the Velazquezes in Barquisimeto and Valencia respectively, and the work of the Witherells out in the countryside in the small town of Nirgua.

We packed a lot into those eight days in South America. I learned much but experienced more. As a result, my opinion of world missions has been changed forever.

My pastor, Jay Harvey, was a BIMI missionary, himself, before leaving the mission field almost ten years ago to pastor our church — The Madison Avenue Baptist Church in Paterson, New Jersey. Under his ministry, the church has seen its missions program grow explosively.

There are several reasons for this growth. One of the first changes our pastor enacted was to schedule a 3-day missions conference for the spring of every year. These annual conferences have since been moved to the fall and expanded from three to five days. During the other eleven months of the year, there is a steady stream of missionaries that come through the church’s doors to present their work. God has blessed the church’s missionary emphasis in a number of ways. Almost a dozen teens and two young couples have surrendered for full-time missions in the last several years. The church’s faith promise has increased dramatically. The number of missionaries the church now supports has more than doubled, from 23 to 54, during the ten years since Jay Harvey has been our pastor.

There is one other.phpect of our missions program that I believe truly makes it unique. Our pastor encourages laymen to get involved in missions and creates opportunities for those who are interested to go and experience the mission field for themselves.

I believe that experience is the key to getting laymen interested in the local church’s missions program. Laymen must experience the mission field themselves in order to gain an appreciation, an understanding and a true burden for world missions. No message, no slide presentation, no appeal from the pulpit can stir a heart like a first-hand visit to the mission field.

My trip to Venezuela was one example of an opportunity to go and experience world missions. The year prior, Pastor Harvey took several young couples with him to Australia to be with the Larry Harris family in Nowra, about two hours south of Sydney. One lady who accompanied that group is now the president of the Women’s Missionary Fellowship in our church.

In July 1999, I had the opportunity to travel to South America to the country of Peru where we hiked through the Andes Mountains along the Santa Cruz Trail with missionary Phil Winfeld, Roy Seals, and a group of college students on a mission to distribute Bibles in remote Pueblo Indian villages.

As a businessman, I believe it is God’s will for me to be in the profession in which I am involved. I have prayed about full-time Christian service at different times in my Christian life, but the Lord has never opened a door in this regard for me. So instead of wrestling with this issue ad infinitum, it dawned on me one day that, just maybe, the Lord wanted me where I was.

I have always been fascinated by missions. Whenever missionaries came to our church, it always impressed me that they were willing to make what I thought was (and in some cases is) extraordinary sacrifices to be salt and light in oftentimes very inhospitable places. God began to use this interest in missions during the time I was chairman of the pulpit committee that ultimately voted to recommend Jay Harvey as pastor to our congregation. I began writing to all of the church’s missionaries on a regular basis. My idea was to enlist their prayer support for wisdom in finding the right man to pastor our church. I also wanted to keep them up-to-date on church happenings. During this time, my wife and I created a newsletter which we dubbed “Rumors from the Rummos.” It became a hit with virtually all of the missionaries, and as a result, almost all of them wrote letters to us. We got to know many of them on a personal basis and also became aware of their struggles, their victories, their praises and their prayer requests. It was no coincidence that the Lord sent us a missionary-minded pastor.

Three years ago in 1997, my pastor invited me to go along with him to BIMI’s annual Action Committee Meeting. This is a 2-day event that brings everyone up-to-date on the financial status of BIMI and other matters of importance concerning world missions. It also gives the BIMI field directors an opportunity to present and update their various fields of oversight throughout the world. It has been my experience that this meeting is attended almost solely by pastors, BIMI field directors and other BIMI staff members, along with any missionaries that happen to be home on furlough and in the area. I believe I was the only layman in the meeting that year. As a result of that meeting and a subsequent presentation by Roy Seals in our church on the work of the Vernoys among the Maquiritare and Sanema Indians in the Venezuelan Rain Forest, God started speaking to my heart about going on a missions trip. That trip changed forever my understanding of and my burden for world missions.

The following year, we brought along another layman from our church, Rick Placeres - my friend and travel companion to the Venezuelan Rain Forest. This past year, our pastor brought six laymen with him. I went again for my third year, along with Rick from the previous year, and four of the church’s deacons.

When the apostle Peter wanted to assure the “strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” of the authenticity of his two letters, he wrote: “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2Peter 1:16) Peter wanted to convey to his audience that he had not only heard about Jesus from others, but he had seen him with his own eyes. Peter had experienced Jesus.

Peter and Jesus spent three years together traveling through the Judeaean countryside. They ate together. They conversed with each other, sharing ideas, burdens, heartaches and joys. They were together in all types of circumstances — from a wild tempest on the Sea of Galilee to the feeding of the five thousand. Peter experienced a range of emotions: from the ecstasy at witnessing the transfiguration of Christ on “that high mountain apart by themselves” to the agony caused by his own denial of Jesus the night before His Crucifixion.

I have no doubt that part of what made the Apostle Peter - a simple fisherman by occupation - the fiery zealot for God that he was, is the fact that he had been with Jesus. It was that first hand, eyewitness experience that transformed this common, ordinary, everyday businessman into a Spirit-filled missionary-minded evangelist. The same applies to laymen today in the local church. If they could and if they would go and see for themselves what missions is all about, they too would come back turning the world upside down for Jesus.

When I was in the Witherell’s home in Nirgua, Venezuela, a CLAIM team (Christian Laymen Assisting International Missionaries) was coincidentally on site and in the middle of a construction project. A group of about 20 men was busily involved in the process of erecting a building for the camp Wayne and Francis Witherell started in the Venezuelan countryside. It was a blistering day. Just standing around in the hot sun and humid air was uncomfortable. But the members of the CLAIM team were busy working – sifting sand, mixing mortar and laying concrete blocks. Their sweat-soaked shirts were testimonies in themselves. It was almost beyond belief. Later that evening when dinner was finished, Dr. Seals led a devotion in the Witherell’s living room. He talked about the memories of his father’s miraculous salvation and the call of God in his life for missions. As he spoke, I looked around the room and it occurred to me that almost every man who had volunteered to come on this CLAIM trip had a “hoary head” (Prov. 16:31). Roy finished the devotional and asked me to pray. Something happened to me that has only happened on extremely rare occasions. I started to pray, and then I started to weep. “Where are all of the men my age?” I asked the Lord, through a veil of tears.

To this day I think it is still a good question.

BIMI has data on the ages of missionaries on the field and it shows that their missionaries are relatively young. Approximately 75 percent of all BIMI missionaries are between the ages of 30 and 59-years old. But it is my experience that the reverse is true regarding laymen’s involvement in world missions. The laymen who are interested in missions and who often go on missions trips are either senior citizens or college students interested in learning if God will call them to the mission field. Something is definitely wrong with this picture. Where are all the middle aged career people? Are they so busy with their lives, their families and their careers that they can’t afford a week of vacation and the financial resources to go and see for themselves what missions is all about?

Perhaps this is a case of misplaced blame. Is it apathy on the part of laymen, or is it a failure to stimulate interest and a lack of opportunity extended by pastors to these career people to go on a missions trip? It may be a little of both.

The thought occurred to me that laymen are extremely important in the overall plan of God for world missions. Who is largely responsible for contributing to the faith promise of the local church? Laymen of course. They are the major source of funds for all missionaries to go to the field. It is a wise pastor who will get his lay people involved in world missions. Wallets and pocketbooks will follow the heart. Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matt. 6:21)

I’d like to give a few suggestions to career age lay people and pastors in this area of involvement in the mission’s program of your church.

To the layman I would say:

GO! Find a way to utilize a week or ten days of vacation from your job and go on a missions trip with your pastor or a group from your church.

Take your family, if possible, and combine the missions trip with a week of vacation.

Take a camera, and make sure you have slide film so that you can give a presentation to your church upon your return. I took three cameras on my trip to Venezuela and shot prints, slides and video. Upon my return, I was able to put together a slide presentation, a display board using the prints and an edited 20-minute video.

Be available to share your experiences as the Holy Spirit leads. In addition to a presentation in our church, I was invited to show my slide presentation to the combined 5th grade classes in the Christian school my oldest son attends. Could God speak to the heart of a fifth grader about missions through my slides? Only God knows.

Find out what the missionaries need or what they would like to have as a special treat from the States and plan to take it with you.

Be humble about your experience. Remember, you are not the hero. If anyone deserves hero status, it is the missionary who has left all to follow Him (Luke 18:28). You will have a ticket back home -- the missionary will be waving good-bye. This realization was especially poignant as we flew out of the steaming jungle in Chajurana to a more civilized part of the world.

Yes, it will involve sacrifice. Yes, you will have to spend some of your own money. Yes, you might just have to extend yourself beyond the normal level of Christianity to which you have grown accustomed. Yes, you might just have to make one selfless decision or take a chance one time in life or a leap of faith. But I promise you - you will never be the same person again. Your heart will be changed towards missions in a way that no message, no slide presentation, no videotape, no appeal from the pulpit will be able to accomplish.

To those pastors who involve laymen in the missions program of your local church, I say God bless you! You are a wise man to do so. But to those pastors who for some reason have not made the attempt or who have tried and failed, let me encourage you in the following ways:

Invite a few of your most trusted laymen - perhaps a couple of your deacons - to accompany you to next year’s BIMI Action Committee Meeting in Chattanooga.

Make opportunities for laymen to visit the mission field without pressuring them to consider that God might be calling them to the mission field full-time. If it is the Lord’s will, then let that person be God-called and not “pastor called.”

Try and have a policy where the church can financially help interested laymen who cannot otherwise afford a trip to the mission field.

Plan for laymen in your church to give a testimony of their experience on the mission field when they return from their trip. Make it a big event. Don’t squeeze it hurriedly into a 5-minute time slot during a Wednesday night prayer meeting.

Encourage them to take pictures or slides and possibly take a video camera with them. Then let them present their pictures to the church on their return. My pastor gave us two entire Sunday evening services to present our trip to Venezuela. One week I showed my slides and several weeks later Dr. Seals was with us for a meeting. He preached a short missions message that evening and we showed an edited 20 minute video.

The results will be contagious. God will bless your mission’s program in ways you never thought possible. You may even find that some of your congregation is secretly saying: “These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also.” (Acts 17:6)

© Gregory J. Rummo, edited with permission Gregory J. Rummo is the CEO of New Chemic (US) Inc. in Montvale, New Jersey. He lives in Butler, NJ, with his wife, Jenny, and two sons, John age 11, and James age 8. The family attends The Madison Avenue Baptist Church in Paterson, NJ.

Gregory J. Rummo

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