discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 187
plement each other, will become fearful that a focus on anything other than local
ministries weakens a congregation. That was not the case with Harold John
Ockenga when he became pastor of Boston’s Park Street Church. At one of his
first board meetings, Ockenga asked that church to allow him to challenge
church members to give sacrificially in a special offering for world evangelism.
At that time, Park Street Church was giving only a tiny fraction of its income
to others while struggling to keep its building painted. Although it seemed like
the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference church needed every
bit of its income just to survive, Ockenga pleaded for it to get out of a survival
mind-set. The church board accepted their new pastor’s challenge to make
global mission a priority and that decision fueled a transformation of Park
Street Church. On the crest of an expanding missionary program that sprouted
from Ockenga’s call for a sacrificial missions offering, Park Street Church became
a strong and influential church. Today that congregation has a full-time
global outreach coordinator and gives twice as much to missions as what it
keeps to run its local programs—an amount that, incidentally, has been more
than sufficient to keep the church’s building painted!
The real problem of foreign missions, then, is the home churches,
and without the pastor it cannot be solved. . . . The multitudes of the
distant nations cannot come to speak for themselves, even were they
conscious of their need. Nor can the missionary do so. The missionary
visitor may arouse temporary interest. But it is the missionary
pastor who makes a church a missionary power the year through. 9
3. Modeling Mission Passion
Mobilizing the Local Church 187
—John R. Mott
People respond to what pastors say; they respond even more enthusiastically
to what pastors do. Global missions concerns need to be a part of worship
service prayer times. During their public pastoral prayers, pastors should pray
often for missionaries by name and enthusiastically model for their congregations
what it means to passionately support global mission.
In the early days of Paul Cunningham’s pastorate of a tiny, struggling
church in Olathe, Kansas, he had a vision of his congregation stretching itself
to give a record missionary offering. Cunningham, fresh out of seminary, decided
he needed to lead the way for his flock. To that end, he got a personal