Intro to Cooediators

But over the years, most of the major decisions in OM have been either made by a small group together with myself and then approved by the larger body, or they've been made by the larger body as we've gathered every year since around 1965. And that's the way we hope to continue in the future. We'll be saying more about that later on, and depending on the number of copies available, as we can never keep up producing enough copies for this growing leadership constituency, we will talk about that.

In fact, we are producing the notes now of the last four days, four or five days of meetings, and any propositions that were made of things that we feel we must do and we must agree upon will be at least briefly discussed at this level before, in a sense, we consider it as something that God has definitely led us to do. Again, let me just welcome each one of you and say a brief word, as it's announced here, about what a coordinator is and what this conference is for. I actually, this morning in prayer, decided to speak on something else, more important.

We're constantly wrestling with priorities. It's probably the greatest struggle for many of us and many of you. What is priority? Though I would like to speak on this whole thing of what this conference is for and what is a coordinator, I feel this other subject is more of a priority.

One of the purposes of this conference is to give some of us as leaders and, to be honest, especially myself, the opportunity to speak to you about the direction of the work, problems of the work, what we feel is on the Lord's mind. Some of you are country leaders. How many times do you get to speak to the people in your country? Most of you have orientation, speak to them every day for a week, at least you can.

You're on the ship, you certainly can speak to the people on your team almost any time you want. When I was leading the ship, I certainly spoke at least once, twice a week. I was able to share, which is so important in leading a work.

I wonder if you'd ask how many opportunities I have to now speak to the people who lead this work. I can assure you almost none. The work is so decentralized, so spread out, so complex, it's just not possible to get these people together.

In the early days, it was almost the law of the Medes and the Persians that if you were on OM, you came to the month conference and you were there from the beginning to the end. These were before my days of spiritual balance, though I hope I had a little bit back then. I don't think we would have survived without some.

Now we can't even get agreement on how long people should be at the conference. The conferences are so big and so complex, it's almost impossible to even find a place to gather. The expense of these conferences has become just unbelievable.

One of the reasons the coordinator's conference is just generally where we already are, is to save the mammoth expense. Do we have trouble hearing? Oh. Okay.

The mammoth expense of renting, as we used to do, Whitcliffe Center or some other place. So I am very, very grateful for this opportunity to speak probably two or three times to all of you who, in some cases, I will not even see again for another year or two years. Now I know in one way that's not so important.

God is great. His Holy Spirit is leading this work, not me. And it's not necessary to hear messages from George Burr to be a spiritual person, that's for sure.

But we are a fellowship of like-minded people. We hope that there will continue to be some kind of united voice, at least on major issues. And it does seem through missionary history that God does raise up often incredibly weak but anointed people to help lead His work.

I think you know the quotation that I've been reading for the last couple of years. And I'd like to start with it again, based to me on the whole concept of the New Testament. One of the few quotes that I've written in my Bible filled with quotations that is actually my own words.

Because of world evangelism and the reality of spiritual warfare, we need to agree on a plan of action and a strategy and policy to carry out that action. Even when there are things we don't like or even agree with. We've seen in the past five days there are things in OM that we do not like.

I probably at times with our patient field leaders express myself too strongly. Certainly the other morning when I was speaking on OM, a limping movement, it's good that many of you were not there. It was a little bit perhaps too strong and could have produced an excessive number of resignations.

And that would take a lot of counseling and personal work to recover. This is why this morning, after much thought, I've decided to speak on the subject of, you guessed it, balance. Since I've spoken on balance before, I decided to come up with a new message.

And this one is called Balance at the Top. I had a subtitle, God's Fiddler on the Roof. We could go on from there with a plea for leaders to simply stop fiddling around and get on with the job of world evangelism.

Before I get into that, let me just say a word about the original message. That the initial concept of being a coordinator was actually an effort to keep the leadership on a lower profile. Not to call him a director.

We felt it would be better to have the Holy Spirit doing that. But we realized that got us accused of being super spiritual. Then later on, we had a board of directors which is in some countries called a board of trustees.

That originally started as a prayer board way, way back. But the coordinator concept, which I think I must have got from Evangelism in Depth in Latin America, where it was first used, I felt explained a ministry that a leader was not to direct the work, but to coordinate, to help organize, to help do properly what the Lord was doing. And that the Lord would be directing.

Now, as we get into so many different language groups, the whole thing becomes, of course, completely ridiculous. Something we didn't quite understand when we just launched into Mexico. So over the years, we have not really been so concerned about what name you use.

We've had, of course, all kinds of discussions about even changing names. I think the key is not the word coordinator, or even the word director, or leader. They are similar terms.

But in terms of understanding the person's job, and that's the idea of it, understanding what he's doing so that things can get on decently and in order, is to ask, what word precedes that? He's a country coordinator. Dick Griffin is a country coordinator for Mexico. That indicates, I think, to most of us, that we feel he is the leader of the work there.

If you like the term, he's the director of the work there. But another brother might be coordinator of international literature production. You know, Ann, that's a newer brother in our midst than Dick Griffin.

Brother Neil Brinkley. I saw him over here. Neil, would you just stand up because I would like people to see you.

He is coordinating, he is tying together, helping, and that's another terrific word, really helping, the whole aspect of literature production worldwide. Now, some may say, well, is that an equal position? With Dick Griffin, the coordinator of the work in Mexico? Personally, I don't think that's relevant. One is higher than the other.

We're not trying to build up some hierarchy, trying to figure out who is higher than others. It's a description of a person's ministry, of a person's function within the work, and of course, different ministries, different jobs, will have greater authority in different situations. When it comes to literature worldwide, Neil will have more authority than Dick Griffin.

When it comes to Mexico, Neil will have very little authority. It gets very complicated because the work is so big. Philip Morris, a man with three, four, five hats nobody can figure out, still only one head, he is actually literature production coordinator for the subcontinent because that is so huge.

Philip was doing that before Neil came in. Philip also has been a number of other things in Bradley and is one of the few people that actually functions on two teams as the buyer of books for the ship and as the coordinator of literature production in India and is also helping me to coordinate international finance. One or two other things on top of that.

I think you understand what I'm trying to say. The word coordinator is a description of what someone is trying to do. And I think in some cases it is better, for the sake of communication, to use the term I'm helping to coordinate.

Gary Dean looks after Indian affairs from the ICT, International Coordinating Team. It is not possible for me on that team as it was ten years ago to relate to every nation. Of course, in cases like Europe and the Middle East, we have regional coordinators, a very important ministry.

We don't have a regional coordinator yet for the subcontinent though we're praying about it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, and of course India, an area where there will soon be close to a billion souls. Even if we did have a regional leader, there are now so many regions, so many other complexities, that it is completely ridiculous to think that I can be at the end of all of these strings of communication. So in a very real way, the work is now being coordinated by a team.

Maybe I should change my so-called description, but it is being coordinated by a team, and in a sense, we would like you to understand worldwide that we would in many ways prefer to just be called the International Helpers Team, but it does sound a little ridiculous, and often changing names after years causes more confusion than it solves problems. But certainly the job of Gary Dean in London is not to coordinate India. I've never had anybody think he was doing that for a minute.

That is done from Bombay by the leaders of the work in India. We are simply helping, and we are trying to keep what's happening in India coordinated with what's happening in all the rest of the world. It's like a junction, like a railway junction.

You live in England, you've heard many times change at Crewe. I've spent probably up to 50 hours of my lifetime sitting in the Crewe station, often between midnight and two. Soon Peter Maiden will bypass me as he shunts back and forth from Carlisle to London like some kind of a delivery boy.

I hope he doesn't feel that way about his ministry. Therefore, I would just beg for cooperation in understanding the complicated growth of OM and the kind of leadership that has developed. We're now coming into some new terms, and I hope you'll not let them bother you, because certainly terminology, though it has some importance, is not that important.

This very conference became very controversial because some felt it was getting too big, and with pressure from others because I've been in favor of the bigger conference, which included all responsible and senior people in places of responsibility in the work. Of course, it's very hard to draw the line, but I felt it's better to have one extra, because often many people who come don't say that much anyway. They almost attend like guests, and yet they benefit from these meetings more than some of us who've been going through them for 15 years.

The greatest feedback from these meetings does not come from the people who've been around for years. It comes from new people who are so appreciated, finally, after years, getting a little bit into what is happening in decision-making and discussion and all that kind of thing. So with the desire to keep that, and yet at the same time have smaller meetings where we could just deal with things in an easier way and not lose the much-needed linking between the men who are the main leader of the work in their field, because, you know, to some degree, one field varies greatly from the other, but to some degree, the field will depend on the person who's leading that field.

We believe it is not wrong that a person's personality affects the work they are doing. The work in France has been very much geared with what God has been doing through Mike Evans. We believe he was God's man after years of prayer, changing leaders, that God sent Mike.

We of course know that he works as a team, and we believe in a sense now, many years later, the work in France will be the combined, in a sense, vision, personality, mentality, and reality flowing through those men in every country it burns. Someone who has to step into a task years later will find that the personality, the impact, the style, that's a good word, the style of the previous leader will have affected that work. I think most of a sense now that the work in Canada has taken on something of the Burt Kempis type of approach.

But he was originally in India for some years. I think the work in Great Britain has deeply been affected by the teaching ministry, the stability, and the personality of Peter Maiden. So he is very much a team man.

The work of STL, without question, has built up to some degree around what God has been doing through Jerry and Jean Davey, and I think in every case I would always like to include the women. Therefore I would hope that we would understand the need as we move forward to recognize men that the Lord has put in positions of leadership, to be loyal to them, to try to work with them, and to keep in mind that if we are going to evangelize the world, we need to agree on a plan of action and a strategy and a policy to carry out that action, even when there are things we don't like or agree with. If you agree and like everything going on in your country, you must be an unusual person.

But our respect for one another, our unity, our love for Christ, our desire to get on with the job. This is why we're closing down this conference 6 o'clock Monday afternoon, because we could easily meet for another two weeks. I mean, we're great at polemics and discussion.

I mean, you should have seen it last night. But we want to get on with the job. Therefore there will be some things we don't accomplish here.

There will be some things left in the air. Some of us won't be happy maybe about something. And we go from here to disciple hundreds and hundreds of new people that are arriving this weekend, giving our life to them, going back to our countries and getting on with the job in our countries.

Moving from that, let me just share now on this subject of balance for the man at the top. I don't even like the term man at the top, but it is used in the secular world. It communicates to some.

The buck needs to stop somewhere. Someone has to have some final word, even if it is simply, as it often is, you know, M. I believe that should be taken up with a board of directors. So in a sense, the buck, I think you know that expression, final decision, the final veto, doesn't generally stop with me.

I'm the temporary stop. I see something that I don't feel is right. I say one of two things.

Well, there may be a few other possibilities, but mainly I say that needs to be discussed at the coordinator's conference. We can't go ahead with that until we discuss it at the coordinator's conference. Or I may say, as often throughout the year, that really needs to go to the board of directors.

And that's how so many things go on throughout the year. In a real sense, in many organizations, the board of directors, that is the end of the line. They are the final, absolute authority.

In O.M., it is basically a negotiation between the board of directors and the full-time leaders of the work, in which each esteems the other. Each esteems the other. Each provides a check and a balance.

And it is our conviction that the ultimate authority must be God. And if we don't have peace about something, we're not sure of the direction, we must wait upon God. We must pray together.

That's why yesterday we spent the whole day in prayer. This must be the final authority in the work. So, in a sense, no group of men, no individual men, can stand puffed up as somehow some great spiritual dictator.

There never has been dictatorship within O.M. This kind of international crowd of people with such a wild range of ideas is not going to tolerate any kind of dictatorship. Any moves on my part, even without being aware of it, I can assure you, I was shot out of a saddle before I could barely get in it. I don't think I ever wanted to go that way anyway, but we're all weak and do things that give, I think, sometimes the appearance of evil.

So there are people, in a sense, who are over others. Some call them under shepherds. There are so many terms for these leaders, it gets very interesting as you study the different streams of the church.

We know the leader is to be the servant. That's why we call the doulos. The doulos in Greek means servant.

And so don't get the wrong idea what I'm saying. I left the word in here on the top just to be a little bit different. And because of the concept that the further up you go on something, if you go off balance, the greater the fall.

Some of you are going, in a sense, up, in the other sense, down, in your position of leadership. You have people under you. You are over people in that you have to counsel them, you have to give them some instructions.

You are a leader. There's nothing wrong with the word leader. Some people in the church who use more profile terms actually have become the strongest dictators.

In the Bucksing movement they tried to have a low profile term for their leadership people. So they just called them the Lord's servants. But there is a hyper-spiritual term among the people of that movement.

And that term is the Lord's servant. Who could that be? I will tell you there is no question The Lord's servant is Brother Bucksing. If you want to see a movement that operates with a little bit of a strong hand, which some people would call a dictatorship, I don't think really it is totally, maybe moderately, then you would fellowship with that movement for a while.

Yes, the further up you go, the further down you go when you fall. I read a leaflet when I was a student, The Perils of the Victorious Life. And I am convinced that the more you experience of the deep things of God, the more you experience of God's working through you, the more you become a primary target of Satan.

Some of you, by the very fact that you have come into leadership and as humble as that may seem to you, may come under fiery attack from Satan in the coming years. I believe that one of OM's great mottos, great challenges is commitment with balance. Commitment with balance.

And I know that most of you have heard me speak on this subject and you know the many, many scriptures that we can tie into this whenever we speak on the subject of spiritual balance. I feel it would be good so that the Lord can speak to us through His word just to read together in Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians chapter 4. The word balance, like the word trinity and a lot of other beautiful words, is not found in the New Testament. But the word love is.

The word balance, I don't know how much it was used in the very early days of OM, but the emphasis on love in the earlier days was greater than today. The very first conference, before we went into Mexico in 1960, when I came over to Spain, every night we spoke on the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Every single main message of the entire conference was on love.

And I think there is a need to go back to the original message of OM, which was not, as some people think, mainly forsaking all, or evangelizing the world through literature, or other things along that line. Total commitment. The strongest aspect of the message, really, was love.

Even the leadership manual, written almost 20 years ago, has a method of personal evangelism, which probably most of you have never read or haven't read lately, which the whole method of personal evangelism is based on love. I was almost an extremist on that line. Therefore, I don't think in any way we are proposing something new.

If it wasn't for the spiritual balance that came into the work at Moody, we would have been banned by the leaders of that campus because they were thinking of banning our trips to Mexico. And because of balance, our willingness to apologize, I had to apologize publicly for one of my foolish statements in front of the entire class, our willingness to go to the leaders, admit where we were wrong, and seek for balance. In the area of health, they were concerned about contagious diseases.

In the area of driving, they were concerned about our crazy old truck. And many, many areas in those very early days at Moody. In fact, several of the most extreme people left OM within the first two years because they felt that there just wasn't enough teeth and that we were just playing around.

That was 22 years ago. We're not dealing with something new, though the Lord has taught us so many new aspects. The Lord has shown us how to present these things in a more sensible way.

And of course, we use the word balance as well as the word love and many other terms. Let's look at verse 10 and read from there. Verse 9, chapter 5, and then we'll go back to chapter 4. For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth, proving what is acceptable unto the Lord, and having no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.

For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret. But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light. For whatever doth make manifest is light.

Wherefore, he said, Awake, thou that sleepest, arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. During this weekend is too vague. I have a quotation I put here in the back of my Bible from Robertson McQuilkin.

This, to me, is really beautiful. Even Jonathan confessed as one who was tired of hearing me talk about balance. And I spoke in a church in Brussels some months ago that he appreciated this.

Whenever Jonathan appreciates something that I say, it especially warms my battery. It is easier to go to a consistent extreme, in other words, that's easier, but it's not right, than to stay at the center of biblical tension. OM, beloved, is loaded with tension.

I oftentimes can feel it in the very depth of my being. The different opinions, the different memos, the different cross-sections of ideas. And the Word of God is a book that produces tension.

It doesn't produce sort of a relaxed, flippy-floppy mentality. There are extreme statements in the Word of God except you forsake all that you have. You cannot be my disciple.

It still hasn't been taken out, even of the RSV. Even in the Jehovah Witness version, they seem to practice it. Leaving most of their salaries to live on the barest essentials in order to flood out the greatest avalanche of doctrinal garbage the world has almost ever known.

We've got to find that center of biblical tension. Forsaking all, yet God supplying all. It's a constant battle.

What are some of the specific areas we have to watch for as we move up in leadership? I want to say right now that I am unbelievably thankful to God for each one of you. I think I have the blessed position of knowing more of you personally than anyone else. In fact, there are very few of you I don't know personally.

There are very few of you here that I've not spent time and fellowship with. There are some of you that are new and have come into positions very quickly. A couple of you I haven't even met.

And we are moving quicker. Hang on. You must understand this, especially just as a person, have such an appreciation for the leaders God has raised up in this world.

It is a constant nightmare to me, my wife could affirm this, that I don't have more time, longer days. Yesterday, a typical day, banged out of bed at 6.30 to jog with a little group. Time of fellowship with my good friend Richard Sharp after the jogging in which we discussed very relevant things.

Then the quiet time. Then the day of prayer. Then the evening meetings.

Then fellowship with a few people, cup of tea by my caravan at 11.15 or so with David Hicks. My wife was patiently waiting in bed for me to come to sleep. That is not the way I live every other day or every other week.

That's it. Every day some modification, praise God, 365 days a year. There are some modifications.

If I stay up to one or two, I've even learned to be more free to sleep in till 7.30 or some other hour. Now, I don't believe for a minute everybody should live that way. We're all different and I still need more balance.

And in the middle of the day, different times in the middle of the day, I would definitely be doing things today that I wouldn't have done years ago, just lying down, just completely separating myself from everything for an hour, sleeping, lying down, taking a walk, playing a game of tennis, maybe even an hour of a golf course. Just in case you've joined the critics of my golf because you think it's an expensive sport for, you know, the upper class, that is not the case in England. In England, any Joe Blow plays golf.

Believe me, they are cluttering up the golf courses in an unbelievable way. And I play nine holes of golf in Bromley. I generally don't have much time for more than nine.

It takes an hour and a half. If I'm alone, I sometimes jog between the holes, which is upsetting to other golfers. And it costs 90 pence.

Now, if you can find recreation for an hour or two for 90 pence, I'm sure that you will not be accused of breaking the economical principles of the work. It now costs a pound to play tennis in Bromley for an hour. Now, the rumor may also be out that I belong to a very exclusive tennis club.

Now, if you're in Germany or Austria and you belong to a tennis club, you know, you're up here. But not in England. I belong to a little unknown tennis club behind the Hayes Library that costs, not full membership, so I can't play on two half days of the week, Wednesday afternoon and Saturday or something.

It costs six pounds per year. Now, if any of you feel that I have gone off balance and I'm leading the movement astray into excessive recreation, please write me because I would like to talk to you. You no doubt have some really interesting hang-ups.

So I praise God for each one of you. I think God has given us a tremendous group of leaders, field leaders. I'm constantly thanking God, constantly praising the Lord.

That doesn't mean that at times I will not speak out with all my heart for things that I feel are wrong in my own life, in the work, and of course, as a shoe fits, in your own life. Please never misunderstand that. A couple of the specific areas before we go for a little bit of a break is this whole area of evaluating one's own gifts.

As we get nearer to the top or as God begins to use us in greater ways, it is easier to become self-centered. Avoid becoming self-centered. I have found in the last couple of years that if I was not careful, I was becoming self-centered.

And I can't go into the details, but watch out for that. I feel that many of our outstanding Christian leaders, if they don't become self-centered, they become organizational-centered. Their whole life revolves around their own organization.

They show little interest in other organizations. May God keep us from that sectarian mentality within our own. May all of us be getting the prayer letters of dozens of other organizations and other missionaries.

May we write to them. May we pray for them. May we esteem their work.

And may we send them even some of the best recruits that we can possibly train. God has honored our non-sectarian position. God has honored our esteeming of Philippians 2, that we should esteem others better than ourselves.

Another area where it gets dangerous as we move on in leadership and where we have to find the balance is between faith and discernment. Reckless faith, spiritual discernment. After a series of great answers to prayer in which we see God do the impossible, there is the danger that we can think this is the main thing God wants to do for the next so many years.

And we will fail to have the discernment and the wisdom to at times spend more time consolidating, driving the stakes in deeper, so that that which we have built will not topple over. Because too much of what evangelicals have built and Bible-believing people have built, too much of it is already toppling over. We again are only using words sometimes very weak to explain what we're talking about.

There are those verses that talk about the danger of building on sand. Could it be that in some of the avenues of OM, we are beginning to build a little bit on sand? Not taking enough time to be with God. Not emphasizing enough our devotional life, our life of worship.

Becoming too activistic. Claiming too many things. Rather than being deeply in love with the One who giveth all things, our Lord Himself.

This will be never-ending tension. The tension especially comes between the sort of phlegmatic optimist and the choleric realist. The choleric realist probably is an optimist, but he doesn't find it easy to be optimistic.

The phlegmatic optimist probably has some very realistic streaks. That will be helpful. Hoser said in our day, if we're going to survive, we need to develop a little bit of reverent skepticism.

And even when I read some of the OM reports these days, I just take them with a little bit, I hope, of reverent skepticism. Let's be careful what we put into the reports. Let's beware or be more aware of what our team members are saying in their prayer letters.

Because some of them are really interesting. And it gets a little bit out of control. OM is at the stage where we have grown so big, so fast.

We have reached 300 million people with the word of God. We had almost 2,000 people on the summer program, if we count little things like Brazil and Taiwan and all the rest. About 1,800 in Europe alone.

Plus the 1,500 approximately existing personnel. And that doesn't include children who are just as important as any of us. We are at the stage in which there must be consolidation.

There must be a realistic facing of some of our problems and an all-out effort to resolve those problems and to build a solid, united work. Another great area where we have to work for balance and where the devil could easily attack us is in handling the large sums of money that we now have to handle. I am convinced that there is not enough financial accountability within OM, especially for leaders handling large sums of money.

Major movement of money will now be handled by a group of six or seven who have delegated the day-to-day moving of money to three or four. It will mean more communication, more phone calls. It will certainly mean some highly proficient secretaries.

But it's no small matter when a gift of 100,000 pounds is suddenly given to us as it was this week. And there must be accountability right down the line. Major expenditures should go back to boards of directors who can pray and give different kinds of advice.

We need more research into the price of things that we can get the best possible price when we buy. We can save enormous sums of money and already are because of efforts made in this area. There must, however, still be the freedom to spend fairly quickly.

When the leader and the few people around him feel this is God's way, if it isn't too big an expenditure, say up to 1,000 pounds, they need to be able to move. If we don't keep that freedom, we're not going to be able to accomplish what I believe God wants us to accomplish. Praise God, we don't have to go to the board of directors to decide to produce another million tracks to reach Bihar for Christ.

I heard of one group in India that couldn't even sell one broken-down bicycle without getting permission from the board back in, who knows, Cheshire or some other place that these Indians had never even heard about. All of you who are handling large sums of money, may you walk carefully before God. May it be in the open.

May your own personal finance be in the open completely that there can never be a question that any leader is playing games and somehow taking advantage of his position to stack up something for his own personal gain. This recently happened in one country and another organization and just about completely destroyed one of the most significant works of God in that country. Another difficult area that we will have to battle continually is the balance between persuasion, because leaders use the method of persuasion, and becoming defensive.

We have to search our hearts. Those of us who are constantly trying to convince people about this and that, are we being defensive? Forgive me if I have at times been defensive. I've tried to run away from being defensive like the plague and perhaps at times have gone into the other extreme.

It's a difficult area. We will constantly have to work at it. It means the crucifixion of self.

Then we have to find the balance between freedom and license. Naturally a leader has a little more freedom than the average newcomer into the work. He may have one credit card.

Do you realize what some of the leaders in this work are attempting to do every day of the year? The people that they sometimes have to meet and show a little hospitality to. The airplanes they have to catch which sometimes don't even exist. And we cannot in any way think that every aspect of the work will be the same.

If you want that then let's divide in two now. Let India be one work. Let the ship be the other.

Europe can be a third. Because we are facing totally different challenges in different sections of the world. I cannot function in Bromley the way my brothers lived in Bihar.

I can't do it. Number one, I'll destroy my three beautiful teenagers. It wasn't for spiritual balance that has enabled us to adapt to our own country to some degree.

So that we would not be an obnoxious, freakish offense to that country. We would be in serious trouble, perhaps even accused of being a cult. I'm so extreme in this that I've at times dreamed of just living in a tent.

It wouldn't be all spirituality. It would be a mixture of spirituality and hostility. Because I'd like to pitch it on the front lawn of some millionaire.

And stand on the lawn and call the rat down upon his million dollar house. And I don't think that's from God. It is a miracle that I was not caught up in the left wing, radical type of theology that is so common today.

It is a miracle because there's a bend in me. A very hostile, very vicious, very aggressive, my wife has seen it, pull in that direction. I have tremendous sympathy for terrorists.

I know that frightens some of you. But I believe that the people fasting on to death in those prisons in Northern Ireland, I believe the guerrillas fighting in Salvador, I believe the terrorists, including the Palestinians, are some of the most misunderstood people in the world. It's not that they're right.

They're sinners like all the rest. And I'm not convinced the extremists on either direction are any more sanctified. You just thank the Lord that I got saved.

I thank the Lord some of you got saved. Because I can imagine if some of us weren't saved, you know, we'd be out in the streets and we wouldn't be on the same side. It's a miracle how God has brought into O.M. people from the left, people from the right, and people who are just confused at how he saved us and used us for his glory.

Yes, we need freedom to get on with the job. The Bible says let the one who ministers in the word be given double honor. Wow, that's an anti-O.M. verse, isn't it? We'll produce an O.M. Bible and keep that one out.

And I think we have learned certain people, because of their ministry, just somehow need a little more I produced a memo, gave it out only to about 10 people about how I feel it's impossible to live a totally simple lifestyle and also evangelize the world. We'll talk more about this later on, because our time is really gone. We're going to find as we move into leadership enormous tension in finding the balance between the family and the work.

There is no area of tension greater than that. It's so easy in O.M. to neglect the family, neglect the children. It isn't always because we're so disciplined, so dedicated and so committed to the work.

I believe more often it's because we are not disciplined. I don't believe the message and the vision and the work that God has given us in O.M. is possible without discipline. Though we're all different, we're all growing and we're all learning.

It takes discipline to lay everything aside and go off with your family. It took discipline a number of times, this summer for me, almost every week to lay things aside and go off for the whole evening with one of my children or the whole day and evening combined. My wife part of the day and then we brought in two more children for the evening as it's hard to get time with them.

We've got to work for balance in this area. The enormous tension of trying to be a normal citizen. There is a biblical injunction that says live at peace with all men.

The true disciple is not some kind of a weirdo. He's not some kind of a gorilla in terms of somebody coming down the street with a khaki suit and a great large Bible in his hand. He is a balanced person.

He's an acceptable citizen in the community. He lives in at least some degree an attractive environment. Now that easily goes off balance.

But how do we keep that in balance with the challenge to be radical, to be revolutionary, to be aggressive and all the rest that we've heard for many years. I believe it is possible. Not without failure.

Nothing is without failure. Not perfection. Nothing we do is with perfection.

But that's our goal.