#296 | Taking Jesus Across the Street: Simple Ways to Live Mission with Nik Ripken, Pt. 3

Today's episode is brought to you by the Chase family.

May the Lord our God bless you and grant favor to you.

Witnessing has more to do with hospitality than anything else.

It's time consuming.

It is not hard.

And you witness in order to find out what God's already doing in that person's life.

And you build upon what the Holy Spirit has done before you got there.

What if one of the greatest things we could do to build a healthy church was also one of the simplest?

Open our homes.

That's it.

Share a meal.

Listen to someone's story.

Pray for them by name.

It's not that hard.

Let them see what following Jesus actually looks like in the ordinary rhythms of your life.

Welcome back to ministry Deep Dive.

My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and today we're coming to part three in the final part of my conversation with missionary and author Nick Ripken.

Nick, if you haven't listened to parts one and two, I really encourage you to go back and listen to them because this entire conversation builds.

We've talked about persecution, We've talked about suffering.

We've talked about witness and whether we're forming the kind of disciples who can remain faithful when following Jesus actually cost us something.

Now the conversation takes another turn because the question becomes, what do we actually do?

What does it look like to build healthy church leaders and healthy churches that don't merely know the gospel but actually live it at Apollos water?

That's what we care deeply about, healthy leaders who build healthy churches.

And we believe that in order to become healthy, sometimes we need to see things differently.

That's why we look through our four lenses.

We've talked about them before.

Scripture.

That's our primary lens and through which everything else must be evaluated.

Church history, learning from those in the past, the mission field, learning across the sea, listening to brothers and sisters who have followed Jesus in places and circumstances radically different from our own.

And neuroscience.

We're paying attention to how God has created us and how people are actually formed.

And together those form what we call missioholism, the mission of God for all of life that is concerned not only with the task, but who we're becoming in the process.

And once again, we're looking through that third lens, the mission field.

But here's what I love about this part of my conversation with Nick.

After all the extraordinary stories we've heard, I mean, persecution stories, imprisonment, suffering, sacrifice, and incredible courage, he brings the mission of God right back into something incredibly ordinary.

That's the home.

He says something in this conversation that I Think every church leader needs to hear.

Witnessing is two thirds listening and has more to do with hospitality than almost anything else.

Think about that.

We've often turned evangelism into this presentation.

We had to learn the right verses, memorize the right method, ask the right questions, get someone to make that decision.

And it feels really awkward.

And there's certainly a place for knowing how to articulate the gospel clearly.

Okay, but Nick reminds us that people need more than an explanation.

They need to see it.

They need to see it lived out.

They need to see what it looks like when a husband loves his wife.

Or they need to see what it looks like when parents raise their children to follow Christ.

They need to see Christians eating together, laughing together, praying together, forgiving one another, caring for one another, and welcoming the stranger into their lives.

They need to see all that.

In other words, the home becomes one of the primary places where the gospel becomes visible.

And that raises some huge questions for those of us who care about building healthy churches.

I mean, have we made ministry too dependent upon what happens inside a church building?

Have we become really good at teaching people the content of the Bible while failing to teach them the context in which the Bible is supposed to be lived?

And have we trained Christians to invite people to church when we should also be training them to invite people into their lives?

Because the church isn't simply something we attend.

It's a people we belong to and a life we share.

A healthy church isn't simply a church with great preaching programs, worship, and attendance.

A healthy church is a people who know Jesus, love, love one another, open their lives to their neighbors, disciple their children, care for those who are suffering, and take the gospel with them into the ordinary places where God has already put them.

And healthy leaders help people learn how to live that way.

So as you listen to the final part of my conversation with Nick, I want you to ask yourself a few questions here.

Number one, is my home open?

Number two, do my neighbors actually know who I am?

Number three, am I listening to people or merely waiting for an opportunity to talk?

Number four, am I helping people encounter Jesus only inside the church building?

Or am I taking Jesus into the places where people actually live?

And here's the last question.

It's the most important one.

Are we building churches that merely gather Christians, or are we forming Christians who know how to live on mission when they scatter?

Because the mission field isn't somewhere across the ocean.

It's across the street.

It's around the dinner table.

It's at work.

It's at School, it's wherever God has already placed you.

And sometimes building a healthier church begins with something as simple as opening your front door.

This is part three of my conversation with Nick Ripken.

So grab your gear, buckle up.

It's time to think different, go deeper and serve greater.

It's time for another ministry deep dive.

There is so much in what you just said that is so challenging, and yet you're not talking about anything that the Bible's not already talked about.

Right?

Exactly.

It seems as if we have neutered the word of God and removed.

I mean, we don't have a theology of suffering in the West.

We have everything we want.

We've got full bellies, we've got technology, we've got resources, stewardship.

You're seeing the church decrease, as you mentioned, we're seeing the population go down.

And it seems like we've lost our ability to witness.

And there's a variety of reasons because of that.

Our love growing cold, delighting more in the creation than the Creator.

We've lost a picture of the majesty and the wonder of God.

And again, there's so many different factors at play here.

And yet God is working and it's fearful to me.

We talked about this in the pre show walkthrough, how Philip Jenkins.

We had this discussion about secularism, and a lot of these countries are now getting these comforts and it's a.

It's.

It's like they're being.

Their faith is being swallowed up by the carbon monoxide of culture.

Oh, wow.

And my question is, is how do we overcome that?

How do we use believers?

I mean, we hear these stories.

On one level, they're so challenging, but yet so far removed.

Your contention, if I read you correctly, is if you testify about Christ, not about the social issues, about the resurrection of Christ, that you're going to have persecution.

I remember hearing Janet Parshall say years ago when the whole Da Vinci Code thing was going on, she said, you can talk.

Maybe it was her, maybe it was someone else.

But they said you could talk and say that Jesus had a wife and people will line up at your door beating it down, trying to hear your opinion.

But you mentioned that Jesus died and rose again.

Crickets.

And how do you live out this in a Western culture that in some measure has already heard it and yet has been lulled to sleep and is sleeping away in the middle of these blessings that they have received?

How do we do that?

I mean, not that I expect to have an answer, but maybe you do.

Well, you know, I'll give you.

I'll give you a tool at least.

We do the pastor teacher thing 24 7.

We do the evangelism thing like a drive by shooting.

And yet, whether you're talking about Buddhists or Hindus, and especially Muslims, most Muslims come to Christ by sharing meals with you and I in our homes.

And still, again, if you want to see a movement survive and thrive, then you're going to have the Philippian jailer and his household, and Cornelius and his household, and Crispus and Lydia and their households, and not do this one by one by one thing anywhere in the world.

I don't think it's geared to my personality.

I really don't.

I think it's geared to my personality and my obedience.

But meeting a taxi driver, somebody in a shopping center out in the bush in 15 minutes, just by wanting to hear their story, they're going to take me and buy me a cup of tea and some cookies if I can speak enough language to be understood and show interest in his wife and kids.

And I talk about how I love to eat sheep and even a camel, you know, some camel steak, but I don't care for camel hump.

Fried camel hump is just fried camel hump.

And.

And.

But, you know, within 30 minutes, brother code contact.

They're going to say, come to my house next week.

Give them time to get the goat or the sheep or whatever the beast, and they're going to have their extended family there.

And we're going to be there four to six hours.

And we're going to get to do that as a family and a team three or four times.

And then they're going to send a delegation of women to our house, and they're going to go through my wife's drawers.

They're going through all the cabinets, they're going through the refrigerator.

They're going to look at everything to make sure that we don't have pork, we don't have alcohol, we don't have anything in the house that would pollute them and physically drive them away from God.

And then those families, those women are going to give us the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

And other people are allowed to come to go there.

And what we're going to do, we're going to sit around the table.

Do you know what your girl always asks me when I'm in their homes?

They're going to ask me, as if my wife is not there, how many wives do you have?

This is 90% of the time.

Well, you're looking at my one wife and they're going to say or do something that implies you're not much of a man if you can only handle one woman.

And I'm not going to let them have the high ground.

I say, you don't know my wife.

If you knew my wife, you know why we only have one.

I mess with them and say it goes, it's fun.

And because, you know, the, you're not out debating, you're, you're doing family stuff, you know, and they're going to give their lives for you.

Somebody attacks you while you're in their house, you got to be aware of that.

And so they'll ask me.

And so we start through the Quran and we start through the Bible and, and I'll turn to Ruth and have her tell a story, turn to one of our kids or one of the young people that I brought with me.

See, people come to Christ in the hard places of unreached, unengaged people.

They come to Christ when they meet somebody their gender and their age who is a Christian.

Isn't that not just to unreached people groups?

Because I see that in our culture where you're talking about hospitality, yes.

My contention in the west that we've lost that.

But you always, you always have all the generations, you've never been without young people, old people.

So we send teams out and a team of eight or 10, they're all in their 30s, they just married, maybe first baby singles, and they work for 10 years.

And everybody that's in Christ will be a single person, 25 years of age and under.

So what you got to do is increase your witnessing mirror to wherever everybody in that house can come close to seeing themselves there.

But you're right on that point, and that's the point I'm trying to make is witnessing is two thirds listening and has more to do with hospitality than anything else.

It's time consuming.

It is not hard.

And you witness in order to find out what God's already doing in that person's life.

And you build upon what the Holy Spirit has done before you got there.

And you're telling the next story and the next story and the next story, and, and you're showing interest because you are interested and you do love and you do care.

You pick up that child and you're careful not to look at their wives.

But other cultures, it's very, very different.

And.

But when they watch me see, is Muslims ask us two questions.

Travis.

We know from the beginning, the end, how to do marriage in Islam.

You have no Clue how to do that as a follower of Christ.

Can we watch you and Ruth?

Can we watch her watch you?

Can we?

And those women watch me watch Ruth.

They've never had a man, a husband.

If you want love, you go to prostitute in a lot of those cultures and not all of them.

And they say, the other thing is, from cradle to grave, we know how to raise our kids in Islam.

We have no clue how to do that in Christ.

They're asking us, begging us, can we have access to your family, to your home, to your meals, to your family devotions?

So that we can see three things.

How you do marriage, how you do children, and singles.

Every family has singles in it.

They're tremendously vital to everything we do.

How you do marriage, how you do kids, how do you share, Break bread together?

And they listen to me, ask my wife, what are you thankful for, Ruth around the table, the kids, what would you like me to thank God for?

And then appropriately, I thank God for that.

And as they watch us worship as a family and sing and laugh and the kids retell the story, they'll say, they will say, I can't go and sit under that cross and live.

But if following Jesus is thanking him around the mill, well, who can't do that?

I can't go to that building and live that church building.

But if loving Jesus is studying the Bible and singing and praying with my family in my house, I can do that tonight.

And so what you're doing is you're not just witnessing.

Well, you are witnessing, but you know that it's much broader than you think.

It's much broader than a Roman road.

By breaking bread with them and allowing them to come into your lives and you into their lives and you get to know their names.

And you know what we do?

You know what we do that no other faith system does.

Brother, this is worth going to Africa for 35 years or overseas.

We, outside of a religious building, we are the only faith system I've ever met that prays for people by name in the marketplace and in their homes and some of the most evil people on earth.

When I ask, and I've never been turned down, I'd like to bless your home and pray for you in this situation and call that hate it, hatred filled, mean, want to kill you guy.

And I call his name out to God.

He will not sleep that night because my prayer has taken him in the presence of Jesus, God himself.

And then God begins to work in his heart.

We're the only faith system on earth that prays for people by name, where they live and were they hurt.

Wow.

Who can't do that?

That's incredible.

You get to talk to God along with that Muslim, that Buddhist, that Hindu, that communist, that animist, and they get, I mean, when you're taking, you're calling their name out to the Creator, you're ushering them in the presence of God and they're stripped naked in their sins.

Well, that's not your purpose.

Your purpose is to usher them in the presence of God and then let them deal with what they find there.

Wow.

Yeah, that's pretty.

I don't have to do this.

I get to do this.

How in the west do we recover that sense?

Because it's not that hard.

I mean, inviting someone over and we know the world is at our doorstep.

There was just an article that was released, the Brookings Institution talked about how the nation demographics are changing, but now it's filtering down into small towns.

Because this isn't just for those on the cross the sea.

This isn't just for those that are urban dwellers anymore.

This are for those in small town America.

This is where this is changing.

And we think that they're so the other.

But really, as CS Lewis once said, friendship begins when you realize and you can say to one another, you two, meaning that there's a, there's a commonality, whether it's family, whether it's love.

You build that bridge to them and then you invite your home and open it up.

But unfortunately, we in the west have closed our homes right, where we have a superficial fellowship that others do not have that we have to learn from.

But the Bible talks such a great deal about hospitality that we've lost it.

And you brought out something that I want to come back to just for a moment.

You mentioned, you mentioned the women.

And I know that Ruth has spent a great deal going into the places that you cannot behind the veil.

And I know Audrey's talked about that.

Can you describe a bit for Ruth's ministry?

We know that obviously she was trained.

You said from this is the time she was a child.

But she's ministering in parts that you can't describe to us a bit what she has discovered in her ministry to the women in these different cultures.

Well, for 50 years when we looked at the power structure, particularly of Islam, we thought, well, you reach the men, you reach the family.

And the only thing that's wrong with that, it's not true.

What we found was, is that the majority of women who had been baptized by their husbands the husband went through this big pilgrimage, dreams and visions, reading the Bible through three to five times, came to Jesus.

However, that baptism took place.

And after a few months, he comes home and he looks at that woman like we do in eastern Kentucky and says, woman, you need to know something.

I'm a Christian.

That makes this house a Christian.

That makes you a Christian.

And he baptizes her.

And that's her whole pilgrimage.

And we never knew that for 50 years because we talk to men.

And so what women were saying when we started listening, Christianity and Islam is the same.

It's by men, for men, through men.

And women are a secondary consideration.

And so what, what Ruth does is a lot of places, the conservative places, we're in a house for six hours, four hours, when the men eat on one part of the house and the women eat on the other part of the house.

But when they come to our house at night, they'll come as a couple.

Okay?

And it has to be at night.

This is like a nicodemus encounter.

Well, they eat breakfast at noon.

In a lot of the Arab world, they eat their noon meal at 7pm and they eat the evening meal at midnight.

And then they talk politics, sports and religion.

Midnight to three o' clock in the morning,.

From three to noon.

And so you're.

So you're.

So they sleep from three in the morning young until late.

And so lifestyle changes are the hardest changes to make.

And we teach this to young couples.

And we'll get text and email and I'll look at the timestamp and realize where they are in the world.

And I'll text back, what's wrong?

You're up at 3 o' clock in the morning.

They'll say, well, we're doing what you told us to do.

We've just been with seven people or 10 people from our apartment complex in the parks that these governments make in the middle of these harsh desert countries.

And we've been with our neighbors and their children to have a meal and be at the playgrounds and ride the merry go rounds and things like that and see those lifestyle changes are much harder than doctrinal changes.

I would rather witness to Al Qaeda than get between a conservative Baptist mother and the time she thinks she has to homeschool her children.

One of those you have a chance of surviving.

The other you don't.

Now that's a lot of tongue in cheek.

But our mothers are changing the time of day their kids take a nap and the time of night that their kids sleep in order to be with their People that they love and they want to see them in the Kingdom of God.

I am a witness to the fact that on many church staffs, with multiple staff members, they have not had meals in each other's house.

Yeah, it's true.

And so what we're asking them to do is like, like you said so well, is recapture the biblical sense of hospitality.

Why are we working so late and so long?

Do we need that extra car?

Do we need that Hawaii vacation?

What is it?

It's not really, what is it that I can give up for the Kingdom of God is what investment can I put into the Kingdom of God that pays dividends in souls that go to heaven?

You know, I can build a bank account or I can build a heaven account.

And so it is.

I don't want to make it sound easy.

These lifestyle changes are hard.

And you know what?

We go to a Muslim's house and after four or five, six hours, we can stop to visit, we can say thank you for.

And it's a wonderful visit.

Food, generous people.

My goodness, yeah, Very good.

I can say, our young mothers can say, you know, I've got to get up early and homeschool the kids.

So thank you.

And about nine or ten o' clock, we're gone.

But when they come to our houses, guess what?

They're not leaving.

They're not going home until three in the morning.

And so you've got to get into a different rhythm of life.

And going from Africa, where we got up when it was daylight and we went to bed when it got dark, the Arab world was a huge adjustment for us, a huge adjustment.

And staying up midnight, I think a lot of this is for younger people perhaps, but.

But you see, even when you go in their homes, when the older ones will go off somewhere and take a nap and rest and then get back up, it's just a easier lifestyle.

But again, I think here's something for us to unpack another time.

I think the west gets an A plus for teaching the content of the Bible.

And we go book by book, chapter by chapter, verse by verse.

We love expository preaching, which is good for Christians.

Give us a D minus for teaching the context.

And I think the context is just as inerrant and infallible as a content.

We make the woman at the well come to church to get saved.

We make the demonic go to a counselor, the leper, we've got a place for him to go.

And yet 90%.

When John the Baptist in prison asked Jesus, are you the Messiah?

Jesus said, the Blind see the deaf hear, lame walk, lepers cleansed, dead, raised on and on.

And where did that take place?

In the marketplace, outside of any religious institution.

But that's my thesis is that I remember reading this years ago, is that we don't have the Oedipus complex.

We have an edifice complex where we want to just build buildings.

But the culture shifted.

Ministry doesn't take place.

It takes place in real life places in the homes, it takes place in business and schools and all of these different places.

But in the west, it's always the come and see, come and see.

See the celebrity, see the CEO, see the great personality.

But I keep looking at all these guys that they're not meant to handle this kind of attention.

And you see them fall, you see some type of scandal strike because it's, it's.

We've.

We've made an idol of the celebrity preacher in many different ways rather than just seeing that God has called us as a body.

Yes, there are great teachers out there, but it's not about building that.

It's about building the kingdom of God.

Your ministry is going to go, go away one day.

I mean, last I checked, even your church.

I don't see the church at Sardis or Thyatira having a big, giant mega church anymore.

What happened to those places?

Their job was to extend the kingdom of God in different places.

And so I'm just giving it wholehearted amen to what you're saying.

I hear it because we do emphasize a lot of content, and that's great.

We need to have good content.

And you, and I mean, you've traveled a whole lot more than I have, but I go to places and there's not a lot of great content sometimes.

But yet my friend Charlie Davis, he says we're great on content, but we're low on experience.

And we're low on.

We're this.

And he said some cultures are high on experience.

He calls them slider switches, like on a soundboard, because they're high on.

They're high here on the experience alone.

Content.

And our job is to constantly tweak that no matter where we're going, and learn from those and take the best of what we have, but yet learn from the best of what they have.

And that's what I find that we're doing.

But in the west, it's always content.

Give them more content, give them more content, give more content.

But we don't know how to experience any longer.

We don't hear the voice of God.

We don't Pray the context of that written word, or as we tell the story, the context is always the marketplace.

Yeah, you can't house that.

That's where you live.

That's where you work.

That's where you.

That's where you play.

But we had a hard time for years as churches asked us, how do we become missional?

And there's a lot of ways of doing that, but part of it is making what it means to be part of the body of Christ meaningful.

You know, you don't join a church, that's your body.

And for 10 years or so, we couldn't get anybody to bite.

The last 20 years, a lot of churches have said, yeah, we'll try this.

That say, when you dedicate your children, let's just give you a little tool.

When you dedicate your children to church, do a number of things.

Do what you do.

Pray over that child.

Give them a Bible.

Also give them a passport application and start them a savings account and church.

Put $100 in it.

$150.

Whatever you think is appropriate.

Encourage family members and friends to do that on special days.

And by the time that child is 11, 12, 13 years of age, they have their first mission trip paid for.

And you're going to say to parents and others who are coming into your body, listen, we're going to do everything we can to help make sure that your child.

We're going to follow your lead.

We're not going to lead your children.

We're going to follow your lead and help your kids become world citizens through Christ.

But we will do everything we can to see that your children leave America.

I don't think that's going to be a.

You're not really a big time seller anytime soon.

If you're not willing to put on the table Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth, you're in the wrong church.

There's a church for you, but it's not this church.

Then you make belonging to the body mean something.

You're not being ugly.

You're just saying, this is who we are.

We actually, in our membership, at our church, we would give them hammers.

Hammers.

Hammers.

We did that because we said, we're building the kingdom of God together.

If you're coming here, it's time to get to work.

Wow.

And it was a visible picture.

Like, you know, people give all these little things and coffee cups.

And I had a guy say, hey, maybe we should give him a game.

And I was like, that's the wrong image.

But give him a Hammer to show that we're building something together.

And I'm not talking about the edifice, but it's a metaphor that we are here to build the kingdom of God and not anything else.

That's what God has called us to do.

Jesus preached the gospel, but he said the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel.

I mean, he's proclaiming the kingdom of God.

And I think we have largely lost that doctrine.

I was talking with TV Thomas, I was in India with him, and I said, this was several years ago.

And he, I said, what's the doctrine you feel like the American church has lost?

And he said, I think we as a whole lost this understanding of the kingdom of God and what it means to be a part of the kingdom of God.

And I think that's still true.

I mean, so many things that we have neglected or got caught up in with our celebrity, with so many different comforts, and yet we're seeing God working in other parts of the world that don't have any of those things.

They put this Baptist pastor in a KGB torture facility and he's the leader.

So they're going to kill him, put his family out in Siberia in a one room shack, 30 below zero.

You know, you pour a glass of water out and it hits granite so solid.

And so these are the leaders of that movement.

And, and they know if they cut off that leadership, it's going to be hard on everybody else.

So he's being tortured.

She's in this one room shack and they've eaten their last crust of bread and their last cup of tea.

And your kids, your four kids are scared.

They're cold, they're hungry and they're thirsty.

Mama, where's Daddy?

Mama's daddy alive.

Mama, are we going to die?

My mama hungry, Mama cold.

Mama, what's going to happen to us?

And that mother, see, that's the real story.

Maybe because in prison you don't have a lot of choices except to be faithful.

That's a big choice.

But that mother who raised those kids for those 10 years, those 17 years, in one case, 33 years, you know, and she said, all of your lives, kids, we've taught you to trust God.

This is the night we do that.

And 30 kilometers, which is 20 miles, God wakes up a deacon in one of those Siberian churches.

Of course, this pastor's family didn't even know that church was there and woke him up and said, get out of bed, hitch your horse to the sled and put those meats and Vegetables that the church has gathered and take what's needed over to pastor's family because they're suffering.

And the deacon said to me, I said, God, you don't understand.

It's 30 below zero out there.

That horse is going to freeze and I'm going to freeze.

He said, the Holy Spirit said, get out of bed, harness the horse, take the foodstuffs to pastor's family.

He said, God, the wolves are everywhere.

They're going to eat me.

They're going to eat the horse.

And he said to me, the Holy Spirit said to me, in the middle of the night, you don't have to come back, but you've got to go.

And the next morning they hear and they're terrified who's going to knock on that door.

And they're hiding behind that mother.

And she opens the door and there stood this man of God, this deacon, and said, the Holy Spirit has sent me.

I've got this food stuff and I've got the tea and all this stuff.

This is enough to last you for months.

Now that we know you're here, we'll be back.

We're going to take care of you.

You know what we call that?

We call that church.

We call that church.

You mentioned another story about this.

These Chinese pastors, you're talking to them and you asked them a question, what can I do for you?

And they responded, they said, we have 400 families that are financially in need.

Tell that really quick.

Well, in that movement, I could clearly document by breaking down their leadership and stuff.

And one of the ways that God has made me is I connect the dots.

I haven't always listened well, but I've been taught to listen well.

And the 10 million people in house churches in that movement, I think is a really solid figure.

And so what would happen that I didn't expect?

I would listen to them for 10 to 14 hours a day, and then they'd want me to teach the Bible word for word, chapter by chapter, because they had so few Bibles.

So I would teach through Luke or something every night for two or three hours.

And so we got to know each other fairly well.

But I knew from being in Africa that was the wrong question when they, they.

They were doing sort of Q and A and it was.

Things were going along well and I needed to ask them, how can we learn from you and how can we partner with you?

But I used a more money question, how can we help you?

And they talked about their 400 pastors, deacons and elders in prisons across that country.

And that their families were suffering and this, that and the other.

And it just went through my mind, okay, this is God.

This is why you made me.

You know, this is early on in this persecution journey.

This is why you made me.

I got a big mouth.

I can tell stories.

I'll go back and I'll outdo anybody.

But we will raise money to help the persecuted church.

And God would not allow me to speak.

It was terrifying.

I could not open my mouth.

I couldn't speak.

I thought, you know, I've read stories and I was.

I've always been dumb, but now I just can't.

I can't speak.

And I just, finally, just had enough common sense with them looking at me like, what's going on with this guy?

It wouldn't have taken long before they've come up there and laid hands on me to get out whatever got into me.

But I said, lord, speak.

Your servant wants to hear.

And God said, say this.

I said, I can't say this.

He said, I'm not giving you a choice.

Thus saith the Lord.

I said to them, how many of you are in this movement?

They said, we've already told you there's over right out of 10 million.

I said, hear the words of God.

If 10 million of you can't take care of 400, just 400 families, do we have the right to call ourselves followers of Jesus or the Church of Jesus Christ Christ?

And I thought, well, I don't know where I am in that place.

I laid down in the back of a van, taxi type of thing for 18 hours, which is totally against my personality.

And I didn't know where I was in that whole country.

And I said, I've offended everybody I know, and they're just gonna, I'm done.

And this lady began to cry, and another lady began to weep.

And they began to hold themselves and pull their hair and began to cry out to God for forgiveness.

And they just begged God for forgiveness.

And after this went on for 30, 40 minutes with me just sitting there watching it, the leader got up.

One of the leaders got up and wiped the dusty tears off his face.

And he said, you're going to go home.

You're going to go home.

And we want you to tell the story of our faith.

You don't have to tell the stories of our financial need.

He said, if 10 million of us can't care for just 400 families, we have no right to call ourselves followers of Jesus or the Church of Jesus Christ Ripken.

You go home and you do your Job.

Let us do our job.

And what convicting, what word do I use?

You see, I don't want to come home and beat up on the bride of Christ any more than I want somebody to beat my bride up.

It's a bride of Jesus here in America.

But that's why I want her to be faithful.

I want her to love her husband, the bridegroom.

I want her to soar.

I want her to have a spiritual marriage that, that is just beyond human words.

I don't want to reduce that to a denominational, doctrinal position, those, of course, important.

I want it to be a vibrant place where believers come together and then take Jesus to the marketplace and then that bride comes back together and celebrates with new parts of that family of what Jesus has done in all the six days of those that they've been apart.

Perhaps.

But you and I are probably making the cardinal mistake is that the center of worship for the kingdom of God in the Bible and in the world today is in the home.

We're fighting over who leads the church.

The biggest deficit we have in Christianity in America is the lack of men leading their families in worship in their home.

That is the center of worship and Christianity in the world today and always has been.

And I often think, and I'm not opening up a can of worms, but if I give my children over to any godly clergy to lead them to Christ, to baptize them, to disciple them, and what I've done is given up my leader, spiritual leadership of my family to someone else.

And I've allowed them to take away from me the joy of leading my kids to Christ, baptizing them and gathering them in my home for worship.

And then as we join the broader body and do even greater things that we couldn't do as a family, when you farm your children out to someone else to lead them spiritually, you've abdicated your role as God's person in that home.

When I think of the Shema, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

But the second part, where he says, and then you shall teach them to your children.

Or in Malachi, where he says, God giving a man and a woman and giving a portion of spirit in their union.

And for what purpose?

So that we would produce godly offspring.

So there is this idea that I think the church is lost of the family and God's intent for it, because yes, it is the church, the church, that living institution, the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

But it's the families that help make up the church.

Yes, there are singles, and we need to talk about singles as well in the body of Christ, because in many ways, singleness has lost its.

Got a really bad rap, as if something is wrong with you.

And God has called people to singleness.

You've alluded to that.

It's just that we have such a convoluted understanding of what the family is and how we are to live as Christians with our responsibility that God has given as husbands, as fathers, as wives, as mothers within our society today.

No wonder the family is really a mess.

In many ways, the church is reflecting the transitions of the family, that the devil has really gone out of his way to do those things and to really affect the church.

And going back for a moment, talking about the effect of the church and talking about these people that you've spoken to, there's one other story that I want to draw out today in our time, and I hope that we can pick up this conversation again, because I think we could talk all day long on these issues.

But you mentioned the story of hearing you were sharing with these Chinese brothers the persecution that those who have come to Christ, the Muslim background believers have encountered.

And you woke up, you went to bed that night, you said you were tired, you were done, and you woke up the next morning, really a loud noise.

Describe that whole situation, if you will.

It's phenomenal.

The bamboo curtain around East Asia, China is as strong as any.

What we used to call about the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union and, you know, nothing got in and out of there from the cultural revolution in 48.

Would we find any churches left alive and any believers left alive?

And when we got back in there, we found out that 400,000 severely persecuted, martyred, destroyed churches had become over 10 million believers.

And that's what God had done in that place.

And so the point is, like you say, they were so isolated and so closed off that one of the first questions they asked me, I thought they had gathered way too many leaders.

And sometime in that process, I thought.

And another.

It's another story that we were getting busted, but not.

But they.

They asked me, as they told me what was going on in their country, if Jesus had made it to other places or whether China was the only place Jesus had got to.

And I thought, my goodness, what isolation and what faith and.

And how Much they needed, and we needed them, they needed us.

And so I, I told him a lot about America and a lot of little spin off stories come from that.

But I chose to tell them about believers in Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

And the wounds are still not healed from watching all those believers martyred in Somalia and many of those that were some my best friends and, and, and when I shared that, they were just, they've been so vivacious and so open and, and hearing their stories or a lot of laughter, a lot of singing and praying and studying the Bible went off late into the night and, and they just, they were, they didn't, they didn't move, they didn't blink.

They were totally inscrutable, expressionless.

And I thought, well, that was a big hit.

And one of the things I don't tell very often, my soul was soaring in these interviews and travel among these believers, but hiding out and sleeping in a bed that's probably a single and a half with three other guys for weeks at a time, I don't find that edifying.

You know, having a bad stomach, stepping in a hole, thinking I broke an ankle and there's no place I can go for medical care.

And I've got all this stuff that's going on internally that's singing with the angels, and yet this shell of my body is just taking a big beating by what we're trying to do.

And I went to get, I just stumbled off that little platform and went in and got into the bed thinking, well, let me grab 30 minutes before the other three guys come get in the bed with me.

Because you wake up at night and you've got an arm across your chest and somebody else has given you the Abrahamic blessing.

You know, that's just not edifying for me.

That's not what rednecks do.

Oh, that's good, Nick.

Keep going.

Sorry.

Very few people know what that means, but that's funny.

I just let that one out.

But I just, and I just went to bed.

I thought, they don't care.

And the next morning, I hear about six in the morning at daylight, I hear all this yelling, screaming like.

So I get up thinking, okay, we've been here too long.

There's too many of us.

They're busted, they're going to go to jail and I'm going to be taking the airport, which is usually what they do.

You can't make persecution fair.

That's just something else we have to talk about sometimes.

But.

And I went out there and they were sitting on the ground, men and Women, old, young, dust is flying, and they're pulling their hair and they're pulling their clothes and they're beating the ground and they're crying out.

And I thought, well, this is some kind of mass stuff, bad stuff going on.

And Jonathan, who's with the Lord now, the interpreter that was out of Taiwan and then out of California, he saw the look on my face and saw my body language, came looking over and he said, nick, just be quiet and listen to what they're saying.

I said, you know, I know absolutely no Chinese.

He said, just be quiet.

Basically, for once in your life, just be quiet.

He took me by the hand and we're walking among people who don't know down there, and they're crying out to God.

They're hitting themselves.

And as I'm quiet, I hear, Somalia, Somalia, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia.

And Jonathan looked at me and tears were just streaming down his face.

He said, now, these are people, 40% of them were in prison at that time.

Men, women from rural places, urban places, highly educated oral communicators.

They were looking at prison as their theological seminary.

I have watched how they had been beaten, how they were suffering and in some cases, tortured and killed.

And they're yelling out to God for Somalia, Saudi Arabia.

And Jonathan said, when you talked last night about the believers who are really persecuted was their words.

They vowed unto God after you went to bed that they would get up an hour early each morning and pray for believers in Somalia and Saudi Arabia until Jesus is made known there.

Now we've got the biggest movement of Christianity in persecution in China.

The lowest estimates are 85 million.

There's significant things going now, face recognition software and stuff.

This is a tough, tough time for the church house, churches again, we'll have to save that up.

But I was able to go back months later to Somali believers and to Saudi believers.

And I don't want to give your listeners the impression there are a lot of believers in Saudi Arabia.

We just don't want to paint targets anywhere.

But I went back to them and I said, how things going?

They said, well, you can't believe it since you've been gone.

The breakthroughs that we've had and the relationships that's been healed and families that have come into the kingdom.

I said, yeah, I think I do believe it.

There's a movement in China of 10 million people that bowed unto God to pray for you an hour each day.

And they just began to weep.

And they said, oh, God, as if I'm not there.

Oh, God.

Let us live long enough to make it to China to thank those who didn't forget us and who remembered to pray for us when we needed them the most.

That's one of the things that the Western church must remember.

Must remember that Simon of Cyrene carried the cross of Jesus when Jesus could not carry it himself.

And through prayer and intervention and fasting, we carry our brothers and sisters in persecution when they can no longer carry themselves.

And are we willing today, this is my wife's statement.

Are we willing for them to pray for us when it becomes our turn to suffer and be persecuted to the same extent that we're praying for them today?

And Ruth will say all the time, there is no such thing as a persecuted church and a church in freedom.

There's just the church of Jesus Christ that all day, every day it's persecuted and it's free, but it belongs to itself.

That's a good word from Ruth.

Nick, I want to thank you for all your time.

How can people learn more about what you're doing and your story?

How can they follow you?

Well, as a gift from the church in persecution, we're commanded by God to write these books.

The most important book for me is the Insanity of Obedience.

The Insanity of God we wrote first and it's a lot of these stories that we tell.

And a lot of people in those stories are still alive.

Some of them aren't, many of them are.

But the insanity of God is a book of inspiration.

The insanity of obedience is a book of perspiration.

It's how to be wise.

You can't change being sheep among wolves, but you don't have to be stupid sheep.

And the insanity of God makes the premise that when persecution comes, not if it comes.

When it comes, let's live our lives in such a way and reach out in such a way that the persecution is for who Jesus is and not for who Nick is.

And then we did a book called the Insanity of Sacrifice.

And that's a 90 day devotional book to use this so families can use it sort of to get them started worshiping together.

I want to do a children's book.

But when you have to do a book that's illustrated with just a few words per page, that's the hardest thing I've ever attempted in my life.

So if people will access those books, they can put their fingers on the pulse of God, of what he's doing among the nations and see the abject poverty of soul and sense what it's like to walk where there's not a word of scripture in your language.

And at the same time, get to listen in on where movements of God are exploding.

And I think, though the most of anything else is read your Bible and practice.

Read the content and practice the context and take Jesus across the street, Take a meal to your Muslim neighbor, to that immigrant.

They're waiting.

They're waiting for you.

They're waiting for you to say welcome.

They're waiting for you to invite them to the house.

They're not going to kill you in your beds.

Matter of fact, the safest thing, the way that we do security the best around the world, is by being a good neighbor.

I didn't find out until months later how many times Somalis surrounded our compound when they heard that the fundamentalists were coming to hurt us.

And we had fed their village, we had brought water to them, we had saved their children from starvation.

Whatever it was, we didn't even know it.

They heard the bad guys are coming and they physically surrounded our compound a block or two out and said to the fundamentalists, if you want those people, you have to go through us.

They are the ones that love us.

And by the way, they've done things for us that you've never done for us.

That's what witness will do for you.

And I'm begging your people, your listeners, don't cheat yourself.

Because what you do when you share Christ is when you see a life changed from abject poverty of soul to walking into eternity that affirms your own salvation, that affirms how real Jesus is to you.

And yet if you don't witness and you don't see lives change, you'll become where you doubt your own salvation.

And that if Jesus ceases to be Lord of Lord and King of Kings, he just becomes a good moral person.

To keep your kids out of drugs, off alcohol, and from getting pregnant before they're married.

Promise me next time we come together, we can discuss more of this stuff.

Hey, I'm yours.

I'm a phone call away.

You can give no one a greater gift, then allow them to exercise their gift.

And my body can't take me where my heart wants to go.

And so being able to speak and tell these stories on behalf of believers around the world, it's a rare gift, brother, you have given me.

Well, you have given us a gift and something that I am very, very thankful for.

And I hope sometime I want to talk about the insanity of obedience and the insanity of sacrifice.

I don't have those yet.

Someone, a friend of ours, a Mutual friend gave me the sanity of God and I got my copyright there.

But they also said we need to meet and hear from Ruth.

So I'd love to have Ruth come on and share here, but thank you so much.

Also, they can follow you on your website, Nick Ripken Ministries.

That's right.

They just google that and see all that we do.

Nick Ripken.com and they'll find us.

I want to thank you for coming on Apollos Water Day.

It has truly been a blessing.

Oh man.

To find a brother, it's like finding a glass of ice water in the desert.

Amen.

And amen again.

What a conversation.

And what a way to bring this three part conversation with Nick Ripken home.

We've covered a lot of ground over these last three episodes.

I mean, we've talked about persecution and suffering.

We've talked about witness and what happens when following Jesus actually cost us something.

We've talked about the lessons our brothers and sisters around the world can teach those of us who live in places of relative freedom and comfort.

But I love where the conversation ends.

Because after all these incredible stories from around the world, he brings us back to something remarkable.

Open your home.

It's not that hard.

Share a meal.

Listen to someone's story.

Pray for them by name.

Love your neighbor.

Disciple your children.

Live your faith in such a way that the people around you can actually see what following Jesus looks like.

And it escapes all the time.

It just comes out.

It's not complicated, but it's costly and it takes time and intentionality.

But you can do it.

I know you can.

Because it requires something more than attending a service or consuming Christian content.

It requires our lives.

And that's really what we're talking about when we talk about healthy leaders and healthy churches and missioholism.

All of it.

It's about following Jesus with everything of who we are.

Healthy leaders don't simply teach people what to believe.

They show people how to live.

That's what my SEO Holism is all about.

It's simply.

You want me to put it simple?

It's Biblical Christianity.

That's what it is.

And healthy churches don't simply gather people into buildings.

They form people who take Jesus with them when they leave those buildings into their homes, their neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, marketplace, the everyday places where life actually happens.

Next said something in the conversation I don't want us to miss.

Witnessing is 2/3 listening.

Maybe that's where some of us need to begin.

Not with some evangelism program or presentation or church event.

It starts with learning the name of the person across the street, inviting them to dinner, listening to their story, find out where God is already at work in their life, and then be willing to open our lives and let them see Jesus in us.

Because ultimately, that's the kind of Christianity we're trying to cultivate here at Apollos Watered.

We want to form healthy leaders who lead healthy churches.

Men and women who think different, go deeper and serve greater for the sake of God's mission in the world.

If that's something you want to I want to invite you to take one simple step.

Go to ApolloSweater.org and join our email list.

That's it.

Give us your email address so that we can stay connected with you.

Beyond this podcast.

We'll let you know about new conversations, articles, resources and tools we're developing to help you become healthy, healthier leader and help build a healthier church.

We're not interested in simply giving you more Christian content to consume.

We want to get to know you and have you get to know us.

And we want to help you to put that into practice into your everyday life.

And after these three conversations with Nick, maybe that's the most appropriate place for us to end.

Don't just admire the faith of Christians in other parts of the world.

Learn from them.

Don't just be inspired by their courage.

Let their courage change the way you live.

Don't just listen to another conversation about Witness.

Go witness.

Open your home.

Share your table.

Pray for someone by name.

Tell someone about Jesus.

Live in such a way that the people around you can see that he really is Lord of Lords and King of Kings, and that he's worth it.

And if these conversations with Nick have challenged you, share this series with another leader.

Send it to your pastor, your elders, your staff, your small group, or someone you serve alongside.

Then ask each other one question.

What would we do differently if we really believed this?

Until next time, this is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Ministry Deep Dive.

Stay watered, everybody.