I never would have believed God could use me! I didn’t grow up in church. In fact, I was an atheist as a young man. I stumbled into a midweek evangelism meeting because I wondered why so many cars filled a church parking lot. That’s where I met Jesus. And that’s how I met pastor Roger Barrier. My ministry story is nothing short of astonishing. I hope that Christ could convince you that you can see God work in your life more than you can imagine.
’ve been in broadcasting for 37 years in Arizona, New Mexico, and Turkey, with ten of those years in Mongolia serving as manager of Eagle Television, the first independent TV station in that country following the fall of communism.
Eagle TV was the first independent TV station in Mongolia that was not owned by politicians or programmed by government officials. Because Eagle TV was independent it afforded me a special status. I had everything in Mongolia that a TV manager could want.
In Mongolia I had status, power, finances, powerful friends, and powerful enemies. I interacted with ambassadors, parliament members, presidents, and prime ministers. I was awarded with medals twice by the Mongolian government, including once from the President who also gave me a signed letter of recommendation.
I had a staff of 136 people and a budget around $70,000 a month to use for our ministry. We saw thousands of people become familiar with the Gospel and our ministry planted 50 new church groups. Anywhere from 9% to 23% of people responding to our call center made professions of faith in Christ. It was all I could have hoped for and more. Yet, after ten years, it was time to leave Mongolia and return to the States for a new ministry assignment.
I’ll come back to Mongolia in a moment.
Now
I currently serve at the headquarters of Cru in Orlando, in two capacities:
(1) Director of Global Broadcast Strategy for the Jesus Film Project.
(2) Broadcast Consultant for Christian radio and TV in the developing world.
My role is to help facilitate the airing of the JESUS Film, and several other films, on TV stations all around the world. Our goal is to give every person who sees our films a chance to say yes to Jesus. Let me give you a little background on the JESUS Film.
The JESUS Film
The JESUS Film, first released in theaters in 1978 has been called the most accurate depiction of the life of Christ ever put to film. It is still shown all over the world in a variety of venues to tell people the story of Jesus.
Why is the JESUS Film important for evangelism and fulfilling the Great Commission? Because it is the single most effective evangelism tool ever created in the history of the church. JESUS has been viewed over 7 billion times, more than any other film in the history of the motion picture industry.
600 million people have made decisions for Christ after seeing the JESUS Film.
60% of all new church plants involve a JESUS Film showing.
In my current role as director of Global Broadcast Strategy, since 2016, JESUS has been viewed or heard over 850 million times through TV and radio in 155 countries.
Starting in 2022, our goal is to have 500 million people a year see the story of JESUS on television.
Engagement
94% of people watching TV watch with a device in their hands—a tablet or smartphone.
71% of people watching TV are looking up information on their device about what they are watching. In case you think that’s not a lot, consider this: In a country where 10 million people might be watching JESUS, 7.1 million are looking up information about the film or about Jesus while they are watching.
41% are messaging family and friends about what they are watching. Prior to the age of the Internet, we could only address those who were watching at that moment. But because of how people are using their smart devices while they are watching, we are picking up millions of additional people seeing the films that we might not have reached before.
In view of this behavior, we place website addresses and WhatsApp numbers on many of our films so that we can direct people where to go to learn more about Jesus.
Some Results
Since 1979 over 600 million have made decisions for Christ watching the JESUS Film.
Our West Africa broadcasts of JESUS in December 2020 saw 634 people in Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia sign up online for discipleship materials to help them grow in their faith.
In 2017 in Orissa, India a showing of JESUS to 11 million people on TV resulted in more than 4,000 phone calls from people wanting to know more about Christ.
Our December 2020 airing of the JESUS Audio Drama resulted in more than 4,700 calls and emails from people in dozens of countries wanting to know more about Jesus and looking for discipleship.
During 2020, 42% of all viewings of JESUS happened through broadcast! That’s near half of all views of the film globally.
In 2019, 22 million people made decisions to follow Chris through the JESUS Film.
Testimonies
“I have studied Islam and discovered that it is not the truth. I listened to the drama about the life of Jesus. I’m scared to believe in Jesus, but I know that Jesus brings comfort and peace.”
“My husband never liked to listen with me to your programs, but the JESUS drama has moved him very much. There are very few gospel radios, but I believe that the Spirit of God works through you. You should air JESUS often, more often, as often as possible.”
“I was released from prison on Sunday. I heard Luke’s Gospel (JESUS), and the world has made sense again.”
“One of my friends used to be very negative about anything I tried to share with him, and totally rejected the idea of Jesus’ death. But eventually, after many years of friendship, he started to show some interest in stories about Jesus. Every time we would study a story together, he would show more and more understanding and interest. I knew that it was a very sensitive topic, but eventually I shared the Good News with him about Jesus’ willingness to bear everyone’s sin on the cross. I was hoping he would not be offended at my boldness, but to my surprise he said, “Oh yes, I believe that. I’ve believed it for quite a while.” “I was shocked and wondered how he could have changed his mind so dramatically. He told me, ‘It’s true that I used to be confused about Jesus. But then I started watching the JESUS film on TV every night. I learned about the history of what happened and then I understood. It’s true, Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for sin and if we follow him, he will take responsibility for our sin.’”
Here is a brief story about an Iranian man who was watching the JESUS Film in Iran on TV. “Mohsen was addicted to drugs for many years. He tried AA meetings, going to boot camps, nothing helped. Watching the JESUS Film on Mohabat TV, he prayed; ‘Lord, if you really are who you claim to be, please set me free of this addiction!’ The next day he was sober and has never again used drugs to this day. He witnessed to his friends that only Jesus can set them free, and many have come to faith as a result of his testimony.”
Comparison
Now, let me draw a comparison with our Mongolia work.
I noted earlier that our ministry in Mongolia saw many thousands exposed to the Gospel with many coming to Christ. We had a budget of $70,000 a month to make our ministry work. However, when we left Mongolia after ten years, everything changed.
Upon leaving Mongolia, we lost 90% of our personal ministry support. We nearly drained our bank account in the first year just to make ends meet. But once we got resettled in the US, I began working with JESUS Film Project on global broadcast strategy. And something remarkable happened.
When I reported to Orlando, I was given a tiny workspace, no assistants, no staff, no authority, and no budget. Yet, in the last six years we’ve had over 850 million views of our films in 155 countries. The Lord gave us partnerships with key people around the world to make our efforts for television possible. Millions have come to faith in Christ because of our TV showings.
The lesson: You don’t need a big office or powerful friends to make a difference for Christ. You don’t need a big budget or massive resources, you just need the partnership and support of the right people, willingness, faithfulness, and the power of the Holy Spirit.
Look at the Apostle Paul: When he got started, he had no office, no staff, no car, or smart phone, or plane, or horses, and no budget. He likely walked from country to country. Yet, Paul did have three important things:
(1) He had a sending church,
(2) He had partnerships, and
(3) He had the leading of the Holy Spirit.
With just these three things Paul changed the world.
If you get involved in fulfilling the Great Commission, you may have precious few resources to use to bring those you know to faith in Christ. But if you walk faithfully, trusting the Holy Spirit for your efforts, you too can see fruit from that faithfulness.
To learn more about how to support our ministry, please visit www.thomasterry.com.
I commonly hear Christians and non-Christians object to missions on the grounds that missionaries have sometimes been the tip of the spear for oppression and cultural subjugation. People cite the way Christian missions rode the wave of colonial domination in Africa and India, for example. The remedy, according to some, is that Christian missions be halted altogether or at least seriously re-examined.
To be sure, there’s a place for re-examining mission practice. We need to learn from the history of cross-cultural gospel ministry, especially those painful and shameful aspects we do not wish to repeat.
But it’s also important to note that some missionaries were valiant in the cause of justice. Where the gospel and the church have spread, so too has liberation and justice. Yesterday my missions pastor shared a tidbit from the life of William Carey that I did not know. It’s an excerpt from Ruth and Vishal Mangalwadi’s “Who (Really) Was William Carey?” in Ralph Winter and Stephen Hawthorne’s Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, 3rd edition. The Mangalwadis write:
Carey was the first man to stand against both the ruthless murders and the widespread oppression of women, virtually synonymous with Hinduism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The male in India was crushing the female through polygamy, female infanticide, child marriage, widow-burning, euthanasia and forced female illiteracy, all sanctioned by religion. The British Government timidly accepted these evils as being an irreversible and intrinsic part of India’s religious mores. Carey began to conduct systematic sociological and scriptural research. He published his reports in order to raise public opinion and protest. . . . It was Carey’s persistent battle against sati for twenty-five years which finally led to Lord Bantinck’s famous Edict in 1829, banning one of the most abominable of all religious practices in the world: widow-burning.
Carey’s pioneering work is known by nearly all Christians with a rudimentary knowledge of Christian missions history. Yet I wonder how many know of this aspect of Carey’s work—engaging the religious cultural practices and advocating for justice using the tools of both social science and the Bible? Carey wasn’t perfect—no Christian is. But we need more “Careys” not fewer. Perhaps then Christian missions will be associated with positive good rather than injustice, with not only freedom from sin but also freedom from oppression. May it be so. May the Lord be pleased to make it happen in our lifetimes!
The Gospel Coalition. Reprinted.
Pastors Jack Schull and Scott B. commission 19 global workers from around the world. They share their stories, and how the church can be involved. Casas has sent 7,000 members on overseas and short-term missions trips. God wants every believers to be a goer, giver or prayer partner.
Behold a hero of the west: the cowboy.
He rears his horse to a stop on the rim of the canyon. He shifts his weight in his saddle, weary from the cattle trail. One finger pushes his hat up on his head. One jerk of the kerchief reveals a sun-leathered face.
A thousand head of cattle pass behind him. A thousand miles of trail lie before him. A thousand women would love to hold him. But none do. None will. He lives to drive cattle, and he drives cattle to live. He is honest in poker and quick with a gun. Hard riding. Slow talking. His best friend is his horse, and his strength is his grit.
He needs no one. He is a cowboy. The American hero.
Behold a hero in the Bible: the shepherd.
On the surface he appears similar to the cowboy. He, too, is rugged. He sleeps where the jackals howl and works where the wolves prowl. Never off duty. Always alert. Like the cowboy, he makes his roof the stars and the pasture his home.
But that is where the similarities end.
The shepherd loves his sheep. It’s not that the cowboy doesn’t appreciate the cow; it’s just that he doesn’t know the animal. He doesn’t even want to. Have you ever seen a picture of a cowboy caressing a cow? Have you ever seen a shepherd caring for a sheep? Why the difference?
Simple. The cowboy leads the cow to slaughter. The shepherd leads the sheep to be shorn. The cowboy wants the meat of the cow. The shepherd wants the wool of the sheep. And so they treat the animals differently.
The cowboy drives the cattle. The shepherd leads the sheep.
A herd has a dozen cowboys. A flock has one shepherd.
The cowboy wrestles, brands, herds, and ropes. The shepherd leads, guides, feeds, and anoints.
The cowboy knows the name of the trail hands. The shepherd knows the name of the sheep.
The cowboy whoops and hollers at the cows. The shepherd calls each sheep by name.
Aren’t we glad Christ didn’t call himself the Good Cowboy? But some do perceive God that way. A hard-faced, square-jawed ranch-hand from heaven who drives his church against its will to places it doesn’t want to go.
But that’s a wrong image. Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd. The Shepherd who knows his sheep by name and lays down his life for them. The Shepherd who protects, provides, and possesses his sheep. The Bible is replete with this picture of God.
“The Lord is my shepherd” (Ps. 23:1).
“We are your people, the sheep of your flock” (Ps. 79:13).
“Shepherd of Israel, listen to us. You lead the people of Joseph like a flock”
(Ps. 80:1).
“He is our God and we are the people he takes care of and the sheep that he tends” (Ps. 95:7).
“He made us, and we belong to him; we are his people, the sheep he tends”
(Ps. 100:3).
The imagery is carried over to the New Testament.
“He is the shepherd who will risk his life to save the one straying sheep”
(Luke 15:4).
“He has pity on people because they are like sheep without a shepherd”
(Matt. 9:36).
“His disciples are his flock” (Luke 12:32).
“When the shepherd is attacked, the sheep are scattered” (Matt 26:31).
“He is the shepherd of the souls of men” (I Peter 2:25).
“He is the great shepherd of the sheep” (Heb. 12:30).
Eighty percent of Jesus’ listeners made their living off the land. Many were shepherds. They lived on the mesa with the sheep. No flock ever grazed without a shepherd, and no shepherd was ever off duty. When sheep wandered, the shepherd found them. When they fell, he carried them. When they were hurt, he healed them.
Sheep aren’t smart. They tend to wander into running creeks for water, then their wool grows heavy and they drown. They need a shepherd to lead them to “calm water” (Ps. 23:3). They have no natural defense — no claws, no horns, no fangs. They are helpless. Sheep need a shepherd with a “rod and . . . walking stick” (Ps. 23:4) to protect them. They have no sense of direction. They need someone to lead them “on paths that are right” (Ps. 23:3).
So do we. We, too, tend to be swept away by waters we should have avoided. We have no defense against the evil lion who prowls about seeking who he might devour. We, too, get lost. “We all have wandered away like sheep; each of us has gone his own way” (Isa. 53:6).
We need a shepherd. We don’t need a cowboy to herd us; we need a shepherd to care for us and to guide us.
And we have one. One who know us by name.
I don’t need to tell you why this is so important, do I? You know. Like me, you’ve probably been in a situation where someone forgot your name. Perhaps a situation where no one knew who you were-or even cared.
Not long ago my assistant, Karen Hill, underwent surgery. When she awoke in the recovery room, she could hear a fellow patient groaning. She heard a well-meaning nurse comforting him. “Settle down, Tom,” she said. “Settle down.” But still he moaned. The nurse returned. “It’s all right, Tom. Just go with the pain.” He was quiet for a few moments but then began groaning again. “It’s okay, Tom. You’ll be fine.” Finally the patient spoke. With a low, painful voice he said, “My name’s not Tom.”
There was a moment of silence as the nurse picked up his chart. Then she said, “It’s all right, Harry; it’s all right.”
It’s never easy to be in a place where no one knows your name, but few of us know this as much as John Doe No. 24. His story, as recorded by the Associated Press, reads like this:
Unknown Since ’45,
John Doe Takes His
Secret to the Grave
Jacksonville, Ill.
The mystery of John Doe No. 24 outlived him. There were few clues when he was found, wandering the streets of Jacksonville in 1945, a deaf, blind teenager.
Since he was unable to speak had his relatives could not be found, he was placed in an institution. He became John Doe No. 24 because he was the twenty-fourth unidentified man in the state’s mental health system. Officials believe he was sixty-four when he dies of a stroke at the Sharon Oaks nursing home in Peoria.
John Doe’s caretakers believe diabetes made him lose his sight, and records indicate he was severely retarded. But workers remember a proud man, more intelligent than the standard tests showed. They remember the tantalizing hints to his identity—the way he would scrawl “Lewis” and his pantomimed wild accounts of foot-stomping jazz bars and circus parades. “It was so obvious from what he pantomimed that he had quite a life at one time,” said Kim Cornwell, a caseworker. “Like my grandfather, he could probably tell funny stories. We just couldn’t reach out enough to get them.”
He had a straw hat he loved to wear and he took a backpack with his collection of rings, glasses and silverware with him everywhere. At Christmas parties he danced to vibrations from the music. Last Christmas the staff bought him a harmonica . . .
At a brief graveside service last Wednesday in Jacksonville, a woman asked if anyone had any words to say. No one did.
Somewhere in the darkness of John Doe No.24 there was a story. There was a name. There were memories of a mother who held him, a father who carried him. Behind those sightless eyes were eyes that could see the past, and all we can do is wonder, What did they see? A wide-eye youngster eating popcorn at a circus? A jazz band in New Orleans?
No one will ever know. No one will know because he could never tell. He couldn’t even speak his name. And on the day he died no one had words to say. What do you say when you bury a life no one knew?
It’s easy to say this, but I wish I’d been there. I would have opened the Bible to the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John and read verse 3, “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”
It’s not true that no one knew this man’s name. God did . . . and God does. And it’s wrong to say that this man never heard his name. Who knows how many times God spoke it to him through the years? In the silence. Through the dark. When we thought he couldn’t hear, who is to say he wasn’t hearing the only voice that matters?
The Good Shepherd knows each sheep by name. He’s not a cowboy, and we aren’t cattle. He doesn’t brand us, and we’re not on the way to the market. He guides, feeds, and anoints. And word has it that he won’t quit until we reach the homeland.
Mary Magdalene learned from the resurrected Christ that God is real, He loves her deeply and eternally, and she had a purpose to share Jesus with a broken world. Truly, Mary was the first missionary.
John and Valerie spend their days in northern Alaska flying across the Bering Sea into Siberia to provide humanitarian aid and a heaping portion of the Gospel. Children’s ministries, discipleship teams and church planting all benefit from the work of missionary aviators.
Wycliffe missionaries Larry and Nancy Hagberg share their story of the joys and challenges of translating God’s Word and evangelizing an unreached people group.
Wycliffe missionaries Larry and Nancy Hagberg relate a remarkable story of faith in the midst of cancer, a near-fatal car crash and floods. God’s Word is the powerful, sustaining force in their lives.