Keesee A Company of Heroes

Portraits from the Gospel's Global Advance
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6260-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'All Christians should read this book.' -Rosaria Butterfield Across the globe, the gospel is advancing through the work of Christians willing to risk everything in the hardest places. This book, written by a missions journalist as he traveled throughout twenty different countries, is filled with stories of Christians past and present whose examples of endurance, courage, sacrifice, and humility connect readers with God's unstoppable work across the world. These heroes are simply ordinary people who have experienced the transformative power of a Savior who is alive and moving-and their stories will inspire readers to take faithfilled risks for the gospel.

Tim Keesee is the founder and executive director of Frontline Missions International, which has served to advance the gospel in some of the world's most difficult places for over twenty-five years. He has traveled to more than eighty countries, reporting on the church from the former Iron Curtain countries to war-torn Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Keesee is the executive producer of the DVD documentary series Dispatches from the Front. Learn more at frontlinemissions.info.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Keesee, Tim

Leseproben

Introduction

“Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?” The old man had parachuted behind enemy lines during the D-Day invasion forty years earlier. He was part of a crack team that, against superior numbers and weaponry, took out an entire German artillery battery—and thus spared the lives of hundreds of Americans landing on the beachhead at Utah. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor that day, and after Normandy, he went on to fight with distinction. But looking beyond the memories and medals and into the eyes of his grandson, he answered simply and sincerely, “No, but I served in a company of heroes.”1

Across the world, I’ve walked point with a company of heroes, too. We’ve shared jungle paths, desert roads, and city streets on five continents. These brothers and sisters are foot soldiers in the long campaign as Christ builds his church across the centuries and among all peoples. Their stories are drawn from my journals—often written in motion as they went about their days. Viewers of the Dispatches from the Front film series may recognize some of them, although here I can share their lives more fully without the restraints of filming and security. Other heroes whose stories I tell serve in hard and hard-to-reach places. Their actual names can’t be written here, but they are written in heaven. As Paul described, they are “unknown, and yet well known” (2 Cor. 6:9) because they labor in obscurity, but God is with them.

I also want to introduce you to heroes of the past. Over the years, yellowing books, obscure footnotes, and neglected tombstones have set me out on serendipitous detours to flesh out the lives of gospel pioneers whose courage, faith, and vision shook iron gates and broke deep darkness. Others would follow and build a road over the trail left by the first missionaries—paths sometimes marked by their untimely graves. Some of these intrepid saints are famous and quotable—others were known to only a small circle of rope-holders and left no memoirs or monuments. Whether well-known or unknown, past or present, their stories are important reminders that the gospel does not only reach across the globe, but it also spans generations and centuries. This is why I love to spend time with missionaries on the field and then go and brush off the tracks left in the region by pioneers of a century past. It’s a kind of gospel archaeology that reminds me of God’s faithfulness as “one generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts” (Ps. 145:4).

Joy and Perspective

Many years ago I was in Albania at a time when the little Balkan country was emerging from nearly fifty years under a brutal, Communist dictatorship. Among the Iron Curtain countries, Albania was considered the “North Korea” of Eastern Europe because of the isolation, deprivation, and persecution that the people suffered for decades. When Communism collapsed in 1990, there was no known church in the entire country, but God showed his great mercy to the people of Albania as the gospel was preached to even the most remote corners of the country so that within twenty years, there were Albanian congregations in every city and in most towns throughout the nation!2

During those first years of freedom and gospel advance, a missionary friend invited me to teach a short series on church history to his little congregation of first-generation Christians. Night after night I walked with them through the centuries and shared the stories of faithful men and women—their brothers and sisters—who had followed Christ in their day, and it became clear to them that the gospel they had heard and believed was the same one that Paul and Polycarp and Perpetua believed and died for. Theirs was the same faith that Luther defended and that Hudson Taylor had sailed to the other side of the world to preach in Chinese. These truths were found in God’s Word, the Bible—the same Scripture that Tyndale put into English and Carey translated into Bengali was the book that their pastor preached from in Albanian.

When this reality took hold, light shone in their eyes and joy filled their faces! They had been told by family and friends that they were deceived and were part of a small cult of fellow fools who had drunk the same Kool-Aid. But now they saw that the church wasn’t just the forty or fifty people gathered in an apartment sitting on fold-up chairs. Instead, they were inseparably part of something worldwide and wonderful. They were connected to the saving work that Jesus himself started across the centuries and across the world as he gathered—and is gathering—his own from every nation and generation! Meeting this “company of heroes” from church history put iron in their souls and gave them greater perspective to endure the persecution and ridicule they faced.

These first-generation Christians found strength for endurance in the company of “saints below and saints above, the Church in earth and heaven.”3 I, too, have been impacted by the stories and examples of those who have gone before—and their strides in running after Christ have quickened my own pace.

John Piper put it this way:

What I have found . . . is that in my pastoral disappointments and discouragements there is a great power for perseverance in keeping before me the life of a man who surmounted great obstacles in obedience to God’s call by the power of God’s grace. I need very much this inspiration from another age, because I know that I am, in great measure, a child of my times. . . . When you are surrounded by a society of emotionally fragile quitters, and when you see a good bit of this ethos in yourself, you need to spend time with people—whether dead or alive—whose lives prove there is another way to live.4

Many Proofs

Out of the whole range of exceptional Christians that I know or know of, how could I possibly narrow the list here to twenty or so individuals? First, these are men and women I’ve had the opportunity to walk with and talk with and serve alongside. I worshiped with their churches, whether they met under a mango tree or in a beautiful stone edifice or secretly in the shadow of a mosque. I ate their food, enjoyed their music, explored their neighborhoods, and heard them pray. This gave me the chance to add color and texture to the narrative portraits I capture in my journal so that the reader, as much as is possible, can experience their stories—not just know the facts of them.

Second, my gospel heroes from the past would make up a long list indeed! But the ones I write about here are those whose lives and impact I’ve had the opportunity to trace during my travels. I share David McCullough’s love for experiencing a place in order to give history-writing more of its physical and emotional dimension, seeing the past as their present—real people in real time in a real place. McCullough said:

I couldn’t possibly have written about people trying to dig the Panama Canal without going down there and feeling the humidity, the rain, and the heat. For Truman I had to see the places where he was in World War I, and to make the run he made through the Capitol on the night that Roosevelt died. . . . Well, that run, it seemed to me, was one of the key moments in the whole story. Why was he running? Was he running toward something or away from something? Did he somehow guess that he was running to the presidency? It’s a great moment. I wanted to see how long it would have taken him to make that run, to figure out which route he took, because he could have gone several ways, to see what would have been flashing by in his peripheral vision.5

Tracing paths my gospel heroes walked helps me bring the reader along for the run, to widen their peripheral vision of the past.

The exceptional quality about these heroes—whether past or present—that has strengthened and steadied me is how all of them have oriented their lives around the truth that Jesus really is alive. They are living, walking, witnessing reminders of the resurrection because they daily demonstrate that Jesus is personally and powerfully with them—working in them and through them and for them. By their willingness to go and risk and act in the reality of the resurrection, they live out the truth that “the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power” (1 Cor. 4:20). The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the foundation of their endurance, risk-taking, and death-defying joy. Their optimism doesn’t come from wishful thinking but from the power of an endless life—both Christ’s and ours in him.

This confident hope has also given needed reminders to me—in a thousand different ways and places—that the church is not in decline. It’s easy to think otherwise. Our fears, our tears, our comforts, our brokenness all obscure our vision. Then there is the daily downpour of bad news—a news crawl that feeds our doubts so that sometimes we find ourselves whispering in our hearts what a tactless Gideon...