Ajith Fernando - Jesus Driven Ministry

JESUS DRIVEN MINISTRY

CROSSWAY BOOKS BY AJITH FERNANDO

Crucial Questions About Hell

The Supremacy of Christ

Jesus Driven Ministry

Jesus Driven Ministry

Copyright 2002 by Ajith Fernando

Published by Crossway Books
a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers
1300 Crescent Street
Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Royalties from the sales of this book will be assigned to Christian literature and education projects in Sri Lanka.

Cover design: Christopher Gilbert, UDG / DesignWorks, Sisters, Oregon

Cover illustration: Mark Owen / Illustration Works

First printing trade paper edition, 2007

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise designated, Scripture verses are taken from The Holy Bible:English Standard Version. Copyright 2001 by Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NLT are taken from The Holy Bible, New LivingTranslation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Ill., 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked NIV is taken from The Holy Bible: New International Version. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American StandardBible. Copyright The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fernando, Ajith.
Jesus driven ministry / Ajith Fernando.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 13:978-1-58134-851-4
ISBN 10: 1-58134-851-7
1. Pastoral theology. I. Title.
BV4011.3 .F47 2002

253dc21

2002007072

To
MYLVAGANAM BALAKRISHNAN,
JITO SENATHIRAJAH
CHANDRAN WILLIAMS
MARUDU PANDIAN
TIMOTHY GODWIN

With deep gratitude

for their immeasurable contribution to my ministry

through their competence in my areas of incompetence

CONTENTS

I CHOSE TO DEDICATE this book to five men whose help has been invaluable to my ministry over the years. They have helped me not as preachers but through their practical help that has saved me from several mistakes, compensated for my many weaknesses, and relieved me of much labor that they gladly took on for me. Mylvaganam Balakrishnan, Jito Senathirajah, and Chandran Williams are all qualified accountants or administrators, board members of Youth for Christ (YFC), and invaluable friends, confidants, and advisors. Marudu Pandian and Timothy Godwin have served successively as my assistants in YFC. They both became virtual members of our family, and their willing service to me has helped free me to write, study, and teach from the context of a busy ministry.

I must pay tribute here also to two people who influenced me greatly in my teenage years. My pastor, Irish missionary George Good, and our YFC director, Sam Sherrard, exemplified in different ways the glory of the ministry and surely helped set me along a path that ended in vocational ministry. Everything I write about ministry is what I have learned in partnership with my team members in YFC and also in our church. I acknowledge my debt to them. My seminary teacher and mentor, Robert Coleman, has written two booksThe Mind of the Master which greatly influenced my life and also showed me what a potent model for ministry the life of Jesus is. Over the years I have read scores of biographies and autobiographies, and these have really helped shape my approach to ministry. So I regard Christians such as St. Augustine, Billy Bray, F. F. Bruce, Amy Carmichael, Samuel Chadwick, G. K. Chesterton, Raymond Edman, J. O. Fraser, Billy Graham, Pastor Hsi, Stanley Jones, Isobel Kuhn, C. S. Lewis, Henry Martyn, D. L. Moody, Charles Spurgeon, Sadhu Sundar Singh, Hudson Taylor, R. A. Torrey, and John and Charles Wesley as my mentors. I hope that this long list will whet your appetite for biographiesone of Gods surest ways to send blessings to his servants.

I am also grateful to the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood (especially its senior pastor, Dr. Alan Meenan, and its missions leaders, Dr. Jack and Anna Kerr), and to Loran and Merle Grant, Ed and Kay Goodwin, and Philip and Gloria Brooks, who opened their homes for me to hide in and write this book. Again I must thank God for my loving wife, Nelun, and children, Nirmali and Asiri, whose love for the Lord and for his ministry has made my work so pleasant. Nelun, my secretary Mrs. Shehana Barbut, and my colleagues Mayukha and Roshan Perera read through all or part of my manuscript and made many corrections. I am very happy to be working on a book again with Crossway Books, and I am particularly grateful to Lila Bishop for enriching this book with her editorial expertise.

I WAS AT THE SINGAPORE airport to take an AirLanka flight back to Sri Lanka and was dismayed to find that the flight had been overbooked. I did not have a seat. I had an important family function the next day and desperately needed to get home. With a few inquiries, I found out that the station manager of AirLanka in Singapore had studied in a school of which my uncle had been the principal and that he also knew a cousin of mine. I told him my predicament, and he arranged for me to sit in the jump seat of the cockpit.

It was a wonderful opportunity to observe what goes into the piloting of an aircraft. When the plane was about to take off, one of the officers read out a list of basic things to be checked. It was a fairly long list, and the captain checked each item and expressed his satisfaction about compliance to the standard required. I thought, Surely they must have read this list a thousandtimes. Why do they need to read every single item at the start of every flight? The answer, of course, was obvious. Too much is at stake for the flight to take off with even a small thing not functioning properly. Each and every item had to be checkedno matter how basic it was.

I thought of how this applies to the Christian life. There are some basic things in ministry that we will never outgrow and that will never diminish in importance. My Youth for Christ (YFC) counterpart in Germany, Alfons Hilderbrandt, told me of an older Christian who says that the secret of longevity in the ministry is Sunday-school faith. He was, of course, referring to the basic things about the Christian life that we learn in Sunday school. When I turned forty, I began to think more about these basics. I had seen some Christian leaders whose lives and ministries seemed to stagnate after they reached forty. So I began a search for secrets of long-term ministry. This book is a major step in recording the results of that search, which will, I think, go on as long as I live.

About ten years ago I was at a retreat with a few other younger leaders, led by Dr. Leighton Ford. As part of our personal devotions, we were asked to take a passage that presented Jesus as a leader and jot down what we learned about leadership from that passage. I chose Mark 1, though I do not now remember why. I learned so much that I kept adding material to this study for months to come. The result was a series of Bible studies on Secrets of Long-Term Ministry from the life of Christ, which I shared first with the volunteers of YFC and then with numerous groups of Christian leaders and missionaries in different parts of the world. This series has now been developed into this book.