Larry Stockstill - The Surge: A Global Church-Planting Initiative

Copyright 2012 by Larry Stockstill

ISBN: 9781624883514

The Surge

by Larry Stockstill

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the author.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture is taken from the New American Standard Bible, Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Contents

Preface

The year was 2000, and prior to our Sunday morning service, I was sitting on the couch in my office with a representative of the Gideons International. Our church had heavily supported this fine organization for many years, and today was their annual visit to our church. We would take up an offering for them as we always did, but as I sat on the couch only half listening, I had no idea that my life would be totally transformed in the next few moments.

The Gideon leader was a motor-home dealer from Little Rock, Arkansas. As I have admitted, I was only half listening as he passionately shared with me how the Gideons had established twelve world zones in which they passed out millions of Bibles annually. His zone was the Middle East, and he had been there over thirty times at his own expense, setting up Gideon camps in many of the most difficult gospel areas of the world.

As he spoke, suddenly in my spirit I heard Gods voice: This is how you are going to do missions for the next ten years. I had no idea how this would practically play out, but now, of course, the gentleman had my full attention. I sat riveted by what this layman with a passion for missions had accomplished within the confines of the Gideons unique structure. From that one conversation, God prompted me to adopt a similar structure in our missions outreach and has since used us to plant over twenty thousand churches in those same world zones. In the process, we have discovered anew that God uses small beginnings to effect massive impact.

I hope this book will transform your life the way my conversation with the Gideon representative changed me that morning in 2000. The principles we will discuss together can literally change the entire world!

Introduction

My Missions Heritage

Through and through, my background is missions. As the son of a Southern Baptist pastor, I was regularly exposed to missions and world evangelism. When my father began Bethany Baptist Church in 1963, a steady stream of missionaries began flowing through our home, staying with us and eating at our table. I recall that as a nine-year-old boy, I was once so broken-hearted over a film about missions in Nigeria that I could not attend school the following day. Though my parents wanted to become missionaries, they started the process too late in life to be sent to the foreign field by their denomination.

But that couldnt quench the missions fire that burned in their hearts. After they started Bethany, the first check they ever wrote from the churchs account was a check for a hundred dollars for a missions cause in Baton Rouge. That was only the beginning. Bethanys missions support increased exponentially as the church grew, usually totaling at least 25 percent of its annual budget.

My father introduced our congregation to incredible missionary leaders like Danny and Ruby Ost, veteran missionaries in Mexico, who planted huge Faith, Hope, and Love Centers in remodeled factories and warehouses. Dr. Lester Sumrall regularly visited our church and shared of his church plants in places like Manila, Philippines, where the congregation today numbers over thirty-five thousand.

Yes, missions was in my blood, and as I grew older, it coursed ever stronger through my veins. As the associate chaplain at Oral Roberts University in 1975, I organized the colleges first missions trips, making arrangements for fifteen students to visit five Bethany-supported missionaries. My wife, Melanie, and I had been married only two weeks when we joined one group on a trip to Hohoe, Ghana, in 1976. Two years later, after three outreaches of six months each to Ghana and Nigeria, our trips ended. Though we faced many challengesMelanie almost died with malaria after six weeks on the field, and we lived with no electricity or running water the majority of those monthsthose days cemented the vision in our hearts with a bond that has never been broken.

It is out of that background that I write to you. During my tenure as pastor of a six-thousand-member megachurch, I have been concerned about the lack of two messages in the church in America: holiness and missions. The first issue I have addressed in the book The Remnant: Restoring the Call to Personal Integrity. The second issue, the absence of missions purpose and vision, is addressed in this book, The Surge. It is my hope that it will serve as a word from God about the incredible opportunities for kingdom advancement in the world today.

Thirty-Six Lines Around the World

How big is the world harvest? Sometimes we get lost in a sea of numbersthousands, millions, billions. As I write this book at the end of 2011, the earths population has just crossed the seven billion mark. Encyclopedias generally estimate the present Christian population at 2.2 billion people, of which 50 percent are Roman Catholics. This number also includes everyone who is even nominally Christianized. However, for the sake of illustration, lets use this generous estimate of 2.2 billion as the number of Christians worldwide. If you subtract that number from the total world population, you still have 4.8 billion unsaved people on our planet. How do you wrap your arms around that astronomical of a number, a number as nebulous as the staggering amount of the national debt?

One Sunday afternoon I was sitting in my study and preparing a message for our church on the vastness of the world harvest. Suddenly the thought of a single-file line representing the lost of the world popped into my mind. If I were to line up the 4.8 billion lost people so closely together that even a piece of paper could not fit between them, how far would that line stretch?

After a few moments of computation, I discovered something astounding. Much to my surprise, the line would first stretch from my pulpit in Baton Rouge all the way to the eastern seaboard. Then it would bridge the Atlantic and reach all the way to Europe and Asia. From there it would bridge the Pacific, come back in on the western coast of America, cross Texas, and reenter the door of my church. This would compose one revolution around the entire world, but it would not begin to account for the vast number of lost people. The last person in line would have to shake hands with the first person, and then the line would have to go out the door againtwo times, five times, ten times, fifteen times, twenty times, thirty times, thirty-six times around the entire planetin order to properly account for the 4.8 billion lost souls on earth. I sat stunned at the magnitude of people destined for an eternity apart from God.

What a game-changer that revelation was to me! As important as the color of the church carpet may seem to be, it has no bearing on those thirty-six lines of lost humanity. The horrific Asian tsunami in December of 2004 took the lives of 227,898 people in a matter of two minutes. If you laid the terrible carnage of all those bodies side by side, the line would stretch only forty miles down the beach. Just compare that to the thirty-six lines around the world that lost people represent. Every issue, every church conflict, everything else we are doing pales in comparison to the vision of those thirty-six lines of people waiting for one crumb of gospel truth.