World Missions Advance

MISSIONS UPDATE | GREECE | Jona Pettijohn Missions

In May, I was in Thessaloniki, Greece, assisting the leadership of International Christian Center Athens, as well as a team of missionaries from Christ For The Nations Institute with what turned out to be an extraordinary event!

The International Children's Leadership Experience was a day devoted entirely to the education and building up of children's ministry leaders from across the world. We had over 150 attendants from 25 different countries join us. Some of them were pastors, some were sent by their pastors, others were simply believers who operated home churches because they come from cities where they have no church. Some of them were passionate about reaching and ministering to children and others were fairly new to the idea. All of them, however, were deeply impacted by their time at the conference.

The speakers brought a wide range of topics from teaching children the full Gospel, to pre-teen ministry, and ministering to children with special needs. One moment that really struck me was a conversation I had with a Greek woman who attended a session how identify and handle issues of child sexual abuse. "This is historic for Greece," she said to me. It was a comment that caught me a bit off guard. Coming from America where nearly every church has a children's ministry and topics like these are discussed more and more consistently, it's hard to grasp that a country so steeped in religion and church culture could go for so long without recognizing the need to reach children. But that's exactly what's happened in Greece for centuries and it's also exactly what's currently changing in this nation. More churches are waking up to this blind spot and working to remove it to better reach the next generation. Praise God for the revelation He's bringing to His people in this land! This conference was an incredible contribution to the cause of Christ amongst the Greeks and the people of the nations who attended. However, it's also just a drop in the bucket of the work that needs to be done to make up for centuries of neglecting to spread the Gospel to the youngest members of the church. Please pray that the Lord would send more workers for the harvest of the littlest hearts in Greece!

For more information about Jona Pettijohn Missions and her ministry, go to worldmissionsadvance.org/pettijohn

In our last newsletter, we discussed that when we approach Scripture, it is a great idea to use the Inductive Bible Study Method: 1) Observation, 2) Interpretation, 3) Correlation, 4) Application. This is not a magic formula to arrive at Scriptural truth, rather it is a guard rail that keeps us from “going off the rails” when we engage in the art and science of biblical interpretation.

We now turn our focus, briefly, to the second step of this process, Interpretation. Once we have spent time observing the text (which would of course include prayer), we then seek to interpret the text. We can’t apply a text that has yet to be interpreted. So often, we jump to application. The problem with doing so can quickly become clear. Joshua was instructed to walk around the walls of Jericho and then make a loud noise and then the walls would come down. Is this prescriptive for us today? Are we to say “the Bible says it so I’m going to do it,” and then walk around the walls of a building and yell? It seems funny to think of such a thing, yet often, this is exactly how we apply Scripture. Cherry-picking can be a harmful and dangerous thing. We wrongly interpret and apply a verse and then get mad at God when He doesn’t do what we thought He promised to do, only to realize in retrospect, that God didn’t fail, it was our faulty interpretation of His Word that caused the problem. Don’t indict God for your mistaken interpretation. He ALWAYS keeps His promises. If it seems like He has not, then the issue is on our end, not His.

As one of my professors explained, we don’t have access to the events of Scripture, we only have access to the text. The events are 100% true, but we have the inspired text not a time machine. The written word is the medium God chose to communicate His Word to the immediate readers and to us today. Proper interpretation begins with the hard work of studying to see what the original sender of the message intended for the original recipient to understand. Only after we spend time in interpretation can we move on in our journey of methodical Bible study to correlation and application and, I will add, transformation. -Chad

“A reader cannot create any meaning [he/she] likes. In any intelligible verbal or nonverbal communication, the sender communicates a message to the receiver with the assumption that the receiver will understand the intended meaning of the sender.” -Dr. Cornelis Bennema, “Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Book of John”
(see podcast below)

YouTube: https://youtu.be/Q-I46Uyo98g?si=E1Z1lprdrU0awtup

ApplePodcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finding-ourselves-in-the-gospel-of-john-chad/id1814853643?i=1000759640156

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3PKCdzBTN65soM3WFMY6Qt?si=3e58203286674ac3

Finding Ourselves in the Gospel of John | Chad Bozarth Show #044 w/Cornelis Bennema, PhD In this episode, I talk with Dr. Cor Bennema, Head of Research and Professor of New Testament Studies at London School of Theology. We discuss his journey fr...