In the gospels Jesus talks about end time at several occasions. In doing so he mentions in Matthew 24:14 about the gospel being preached in all the world as a witness to all nations, then the end will come.
Witness is someone giving his life for a cause, a person living for a purpose. Here the purpose is talking about Jesus, what he did on the cross, died for our sins and resurrecting in power now having the authority to forgive sins, heal broken hearts and lives. The whole of Old Testament points to one thing and that is the Cross of Christ. He is the center and the star of the bible!
Jesus talks to His disciples in Matthew 24 about the situation when they go on their witness-mission, war, ethnic conflict, false Messiah’s and so forth. The focus is to establish a witness about Jesus so all ethnic groups will hear the true message of the gospel, not a self promoting, ego centered, human worshipping gospel, but Jesus and His sacrificial death on the cross. Jesus is to be the one witnessed about! Jesus!
There is no salvation in any other name!
These witness centers what is it? What is it Jesus talks about? Well, I think He thinks about groups of people living in community in their community witnessing about Jesus. About the Cross! We call this church! A group of believers living together, worshipping together socially open for integrating new members of their ‘family’ of believers, actually their solemn purpose is to grow in numbers.
Today in the world there are spots where there are no such a witnesses, unreached areas. There might be some barely surviving churches but very isolated from the rest of the community. There is a desperate need of new wineskins, actually tens of thousands of new ‘witnesses’.
The Lord spoke to me recently asking me if I wanted to be a part of a movement of church planting which He carries in His heart. It has already begun, it’s not that public due to the persecution and challenges. I said ‘Yes, Lord I want to be a part of that!’. We saw it when the Iron curtain fell down and we run in preaching and proclaiming the gospel in the former soviet union. Today as a result of mine and many others work tens of thousands of churches has been established and now there is a living testimony about the Cross, about Jesus in that part of the world.
Now we must go to other parts not having a testimony established. Recently when visiting Ethiopia and my good friend Per Åkvist, Joshuacampaign, I talked with an Ethiopian man of god, a church planter who had planted hundreds of churches over the years. Now he had left the movement he once started to start all over again to plant churches. I asked him how many churches he could start in 5 years. His answer came fast and very convincingly ‘100 churches in 5 years’. A missionary pastor is send out and he gets 50 Usd/month for 2 years then he must be selfsupporting. I thought to myself for 30,000 Usd I could help this brother start 100 churches in the unreached areas of Ethiopia.
This was a couple of weeks ago and I can’t get it out of my head. I want to channel those 30,000 Usd to this man.
For 50 Usd/month you can support a missionary/pastor to go and start a church. This means it will cost around 1000 Euro to establish one church! Not much.
If you want to help this pastor please write me mjs@matsjan.com and I will get the money over to him. He told me he has 9 ready missionaries he want to send now! Will you send them!
Matsjan