In response to the word of thanks, I'd like to start to say that Helena and I have very much appreciated being down here at the Park of the Palms. This has been our first trip here, and it has been delightful to get to know many of you and to interact with you, to speak with you, to talk with you, and to enjoy the very much nicer climate than we are putting up with in Chicago. It was five degrees there this morning, I understand. It has been delightful to be here. But the warmth through climate inside is much better than the warmth of climate even outside. Although who can complain about that? This one here. Hello. Well, I'm speaking into this one. Can everybody hear all right? If you cannot hear, can you raise your hand? switches on, I don't know. If I speak into this one, does it help any? One thing that I was asked to say something about tonight, and some of you are interested because a number of you have mentioned it, And that's the young man, Stephen Lynn Scott, who was convicted for murder. He was an Emmaus Bible School student and suspected and convicted of murder about three and a half, well, the murder occurred about three and a half years ago, and about a year and three quarters ago in June, he was convicted by the courts in Cook County, where we live. you probably know that no one, either Atameus or anywhere else that knows Steve, believes that he was in any way at all implicated in the murder, and that what evidence was produced was certainly nothing more than a dream. Unfortunately, he was foolish enough to have told a dream he had to the police who assumed that he could not have known what he dreamed about unless he had been there. There is no physical evidence whatsoever and no other incriminatory evidence. Poor trial system, poor jury and poor decision. However, he's still in jail and has been there for a year and three quarters. And the latest on it is that in December there was a hearing by an appellate court. And this consisted of three judges who heard the written evidence of everything to do with the case and what his new lawyer and the state's prosecuting attorneys wanted to submit. That took a long time to come to the court, but it finally did come in the early part of December, and the judges are still deliberating about what they're going to do about it. Everybody at that trial felt it went very well, but we shall not hear any word at all until those three judges make up their minds. They may throw out the trial. They may put it up for an appeal. Or they may schedule a retrial of the first at the lowest level or the district level. We don't know what will happen. But do pray for Stephen. He has a wife and three small children. They're living in Centralia, Illinois. He's in a medium security prison there where God has used him to lead a few people to the Lord Jesus right within the prison walls. He's the... the sort of chaplain's assistant there and the editor of the prison newspaper for which he has received some national awards for whatever goes to prison newspapers. But pray for Steve. He was going to be a missionary. He was heading toward the island of Guam, where he himself served in the Navy for two years and was hoping to go back to reach the native peoples of the island of Guam. He's not yet got there, but I'm sure your prayers for him and for his wife and for their three children would be very much appreciated. While you're praying, don't forget to pray for Emmaus. Emmaus has contracted to move to Dubuque, Iowa, right on the Mississippi River. You probably know we are very thrilled about the move. We believe it is part of the will of God for the institution and that God is going to increase the ministry of Emmaus in the hearts and lives of students. Frankly, it is a wonderful thing for us, as we have, input into the lives of students, some of whom are going overseas, some of whom are serving God in their home churches, their home assemblies, and are going into full-time work or on for further study. But we have a delightful group of young people there, some of whom are your own grandchildren or your own children. keep sending them. We love to have them. Now shall I read, please, from Proverbs chapter twenty-nine, verse eighteen. This will be my takeoff point this evening. Proverbs twenty-nine, verse eighteen. And it is this, where there is no vision, the people perish. Just that phrase, where there is no vision, The people perish. I want you to think in your Bible for a moment or two that the end of an era or a movement is usually marked by people who have lost their vision, people who cannot see. Eli was Israel's last priest under the judges. And you remember, Eli had lost his vision. He was blind. The lamp was about to go out in the temple. And because he was blind, he couldn't even see the sins of his own son. Eli, Israel's last priest, was blind. Samson was one of Israel's last judges in the period of the judges. And Samson ended up blind. He learned what they used to call the blinding, grinding, binding power of sin. But Samson was blind, and because of his association with the world and with aims that were less than spiritual, Samson ended up a blind man. Zedekiah was Israel's last king or Judah's last king. And he ended up blind as well. His eyes were put out so that he could not see. The last church described in Revelation two and three is Laodicea. And of that church it was said that they were poor and blind and naked. One of the things that marked that last Laodicean church Was it blindness? We often hear that we live in Laodicean days. Well, if we do, let's not be like the Laodicean Church. Let's lift up our eyes as the Lord Jesus asked us to do, and see the world in which we live, and see what God is doing and be involved in that. When the Lord called Nathaniel, He says, Nathaniel, in the end of John chapter one, thou shalt see greater things than these. He'd been dreaming, or at least meditating on Jacob's vision of the ladder or staircase between earth and heaven. And the Lord says, Nathaniel, you become a disciple and you shall see greater things than Jacob saw. And of course he did. He saw people come to Christ by their thousands at Pentecost and and on the days afterward. He saw the Lord Jesus in his activities as Redeemer of the world. Well, we need people who can see. Don't slip into spiritual blindness. Now we're going to look tonight at South America. South America or Latin America, as it's often called, because the northern part of the New World is called Anglo-Saxon America. It is called Anglo-Saxon America because it speaks English as its main language. Latin America speaks Spanish or Portuguese as its main language, both Latin languages, and therefore it is called Latin America. Latin America has something like three hundred million people in it. Most people don't realize that three-quarters of the people in Latin America's racial base is not Latin at all. but Indians, and the true Latins are for the most part in the upper classes. You may remember your history books that in the colonization of North and South America, these two colonizations were strikingly different. Maybe I'll put up a map here, and you can look at Latin America right in the middle of the map here. The colonization of Latin America and North America was strikingly different. You may possibly remember, and you could see it very easily here, that because South America is much nearer to the sailing world, it was first occupied rather than the north part of America, which had much rougher seas and much further to go. in order to get here. And so you find the colonization of Latin America occurs first, coming across from the Azores and the Canary Islands here, Cape Verde Islands, very much more quickly than they could get over here with their old sailing vessels. And that was part of what was happening in the old days. Latin America, of course, was colonized by the southern European nation, principally Portugal and Spain, whereas North America was colonized by northern European nations. France, and England, and Germany, and Holland, and more of people in North America came from those nations. In North America, people came to settle down. The pilgrims came because they were being persecuted by the Church of England, and they wanted a place to worship in the way they felt was right. And so they came with their families, and they came to settle down. In Latin America, they came for a completely different reason. They came to make money, or to feed it, and to get as wealthy as possible, as quickly as possible. In North America, they found a rather primitive Indian tribe, and they didn't bother them at first. very much at all. They tried to evangelize them. They had no idea of intermingling with those Indians, and they just simply pushed them back. In Latin America, only single men went, and they did intermingle with the Indians that they found. And so you have a very much more racially mixed population in Latin America than you do in Anglo-Saxon America in the North. Another difference is that Spain and Portugal, the chief colonizing countries of Latin America, had never felt the effect of the Reformation or of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so there was not that stabilizing influence when these conquistadors, as they were called, came across and sought to make their fortune in these new lands. Latin America, as far as missions goes, is sometimes called the neglected continent. There's a book by Lucy Guinness, and that's just what she calls it. It's sometimes called the continent of opportunity, and there's another book in our library by Francis Clark, and that's what he calls it. Sometimes it's called the continent of tomorrow, although it might be called, easily, the continent of today. You probably know that it was discovered by Columbus in fourteen ninety eight and invaded by Cortez in fifteen nineteen. Cortez attacked Central America. He overthrew it within two years because of guns, because of horses, and because of the malicious way in which they overran the Maya Indians there in Central America. It was not very long until Cortez had captured much of Central America. Then they moved on down into South America and the history began to repeat itself there with many of the other conquistadors coming in and trying to find gold, trying to gain what they could out of the new world. and they found a great deal of gold, and they found a great deal of silver, and other kinds of things as well. Now, it is also good for us to remember that Latin American civilization is older and more firmly entrenched than our own. These people that came from Spain and Portugal came from a rather easy-going life, but they established a very, very strong civilization in Latin America. We tend to look on it as our little poorer brother down to the south there, and that if only we could give them a little bit of our expertise and a little bit of economic power, they might get along much, much better. South America itself has twelve individual nations, you probably know. Each one with its own problems, its own preoccupations. and very few of them like us very much at all. The only one of them that is not independent is French Guiana, which is part of France. It's a department of France. But it only has fifty-five thousand people. It's one of those tiny little countries, the little yellow one there, on the northeast corner, northeast border of South America there. But it's a continent of contrast. It has brilliant new cities, Rio de Janeiro, San Paulo, and other cities like that, as well as the same old problems of poverty and inflation and illiteracy and grass and one-crop economies and tax dodging by the rich men and the poor being overloaded with tax. Five percent of the population controls eighty percent of all the money. All the wealth. In our day, there are all kinds of problems. Argentina has been running with rampant inflation for a long time. It only had a hundred and sixty percent last year of inflation. Now that's considerably down. There have been years when Argentina's inflation has been running at nine hundred percent. So you see how much better it is. We complain when ours is at six or seven percent. something like that. Brazilian cane cutters working for two dollars a day cutting sugar cane. Venezuela is rich, it has oil and enough money, and sends thousands of students to other countries of the world for study. But of course, out of South America come lots of things we don't want. Cocaine, for instance, comes out of Colombia. and is the highest export earner of anything Colombia produces. South America, for a large area, has the world's fastest growing population. And over the whole continent is running at something like two point eight percent per annum. Now if you apply Brother Linstead's crisis equation to that, you will find that the population will double every twelve years or so. And that's a little scary when you operate along that line. But never mind, we shall look at another way. His crisis equations don't always work, by the way. I got very excited about them a number of years ago when he first told me, and I've been following them along, and they don't always work, because there are other things that come in. Things in life are not always as simple as just this fact and that fact. Sometimes there are other facts that come in. All of life is like that. Now, the history of the Roman Catholic Church in South America has been one of unscrupulous methods, and it has earned the contempt and antagonism of lots of the people there. The Spanish Inquisition spilled over into South America, and at least a hundred and twenty thousand people in South America were killed as a result of it. Some of the conquistadors that came in did some horrible things. And so on. Occasionally they got their own back, like one of them that demanded hot silver. And so they brought it to him, but they brought along an army and captured him and heated it up and poured it down his throat. But that didn't usually happen that way. Pizarro, for instance, going into Peru, demanded a room full of gold. And he would then leave peaceably. Well, he got his room full of gold, and then he murdered all the Aztec Indians, all the Inca Indians, I mean. And so on. So there was a great deal of animosity buildup. But what the conquistadors did was establish priests in control of every area that they took. And so the Roman Catholic Church set up a church in the middle, in the village square of every single town that was established then, and these are still there. And the priests controlled the town. And if they had feast days, they just incorporated those feasts. Heathen feasts, idle feasts that made no difference, incorporate them into the local church calendar. It's called the Mission Policy of Accommodation. And they did this right across South America. and so on, so that you have the makings of an explosive population, those that have been held down for three centuries. But now, in our day, are beginning to have political power. The masses in South America are getting political clout, and they're beginning to grumble, and there are many, many things there that cannot be held down much longer. We're beginning to find that out in little countries in Central America. Wait till we try and solve some of the bigger ones. And we'll find that these problems will increase. Now, the result of the early history of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America has meant that the intelligent or upper classes have largely turned away in disgust from the church. It is true that some of the early Roman Catholic missionaries were hardworking and faced incredible hardships, but for the vast bulk of them it was otherwise. Now Protestant missions came into South America in three ways. First, and by the way, the earliest of them only began about a hundred years ago. We're not going back very far in missions in Latin America. But first were the Presbyterian. They, along with brethren in Argentina, were working largely among higher class people, and they established schools. Let me give you another map or two here and see. You find Presbyterians coming into Latin America and establishing schools and working among higher class people. There was quite a wave of them in many of the countries. At the same time, there were British brethren that came into Argentina. They came down here to work on the railroads because the British railway system had been given the contract to build a railroad right up through the hinterland of all of the Pampas areas of Argentina. It was virtually untouched territory. There were no Indians living down in Argentina. Argentina was virtually a vacant land. very much like South Africa when some couple of hundred years before. And the British railway system, of course, brought over engineers and workers by the thousands. And among them were many early brethren. And some of them had a great pioneering spirit. And they began to preach the gospel and to see people sage and establish assemblies. And there are now some four or five hundred assemblies in Argentina. as a result of those men, and they weren't missionaries. They weren't supported as missionaries. They were engineers and accountants and workers on the railways, skilled tradesmen and so on. And they learned Spanish and they preached the gospel and they established assemblies. That's first-class missionary work. And it ended in a very, very fine, solid work in Latin America. Well, that was the first wave. Then there was a wave by the Methodists and Baptists. And they arrived, and they worked among the slightly more middle-class people. They didn't establish schools particularly, but they worked in middle-class district, and they began to preach the gospel and work was slow, but they saw the establishment of many churches. In those days, they were evangelical. Still later, and this is now going back only in about the twenties and thirties, the Pentecostals arrived. and began working among the poorer people. And their churches grew rapidly. And they started out with tent meetings and different kinds of campaigns. And even though their mortality rate, their drop-off rate was very high, those Pentecostals have become the significant Christian force in Latin America today, or in South America today. and something like one thousand five hundred new churches being established every year. Pentecostal churches in the country of Brazil alone, let alone other countries that are there. Even later than that, the faith mission and some pioneer assembly workers began to come into South America. And so the work there is relatively young. It is not as old and as established as many people think it is. As young as it is, however, there are at least one thousand five hundred assemblies in Latin America, and that number is growing all the time. The potential for growth in Latin America is almost explosive. Some of the problems that are being faced, and maybe I'll just mention some of these briefly, some of the problems that are being faced are listed here for you. There is that explosive population situation where the population is growing very, very rapidly. There's a massive migration from rural to urban. Did I bring it? Oh, yes, I did. Have a look at cities in South America. that all in the last fifteen years have developed in the cities where there are over a million population. Buenos Aires, Montevideo, San Sion, Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Recife, Caracas, Bogotá, Pizzo, Cayaquil, Lima, La Paz, Santiago, and so on. Cities that are getting to be huge and where people from the poor hinterland are moving into South America South American cities at a fantastic rate and the result is huge slums. You go to Lima, you go to Rio, you go to any of these cities and hundreds of others that are slightly smaller and growing rapidly as well. And you will see shack populations and slum populations, people looking for a better life and economically hardly finding it. By the way, we were talking about the Harvey's down in in Chile and the terrible accident they had a couple of weeks ago. They live just north of Santiago in a little city called San Felipe. There's David Jones, another Canadian couple that are working with radio work down in San Felipe as well. I've been there and there is a very fine, healthy assembly in that little town and you need to pray for the Rogers family. you probably know that our own son and his wife are hoping to go to Lima during the coming summer. They're in California just now and hoping to leave for Lima to work with the Wakefield in the city of Lima. Large city, the three million here, it's now up to almost five million people. These cities are exploding in a very real way. Then there is the rising expectations of youth. Latin young people are reading of the things that are going in this world, and they see the manufactured goods, and they want a piece of the action, and there are political revolutionary rumblings all across Latin America. We read a good deal about El Salvador, but in almost every country there are some forms of rumblings or others. There's a growing impatience with paternalism. These rich wealthy government, like the one in El Salvador, and treating the people as the children. You see, they're the wealthy people who own half the country, and they treat the people as peons, and the people are not tolerating that anymore. And you have the ferment that's growing up, and you could easily see a lot more swing toward socialistic government. We're trying to stop it with infusions of money and arms. My viewpoint is it probably won't work. Number five, there's increasing political left, and you can see why. Because of all these same things, there's a decreasing Roman Catholic influence. In Colombia, for instance, it wasn't very many years ago before Christians were stoned. One of our missionaries there lost his life under very mysterious circumstances. and may have been part of the plot of local priests in Paso and Kali in Colombia, Catherine Morgan's husband. But, Lester, but this kind of open opposition to the gospel is not nearly as strong as it used to be. It is much more open to the gospel. Any good gospel communicator ought to be aware of that. Then there's rapid evangelical growth. Some of the most exciting things in the world are happening in Latin America. For instance, down in the Andean countries, that is the countries that stretch along the inner Andes. The Andes running two ranges and in between them there's a kind of a dish there. And there are millions of Quechua Indians, twenty different tribes of Quechua Indians that live all the way from Colombia right down into northern Chile. from in Bolivia and Peru and Ecuador. And there have been people movements in the last fifteen or twenty years that have been simply phenomenal. Not a lot of missionary activity, but people getting saved, passing the word along, finding their neighbors and friends to be right for salvation, and whole communities springing up as believing communities. within a very, very short time and pleading for teaching and pleading for literature and pleading for material to help them grow in the faith. And one of the exciting things that's going on in our day has been that growth along there. And by the way, one of our own missionaries, Dick Farstead, who is a radio broadcaster, he's been seconded to HCJB in Quito and Ecuador. But God gave Dick Farstead an amazing gift of language. And that man has been able to broadcast in twenty different dialects of Quechua. He looks at a picture of the dialect he's talking about. It may be in Ecuador, it may be in Colombia, it may be in Peru, it may be in Bolivia. And he can remember the distinctives of the dialect of that. use them with high enough quality to be able to broadcast messages to these people. And then he goes out and visits them from time to time. He's had to do a lot of this from St. Louis, where he's now living. But he goes back and forth to Ecuador all the time. Pray for Dick Farstead in these broadcasts, because some of this radio ministry is the only form of teaching that these Quechua people... are getting up and down the mountains of the Andean countries there. And so there is a great deal going on. One of the problems has been the lack of biblical literature, but this is being met by numbers of different evangelical groups, and there's an increasing amount of correspondence courses and Bible commentaries and Christian books of various sorts that is coming out. It's being advertised over the radio. There are magazines being sent out. We have this new magazine for the leadership, the evangelical leadership of Latin America going out from Mexico City by Bill Conard, who is the editor of that magazine, commended from one of the Portland assemblies, and so on. There is a lot going on in Latin America today, and the assemblies are growing, and other evangelical movements are growing. And we can be very thankful. Along with that, there is some counter activity going on. Because the Roman Catholic Church has finally awakened up. And because of their big conference in Medellin in Colombia, excuse me, some years ago, and then back in nineteen seventy-nine in Puebla, in Mexico, they have taken a very liberal social stance. Up until that time the Roman Catholic Church was solidly behind the rich. Now the Roman Catholic Church is turning it back on the rich and is going for the young upstart peoples who are looking for social reform. And as a result they are winning over to their side people with political opportunism in mind. And this is part of the general picture now in many of the countries of Latin America itself. And they've adopted not only in the Roman Catholic Church, but in some of the more liberal Protestant groups as well, a liberation theology in which they use our language. They use salvation and evangelism. But they don't mean what we mean by it. They mean social reform. They mean more schools. They mean guns. They mean kill the enemy. They mean guerrilla activity and things like that. And so while there is a great deal of growth in Latin America, there are also problems that are emerging and of which the Christian people ought to be aware. Now we have missionaries in various parts of Latin America that are serving God acceptably. There has been quite a lot of growth in Venezuela, largely from our more conservative brethren. If you're not a conservative bent, I don't suggest you go there. There have been a considerable growth in Colombia, although not without problems. They've had charismatic problems and so on. But there are great possibilities in the country of Colombia. There have been a good deal to give thanks to God for in Ecuador. You know very well that my own brother and four others lost their lives in nineteen fifty-six. And the Assembly is now controlled, that is, their activity to have about one-third of the eastern jungle area of Ecuador. The Christian and Missionary Alliance have the northern third, and the Gospel Missionary Union have the southern third, and we have the central part there. And in that are three of the five Aoka settlements. And there are now some kinds of meetings. There are schools in these Aoka settlements. And while you read in some reports that Aokas have just sort of almost come to the Lord in mass. That's just not true. But there have been some that have made movements toward the gospel. And for these you can give thanks. And you might pray because there's a good deal of animosity between Kishuas and Alkas. And if you remember the lady Dayuma, who was one of those that were first reached among the Alkas, Dayuma had a family that did not follow the Lord. And she has a godless son who is bound and determined to do everything he can to wreck any Christian influence in eastern Ecuador today. Particularly among Alca people. His name is Sammy. You might pray that God will save Sammy. Because Sammy is a very important individual in Ecuador at this time. Then there is some work in Peru. There's a remarkable work by Jim Elliott's brother in northern Peru, Bert and Colleen Elliott. They never had children, and so they felt that God gave them kind of Pauline ministry. And they've seen the establishment of something like sixty assemblies up there across the mountains, from the jungle side of Peru over here, across over to the coast. And right across there, there are these little assemblies, Quechua Indians, Spanish people, jungle Indians, and we can thank God for this. Well, there goes my time, and I'm just getting started. We must leave it. I will lead you to read your missionary magazines, and I hope as a result of our evenings together, that you are a little more excited about what God is doing in our world, that you'll take an interest when you read your newspapers in various things that you can see affect the gospel. That's how I read Time magazine, U.S. News and World Report, and other literature of that nature. How is this affecting the gospel? When you read about Lebanon, think about the Christians there. When you read about revolt in El Salvador, think about the Christians there, the assemblies there, the evangelical churches there. How are they being affected by all this? And then we can become much more effective prayer warriors and communicators. And the more we know, the more we can apply what we know in prayer and see God working. And when God does work, will have been able to follow on what he's done and give him thanks for moving in the lives of many others. Thank you for inviting us down here to Mark of the Palm. May the Lord bless you. And may there be a great deal of missionary activity come from right among this group of God's people here. Shall we pray? Our Father, as we have struggled to pack a good deal of information in a very short period of time, and yet come across with some impressions of what the Lord Jesus Christ is doing in the hearts of mankind in some parts of the world during the evenings of this week. We just pray that something of excitement will be generated in our heart because the Lord is working, because God is on the throne, because the Lord Jesus is the Savior of the world. and because his servants are serving him in many parts of this world. We thank thee for all of them, and we pray that there will be others raised up. For we have been asked by the Lord himself to pray that the Lord of Harvest would send forth laborers into his harvest. For all of those in Mexico and Central America, for the Caribbean islands, and for right around all twelve countries in In South America, we pray especially tonight, our Father, and ask that thy blessing may rest upon thy work. Now we just commend our hearts into your care again for this evening. In Jesus' name, amen.