November 01, 1991 by

[Recently, Phil Bogosian of the Mobilization Division of the USCWM interviewed out-going Director Dr. Jack Frizen as well as the in- coming Director, Dr. John Orme. Here is an abbreviated version of those interviews.]

MF: Dr. Frizen, you have been the Executive Director of the IFMA for 28 years. What were you doing before that?

FRIZEN: For 13 years I was with what was then Far Eastern Gospel Crusade, now SEND International. I was one of the so-called "GI founders" of Far Eastern Gospel Crusade after World War II. We were serving in the Philippines when we received the vision for what is now FEBIAS College of Bible in the Manila area.

MF: Dr. Frizen, what have been the greatest surprises in your 28 years at IFMA?

FRIZEN: There are disappointments and great joys in the ministry. One of the disappointments is the apparent apathy in the evangelical church, generally speaking, and a lack of missionary vision to reach out to the Unreached Peoples and complete the task. IFMA at its origin in 1917 had as one of its purposes to work toward a speedy completion of world evangelization, and yet here we are 74 years later. We need an emphasis on prayer ministry to pray the Lord of the Harvest to thrust forth laborers--not necessarily just from North America, but from the whole world to the whole world--particularly to the places where the gospel has not been preached and the need is greatest.

MF: Dr. Frizen, what are some of the things over these 28 years that you have wished the mission industry as a whole would have done, but has yet to do?

FRIZEN: That is difficult to say. I am very high on mission agencies, and I feel a part of all of the mission agencies that are a part of IFMA in particular. In the early days, all of our missions were involved primarily in evangelism, church planting and church development. However, from the very beginning, all of these early missions were very involved in social action of different kinds. When they arrived on the field, the physical needs were most evident, so it really disturbs me when the critics of missions say that evangelicals have not been involved in social issues, etc.

There are areas that have been greatly developing during the last 25 to 30 years. One is in the area of recognizing the national leadership of the churches that have been planted. Some of missions have been slower to recognize that leadership in others. In the New Testament, the Pauline bands that went out in missionary evangelism were much more mobile than some of our missionaries today. There is a tendency in our family situation, in the schooling of missionary children, and other factors, to become sedentary, to build missionary compounds and not have the mobility in reaching out into new areas. Very interestingly, in certain areas some teams of single women going out to plant churches have been very successful (if they had the right missiology) in establishing the church. Right from the beginning they have turned over leadership, whereas some of their male colleagues became pastors, and, for a time, forgot that they were church planters. They turned over the leadership to the men much later than the women did.

MF: In an Evangelical Missions Quarterly article some years ago, you stated that the most important development in missions in recent years is the concept of reaching the Unreached Peoples. Has the response of the missions industry to this challenge been all that you expected or would have wished?

FRIZEN: It is very difficult for established missions to change the course of mission activity. Institutionalism "eats up" missionaries. When you have institutions, and they are good institutions--schools, hospitals, etc.--they receive a priority of new personnel coming that perhaps is not in keeping with the priority goals of a particular mission. This is because of the fact that it is very difficult to stop a school or a hospital for a year or two years and then start it up again. No matter how many missionaries a mission has in a particular field or area, there are never enough to meet the opportunities or the needs. I have been editing the Opportunities Section in the IFMA news for 28 years and I have seen that it is easier to recruit institutional personnel than those for evangelism and church planting. People say they don't have the gift of evangelism. Well, we can hardly find schools in the USA with even one personal evangelism class anymore, and we are just now getting courses on church planting. In addition, there is very little evangelism or church planting going on by local churches. Missions are dependent on the students that come from the schools, and the schools are dependent on the churches that they come from so we can't just blame the agencies. All 3 legs of this stool have to be brought in unity into a vision for missions.

Interestingly enough, some of our fastest growing missions in IFMA today are new missions that are focusing on Unreached Peoples. In our current membership in IFMA, the fastest growing mission is a young mission (that you featured in Mission Frontiers a short time ago) called Pioneers.

MF: Would you say that the reason groups like Pioneers which are focused on Unreached Peoples are growing fastest is that the idea of finishing the assignment Jesus gave us to reach all the peoples has captured the imagination of young people?

FRIZEN: It is starting to. In some schools there is more interest on the part of those that go through the Perspectives course, and those that are receiving information on the Unreached Peoples challenge. But there is a great limitation, because outside the tentacles of the U.S. Center for World Mission, with its representatives around the country and those influenced by the Perspectives course, I don't see this interest on the part of the evangelical church in general. There are very few vitally concerned about finishing the task. As we were reminded in one of our sessions at the IFMA meeting this year, mission executives are going to have to be teaching the basics of the Bible and missions (the whole thing that is being covered in the Perspectives courses) in their outreach, rather than just giving field reports and needs of their particular mission. The churches that they are visiting and recruiting from don't seem to be getting that from their pastors or Sunday School curriculum in a consistent way. There are, of course, exceptions to this.

MF: What is most on your heart for the IFMA for the future?

FRIZEN: That you will have to ask Dr. Orme, because the burden for the future really rests with him. I am going to trust God to use me in a prayer ministry for IFMA and IFMA missions in a new way now I will have more time. This has been a burden of my heart for many years. My concern is that our missions will get involved in, for instance, the AD2000 movement, (whether they use that terminology or not) and that they will set their 5 and 10 year goals in such a way that a portion, at least, of their goals is to reach out into new areas where there are Unreached Peoples. I am very encouraged that most of our church planting missions have these goals and visions. Some of them have goals of more than doubling their present membership in the next 5 or 10 years. Sometimes this scares me because the goals are so great, and the number of new missionaries coming in for both IFMA and EFMA in the last 5 years doesn't keep pace with these goals. Paul McKaughan of the EFMA just told me he was disturbed as he studied their statistics, and 2/3 of their missions, if I understood him correctly, are not growing at the present time. It is almost that same figure in IFMA. We have great plans and visions, but I don't see the personnel coming along that are going to fulfill this under the Holy Spirit. Of course in 2/3 world missions, a much greater curve of increase is present where ours is practically flat. Over the past 10 years there has been a small growth, in the small hundreds rather than in the thousands.,n

Interview with John Orme, new Executive Director.

MF: What were you doing before you came to IFMA?

ORME: We served the Lord in Latin America for 14 years with CAM International after seminary. This included field work, mostly at a seminary, and then friendship evangelism/home Bible classes with professionals. In 1979, we returned to the States to teach at Detroit Bible College, (which later became William Tyndale College). I was there for 5 years, teaching missions and world religions, cross- cultural and ethnic studies. Parallel with that ministry, the Highland Park Baptist Church was without a Senior Pastor, and in need of help with singles, so for the first 5 years I taught full-time at the college, and was the part-time pastor to about 300 single professionals and students at the church. I then accepted the call of the church to join them as a full-time associate pastor.

One of my joys while at the church was to help put together the Suburban Detroit Missions Consortium. As far as we know, it was the first functioning missions consortium where five churches banded together to support new people going to the field.

MF: From Highland Park Baptist, you went right to the IFMA?

ORME: During my last year at the church I began to sense that the Lord was taking us back to the macro view of world missions. The church had graciously supported me in various teaching trips abroad, twice to Indonesia, Spain, Ecuador, and Pakistan, where I studied some folk Islam. More and more I found my vision getting broader, not just focused on Central America, but the world. Then IFMA contacted me in early 1990 and we made the transition in the fall of 1990.

MF: What do you believe will be your unique contribution to the IFMA?

ORME: Dr. Frizen, in my opinion, was a missionary statesman, in terms of having given greater standards of financial integrity to the field of world missions, the developing of excellence in accounting standards, and resource individuals in terms of taxes for non-profit organizations, and the office had a function of gathering a lot of good historical records. Under Jack we developed a business administration committee, and, today in world missions, there are MBAs and CPAs in many of the mission agencies. That part of the work has been founded well, and will continue through the men who were developed under Jack's leadership as resource people.

My training is more in the area of theology and missiology, so the IFMA executive board would like me to be involved with more external issues now--going to the churches, the fields, the agencies, dealing with missiological and theological matters. Jack and I agree that the issues of the nineties will not be organizational or financial, but rather theological and missiological.

MF: In his closing message to the IFMA, Dr. Frizen stated that "Reaching the unreached and frontier peoples, and working toward completing the task of world evangelization is the IFMA thrust." Do you think that the movement toward the Unreached Peoples and the progress toward completing world evangelization is all that the Lord wants it to be, or we are doing all that he would want or expect from us?

ORME: The IFMA always wants to be concerned about world evangelization and reaching the unreached, the frontier peoples, the hidden people, without getting tangled up in the semantics of those various words. We always want to press forward! That, on the one hand, quite clearly means the frontiers, the people who have not had an opportunity, and don't have a realistic opportunity. We always need to be looking to the frontiers, and ways to penetrate creative access countries, to find every means we can to reach them. This is the heart of Christ. It is the heart of Paul.

At the same time, we need to remember not to neglect other areas that are very accessible, but hardly evangelized. They may not be hidden, they may not be frontier, but they certainly are very lost. It is a matter of balance. We find the apostolic pattern of pressing to new frontiers. We don't find them, at the same time, leaving those accessible areas either. It is not either/or, but rather both/and.

MF: Of course, there are thousands of peoples with no churches among them mixed with fairly well-reached groups too. It is a difficult issue. Our concern is like that of Oswald J. Smith's notion that everybody ought to have the chance to hear the Gospel once.

ORME: It is not an either/or situation. We need the prophets among us like Dr. Winter who has been in our midst to constantly remind us of the need to press out and to move out to the edge. At the same time, we need the voice of church development because it is sometimes difficult to know at what point a church, or a people, or a group, is ready to be left on its own. The tendency, of course, is to paternalize too long.

MF: In the early part of this century A. B. Simpson urged Americans to bring back the King by finishing the task. Every time something happens in the Middle East there is a flurry of thought about Christ returning, and yet it is not frequently linked with finishing the assignment that Jesus gave us. What are your thoughts on this?

ORME: I regret that it seems necessary to have a war in the Gulf for people to be thinking of the Lord's coming. It should be a balanced part of our Biblical pulpit but it is obviously not taught that much. It certainly ought to be a motivating hope in terms of my career choices. I think it certainly ought to be a victorious hope. In our time in history we offer a bonafide hope to a crumbling society--a warning to the evil in society--that there is a righteous judge coming. To those that suffer and the oppressed in our world there is a genuine hope and confidence in His coming--a bonafide time of peace and justice is coming to this earth.