Speaker 1
I'm going to invite 15,000 evangelists to come to this, but I want you to invite 650 world leaders of missions around the world. And let's do a conference run into a conference on why haven't we finished the task? My is the great commission still unfulfilled. And so I had 76 tables. And actually I got Paul Echeleman to, we partnered on this and then I told him, I said, Paul, you're going to have to lead it because I'm pastoring a pretty complex church right now. But I just did Paul's funeral on Saturday. He was a wonderful man, the founder of the Jesus film and great, great guy. But we put the 76 tables, there was a table in the middle called Table, we call it Table 71, where I put the leaders of the largest mission agencies. It was the founder of Youth with the Mission, Lauren Cunningham, the president of Campus Crusade for Christ, Steve Douglas, the president of the International Mission Board of Southern Baptist, Jerry Rankin, the head of United Bible Society is the head of Wick with translators. I put them all there, I call them the gorillas, they were the big, big mission agencies. And out of that conference in 2000 in Amsterdam, we decided that table decided to keep going. And we formed a little thing called finishing the task. And it was very low key, but the idea was to reach the tribes in the world that have no Bible, that have no known believer, and that have no known church, or as I call it, Bibles believers and bodies of Christ. And we thought that there were maybe 600 tribes in that list, we found 3600 tribes. And so over the last 23 years, we've met twice a year, and consistently year by year, we've been taking about 50 to 75 of those tribes off that list, every year, or 23 years, getting Bible translated in there, in that for that tribe, getting a church planted and getting a group of believers going. So that was going along, and then in 2018, Paul said two things. He said, I need to retire. He was about 15 years older than me, and that year his wife had passed away. And he said, I want you to take the thing.