a Vintage Faith and Worn Out Clothes

Dedicated to our elder brothers and sisters, who after 20 or 30 years outside of their homeland are taking up a new call to Reach the Nations though retirement. 

This is the story of their journey. 

Like young bulls eager to be in the throes

They did not care and they didn’t know 

Where they would live, where they would go

Only a lamp unto their feet the path to show

So, they took a vocation not a vacation

To make disciples of every nation, 

Bones burning with one proclamation 

One vision, one Man, this Christ sensation 

And thus they left fools to the professors 

As they confused all their confessors,   

Some discouragers and others blessers,

Away to cry forgiveness to transgressors

Knowing The Way’s a hard road to travel 

with smells of death, dying, and battle 

Still they stayed for decades

Hundreds of visas through Gospel blockades 

Years, weeks, thousands of days 

Now, youth to age and in the gray

They ask should we go or should we stay 

Where should this grace debt we pay? 

My God come quickly, your children are turning 

To the TV while America’s burning 

A melting flesh pot long since churning 

The wages of sin many years earning

Then I raised my eyes unto the hills

And into the wound the God that heals 

His own bride from the world he steals

From selfish pride and mortgage bills

With a vintage faith and worn out clothes

Passion and sacrifice a life that shows   

Our 6 to 800 go back in the throes 

These older and stronger mission heroes

For what is coming, you may not know it

They preach like warriors and pray like poets

We never even asked permission

But now America has become the IMB’s number one field of mission