World Missions Advance

06/23/2026

MISSIONS UPDATE | GREECE | Jona Pettijohn Missions

In May, I was in Thessaloniki, Greece, assisting the leadership of International Christian Center Athens, as well as a team of missionaries from Christ For The Nations Institute with what turned out to be an extraordinary event!

The International Children's Leadership Experience was a day devoted entirely to the education and building up of children's ministry leaders from across the world. We had over 150 attendants from 25 different countries join us. Some of them were pastors, some were sent by their pastors, others were simply believers who operated home churches because they come from cities where they have no church. Some of them were passionate about reaching and ministering to children and others were fairly new to the idea. All of them, however, were deeply impacted by their time at the conference.

The speakers brought a wide range of topics from teaching children the full Gospel, to pre-teen ministry, and ministering to children with special needs. One moment that really struck me was a conversation I had with a Greek woman who attended a session how identify and handle issues of child sexual abuse. "This is historic for Greece," she said to me. It was a comment that caught me a bit off guard. Coming from America where nearly every church has a children's ministry and topics like these are discussed more and more consistently, it's hard to grasp that a country so steeped in religion and church culture could go for so long without recognizing the need to reach children. But that's exactly what's happened in Greece for centuries and it's also exactly what's currently changing in this nation. More churches are waking up to this blind spot and working to remove it to better reach the next generation. Praise God for the revelation He's bringing to His people in this land! This conference was an incredible contribution to the cause of Christ amongst the Greeks and the people of the nations who attended. However, it's also just a drop in the bucket of the work that needs to be done to make up for centuries of neglecting to spread the Gospel to the youngest members of the church. Please pray that the Lord would send more workers for the harvest of the littlest hearts in Greece!

For more information about Jona Pettijohn Missions and her ministry, go to worldmissionsadvance.org/pettijohn

06/02/2026

In our last newsletter, we discussed that when we approach Scripture, it is a great idea to use the Inductive Bible Study Method: 1) Observation, 2) Interpretation, 3) Correlation, 4) Application. This is not a magic formula to arrive at Scriptural truth, rather it is a guard rail that keeps us from “going off the rails” when we engage in the art and science of biblical interpretation.

We now turn our focus, briefly, to the second step of this process, Interpretation. Once we have spent time observing the text (which would of course include prayer), we then seek to interpret the text. We can’t apply a text that has yet to be interpreted. So often, we jump to application. The problem with doing so can quickly become clear. Joshua was instructed to walk around the walls of Jericho and then make a loud noise and then the walls would come down. Is this prescriptive for us today? Are we to say “the Bible says it so I’m going to do it,” and then walk around the walls of a building and yell? It seems funny to think of such a thing, yet often, this is exactly how we apply Scripture. Cherry-picking can be a harmful and dangerous thing. We wrongly interpret and apply a verse and then get mad at God when He doesn’t do what we thought He promised to do, only to realize in retrospect, that God didn’t fail, it was our faulty interpretation of His Word that caused the problem. Don’t indict God for your mistaken interpretation. He ALWAYS keeps His promises. If it seems like He has not, then the issue is on our end, not His.

As one of my professors explained, we don’t have access to the events of Scripture, we only have access to the text. The events are 100% true, but we have the inspired text not a time machine. The written word is the medium God chose to communicate His Word to the immediate readers and to us today. Proper interpretation begins with the hard work of studying to see what the original sender of the message intended for the original recipient to understand. Only after we spend time in interpretation can we move on in our journey of methodical Bible study to correlation and application and, I will add, transformation. -Chad

“A reader cannot create any meaning [he/she] likes. In any intelligible verbal or nonverbal communication, the sender communicates a message to the receiver with the assumption that the receiver will understand the intended meaning of the sender.” -Dr. Cornelis Bennema, “Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Book of John”
(see podcast below)

YouTube: https://youtu.be/Q-I46Uyo98g?si=E1Z1lprdrU0awtup

ApplePodcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finding-ourselves-in-the-gospel-of-john-chad/id1814853643?i=1000759640156

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3PKCdzBTN65soM3WFMY6Qt?si=3e58203286674ac3

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Cor Bennema, Head of Research and Professor of New Testament Studies at London School of Theology. We discuss his journey fr...

05/01/2026

I remember the first course I took on my journey at Dallas Theological Seminary. I was so excited to get started and had the normal anxiety and anticipation that accompanies the first semester for students of any age. When it came time for our first assignment, I wasn’t totally sure what was in store. Perhaps I had heard rumors, but you never know until it happens. You wanna know what my first assignment in seminary was? Make 25 observations of Acts 1:8. 25 observations! Not interpretations or opinions or what I think would be spiritual insights…nope, just plain old observations. You wanna know what my second assignment in seminary was? Make 25 more observations of the same verse! One verse, 50 unique observations!

What’s the point? Am I suggesting you should make 50 observations of every verse of the Bible? No, but sometimes we are so quick to jump to an application of this verse or that one, that we miss what the Bible is actually saying. Using the words of the author of a given book of Scripture and making it mean whatever we want it to mean is practically tantamount to making our words equal with God’s. Can you imagine if you sent a text to someone and someone else read it and used your words to mean something that you never intended? And yet, so many of us are guilty of this when it comes to Scripture.

When we approach Scripture, it is a great idea to use the Inductive Bible Study Method:

1) Observation, 2) Interpretation, 3) Correlation, 4) Application. If we don’t end up at application then we are just engaging in an exercise of pure intellectualism. An intellectualism that doesn’t lead to transformation is just pride. But premature application, can lead to distortion of Scripture and misapplication. Over the course of the next few newsletters, I will briefly consider these steps with the hope that we can, in our own study, “arrive at Scriptural truth” that will be transformative. -Chad

“Methodical Bible study, then, is concerned with the proper path to be taken in order to arrive at Scriptural truth” -Robert A. Traina, “Methodical Bible Study”

If you would like to go deeper on this subject, check out the following fantastic books:

"How to Read the Bible Like a Seminary Professor" by Mark Yarbrough
"How to Read the Bible as Literature" by Leland Ryken
"Methodical Bible Study" by Robert, A. Traina
"Living by the Book" by Howard and William Hendricks

Be sure to check out our podcast on Exploring the Grand Narrative of the Bible here: https://youtu.be/m9sWHxI9sXM?si=Am90_qQbD0rsRPAG

04/29/2026

04/22/2026

"After God created the world and human rebellion marred it, God set out to restore what he had made: 'God did not turn his back on a world bent on destruction; he turned his face toward it in love. He set out on the long road of redemption to restore the lost people and the world as his kingdom.' The Bible narrates the story of God's journey on that long road to accomplish his creational purpose. It is a unified and progressively unfolding drama of God's action in history for the salvation of the whole world that culminates in the work of Jesus Christ. The Bible is not a mere jumble of history, poetry, lessons in morality and theology, comforting promises, guiding principles, and commands; instead, it is fundamentally coherent. Every part of the Bible—each event, book, character, command, prophecy, and poem—must be understood in the context of the one storyline.

Yet many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits—devotional bits, theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, narrative bits. But when we break the Bible into fragmented bits, we reduce its power to shape our lives. All human communities live out of some story that gives unity, meaning, and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should."

Craig G. Bartholomew & Michael W. Goheen, "The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story"

04/21/2026

❕️2 Weeks To Go❕️

Once again time has moved way faster than I can keep up with! 😅

In just two weeks I'll be leaving for Greece and staying for two months! And I'm so happy to announce that this trip is FULLY FUNDED! 🥳

Thank you to everyone who gave financially to help me get to the place God is leading me to! ♥️

Please continue to support me through your prayers and encouraging messages. I can't wait to see what God has in store this summer! 🇬🇷

04/01/2026

"Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures..." (1 Corinthians 15:1–4)

This passage in 1 Corinthians 15 is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. This is the gospel. We never graduate from the gospel. Paul goes on to talk about all of the people the resurrected Christ appeared to. I especially love this bit when he says, “He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now.” I love that, “most of whom remain until now.” It’s like Paul is saying, “listen, Jesus really rose from the dead, but just in case you don’t believe me, go ask these other people who are still alive...they saw Him too!”

When I have the opportunity, I like to ask atheists what proof of the resurrection would they accept? So many people like to try to justify their own unbelief by appealing to the lack of proof, but the truth is there is a lot of proof for the resurrection of Christ. Paul even says “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain” (1 Co 15:14). Everything hinges on the Resurrection. If it happened, it is of ultimate importance. If it didn’t happen, then even Paul says that our faith is in vain. This is our hope as believers. Christ is “the first fruits of those who are asleep” (1 Co 15:20). The penalty for sin, going way back all the way to Genesis is death, but praise God, for His free gift of eternal life to all who believe (Romans 3:23). As Christians, we don’t believe in some ethereal, ghostly, afterlife. No! We believe that one day, the dead in Christ will rise and live forever with Jesus as He reigns upon the throne of David forever and ever (See 2 Samuel 7).

And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:3-5a).

Jesus is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

Chad