Hello, missionary Matthew Stuckey here to the island of Luzon and I want to make a quick
video talking to you about the system of furlough.
Now some of you might not know what furlough is, but furlough is basically the deep dark
secret of deputation.
And so as I mentioned in an earlier video, with deputation you go around from church
to church to church and you get various churches to pledge missionary support and once you
get enough money to be full time from day one, then you go out to the field.
But what takes place is that after 10 years or 15 years, you have to go back to all those
churches and make sure they'll still support you and report how things are going and basically
you'll leave your church that you're running out on the mission field for six months or
eight months and you're just gone from them even though you are the leader of that church.
Now there's many problems with this and when you look at the major problems, one thing
is that you don't really know what's going to happen to the doctrine of the church.
Like if you're gone from six months and you have various people up here preaching, who
knows what kind of heresy they might preach, who knows if there's a devil trying to cause
problems in the church, the doctrine could completely change.
Not only that, but the culture of the church could completely change.
You know, there's just a certain culture that's going to go along with the person who's running
the church and you just don't know what's going to happen after six months or eight
months and what's very likely to happen is a church split.
You could have devils creep in and basically split the church in two, you just don't know
what's going to happen.
And so I want you to understand that I'm not going to say a hundred percent that furlough
is an unbiblical method because you do see Paul either visiting from time to time people
that support him or he sends someone to report on the results that are going on.
Now that was in a time period where there was no internet, you couldn't just call people
up to let them know how things are going, so it was more difficult and he would send
people to report about what is going on.
But here's the difference, when it comes to what Paul was doing, he didn't have two hundred
churches that he was required to report to.
Now we have people that donate to us from time to time at this church, but you know,
I don't feel obligated to visit them and preach there because they're just online listeners
that want to give money.
We thank them, you know, praise the Lord for that, but you know, who I'm accountable to
is Verity Baptist Church and Paul the Apostle was not accountable to fifty different Baptist
churches that he had to preach in every ten years and let them know how things are going,
he's just going to be accountable to one church.
And so the system of deputation where basically, you know, you have like fifty different churches
or a hundred churches that you have to go to and report results from, it's just not
a scriptural method, there's a lot of problems with it, and you don't really see that in
the Bible.
Yes, Paul reports from time to time, but he doesn't have to report to two hundred churches
that he's directly underneath and he's required to do that.
Thank you and God bless.
God bless.