Dr. Delron & Peggy Shirley
Teach All Nations Mission (TAN) is a global evangelical educational ministry birthed from the teaching ministries of Delron and Peggy Shirley. The name Teach All Nations Mission was chosen to carefully indicate exactly what the heart of Delron and Peggy’s mission is.
TAN’s commitment is to establish a solid foundation in the national pastors and leaders so that they can help enrich the people. The vision is Christian teaching materials (in English and the local languages) in printed form and on audio and video, providing scholarships to Christian colleges and Bible schools for promising students, assisting in establishing and building of Bible schools, and broadcasting via the internet, radio, and television.
Our mission to the Central American country of Honduras was packed with a wide variety of ministry opportunities: two pastors’ conferences, a meeting with a fellowship of local missionaries, Sunday and midweek services in the local churches, a missions-emphasis meeting in a local church, a women’s conference, and evangelistic outreaches in a hospital, a prison, and a public park.
The Sunday morning service at the first church on our itinerary was a Foursquare Gospel church, the denomination founded by the early-twentieth-century female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. The denomination is presently celebrating their fiftieth anniversary of their presence in the country of Honduras, and the people were delighted when we told them that our association with the denomination also traces back to approximately fifty years. We shared our stories of having our first date at a fellowship dinner in a Foursquare church, being married by the pastor of the church, and visiting Angelus Temple (the church that Aimee founded in Los Angeles), having a tour of her home, and meeting her son on our honeymoon. Peggy ministered on unforgiveness – focusing both on the need to forgive those who had offended us and the need to be healed from the heartbreak of those offenses. At the altar call as the service ended, almost everyone in the congregation came forward for prayer.
That evening, we were the guest speakers at a missions meeting for the local Church of God congregation. The pastor had announced that the emphasis of the program was “Cry out, Commit, and Dedicate” – giving us an excellent platform to talk about three levels of missions involvement: prayer, giving, and going.
He wasn’t “born with a silver spoon in his mouth.” In fact, he was actually born with “a knife against his throat.” Yet, in divine irony, the man who was holding the knife top his throat wound up feeding him with his silver spoon. This is the beginning of the story of one of history’s greatest leaders – Moses. He was born to a family in slavery to the Egyptian pharaoh at a time when genocide had been declared against his people with a mandate directed by the pharaoh that all male babies were to be executed as soon as they were born. Yet, in the providence of God, his parents decided to defy the royal decree and attempted to save their baby’s life by setting him sail on the Nile River in a little raft. The daughter of the man who had dictated that no boy’s life should be spared discovered the baby’s lifeboat and adopted him as her own. Even though his circumcision mark clearly identified him as a Hebrew, his life was spared, he was taken into the royal household, raised in the “lap of luxury,” given the finest education that money can afford, and launched on the path that would determine the destiny of his people and the course of history.
After living in the royal palace for forty years, Moses essentially committed treason by defending one of the members of his ethnic group and had to abandon his position and escape into the desert where he began a totally new life as a shepherd. It was in this new position that he had the divine encounter that brought meaning and purpose into his life – a literal theophany in which God spoke to him from the flames of a burning bush that was miraculously on fire without being incinerated. This conversation led to a bit of dickering between Moses and God over Moses’ inadequacies for the task that God had assigned to him. But, as always, God won the argument by giving Moses miraculous signs and supernatural power to fulfill the mission before him.
Chapter Twenty-threeThe Violent Take The Kingdom by Force In Matthew 11:12‑15, Jesus said, And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until...
Nigeria Report According to Global Christian Relief, an organization that “keeps its finger on the pulse” of Christians around the world, Nigeria has replaced North Korea as the world’s worst persecutor of believers. Their report included a calculation that almost...
They Loved Not Their Lives Unto the DeathRevelation 12:11 In our August newsletter last year, we shared a report about our partner in Muslim-majority country in northern Africa who had been abducted by a radical Muslim group and held hostage for three months. Teach...
Chapter Twenty-twoDestroying the Works of the Devil He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. (I John 3:8) The purpose of our being...
When I received my first invitation to minister in Sri Lanka, I had not even heard of the country. It was only the picture of the nation on the postage stamp that gave me a clue that it was the island that I knew of as Ceylon, a country whose pavilion I had visited...
Chapter Twenty-one Christians and Demons When asked if a Christian could have a demon, one great Christian leader answered, "A Christian can have anything he has faith for!" Although his answer might seem to be a bit humorous, it really seems to "hit the nail on the...
