Dear friends of TBI,

With trembling gratefulness in my heart, I look at the remarkable cluster of visionary ministries growing like fruit on the tree of Bethlehem Baptist Church.

  • We are a kind of mission sending agency with 85 foreign missionary units (families or singles) who count Bethlehem as their main sending base.
  • Campus Outreach has exploded in its four-plus years at Bethlehem with 25 staff on four campuses.
  • Desiring God has been spreading resources and holding conferences for over a decade and nourishes people around the world with its Internet presence.
  • Children Desiring God is transforming the way children are nurtured in over two thousand churches in the US and overseas.
  • Bethlehem Urban Initiatives pushes truth and love into the inner city.
  • Treasuring Christ Together plants churches and channels Christ-exalting relief and reformation to the poorest of the poor.
  • The Bethlehem Institute has graduated nine classes of pastoral and missionary-destined men for Bible-saturated, God-centered ministry.

I mention these as a testimony to God’s sovereign grace...

Read the rest of this letter.

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org. He served for 32 years as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books. John and his wife Noël have five children and twelve grandchildren.