Steve Addison's Blog, page 28

June 15, 2021

June 13, 2021

Where did the Kingdom go in Acts?

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The kingdom of God was the central theme of Jesus’ ministry. So why does the book of Acts appear to neglect it? The term “kingdom” occurs forty-two times in Luke’s Gospel, but just eight times in his book of Acts.

How could such an important theme to Jesus appear to almost vanish for the early church? With some help from Chris Green, let’s take a closer look at Acts and see.

The kingdom at the beginning of Acts

As Acts opens Jesus, risen from the dead, is meeting with the disciples over a period of forty days. Luke tells us that content of his teaching during that important time of preparation for world mission was the kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). During this time the disciples pressed him be definite about the restoration of Israel as a united people under the kingship of the Messiah. They asked “is this when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).

They longed to see the divided kingdom, made up of Judea and Samaria united more under the Messiah’s rule, free from the oppressive rule of Rome.

The disciples may have hoped that the reign of Jesus would mean that Caesar would no loner rule over Jerusalem or Palestine. But since Jesus rules as King over all the earth, it means Caesar no longer rules anywhere.

The kingdom at the end of Acts

Acts closes with Paul under house arrest in Rome. Despite this constraint, from morning to evening, he is boldly proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 28:17-31).

Luke intentionally highlights the theme of the kingdom of God at the opening and closing of the story of missionary expansion. He’s telling us that everything that happens in between expands and demonstrates the message of the kingdom.

For Luke, the book of Acts is a commentary on the kingdom of God.

The kingdom throughout Acts

When Phillip went down to Samaria to proclaim Christ, heal the sick, cast out demons, and baptise new believers, Luke tells us he preached “the good news of the kingdom” (Acts 8:12).

When Paul and Barnabas preached the gospel, made many new disciples and planted churches on their first missionary journey, they returned to strengthen the disciples and and remind them that, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).

In Ephesus, Paul entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly about the kingdom of God until he was forced out (Acts 19:8).

In his farewell speech on the beach at Miletus Paul reminded the Ephesian elders how he had gone among them preaching the kingdom and thus proclaiming to them the whole will of God (Acts 20:25-27).

In Acts, kingdom ministry involves pioneer evangelism, disciple making, church planting, and church strengthening. There is also a future element to the kingdom and disciples must persevere through many hardships before they experience the fullness of the kingdom in the life to come (Acts 14:22).

Acts refers to the kingdom eight times. Five of references occur in the context of “preaching the kingdom.” The kingdom is coming in its fullness at the end of time. Right now the reality of the kingdom can be experienced through repentance and faith.

What does this mean?

The kingdom in Acts cannot be separated from the risen King who rules from heaven. Jesus is in heaven, but he is not absent from earth. He is the active ruler over his kingdom. The building and equipping of his church is exactly what his kingly rule is designed to produce until his return in glory.

The gospel of the kingdom is not an alternative to the gospel of Christ crucified for our sin. Jesus has been sent not only to announce the coming reign of God, but to perform the decisive event through which God will bring in that reign. Talking about the kingdom of God requires us to talk about the cross.

The gospel of the kingdom as we find it in Acts is the announcement of forgiveness and the gift of the Spirit that flow necessarily from the throne of the crucified and risen Saviour-King.

Reference
Chris Green, “The King, His Kingdom and the Gospel: Matthew, Mark and Luke-Acts” in God's Power to Save: One Gospel for a Complex World? (London: IVP, 2006) 104-37.

Series
Jesus, the Great Commission and the Kingdom of God
The Great Commission in the Gospels and Acts
The Great Commission in Acts
The Great Commission in Matthew
The Great Commission in John
The Great Commission in Luke

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Published on June 13, 2021 19:03

June 7, 2021

What you talk about says it all

NoPlaceLeft Haiti

NoPlaceLeft Haiti


When I travel I meet two kinds of people: those who talk about mission as an idea and those who talk about their disciples. Disciple makers talk about their disciples. It is the latter that I talk to a second time.


Mr Smith
movement catalyst


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Published on June 07, 2021 18:28

June 6, 2021

Seven Lessons from Stan Parks

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Stan Parks has been a movement catalyst for thirty years. He’s seen multiplying movements of disciples and churches emerge among unreached people groups of South East Asia. Now he serves movement pioneers all over the world.

Stan packed a lot of learning into a thirty-minute interview. I went over the transcript and counted about thirty of them. Here’s my top seven:

1. God prepares us.

My parents were missionaries in Indonesia. They did some interesting things that were against the grain so I learned a lot of the principles from them. Then when I was in high school and college in the 1980s my dad was at the IMB and he helped put together this effort in which Bill and Susan Smith and Dave and Jan Watson and Curtis and Debbie Sargent and David Garrison and other folks tried crazy stuff. A lot of what they tried laid the groundwork for seeing many movements. I would come home from my summer construction job and they’d tell me some crazy story of what Bill Smith had done recently. So I began to hear about movements and learning from their stories.

2. Bring people together, sell the problem and find a solution everyone owns.

My wife and I went to Indonesia in 1994. I was doing computer work. I soon got involved in an effort to identify the Unreached People Groups (UPGs) of Indonesia. David Barrett estimated there were around 7,000 of them. We brought together 400 Indonesian leaders and about fifty expats. We put up a list of 127 people groups with 0 workers, 0 believers, 0 churches. There was a stunned silence, then we all turned to God in prayer confessing our neglect of the task. People knew there were unreached people groups, but they hadn’t realised the magnitude of the task. Now we knew there were 150 million Indonesians in UPGs. That created the groundswell among the Indonesians—we’ve got to send people! Within five years over 100 of the UPGs had workers among them.

3. The foreigner is not the solution.

We knew the Indonesians were the key. Indonesia has a significant number of Christians. Some people groups in the East are majority Christian. Many Chinese-Indonesians are Christian. There was a move of God back in the 1960s in on the island of Java and there are millions of believers there. These Indonesian disciples were the ones who would reach their nation. They were just one step away culturally from the UPGs. They can go where we can’t. Our job was to serve them as partners.

4. Identify the blockages.

Around 2007 we began to realize that the workers among the unreached groups were reproducing a Western style of church. That’s the model they knew. They learned Christianity from Americans or Dutch or Australians and they copied a Western form of church. We gave them our culture along with the gospel and it wasn’t working.

5. Learn from other fields.

About that time we heard of movements starting in other places. So we invited Victor John from the Bhojpuri movement in India, and David Garrison a mobilizer and researcher of movements. David presented on the principles behind movements. Victor presented on what it is actually like to be in the middle of a multiplying movement.

The Indonesians said, “This can’t happen in Indonesia. We’re a Muslim country. Victor replied, “We were the graveyard of modern missions for 100 years. They said it can’t happen here! But God chose the holiest part of India to be the source of a movement. It can happen.”

I didn’t give up. I sought out others who God had used to spark movements — David Watson, Victor John, Bill Smith, Steve Smith. I sat with them and learned, others did the same and then we applied the learning.

6. God prepared us, then he brought the breakthrough.

The tsunami in Ache was a key breaking point in Indonesia. The Indonesian prayer movement that grew up in the 1990s was praying for the UPGs. The day before the tsunami happened they had a large prayer gathering in different locations. One of the key things they prayed was that God would open up the province of Ache.

Ache had closed down due to the imposition of Sharia law and civil war. They expelled almost everybody trying to share the gospel. Then the tsunami hit on December 26, 2004 and devastated Ache.

After the tsunami a lot of people went to Ache, some for a few weeks at a time, some moved up there. They had learned from movements in other parts of the world, they followed Jesus’ pattern of when he sent out the 70 disciples looking for households of peace.

Even before we began to see any fruit among the lost our lives had begun to change. We began to focus on obedience-based discipleship, not knowledge-based discipleship. We prayed more seriously than ever before. We knew who we were looking for. We were asking — is this a person of peace, are their family and friends open?

The workers sat down with locals in groups, not just individuals, and searched the Scriptures together. They didn’t teach but allowed people to discuss and think and ultimately come to faith in Christ.

It was dangerous for the workers, it could have cost their lives, but they were full of faith. Healings and miracles shocked some communities who then wanted to study the Injil — the Gospels — and learn about Issa — Jesus.

Some radical religious leaders confessed they had been fighting this movement like Saul. One said, “There’s no way God can forgive what I’ve done.” The Indonesian worker said, “Brother, God can forgive you.”

The workers persevered despite the risks and churches began to emerge that looked a lot more like Acts 2 than a traditional Western church. Most were first generation believers, they knew what it is to be rescued from darkness.

7. Take it to the world.

As we saw streams of reproducing disciples and churches in Indonesia, I began to help other networks and agencies around the world — South Asia, Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia. In Indonesia I was a Barnabas to the Pauls. Now I was becoming a Barnabas to other Barnabases all of whom had their Pauls!

God connected us with Steve and Laura Smith and we began to look at the spread of multiplying movements globally. In 2010 we could identify eighty movements around the world. In 2017 we identified 550 movements.

God is doing an unprecedented move around the world. Never in history have we seen movements on every continent, in every religious sphere. Today the number of identified movements is over 1,370. The total number of people in movements is about 80 million — that’s about 1% of the world’s population. That’s astounding!

Jesus said, This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations (ethne), and then the end will come. (Matt 24:14).

We don’t know when the end will come, but we know it will not come until every people group (ethne) has heard the gospel. Jesus commanded us to disciple every people group. What will it take? What about a city that has 400 different people groups? So we decided to go for every people group and every place.

It is a global movement. God is the one building his church all over the world.

The key to starting movements in an unreached people and place is to get behind the existing movements and help them start movements. Over 80% of movements were started by other movements. Once you know how to start a movement you can go to a neighboring people group and you know what to do.

That why I’m part of 24:14, a global network of movements and agencies who want to see movements in every language and every place.

The full interview.

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Published on June 06, 2021 16:14

June 3, 2021

249-NoPlaceLeft San Francisco

Brett Butler tells his and Patti’s story of pursuing NoPlaceLeft in San Francisco.

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Published on June 03, 2021 21:18

June 2, 2021

We’re on a search

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Some big news…

We are on a search for the next Director of MOVE Australia and we’re looking for candidates. If know of someone who would be suitable, could you pass this on to them or let me know so we can get in touch.

MOVE is mission agency whose workers pursue movements of disciples and churches using a 4-Fields approach: movements.net/4fields. We envision a growing, best-practice mission agency that mobilises and serves workers in Australia and around the world.

MOVE is seeking an Australian-based Director to develop effective organisational systems and leaders that serve our growing impact.

Such a leader will have a passionate commitment to fulfilling the Great Commission. They will be experienced in making disciples and planting churches. They will envision the mobilisation of workers for Australia and the nations. They will have the ability to build best practice organisational systems and teams that facilitate expansion. They will have the capacity to raise financial support.

This is a job for a leader whose calling is to mobilise, equip and support workers who obey Jesus’ command to make disciples of the nations.

Here’s the position description.

Steve Addison
movenetwork.org

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Published on June 02, 2021 19:03

June 1, 2021

How Jarod Discovered the Myths of Friendship Evangelism

Jarod Osborne

Jarod Osborne

A blog post fromJarod Osborne who has discovered why Friendship Evangelism alone, can never reach a lost world.

I enjoyed living in the comfort of friendship evangelism. There was only one problem — the Holy Spirit made me so uncomfortable I had to move out.

When I was enculturated in friendship evangelism, like most American Evangelicals, I thought that I had to build trust with a person before I could share the gospel with them, and trust takes a long time. I was sure that people wouldn’t want to hear about Jesus until they knew that I cared about them, they knew my personal struggles and knew that I was an authentic Christian. I even figured, according to my informal training on the subject, that if I lived a good life, my witness would shine, and people would come to me asking about Jesus.

The responsibility inadvertently fell on the people who weren’t Christians. It was their fault they weren’t coming to ask me about my relationship with God. My job was to be a friendly guy and wait, maybe even drop the word “God” in a few conversations and talk about my church on occasion.

If a person who was spiritually searching walked into my church service, I might share the gospel in a message and give an invitation to pray. But I had a file full of really good excuses why I wasn’t “in the harvest.” I’m a pastor who equips, not an evangelist. I’m an introvert. I have no natural environments to meet non-Christians. I don’t want to be a Bible-thumper who turns people away from God.

Let’s contrast my approach to that of Jesus. He traveled to every town and village in his region. He preached to crowds outside, healed sick people, freed people from spiritual oppression and made house calls to people who were lost. He instructed his disciples to do the same. Just read Matthew 9-10. Jesus and his crew were proactive. They went to people and initiated conversation. When they were rejected, they simply moved on. When they found someone who was hungry for God, they stayed.

I wish the facts supported my comfort zones and preferences, but they don’t. Dr. Stephen Elliott, a Wesleyan pastor and professor, writes “only about one percent of the conversation stories in the New Testament can be primarily attributed to the impact of friendship/lifestyle evangelism, whereas 99 percent of the conversion stories are due to the combination of … prayer, the Holy Spirit, usable/available believers, miracles; and powerful/passionate witnessing.”

A recent Lifeway Research study echoes this reality in our own era. More than half of Christians in America pray every week to have an opportunity to share Jesus with someone who is not a Christian. But in the last six months, less than half of Christians have actually done it, even once. Looks like we are fishing for people by only getting out on the lake once or twice a year. That sounds more like a fringe hobby than a calling.

It took God a long time to nudge me out of my comfort zone and actually get me into the harvest fields around me. How did I do it? I’m a little embarrassed to say. The first step was surrender. I apologized to God for my excuses and laid them down. I asked for the Spirit’s help to do the work Jesus gave me to – the same work he did – making disciples. I practiced sharing the story of how Jesus changed my life. I practiced it with Christian friends, family members, even by myself. I practiced sharing the Gospel using simple language, asking if the person would like to explore more about who Jesus is, or surrender their life to him. Again, at the risk of sounding juvenile, I practiced this with Christian friends and alone in my office.

I discovered in my practice that I was somewhat embarrassed of Jesus. I was afraid of being labeled, rejected or even hated because of my obvious association with him. Once these feelings came out, I repented again. I knew what he said: “Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” (Luke 9:26)

So I just started moving. I knew I had to do something because the nothing I was doing had not worked. I literally put on my shoes. That was step one. Then I walked out my door, step two. (I know, this isn’t an amazing strategy. I didn’t know what to do.) I walked up and down my street, praying for each neighbor by name as I walked by their house. I did this every day for a week. Great! Easy enough.

Then I started praying with people. I never knocked on a door, but when I saw someone outside, I’d introduce myself if I didn’t already know them, and ask if there was anything they’d like me to pray for them about. I was shocked! I expected to be cussed out of their yard, but instead almost everyone I asked responded immediately with a sincere prayer request. I prayed with people about their grief and loss, drug addictions, childhood sexual abuse, job stresses, pregnancy. I couldn’t believe that strangers would be so open.

One man who was far from God even told me that he knew I was going to come and pray with him from the moment he saw me. Somehow he just knew. I interpreted it as God’s Spirit speaking to him ahead of time. Only a few people gave me the cold shoulder.

My neighborhood walks didn’t last forever. God used those times to get me moving and teach me some important lessons. Perhaps the most important was that Jesus was right, the harvest is plentiful! But the workers are few. Not only did I need to pray that God would send workers into the harvest fields, I needed to be one of those workers myself.

This season of walking and praying led to new opportunities. God opened amazing doors for me to share the gospel on a weekly basis with people who are spiritually hungry and in great need. Just last week I shared the message of Jesus with a group of people, and six of them surrendered their lives to him. I prayed with them to put their faith in Jesus as their Savior and become children of God. I’ve only known these guys for a few months, and I did build relationships with them, on their turf. But the relationships were formed around the gospel. Friendship was never a Trojan horse to sneak Jesus into their lives. They knew my story up front, and that I was associated with Jesus.

I have seen this again and again: the gospel actually works. Followers of Jesus were never meant to lure in the fish only by inviting them to church. We don’t have to be friends with everyone for a year before we introduce them to the God who changed our lives. (Imagine if Paul or Barnabus or Philip took that approach.) God has given each of us a mission: to make disciples. He’s placed us in communities of people who need the gospel. He has given us his Spirit, the greatest resource we’ll ever have. And he has given us a story of his grace to share with others.

“God, please evict us from our comfort zones, and send us into the harvest fields. There are people that we know who are hurting. Lost sheep. Lost sons and daughters. Help us to be your ambassadors in their lives, helping them find their way home to you. Amen.”

Jarod Osborne serves as lead pastor of Pathway Church in Warsaw, Indiana.

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Published on June 01, 2021 16:00

May 30, 2021

Floyd's Legacy in My Life

Floyd McClung preaching on Dam Square, Amsterdam early 1980s.

Floyd McClung preaching on Dam Square, Amsterdam early 1980s.

One of my heroes has just died, his name was Floyd McClung. Here’s what I wrote about him and Sally back in 2009 in the introduction to my first book on movements.

Let me tell you why movements matter to me. I walked away from my faith in my late teens and early twenties. It didn’t take long for my life to unravel. I wasn’t happy with God, and I wasn’t happy without him. I didn’t think living as a Christian was possible. Then along came an Australian guy named Bill Hallam. He’d come to know Christ on the hippie trail between Amsterdam and Delhi through a ministry called Dilaram, founded by Floyd and Sally McClung.

I was impressed with Bill. There were times when I wanted to throw him out of my house because of the hard things he had to say, but I knew he loved me, and I knew that Christ had changed his life. I hoped my life could change too.

I gave up running from God. Six months later I’d saved enough money to travel from Australia to Holland and join Dilaram. It was the late 1970s. I ended up in Amsterdam on the Ark—Dilaram’s discipleship community, located on two large houseboats on a canal behind the central railway station.

There I learned how to experience the love of God in prayer and worship. I learned how to communicate the gospel to travelers from all over the world. I saw broken lives restored by the power of the Word and the Spirit in the context of a discipleship community.

There was Jean Claude, a deserter from the French Foreign Legion who had come to faith. I was there the day Interpol came to arrest him. I shared a room with two former members of the Irish Republican Army, both new Christians. One eventually turned himself in and went to prison. I remember Dave, a six-foot-five inch Scotsman and rage-aholic, waving a hammer in front of my face and threatening to kill me. There were people with backgrounds in homosexuality, prostitution, Eastern religions and drugs. Every year around forty of them came to faith and began the journey of discipleship.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Dilaram was a movement. It began when God called the McClungs. Floyd was in India with Youth With A Mission when he passed a beggar on the street and realized the beggar was a young Westerner who had fallen on hard times. There were thousands of hippies on the road from London to Delhi. Many were searching for truth but instead got dysentery and hepatitis and became addicted to drugs.

Floyd and Sally set up the first Dilaram House in Kabul, Afghanistan. They took in ill and drug-dependent hippies, nursed them, talked to them about Jesus and saw many come to know him. Soon Dilaram Houses were established in London, Amsterdam, Kathmandu and Delhi. Many of the workers for these houses had come to faith through Dilaram.

I never forgot the lessons I learned through my time with Dilaram: I discovered the love of God, the call to discipleship, the power of the gospel to change lives, the work of the Holy Spirit, the importance of prayer and Christian community, and God’s heart for the nations. These lessons became part of me and have guided me ever since. I also didn’t mind meeting Michelle in Amsterdam, the Australian girl I would eventually marry.

I was just one of so many lives changed through Floyd’s influence.

In their sixties, when many are planning retirement, Floyd and Sally relocated to Cape Town, South Africa to pursue disciple making movements throughout Africa and beyond. He never left Africa.

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Published on May 30, 2021 23:48

May 27, 2021

What’s Better—Persecution or Power?

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Nilay Saiya analysed data from 166 countries between 2010 and 2020 and discovered “the most important determinant of Christian vitality is the extent to which governments give official support to Christianity through their laws and policies.”

1. Pluralism

In countries where Christianity enjoys a monopoly over other faiths, it is weak. Christianity is more likely to thrive where it has to compete freely with other faith traditions.

In Asia, Christianity is growing twice as fast as the population. Yet only the Philippines is a Christian-majority nation. The ten countries with the fastest-growing Christian populations are all in sub-Saharan Africa. Only in one is there some level of official government support. Contrast this with Europe where Christianity has enjoyed state support for hundreds of years, yet state-supported Christianity is in terminal decline.

2. Privilege

Churches with a favoured position in society think they can exert influence. Instead they tend to become civil religions expressing their faith in rituals and symbols. Commitment levels fall as they drift from a white-hot Biblical faith to cultural accommodation.

3. Persecution

History shows it is possible to suppress the spread of Christianity through systematic, brutal persecution, but that’s the exception, not the rule. Typically persecution results in the vitality of Christianity. Right now there are around one million followers of Christ in Iran, despite the opposition of the Islamic regime. China is on the way to becoming the most populous Christian nation on earth, despite the opposition of its Communist rulers.

Nilay Saiya concludes that political and cultural power is a greater threat to the vitality of Christianity than persecution.

Stay tuned for the analysis and implications of Saiya’s research, including a podcast interview.

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Published on May 27, 2021 18:58

May 25, 2021

Mind the Gap

  Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.  

Everywhere you go on the London Underground there are warning signs to Mind the Gap. To my embarrassment at first I had no idea what those signs meant. Eventually someone explained it’s the gap between the train and platform.

There’s a gap between the Book of Acts and our experience and it matters.

Not everybody agrees. Some say the book of Acts is not a guide for us today. They believe Acts is descriptive not prescriptive. It tells the story of the early church, but not necessarily what we have to do today. In Acts 1, Judas’ replacement was chosen by casting lots. Nobody does that today. So we can’t blindly follow the book of Acts. We need to contextualise.

But isn’t that the case with rest of the Bible? When Jesus spat on the ground, made some mud and applied it to a man’s eyes he wasn’t showing us for all time how to heal the blind. If Acts is only descriptive and not prescriptive, so are the Gospels, maybe even the Epistles. When was the last time you required women to wear head coverings in church?

Acts like the rest of the Bible has to be understood and rightly applied. So when people say, “We’re not going to blindly follow the book of Acts.” I agree. Then I ask them to help me make two lists. What’s not longer prescribed in the book of Acts and what we still need to do today. Here’s a start.

Typically no longer relevant:

Casting lots for leaders.

Missionaries only traveling by road or ship.

Communication to the churches written on animal hides carried by messengers on foot.

Still relevant today:

Desperate corporate prayer and passionate worship.

The power and presence of the Holy Spirit to bear witness to Jesus throughout the world.

The sharing of lives and possessions in communities of disciples.

The widespread proclamation of the gospel resulting in new disciples and churches in major cities spreading into the regions.

Faithful endurance under persecution.

Local churches and mobile missionary bands in partnership.

You get the idea.

Maybe our reluctance to apply the book of Acts is because our settled existence would be threatened. There’s a gap but we don’t want to see it. We want to keep on doing what we’re doing. We’re satisfied with the results we’re getting. We don’t mind.

If we don’t grant the book of Acts its rightful authority we’ll fall back one of two things: (1) Our long-held traditions of church life and mission practice, or (2) We’ll be at the mercy of the latest missional fads.

If there’s a gap between Acts and our cherished traditions or our missional practices, shouldn’t we be asking why?

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Published on May 25, 2021 16:00