Your Definition of Blessing Is Too Small

I was once invited to preach at a church of Burmese refugees. After the singing, one of the church leaders got up and proclaimed that ever since he had believed in Jesus, he’d never once gotten sick. This deacon claimed that what he had experienced for the past twenty-five years is possible for every believer, if only they have enough faith.

As soon as it was my turn to get up to preach, I made sure in my introduction to mention that I was the son of a faithful missionary who had gotten sick and died while faithfully serving Jesus. Yes, like Paul, many faithful Christians get sick, and even die, even though they have great faith.

I’m sure that it was shameful in Burmese culture to indirectly yet publicly contradict a church leader like that when I was just a guest preacher. But I wanted to take my one chance to try to guard these precious believers from the deadly prosperity teaching one of their own deacons was proclaiming from the front.

During that same season, I had been asked to preach elsewhere on Psalm 128. That psalm does present a very direct relationship between faithfulness and blessing: those who fear the Lord will be blessed. Take a look at the unflinching confidence and optimism of this psalm of ascent.

        [1] Blessed is everyone who fears the LORD,
		who walks in his ways!
	[2] You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands;
		you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.
	[3] Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
		within your house;
	your children will be like olive shoots
		around your table.
	[4] Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
		who fears the LORD.

Seems pretty straightforward, right? Everyone who fears the Lord and walks in his ways is blessed. He will enjoy the fruit of his labor, and his family will also be richly blessed. These sorts of material blessings are often true of faithful believers and are especially highlighted in the Old Covenant. Consider Abraham, for example, and how his blessings of herds and wealth are directly tied to his relationship with God.

So what about that Burmese deacon who claimed that believers will be blessed with good health if they are faithful? If you’re only reading Psalm 128, it’s hard to say that he was wrong. Thankfully, mature believers know from reading the whole Bible that that’s not the whole picture, that even the faithful will face suffering. Often, this is despite their faithfulness. And yes, sometimes because of it. Consider the stories of Job, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Stephen, or Paul. While we’re at it, consider the suffering and murder of Christ himself.

So how do we square the Bible’s unblushing promises of blessing for the faithful with its theology of suffering? Put another way, how does Psalm 128 fit with a passage like Psalm 88, where the faithful one seems utterly abandoned to the darkness?

One way to answer this question succinctly is to realize that the Bible, first, expands the meaning of blessing in this life, and second, eternalizes it.

First, the Bible expands the meaning of blessing for the faithful to also include suffering, and even death.

Consider the beatitudes in Matthew 5. Jesus flips our natural understanding of blessing on its head and says that the poor in spirit are blessed, the mourners are blessed, as are the reviled and persecuted. In this way, he is helping his disciples to understand that true blessing is much broader and deeper than the temporal categories we tend to limit it to, such as health, wealth, and honor in this life.

Consider also Hebrews 11, the great hall of faith passage, where there’s this wild turn in verses 36 and 37. After hearing example after example of how the faithful triumphed over adversity, put foreign armies to flight, and performed miracles, suddenly we’re told that the faithful, “… were tortured… suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated.”

Don’t forget that Paul even calls death itself a blessing, gain (Phil 1:21).

The New Testament is chock-full of this kind of radical expansion of the definition of blessing (and the OT as well when we look carefully), along with many reasons for why we should count even our sufferings as blessing. For example, suffering leads to endurance, character, hope, honor, and love (Rom 5:3-5). And our suffering is a chance to fellowship more deeply with Christ himself (Phil 3:10).

But along with this expansion, the Bible also eternalizes the definition of blessing. What I mean by this is that believers are repeatedly promised abounding health, wealth, and honor forever in the new heavens and new earth (Phil 3:20-21, Matt 6:19-20, 2 Cor 4:17). This means that there is a sense in which the promises of the Prosperity ‘Gospel’ are true. They just have the wrong timeline, the wrong scope in view. Taken together with the previous point, we see that their proclamations are, surprisingly, too mild, too small, too narrow, too temporary.

In the light of eternity, every believer can absolutely and without qualification apply Psalm 128 to himself – and every other passage the false teachers use to mislead Christians into thinking that they should be living their best life now. Our God is a rewarder. He promises stunning good for his children in the age to come. In the New Jerusalem, there will be no sickness, no death, no poverty, no suffering (Rev 21:4). The faithful will prosper and be blessed forever. Period.

When I take up both of these aspects of biblical blessing, then in both sickness and health, poverty or riches, I am able to say confidently with the Psalmist, “In whatever I do, I prosper” (Ps 1). Or, “Goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life” (Ps 23). Why? Because when I am walking in faithfulness and repentance in this life, even my suffering is counted as blessing and prosperity from my heavenly Father. But it doesn’t stop there – I also have an eternal inheritance waiting for me that the world’s categories of blessing aren’t even worth comparing to.

Believers, this understanding of the Bible’s definition of blessing really matters. It matters for how we navigate our own suffering, or that of our brothers and sisters. It matters for how we process how our kids turn out. It matters for how we do politics.

Do we understand that our poverty, our sickness, our rebellious children, or our failed political project might be because we have been faithful and are in turn being blessed by God? I have heard many Christians ask the question of whether or not their current suffering is a result of some sin in their life they’re not aware of. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a Christian ask if it might be the result of their faithfulness.

Most of those reading this blog will be alert to the dangers of the Prosperity ‘Gospel.’ But we can slip into the same heretical outlook when we apply a narrow and unbiblical definition of blessing to the results of our parenting or to our political dreams.

In fact, one of my main concerns with so much of the conversation about Christian Nationalism is how simplistic it often is in this regard. “Look at how the downfall of the West is due to the failure of the Western church! If we get our political theology just right and are faithful, then God will once again bless our country and our government,” etc., etc. Ironically, I sometimes hear this echoed here in Central Asia among our focus people group when believers make claims such as, “If enough of us follow Jesus then Jesus will give us our own country!”

Well, tell that to the Christians under the ancient Sassanians who boldly and faithfully endured centuries of Zoroastrian persecution only to have the armies of Islam invade just as their own freedom and a Christian government were finally within reach. Or the French Protestant Huguenots who were massacred and exiled and never saw the kind of Protestant nation their brothers in faith were seeing birthed elsewhere. Tell that to the masses of North Korean believers who experienced incredible revival in the early 1900s, only to see their country divided and turned into a Communist dystopia.

Were these blessed for their faithfulness? Yes. But not in a worldly sense. If our political theology cannot account for the myriad examples throughout history where faithful communities of Christians had their political hopes utterly dashed, then it is a political theology built on an unbiblical definition of blessing.

Jesus says that the church will storm the gates of hell. But my physical health? My bank account? My physical descendants? My country? All categories that God might take away, call me blessed while doing it, and then give them back to me in eternity in a fuller way than I could ever now imagine.

No, that does not mean we stop pursuing these good and God-given forms of natural blessing. God can and still does bless his people in temporal ways that make straightforward sense to them and the world. The diligent often gain wealth. Children trained up well often flourish. Countries full of Christian often end up with just laws and somewhat less bad governments. But not always. Our posture while pursuing these natural blessings must reflect the full biblical perspective.

According to the Bible, blessing in this age is expanded. And in the age to come, it is eternalized. Let us renew our minds accordingly.

For many of us, that means our current definition of blessing is simply too small.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

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This post is 100% human-generated and written. I used an AI tool for searching and for spelling/grammar checking.

Embodied Truth and Non-Residential Ministry

“In the beginning, I never understood what you meant by God being our Father. It didn’t make sense to me. But now that we’re good friends, now I understand.”

My friend Hama* said this to me one day, and it was then my turn to take a while to figure out what he was getting at. It was a quote from Tim Keller that eventually made things click for me: “The best hermeneutic for the gospel is a redeemed life.”

Turns out there are aspects of spiritual truth that are near-impossible to understand unless we see them lived out in the life of another believer. The good news itself is not something we find clear and plausible through mere information transfer. No, there is something about an embodied message that is key to the process of genuine conversion and spiritual growth. In our part of the world, the Holy Spirit uses lots of dreams about Jesus to draw people to himself. But he always, sooner or later, sends the dreamer a flesh-and-blood evangelist (which is typically the point at which they actually repent and believe).

Because of this dynamic, I conclude that long-term missionaries, on the ground, are an essential part of the gospel taking root in unreached places.

Then this week I was reminded of yet another area where living among our focus people group makes all the difference; namely, gaining a deep understanding of the culture. During a conversation about the local culture’s bent towards concrete thinking instead of abstract, a local colleague pointed out that I needed to take it one step further. He said that the local culture can and does often communicate about the abstract, but they start with the concrete, and use that concrete imagery and language in order to then think about and discuss the abstract. It’s not either/or; it’s more about the direction of things.

I’ve been living here for a decade or so, and involved in ministry with Central Asians in the diaspora even longer than that. Yet this was a brand new insight for me – one that only emerged through a long process of curious presence and a sort of marination in a foreign cultural milieu.

This is the same sort of marinating that made me eventually realize that when it came to preaching vs. participatory Bible study, we foreign missionaries had it completely backwards. We all assumed that preaching was the foreign form while group Bible study was the truly local and contextual form. It took a while, but listening to locals and observing the local culture over a number of years eventually broke through my missiological brainwashing. Local culture is full of preaching, at least in the form of non-Christian authoritative proclamation (religious, political, social, you name it). Group Bible study is the foreign, less natural form. False assumptions continue to lead most missionaries here to jettison preaching, when in fact we should be leaning into it, even while we teach the locals how to also do that weird group study of the text thing.

Therefore, I similarly conclude that long-term missionaries, on the ground, are an essential part of good contextualization.

Now consider what it takes for believers in a strongman culture to plant churches that are led by a team of humble pastors. Sure, we can fly them out to do trainings on church leadership in another country, or we could fly a trainer in. But merely understanding the concepts of the biblical model of church leadership does not typically lead to locals implementing them. No, in order to actually build a structure you’ve never seen before (never mind sustaining it in crisis), you first have to see it modeled. This is simply human nature. That means if we want locals to plant and sustain churches that are led by a plurality of qualified elders, local believers will themselves need to experience being part of churches where that kind of leadership is on display.

As with the gospel taking root and doing good contextualization, long-term missionaries, on the ground, are an essential part of planting and sustaining healthy churches.

But the Apostles were non-residential itinerants!

When it comes to the Apostles, yes, some of them moved around a lot and did a lot of ministry via shorter visits and writing (looking at you, Paul). But when we pay careful attention to their letters, it’s clear that they preferred a face-to-face ministry of example whenever possible, and would even settle in one place for extended periods.

“For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.” -Romans 1:11–12

“But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time, in person not in heart, we endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face, because we wanted to come to you—I, Paul, again and again—but Satan hindered us.” -1 Thessalonians 2:17–18

“as we pray most earnestly night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith?” -1 Thessalonians 3:10

“Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete.” -2 John 1:12

“Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears.” -Acts 20:31

But many of the least reached areas do not allow residential missionaries!

This point is valid, and the strongest case for non-residential missions. However, even in places where this is the case, creative access strategies can sometimes allow for residential ministry, even if it’s only for a limited time. Many of the smaller cities and towns in our area of Central Asia are like this. Missionaries can live there for a few years. But once word gets out that a small house church is forming, typically they get run out and have to relocate to the big city.

In other cases, semi-residential ministry is still possible among displaced or diaspora populations of the focus unreached group. This can allow for many of the benefits that we’ve already mentioned that would otherwise come from living in the homeland.

For cases where residential ministry is truly not possible, I do believe that non-residential work is permissible in the “best of the bad options” kind of approach. It’s tough, but it can and has been done faithfully – although I will add that it seems to require a unique sort of gifting in order to do it well.

The problem is that many missions methodologies want to say that non-residential ministry is preferable in all kinds of places compared to the traditional model of missionaries living on the ground for the long term while they seek to make disciples and plant churches. In this view, coaches, coordinators, or trainers living outside of the target context do a better job of reaching the unreached because they don’t risk getting deported or surveilled, they don’t slow down the movement because of their paternalism, prominence, or by infusing their own culture; they can coach or train a much larger group of local leaders via social media or outside trainings; and they don’t put local believers in danger through being locally known as their friends.

Putting aside the issue of the New Testament precedent of face-to-face ministry, one of my main concerns with non-residential ministry approaches like this is how remarkably well they fit, hand in glove, with typical the blind spots and handicaps of Western missionaries.

What do I mean by this? Well, we tend to idolize safety and security, both for ourselves and for local believers. We have a bad habit of treating local believers like projects rather than true friends. We are hyper-allergic to any sense that we might be paternalistic and are deathly afraid of “contaminating” the local believers’ culture and forms with that of our own. We are jaded when it comes to institutions. We are much too excited about speed, scale, and efficiency. And we positively love roles where we can have significant influence with very little official authority or spiritual accountability.

No wonder non-residential methodologies are so popular right now. They fit us so very well. If only they served the local believers as well as they serve our current Western evangelical moment.

Add to all of this the very real danger of the foreign trainers and coaches getting played by schemers who are happy to inflate numbers and tell tall tales of how many groups or churches they’ve started – a dynamic that only gets worse when the missionaries are not going deep in the local language and culture and can’t vouch for local leaders’ character by means of long friendships in context.

No, whenever possible, we need missionaries to be residential. I know this is not, in fact, always possible. But this is one of the weird cases where the unfortunate exception has now become the preferred norm in certain circles.

Non-residential missionaries who are laboring hard to faithfully engage populations you truly can’t access, I salute you. You have a really hard and noble calling. But for all who are choosing non-residential ministry when face-to-face ministry is somehow possible, I have deep concerns about both your blind spots as well as the long-term fruitfulness of your labors.

If the internet age and the rise of AI teach us anything, it should be this: nothing replaces true, face-to-face human interaction and community. Concepts such as God as our heavenly father or what a healthy church is cannot be simply downloaded from the cloud or transferred through slides at a training seminar. They need to be embodied.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash

This post is 100% human-generated and written. I used an AI tool for searching and spelling and grammar checking only.

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

I have written many posts over the years exploring how far too many missionaries have drunk the metaphorical Kool-Aid and need to get back to healthier ministry models based both on the Bible and good, local contextualization.

This is not one of those posts.

This is a post about some very literal Kool-Aid that I should not have drunk. Fair warning, this story from my high school years in Melanesia involves a lot of what has at times been called Montezuma’s revenge. I won’t get graphic, but, alas, I can’t tell the story without that very central aspect of it. If you choose to read on, consider yourself warned.

Growing up, I had a mom who enjoyed a good prank. She would even prank us sometimes. During one of my sleepover birthday parties, my friends and I awoke to find that my mom had painted a number of our toenails while we were sleeping, as well as hidden Ziploc bags of slimy cooked spaghetti noodles into a fair number of our sleeping bags. I got her back by putting salt in her morning tea.

A few years later, my friends and I got some girls in our class good by dumping a bucket full of live cane toads into their exclusive hot tub gathering. My mom then happily collaborated with these girls to get me back when they ‘princess-bombed’ my bedroom.

Mom (mostly) knew of and was (mostly) amused by my friends and I stink-bombing or cough-bombing gatherings of other MKs (missionary kids), toilet-papering or VCR tape-wrapping our friends’ or teachers’ houses, and water-balloon ambushing high school couples who were just trying to have a romantic chat on a lovely Melanesian evening. She might have even quietly assisted graduating senior classes so they could pull off their tradition of pranking the entire school during the final week when their classes were done, but the rest of the school was still in session.

All that to say, I only ever saw my mom once get really angry over a prank.

It was the beginning of summer break, and my oldest brother was back visiting us after having returned to the US for university. I was sixteen, heading into the 10th grade. Most of the dorm kids were back with their families in remote, tribal areas of the country, but there were still a good number of us ‘base kids’ around to do things with. Breaks could sometimes be boring, but it wasn’t too hard to find groups of other MKs to hang out with, even if these groupings were somewhat different and more age-diverse than they were when school was in session.

On this particular night, a friend heading into the eleventh grade was hosting a movie night at his house. My older brother and I decided that we’d go. I don’t remember what the movie was, but I do remember arriving happy and being told that there was some Kool-Aid in the kitchen if we wanted any. Without thinking much of it, both of us got some big cups of red Kool-Aid and settled in to watch the movie. Afterward, we walked back home. It was an enjoyable summer evening, but there was nothing remarkable about it – or so I thought.

The next thing I remember is waking up suddenly at 5 am, knowing from the wild and awful feeling in my gut that I absolutely had to get to the bathroom. I rushed from my bedroom down the dark hallway to the single bathroom we had in that house. Relieved to have made it, I reached for the handle. It was locked.

What was going on? I banged on the door.

“Uh… I really have to get in there!”

The voice of my older brother came through the door, muffled, “It’ll be a minute. I’m really not doing well either.”

“I don’t think I have a minute!”

…

Somehow, I hung on until my brother stumbled out of the bathroom a few minutes later. As I took his spot, something began to happen to my body that I had never quite experienced before. But after only a few shocking minutes of the most intense bowel movement of my life, my brother started banging on the door.

“Hurry up! I need to go again!”

“What?” You just went? What is happening?”

“I dunno, man, but something is really wrong… Maybe we ate something bad!?”

[insert audible moans of an unintelligible nature]

After a minute, I stumbled out, and my brother took his turn again. Initially, I felt much better and thought I had gone through the worst of it. However, only a few minutes later I realized my relief had been a delusion. Once again, I banged on the bathroom door, and my brother and I went through the same fraught negotiation.

This miserable tag-teaming of ours continued for hours. We reached the point, similar to food poisoning, where you know there is nothing left for your body to give, but somehow it is going to try anyway – and you, miserable you, are simply along for the ride. Finally, sometime mid-morning, we collapsed into our beds for some desperately needed recovery sleep.

It took all day before the insurrection in our intestines was finally quelled. Somehow, by God’s grace, we had performed the single toilet musical chair game successfully. But yes, there had been some very close calls. My brother and I sat across the table from each other to try to sip some fluids. We were skinnier than we had been a mere few hours beforehand. And our eyes and faces had a pale, shell-shocked look. What in the name of Melaneisan parasites had we just gone through?

My mom, for her part, had been doing some digging. Apparently my brother and I were the only ones from the previous night who had gotten sick, so it must not have been the snacks that had been passed around. Eventually, a local friend and student who had also been at the movie night dropped by and fessed up. One of the other MKs had dissolved eighty-some laxative pills in the Kool-Aid. He had warned everyone else beforehand not to drink it. Then, the whole room had watched in quiet amusement as my brother and I chugged whole glasses of the stuff.

No wonder I had never felt that way before. That may have been the first time I had ever taken laxatives, let alone drunk the equivalent of fifteen or twenty of them.

This was why my mom was so angry. All kinds of pranks may be good fun, but she felt we could have gotten pretty messed up physically from overdosing like that. It seemed that a line had clearly been crossed that could have made things down right dangerous (for this same kind of reason we had also stopped doing our cotton ball/chili pepper cough-bomb attacks).

I’m not sure what conversations may have taken place afterwards, but I remember hearing that our fellow MK responsible for our night and day of gastrointestinal pergatory felt really bad about it all. No direct apology was ever forthcoming, but he did end up becoming a financial supporter of my family many years down the road – perhaps the whole Kool-Aid incident played some part in that. God works in mysterious ways. However, I had forgiven him almost right away. I knew only too well the foolish things bored MKs can get up to. For instance, I once suggested we toilet paper the mission helicopter. I didn’t go through with it, but some friends did. That one was, similarly, a really bad idea.

Yes, all was quickly forgiven, but my brother and I were still somewhat-traumatized from drinking that Kool-Aid. So, as soon as we heard there was an opportunity to move into another house on the mission compound with two bathrooms, we were adamantly for it – even though this would mean only living in it for a year and then moving back to the same single-bathroom house. We’d rather move twice than stay and risk another night of Montezuma’s musical chair revenge.

Is there a lesson to be learned from this tale? Like my title, I could say “Don’t drink the laxative Kool-Aid.” But how are you to know if some mischievous classmate has secretly spiked it with dozens of Ex-Lax pills beforehand? No, I guess the lesson really is for those considering doing the spiking.

Friend, trust me, don’t do it. You do not understand the things you will set in motion. And I don’t just mean that metaphorically.

We’ve raised 16k of our 20k goal this summer! Would you consider supporting our work? You can give here through the blog or contact meto find out how to give through our organization.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash

This post is 100% human-written. I used an AI tool for spell-check and grammar checking only.

A Gospel Grenade

Remember that time when Paul lobbed a gospel grenade into the midst of the Sanhedrin (“I’m on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead!) and it turned his blasphemy trial into a rabbinical bar fight? Luke says it got so bad the Roman tribune was genuinely worried that Paul would be torn to pieces (Acts 23:5-10).

One part of me thinks Paul was a bit of a madman for attempting this. The other part of me would like to try it someday.

I’ve never been in a setting where dropping gospel truth led to literal fist fights. But last year I did get a bit of a taste of what it was like to set off an uproar in my living room because of the scandalous nature of the God’s grace.

Until the Iran war kicked off and our proximity to certain drone strikes meant the guys got squeamish, we hosted a weekly discussion group for local unbelieving men. The concept was that we would partner with a few local believers by opening up our apartment, serving copious amounts of chai, popcorn, and sunflower seeds, and helping to facilitate discussion that would spiral into gospel truth.

Most of these young believing men do not yet have households and homes of their own to host this kind of gathering, so opening up our place was a practical help in this way. The fact that we are also Americans who speak the local language (and that my wife also knows how to keep the chai and snacks generously flowing) also helped sweeten the deal for the invited group of angsty young agnostics, philosopher types, and liberal Muslims.

Week by week, the motley crew that gathered grew in number. By the end, our living room was overflowing with around twenty five local men. We eventually learned that if we didn’t recruit a couple of the single teachers from our kids’ school to keep the kitchen going, we’d never make it.

It was chaos, but mostly a happy chaos. And chaos that led to gospel truth being shared every single week. It also wasn’t a very structured time. Usually, a young local pastor who was the main facilitator of the time would prepare one meaningful question to throw out to the attendees after we’d gathered them up from the half dozen or so smaller conversation groups that would inevitably form. This good question – “What is the true nature of unity?” for example – would give everyone present a chance to share, including the handful of believers who could then inject truth from God’s word into the mix.

Some weeks I would begin to despair as the deeply unhappy Jungian psychiatrist would drone on and on about the collective unconscious. Sometimes, the questions about alien soteriology, trauma, politics, or long-dead French philosophers would leave me uncertain if the night would truly be worth the effort it took to pull it off. But at the end of each gathering, I always went to bed encouraged (as well as both jittery and exhausted) because of the extent to which I or the other believers had got to share truth about Jesus.

We even had one young man come to faith through all this – a guest invited by the unhappy Jungian, no less.

One evening we called everyone into the bigger circle, including the guys who had been smoking hookah out on the balcony, when the discussion settled on Christians’ belief that even the vilest of sinners can be forgiven and go to heaven by faith alone through Christ alone.

One of the young political poets had the floor, and, as would sometimes happen, he directed the question to me as the older and more experienced Christian present. I’m only in my late thirties, but when the majority of the room is made up of young twenty-somethings, I’m considered an elder statesman of sorts.

“So, if Hitler…”

“Hitler?”

“Believed in Jesus before he died…”

“Yes…”

“Are you really saying that even Hitler, someone so bad, would be forgiven and go to heaven?”

The room grew silent as everyone turned to look at me. I chewed on whether it would be better to reframe the question or to answer it directly. No, I decided to simply go for it this time. Slowly, and as clearly as I could in the local language, I gave the blunt and direct answer.

“Jesus teaches that if the worst person in the entire world truly repents and believes… then yes… they are immediately and forever forgiven of all their sin and they go to paradise.”

And that’s when the room exploded.

I leaned back and watched as the room erupted in dozens of objections, men turning and arguing with another, hands gesticulating in the air, men on their feet in protest, popcorn and sunflower seeds flying and spilling onto the couches and the floor.

Behold. The scandal of the gospel.

The good news really is foolishness to those whose eyes are still blinded to the truth, those who do not yet understand that if this is not the case, if there is no hope for someone like Hitler, then there is no hope for them.

Thankfully, once things calmed down a little bit, I got to expand on this truth a little bit more, that it’s good news that the scandal is true. The worst sinner in all of history can be completely and utterly forgiven and made new. And that is amazing news for everyone, but in particular, it’s good news for the worst sinner that I know; namely, myself. I can be and have been scandalously pardoned and welcomed into paradise. Yes, if there is hope for a genocidal maniac, I explained, then there is hope for every one of us.

The scene in our living room that night reminds me that it is so hard, even impossible, to believe this rather than to stumble over it. But the miracle of the new birth shows us that the blind and offended can and do come to see and love the beauty at the heart of the scandal.

The vilest offender who truly believes
That moment from Jesus a pardon receives

Pray for us. We restart part of this group as a structured Bible study later on this week – and we’re hoping that more of these gospel grenades will hit home.

We’ve raised 15k of our 20k goal this summer! Would you consider supporting our work? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The Perseverance of the (Fractious) Saints

One of the hard things about returning to Caravan City after a couple of months away was hearing that two brothers in the local-language church have broken off to do their own thing. Tempted apparently by promises of money and position by a group of Central Asian Anabaptists of ill-repute (yes, really), they made secret plans to become the leaders of their local language group. Rather than seeking counsel from their pastors or fellow church members, these men simply announced what they had already decided to do. Then, along with this announcement they threw out a bunch of random complaints, seemingly trying to find some that would stick and justify their departure.

This is a sad development, but one that has happened so many times here it almost feels like a trope. A promising new believer does well for a year or two, truly growing in knowledge and ability. Unfortunately, character does not grow as quickly as knowledge and ability do. This often leads to a dangerous stage where a local believer sitting under faithful discipleship has a head full of knowledge, lots of idealistic energy, and lots of ideas they want to see realized ASAP. The honeymoon stage with their church and their leaders is, by now, long over, so this believer is seeing some genuine shortcomings and weaknesses – along with many things that they misunderstand as such. Quietly, discontentment begins to grow and fester.

Often, all that is needed to spark a breakaway is some other ministry that finds and is impressed with the local believer, sympathizes with their complaints, and offers them money and/or a position if they would come and be a leader in their efforts. Sometimes, this is actual headhunting. Other times, it’s a well-meaning group that doesn’t know the local believer well enough to spot the character issues that have kept their church from giving them more leadership responsibilities. I’ve seen both. And neither tend to end well.

This dynamic mirrors something common in the tribal culture of our people. Often, sons and nephews of a tribal chief will chafe under the leadership of the rightful head of the tribe. Rival tribes know this, so they secretly approach these younger men, offering to support them if they will break away with a cohort of their tribe loyal to them. In this way, they can weaken their rival tribe’s position and strengthen their own. Our people group’s history is full of this kind of thing. I would go as far as to say this pattern of seizing power rather than waiting patiently for it seems to be a besetting sin of the men in this culture.

When it comes to churches, a few bold wolf-types might attempt to take over the church from within. But for many, it’s easier to break away and start something new under someone else’s patronage. Sometimes, these fractious men are, in fact, dangerous predators. But other times they’re just foolish and impatient. Most likely, the two brothers who broke away this summer are in the latter category. That means there’s more hope for them to eventually come back around and repent. However, I’ve rarely seen the sort of humility required for something like that to happen. More often than not, breaking away from a church that has nurtured you makes it all too easy to break away from the new patron and their church, and then the next one, and then the next one, etc., etc. Much like getting your first tattoo or plastic surgery, once you have broken away from a church, you tend to keep doing it.

However, just because humble repentance and reconciliation is rare doesn’t mean it never happens. Unhealthy church leaders can humbly repent and seek reconciliation. An example from Poet City reminds me that true believers will, eventually, come back around and pursue faithfulness and repentance. Even when it seems unlikely, true believers will even keep doing this until the end – and in this way demonstrate that their faith is real. This is, after all, what perseverance of the saints means. See how the doctrinal statement from our international church puts it:

“We believe that genuine believers are only those who endure to the end. Their persevering attachment to Christ is the grand mark which distinguishes them from those who falsely profess faith in Christ. Christians may fall into sin, which grieves the Spirit, impairs their graces and comforts, brings reproach on the church and temporal judgments on themselves, yet they shall be renewed again to repentance, and be kept by the power of God through faith for salvation.” (1 Jn 3:9; 5:18; 1 Jn 2:19; Matt 13:20-21; Phil 1:6; Heb 13:5; Jude 24-25)

Yes, even if they are a fractious believer, if they truly belongs to Jesus, they will, sooner or later, come to their senses, repent, and walk in faithfulness. This is the evidence of the genuine faith within them.

Back in the beginning stages of our church plant in Poet City, we made a serious enemy of one of the few local pastors around. This man had a reputation for not playing well with others and for ruling his little house church with an iron hand, like a little strongman. His church was made up of a group of believers who had somehow survived the implosion of the house church I had been connected to back in my single days – itself a group that had been formed by a promising local leader who had prematurely seized power from his gentle Australian mentors. All this, along with some theological concerns, meant that healthy partnership at the time wasn’t really possible. It also meant that when a local family stopped attending his church and started attending our church plant, we were mostly okay with it.

A follow-up meeting with this pastor about a possible transfer of these believers from his church to ours did not go well at all. He claimed that these believers belonged to him and that they had no right or freedom to ever join another church. We tried to reason gently with him, but to no avail. Long story short, he ended up raging and cursing at us and telling us we were out to destroy the church. After that, didn’t think we’d ever hear from him again. At least not in any friendly sense.

Imagine my surprise when, eight years later, I heard that he had humbly approached my teammate to ask forgiveness for that conversation – and to ask if they could become friends and partners. A couple years on now, this relationship is still warm and happy. Why? Because this pastor is a true believer – and sooner or later, true believers repent and come back around. Even the fractious ones.

All this gives me hope for these two brothers who have foolishly broken off. Give it some time, give it years or decades if necessary. If they’re truly brothers, repentance and reconciliation is in their future. If not, then God has been merciful to prune his church of those who appear to belong but who actually don’t.

But I will keep praying for these fractious believers. If they are indeed saints, then we’ll be hearing from them again.

We’ve raised 15k of our 20k goal this summer! Would you consider supporting our work? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash

Something Is Wrong with the Missionary Teams

“Someday, my best friend and I hope to serve together on a frontier missions team!”

“Is that right? Ha… you won’t stay best friends for long.”

I’ve always remembered this interaction with a missions mobilizer from back in my college days. It struck me because it seemed like such a jaded thing to say. Surely, teaming on the mission field couldn’t be that bad.

Then I became a missions pastor and saw how church-based teams were blowing up left and right. This was surprising because these teams were often made up of friends from the same church who had gotten along superbly back in the home country.

Then I joined a team on the field and witnessed a tragic falling out between our teammates, both families good friends of ours, with whom we’d planted a church and even survived a wolf attack.

Then I became a team leader and experienced my own team members turning against me for reasons I could never quite figure out.

Then I became a supervisor of team leaders and saw some of those same team members themselves become team leaders – only to have their teams turn on them as well.

I remember driving from Poet City to Caravan City with a colleague a few years ago, on my way to deliver a disciplinary action to a veteran missionary, who, it had emerged, had been treating a younger missionary in a horrible fashion. In tears, I lamented that we’d never be able to help the local believers if we – the ‘mature’ Christians – couldn’t somehow figure out how to love one another.

Now, curiously, I find myself on a team that does seem to maintain a normal and happy Christian unity, even as I continue to hear about team after team in other contexts busy biting and devouring one another.

All of this has led me to this conclusion: Something is wrong with the way we do missionary teams.

I do not claim to have a full diagnosis of the why and the how. But I’m ready to say that something is definitely wrong. It may be commonly accepted, even cliché, to say that team conflict is the number one reason missionaries leave the field. We may have all gotten used to this. But it is not normal for mature Christians to behave this way. It’s not just a feature of the missionary task. It is some kind of bug – and a deadly one at that.

Several issues have come to the surface as I’ve chewed on this issue over the last decade or two.

First, missionary teams try to be (and sometimes have to be) everything for one another. They are colaborers in the gospel work. But they are also coworkers in an organization and often also in a platform job. They’re usually church for one another. And they are pseudo-family, with the kids calling all the adults ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle,’ along with all the holiday and birthday expectations that come along with that. These layers on their own would be enough, but missionaries also have a say (and often convictions) about one another’s housing, schooling, vehicles, time off, lifestyle choices, and place of worship.

All this means that the normal evangelical missionary team is all up in one another’s business in a way that, in the home country, would better fit a cult than a healthy church. This kind of layer-upon-layer-upon-layer lifestyle is a ticking time bomb. Few relationships outside of that of believing spouses can survive these kinds of layered expectations and demands.

Compounding this, many missionary teams side-step the local church on the mission field. By far, the most common practice for evangelicals on the mission field is to retain church membership in their sending church back home (if even that) while never submitting themselves to a local church on the field. Many default to a ‘weekly missionary chapel’ practice with other foreigners. Many missionaries simply do this because it’s practical. But some believe that, as missionaries, they are part of a different category than normal Christians – that to be part of a Pauline team means you plant churches but do not need to be part of one yourself in the place where you live. The missionary team is treated as a permanent and exclusive structure, one in which missionaries continually hover in a church-adjacent posture for decades on end.

Second, there is a sort of insanity that is almost a given for a first-term missionary. The pressures of immersion in a new culture and language, the push to learn that new culture and language, the fact that your societal competence was just downgraded to that of a toddler, the grief of leaving behind family and friends, the unresolved issues from your past, the platform demands to maintain your visa, the culture shock, the unrealized expectations going unmet one after the other – all of these lead to tremendous emotional, spiritual, and mental angst. And that angst often wants someone to blame. Sometimes, first-termers will turn on each other. Usually, they turn on their team leader.

Third, and pouring gasoline on the flames of previous issue, is that most missionary teams are made up of believers from congregational traditions – but the team they join on the field is often strictly hierarchical. The team leader is often given ultimate strategy and decision-making authority. If he is a wise and humble leader, he will wield this power very cautiously. But in the stress and urgent dumpster-fire lifestyle so common on the mission field, many team leaders simply do not have the margin to wield their power cautiously. They do what they can, try to make good decisions, try to care for the team and the local believers and keep the organzation happy – and then are often surprised that their team members end up resentful or making claims that they’ve been victims of neglect or spiritual abuse.

Fourth, the missionary team is under profound spiritual attack. Satan and his minions do not want the multiplication of healthy churches among the unreached. It’s not just the dynamics I’ve already mentioned that cause best friends to turn on each other once they’re teammates on the field. It’s also that we have a very real enemy who will do whatever he can to destroy these believers who are seeking to establish gospel footholds among the nations. He delights to deceive us so that we come to feel that our real enemies are not him and his spiritual forces, but actually our colleagues.

When it comes to this final issue, spiritual warfare, we know that there is something we can do – pray. If your church does not yet have a regular rhythm that it uses to pray for its missionaries, please do whatever it takes to put one in place. It’s desperately needed. But for the first three issues – team size, team angst, and team structure – is there anything that can be done? Or do they merely come baked into the missionary enterprise?

I do not think we are without options, at least when it comes to a great many of the missionary teams out there.

First, when it comes to the team’s pressure-cooker size dynamics, there are many contexts where missionary teams can join healthy churches on the field – or intentionally choose to form one. The broader community of the local church can bear burdens so much better than the missionary team can on its own – the local church is the structure God has ordained for doing this. Rather than subjecting themselves to decades of lopsided deficient community, missionaries should form or join healthy local churches whenever they have the opportunity to do so. Yes, even if this means they worship in a different language or culture than that which they are focusing on for their missionary efforts. Better a team that is slower to learn language and church plant but that joyfully endures for decades on the field than a team that is uber proficient in language learning and church planting only to blow up and leave devastation in its wake.

We simply cannot and should not replace the local church. The missionary team exists for the church’s sake and, once it has been planted, must submit itself to it rather than continually remaining unaccountable to it. This is not only good ecclesiology. It is also good for the survival of missionary teams. One of the main keys for long-term team health that has emerged in our context is whether or not a team chooses to or is able to join a mature church. This broader local body of Christ, I’m convinced, is what makes our current team so, well, unified and downright happy. It’s not that there’s never conflict. But that conflict seems to be so much less pressurized and existential compared to what we’ve seen on previous teams.

Again, I know this is not always possible. But it will become possible in so many more contexts if it is our actual plan from the beginning.

What about team angst, especially (though not exclusively) that of first-termers? Here, counsel is needed pre-field, on the field, and post-field for greater missionary humility and self-awareness. It’s okay to feel like you’re going to explode because of the intensity of your culture shock (and because it’s likely dredging up your family of origin issues you carried with you to the field). It’s not okay to actually blow up on your teammates or your team leader. I have sat in meetings where team leaders gently and patiently listened and led, only to hear later that the team members in those meetings claimed to have witnessed domineering leadership there. Occasionally, this is team members being slippery and dishonest. Often, it’s that they need help parsing what it is exactly that is making them crazy, and that, no, it’s not really their team leader after all. Much like puberty and pregnancy, what many missionaries need is a kind, experienced older brother or sister to tell them, “Yes, that’s also normal. Keep going. You’re going to be okay.”

Organizations, for their part, need to do a good job of shielding their personnel from reckless claims of spiritual abuse or domineering leadership (which are increasingly common in this climate). It’s not that this is never the case. Team leaders will sometimes need to be disciplined, reassigned, or removed. Abusive leadership on the field can and does happen. But often a whole lot of that angst on a missionary teams is just normal, first-term insanity.

Finally, what about team structure? Here, I’m going to put out a hypothesis. Missionary teams that are run more like first-among-equal elder teams are going to be far healthier than teams with the common single-leader structure. Will this be less efficient? Sure, in the short-term. But my theory is that teams that make decisions together, similar to a healthy council of elders or deacons, will preserve a more robust unity. As with many elder or deacon teams or congregational churches that vote on things, this will mean defining which kinds of decisions need to be brought to a vote, and which kinds of decisions will be the prerogative of the TL. But any kind of change in that direction would be an improvement from the current structure where team leaders are empowered to impose or veto just about anything.

Baptists and other congregational churches, here I’m speaking especially to you. Apply the priesthood of all believers to your missionary teams, just as you apply it to your churches. We have, inadvertently, been structuring our teams as if we were crypto-Catholics.

Friends, pray for missionary teams. Exhort them to join churches on the field. Counsel them in the midst of all their angst. And structure them to better reflect the church. I believe these things can make a difference when it comes to the great difficulty of teaming on the field.

I do not want to live in a world where best friends cannot serve on the mission field together and remain best friends. I do not want to resign to this sad and jaded outlook, one that reflects so poorly on the power of the gospel. But something is very wrong with our missionary teams. And, for the sake of the gospel, we have got to figure out how to fix it.

We’ve raised 10k of our 20k goal this summer! Would you consider supporting our work? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region, and our kids’ TCK school is also in need of teachers for the 2026-2027 school year. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash

Thief! Hold Him! Hit Him!

There was a lot of crime in the Melanesian country where I grew up. Much of this was the result of the breakdown of old tribal structures and community as locals moved to the cities and towns to find work, only to find themselves caught up in money problems and addictions. It’s a story that has played out all over the world as previously isolated tribal societies crash, head-on, into modernity.

This is not to say that their previous tribal isolation was better. On the contrary, there are few societies so dark and so stripped of common grace as a pre-Christian, animistic jungle tribe. The whole noble savage thing is a convenient fiction created by Westerners who apparently needed this fantasy to make sense of their own society’s continued brokenness. It is, to use a newer term, a luxury belief, one you can only afford if you yourself are not living in that kind of situation or truly friends with those who are.

The prevalence of robbery and armed assault, especially in the cities and towns, meant that foreigners and missionaries needed to be alert and intentional whenever heading to the market, the grocery store, or even just going for a walk. Men needed to be careful with their wallets and backpacks due to pickpockets (and presumably now phones as well). They needed to walk several paces behind any women with them in order to keep an eye out for any potential trouble.

Women or girls needed to dress modestly, usually in skirts and loose clothing, and to use purses or bags that they could strap across their torsos. The local woven bags with long straps that both men and women use in that culture were perfect for this. Wearing these bags of spun plant fibers, fur, or colorful yarn also signaled to locals a respect and appreciation for their culture that won friends when out in public and distinguished you from the cash-laden tourists.

In this kind of high-crime context, my mom was a stellar example of how knowing the local language and culture, and going everywhere with local friends, could lead to a surprising degree of freedom and favor. My mom is a short, petite woman, and for most of our years living in Melanesia, she was a young widow, an easy target. But she tended to experience far fewer security incidents than other foreign women because of the posture she struck with the locals. No matter the country, locals are able to pick up on which foreigners extend a humble, genuine friendship of equality. And not only does this mean you make lifelong (and sometimes eternal) friends. It also makes you far safer. Many of the MK girls in my school also did an admirable job of navigating these dynamics well, despite the many challenges.

But even the most careful or skillful sometimes get careless – or become a target even though they did everything ‘right.’ In case we were ever attacked, locals and adult missionaries taught us that we had options. In particular, other locals who were present would leap to our defense if you called out in the trade language, “Thief! Hold him! Hit him!!!” This is because even though crime was so prevalent, it was still despised in the local honor-shame culture. So, calling out this kind of phrase while an attack was happening could mean the sudden appearance of a crowd of local vigilantes eager to help you – and to teach the thief a good lesson with their fists.

I’d heard the stories. But I’d never seen it happen, nor been forced to use this defense mechanism myself. One part of me hoped I’d never have to. Another part of me was curious. Would a mob of friendly locals really materialize out of nowhere and rally to my defense if I remembered to yell the magic words?

One afternoon in my 11th or 12th grade year, my mom, I, and one of the girls in my class went into town together to do some errands. This girl was a close friend with whom I was in an on-again, off-again relationship. I believe when this incident took place, we were in another season of deciding to just stay good friends. I’m pretty sure there were some feelings still there, at least on my part. High school is a confusing time for the heart. But we were committed to navigating the confusion in such a way that we could preserve our friendship as fellow believers, for which I remain very thankful.

Regardless, there was enough trust there for her family to feel comfortable with her going into town with us, even though not having an adult man present was technically against mission policy. My family, for understandable reasons, was often granted an exception to this rule.

We had finished up our errands when we decided, on a whim, to stop into a little shop on Main Street to get some deep-fried snacks for the ride home. I loved (and still miss) the deep-fried flour balls made in that country called skon. Cheap, hot, and sprinkled with salt, I was always down to munch on a bag of skons on the way back from a town or river trip.

My mom chose to remain with the car out front (another one of those security practices that was commonplace) while I went into the snack shop with my friend. Because it was such a short stop, she left her shoulder bag in the car and just grabbed her little money pouch. It was small inside the shop, with a little greasy lobby area for customers and a huge glass display case full of fried snacks illuminated with a yellow-red light. I went up to the little window and put in an order while my friend waited by the wall a couple of meters behind me. The heavy aroma of fried goodness and grease wafted all around us.

I’m not sure what exactly caused me to turn around. But when I did, I saw something strange. My friend’s face had gone sheet white, her eyes wide and her mouth open in silent shock. She was locked in a quiet but panicked struggle with a short, muscled local man. I could only see him from behind. One hand, I could see, was desperately trying to rip my friend’s money pouch out of her hand. I couldn’t see his other hand.

You always wonder what you’ll do when faced with a situation that requires a split-second decision to act. I’m convinced you can never truly know until you’re in it. But it sure helps, for boys and men in particular, to have repeatedly made the decision ahead of time that, if at all possible, we will act. Stories of courage from the Bible, good books, and stories from my dad’s life helped me make these many small preparatory decisions. Even Bilbo Baggins played a role in growing my resolve to be courageous. But when the moment finally came, all I can say is that, by the grace of God, I acted.

I charged across the room and threw my arm around the assailant’s neck in a headlock to pull him off my friend. With a burst of strength that really surprised me, I jerked him out the door while yelling something at him in English. He was a much bigger guy than I was in terms of muscle mass, but in that moment, it seemed like he weighed nothing at all. In the couple of seconds it took for us to stumble out of the shop, he spun around and swung a small blade at my stomach. It passed a few inches from me, and I remember immediately registering the flash of metal and letting him go.

The assailant then started running down the sidewalk as I stood, blinking. Suddenly, I remembered the phrase I was supposed to yell.

“THIEF! HOLD HIM! HIT HIM!!!” I yelped, hoping someone would respond.

Would it actually work? As he rounded the corner, I saw a few bystanders start to take off after him. Then I went back into the shop to check on my friend.

She was, of course, very shaken up and barely able to respond to my questions. But it seemed she was okay. The man had pressed the blade against her stomach, but not cut her. She had locked up in panic, meaning that even though she wanted to, she could neither scream nor let go of her money pouch. I saw that coins were scattered all over the floor. Being myself in a pretty confused state of mind, I started shakily picking up the coins off the floor and asking the staff behind the counter if we could still get our order.

We waited for a minute or two, minds flooded with adrenaline and hands shaking, when a police vehicle screeched to a stop in front of the shop.

“We were parked around the corner,” the smiling officer said, “when we saw this man being chased by a big crowd right toward us. We got to him before the crowd could – lucky man. He’s in the back now. They said he attacked you. Is that true?”

I nodded yes.

“Follow us to the station, then.”

In a blur, the three of us drove down the street to the police station. Inside, we were ushered into a dirty and faded blue room with holes in the walls where the assailant was sitting in a chair, hands handcuffed behind his back.

The police officer was clearly enjoying the whole situation and continued smiling in a disconcerting way. Many of the police in that country are corrupt and heavy-handed in their tactics, demanding bribes on the highways and burning down whole villages in response to tribal warfare. The handful that we knew who were believers were markedly different. But this big man seemed to be of the more common, unregenerate variety.

“Is this the man who attacked you?” he asked, lifting up the attacker’s face.

“Yes,” I responded, “That’s him.”

Immediately, the officer swung hard and punched the man in the face. The man whimpered.

Trying to process what was going on, I continued to answer questions and to describe what happened.

“Did he have a weapon?”

“Yes, a small knife.”

“Where’s the knife!!!” he roared at the man, dealing another savage blow to the face. The man didn’t respond.

“Hahaha! You don’t see policing like this in America, do you?” the officer asked us, grinning like a villain.

He leaned over the man. “Where are you from?” he asked him softly.

“Okapa…” the man groaned.

“OKAPA!!!” the officer roared, kneeing the sitting man in the face. More cries of pain.

By now, there was a puddle of blood pooling on the floor from the man’s nose. The drips were spattering on my shoes. One look at my mom and my friend told me that this experience might be far more traumatizing than the actual assault itself.

“So, do you want to press charges?” the officer turned and asked us.

“No!” My mom and I said together. “No… no one was hurt. And he’s already gotten enough punishment.”

“Too bad – lucky man,” the officer said, shaking his head and sneering at the man in the chair.

We got out of there as fast as we could and drove back to the mission base in a daze.

I felt terrible for what had happened, thinking my friend’s parents would never allow her to go to town with us again. However, they were extremely kind and encouraging, telling me they were proud of me and they’d be happy for their daughter to go into town with me any time. As a young man, that was one of the kindest things they could have said.

Over the next year or so, my friends and I did continue going into town, though we never went back into that particular snack shop. Thankfully, there were no more big incidents like this one.

Over time, we continued to shudder at the attempted robbery and the whole police station scene. But there was one scene of the whole event that we were later able to laugh about.

And that scene was of a skinny white boy standing in the street and squawking, “Stilman! Holim em! Paitim em!!!” (Thief! Hold him! Hit him!) and the hapless robber being pursued around the corner by an angry mob.

It really did work, after all.

There are countries out there, sadly, where strangers will not come to one another’s aid when someone attacks. But that country in Melanesia is not one of them. No, if anything, you may want to be careful rallying the mob to your defense, unless absolutely necessary. The whole time, the police, even with everything they did, were acting like they had saved the man from an even worse fate.

Yikes.

We’ve got 17k of our 20k goal still to raise this summer. Would you consider supporting our work and the Church in Central Asia in this way? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region, and our kids’ TCK school is also in need of teachers for the 2026-2027 school year. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash

Two Very Different Dialects of Respect

I continue to be struck by the many ways that Western culture and Central Asian culture differ in showing respect. One way to summarize these differences would be that Central Asian culture primarily respects a person by elevating them, while Western culture primarily respects a person by equalizing them.

When a Central Asian meets another Central Asian, both are trying hard to show that they feel the other person is higher than they are. They show this through the many respectful phrases and titles they drop, as well as their body language. Both are careful to formally and expressively show that they are lower, and the other is higher. This goes on for quite some time until one finally relents and, with much protest, receives the preferential treatment.

When two Americans meet, both are trying to show that they feel that the other person is their equal. They do this by doing away with titles and by acting in a relaxed, casual, relational manner. Their body language is not rigid and formal, but loose and friendly. Both are careful to demonstrate that “you know that I know that you don’t think you’re better than me,” and vice versa. This might take place with very few words spoken at all, or with something as casual as a silent chin nod.

When a Central Asian and a Westerner interact, the Westerner might come away feeling that the Central Asian was way over-the-top and uncomfortably verbose in their praise. Are they for real? Do they have an agenda? The Central Asian might come away feeling that the Westerner was strangely cold or even rude. Have I offended them? Do they think they’re that much better than me?

These differences have a lot to do with our different histories and cultural makeup. The West, especially North America, is deeply shaped by a historical reaction against the hierarchies and class system of the old world. Some of the deepest values of Western culture are tied to the dignity of the lone individual, regardless of their background or current social status. Central Asia is still very much an ancient patron-client system, where, in the absence of sound impersonal institutions, one must acquire honor and status by securing the patronage of those above you and the client services of those below you. In this kind of system, honor, respect, and reputation are central to everything – even survival.

These differences in showing respect get highlighted for us in funny ways as we navigate (sometimes daily) between Central Asian and Western cultures in Caravan City. The international church, with its global-Western hybrid culture, tells first-time guests that they don’t want to embarrass them, so they can just quickly raise their hand to receive a visitor card. They want to honor them but also to treat them as equals, and equals aren’t eager to be singled out for recognition. The Central Asian church they planted, however, asks first-time guests to stand up and introduce themselves, knowing that the chance to be visibly elevated like this in a meeting is a great honor, and one that guests will feel deeply. Both churches then clap to welcome the newcomers, and both have acted honorably according to their respective cultures.

When it comes to introducing someone speaking up front at a seminar, a Westerner will want to humanize them, to tell the audience about their personality and their hobbies, maybe a funny story. And the Western speaker will often want to connect with their audience by showing a picture of their kids or grandkids. But if a Central Asian is introducing a speaker, they’ll want to focus on their qualifications and achievements, the things that have elevated them enough to be an expert worth listening to. The Central Asian speaker will begin their talk, not by trying to humanize themselves, but by offering detailed thanks to all of the other respected figures present or not who have made it possible for them to come and speak.

Of course, Westerners do quietly enjoy being elevated. And Central Asians quietly enjoy being equalized. But neither culture can quite bring itself to lead with these things. No, they are supposed to happen indirectly, as a sort of open secret. Westerners know that the double PhD is there and is very significant, but it might embarrass the speaker if we focus on that too directly, just like it would embarrass the Central Asian speaker if we focus too much on his hobbies, spouse, or grandkids.

Having made many mistakes hopping from one culture to the other, I can say that understanding these primary dialects of respect can go a long way toward navigating such different cultures well – or at least toward navigating them functionally. You really can communicate genuine care for a Central Asian by being thoughtfully respectful and by constantly trying to elevate them. But when you’re with that Westerner, all that usually feels a bit much. Instead, be relaxed, treat them as a friend and peer, and keep the compliments select and low-key.

It is a curious thing that such different-seeming behaviors can grow from the same root virtue of honor or respect. Yet they do. And both can be a way to put on true Christian love, because both can be found in the gospel itself.

The gospel both equalizes and elevates us. In its pure and powerful light, we are all seen to be equally made in the image of God, and each also equally sinful. Those now in Christ are all equally little prophets, priests, and kings, and heirs of the resurrection. Yet each one of us is also elevated through the gospel, raised from one degree of glory to another, with differing honor and rewards bestowed in this age as well as in the age to come. Our particular tribe of Christianity will tend to focus more on one of these truths than the other, usually depending on what culture we’re in. But they’re both there in the Scriptures. “Outdo one another in showing honor” (Rom 12:10) goes hand in hand with “All are one in Christ” (Gal 3:28).

What happens when believers from both kinds of cultures mix in the same church? Well, every church must develop one primary corporate culture in order to function. There is no way around this. There’s nothing wrong if the culture your church has naturally landed on is more Western or more Central Asian, especially if this is a good reflection of your members and your community. But there’s lots of room in relationships and personal interactions to care for people by attempting to speak their dialect of respect, as it were. If you’ve got a pastor or visitor from a culture that elevates, use titles and use body language that shows you’re putting them ahead of yourself. If you’ve got a pastor or visitor from a culture that equalizes, stick to first names, and treat them like you’re old friends.

Finally, saturate it all in love and grace. There’s no world in which you learn to perfectly operate in a different culture’s dialect of respect. And others will fumble yours as well. But humble, loving, and gracious believers don’t get bent out of shape about this kind of thing. In fact, when they look carefully, they can even see that these very different words and actions stem from the very same posture of the new heart.

We’ve got 19k of our 20k goal still to raise this summer. Would you consider supporting our work and the Church in Central Asia in this way? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region and our kids’ TCK school is also in need of teachers for the 2026-2027 school year. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash

Strange Encounters in Country Church Parking Lots

If you’ve ever lived near a country church parking lot, then you know there’s a lot of odd stuff that goes on there. And I don’t mean the church-related traffic.

For two different seasons while stateside, we lived in parsonages next to churches in rural Kentucky. And thus it was that I began to learn about the many and varied ways in which a community makes use of that wide-open asphalt space.

Strangers meet up at these parking lots to exchange items purchased on Facebook Marketplace. Some take their kids there to practice driving. Others pull over to change tires or to look under their hood when their car starts smoking or making suspicious noises, even leaving vehicles overnight if need be. Police cars will pull in to camp out for a while and keep an eye on the road. I don’t know if Pokémon Go is still a thing or not, but that was one reason during a certain season for many of the suspicious-looking cars that would randomly pull in for a few minutes, hover, then suddenly take off.

Mosques in our area of Central Asia have 24-7 bathroom facilities available to the public. Anyone, Muslim or not, can pull over and make use of this infrastructure if needed. In a similar way, rural church parking lots function as a kind of community resource, a private piece of property that is available for anyone to use for certain reasonable needs. I don’t know that anyone ever consciously agreed to this arrangement, but it has developed nonetheless.

However, others seem to make use of these parking lots in ways that, if the church knew about it, would clearly violate this unwritten contract. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some drug deals going down next to the old Baptist church late at night. Another time, I was startled to stumble on a random wandering man just sitting in the darkness behind the church when I was taking out the trash. Then there are the vehicles that would pull in after dark and just sit, lights on, pointed at the parsonage, for hours on end – almost as if they were watching us. Sometimes I would go out and straighten up some stuff outside in case the sight of a person keeping an eye on the place would make them conscious of their creepiness and cause them to drive off.

But none of these activities caused my heart to leap into my throat like what happened one Sunday at 2 am.

After a late night of treating diabetic lows, my wife and I were finally asleep when we were shocked awake by a horrific screeching sound. We bolted upright in bed and noticed that strange lights were flashing through the blinds and into the room. Disoriented and bleary-eyed, I peered out through the blinds. But all I could see was that the air was choked with a strange, flowing smoke or mist, oddly lit up in a way that didn’t make any sense for 2 am. The loud screeching and roaring wasn’t stopping.

Was our city under attack? Had the neighboring regimes finally had enough and decided to invade? Wait, no, we weren’t in Central Asia. We were in rural Kentucky. What then? Had some demon-UFO come to harass us like something straight out of the Haunted Cosmos podcast?

Then, all at once, I realized what was happening. The church secretary had foretold that such a time would come. And she had solemnly deputized me, for such a time as this, to be the guardian of the church parking lot.

I girded up my loins, threw on a gray bathrobe, grabbed a bright flashlight, and rushed out to the porch. In my bare feet, I ran into the smoke to confront the foes with all the bleary-eyed middle-aged righteous indignation I could muster.

The teenagers had come. Yes, they had come to do donuts and spin-outs with their little souped-up sports cars.

Now, there’s nothing in particular that I would normally have against teenagers doing donuts and spin-outs in an empty lot. After all, I used to enjoy doing them with my ATV back in high school in Melanesia. But Miss Peggy, the secretary, had told me they had just paid an arm and a leg to redo the parking lot surface and that this kind of activity would seriously damage it again.

Plus, it was 2 am. And they had nearly given my family a heart attack.

Through the clouds of smoke and screeches caused by spinning rubber, I staggered, shining my light in as menacing a manner as I could and yelling something terrifying like, “HEY… YOU KIDS!” My hair was wild, and my eyes were wide. All that was missing were some slippers on my feet and a shotgun in my hand to channel the timeless image of the old grumpy man out to ‘teach them kids a lesson.’

I must have spooked them nonetheless. Perhaps the lights cast a giant shadow of my figure onto the grey clouds of rubber smoke. Or, perhaps it was just the unexpected sight of a jumped-up, hollering dad in a bathrobe at 2 am that did it. But the faces my flashlight caught looked spooked and pale, and the three cars quickly sped off into the darkness. Leaving me standing there barefoot in the growing quiet and stinky haze, unkempt yet victorious, wishing I’d had the wits to holler something more intimidating like “ALLAHU AKBAAAAR!!!“

Oh well, next time.

Not surprisingly, we were late to church the next morning. I scowled as we crossed the parking lot and saw all the black marks the kids had made during their nighttime antics.

However, I was glad to inform Miss Peggy that I had indeed scared the intruders off. And that I’d be glad to do so again should the need arise. And that, yes, we would love some more coffee to help us stay awake during Sunday school.

The teenagers tried to come back to do donuts and spin-outs a few times after that, but I recognized their cars and was on to them at that point. I even got to talk with one of them during one of these follow-up attempts, to tell him that I had his license plate number and would have to do something with that information if they came back to do donuts again.

To his credit, he responded with a very respectful “Yessir… we won’t do it again, sir.”

I realized that in that season I had become the guardian of the church parking lot. A modest, yet worthy role. After all, rural church parking lots are weird places. Somebody’s got to keep an eye on them.

And having compared notes with others over the years, I know that I am not the only one to notice the strange things that happen in these locales. If you’ve seen some weird stuff in church parking lots yourself, be sure to let us know in the comments.

This summer, we are looking to raise 19.5k, half for our family’s support needs and half for the cost of writing, translating, and printing solid resources for local believers. Would you consider supporting our work and the Church in Central Asia in this way? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region and our kids’ TCK school is also in need of teachers for the 2026-2027 school year. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Set a Guard over Your Lips

Ever wonder what the content that we write for local believers looks and sounds like? Below is an example of an article I wrote this past year in response to the widespread sin of gossip among the young churches of our area. You’ll notice some commonalities (like using local proverbs), but also that the style of the writing is different from what I normally post here. It’s deliberately simpler and more straightforward. This is both due to the need for translating it into our local languages but also the value of prioritizing clarity over style in content written to help new believers.

That being said, gossip is not a sin limited to the churches of Central Asia. I was challenged to grow in this area as I wrote this article, and I hope that others will be helped by it also. May we all grow in speaking the truth in love.

“Talk that has gone to a tongue has gone to a city.”

This local proverb refers to the incredible speed with which rumors or gossip about other people can spread. The idea is that if even one person shares information about someone with another person, then there is a good chance that soon the whole city will know. This proverb tells us about an aspect of local culture, that the culture is full of talk about other people, full of gossip.

However, this Central Asian culture is not alone in struggling with sins of the tongue. Humans in general have always sinfully enjoyed spreading shameful or negative information about others. The book of Proverbs bears witness to how this was the case in ancient Israel around 3,000 years ago.

Proverbs 18:8 says, “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to the inmost parts.”

Because of our sinful nature, humans in all cultures, even those among God’s chosen people, have been tempted by gossip. This is because gossip seems to have a sweet taste in the beginning. However, after we have listened to gossip or shared it, it does not truly result in anything good. Instead, it results in destruction and division.

Proverbs 16:28 says that, “A perverse person stirs up conflict. And a gossip separates close friends.”

This verse says that it is a perverse person who stirs up conflict by talking about others. It says that this kind of person even separates the closest of friends through the harmful power of their words. In fact, our words are so powerful that the book of James says, “The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell” (James 3:6).

Friends, do you want your whole body to be corrupted? Would you like the whole course of your life to be set on fire? Or to have your tongue set on fire by hell? God’s word says these results and judgments happen to those who do not control their tongues, those who gossip about others.

Beloved brothers and sisters, this is one of the most important areas where local believers will need to change their culture and their daily habits.

Many years ago, I was preaching in a house church from the Sermon on the Mount. That day, we were focusing on the section where Jesus tells his disciples not to swear by anything, but to let their yes be yes, and their no be no. After the service, a believing husband and wife said to me, “This means we need a whole new language! We don’t know how to speak our language without swearing. We swear in almost every sentence!”

Yes, when we follow Jesus, everything changes. And one of the most clear changes should be the way in which we speak. Even though we still speak our native language, the way we speak it might be so different that, in one sense, it will seem like a new language. Unbelieving friends, relatives, and neighbors might be shocked or confused when a local believer stops telling gossip about others. But this is what Jesus requires. He requires a way of speaking that is worthy of him, especially when it comes to how believers speak about one another.

Ephesians 4:29 says, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”

This verse describes the standard for every believer. All of our words must be helpful for building others up, bringing benefit to those who listen. If any word or kind of talk does not do this, then we should not say it. Gossip or shameful talk about other believers always fails this test. It fails the test because it is not helpful but hurtful to the body of Christ. It fails because it does not build others up; instead, it tears them down. And it fails because it does not bring any benefit; instead, it brings division and conflict.

Friends, from now on, you can use this verse, Ephesians 4:29, as a filter for everything you say. You can test every word, every sentence, according to this standard, and only say it if it is helpful for building others up.

Here, some might wonder about a situation where another believer is truly sinning or damaging the church. Should we not warn other believers about them? The short answer is no. Instead of talking about them, first, believers should go to that person and gently tell them their sin face-to-face (Galatians 6:1, Matthew 18:15-17). And when you do this, don’t tell anyone else about it. Only then, if that person doesn’t repent, should you tell one or two other believers about their sin. And this is only so that they can go with you to talk to that person about their sin. Once again, at this point, don’t tell anyone else about it except for this one or two others. If, after this second step, the believer who is sinning still doesn’t repent, then you should go and talk to the pastors in your church about that person’s sin. The pastors should then consider if it’s necessary to tell the church in an appropriate way, according to Matthew 18.

At each of these steps, limit what you say about that sinning believer to what is truly helpful and necessary. Keep your conversations about their sin short and careful, and watch out for the temptation to give in to gossiping about rumors or even true details. As Proverbs 10:19 says, “When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise.”

For example, you might see another believer lying to others about some area of his life. Without saying anything about this to anyone else, go to that believer yourself and gently talk to them about their lying. If they refuse to listen to you and refuse to repent, only then should you talk about their sin with one or two other believers so that you can make a plan to talk to the sinning believer together. If the sinning believer still refuses the counsel of this small group of believers, then privately share the situation with a pastor of your church so that, if needed, it can progress toward the next stage of church discipline.

Brothers and sisters, even if someone is truly sinning, it is still gossip and still sinful to talk to others about that believer unless you are carefully following the Matthew 18 process that respects believers’ honor and privacy. The Bible calls us to “speak the truth in love.” Telling others about proven sin in another believer’s life may be telling them something true, but it is disobeying this command because it is not speaking that truth in a loving way. Loving other believers means we seek to keep their sins as private as possible, even while we help them to repent. This is what it means to love them and to love them truly, according to 1^st Peter 4:8, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”

Have you sinned in the way that you speak about other believers? Friends, all of us have. But praise God, we can repent of any sinful words that we have said. We can repent to God, and, if necessary, we can repent directly to those we have gossiped about. We can join the prophet Isaiah in saying, “‘Woe to me!… For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.” When we repent like this, we know that the blood of Jesus is powerful to cleanse us from our sin.

Is it really possible to stop gossiping? Can someone who has gossiped about others all their life really learn a new way of speaking where they no longer do this? Yes, through the power of the Holy Spirit, every believer can have a new way of speaking that becomes a powerful witness to others that God can truly change us.

Believers can learn to rely on the power of God in this area by regularly praying Psalm 141:3, “Set a guard over my mouth, LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips.”

For many local believers who have grown up in a culture where gossip is so normal and accepted, this is a prayer they might need to pray every day. Probably multiple times every day. But God is faithful. Through his Holy Spirit, he truly can guard our mouths and keep watch over our lips.

Believers gossiping about other believers is one of the greatest dangers that is destroying friendships and churches in this region. But when believers learn to speak in this new way, their speech will become one of the most powerful witnesses to the truth of the gospel.

Yes, instead of having a tongue that spreads gossip to an entire city or sets our whole life on fire, we can have tongues that are instead like a tree of life, filling our lives with the wisdom and light of God.

This summer, we are looking to raise 20k, half for our family’s support needs and half for the cost of writing, translating, and printing solid resources for local believers. Would you consider supporting our work and the Church in Central Asia in this way? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region and our kids’ TCK school is also in need of teachers for the 2026-2027 school year. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash