Seven and a Half Years – and Every Bit Worth It

The Achilles heel of the church planting efforts in our corner of Central Asia has been the absence of faithful and qualified local leaders. Many missionaries have handed over leadership too quickly and men who might have eventually become faithful pastors instead fell into “puffed up conceit and the condemnation of the devil” (1st Tim 3:6). Other local men grew impatient and seized power, position, and ministry money before they were ready. All too often, promising leaders that long-term missionaries were faithfully discipling got lured away when an outside organization showed up looking to hire a local to head up their imported formulas for disciple-making movements. Persecution and burnout have also played their role in running off local leaders.

Were you to diagram it, you’d see four stages local believing men go through. First, there’s the new believer stage. This is the stage with the highest numbers. Next is the maturing disciple stage. A good number make it from stage one to stage two. Then, you have the potential leader stage. There’s a smaller number of men in this stage, but they are very encouraging men of vision and potential. But the fourth stage is that of a qualified and faithful leader. Almost no one has passed that last threshold.

This week Darius* was voted in as the first local elder of our church back in Central Asia. According to one of our colleagues there, the local believers were engaged, asked thoughtful questions of the elder candidates, then prayed hard for the two new pastors after voting them in. Darius and one of our other teammates have been in an elder-in-training season for about a year and a half, a development partially prompted by my family’s unexpected departure from the field. Now they are the very first elders to be tested and voted in congregationally. It’s taken seven and a half years for this to happen, seven and a half years for us to at last see a local man raised up for pastoral ministry.

This church was birthed at a Christmas party in December of 2016. Frustrated that none of the isolated local believers were willing to attend the house church services we were offering in their language, we experimented by inviting them to a Christmas party – one that involved teaching from the word, worship songs, and some prayer. Some of the very same believers who refused to come to a house church service told us how much they had enjoyed the teaching, songs, and prayer at the Christmas party. We invited them back for another gathering the week after – and at some point broke the news to them that what they were enjoying were in fact the basic elements of church. Once they had tasted it, they weren’t nearly as reticent to come back.

But that first group didn’t exactly result in a church. Hama and Tara soon fled the country. One man lived too far away to attend more than quarterly and another proved not to be a believer. We had a very explosive falling out with Hamid after we held firm on the exclusivity of Christ, so as far as we knew he was gone for good. Only a single gal who would later turn out to be the daughter of a spy and Harry would gather with us somewhat regularly – and Harry inconsistently because of pressure from his violent and conservative tribe. Six months into every other week producing no local attendees, and we almost pulled the plug on the whole thing.

Thankfully, we just barely decided on continuing to meet, believing that if the locals didn’t know how to gather in a steady, weekly fashion, then we’d just have to model for them what that looks like. Every week we’d all text and call our own small networks of isolated local believers and seekers we were studying the Bible with. And every week our team would wait anxiously, chai and sunflower seeds set out and ready, hoping for maybe two or three locals to show up this week.

The turning point came when Ahab’s family started attending regularly. Finally, we gained some momentum and averaged about six to ten locals joining us every week in Ahab’s house, where we had moved the meeting. Unfortunately, as I’ve recently written about, Ahab proved to be a very dangerous wolf in sheep’s clothing. Yet God was still working even as that danger lurked. During that season Mr. Talent and Patty and Frank came to faith and went under the water on a freezing January day. By spring 2018, we were seeing several dozen locals gathering every week, Harry and Ahab were seen as potential elders-in-training, and we thought we were in the clear – a church was being born before our eyes.

Then Ahab almost blew it all up. We extracted the church from his house and moved the meetings into the international church building. Only five or six of the believers stuck with us, but we were encouraged that there was still any church left at all. It was in this season of damage control that we met Darius and he came to faith and was baptized. He was, amazingly, captivated by the beauty of the church – the traumatized group of local believers and foreigners who had just barely survived a wolf attack.

This was when my family transitioned to the States for a season and then back to a different city in Central Asia. But during the two years that we were gone, the church continued to grow under the leadership of our colleagues, in spite of serious opposition. During this time, it was raided once by the security police and then later experienced another implosion due to another attendee who was some kind of spy from the militant regime to our East. Harry had been appointed a formal elder in training in this season and we had high hopes that he would be our first local leader. Sadly, this implosion and its relational fallout led to his leaving the church for the next year and a half.

When we eventually moved back to help this church in 2021, the church had once again entered a period of steady growth. Alan and others came to faith and Adam was rescued from his crippling schizophrenia. Our team realized that it was time to go official. We had been a church with informal membership and other structures for a few years by that point. Now it was time to step into the fulness of the Bible’s vision for a local church. And that meant formalizing membership and drafting a Central Asian church covenant. Shortly before we once again left in late 2022, the church had covenanted together and was openly committed to pursuing all twelve characteristics of a healthy church.

One of those characteristics is biblical leadership. This means seeing local elders and deacons raised up who are qualified according to passages like 1st Timothy 3 and Titus 1. A few other men and I have functioned as temporary lowercase-A-apostolic elders for this church body up until now. But the goal was always to work ourselves out of a job. It just took much longer than we thought it would. I once heard a local pastor in a neighboring country say that in their context it took about seven years for a man who has come to faith from a Muslim background to be discipled and mature enough to lead in the church. So far this fits with our experience as well.

For several years we had been hoping that Darius would be the first local pastor of our church. But just like every other man who makes it into the potential leader phase, the attacks came – potent and often. He was approached by other organizations asking him why his church wasn’t making him a leader yet, why they weren’t paying him a ministry salary yet, and why he didn’t consider aligning with someone else who would recognize his clear leadership gifts. It was a hard fight, but Darius resisted these enticements one after another. He also hung in there through numerous bouts of cross-cultural conflict with us, his mentors. By God’s grace, he was able to see our heart for him, that we would be delighted for him to lead – but only at the right time and in the right way. And unlike so many other potential leaders, Darius chose the harder and healthier path, the path of humility (1 Pet 5:6).

My family’s departure in late 2022 sped things up a little bit, as it left only one teammate pastoring a still messy and growing church on his own. We knew this was going to be too much, so the plan was hatched to bring Darius and another newer teammate into official elder-in-training roles. The past year and a half have demonstrated that God has indeed given these brothers the knowledge, the gifts, and especially the character to be spiritual shepherds. This was joyfully and soberly affirmed this week by the members of the church.

It took seven and a half years for the first qualified local pastor to be raised up. But we truly believe that this is one of the most important keys to seeing healthy local churches planted that endure – and that go on to reach their own people and others with the gospel. So, even though seven and a half years has been quite the messy and costly investment, it has been, without a doubt, entirely worth it.

Darius is the first. May countless others come after him.

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*Names changed for security