Trojan Horses and Proverbs on Trust

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

This proverb comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, referring to that infamous Trojan horse incident. I’m sure this proverb was true enough once, at least back in the day when Greeks were a dominant power in the Mediterranean world. Even now, when a military power leads with a gift, it’s wise to think twice before receiving it. You never know how that gift (or development loan) might be turned against your people – or at least what strings may be attached. This is just as true of today’s global powers as it was 2,500 years ago.

When it comes to missions, it could also be said, “Beware of missionaries wielding proverbs.” This is because, as we’ve come to see, local proverbs can be a great way to smuggle biblical truth past the defensive walls that might exist in the local pagan worldview. The difference is the intent of the incursion. The Greeks snuck in to conquer. We sneak in to serve.

As we’ve been sharing in front of different groups about heading back to Central Asia, I’ve repeatedly told the story of how finding a local proverb on trust greatly helped our team overseas. You see, the local believers in our corner of Central Asia have major trust issues. “We don’t trust any locals we didn’t grow up with” is the typical position. Local believers will hold firm on this, even when it comes to interacting with others who profess Christ. Often an introduction of one local believer to another will later be followed by each separately approaching us, quietly warning us not to trust the person we just introduced them to because they are likely a “bad” person. This dynamic makes church planting and even small group Bible study formation next to impossible, unless it’s made up of people who grew up together.

In these areas, the worldview of our people group is very rigid and binary. People are either good or bad, trustworthy or not. If you grew up with them or somehow otherwise know in great detail that they come from a “good” and trustworthy extended family, you can trust them. Otherwise, you can never trust them. Trustworthiness is something you either have or don’t have. It’s not understood as something that can be granted or lost in degrees or something that can be incrementally built. At least this is how most locals think and behave in their day-to-day lives.

However, this is where a local proverb has proved so incredibly helpful. “Travel and business are a gold appraisal tool.” Paraphrased, this means “Through travel and business a person’s character is revealed.” In this proverb, we see the ancestral wisdom of our people saying you can come to trust someone by going on a long trip with them or by going into business with them. When we started using this proverb in response to a local believer insisting he’d never trust another local believer, the conversations noticeably changed.

Before, it was like we hit a wall, a locked gate. But when we used this proverb by way of appeal, it was like we were somehow smuggled in behind the defenses – and were then able to turn the conversation to how the Bible speaks of trustworthiness. As the local believer then scratched their chin and admitted, “We do say that, don’t we?” we could tell them that the Bible’s questions for ‘trustworthy or not’ sound like, “Does someone confess the gospel? Does their life exhibit the fruit of the Spirit? Are they a member of a healthy church?” In this way, this local proverb became our Trojan Horse by which we smuggled in biblical categories that were otherwise being rejected out of hand. Today, a local church exists of believers who did not grow up together – yet who have come to trust one another (at least the core members, anyway).

This miracle is, of course, a work of the Spirit. And yet the Spirit uses means. And one of the surprising means that he used was a proverb that our local friends knew and believed, but which they were mostly forgetting about in favor of a more prominent idea. We had somehow stumbled on a place of inconsistency in the local culture where one area of inherited wisdom contradicted another area of inherited wisdom. When in response to “Don’t trust anyone you didn’t grow up with,” we countered with “Travel and business builds trust,” this seemed to produce a worldview short-circuit of sorts. These crossed wires created just enough space to shift the conversation into the creation of new, biblical categories.

It doesn’t always work, of course. Cultural beliefs and habits go deep, even if you’ve got some punchy proverbs on your side. But for me, this story illustrates the potential of this kind of work. We’ve not really ever laid out an organized biblical theology of trust and trustworthiness for local believers. We’ve only made very initial attempts to do this, somehow gaining far more ground from this lone proverb and brief references to Scripture than we ever thought we could. Imagine what might result if we were to lay out for local believers, on the one hand, a detailed picture of what their culture believes about trust; and then on the other hand, the big picture of what the Bible has to say. Then after comparing and contrasting, thanking God for the overlap and lamenting the deficiencies, we break it all down into new, biblically-faithful proverbs that they can carry with them and use in their daily lives.

All of this reminds me of Paul in Acts 17 and Titus 1. In both places, he uses the pagan poet Epimenides of Crete to illustrate and create space for his difficult biblical message. The line “For we are indeed his offspring” is used to prepare Paul’s Athenian audience for his point that God is not an idol, but a living being who demands repentance. And “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons” is used to strengthen Titus’ hand in shutting down all the insubordinate, empty, and deceitful talk going on among the churches in Crete. Some Areopagites would be helped to hear Paul because he appealed to a poet they respected from a nearby nation. And hopefully, some Cretans might likewise hear Paul/Titus referencing the same man, their native poet, and stop being such blockheads.

Even Jesus appeals to local oral tradition when it agrees with and supports his teaching. “For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” (John 4:37-38)

The takeaway from all of this is that there will often be some local wisdom that is on our side – sayings or proverbs or poets that can function as Trojan horses for gospel servants who hope to get in behind the defenses and gain a hearing for biblical truth. We have found proverbs like “travel and business” to be immensely helpful in gaining a hearing for biblical truth. Perhaps even deeper and more thorough work in these directions could yield even more encouraging fruit.

Beware missionaries wielding proverbs? Well, if you are a servant of the enemy, then yes. Whether proverbs, poets, or otherwise, it seems that God has planted Trojan horses like these that can get through even the thickest of walls.

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