Pray for Missionaries to Enjoy The Culture

Try as I might, I simply cannot enjoy the taste of cooked peas. I like pea soup. I like snap peas. I like those dehydrated pea pods that are allegedly a healthier option than potato chips. But there’s just something about the taste of cooked green peas that makes my tastebuds twang and my body shudder.

This, in spite of the fact that I am, if anything, too convictional about the importance of being able to enjoy every good edible gift that God has given for our sustenance. When my kids call a certain food disgusting there is a part of my soul that registers that as a major problem and a worrying portent of a less joyful future for them. My wife, thankfully, is always on hand to remind me that disliking certain foods is quite normal and not something that always needs to be addressed as if it’s a great injustice against the Creator and against us, the vice-regent parentals he has appointed for these particular offspring.

Yes, the humble cooked pea reminds me that even when we have tried our best, the freedom to enjoy something is, at the end of the day, a gift from God. In this fallen world, we simply cannot always bring our bodies to enjoy everything that is, in fact, made for our enjoyment. There will always be some things that are fundamentally good that our bodies will register as bad, that we just won’t like. Sometimes we can change this. Often, we can’t.

When it comes to missionaries enjoying the local culture of their people group, these dynamics are also present. Missionaries are only partially responsible for their ability to enjoy the good parts of the local culture. But much of that ability is simply the mysterious gift of God.

It’s a grace and a help when a missionary is able to enjoy the good aspects of the local culture. Missionaries labor in what some studies have shown to be the most stress-inducing roles on the planet. Along with the normal troubles of life and ministry, they must also constantly reject and navigate the dark, twisted parts of a foreign culture – and there’s often much of this in a place that’s been cut off from God’s word and his people from time immemorial. These dark and distressing parts of culture are present in all kinds of unreached contexts and seem to be especially highlighted in isolated, tribal cultures.

Yet every culture retains aspects that still, somehow, beautifully reflect the image of God. These might be the outer layers of the culture, things like food and clothing and customs. They might be the inner layers, things like values and preferences and what is understood to be real. These are the aspects of the culture that point back to a good creation in the beginning and point forward to the strengths of the future Indigenous church. These parts of the culture are worthy of delight, even if they are significantly different from the good parts of the native culture of the missionary. When a missionary is able to delight in them, his life and work will be easier. When he’s not, it’s an extra burden that he must carry.

Now, I’m persuaded that missionaries should earnestly seek to appreciate and even enjoy the good in their focus culture. I believe that the effort to do this is the natural outworking of mature missionary love and humility. If a missionary does not even try to taste and see the goodness of a culture that is, for example, more people-oriented than time-oriented, then something is likely going wrong at the level of the heart.

But I also concede that this mature posture and effort of a given missionary may not produce the desired result. A missionary may try his hardest to enjoy the local music or local cuisine and, after years, still find himself barely able to keep it down. They may labor to know and understand the upsides of impromptu house visits, but still only feel them as incredibly stressful intrusions. When this happens, a missionary has come up against the wall of God’s mysterious sovereignty as it applies to our freedom or lack thereof to enjoy his good gifts.

This is why you need to pray for your missionaries to be able to enjoy the local culture. Because a significant part of their ability to do this is not in their hands at all, but in God’s. I have a good friend who served in a neighboring country in Central Asia. This friend, a godly brother, simply hated tea, yogurt, and olives – all major staples of his region’s diet. He tried his best, but nothing he did could change these preferences. On the other hand, I have known missionaries who were strangely drawn to the cultures of a different part of the world from the time they were children. What accounts for the difference? Certainly, nothing that they did. It was a gift given or not, plain and simple.

I genuinely enjoy many aspects of our Central Asian culture. Some of this is the result of intentional effort, tastes that have been acquired as it were. But some of it I can’t explain. Why should my heart come alive in the Central Asian bazaar when some of my expat friends hate the crowded, loud, and smelly nature of it? Why should I enjoy fizzy fermented yogurt water sprinkled with dill when it makes so many want to gag? I can’t explain these things other than they are gifts that I must learn to steward well. Perhaps someone has been praying for me.

Missionaries’ lives are full of so many things that are hard, that are draining. Small as it might seem, when they are able to find some measure of delight, joy, and even refreshment in aspects of the local culture, this makes a difference in their ability to remain on the field. When they don’t just know that something is technically good, but they are free to also feel its goodness, this is a real grace. And it’s encouraging to the locals as well.

So, pray for missionaries to be able to enjoy the local culture. Pray that they would be able to appreciate and delight in all of the good aspects, even if they’re wildly different from the good aspects of their own culture. Pray for me and my family in this area as we get ready to head back to the more culturally difficult of the two cities we’ve lived in in Central Asia.

And, while you’re at it, pray for me to be able to enjoy cooked peas. If God has created something good, then I want to be free to taste it as such.

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