The Important Role of Foreign Stabilizers

“I’m worried about us local believers,” a new local friend said to me yesterday as we sat in a cafe dating back to the 1880s, sipping a brew made from wild tree nuts.

“We don’t know how to be steady. We are concerned with so many things and get upset so quickly and leave the church.”

“That’s not too unusual for new believers,” I responded. “And it points to one way the foreigners can help in this season. We model stability until, slowly-slowly, the local believers can also become stable.”

The ironic thing is that missionaries are some of the least stable and most transient people I know, at least in terms of physical presence. We move constantly. We take a lot of trips in and out of the country. We get uprooted by family needs or leadership gaps or security crises. At first glance, we may seem to make poor examples of being “steadfast, immovable.”

And yet one of the most important roles for missionaries in places like Central Asia is that of the stabilizer. We may be familiar with the concept of a foreign agitator, some kind of spy whose presence is meant to stir up discontent and division among the locals. Well, when it comes to our posture among the local believers, I am more and more convinced that we are to be foreign stabilizers – especially in terms of spiritual stability. To put it in terms of being on a journey, when surrounded by our younger brothers and sisters who want to sprint, grumble, fight, go off trail, give up, or go back, we simply keep plodding and modeling the “long obedience in the same direction.” We are, or should be, a lot like faithful, stubborn turtles.

When it comes to the believers from our particular region, there really is for a good many years a restlessness, a spiritual and emotional flailing around, a great struggle with steady commitment and contentment. Many stumble over the simplicity and repetitive, quiet nature of true spiritual growth, whether that’s the growth of an individual or that of a local church. Like adults with traumatic childhoods, some internal part of them tends to freak out and go on the attack when finally offered true stability – even when that’s what they most desperately long for and need.

Now, add into this mix Westerners’ expectations of speed and results and their fear of wielding spiritual authority and you get one very destructive brew. The very last thing my local friends need is a foreign missionary who himself is restless because he’s overcome by the immensity of the lostness, or, who is terrified of ‘contaminating’ the locals with his culture. Or, even worse, those willing to turn to money to catalyze some kind of ‘movement’ because they’re doing the math and realize unhappily that at the rate of fifteen believers after five years they won’t ever reach their goal of one million believers they’d set back when they were fundraising in America.

No, what will truly serve my local friends is if we set our course for faithfulness – and simply keep going whether they join us or not. In order to really help them, we must be honest appraisers of the lack of stability that is currently there, while at the same time being incredibly hopeful about the fact that Jesus really will eventually create the needed spiritual steadfastness in them. We must not depend on them when it comes to our own initial role of modeling faithfulness and healthy church, while also constantly reminding them that it is our heart’s desire that someday we will depend on them completely. We must ourselves be the stable core of the local church plant that will, Lord-willing, one day, fully thrive without us.

This kind of posture may be offensive to other missionaries. After all, it places the foreigner at the visible beating center of the work, sometimes for a good long time. In the short run, it may draw accusations of paternalism or building one’s own kingdom or not trusting the Spirit. But if the missionary takes on this role of foreign stabilizer for the sake of loving his currently unstable brothers and sisters, then time will show that this kind of foreigner-leading-by-example-as-long-as-it-takes model is actually the one that best raises up locals in the long-run. Missionaries are afraid to take charge like this because it looks bad. But good missions work should always be less concerned with optics and more concerned with what’s actually most loving for others.

This sort of model is not without its dangers, of course. But the alternative – attempting to stay in the background and using salaries to prop up locals prematurely – is far, far more dangerous. Ministry salaries follow spiritual and emotional maturity. They cannot create it.

The traditional analogy for missionaries is that we are like scaffolding – temporary, only present until the permanent structure of the indigenous Church can be built. This is a great analogy in many ways. But at least for our context, its focus on external support doesn’t communicate well the necessity of the missionary’s central stabilizing role. A better analogy might be that the missionary is like some kind of planet orbiting a star that by nature of its own gravity pulls other renegade space rocks and moons into, first, its own orbit, and then eventually into that of its sun. I’m not very good at science illustrations, so if this would never happen in the real universe, you’ll have to forgive me. But I think you see my point.

I don’t presume that every unreached context will need the same thing. Due to differences in how common grace has been dispersed, some people groups will not have the same kind of radical spiritual instability that ours do. But I do presume that there are other contexts out there a lot like ours, where missionaries have been told they are not supposed to be front and center, that this would be taking a step backward as it were, who are now confused because being the stable center seems to be the most loving and effective way forward.

If this is you, then my encouragement would be to forget what it looks like. Love your local friends by being the stable example they need. Teach, preach, lead, counsel, worship, rebuke, gather, host, visit – do the work of the ministry in a steadfast, immovable fashion. Your local friends can eventually ‘catch’ Christian stability by observing you. So, be the kind of steady believer they have never seen before. Be an example, and thereby, a foreign stabilizer.

If you would like to help us purchase a vehicle for our family as we serve in Central Asia (8k currently needed), you can reach out here.

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Photos are from Unsplash.com