In recent months we have been witnesses to a quiet miracle. One of the deacons of our home church almost died when a car hit him while he was riding his bike to work. But God has not only brought him back from the brink of death but also stunned the doctors with the speed of his recovery.
Initially, things didn’t look good. Bryan* suffered dozens of fractures, brain swelling, and lots of internal bleeding. For several weeks it wasn’t clear if he was going to pull through. Bryan was one of the co-leaders of the home group we’ve been a part of during this season, so we had a close-up perspective of how everything was developing.
First, I must say that it is times like this when you truly witness the power of the local church. Our church immediately rallied to provide meals, childcare, and other help for Bryan’s family. The meal schedule was completely filled up for weeks on end within just a couple of hours of it being sent out. And brothers and sisters from the church regularly came by to visit and encourage Bryan and his wife, who was spending most days by her husband’s side in the ICU. Those who doubt the love and power of a local church need to see it in action when there’s some kind of emergency like this.
I was able to visit the ICU several days after the accident. Bryan was mostly under sedation, had a trach in his throat, and was covered in bandages, bruises, dried blood, and splints. At that point he was showing some response to male voices, so his wife encouraged those of us visiting to talk with him and to sing a hymn. I didn’t notice any response during that first visit, but we prayed hard that he would soon be able to breathe on his own as well as fight off the pneumonia that was getting worse. His wife, for her part, was remarkably steady and joyful, clearly being sustained by the prayers of God’s people.
The next time I visited was about a week and a half later. He still had the trach in his throat and looked largely in the same condition, but he was a little more alert. He was off and on able to make eye contact, squeeze hands, and give a thumbs-up. It was heartening to have even this level of basic communication with him again. Amazingly, it seemed like he had pulled through and was going to make it. But he would need many weeks, if not months, of slow recovery.
I came back to see Bryan again one week later. I was stunned. It was his first day sitting up in a recliner chair next to his bed. And he was fully and remarkably conversant, even though it was clear that his injuries were affecting his memory somewhat. Sometimes he would ask the same question he had asked earlier, or get confused about certain details. But the two of us spoke in depth for about an hour and a half. Most of the time was Bryan telling me how encouraged he was by God’s goodness toward him and his family.
Bryan is a chef by profession and in previous seasons we had spoken of this passion of his, how he felt like God had given him a particular delight in making amazing food and serving others in this way. We had even spoken before of how these things might be reflected in the New Heavens and New Earth. How might a chef occupy himself in the new creation? I decided to turn the conversation back toward this topic and to ask Bryan about the first thing he would do in the New Jerusalem after spending time with Jesus face to face. I couldn’t help but laugh at his answer.
“Fresh octopus! I’m going to cook the freshest and most amazing octopus.” Bryan’s blue eyes gleamed and his head shook as he said it. “There’s nothing like it.”
Why not? Who’s to say the New Heavens and New Earth won’t have fresh octopus for those the king has called to be the chefs of his kingdom? And if it can be stunningly delicious in this age, then just imagine the festival of flavors to come with it in the next. I told Bryan that I would gladly take a break from perusing the New Jerusalem library’s history section to join him for this particular seafood of the resurrection.
Just a couple weeks later Bryan was out of the hospital and back home. This past month he’s been able to attend our home group again and we’ve been able to talk about what he remembers about his time in the hospital. He can’t recall most of it, including our conversation about fresh octopus in the resurrection. But he did have a good laugh when I told him about what his answer had been to my question.
The doctors are stunned. Bryan’s body naturally should not have healed in the time that it did. It seems that God responded to the countless prayers being made on his behalf by allowing his healing to take place at 1.5 or 2x speed.
We who are Christians should be overjoyed by this, but we should not be surprised by it. As Lewis points out in his book, Miracles, the creator has certain rights over his creation which means he is free to alter the speed, scale, or direction of the processes he has created whenever he wants to. So water becomes wine instantly, rather than this needing the many months normally required. Storms are calmed at a word, rather than slowly dissipating as the weather system moves on. And the broken bodies of bike-riding deacons heal themselves at rates that confound modern medicine.
One day death itself will move in reverse direction and dry bones will put on flesh and come alive. On that day, it is said that there will be a feast. As for me and Bryan, we’ll be keeping an eye out for a particular dish – freshly prepared octopus.
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They would never see it coming. No class would sneak off for their senior trip during the festive and lucrative Independence Day celebration. Yet that was exactly our plan, at least the first part of it. There were layers to our sneakiness. We would indeed skip out on Independence Day, but then we’d also pass the whole thing off as what was known as a fake senior sneak. Once everyone was convinced it wasn’t the real thing and that we were just spending the night somewhere nearby, we’d get on a plane and be gone for real. It was, in the language of Dune, “a feint within a feint within a feint.”
At our missionary kid school in Melanesia, the senior sneak was a proud annual tradition. Eleventh graders would work hard all year long hosting skate nights, cafe and restaurant nights, selling frozen burger patties, and doing other fundraisers in order to afford one secret and epic senior trip. Since we were living in Melanesia, the options were either to leave our school in the highlands to fly to one of the tropical coastal cities or even to take a trip to Australia. My class opted to stay in-country and go to a beautiful area none of us had ever been to, one famous not only for its peaceful and beautiful beaches but also for a historic WWII naval battle that took place nearby.
We planned to sneak during our school’s Independence Day festival because that was the one day no one would ever suspect. During the festival, each class set up booths and games to raise money for their class projects – picture fundraising activities like grease poles, dunking booths, and fake wedding booths where you could pay to have two very embarrassed classmates “married.” I remember one year cracking up as two mortified students were ceremoniously dressed up in ridiculous costumes and my older brother (the “reverend” that year) pronounced them man and wife, followed by a mournful tune on his trombone.
Anyway, the assumption would be that we’d need to work on Independence Day in order to raise more funds for our class trip. But we must have done a good job in our junior year’s work because these funds weren’t necessary for us to pull off a combined fake sneak and real sneak in one.
Our parade float was the first thing that gave any clue of our intentions that morning. Our float vehicle was a pickup truck. But instead of members of our class riding it in float-themed costumes, the truck bed had a bunch of life-sized cardboard cutouts waving out at the crowd. Each cardboard stand-in was wearing one of our class shirts and had the face of someone from our class glued onto it, grinning mischievously. On the sides and the back of the truck were large signs that read simply, “We Snuck!”
Layer one. The crowd saw the float going around and chuckled. “Clever! But surely they wouldn’t sneak, today of all days.” Slowly, the crowd realized that there were no twelfth graders anywhere. “Did they actually sneak?” By that time we, along with our class advisors, had been smuggled out of the base in big vans, heads down and giggling, trying to make sure that no one who just happened to be on the wrong side of the base that morning would spot our getaway.
Layer two. Once we escaped unnoticed, our destination was the one nice hotel in the nearby provincial capital town, named after the national bird. We would spend the day at “The Bird,” swimming at the pool and enjoying burgers and milkshakes. Meanwhile, our co-conspirators back at the base would spread the word that the seniors had been spotted at the hotel, clearly enjoying an overnight fake sneak. Everyone would laugh and assume that we would be back on base the next morning. But we had packed our bags for an entire week.
Layer three. The next morning, rather than drive back to the base, we drove to the airport and boarded a small Dash 8 plane to make our way to the nation’s capital city. We’d spend a day and a night there. While there, we visited a gold refinery, toured the one TV station in the whole country, and had dinner at a posh seaside restaurant. I remember ordering a massive mud crab for dinner, just for kicks. Its bright red color matched my gaudy red button-up and red lens sunglasses. Alas, the things we do when we are seventeen.
Layer four. The next morning we boarded another small plane to travel to our final destination. I was class president and I was thoroughly pleased at how well we had tricked everyone. Surely, how we snuck would long be spoken of in our school lore. The plans had gone off without a hitch and I for one didn’t think that there were any surprises left.
We were all settled into our seats but the plane seemed to be waiting for one last passenger. Someone stepped onto the plane. It was another American high school kid. That’sstrange, I thought to myself. He looked oddly familiar. Suddenly I jumped up, realizing who it was. He came down the aisle, beaming, and we gave one another a huge bear hug – and then we cried a little.
It was one of my best friends. His family had left unexpectedly during our junior year, his dad suddenly caught in ministry-ending scandal. When they had left we’d all wept together at the airport, not thinking we’d see each other for years to come. It was terrible. Another close friend was unexpectedly gone, our friendship cut off by some of the hardest of circumstances.
Somehow, our class advisors had managed to be even sneakier than we were. They had arranged for him to come all the way from the States to join us for our senior trip. Now he would get to be with us during the trip we’d worked so hard for together.
It was one of the best surprises of my life.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
One advantage of being based in Louisville, KY, is that we are only a day’s drive away from 3/4 of those who live in the US. I heard once that this was one reason for the T4G conferences being held here.
I’ve been chewing on this fact of geography as we’ve been knee-deep in support raising to return to Central Asia this August. Currently, an amazing network of friends from different seasons of life and ministry has brought us to just under 50%.
But at this point, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to be able to make our goal with only our current network of relationships. This means we’ll need to find several dozen new partners who are open to partnering with us on a monthly or annual basis.
One way this could happen is if some of you, the readers of this blog, are willing to meet up face to face or via video call to explore partnership in both gospel and treasure. It’s one thing to know someone only through their pen name and their writing and stories that have to stay strategically vague for security reasons. But it’s another thing to know someone face to face and in the kinds of life and ministry details that can’t be published on the internet. This would also give me the chance to get to know many of you who have been so kind as to regularly read about my family’s work and many misadventures.
Yes, we’d have to vet you just a little bit to make sure you’re not some kind of Salafi on a mission to expose missionary bloggers. But once we established that you do indeed love Jesus and are not a misguided pharisaical short-pant wearer desperately in need of a patient Christian friend, then I could meet up with many of you who are based in the continental US. Think roughly between Oklahoma City and New York. Of course, when it comes to video calls, these can happen regardless of state or country. It’s as easy as figuring out the timezone differences.
The work we are going back to do is that of resource creation for the local church. We want to create and translate resources that are both robustly biblical and that also communicate deeply to the heart, mind, and culture of those from our region. We have the Bible now, the most important resource, but we don’t yet have Christian resources in our local languages about everyday topics like biblical parenting and giving to your local church. Nor do we have anything yet that helps Christians take on deeply ingrained evils like wife-beating, female circumcision, and honor killings. We want to research, translate, write, record, and distribute the kinds of resources that are going to build up the fledgling churches in our region – and equip the local believers, missionaries, and leaders who are fighting for every millimeter of growth in a very difficult place.
Want to be part of this work of stocking the spiritual arsenal of brothers I’ve written about like Darius*, Mr. Talent, and Alan? Want to help us find the metaphorical basement of the culture and get to shining some much-needed light down there? We’d love to have your help in this.
If this is something you (or your church) would be open to, send an email to workman.entrusted@gmail.com and we can work to find a time to meet up.
I’m truly thankful for everyone who reads this blog, whether you’re able to partner with us financially or not. It’s been an honor to pass on stories and essays that dive into things like missions, wisdom, history, and resurrection. No writer or missionary can succeed without the backing of many, many friends. As they say in another part of Central Asia, “One flower doesn’t bring the spring.”
Finally, would you pray even as you read this post that God would provide the support we need to return this August? He is most certainly able to do this. For Him, it’s not an airplane at all.
Grateful for each of you,
A.W. Workman
*Names have been changed for security
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
The past careers of languages are as diverse as the worlds that each language has created for its speakers. They have suffered very different fates: some (like Sanskrit or Aramaic) growing to have speaker populations distributed across vast tracts, but ultimately shrinking to insignificance; others (such as the languages of the Caucasus or Papua) twinkling steadily in inaccessible refuges; others still yielding up their speakers to quite different traditions (as in so many parts of North and South America, Africa and Australia). Some (such as Egyptian and Chinese) maintained their speakers and their traditions for thousands of years in a single territory, defying all invaders; others (such as Greek and Latin) spread by military invasion, but ultimately lost ground to new invaders.
Often enough, one tradition has piggybacked on another, ultimately supplanting it. One big language parasitises another, and in a ‘coup de main’ takes over the channels built up over generations. This is a common trick as empires succeed one another, in every time and continent: Persia’s Aramaic made good use of the networks established for Lydian in seventh-century Asia Minor; in the sixteenth century, Spanish usurped the languages of the Aztecs and Incas, using them to rule in Mexico and Peru; and in the early days of British India, English and Urdu gained access to power structures built in Persian. But the timescale on which these changing fortunes have been played out is astonishingly varied: a single decade may set the pattern for a thousand years to follow, as when Alexander took over the eastern Mediterranean from the Persians: or a particular trend may assert itself little by little, mile by mile, village by village, over thousands of years: just so did Chinese percolate in East Asia.
– Ostler, Empires of the Word, pp. 11-12
A few thoughts:
The Central Asian language we have learned is a mountain language, one of those “twinkling steadily in inaccessible refuges.” This is how it survived as successive larger and more powerful languages of empires washed over one another down on the plains. Never underestimate the power of mountains to preserve languages and cultures.
‘Coup de main’ means a surprise attack or a quick, forceful military action, “blow with the hand” in French. Had to look this up just now since Ostler didn’t provide a translation or footnote. It’s curious how many authors still assume their English readers don’t need the translations of French terms like this one. This is probably from our own language history where French was viewed as the language of the educated elite during the period of Middle English, a tradition that still leaves traces like this here and there.
It is remarkable and unpredictable how quickly a language’s fortunes can change in a given area. In our region, the past several decades have seen the “backward” language of the mountains and nomads become more dominant in our area than the three massive surrounding languages. This is largely because of accidents of American foreign policy in our people group’s favor. This surprising takeover has happened even while little pockets of the languages of ancient empires still barely manage to hold on among minorities. And all the while the internet and globalization mean that English is making massive inroads into each of these language communities. Thirty five years ago this picture would have seemed impossible.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
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If there is one restaurant that my family misses the most from Central Asia, it would be Curious Kebab. The name of the restaurant comes from the first name of its owner, his name being a local language term that I’m here translating as highly curious. But its semantic range also includes concepts such as excited, passionate, highly anticipating, etc. All of these possible definitions would be appropriate when describing how my family feels about this particular culinary establishment. We – and the others we’ve converted – feel that it’s the tastiest kebab spot in the whole country – if not the world.
If you were to visit me in the city we last lived in, and we were to set up a lunch meeting, I would definitely suggest we go to Curious Kebab together. Here’s what that would be like.
First, I would send you the pin for our old stone house on the northern edge of the bazaar. Neighborhood street names and house numbers are a fairly new thing, so most locals don’t use them and they’re not yet integrated into things like Google Maps. It’s better to just send a pin. Once you’ve arrived, I’ll come out of our courtyard gate and undo the chains strung up on our street, the neighborhood’s vain attempt to keep bazaar shoppers from taking over all our street parking. Once we’ve got you parked, ideally underneath the excellent shade of a sabahbah tree to protect your car from the heat, we’ll head downhill on foot toward the center of the bazaar.
We’ll most likely take Soapmakers Street, since that’s the quickest route, about an eight-minute walk. These days there’s no longer any soap being made here. Instead, the street is full of shops that sell birds, makers and sellers of traditional clothing and shoes, hardware shops, a smattering of tea houses full of old men, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. We’ll also pass a small hotel where we once had a short-term team stay. They’ve got a pet falcon in the lobby and very affordable prices, but all their rooms do have burns in the carpet from hookah use and are squatty-potty only.
Soapmakers Street is mostly trafficked by men and has narrow, uneven sidewalks. So, if there are women in our group or small kids, or if we need more protection from the sun or rain, we’ll instead walk down a different street a few blocks to the West, which I’ll call Juicemaker Street. This street is full of small fruit juice cafes, pharmacies, and shops that sell women’s clothing or jewelry. If anyone needs some gut strengthening before our kebab lunch, we might stop for a cup of fresh pomegranate juice. Most of the pedestrians on this main artery of the bazaar are women – about half with heads covered and half not – and the sidewalks are broad, even, and mostly shaded, which makes for a more relaxed experience for any ladies or kids in our group.
The arteries of the bazaar are set up roughly like a spider web, with the main roads leading down toward the old center. At the center of the bazaar is an impressive old colonial administrative building with statues and gardens. This faces the center of the intersection, where there’s a small covered pagoda of sorts which has been used in the past by traffic police but also used by dictatorial governments to hang dissidents. This center area of the bazaar is typically bustling with shoppers and sellers, traffic moving more slowly than the pedestrians, and the sounds of street musicians playing traditional melodies. If there are protestors, this is usually their destination, with the security police and their tear gas hard on their heels. But most days it’s a happy and energetic place, humming away under a massive painting of the mustachioed sheikh who led an uprising against the colonizers.
Just off of this intersection, there’s a small network of alleys, right at the corner of Soapmakers Street and the street named after the legendary blacksmith tied to our people’s origin myth. A small fruit and veggie sellers area congests the opening to this alley, so we would weave through the carts piled up with produce and duck into the first alley. After passing a dry cleaner and some shops selling CDs and electronic gadgets, we’d come upon another alley flanked by a bakery on the right and a tea shop on the left. A few paces up this tiled alley brings us to Curious Kebab.
Curious Kebab has its kitchen grill area visible through large glass windows that we can see as we approach. The windows display rows of sword-like skewers with ground lamb pressed on them and narrower skewers of chicken or beef chunks. There are also skewers lined up of bright red tomatoes. We can also see the furnace grill built into the back wall where the meat is cooked. We can see the small crew of two or three who work in this area, chopping vegetables, preparing the meat, and turning over skewers on the grill. This is usually where the man himself, Mr. Curious, will spot us.
“My American donkeys!” he will likely holler upon spotting us. Then he’ll come out, laughing, and give us fist bumps with his mincemeat-splattered hands.
This is a running joke between Mr. Curious and me and my friends. Our Central Asian people group finds donkeys downright hilarious and also somewhat disgraceful. The term donkey can be used both as a terrible insult and as an affectionate term, depending on how you are using it and for whom. To tell my best friend he’s a male donkey means I think he is brave and fearless – a Chad in contemporary internet parlance. But call someone a donkey, son of a donkey, and you better be ready for a fight. Mr. Curious, to have fun with all of this, has decorated Curious Kebab with pictures and artwork of donkeys on every wall. Somewhere along the line he started referring to us repeat foreign customers as his American donkeys. Because his eyes light up when he says this, and because he calls himself a donkey as well, it’s clear that for him this is meant as a backhanded term of endearment.
Mr. Curious, after greeting us warmly in his British-accented English, will insist that we go inside and find a spot to sit down. Inside the two small adjoining rooms that make up the restaurant, we’ll look for an open table and crowd around it. Because Curious Kebab makes excellent kebab and is only open for lunch, it’s almost always packed. We’ll need to wave down the server and tell him what we want. I highly recommend the spicy garlic kebab, a skewer of minced lamb meat with garlic and green jalapeño in it. It’s not very spicy by the standards of other cultures but does have a little bit of kick to it. This is the kebab that I and others claim to be the best in the country.
Mr. Curious worked in restaurants in the UK for over a decade and thus became one of the only local chefs willing to use garlic in his grilling, something that gives his kebabs their distinct flavor. This, and the fact that he only uses local sheep, specifically, the special lump of fat they have above their tails that other breeds of sheep don’t have. This fat is mixed in with the kebab meat and gives it a rich, buttery flavor. If you’d rather have chunks of chicken or beef (or liver) you can’t go wrong there either. Even when it comes to these, Mr. Curious’ special marinade sets them apart in terms of tenderness and flavor.
After ordering, a teenage boy will come by and ask if we would like to order any yogurt water to drink with our meal. If you order one, it will arrive in a personal silvery bowl for you to sip it from. Another server will bring fresh flatbread to our table and give each of us a plate of sliced radishes, lemons, onions, and garden herbs. After about ten minutes, our grilled meat will be ready and we’ll be set to eat. We will likely be the only ones in the restaurant that day to bow our heads and thank God for the food, so we’ll probably get a few curious looks as we do this. The other patrons of the restaurant are locals, but from all over the socioeconomic spectrum. Important-looking men in suits eat here, but so do builders, singers, and teachers. Each one seems to glance at the others a little warily, seemingly worried that their favorite hole-in-the-wall might be getting a little too well-known.
The kebab will be delivered on the plate and already off the skewer. But if you ordered chunks of meat it will come still on the skewer, so you’ll need to grab a piece of flatbread and use it to slide the steaming meat off of the skewer and onto your plate. Most locals will then proceed to enjoy their meal by tearing off a soft piece of the flatbread and using it to scoop some meat into their mouths. I like to mix in some onions or herbs into this bread bite as well. The result is fantastic.
During the meal we can speak with a measure of freedom about ministry stuff, though we’ll need to be careful in case there are English speakers eating nearby. But mostly the other patrons seem more interested in guzzling down their delicious lunch than in trying to figure out what the foreigners are talking about. Still, depending on our surroundings we may be able to talk with great freedom or need to wait until we’re somewhere more private to talk about “M” (missions) stuff.
After we’ve enjoyed our meal, Mr. Curious or one of the servers will come by and ask if we’d like to finish off the meal with the customary small glass of black sugary chai. If your stomach can handle anything more at this point, then I always recommend finishing a meal with chai. Another teenage boy will bring it by from the nearby tea house and we can enjoy it either at our table or at a small seating area out in the alley.
Mr. Curious might come by and talk some more once the lunch rush slows down. He likes to share about his philosophy of life, how he doesn’t believe it’s worth it to kill yourself for money. How he could make a killing if he kept Curious Kebab open for dinner also, but he’d rather spend time with his young family and his friends and enjoy a good drink. It’s all very Ecclesiastes. Mr. Curious is one of those locals who I pray to have a chance to talk more with. There are certain things about his bearing and his conversation that make me wonder where he stands spiritually. He’s tasted success working in high-end restaurants in London and turned away from it. He works hard but is not mastered by work, instead preferring to leverage work for things like spending time with his kids. His lifestyle and sense of humor also seem to indicate he’s not really that impressed with Islam but more likely to be of that breed of local men who saw through its hypocrisy a long time ago. If I’m honest, he reminds me of my friend Hama in the early days. One of these days, either myself or one of my colleagues will get to talk with him more about Jesus.
At this point, the meal is finished. We’ll head up to the counter to tally up our bill and Mr. Curious will tell us at least once that he doesn’t want us to pay. But we’ll insist and hand over the money to either him or one of the other grillers. Then, we’ll walk back out into the bazaar, either to explore its many alleys or to wander back up Soapmakers Street to my place.
The bazaar is humming, the tea glasses clinking, the smell of baking bread, roasting meat, and the gutter funk all mixing in the air. You are now one of the privileged few foreigners who have eaten at Curious Kebab, certainly the best kebab in the city – and possibly, one of the best kebabs in the world.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
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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I preached at a partner church this week on Daniel 7:1-14. The worship pastor did an excellent job of choosing songs with rich connections to that passage. This was one of them. CityAlight is probably not new to many of you, but I continue to appreciate their particular and consistent blend of good music, rich lyrics, and melodies that can be both sung congregationally as well as blasted on a family road trip.
The universal and eternal rule of the Ancient of Days (that he gives to the Son of Man) means we can have a posture of trust, confidence, and mission as the beastly kingdoms of this age rise and fall. It also means that we have a solid anchor and hope for our core longings for “glory, honor, and immortality,” (Rom 2:7).
These truths lead to a people characterized by worship.
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Have your church’s discipleship classes ever focused on what it means to be a faithful Christian patron? Or on how to restore a household’s honor when a daughter has brought shame on the family through sexual impropriety? Or on how to shape the future destiny of your child, including whether buried umbilical cords have any influence on this?
For most, if not all of my readers, the answer would be no. But I’ll bet your church has had classes or studies on the Bible’s view of gender and sexuality, how Christians should engage in politics, and how Christians should think about retirement.
It’s no surprise that the first topics I listed haven’t featured in the classes your church has offered or in the Christian books you’ve read. They’re simply not pressing issues for the Church in the West – if they are even on the radar at all. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s merely a reflection of the particular slice of history and culture where Western Christians find themselves. But Western Christians are living in a time and culture where there’s widespread gender confusion, Christian participation and influence in elections, and individualistic retirement planning. Accordingly, our Christian resources reflect these issues.
When we move back to Central Asia this summer, my new role will be focused on creating and translating solid resources in our people group’s languages. The aim is for these resources to be both robustly biblical and deeply contextual, and in this way to serve local believers, their leaders, and the missionaries who are working among them. We now have a full or partial Bible in several of our languages, and there also are a good number of evangelistic resources both in print and online. What is lacking is content that focuses on building up the church.
In general, I’ve been chewing on two broad categories of resources: global vs. local. There are resources that every Christian in every age and culture needs. These would be universal or global resources. For example, resources in systematic or biblical theology that help Christians to understand what the Bible teaches about God, about the gospel, about the Church, and about God’s plan of redemption throughout the ages. There are also the universally-relevant areas of practical theology that help Christians apply the Bible to things like parenting, marriage, and work. These resources are, to a large extent, timeless, even if the examples and applications used might be more culture-specific.
Think of how impactful the Westminster catechism has been on global Christianity. Or, the broad appeal a book like Pilgrim’s Progress has had over the centuries and around the world. It’s been easy for Christians for four centuries to identify with Christian and his journey toward the Celestial City and the many common struggles that he faces, such as sin, doubt, complacency, despair, and death.
Every people group needs these kinds of global resources. But every people also needs local resources, resources that take aim at the unique strengths, weaknesses, and questions of a given culture. These resources greatly serve believers because their applications are so specific to the world of their target audience.
Our focus people group is very strong in hospitality. But their hospitality is done from the wrong motives – and only extended to those who are existing or possible patrons or clients. This means that local believers need resources that will explicitly point out how biblical hospitality should be done from a gospel motivation and extended toward even those who cannot repay the hospitality through some kind of future loyalty or other service. We have some great resources in the West that lay out a practical theology of hospitality. But how many of them will engage this activity through the lens of a society that relies on hospitality to build its patronage network and social safety net?
Our focus people group also oppresses women in some very dark ways. The oppression of women may be a global issue, but our local believers need resources that will argue directly against its local forms, such as female circumcision of babies, wife-beating on the marriage night to establish a husband’s authority, and honor killings as a response to sexual misconduct. Translated Western resources on biblical manhood and womanhood will cover the principles that oppose practices like these but will not address the practices themselves directly.
The need is to pursue both kinds of resources at the same time. All local churches need universal resources that teach them timeless doctrine and universal principles of Christian conduct. But all local churches also need local resources that will help them wrestle with the particular spirit of their age.
Sometimes these resources end up doing both very well. Augustine’s City of God, for example, was written to argue that it was not Christianity’s fault that Rome had been sacked by the barbarians. This was a particular question hotly debated in the late Roman world. But in doing this, Augustine went on to write about the theology of the City of God and the City of Man and how they are entangled and in conflict in all societies in this age. Augustine’s understanding of the spiritual city of God and its peculiar relationship with the City of Man still serves me very well in early 21st-century America, even though I am so far removed from Augustine’s culture and world.
I think this should be the goal of all serious Christian resources. We cannot escape culture-specific applications in the resources we create. In fact, we must get specific for the sake of our audience. But we can try to write, record, or film in such a way that the biblical exposition and reasoning we employ might also apply to audiences on the other side of the world – or in some future century. You never know how a faithful book written in past centuries might be the key to unlocking the future church’s way forward in some seemingly unrelated controversy.
God’s truth is universal, there’s nothing new under the sun, and yet every generation of believers is also unique. So, we will aim for both – universal and local. And trust that if a resource serves the church well for a decade, then that is good. And if it serves it well for 1,500 years, then that is good as well.
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“A.W.? How are ya? Daniel* here. Listen, I’ve got a job offer I want you to consider. Can you come by my office for some tea?”
Daniel was the middle-aged British manager of a five-star hotel in our Central Asian city. He had recently come to faith while attending the international church. I didn’t really know him very well, but I loved his story. It was just like God to bring this British man all the way to our corner of Central Asia for a hotel job so that he could hear the gospel and be born again.
I was not looking for a new job. I was happy and busy working as an English teacher while also engaged in cross-cultural church planting. But I was always on the lookout for good jobs for local believers or for other foreign believers who might move to our city in order to be Christian tentmakers.
After I arrived at the hotel, Daniel greeted me enthusiastically and offered me a chair and a cup of tea. Then he began to explain the situation.
“Right. So our hotel has a close partnership with the UN, given that their office is right next door.”
He indicated out his window to the unmarked building which was nestled into the hillside next to the hotel. So that’s where the UN offices are. I took note, thinking that I might need to visit them at some point if things got bad for certain local believers – something that did eventually prove necessary.
“Their foreign staff live here at the hotel during their six-month assignments. And we take good care of them. So they trust me and occasionally ask for my help with some of their internal workings.”
I nodded, sipping my Earl Grey and wondering where all this was going.
“Well, last month one of the vice presidents for the UN came to visit the UN office here. Problem was, someone dropped the ball at the local office so no driver was sent to pick up this VP – who then had to wait hours before finally being picked up. Well, as you can imagine, she was positively livid and gave the foreign and local staff quite the talking to. Do you know how the UN staff operate?”
I shook my head. In spite of seasons of doing relief and development work, I’d never been directly connected to the UN.
“Well, there’s a complete turnover of the foreign staff every six months. This means that just as the new foreign staff are learning how things are done, they are shipped off to another part of the world. Terrible way to run an organization if you ask me.”
I nodded in agreement.
“So it’s the local long-term staff who really know what’s needed, but of course, they’re the ones without any power to make decisions. Meanwhile, the foreign staff don’t even have time to get their heads on straight. Anyway, after the VP left our city, it was decided among the higher-ups that this type of mistake must never happen again.”
Daniel gave me a look as if he wasn’t sure if I’d believe what he was about to say next.
“They’ve created a new position for a long-term foreign employee to organize their airport pickups – and they’re going to pay this person $10,000 – $12,000 a month. Can you believe that?”
I sat back in my chair. “Wow, why would they pay that much?”
David threw up his hands. “It’s the UN. Who knows? Either way, that VP must have been very angry. But listen, they want me to send them recommendations for this job. It’s fantastic pay, of course. But the work is very very simple. They want someone to stay on top of the UN airport arrivals and oversee a team of local drivers so that all visitors are picked up and dropped off in a timely fashion. And that’s all they want them to do. They seem to be very serious on this point because they kept telling me that whoever they hire needs to completely ignore everything going on with projects and cases and such.”
“They’re even going to test people on this front during the interview,” Daniel continued, “which is why I wanted to meet with you. When you sit down with them they’ll ask you about your interest in the UN’s projects in the city. But you have to act like you know nothing and care nothing about any of it. ‘I don’t really care about food for refugees’ and all that. They’ll probably stage a phone call interruption and then ask you afterward what you overheard in the conversation. You’ll need to ignore it or pretend to ignore it. They’ll use it as a test. They told me if anyone shows the slightest bit of interest in anything other than airport pickups and drop-offs, they’ll absolutely not get hired. Once hired and the driving schedule is set, you’ll have most of the day to read, watch telly, take a nap, whatever. Just don’t poke your nose in anything else going on in the office, and you’ll be all set.”
On hearing this condition, I knew this kind of setup would never work for me, even if I had been interested. I would be way too curious about the different projects going on and way too bored if all I had to do was make sure the airport runs were happening on schedule. But what about solid believing friends back in the US still trying to pay down their student loans? Could be a Godsend for them. Maybe they could use all the extra time to learn the local language and build solid relationships with the local staff?
“It has to be a foreigner? They’re not open to hiring a local?”
He shook his head. “Has to be a foreigner.”
Listen,” Daniel continued, “I wanted to tell you in case you were interested. Or if not, maybe you could give me some good leads. They are really hoping I can help them find someone reliable.”
I thanked Daniel and told him I’d keep in touch if I had some friends who were interested. He promised to keep me updated.
“Just don’t forget,” he told me as I stood to say goodbye. “If you go for the interview, play dumb and uninterested in everything else UN-related – but don’t let them know I told you that,” he said with a wink.
I stood up to go. “See you in church this weekend?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
The actual interview process kept getting delayed over the following months, much to the disappointment of those back in the States I’d texted about the job. In the end, it was too good to last. Someone with some sense and power in the UN must have found out about this wildly overpaid new position and shut it down. Good for them. When local staff were only being paid $500 a month to work for the UN, paying a foreigner $12,000 a month to merely arrange airport pickups would have been a stunning example of resource mismanagement – even if we had been able to leverage it for other believers.
Bizarre situations like this remind me that at the end of the day, secular organizations – including the UN – are just collections of people – and people are nothing if not flawed and inconsistent. People make mistakes, get angry, overreact, underpay some people, wildly overpay others, and yet somehow still manage to do important work. A couple of years later, UN lawyers were key in keeping Patty and Frank from getting deported back to the country they’d originally fled from. God can certainly use large international bureaucracies like the UN for his purposes. And they can also be bloated, foolish, and corrupt. They’re not quite the evil entities anti-globalist Christians make them out to be. But neither are they exactly agents of light like my Central Asian friends expect them to be. Rather, they’re somewhere in between.
That means they can at times be leveraged for the kingdom. A well-placed believer working on UN refugee cases in our part of the world can make all the difference for a Christian family needing to flee the country or fight deportation. I’d bet that even a believer organizing airport runs could make a difference.
Who knows? God brought Daniel all the way to Central Asia to be a hotel manager so that he could save him. He just might bring you over so you could do wildly overpaid airport runs. If you were faithful to use that money for the kingdom, then that could be a pretty great story in itself.
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Tonight I was enjoying some fish and chips at a downtown Indianapolis plaza while recovering from a long day of support-raising training. Suddenly, I found myself recruited by strangers to join a team for the Taylor Swift trivia competition about to begin in the plaza. I warned my three enthusiastic new friends that I was one of the worst people they could possibly find for knowing pop music trivia. When it comes to superstars like Taylor Swift, I have very much been living under a rock. Or, as my Central Asian friends say, sleeping in the ear of a bull. And I am okay with that. There are Central Asian idioms to learn, after all.
Alas, the Swifties recruited me anyway. Funnily enough, I did help them get the answer right to the first song Swift ever learned on her guitar. But this was only because anyone who was a teenager beginning to learn the guitar in the 2000s was bound to quickly learn Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. It was easy, catchy, and made you sound much better than you were. This deduction shocked us all by actually being correct and left my much younger teammates (who had been stumped by the question) thoroughly impressed. I also helped them spell the name of Zayn Malik, not because I know anything about him as an artist, but simply because I’ve had Muslim friends named Zayn or Malik. You really never know when two utterly isolated fields of knowledge are going to suddenly intersect.
Anyway, back to Central Asia. “Have you been sleeping in the ear of a bull?” is the kind of idiom someone would throw out when a person is ignorant of something that has become common knowledge to seemingly everyone else. In English, we would say things like “Where have you been?” or “How could you not know that?” or “Have you been living under a rock?” Imagine someone in the US not knowing that America is facing the slow-motion train wreck of Trump vs. Biden 2.0, for example.
My unbelieving Central Asian friends might use this saying when they’re insisting that it’s really the US who controls groups like ISIS as part of its grand puppet master strategy for the Middle East. And my believing local friends might use it when foreign Christians reveal that we don’t really understand what Jesus is talking about with the whole wineskins thing. Their common experience with using goat skins for liquids that ferment makes Jesus’ parable about the kingdom needing new goatskins super straightforward, something everyone surely knows – unless they’ve been asleep under a rock, that is, or in the ear of a bull.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 