I’ve been enjoying listening to the recent Titanic episodes on the The Rest Is History podcast. This famous tragedy really is an amazing window into the world as it was around 100 years ago. One of the biggest surprises of the series for me was hearing that the Titanic was, in fact, the safest ship in the world at the time of its christening – and the time of its sinking.
The idea that the Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats – and this being the result of arrogance – is something I had certainly absorbed as fact, right along with so many others who have heard the disaster referenced in popular culture. Indeed, the Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats for all of its passengers. It only had 20, which was enough for only about half of its passengers – and even less than that if the ship had been carrying its full capacity. But this shortage of lifeboats being the result of hubris is a historical fiction.
Instead, the Titanic’s number and size of lifeboats meant that it had the best lifeboat-to-passenger ratio of its time. It surpassed all of its competitors in the number of lifeboats to passengers, and in its other safety features as well. See, during that period, it just wasn’t obvious that a ship should have a lifeboat seat for each and every human on board. This had never been done before, and it wasn’t seen as necessary or realistic.
When the RMS Republic sank in 1909, it had put out a distress signal with new wireless technology, and another ship was able to rescue its passengers as its lifeboats ferried them off of the slowly sinking vessel. This was the emergency plan for the Titanic also. The assumption was that if necessary, there would be plenty of time to evacuate the most safety-conscious vessel of any that had yet sailed the ocean.
Oh, the benefit of hindsight. One hundred years later, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world to us that a ship should have enough lifeboats for all of its passengers and crew. But if anyone had pointed out the danger to White Star, the company that owned the Titanic, they would have laughed as they positively compared themselves to every other ship out there. See, the standard they relied on was the lifeboat-to-passenger ratios of the other ocean liner companies. In this light, they looked completely safe and wise. But we know now that it was the wrong standard. When the iceberg struck, their error – and their doom – was suddenly and tragically revealed.
We shake our heads at the foolishness of shipping standards a century ago. But in likewise manner, heaven will shake its head at any one of us who seeks to justify ourselves by comparison to the sinfulness of others. If, when we think of the day of judgment, we seek comfort with thoughts of how others are really so much more sinful than us, then we make the same mistake the designers of the Titanic made. We use the completely wrong standard. And just like them, trusting this errant standard as our measure will result one day in a sudden and terrible moment of revelation.
In light of what we can now see so clearly, not only the Titanic, but all ships in the early 20th century were utterly failing when it came to the safety standard that counts – enough evacuation craft to keep each human on board from drowning in the frigid North Atlantic. Likewise, in light of what we will one day see so clearly in eternity – and what is seen by heaven now – all of us fail the true spiritual standard, that of the righteousness and glory of God (Rom 3:23). In light of that standard of sinlessness, depending on the fact that we sin less than others is as foolish as bragging that only half of our passengers will drown in icy water, as compared to the other guy’s two-thirds.
We must stop comparing ourselves to the other woefully inept vessels of our age. We are just like them. When the iceberg of divine justice strikes, we will all fail the test. And one day, when the true standard is revealed, all of the cosmos will marvel that we could have missed something so obvious.
The key then is to have the right standard, and second, to be alarmed that we cannot possibly keep it. Then, to do whatever it takes to be found in the only one who can.
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We’ve been so encouraged to be members of the Great Commission Council over the past couple years. The GCC is “a coalition of long-term missionaries from around the world who are dedicated to helping sending churches and mission agencies understand the greatest needs in modern missions.”
This year, a number of videos and statements that we’ve worked on together are beginning to be published. I’ll be periodically posting some of these short videos which will focus on topics such as what missionaries wish they knew before going to the field, important definitions, and missiology statements that we’ve been developing.
This video focuses on what one member of GCC wishes he knew before he went to the mission field. It fits well with something a brother at our church recently shared, that a biblical posture towards the lostness of the world should be “urgent, but not frantic.” As this video states, the longer someone is on the field the more they value relationships, knowing the language and culture, and the steadying truths of the sovereignty of God.
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The Runestone of Harald Bluetooth at Jelling, Denmark
Have you ever wondered about the little Bluetooth symbol on your phone or computer? If you’ve ever thought that the name of the tech and the shape of its symbol are peculiar, that’s because they are. The Bluetooth logo comes from the overlaying of two old Scandinavian runes for H and B. And these letters stand for Harald Bluetooth, a Viking king of Denmark, and the first Christian king of Denmark and Scandinavia. Who knew that all along a little piece of missions history was hidden in plain sight in a technology many of us use every day?
First, King Harald was nicknamed Harald “Bluetooth” either because he had a dead tooth that was conspicuously blue-gray, or because he had a particular fondness for berries, which stained his teeth blue. Or, my favorite theory, because some Vikings sometimes carved black line pattern tattoos into their teeth. King Harald may have had bluish tooth tattoos that flashed anytime he smiled, laughed, or snarled.
There is debate about much of Harald’s life and story, but the traditional accounts state that he became a Christian around the year 960 through what is known in missions as a power encounter. A power encounter is a spiritual showdown of sorts between the power of Jesus and the power of the indigenous spirits or gods. These can vary greatly. Earlier missionaries to Germanic tribes were known for boldly cutting down the sacred trees of the tribes they were trying to reach. One missionary I knew in Melanesia unintentionally stunned the tribe he was working with by emerging unscathed from a car wreck soon after lightning had hit his house. In their tribal beliefs, anyone whose house was hit by lightning was doomed by the spirits to die. But when this missionary’s vehicle afterward tumbled down a mountainside with him in it and he came out of it all just fine, the tribe knew that whatever power he possessed was greater than what they knew. Yet another missionary team in Africa demonstrated Jesus’ power over the spirits by the wives wearing their babies strapped on their backs out in a gathering area at night – something the local women would never dare to do. Even in our experience in Central Asia, we once prayed for a woman and saw her miraculously healed after the mullah’s prayers had failed to accomplish anything. Of course, Elijah’s encounter with the prophets of Baal is one of the most famous power encounters in the Bible.
The power encounter that allegedly led to Harald’s conversion took place because of an argument. During this period, the Viking peoples of Europe were mostly polytheistic, worshipping Odin, Thor, Loki, Freya, and other gods who have now been coopted and Disney-fied by superhero movies. But the true Viking religion was very dark, including sacred groves where they would hang bodies of their human sacrifices from the trees. But at last, in the 900s Christianity was making major inroads. Not only were missionaries actively preaching within Viking areas, but the politically Christian powers of Europe were exerting state pressure from without. Apparently, some Vikings were willing to absorb Jesus into the pantheon, similar to how a Hindu today might “accept Christ” but merely add him to the many gods they are devoted to. Well, a group of Vikings in Harald’s court and one Christian cleric, Poppo, were arguing about whether Christ was more powerful than the Viking gods or merely a kind of peer. Poppo insisted that Jesus was the one true God and that all the Viking gods were, in fact, demons. So, King Harald, observing this disputation, asked Poppo if he would vouch for his beliefs with his own body.
Poppo courageously agreed, not knowing what this would mean. Harald had him locked up overnight and in the morning set up the showdown. He had a heavy piece of iron heated up until it was red hot and then asked Poppo to carry it across the room. Poppo then proceeded to pick up the scalding iron in his hand, carry it calmly across the room, set it down, and then show his hand to Harald, healthy and unburnt. This demonstration is what later Christian chroniclers claim led to Harald’s conversion and baptism and made him the first Christian king of Denmark, which he had earlier unified. He later went on to briefly control Norway as well, as he famously claims on his Jelling Stone, “that Harald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.”
Of course, there’s a lot of debate about the legitimacy of this conversion story among historians. They debate whether Harald’s motives for switching religions were really because of personal conviction, like in this story, or whether it was really a politically shrewd move to protect his kingdom from the encroaching Christian powers, the Franks and the Holy Roman Empire. In this world of complex motives, it may have been both. Probably only God knows at this point if Harald was a truly born-again Christian or if it was merely a switch of identity categories in this world, something that seems to have been true of many “conversions” in this period – and can still be true even in our own corner of Central Asia. Many a young Central Asian has become a “Christian” in an Islamic society merely because it felt like the hip and rebellious thing to do.
But there’s also debate surrounding the ordeal of Poppo, the alleged miracle at the heart of the power encounter. Of course, secular historians write this off as the typical Christian embellishment of the period. But many modern Christians also find themselves skeptical of miraculous power encounters like these, even if there were no dispute about motives or the sources themselves. For my part, I do think medieval scribes were prone to overly-embellish their accounts of Christians’ lives. But I also think there is a good case to be made that even in this post-apostolic age, miraculous events will occasionally accompany the preaching of the gospel. This seems to be true especially when the gospel is newly breaking into a people group. Missions history demonstrates much of this going on, particularly in fear-power cultures, where the primary question being asked is not “How can I be forgiven?” or “How can I buy back my honor?” but “How can I not live in abject fear of the spirits’ power?” And though I am a continuationist, even well-known cessationists like Augustine went to great lengths to document that miracles were still quietly happening in his circles in order to confirm the truth of the gospel and to strengthen the faith of God’s people. So, I leave the door open that Poppo’s power encounter may have really happened.
But how in the world did Harald Bluetooth become the inspiration for a new kind of wireless network technology? The answer is to be found in the late ’90s when two engineers from Ericson and Intel were at a bar discussing what to name this new prototype technology. Both of them were history nerds, so one mentioned recently reading about Harald Bluetooth, the Viking king who united the Danes, and how his nickname might work for a new wireless technology that would unite various devices. The name was supposed to be temporary, but it stuck and is still with us today.
Today, Bluetooth tech is everywhere, far more widespread than the name of King Harald ever was. Perhaps the next time you see that peculiar runic symbol on your smart devices, you can remember Harald Bluetooth, who may have been a brother in the faith, and praise God for the way God used him to bring Christianity to his people. And you can remember the power of Jesus, his superiority over any and all spirits and “gods,” and his power to reach even the hardest to reach peoples.
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Frontier church planting and missions can helpfully expose hidden weaknesses in Christianity where it is more established. Like trying to carve a homestead out of the wilderness, there’s something stark and clarifying about planting churches where there are none. You quickly find out there are certain very important skills and tools that you need, but which you didn’t really prioritize back home.
For us, our time on the field has exposed that many complementarian churches are not training even their most gifted women in how to teach and preach the Bible. They are training their women to value good teaching and preaching from the Bible, and to discern good teaching and preaching from the fluff – and these are very good things. Yet it needs to be said that sitting under good preaching and recognizing it is not the same thing as being trained in how to do it. One might sit under good preaching for decades and not be able to prepare for and deliver a good lesson or sermon. This is because training is needed that shows, behind the scenes, what the process looks like to faithfully study, structure, write, and deliver a sermon or lesson. And then that training needs to be cemented with practice.
When complementarian churches send their women to the mission field, where ministry must often be done in gender-segregated environments and where female missionaries vastly outnumber male missionaries, these women are finding themselves in contexts where teaching or preaching to other women is needed. However, they suddenly realize that they are unequipped to study a text, prepare it to be taught, and then deliver it skillfully. Once again, years of sitting under faithful teaching and preaching will not often lead to the ability to reproduce that teaching or preaching. Nor will years of personal and small group Bible study, as valuable as these experiences are.
This is a curious oversight because we convictional complementarians are not against women teaching and preaching. We just believe that God in his wisdom has designated specific environments for that kind of ministry to take place. There is some variation among complementarians on what is biblical and what is not, but in general, most believe that women are called to teach and preach authoritatively to other women and to children (Titus 2:3-5). And that certain forms of public verbal ministry are also beneficial in the broader mixed congregation as well, such as prayer, testimonies, and other related forms of sharing (1 Cor 11, 1 Cor 14:26, Acts 21:9). All of these common forms of ministry by women are understood as taking place under the authority of the church’s pastors, and can and do take place without women functioning in the authority, office, or role of elders/pastors/overseers. This kind of posture is, in my view, the best way to thread the needle given the nuanced picture the New Testament gives us for women in the church. It’s not a simple all-or-nothing, but a thoughtful yes and thoughtful no.
I assume that most of my readers will be complementarian, but even if that is the case, it must be repeated that we believe these distinctions are those of spiritual role, not of spiritual value or equality, nor necessarily of ability. Men and women are indeed created different in important ways, but they are both made equally in the image of God, and in Christ they are both equal coheirs of eternal life (1 Pet 3:7, Gen 1:27). Men and women can both possess strong gifts of teaching and preaching. But we believe that the Bible teaches that God has ordained that only qualified men take the role and ministry of authoritative teacher and preacher when the church is gathered for worship as a spiritual family. In our postmodern age, God’s reasons for doing this are increasingly hard for us to resonate with and understand, but it’s precisely places like this where we find out if we are Christians of the Book, rather than merely Christians of our particular slice of time and culture.
We should remember that women and children make up approximately three-quarters of most churches. That means that certain women will be spiritually qualified to teach and preach to around 75% of those in the congregation. Men won’t sit under the teaching and preaching of these women, but that’s no reason to assume that women don’t need training for the many opportunities they have to serve the other three-quarters of the church body. Few would say they want lower quality teaching and preaching in our kids’ and women-only gatherings, but if we’re not actually training the women in our churches to teach and preach, then we are in some sense showing that we feel a subpar ministry of the word for the women and kids is just fine after all.
To bring it back to a frontier missions context, if my wife or a woman on my team overseas has the chance to preach the word to a room full of Muslim or believing Central Asian women, I want her to bring it. We need her to be able to teach or preach in a way that is faithful to the text and in a way that is skillful so that the hearer is not distracted by an unclear or poorly structured message. But most of our female colleagues currently being sent to the mission field will need to receive this kind of training after they arrive, because they’re not getting it from their sending churches and seminaries. If we’re not training our missionary women in these ways, some of our most gifted saints, then are we training any women in this way?
My wife and I have raised this issue in a number of contexts over the years and the response tends to be pretty lukewarm. My sense is that there is an emotional discomfort with introducing more formalized teaching and preaching training for women because of a fear that that might somehow lead toward something egalitarian down the line. How exactly this would happen is unclear. But that anxious feeling is enough to keep us from wrestling with the problem until we have clarity – and then actually changing our structures to account for the need. Yet there is nothing about training complementarian women to teach and preach that means they will somehow become egalitarian in the process. In fact, if they are receiving better training in rightly dividing the word, chances are they’ll become even more established in their convictions.
Similar to Christians who won’t partner with others who differ theologically because of a vague fear of compromise, Christians who won’t train women to teach and preach because of a similar angst first need to pursue greater clarity. Once they have conscience-clarity on the places and times where women are called and free to teach and preach, then they can go about the practicalities of equipping them for this ministry without fear. But if that basic work of clarity is not done, the anxious fog of potential compromise will often keep any movement from happening.
But would women preaching or teaching to other women or to children somehow undermine the elders’ ministry of the word? This is the main thrust of the objections we’ve heard over the years. This could indeed happen if such preaching and teaching were happening independently of pastoral leadership (the same goes for lone ranger men preaching and teaching). But healthy churches often train and raise up men to preach and teach who themselves do not become pastors, and this is understood to be simply another way the saints are equipped to do the work of the ministry. When a faithful brother is mentored in teaching and preaching and then goes on to do this at a men’s breakfast, at the homeless shelter, or at a student gathering, this is not viewed as a threat to the pulpit – but instead a submissive extension of it. The same can be true of women preaching and teaching other women inside and outside of the church.
What would it take for complementarian churches to provide this kind of training for their women who are preparing for ministry contexts such as the mission field, church planting teams, or women’s ministries? This will require not just answering the concerns and ambiguous fears we might have, but also creating structures that are more fully consistent with our beliefs.
At the very least, training and practice are needed. Women must be given access to training that will help them learn how to teach and preach expositionally – such as the excellent Simeon Trust workshops. But then, just like any learner, they will need opportunities to practice that skill on the front end in order to become proficient. They will also need opportunities to practice over time so that they don’t grow rusty, but instead steadily improve. The local church is the very best place for these opportunities to be offered.
Practically, many local churches don’t yet have women who can lead this kind of training, so pastors will need to find appropriate ways to listen to and give feedback to women who are learning to teach and preach. Can this be done without violating the principle that women should not teach or exercise authority over a man (1 Tim 2:12)? Given the fact that the pastors are present to train and assess, I would contend that there is no problem with the authority dynamics going on here. After all, a bible college student taking Preaching I is not somehow exercising authority over his professor as he preaches his sermon for a grade. For churches who might not be comfortable with this, there may be gifted women in sister churches who can instead lead this kind of time.
But I imagine the greatest hurdle toward training women to teach and preach is simple busyness. Faithful pastors are often swamped with the many needs of ministry. So, in the place of training, a very understandable trust and grateful relief are extended to the servant-hearted women who fill the teaching roles needed in the church. This may be accompanied by the (faulty) assumption that since these women are sitting under the faithful preaching of the word week in and week out, that will be enough. Or, that these women will be able to train themselves through reading, podcasts, and other resources – and to be fair, some do. But many will struggle, wishing they had the chance to apprentice in this weighty and dangerous work. It’s very understandable that pastoral busyness has prevented women from being trained to teach and preach, but surely even the busiest church could get creative and fit in a Saturday morning training every quarter or so. In the end, we will prioritize what we value.
Let us consider how much better it would be if we intentionally equipped our sisters to teach and preach. This is so that when they find themselves in the appropriate contexts, they are free to bring it – to proclaim the word faithfully and skillfully because they’ve seen it modeled. But more than that, because they’ve also been trained, given chances for practice and feedback, and given the freedom and trust to go out and do it well.
I know this would make a difference on the front lines of the mission field. I’d wager it would make a difference in your local church as well.
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Every language is learnt by the young from the old, so that every living language is the embodiment of a tradition. That tradition is in principle immortal. Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction. Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh. And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die.
Every language has a chance at immortality, but this is not to say that it will survive for ever. Genes too, and the species they encode, are immortal; but extinctions are a commonplace of palaeontology. Likewise, the actual lifespans of language communities vary enormously. The annals of language history are full of languages that have died out, traditions that have come to an end, leaving no speakers at all.
Ostler, Empires of the Word, pp. 7-8
Even more than the linguist, the Christian knows that every language has a chance at immortality. The presence of the world’s diverse languages in the Son of Man vision of Daniel 7 and the heavenly throne room vision of Revelation 7 imply that many languages will indeed be immortal, living forever on the lips of their redeemed speakers. This makes practical sense since no one human language is sufficient on its own to describe God in all his wonder. In fact, we may need to invent some new ones to account for the new experiences of finally seeing God face to face, having friends who are angels, possessing spiritual bodies, etc.
What do we make of the languages that have gone extinct in world history? If we take the promises of “all languages” literally, then we would need to insist that there were believers somehow present in all of those language groups in time past. More likely, the “all” of these passages is symbolic, meaning that the vast majority of the world’s languages will indeed be represented in heaven. A third intriguing possibility would be that of language resurrection, where there is a return in the new heavens and the new earth of languages long dead, just as my kids and I hope for a return of dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, and giant sloths.
After all, if we’ve got billions and billions of years to enjoy, I would certainly sign up for a class on old Sumerian were the library of New Jerusalem to offer such a course.
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“Don’t you remember? She lost her gall bladder in Turkey!”
“Ohh… right…”
I honestly can’t tell you how many times this conversation was repeated among our kids during our first term. It began as a tongue-in-cheek way to tell our kids that mom couldn’t eat the same way anymore because she no longer had a gall bladder. But it took on a life of its own that eventually had us concerned that our third-culture kids might grow up thinking that people simply lose their gall bladders when they travel – like they might misplace some toy – rather than having them surgically removed. Don’t underestimate the things that can get missed in a TCK upbringing. Until I was sixteen, I thought that spaghetti was grown on farms.
The whole gall bladder saga came about quite unexpectedly. We needed to take a medical trip to Istanbul, Turkey, a year and a half after arriving on the field. There, we would visit a network of hospitals called Acibadem for our needed shots and checkups. Because of these shots, our family came to call this hospital “Ouchy Bottom.”
Before any of our medical work was done, we decided to spend a week of rest in a historic island town near Istanbul where no cars were allowed. It was a good, if very humid, week, dragging our toddlers all over the island. If you are ever traveling somewhere with toddlers where cars are not permitted, always be sure to check that your Airbnb is not a long walk uphill. Also, Turks, unlike our desert people group, seem to think that AC and ice water will make you sick, so these are not nearly as readily available as one might hope in a sweltering July.
During our week there, our daughter accidentally head-butted my wife in the eye, leaving her with quite the shiner – swollen, puffy, and dark purple. I had a lot of people give me the stink eye on ferries and around town that week, thinking that I had something to do with this. I didn’t know enough Turkish to point out the true culprit – the adorable little girl with the pigtails.
All good things must come to an end, and at the end of the week, we left the charming yet sweaty island and moved over to the mainland to commence with the medical work. The kids got their shots and my wife went in for an abdominal ultrasound, something a doctor had ordered out of an abundance of caution. While the area the ultrasound was supposed to focus on proved to be fine, the tech had also accidentally/providentially pointed it at the gall bladder area. So, we were informed that there were some pretty serious gall stones there, and that surgery would be necessary.
One of the strange contrasts between Turkey and our area of Central Asia is that while Turkey is much more developed and modern, and there’s a lot of Western music playing everywhere, there’s actually a lot less knowledge of English in the general and professional population. The doctors had good English, but to our surprise, the rest of the nurses and hospital staff didn’t. In one sense, good on them for being so confident as a people in their own language. But in an age of medical tourism, this can sometimes mean things get lost in translation – like entire organs.
In the consultation, the doctor told us the medical term for the procedure he would do, called a cholecystectomy. Then he blitzed through the scheduling and recovery pieces. My wife and I, having very limited experience with medical gall bladder terminology, thought that this cholecystectomy surgery must entail simply removing the gall stones. We had no idea it meant removing the entire organ. Our Google Translate conversations with the hospital staff didn’t clear this up for us either. Everyone assured us that we were in store for a very simple and normal procedure.
So, a couple of mornings later, the kids and I said goodbye to our wife and mother in her blue hospital gown and shower cap, still sporting her black eye.
After several hours, the doctor told me that the procedure was complete and that I could come and be with my wife when she woke up from the anesthesia.
“Mr. Workman, the surgery was a great success!” the doctor enthusiastically told me as I walked into the room. “Would you like to see the organ?”
“The organ?”
“Yes! I have it in a jar and can show it to you if you like.”
“The stones?”
“The gall bladder, of course, with the stones too. Everything went perfectly according to plan!”
I took a moment to absorb what the jovial doctor had just said. They had taken out the whole thing.
“Oh, right… Um, no, I don’t think I need to see the organ. Thank you.”
“Please excuse me for a moment,” the doctor continued. “Your wife should be waking up any minute now.”
I went over to sit by my wife and thought about the best way to break the news to her. I could let the doctor do it. But no, that was not likely to go well. The doctor was acting far too cavalier for that. I’d better do my best to break it to her gently, but directly.
A few minutes later she stirred, blinking back into consciousness.
“Hey, love!” I said in a low voice, smiling.
“Hey…”
“How are you feeling?”
“Mmm… Okay, I guess.”
“Well, the doctor said the surgery went great. No issues whatsoever.”
The moment had come. I had to tell her. I took a deep breath.
“But… they had to take out the whole gall bladder.”
My wife rolled her eyes over to look at me.
“They what?”
“Yeah, they took the whole thing out. I guess that was their plan all along.”
We both sat there in that hospital room, registering what this meant and wondering how in the world we had missed something like the nature of the surgery itself. In the days that followed, we learned that this had indeed been the medically necessary thing to do, which brought some relief. Still, had we known they were planning on removing an entire organ we would have at least done some more research about alternatives or how this surgery might affect the rest of someone’s life.
In the years since, not having a gall bladder has indeed had a drastic effect on what my wife can and can’t eat, meaning we’ve added that particular organ to our growing list of things we look forward to being made new in the coming resurrection. We do laugh about how it all went down, but it’s a laughter tinged with some sadness also. Our bodies were meant to have functioning gall bladders to help us enjoy the great variety of God’s good foods. Now my wife’s was gone, perhaps still in a jar somewhere in Istanbul, another casualty of the fall.
Despite being the place where we lost mama’s gall bladder, we still love Turkey. A very special part of my calling took place there during a prayer meeting in 2008. My wife and I spent a couple of wonderful days there during our first vision trip to Central Asia as newlyweds. Where else can you can drink chai on a ferry as the sun sets on the Bosphorus, watching the light play on the spires and even more ancient domes of the Hagia Sophia? Or drink some good Japanese cold brew in historic Chalcedon?
Yes, despite misadventures like this one, part of our hearts will always be in Turkey. And now, one of our gall bladders also.
*Spellcheck has made me aware that Americans are supposed to spell gall bladder as one word, gallbladder. But having grown up overseas, I’m with the Brits on this one, so gall bladder it is and shall remain in my writing.
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What are the common barriers that keep the gospel from spreading from one group of humans to another? How can one group have a strong presence of believers and churches and yet live side by side with other groups that are completely unreached? The answer to this question is not as simple as it might seem.
The modern missionary movement mainly used geographic and political lenses when they sought to evangelize the world. William Carey’s An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen featured a list of the world’s countries, their population sizes, religions, and other statistics. Mission agencies followed suit until the late 1900s, focusing mainly on countries and political boundaries when they sought to organize their missions strategy. This is not without biblical precedent. In the book of Acts, we see that Paul’s missionary strategy is focused on the cities and provinces of the Roman Empire. Paul and Luke are using a geographic lens when they seek to apply the Great Commission (along with a very broad ethnic lens of Jew vs. Gentile). Paul’s ambition is to preach to the Gentiles in places where no one else has yet laid a foundation (Rom 15:14-24).
Political and geographic borders and systems can absolutely provide barriers to the gospel. Consider the great contrast of the two Koreas. South Korea, one of the most Christian nations on earth, neighbors North Korea, one of the most unreached. With the same language, ethnicity, and historically the same culture, what is the barrier? The DMZ and the North’s communist/cult of personality government that seeks to stamp out Christianity.
However, the nation-state lens of modern missions was insufficient to recognize other massive barriers to the gospel. 20th-century missiologists like Donald McGavran and Ralph Winter demonstrated that this political and geographic lens meant that there were thousands of “hidden peoples” who were completely overlooked because of the ethnic, linguistic, or cultural barriers that existed even within countries. A missions agency might consider a country reached because of a strong presence of Christianity among the majority ethnicity, but with their nation-state lens fail to see that the minority ethnicities were completely without a witness.
Starting in the late ’70s, this led to a paradigm shift in missions, where agencies adopted the primary lens of unreached people group (UPG). This ethnolinguistic lens also has biblical precedent, with a strong thread of God’s heart for all peoples (panta ta ethne) evident throughout the Bible. We see this focus on ethnicity and language in passages like Psalm 67:4, Isaiah 66:18, Daniel 7:14, and most famously, Rev 7:9, “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages…”
This lens seeks to recognize three other significant barriers to the gospel: ethnicity, language, and culture. It recognizes that humanity typically divides up into groups that identify as distinct from others around them along significant ethnic, language, or cultural lines. Sometimes ethnicity is the main barrier, where the same language is used and similar cultures exist, but neighboring people groups struggle to influence one another because of longstanding ethnic tensions. This is the case with many ethnic Christian groups in the Middle East and their Muslim neighbors, all of whom are fluent in Arabic.
Other situations show that focusing on ethnicity alone is not enough. Our own central Asian people group share a common ethnic identity with neighboring groups, but their languages are not mutually intelligible. In this case, language is the primary barrier, not ethnicity or culture. A missions agency might see the church take off in one of the dozen or so language groups of this ethnicity and consider their job done. In reality, this language barrier is going to prevent the spread of the gospel to the other segments of this ethnicity unless there is a very intentional effort.
Yet other situations show that culture can be the primary barrier. This is where things can get really murky, yet an honest appraisal of how humanity actually functions shows that this is often the case. Cultural differences provide significant barriers to the gospel. This is where socio-economic, religious, and even generational differences come into play – and evil things like caste. For evidence near at hand, consider how hard it is for middle-class churches to reach the poor and working class, and vice versa. It is very difficult for any of our churches in the West to truly impact subcultures different from ours that live within our own cities and towns, and this is with a shared history of Christianity. How much more might cultural differences prevent gospel impact among groups that have no Christian heritage? Even here there is biblical precedent for acknowledging this barrier. Many of the Jew-Gentile issues that Paul deals with in his letters are not just issues of religious background and conscience, they are issues of differing systems of culture and meaning – head coverings being one example.
The key is to recognize that multiple barriers exist to the spread of the gospel from one group of humans to another. These barriers might be political, geographic, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural. The Bible acknowledges all of them. That means we don’t have to lock ourselves into only one lens; rather, we should make use of all of the lenses the Bible gives us when we are seeking to discern why the gospel might be making inroads in one group and not among others.
Once we’ve recognized the primary barrier or barriers, then we are in a good place to discern if they are significant enough to warrant a separate church planting focus or not. Typically, I believe that geography and language do warrant separate approaches, while ethnicity and culture need to be taken on a more case-by-case basis. This needs a post of its own, but in brief, we must remember that the New Testament church brought Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian together into the same churches, messy and scandalous though that effort was. The splintering of missions strategy into hyper-specialized church planting efforts can often reinforce natural human divisions, rather than overcome them.
Deep divisions cut through lost humanity, cutting off whole countries, peoples, languages, and cultures from the good news of salvation through Jesus. Yet the Bible shows us that these can and will be overcome. To play our part in this we will need to take these barriers seriously, on the one hand, even as we trust that the simple gospel is powerful to conquer each and every one of them. We must work hard to understand and undermine these barriers, though our faith must not be in our ability to figure them out.
Carey understood “the Obligations of Christians to Use Means in the Conversion of the Heathen,” even as his faith was in the sovereign power of God to save the nations. May we follow in his footsteps – til every barrier falls.
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“Shamgar Had an Ox Goad” by Mr. and Mrs. Garrett Soucy
As soon as I saw the title of this song, “Shamgar Had an Ox Goad,” I wanted to listen to it. It didn’t disappoint. The creative and quirky title is accompanied by a very creative and catchy song, where the writers’ celebrate that when it comes to the glory of God, “everything is on the table.” The instruments that God can use for his glory are as limitless as creation itself. That is both a biblical and a hopeful message for any of us doubting that God can indeed turn our stumbling efforts, weaknesses, and even suffering into displays of his glory.
I apologize, but here I can’t help but think of a crossover from that scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, where the different members of the fellowship pledge their weapons (and loyalty) to Frodo, the ring-bearer.
Aragorn: “You have my sword.”
Legolas: “And you have my bow.”
Shamgar:
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“What’s the issue, my brother?” the politician said over the phone.
“I was driving from desert city to mountain city with my chickens for sale. I had all the official paperwork ready. I passed the last checkpoint for desert city without a problem, but they wouldn’t permit me through the first checkpoint of mountain city.”
“I see.”
“I asked them why and they just said, ‘We’re not letting you through.’ So I turned around to go back to desert city, but now they wouldn’t allow me through that checkpoint either! Now I’m stuck in no-man’s-land, me and my chickens, between these two blasted parties. What can I do?”
“Well,” responded the politician, “The only thing you can do is try to get some barbecue supplies, and start roasting those birds for lunch.”
That is a real conversation that happened recently, as reported by the politician. He was on a show TV show ranting about the absurdity of our region’s checkpoint system and the indignities it thrusts upon the normal people of the region who are just trying to live and make a living. My friend, Adam*, told me this story yesterday, then later sent me the clip.
“Bro,” he said, laughing on the line, “One time I was in a bus going through that same checkpoint. When they stopped us, I was the only one they made get out. You know, ‘Come with us, Mr. Adam,’ and all that. Anyway, they took me over to their little plastic shed and sat me down to ask me some questions. They made me empty out all the contents of my bag and kept asking me if I had any guns on me, trying to act very concerned about security. Then the guard talking to me up and leaves the room – and leaves his AK-47 on the chair right next to me!”
“He gets back to the room and tells me they didn’t find any gun after all. So I said to him, ‘Well, I found a gun for you, the one you left for me right here on this chair!'”
These checkpoints didn’t used to be there. After all, these two cities and the surrounding areas they control belong to the same people group. But in previous decades there was a civil war between the two parties that control these cities, and the checkpoints went up. There are now around eight of them on the two-and-a-half hour drive from one city to the other. Any time tensions flare up between the political parties, the checkpoints get more onerous, the politicians and bureaucrats using them to enact their personal vendettas against one another.
The particular checkpoint area Adam was telling me about is where the front lines of these two tribal-mafia-style political parties meet. In between them is a no-man’s-land, perhaps half a mile long. There’s a small cement mosque in this area intentionally painted in the colors of both of the political parties, but it’s not fooling anyone. This is no longer technically a war zone, but it could become one at the drop of a hat. In the meantime, it seems designed to just make things harder for everyone.
You’ll probably be waived through the last checkpoint as you leave one territory, but then be greeted with at least the suspicious body language of a soldier leaning in your window wanting your ID, what you were doing in that other city, and just what exactly you plan on doing in our city. There’s even a linguistic element to this, with both cities having different dialects, perhaps comparable to a Scottish vs. Texan accent. They seem to enjoy placing guards at these checkpoints that emphasize these dialect differences for some kind of Shibboleth effect. In the beginning it was very confusing for me, but after a while it became a sort of challenge to see if I could not only understand their questions but even respond in the right dialect. When we got it right the guards would be so charmed by these goofy Americans attempting their dialect that they would usually just wave us through. We eventually found this even more effective than the otherwise sound principle of “speak English to the men with guns.”
“Our moving truck was stuck in that no-man’s-land for hours one time as well,” I told Adam. “When we moved from mountain city to desert city we had a lawyer who told us not to worry about the paperwork, because he’s got patronage.”
“Oh no, you had a zombie lawyer!” Zombie is one of Adam’s favorite terms for someone who is essentially an inside member of the very corrupt bureaucracy of his country.
“Yes, well this zombie lawyer told us that because his sister was so important in the government, instead of paperwork, we should just give him a call and he’d work his magic to get us through the checkpoint. Well, he was wrong. They let our moving truck through one of them, but not through the other, and it was stuck there for hours.”
“In the end, the only way we got through was by calling in a favor from Ahab*. Remember him?”
“No! The snake?”
“Yep, the super deceptive guy who split the church. Well, someone called him because his brother is somebody important in the secret police. So, with the help of both of these very shady men we finally got our stuff through. It was a nightmare.”
“Bro, the zombie lawyer and the snake, that’s a bad day. Maybe it would have better to just have a barbecue, like the chicken guy!”
I am so grateful for friends like Adam who can help me laugh at the absurdity of it all.
I have also become more thankful for the common grace of open roads within the same country. My local friends are amazed to hear that you could drive for hours and hours in the US and through multiple states and never have to stop for a checkpoint. I remember hearing the bad news during the Covid culture wars that blue states were talking of putting up vaccine checkpoints at the borders of red states, and suddenly blurting out to the radio, “No, no, no, you do not want to start that game!”
We laugh about our checkpoints, but they can be an expression of the banality of evil. Sin makes people fools. And evil uses systems full of fools to make things complex and annoying that should be simple and easy. It’s like a system-wide equivalent of the demon-possessed man, Weston, in Perelandra, when he decides to wear Ransom down by simple repetition of his name over and over again.
“Ransom… Ransom… Ransom… Ransom… Ransom… Ransom…”
“What!?”
“Nothing…”
“Ransom… Ransom… Ransom.”
But foolish systems like this don’t stop at mere nuisance. They can actually contribute to oppression of the poor and of hard-working laborers. Why should that chicken farmer be prevented like that from doing work that serves his family and serves his neighbor? It can even hinder gospel work. As Westerners, we navigate these checkpoints relatively easily. But our Latin American colleagues are given a much harder time since they physically resemble those from an enemy people group. We’ve even had to factor the risks of these checkpoints into contingency conversations with local believers, in the chance that they would someday need to flee from one city to another.
One Christmas, we decided to try to use the checkpoint system to do some simple seed sowing. We got a bunch of small, fancy chocolate boxes, one for each checkpoint. The plan was to give one out with a small portion of scripture each time we were stopped and to tell them that today was the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, our savior. As is customary on any big holiday, we would hand over the gift with a hearty “Congratulations!” Or, literally-translated, “May you be holy!”
The Muslim checkpoint guards really didn’t know what to do with us, but we at least succeeded in providing them with something unusual to talk about later, some chocolate to eat, and perhaps some scripture that would sit on their shelves like a spiritual time bomb. Most don’t know that Dec 25th is Christmas, thinking that New Year’s Day and Christmas are the same thing. The guards didn’t give us a hard time that day, instead smiling bemusedly as they waved us through.
Perhaps my favorite checkpoint story came late one afternoon. We pulled up to the checkpoint, the kids asleep in the back seat, my wife nodding off in the front.
The guard leaned in, looked at me, looked at my wife, and then squinted hard at me.
“Tell me, brother, what exactly are you doing with that foreign woman?”
I couldn’t help smiling as I explained to him that that foreign woman was actually my wife, that we were both foreigners, et cetera, et cetera. To this day, it’s a line my wife and I will recite to each other, one way the absurd checkpoint system has now contributed to our family’s lore and oral tradition.
So I guess the checkpoint system hasn’t been all bad. But it’s mostly bad. And I hope they do away with it all someday – and that they didn’t make that poor guy have to barbecue his chickens.
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A number of months ago I was reading the parable of the talents to my kids at bedtime. There was nothing unusual about the night. I was leaning against the doorframe to the bedroom they all currently share, Bible open in my hands. The lamp was turned off in their room to help them settle down and I was relying on the hallway light for my reading. The plan was simple as always. Read a little bit, discuss a little bit, sing a song or two together, pray, give kisses and hugs goodnight, and finally, navigate multiple attempts to get out of bed again for various and sundry reasons. It was a typical night, not the kind of time I would have predicted for the conviction of the Spirit to fall.
We were almost finished our reading through the book of Matthew and that night had come to chapter 25, verses 14-30. The parable of the talents will be well-known to most of you, but if it’s not you can read it here and I’ll also post it below. The summary is that a master leaves on a long journey, entrusting three servants with three very large sums of money (called talents). The first one receives five talents, about 100 years’ worth of wages for a laborer. The second receives two talents, about 40 years’ worth of wages for a laborer. And the third receives one talent, roughly 20 years’ wages. The first two servants spend the following lengthy period investing their master’s money and both double the amounts they received. The third servant goes off and buries the money he received. When the master returns, he affirms the faithfulness of the first two servants and then rewards them with both increased authority and joy. But the third servant explains that he played it safe and merely stashed his master’s money away. He says he did this because he knew his master’s character to be harsh and stingy. The master, in turn, strongly rebukes him, telling him that if he knew this he still should have at least put the money in the bank, where it could have collected interest. He then commands that the one talent be given to the first servant, and that the wicked servant be cast out into the “outer darkness,” essentially into hell. The parable ends with the third servant losing even the amount that he had preserved, while the first two servants receive even more than the enormous amounts they had ended up with.
This is a parable I know well, and have read dozens and dozens of times. But for whatever reason, when I read it this time (and read it for my kids, no less, not for me), clarity and conviction fell hard. The familiarity of the passage meant that I’d never really understood the whole bit about the master’s character. But I suddenly realized that this was at the very core of the parable. The wicked servant says of the master, “I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” Essentially, “You are a stingy, exacting man, so I didn’t risk doing costly work that would go unrewarded. I played it safe and stashed your money away.” In Middle Eastern culture, then as well as now, stinginess is viewed as one of the very worst vices.
I was struck with a question I’d not thought of before. What was the servant doing all those years when the other servants were busy trading for the increase of their master’s wealth? Presumably, looking out for his own wealth. And why? Because he did not believe that it would be worth it to risk spending all those years and all that sweat, only to have his master come back and take it all from him. If he invested for his master, he would labor and sacrifice and risk, and for what? A stingy master? No, thanks! He would instead do the minimum, follow the letter of the law, try to serve two masters. His master had given him this money to keep safe, so he would do that – and no more.
The other two servants seem to have had a radically different view of their master’s character. We see this from their actions. They do spend a long time using what their master had entrusted to them to generate even more wealth for him. How are they able to do this? Well, the parable tells us that they are faithful. In one sense, this is enough. Faithful servants seek to obey their masters above and beyond what they are asked, as if they are working as unto God, not unto men. But it seems that the whole back-and-forth about the master’s character is giving us a clue that the other servant’s must not have believed that their master was stingy and harsh. Rather, they must have believed that in the end, their master was a rewarder. The end of the parable shows us this was indeed his true nature. But also consider how often Jesus speaks of heavenly rewards in the book of Matthew alone (5:12, 5:46, 6:1, 6:2, 6:4, 6:5, 6:6, 6:16, 6:18, 10:41, 10:42). Then, take the radical statement from Hebrews 11:6 that to please God, one must believe that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. No, this faith in the master’s character is the difference between the two servants’ faithful risk and the other’s wicked self-interest.
These truths cut to my heart because I was in a long season of doubting God’s character. After seven years of costly ministry on the field, preceded by seven years of costly ministry in the US, I felt like we were in shambles. We had worked hard for our master and even seen what he had given us multiplied many times over. A few dozen had come to faith, a church had been planted, hundreds had heard the gospel, missionary teams had been strengthened and served – tens of thousands of words had been written. But our health, our faith, our finances, our prospects? These all looked pretty bad. My heart had settled into a posture where I was counting up the cost, and feeling like God was harsh and stingy. I was no longer open to risking for God in the same way, instead feeling like I needed to take care of myself and my family’s future. Sure, I knew I would keep doing the essentials – trying to pray and read my bible, trying to write, trying to encourage others, doing bedtime devotions with the kids. I wouldn’t get rid of the talent entrusted to me – but I just might bury it.
“Is this really what I think of God’s character?” I thought to myself as read the cynical words of the third servant to my kids that night. “…a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed…”
I finished the parable and paused in my reading, quiet, sad, and somehow grateful to feel the sharpness of the Word after a long season of numbness.
“Dad?” my oldest son asked, wondering about my extended silence.
“Huh?… Oh, right. Um, what song should we sing?”
“The fruit of the Spirit’s not a coconut!” piped up our youngest. Ah, yes, a classic.
We proceeded to finish the bedtime routine, but I knew I would be chewing on Matthew 25 and this train of thought for some time to come. Deep down, I had felt that there was a part of me that still believed that God is not stingy, but instead a generous rewarder. That everything, absolutely everything, would be remembered and reflected in that eternal weight of glory being prepared for us. But this faith had been slowly buried under shovel-fulls of sorrow, self-pity, and spiritual fog.
In the following months the theme of God as a rewarder, and the resulting joy of those who out of this truth risk and suffer (and are therefore the most fully alive of any of us), jumped out at me from passage after passage. I saw it shouting at me from the Beatitudes, from Hebrews 11, from 2nd Corinthians 4, even from grumpy Naaman the Syrian risking seven dips in the muddy Jordan. I remembered how it was the truths of the coming resurrection that shook me out of seasons of spiritual depression in the past – one of the reasons I had initially chosen to highlight that theme in my blogging. Slowly, the faith to risk because of God’s character returned, until I found myself one night hearing my wife telling me she was now ready to attempt a return overseas. In fact, she was playfully kicking me while she said this, asking me what was taking me so long to join her.
There were a number of powerful truths that combined to open my heart again to risk again, whether that means ministry overseas or back again in the States someday. But the first life-giving blow came from the parable of the talents, from a seemingly-normal bedtime with my kids, and with it the resolve to no longer doubt the character of my master.
He is the great rewarder. His commendation awaits. I must not bury his talents, but invest and risk them. Risk them all.
[14] “For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. [15] To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. [16] He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. [17] So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. [18] But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money. [19] Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. [20] And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more.’ [21] His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ [22] And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.’ [23] His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ [24] He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, [25] so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ [26] But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? [27] Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. [28] So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. [29] For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. [30] And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Matthew 25:14-30
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Entrusted to the Dirt 
