A Call to Start Seminaries Among the Unreached

As the situation currently stands, no believer in our people group of five million can attend seminary in their own language. No, seminary is not a prerequisite for faithful ministry, but the formal study of theology in an academic setting has often proved to be an incredible blessing for pastors and their churches. I sometimes wish I had a marketplace degree, but I have also seen how my bachelor’s and master’s in theological studies have borne hundredfold fruit in the different ministry settings I’ve ended up in.

However, in our corner of Central Asia, there’s also a practical need. The government won’t allow a church to be legally registered unless it has an indigenous pastor who has a master’s degree in theology. This requirement seems to be partly just making things difficult for non-Muslims, and partly a reflection of the culture’s high valuing of training, experts, and certificates.

In our context, we believe that if there is a path toward legality, then the honorable and Christian thing is to pursue it. And this is our long-term goal. Yet knowing that we need to obey God and not man, we have proceeded with starting undocumented churches anyway, even as we pray and scheme of how to someday meet these high requirements. Some of the churches that have been started are able to temporarily come underneath the legal covering of the small number of churches that are registered. Our church plant did this after being raided by the security police a number of years ago. But in a patron-client culture, this sort of relationship can often come with strings attached.

Even worse, some churches get around this legal requirement on their paperwork by claiming as their pastor one the handful of locals who in years past attended seminary in another country – although these freelance “pastors” no longer attend any local church and they lead questionable lives. These men know the power they exert over the churches they have these made deals with. It’s a dynamic ripe for extortion.

We believe that only men who are qualified and faithful according to passages like 1st Timothy 3 and Titus 1 should be pastors, regardless of seminary training. We believe that we should pursue legally registered churches. Yet the government requires seminary. Yet there is no seminary available in the language of local believers. You can see the bind.

The path forward for the long-term is to work to see a crop of believing men armed with master’s degrees, some of whom will be biblically qualified to be pastors. Toward this end, our first two local believers have started online programs, albeit only because they are fluent in other languages and were provided scholarships. Frank* has been involved in Southeastern seminary for a couple years now, taking classes in their Persian-language track. Alan* recently started taking online classes in English at SBTS. But few local believers know another language at the level required for theological training, which brings its own advanced collection of terminology and writing requirements.

Could non-residential theological training be set up with groups like Reaching & Teaching or Training Leaders International? Someday, yes, but currently we don’t have the minimum number of local pastors required to qualify as a site for these ministries. Eventually, partnering with these groups may be an answer to our need for this kind of training. But in our situation we need seminary training that will help raise up pastors, not just training for pastors who already exist.

“But seminaries aren’t reproducible,” says mainstream missiology. To that I would simply say there are thousands of them, all over the world. They are clearly reproducible, perhaps not according to someone’s arbitrary or preferred timeline, but reproducible nonetheless. Previous generations built these institutions all over the place. We, having reaped the benefits, now claim they are not really worth building.

Given these realities, I’d like to put out a call to start new seminaries in strategic unreached cities. Recent online conversations have highlighted that far more aspiring professors with PhD’s exist than there are open seminary positions. My costly request is that some of these men take the incredible training they have received and use it to start new seminaries overseas. Yes, starting a seminary in a foreign city will be much harder than plugging into a job in pre-existing school (itself still very hard work). But, in the West we have a backlog of potential professors. And in much of the rest of the world we have a theological famine.

To highlight our specific context, our people group has a hub city which would provide easy geographic access to students from the surrounding areas. This city even has enough freedom whereby an evangelical seminary could be established legally. Initially, there could be three tracks: one for classes offered in English and two for classes translated into the main languages of the regions. Some professors could then learn the local languages and eventually teach in them. After a few years, gifted local graduates could also be ready to teach. This city also has a healthy international church and a new MK school, so families of professors would even have believing expat community available. Starting a seminary in a city like this is far from impossible. But we lack the PhD’s, the funding, and most important – the men willing to take the risk.

It would take a unique individual to head something like this up, someone who is not only a gifted academic, but who is also a starter and administrator – and potentially also good at learning languages. Or, this could be pulled off by a team of professors where these gifts are distributed among them. My alma mater, SBTS, was founded by a team of only four professors. The first year they only had 26 students.

If you have a holy ambition to teach in a seminary context, have you considered doing so among the nations? You could found a seminary in a place today considered unreached that plays a pivotal role in raising up hundreds or thousands of trained pastors, scholars, and missionaries – some of whom might someday bring the gospel back to your homeland.

If this post stirs something in any of you out there, then I would love to hear from you. Let’s start the initial conversations that could one day give birth to new seminaries among the unreached.

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*Names changed for security

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A Christianity Unashamedly Asian

It is too often forgotten that the faith moved east across Asia as early as it moved west into Europe. Western church history tends to follow Paul to Philippi and to Rome and on across Europe to the conversion of Constantine and the barbarians. With some outstanding exceptions, only intermittently has the West looked beyond Constantinople into Asia and given attention to the long, proud traditions of a Christianity that chose to look neither to Rome nor to Constantinople as its center. It was a Christianity that has for centuries remained unashamedly Asian.

… [Christianity’s] earliest history, its first centers were Asian. Asia produced the first known church building, the first New Testament translation, perhaps the first Christian king, the first Christian poets, and even arguably the first Christian state. Asian Christians endured the greatest persecutions. They mounted global ventures in missionary expansion the West could not match until after the thirteenth century. By then the Nestorian church (as most of the early Asian Christian communities came to be called) exercised ecclesiastical authority over more of the earth than either Rome or Constantinople.
Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol 1, p. xiii

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The Prisoner-Scholar and a Bible For His People

Since 2011, our people group have had the complete Bible in their language – both Old and New Testaments. This is an amazing thing. The translation and publication of the Bible into any language is usually a long tale with many different players. Someday, I’d like to put that more detailed story together. For now, this is the summarized version that I’ve managed to piece together through various conversations over the years. So, consider this a rough draft of the tale, not yet history in the carefully-researched sense.

The story begins with Kamal*, a prolific writer and educator among our people group during the turbulent 1970s. Kamal was a short man who always wore a distinctive floppy scarf-hat and had a passion for his people group’s suppressed language. In spite of this politically dangerous interest, Kamal’s reputation as a scholar and writer was so strong that he was put in charge of the education department of his province. However, it didn’t take much to fall foul of the ever-changing governments of the country during that era. Kamal seems to have written something or to have held a position that put him in hot water with whichever military dictator was in charge at that point. He was imprisoned in the south of the country, far away from the mountainous homeland of his people.

Many years later, when I attended his memorial service, I learned that it was while he was imprisoned and not yet a believer that he first committed to translating the Bible for his people. Apparently, Kamal had a dream where Jesus straight up told him to translate the Bible into his language. Kamal, wisely, agreed that he would. But he was in prison. How was he to accomplish this enormous project? God provided the means through a new cellmate, a Syriac priest – who had an old Syriac Bible with him. Kamal and the priest could communicate in the trade language of the country, so it seems that the priest would translate from Syriac into the trade language and then Kamal would craft each verse into his native tongue.

By the time he was let out of prison, Kamal seems to have come to faith and to have written a manuscript of the gospel of Luke, made up of loose papers. He moved back to his home city and neighborhood, just a few alleyways down from where my family recently lived in our old stone stone. There, he continued to write and teach, unsure of what to do with the Gospel of Luke manuscript that he kept in secret. Given the political and religious climate of the time, it was much too dangerous to attempt to work on it or publish it openly.

Just a few weeks ago at Cross Con ’24, I learned that this is where a Lebanese ministry leader enters the story. This now elderly leader told me that he had come to visit Kamal’s country, having independently developed a desire to see the Bible translated into Kamal’s language. This was a time of political intrigue, assassinations, and guerrilla warfare, so this ministry leader had to be very cautious as he asked around to see if there were any believers who would help him begin the translation. Somehow, he was directed to Teacher Kamal’s house, where a relieved Kamal handed him his precious stack of papers and told him to take them back to Lebanon to keep the translation moving along. At least at that point, the project was too dangerous to conduct inside the country.

Over the next couple decades, an international coalition of believers worked on the New Testament translation together. From what I understand, these were believers in Lebanon, Germany, France, and eventually back in Kamal’s country also. At this point much of the translation was being done from German, though later work was to be done directly from Greek and Hebrew. By the time the 90’s came, a British Bible translator, Alex* was living in a different city of Kamal’s region, and took on leadership of the project. Alex put together a translation team, including Kamal, and in the late 1990’s the New Testament was published. Although there were many revisions to come, the involvement of writers and poets like Kamal from the beginning gave the text a rich literary beauty in the local tongue.

By the time I was on the ground in 2007 as a green 19-year-old, this New Testament had been updated and had been eagerly adopted by the the community of local believers. The next year, Hama*, one of my close friends and a new believer, also managed to get his hands on one of the few early drafts of the complete Old Testament. I remember opening the massive three-ring binder with him and gazing together for the first time on Genesis and Psalms in his mother tongue. Hama treasured and studied this early text for years to come.

In 2011, the complete Bible was published for the first time. Decades of work by Alex, Kamal, the ministry leader from Lebanon, and others had led to the complete word of God now being available in our people’s heart language. Some communities of believers loved this 2011 text so much that they flat-out refused to use later revised editions, and started circulating illegally printed 2011 Bibles for their house churches – thus proving that KJV-only-style controversies are unfortunately not unique to the west.

The political and religious climate, while never calm, had grown much calmer since the 70’s. This has meant long stretches when this complete Bible can be spotted for sale in the bazaar’s book shops. To this day, someone on our teams might snap a picture when we see one prominently on display and send it to each other, “Look what I spotted in the bazaar today.” The government has even allowed a local church to set up at a huge annual book fair to sell these Bibles and other Christian books.

In spite of this measure of freedom, we still have many locals who don’t know that the Bible exists in their language. I’ve always loved asking if a given local knew that God’s word was available in their language. When they said no (as they often did) I would pull a print Bible out of my bag or open up a Bible app on my phone and show them a text like John 1:1, one of my favorite texts for explaining the divinity of Jesus. “You believe the eternal word of God became a physical book, right? Well, this verse says that the eternal word of God became a man.”

As I referred to earlier, I got to attend the memorial service for Kamal a few years ago, led by Alex and others. This was a public event, where hundreds of locals came out to honor the great writer. Few, however, knew of his role as the first Bible translator of their people. To my great delight, this part of Kamal’s story was told publicly, and a plea made for the attendees to read this book to which Kamal had devoted so many years of his life.

Kamal was obedient to the work that God gave him to do. So was the leader from Lebanon, and Alex, and many others. This has meant that as a church planter I have had the most important of all tools available to me – a Bible in the local tongue. It has meant that when I find a verse that seems a bit off in the word choice or grammar I have the privilege of simply emailing Alex for it to be considered for a future update. Sadly, most of the feedback these men get these days is suggestions and complaints from foreigners and locals for places where the the text needs to be revised!

Yet when we come to our senses we all realize what a great debt we owe these men. They have done something that is foundational for everything workers like myself try to accomplish. Cliche as it might seem, we really do stand on their shoulders. Many are aging fast and looking to hand off their work. Some of them are no longer with us, like Kamal. But I thank God for each of them, and someday I hope to write more of their stories.

Because of Kamal, the prisoner-scholar, his people now have a Bible. And that changes everything.

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*names changed for security

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Becoming Storytellers and Poets Also

Yesterday I was on a call with a friend who has served as a Bible translator in South Asia. The purpose of the call was for him to tell me a story from his ministry. The plan is then for me to write up the story for the blog of a leadership network that we are both members of. On the day previous, I had put out the call for stories to the different members of this network, “Don’t discount the encouragement that others can receive by putting stories from your ministry out there. Theological essays are wonderful, but they are not enough. We need stories where that theology is lived out.” Two brothers quickly contacted me, one a pastor in Hawaii, the other, my friend the Bible translator.

The story he told me was fascinating, funny, and deeply encouraging. It involves struggling with the seeming futility of ministry, the grit of real missionary life (like taxi drivers striking and people vomiting), small acts of faithfulness leading to breakthrough, and a people group getting the word of God in their language for the very first time. I can’t wait to write it up. I left our call encouraged to press on in the areas where I feel a sense of futility because I had heard my friend’s story about a surprising, eleventh-hour provision of God.

Our conversation also touched on my growing conviction that we need to tell more stories in our reformed ministry circles. We are a people very drawn to the theological essay. And this is in fact a very important kind of writing. Think of the impact that sites that major in this genre have had, like Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, or 9 Marks. I am left profoundly grateful when I step back to consider how influential written sermons and theological essays such as Lewis’ The Weight of Glory have been in my own life. The theological essay is powerful, and it has precedent in the Word of God, mainly in the New Testament epistles.

Yet it’s not the only kind of writing that has precedent in the Scriptures. Forty three percent of the Bible is theological narrative – stories, parables, and history. Thirty three percent of the Bible is theological poetry and proverbs. Twenty four percent is theological prose, which is where the essays, laws, and sermons are.

I’m not claiming that our writing as Christians should rigidly conform to these percentages. However, as ahli-kiteb (people of the book, an Islamic term for Christians that I happily plunder), I do find it curious that the vast majority of what we write about God’s word and the Christian life is in the form of theological prose, when God’s word itself contains these three broad kinds of writing. It’s worth asking ourselves – are we seeking to edify others through our non-inspired writing in only one of the three main genres by which the inspired word of God edifies us? Why is that?

What began several years ago as several categories I could write in or post about – essays, stories, and proverbs/poetry/songs, has become three categories I increasingly feel I should write in. This is, as I have said, to seek to reflect God’s balance of revelation in my own writing. But it’s also because I’ve heard from others and even felt in my own heart the deep encouragement that has come from theological story and theological poetry. Leveraging all three categories seems to more fully engage the mind and the heart, the whole person. Emphasizing each will likely give us more effectiveness not just in edifying believers, but also as we seek to win the lost.

Let us strive to keep on writing compelling prose to the glory of God. But alongside of this, let us seek to become storytellers and poets also.

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A Song for Wayfaring Strangers

“Poor Wayfaring Stranger” by David O’Dowda (I don’t know anything about this game being advertised, just linking for the song which is hard to find on YouTube)

This is a solid remix of the old spiritual, “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” This song reminds us that we are sojourners and strangers here in a world of suffering, but that we are bound for our true homeland. The traditional lyrics of the chorus focus on seeing loved ones again in heaven, which is a wonderful thing. However, I’ve been trying to rework the song for a corporate worship version in a way that incorporates our longing to see the face of God. It has a singable structure, it just needs to be put to a tempo appropriate for congregational song. Below is what I have so far after borrowing from various versions of the song and writing some lines of my own.

I am a poor wayfaring stranger
While journeying through this world below
But there’s no sickness, toil, or danger
In that bright world to which I go

I’m going there to my true Father,
He said he’d meet me when I’d come
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home

I know dark clouds will gather o’er me
I know my way lies rough and steep
But heaven’s fields lie out before me
Where weary eyes no more shall weep.

I’m going there to see my Savior,
He said he’s making me a room,
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home

I want to sing salvation’s story,
In concert with the blood-washed band;
I long to wear a crown of glory,
When I get home to that good land.

I’m going there to join my people,
The multitude from every tongue
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home

I soon shall die, leave all behind me,
This form will rest beneath the sod
But resurrection’s waiting for me,
And my forever home with God.

I’m going there to see his glory,
To worship Christ with seraphim,
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home

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Why My Family Traveled in Luxury Soccer Tracksuits

When travel goes wrong, you might find yourself in all kinds of unexpected situations. This was true even when I was a single. But when travel goes wrong and you’ve got small children in tow, this changes the calculus even more. When this happens, never underestimate the lengths parents will go to keep their children warm, fed, and rested enough to hold back the I-am-so-exhausted-I-will-make-the-universe-feel-my-pain meltdowns. As we regularly see in the news, even adults can reach their limits when it comes to the constrictions and indignities of modern air travel. So, I don’t blame the little ones for showing on the outside what most of us big people are feeling on the inside. But for everyone’s sake, we have found it best to keep our kids away from that point of no return whenever possible.

Speaking of indignities, most airlines don’t count our region of Central Asia important enough to warrant flights during waking hours. The vast majority of our flights come and go between 2 and 5 am. This is of course to line up with the morning flight schedules in the “important” airports of the region. And yes, it’s brutal for small children. Mind you, this is how almost every trip to or from our region either begins or ends, standing in airport lines with bleary-eyed offspring at an ungodly hour of the night.

So, this was the typical beginning of a trip back to the US two summers ago. But something had delayed our first flight, which meant we sat an extra two hours in our departure airport, which meant we missed our connecting flight in Doha, Qatar. Having traveled through Doha before I was hopeful that they might simply put us on another flight, or in case of a lengthy delay, put us up in the hotel inside the airport.

Unfortunately, we landed and were informed that for the second of the three legs of our journey, they’d have to put us on a much longer flight (to Dallas, sixteen hours in the air), and that we’d have to wait inside the airport for another seventeen hours. And sorry, the airport hotel was full. And since we only had our vaccination cards, but not a valid PCR test, we were not allowed to enter the city to make our own accommodations. One very thoughtful member of airport staff tried to convince us that we had a decent chance of making it through immigration illegally, but we thanked her and decided that would probably make our situation go from bad to worse. Plus it was illegal. After all, the Doha airport is relatively new and clean. Surely we could figure something out.

We texted our teammates to let them know our situation and to call in some prayer support. One of them reminded me that we carried a travel credit card with trip delay coverage, up to $500 per person. I had not remembered this detail, so I thanked him profusely and tried to put a plan together as we sat on the floor and my kids played UNO. There was a quieter lounge with semi-private couch areas where we could get some sleep. We had been given access to it once before while traveling during the height of the Covid-19 travel shutdowns, when the massive Doha airport was eery and abandoned. Now that things were getting back to normal the lounge charged a lot for entry, but with all the hotel options closed off I thought we had a good chance of getting reimbursed for it through our card. If we got in for six hours’ access, that would mean fresh food and hopefully a few hours of sleep for the family before figuring out the next ten hours in the airport, and then the sixteen hour flight.

But there was one other problem. It was summer and so we hadn’t packed warm clothes in our carryons. And the airport was freezing. At the time, our kids were three, eight, and ten. They’ve always been on the smaller side and tend to get cold easily. This is especially true of our daughter who has type-1 diabetes. So, part two of my mission needed to be finding some kind of warm garments or blankets. This would make sleep more likely, and hopefully also keep them from getting sick.

Blessedly, the lounge we were hoping for wasn’t full and we managed to claim one of the semi-private couch areas. So far, so good. Thinking the more difficult part of the plan accomplished, I headed back out into the duty free area of the airport to find some warm sweatshirts or blankets. The airport had dozens of stores selling clothing, so I didn’t think it would take too long to find something reasonable.

I waved and smiled at the attendant in the first store I walked into and I went over to look at a rack of sweatshirts. My smile vanished as I looked at the tag – $450. Wide-eyed, I quickly exited that store and went into the one next to it. But the sweatshirts there were $300 apiece. In store after store I had the same experience. It seemed that luxury clothing was the only kind for sale in this airport. Where were the smart yet affordable Central Asian brands like LC Waikiki? There were no blankets or other warm things for sale anywhere. Just clothing roughly the price of a kidney.

The best option I could find were tracksuits/sweatsuits in the store of a football/soccer club, Paris Saint-Germain. These were warm, they had them in the various sizes we needed, and they ran just below $100 for the kids sizes and a little above $100 for the adults. After several rounds of the duty free area, I kept coming back to the PSG store as I slowly resigned myself to the truth that dropping over $500 on tracksuits was the cheapest option available to me. But would I be able to convince the credit card insurance to reimburse these? It was a gamble.

I thought of my kids shivering, curled up, and trying to sleep on airport couches. I thought of the dark patches beneath my wife’s eyes and the very long way we still had to go to even begin the second leg of our journey. I gritted my teeth, and bought the matching tracksuits.

I shook my head as I walked away and back toward the lounge, loaded with bags of PSG merchandise. My family didn’t even follow professional sports. Apart from a season in high school in Melanesia where I followed the Australian National Rugby League, I’ve never made the time nor had the desire to follow either American sports or those more popular globally, like football/soccer. In fact, one of the quickest ways to make my or my wife’s eyes glaze over is to turn a group conversation to professional sports.

But now, I told my wife as I returned to the lounge, now we would need to become soccer fans. Not because I had a sudden affinity for the team or for some guy named Messi who apparently played for them. No, simply because we were now financially invested in the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club. So invested, we would in fact travel the world as a family in matching luxury track suits. The kids, having been told that they were now officially fans of a French soccer team, put on the warm tracksuits, and promptly fell asleep. My wife liked hers also, though her eyes nearly popped out of her head when I whispered the price to her.

There have been times over the years when we’ve eaten at some very sketchy places, because that was what was required to keep the family going while on the road. Apparently, this was the other end of the spectrum. Sometimes you eat dodgy kebabs. Sometimes you don rich kid tracksuits.

During the rest of our time in Doha and even on the plane, fans of PSG said hi to us, gave us fist bumps, or otherwise complimented our sporty-seeming family and our matching outfits. We did our best to smile and play the part – and then shoot one another sideways glances. We were frauds, but at least we were warm frauds.

After what felt like days later, we finally made it to Dallas, where one last layover – at a hotel this time – would get us to our final flight the next day. At least being back in America meant people didn’t really know about professional soccer and would stop commenting on our wardrobe.

We walked into the lobby and were immediately greeted with a cheer by the man behind the counter.

“You fans of PSG?! That’s my team, bro!”

p.s. Thankfully, months later, the travel insurance did indeed reimburse the tracksuits.

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Don’t Rule Out a Burning in the Bosom

My wife and I had the honor of serving at the recent Cross conference in Louisville, KY. As members of the Great Commission Council, we were there to interact with students who had questions about missions and to attempt to provide them with wise and experienced counsel. Overall, we loved the conference. Over three days, 11,000 students and leaders sat under preaching, breakouts, and panels that focused on local church-centered missions. If there are students in your church or ministry interested in missions, I’d highly recommend they attend Crosscon ’25. Sadly, many that we trust in missions circles have serious concerns about theological drift at Urbana, but Cross aims to be a student missions conference that loves missions, loves sound theology, and loves the local church.

One of the days featured a panel on Decisions and Calling. As with much of the content, this panel session was rich in wisdom and practical, biblical guidance for young people wrestling with whether or not God might be calling them to the mission field. The framework presented focused on discerning the will of God through pursuing what is clearly revealed in scripture for a holy life, recognizing what our personal opportunities are, and submitting to what our church thinks we should do. Sound counsel for an age of radical and subjective individualism.

As my wife and I debriefed afterward, there were only two things that we would would have added to this important discussion (These are things I believe the panelists would agree to as well, but you can only say so much in a given session). The first would have been mentioning that skill is also an important part of discerning if someone should be heading toward the mission field or not. While character is the foundation, and knowledge is essential, there are some abilities that really need to be present for a good potential missionary.

Not least among these is what has sometimes been called cultural intelligence. Practically, this is the ability to make deep friendships across cultural and linguistic lines. If someone wants to reach the nations for Jesus but all of their friends here in the West look just like them, something doesn’t quite line up. Since most in the West now live in areas with some level of access to cultural and linguistic diversity, it’s not unreasonable for churches to look for these kinds of friendships as one marker of whether or not God is calling someone into missions.

There are other skills as well, but here I’ll just mention that the vast majority of missionaries also need to be able to teach. This might seem blatantly obvious, but a surprising number of missionaries end up on the field with very little actual teaching experience in their local church. Please, make sure that your missionary can do a decent job teaching and/or preaching in his own language and culture before you send him to teach or preach in a foreign one. If you are sending missionaries as church planters, then evidence of this skill is absolutely essential (1 Tim 3:2). Don’t neglect to train women missionaries in this skill also since so many of the unreached peoples around the world are also highly gender-segregated.

In addition to this, I felt that the Decisions and Calling panel should have left more room for the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in giving holy ambitions on an individual level. The panel pushed back against what was too much of an emphasis on a “burning in the bosom” in generations past. But I think we should be careful that we don’t rule out a kind of specific passion personally received which compels someone to reach the nations for Christ. It is not the only way to have a “real” missionary calling. But biblical example and church history show that this kind of individual calling really happens sometimes.

Paul had a holy ambition to preach the gospel where Christ had not been named (Rom 15:20). Timothy had a gift (perhaps connected to evangelism) uniquely imparted to him by the laying on the hands, which he was to fan into flame (2 Tim 1:6-8, 4:5). St. Patrick experienced dreams that convinced him he was to return to Ireland as a missionary. Hudson Taylor and Adoniram Judson also experienced personal calls to missions soon after coming to faith.

Yes, there are some like Nik Ripken, author of The Insanity of God, who simply read the great commission and decide that they are supposed to be a missionary. That’s one side of the spectrum. Then there are people like me. As a freshman in college, I was hypothetically open to missions, but definitely not open to working among Muslims. Then I found myself sitting in a Baptist church presentation where a missionary played a video of a night baptism in the Middle East. As I watched, my heart burned and I heard these words clearly spoken to my soul, “Go to the [people group name], go to the Muslims.” And there are countless experiences in between.

Just like we see in the Scriptures, God rarely calls anyone into ministry in the same way. The burning bush wasn’t repeated for anyone else. Neither was the Damascus road experience. Jesus’ calling of Peter and Andrew was very different from Nathaniel’s. Sometimes people go into missions in a style more akin to the authorship of the book of Luke. They do a lot of careful research and build a very good case that they are called to be a missionary. Other times it’s more like the Apocalypse (Revelation) of John. No research there, but instead rapt attention paid to some very unexpected things that have been seen and heard. Will we really say that one is more spiritual or valid than the other? And what would be our biblical grounds for doing so?

The very understandable position in reformed circles is to dial down the talk of missionary callings and burnings in the bosom. But we need to be careful lest we rule out valid ways in which the living Spirit works, lest we get pulled into an experience of following God that is only cognitive and not also open to the way the Spirit mysteriously leads through our affections. We also must be careful of a posture where we hypothetically believe that God can clearly communicate specific callings to his people, but where we assume that will never actually happen in our circles. We must know our own tribe and place in history and these particular ditches we tend to fall into.

A personal calling to the mission field must always be submitted to the wise counsel of local church leadership and put through the filters of character, knowledge, skill, and opportunity. But along with that, we need to have a category for a spectrum of calling experiences. Like our personal testimonies, some will seem more natural, others will seem more dramatic. Both are supernatural.

Why did I experience a calling to the mission field that was more like a burning in the bosom? Who knows? Maybe it was because of weakness, and the Lord knowing that I in particular would need that crystal clarity when things got hard. Perhaps others are steadier than I am and so their holy ambition was clarified through simple circumstances or logic. It’s hard to say.

I love wisdom, the pursuit of it, and I love frameworks built upon it. I love missions that is infused with sound theology and rooted in healthy church emphases. But I do not want to rely so heavily on these things that I discount the possibility of the clear, personal, affective guidance of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer. To do so would be to deny things I have seen and heard, yes, but more importantly, things that are in church history and in the word itself.

To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.

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A Proverb on Not Arguing with Your Spouse

Arguing with your wife is like spitting straight up into the air.
Regional Oral Tradition

This is a new proverb I’ve just learned, used among a sister people group. What’s true of making connections to remember new vocabulary is also true of learning proverbs – the more absurd, the easier to remember. This proverb uses a thoughtless and self-defeating action – spitting directly up into the air – to highlight the foolishness of much arguing within marriage.

When you spit straight up, it’s going to come back down, right onto your face. Likewise, when you dig in and keep pushing and prodding in order to win that argument with your spouse, you might be technically “winning.” But because of the nature of marriage, the relational oneness you share with your spouse, you are in fact doing harm, both to them and also to yourself. We have an English saying similar to this one, “like spitting into the wind,” that also communicates the futility and stupidity of a given action – although I’ve never heard it applied to marital conflict.

The Scriptures also present the importance of pursuing peace in the marriage relationship. “A continual dripping on a rainy day and a quarrelsome wife are alike” (Prov 27:15). “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way…” (1 Pet 3:7). And, “He who loves his wife loves himself” (Eph 5:28). What does this practically look like? “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19).

So, heed the wisdom of generations of Central Asian nomads past, and more importantly, the wisdom of God’s word. Don’t spit directly up into the air, and don’t argue with your spouse. Your spouse (and your face) will thank you.

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The Shame of a Prodigal Daughter

Several years ago my wife and others hosted a Valentine’s Day outreach for local women. As a part of the event, they read the story of the prodigal son from Luke 15, and led a discussion about its meaning and implications.

Surprisingly, when they asked the local ladies what they thought about the father’s response to the return of his wayward son, these ladies responded that the response was right and good. “That’s what a father should do for a son.”

Either my wife or one of our teammates then posed the question differently. “What if it had been a prodigal daughter rather than a prodigal son?”

At this question, the mood of the room shifted dramatically. Everyone knew that a prodigal daughter should never be welcomed home and forgiven like that. No, if it had been a daughter rather than a son who had dishonored her family by wasting her inheritance on prostitutes in a far country, she would be a dead woman. She would never be welcomed home with joy and celebration. Instead, if she showed her face again the men of the family would have to kill her in order to restore their honor in the eyes of the community.

In this situation, because of their own culture these local women didn’t feel the shamefulness of the younger son’s actions, even after it had been explained to them. But when the connection had been made with an equivalent example from their own culture, then the weightiness – and the scandalous nature – of the father’s actions sunk in.

Much has been made of the connections between contemporary Middle Eastern/Central Asian honor-shame cultures and the cultures of the New Testament era. And there are many similarities. These cultures are certainly closer to one another than they are to the modern west. Yet there are also some very significant differences that mean a direct understanding or resonance with New Testament era culture shouldn’t be assumed.

One major difference would be the way in which our Central Asian culture places the burden of the family’s honor almost entirely on the conduct of their women (at least in part a downstream effect of Islam). The honorable reputation, community standing, and future prospects of the extended family all hinge on whether the community believes the young women and the married women are sexually pure and faithful. If I had to quantify it, I’d say it’s something like ninety percent of family honor that comes down to this. The other ten percent is made up of whether or not the men are hospitable, loyal patrons and clients, not thieves, not drunkards, not gamblers, and if they come from a line of honorable fathers.

The men do have a small part to play in maintaining the family honor, but in general they are given all kinds of grace and freedom to go out and sow their wild oats. At the end of day, they are the beloved sons who will be welcomed home by mama and papa and all will be forgiven. The same cannot be said for the daughters of the family. One misstep – or one nasty rumor – can spell disaster for them. This is why the women of our people group are so much more observant in their Islam. It’s also why believing women are outnumbered by believing men by about ten to one. If you feel that this is terribly unjust, you are right.

So, what does the gospel laborer do in this kind of situation where the culture means the locals do not understand and feel the point of the parable? In our telling of the story, should we replace the son in the parable with a daughter? Not at all. Though it may be tempting to do something like this, we must remember the proper roles of the word and the culture when it comes to communicating God’s truth. The word of God is where all the authority and the grounding of our teaching comes from. The culture, on the other hand, is what we use to illustrate.

Rather than replacing the prodigal son with a prodigal daughter upfront, instead we need to explain what this parable would have meant and felt like to the original audience. Then, we use a comparable example of shamefulness and scandalous forgiveness from our target culture to help our hearers wrestle with the offensive grace communicated by Jesus in this parable. In this way, we are being faithful to God’s powerful word as it was originally revealed, and we are also doing our best to help our audience understand it with both their heads and their hearts. This is in fact just what the ladies on our team did during their Valentine’s outreach.

Any of us reformed-types who scoff at the study of culture out of a professed trust in the word of God are missing something important here; namely, that effective teaching and preaching requires more than faithful exegesis of the text and argumentation. It also requires faithful illustration and application. To do all of this you must study the text first, and then study your people.

As with any culture, the honor-shame dynamics of our Central Asian culture contain both hindrances and helps when it comes to making sense of God’s word. Though they are wrong to place the burden of family honor almost solely on the shoulders of their women, they are not entirely wrong in their belief that sin means that someone must die in order for honor to be restored.

From the very beginning, sin deserves death (Gen 2:17). This divine law has never changed. Their culture simply needs to universalize it. Instead of just women who have allegedly shamed the family, every single individual deserves death because of how he has fallen short of the glory (the honor) of the Father. The amazing good news is that a perfect Son has been killed so that we don’t have to be. He has died in our place and has taken upon himself the righteous anger of the shamed Father. By doing so, he has also satisfied the demands of divine honor (Mark 10:45, Rom 3:21-26).

The local women at the Valentine’s outreach shuddered when they thought of the forgiveness of a prodigal daughter. But such a daughter’s shame is not any greater than their shame, or my shame. The sacrifice of the divine Son means that we no longer need to kill our children to restore the family honor. Someone else can cover that shame and restore honor in the only court that really matters, the eternal one. Whether prodigal sons or daughters or prideful older sisters or brothers, we must all turn from our futile attempts to deal with our sin and shame and trust in him alone.

For any of those local women, to let go of their hard-fought honor and to admit their true shame is a terrifying thing. How could it not be when your conformity has been enforced all your life at knife-point?

But some will. And those who do will know the amazing warmth of the Father’s welcome – and the wonder of his undeserved honor.

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Missed Opportunities and the Best of All Possible Timelines

Last night I spent time with my closest friend in the US, an Iranian brother named *Reza. After the other guests had left, our conversation meandered through subjects like parenting, our own upbringings, and the fatherhood of God.

“You know,” Reza told me. “I still have the invitation letter to join the national Iranian youth soccer team.”

“You mean the national youth team? I didn’t know that.”

Reza nodded. “I was very good at soccer in high school. I played for an important regional club, where the coach was a former player for Iran’s national team. I guess the national youth team heard about me and I was recruited. But I never played for them. My father was a political activist. He had recently been jailed. And I got myself in trouble because I was quite outspoken also.”

“You mean that incident where the Iranian president came to your school?”

“Yep, that’s the one.”

Reza was a fifteen-year-old student at a good private school when the Iranian president came to visit the school and give a speech. After the speech, there was a time for questions from the students. Now, Reza has always been bold about his opinions. I’ll never forget the time I took him to hear Wayne Grudem speak and Reza (a new believer at the time) decided to lecture him on his political views in the meet and greet line. Apparently, he was already like this as a fifteen-year-old, because when it was his turn at the microphone he decided to take the Iranian president to task and hit him with a very critical line of questioning.

The president responded like a true politicain-cleric by hemming and hawing and making a comment about how the youth these days need to know their place. Nothing was made of it – that day anyway.

But of course, in an authoritarian system like Iran, a public display of defiance like this can’t go unpunished. Reza was quickly expelled from his school and every other school in the city was put on notice to reject him if he applied. He also lost his opportunity to join the national youth soccer team.

“My life could have been very different,” Reza told me as we sipped tea together. “The youth team was a feeder team for the national team. I could have ended up playing on a national level – and everything that comes with that.”

Instead, Reza and his family ended up emigrating, a long and winding journey that eventually landed him in the US, where he became a follower of Jesus.

“But you know,” Reza continued, “I’m glad for what has happened. Because of those hard experiences I got to come to to the US. And now I get to coach these local kids and share the gospel with them.”

Reza teaches at a middle school known as one of the worst in the state. But his students and colleagues love him, and he’s recently started a Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) chapter there. Students, mostly from broken homes, stay after school, play soccer, and study the Bible with Reza and another Christian colleague.

“We just don’t know how God is going to use our experiences,” Reza said, shaking his head. “Even our biggest missed opportunities.”

It’s true, Reza’s witness has already been used of God as an important part of bringing others to faith, including one of our church deacons and one of our pastors’ sons.

Reza and I are now in our mid-thirties. Already, we and our peers are beginning to look back and to wrestle with the opportunities that didn’t pan out, the might-have-beens, and the reality of where we are today versus where we thought we would be when we looked forward as bright-eyed young men. I imagine this “road not taken” dynamic only gets stronger in the coming decades.

I know theologically that every missed opportunity is ultimately for my good (Rom 8:28). But it’s always good to yet again see that truth lived out in the life of a faithful brother. Reza’s had a hard path, harder than mine by many accounts. But his practical trust, his joyful contentment in God’s sovereignty over his life, his preference for being a middle school teacher who leads bible studies over being a star player for a national soccer team, this is a good reminder for my soul.

Whatever our biggest missed opportunities have been, since God the Father knows how to give good gifts to his children, we can join the psalmist in saying the lines have fallen for us in pleasant places. Truly, we have a beautiful inheritance (Psalm 16).

Or, to paraphrase both the disciples of Jonathan Edwards and recent superhero movies, we live in the best of all possible timelines.

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* names changed for security

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