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How Sheep Stomachs and Kalashnikovs Can Lead to Better Preaching

What do restaurants running out of sheep stomachs, AK-47s, meals on the floor with tribal enemies, and the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca have to do with Mark 11?

When preaching and teaching, our aim should be, first, to faithfully exposit the text. But second, it should be to helpfully 1) argue for, 2) illustrate, and 3) apply the truths of that text in ways that translate to the minds, hearts, and hands of our audience. Many of us who care deeply about expositional preaching tend to be very strong in the explanation side of things, yet weaker in these three other time-tested elements of preaching and teaching. It is in these three secondary, yet crucial, elements that I attempted this past week to draw local connections with Mark 11.

My current role as a resourcer, researcher, and writer means I’m not preaching in the local language nearly as much as I did when I was a church planter. However, this past week, I did get the opportunity to do so. Afterward, I thought it might be helpful to share a few examples of how I attempted to use local culture and experiences to bring the weight of the text to bear on the audience. I do so, not claiming that I necessarily got everything right, but rather, in hopes of spurring on others to make efforts like this in their preaching and teaching as well. After all, concrete examples from other contexts can be helpful as we wrestle with how to do this in our own churches.

My text was Mark 11:1-25: the triumphal entry, the cursing of the fig tree, the cleansing of the temple, and Jesus’ teaching on the power of believing prayer. From this text, my main sermon idea was that Jesus is the king of peace, the king of judgment, and the king of answered prayer. Each of my three subpoints was an unpacking of one of these three aspects of Jesus’ kingship: 1) the king of peace, 2) the king of judgment, 3) the king of answered prayer.

Now, here’s where the restaurant running out of sheep stomachs came in. I began my sermon by telling a story that happened in Caravan City around five years ago, when a group of local men went down to the bazaar in the middle of the night to eat a beloved traditional dish called head-n-foot. This is a meal consisting of rice sewn up in a sheep’s stomach and boiled in a broth containing the sheep’s head and feet. This unique meal is traditionally eaten in the middle of the night, along with fresh flatbread, and sometimes other side dishes like sheep brain, marrow, tongue, etc. While foreigners get queasy just hearing about eating this kind of thing, many locals can’t get enough of it. However, these particular local men loved it a little too much.

When these guys showed up at the head-n-foot restaurant, it had unexpectedly run out of food. This caused them such disappointment and such anger that they returned to their homes, grabbed their AK-47s, and came back and shot up the restaurant’s tables, counters, and windows in a blaze of lead, broken glass, and bits of sheep. Thankfully, no one was injured. But the story became the stuff of local legend, as well as countless jokes.

Why did I begin my sermon with this illustration? Well, one of the main themes of my passage, Mark 11, is the absence of fruit. The fig tree does not have fruit when Jesus visits it, nor does God’s temple. There is something deeply wrong with this situation, so wrong in fact that it warrants the very curse and judgment of the Son of God. While the men who shot up the head-n-foot restaurant were clearly out of line to do something so drastic, they were not necessarily wrong to be upset. A restaurant that fails to keep its most basic duty – that of providing food when open – has failed in its fundamental purpose. Perhaps these men had the right to be angry, but they had no right to shoot up the restaurant in the way they did. Jesus, on the other hand, had every right to both be angry and to also go on to curse the fig tree and the temple. He was the creator, owner, and rightful recipient of the fruit of both. But, scandalously, when he visited them, he found them utterly barren. And in the temple’s case, even worse than barren, corrupted and oppressive.

Did this attempt at using a local illustration work? I think so. Several of the attendees were nodding and chuckling knowingly as I shared the story. At least the sermon must have made two of them hungry because later that night, they went out to eat head-n-foot at the very establishment that had featured in my introduction. This included sending me video evidence that that night, at least, there was plenty of head-n-foot to go around.

My second attempt to illustrate with local culture was when I was trying to explain the significance of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a colt, a young donkey. In the ancient Near East, a king who rides into a city on a donkey is signaling both humility and peace. This is in contrast to a king who rides in on a horse, who is signaling power and conquest. However, this meaning has been lost in the 2,000 years that have transpired between Mark 11 and today. In our corner of Central Asia, donkeys are mostly a thing of ridicule, an insult, a symbol of stupidity, and the butt of countless jokes. This is why my favorite Kebab restaurant has donkey-themed pictures covering its walls. Locals find donkeys irresistibly ridiculous, which is why one local believer cautioned me in the past to avoid them in sermons if I can, due to the risk of the congregation descending into fits of giggles. Yet there’s no avoiding donkeys in Mark 11; rather, riding in on a donkey needs to be redefined according to what this would have meant to the original audience.

But before I explained its meaning, I first asked my audience a question. What would it signify to them if their tribal chief or an influential sheikh invited them to dinner at his house, and when they arrived, they also saw their personal enemy seated there on the floor for the meal? The audience responded with confidence – this scene would mean a desire for peace, a desire for reconciliation. Leaders here will invite enemies to share a meal together with them in an attempt to broker peace. In the same way, I explained, a leader riding into a city on a donkey, in first-century Judea, signaled a desire for reconciliation. Once again, heads nodded when the attempted connection was made. Whatever may have been going on internally, at least there were no visible fits of giggles because I had been talking about donkeys.

My third attempt to illustrate from local experience came in my second point, when I was explaining how Jesus is not just the king of peace, but also the king of judgment. In Jesus’ shocking actions in the temple, we see how much he hates religious oppression and corruption. Jesus is furious because not only is the temple worship being used to make a hefty profit off of Jewish pilgrims, those who are stuck with the inflated temple prices and money-changing fees, but this is happening in the only space available in the temple for the Gentiles to worship God. Tragically, all this shows us that instead of the true worship of God taking place (true spiritual fruit), there was religious oppression of the Gentiles, the poor, and the faithful. God will not stand for this kind of thing, as evidenced by Jesus’ temple violence.

To illustrate how all the world’s religions tend to do this – and thus are worthy of God’s curse – I reminded the audience of how the Islamic pilgrimage, the Hajj, has very similar dynamics to the temple corruption seen in Mark 11. See, Muslims are obligated to make this pilgrimage once in their lifetime. And there’s only one place they can go to do this – Mecca. Because of this, the government of Saudi Arabia charges exorbitant prices for plane tickets, hotels, visas, even corner market goods in Mecca itself, all in an attempt to milk the pilgrims for all they’re worth. Pilgrims have no choice. They have to pay up. In this way, elderly locals from our corner of Central Asia will blow tens of thousands of dollars in a misguided attempt to secure forgiveness of sins. This is money that should have gone to caring for them in old age, or to their children’s futures. Instead, it goes straight to the pockets of the Saudi political and religious establishment. This kind of system is deeply wicked and worthy of being cursed by God.

Having drawn the connection in this way between the temple’s religious oppression and that which this room of former Muslims was all too familiar with, I then reminded them that Jesus’ focus here was not some pagan worship of his day. No, it was the corrupted worship of his own people and their leaders. We, therefore, have an obligation to guard the worship of the local church so that the true worship of God is never hijacked for the sake of worldly gain.

My final attempt at using a local illustration attempted to connect with the fact that many in the audience were former guerrilla fighters. Under the point about how Jesus is the king of answered prayer, I borrowed an illustration from Piper about how prayer is not like a hotel phone, where we call the front desk for a softer pillow. Rather, prayer is like a soldier’s walkie-talkie, which he uses to call in air support for the battle. Jesus’ radical promises for answered prayer in this passage are not given so that we might ask and receive anything random we might desire. Instead, they are for prayers directed against anything (mountains included) that stands in the way of his people bearing spiritual fruit. I couldn’t tell how well this one connected. I’m realizing just now, as I write, that guerrilla fighters don’t tend to have air support. Usually, they’re fighting in the mountains with their small arms munitions against the superior ground and air power of whatever regime they’re resisting. But I’m hopeful it still made sense.

Once again, these efforts to use local culture are not the most important thing going on in a sermon. But if the exposition of the text itself is like a good steak, then the argumentation, illustration, and application are like the salt and pepper, the grilled vegetables, and the glass of red wine that accent the steak so well. The steak is more powerfully tasted because of their presence. In the same way, the faithful explanation of God’s word is more powerfully experienced when it is supported by faithful and contextual argumentation, illustration, and application.

How do we find these local examples? We must be continuous learners of whatever culture is currently hosting us. Through curious questions and good listening, we can, over time, stock quite the storehouse of local examples that we can draw from as opportunity arises. Practically, we will also need a way to remember these examples. For me, writing and lists of things to write about are ways that I find I’m able to better hold onto this local knowledge. Did you know, dear reader, that by reading this blog, you are a part of how I’m able to hold onto things so that I might later bring them into a spiritual conversation with a local? For that, I’m very grateful.

Every culture, indeed the whole world, is full of spiritual analogies and metaphors, things that we can leverage to strengthen our presentation of God’s word. As the old hymn, This is My Father’s World, proclaims, “This is my father’s world; He shines in all that’s fair; In the rustling grass I hear him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.” Missionaries of ages past, such as Lilias Trotter, had such good eyes for the spiritual analogies baked into the world all around them. If we follow in their footsteps, recognizing that not just in nature, but even in fallen cultures, God has not left us without a witness, our preaching and teaching (and writing) will be all the more powerful for it.

Don’t just explain, brothers and sisters. But argue, illustrate, and apply as well – even if that means you find yourself preaching about things like sheep stomachs and Kalashnikovs.

We need to raise 28k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

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Why the Qur’an Doesn’t Seem to Know There Are Four Gospels

If you talk to Muslims about the Bible, or if you read the Qur’an, you’ll very quickly realize that Islam doesn’t teach that there are four gospels. No, the Qur’an, and the vast majority of Muslims, assume that Jesus came and revealed one book, called The Injil, i.e. The Gospel (Surah Al-Ma’ida 5:46). The Qur’an seemingly has no idea about the four separate books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Why is this?

Some of this seems to be due to the Qur’anic worldview and its assumption that all true prophets bring their own heavenly book revelation with them for their specific people, such as the alleged ‘scrolls of Abraham’ (Surah Al-Ala 87:19). These prophets and their books are said to all contain the same basic message about turning from idolatry toward worship of the one creator God because the day of judgement is coming.

This is the narrative that Mohammad claimed about himself (Al-Ma’ida 5:48). Then, to try to defend his own prophethood when challenged, it’s also a narrative he forced onto the story every other prophet. Of course, everyone who has actually read the Bible knows that this is not true of every prophet, and not even true of many of the prophets the Qur’an is aware of, such as Abraham and Elijah. It’s not even true of Jesus. He didn’t come revealing a book from heaven; rather, he was the revealed Word of God, and his disciples later recorded his life and ministry in the four gospel accounts. This is yet another piece of evidence that Mohammed likely didn’t have access to a Bible he could read, though he does seem to have had access to lots of Jewish, Christian, and heretical oral tradition floating around in seventh-century Arabia.

However, this week I learned that there may be an additional reason why the Qur’an doesn’t seem to know that there are four gospels. This reason has to do with an early church figure named Tatian, who is a rather complex figure. Discipled by Justin Martyr, Tatian later returned to his home area of Adiabene, old Assyria, what is today N. Iraq, and proceeded to write a fiery treatise, “Address to the Greeks,” on why Christianity is superior to Greek beliefs – but also how he believed the East to be vastly superior to the West in general,

In every way the East excels and most of all in its religion, the Christian religion, which also comes from Asia and is far older and truer than all the philosophies and crude religious myths of the Greeks.

Significantly, Tatian seems to have been the first figure in church history to attempt to translate some of the New Testament into another language. Tatian combined the four gospels into one account, translating this work into old Syriac. This book was called the Diatessaron, and for several hundred years it was the primary form of the gospels used in the Syriac-speaking Christian world of the Middle East and Central Asia. A standard translation of the four canonical gospels didn’t take its proper place among the Syriac churches until a few centuries later. Tatian himself eventually drifted into some problematic asceticism and was proclaimed a heretic.

Here’s where Tatian connects with the Qur’an’s ignorance about the existence of four separate gospels. The Diatessaron was very popular in the broader Syriac-speaking region – a region that overlapped considerably with the territory of Arab kingdoms and tribes. Biblical scholar and linguist Richard Brown puts it this way in his paper, “ʿIsa and Yasūʿ: The Origins of the Arabic Names for Jesus,”

For several centuries, the Diatessaron was the standard “Gospel” used in most churches of the Middle East. When the Quran speaks of the book called the “Gospel” (Arabic Injil), it is almost certainly referring to the Diatessaron.

Why doesn’t the Qur’an seem to understand that there are four gospels? There is a good case to be made that this Islamic confusion about the actual makeup of the New Testament goes back to a well-intentioned project of an early church leader.

In this, there is a lesson to be learned about the unintended consequences of pragmatism in mission contexts. It’s not hard to see how those in the early church, like Tatian, might have felt that it would be more practical and helpful to have one harmonized gospel book instead of three very similar synoptic gospels and one very different Gospel of John. For one, it would have been much cheaper to copy and distribute. Books were very costly to produce in the ancient world, often requiring the backing of a wealthy patron. In addition, a single harmonized account would have also seemed simpler to understand, rather than asking the new believers in the ancient Parthian Empire to work through the apparent differences between the timelines and details presented in the four separate gospel accounts.

What could be lost if the Word of God were made more accessible in this fashion? Well, for one, this kind of harmonization loses the unique message and emphasis present in the intentional structure and editorial composition of each book. The authors of the Gospels were not merely out to communicate the events of Jesus’ ministry. They were also seeking to communicate the meaning of those events by how they structured their presentation of them. For example, consider how Mark sandwiches Jesus’ cleansing of the temple in chapter 11 between accounts of Jesus cursing the fig tree. This structure is intended to communicate to the reader that the cursing of the fig tree was a living (and dying) metaphor of the fruitless temple system of the 1st century – and its impending judgment.

Tatian’s pragmatic decision cut off Syriac-speaking believers from so much of this crucial meaning because he did not simply translate the four individual gospels. Further, he also inadvertently contributed to confusion among the ancient Arabs about the nature of the Injil, a confusion that was later codified in Islam and continues to trip up Muslims to this day, creating doubts in their mind about the validity of the four gospels.

If you find yourself in conversations with Muslim friends about this question of why there are four gospels instead of one, knowing this background might prove helpful. The Qur’an itself doesn’t know that there are four gospels. This is because of its own errant understanding of prophethood – an understanding, unfortunately, aided by some ancient and pragmatic missiology.

We need to raise 28k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash.com

A Strong Jewish-Christian Tinge

Christians, too, were scattered by the catastrophe but with a significant difference. Theirs was a living Messiah who had called them to a world mission and whose good news of the gospel was for all peoples. Instead of turning inward, they moved out across the world. Most of them were Jews, however, and as they went they found that the Jewish communities of the Diaspora were a natural ethnic network for the beginnings of Christian advance. This was particularly true in oriental Asia. The surviving records of the earliest Christian groups in Asia outside the Roman Empire almost always have a strong Jewish-Christian tinge, as we shall see.

–Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol I, p. 10

The quote above, which refers to the scattering of Jews and Christians after the temple’s destruction in A.D. 70, describes a pattern certainly true of our own area of Central Asia. The earliest Christians here in Caravan City* 1,900 years ago, seem to have been Jews. This is evidenced by the fact that the earliest leader of the Christian community here has a Jewish name, a localized form of Samson.

When locals ask me why the Jews rejected Jesus and his message, I am always quick to point out that that simply isn’t the whole picture. Early Christianity was majority ethnically Jewish for its first generations, even though Gentiles eventually came to outnumber their Jewish brethren. The early church was very much a community characterized by what Moffett calls a “strong Jewish-Christian tinge” for a very long time (as an aside, this is yet another reason why any form of Christian anti-Semitism is so absurd).

This passage also reminds me of a pattern that keeps emerging in the church planting efforts among our focus people group. That pattern is that it’s often communities of displaced locals that are more open to the gospel and who provide the first foothold for communities of faith. Our people group is divided by multiple national borders. Those who live outside of the region/country where they grew up are almost always quicker to come to faith and bolder and more open when it comes to living out their faith when compared to those living in their original community.

I recently visited a nearby country where some of the most encouraging fruit among our people group is emerging. There, I saw that God seems to be significantly using this dynamic of displacement. Displaced members of our people group are coming to faith in surprising numbers and taking risks that allow others displaced like them, as well as the actual local locals, to see the love and power of the new birth and the local church. As these others see these things, they are then won by and to them and also then able to reproduce them. Here in Caravan city, we are seeing a similar dynamic in the church plant we are connected to – a church plant now reaching those of this city, but whose initial core was made up of foreigners and members of our people group from a neighboring country.

Much of this is because the power of tribe, family, and patronage network can be a suffocating thing. But when locals are given just a degree or two of freedom from those systems of social control (often through geographical distance or economic independence), this can free them up to more easily become a good core member for a church plant, which can go on to later reach and integrate those native to a given city or area.

Some missionaries might be concerned about this kind of method, since churches are being started primarily with transplants that aren’t fully indigenous, according to how most would understand that term. But both in early Christianity and in our own corner of Central Asia, it’s these very transplants who are providing the foothold that leads to the locals being reached. It’s an indirect investment, yes, but one that very much seems to be worth the risk in the long run.

We need to raise 31k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

*names of people and places changed for security

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She Forgot Our Names, But Not Rock of Ages

Grandmom Workman grew up in the mountain hollers* of West Virginia. Her dad was a coal miner, as were most of the men in her family. Most of them would go on to die of black lung – a tragic but common outcome for this kind of employment. There’s a little hilltop cemetery full of crooked gravestones that bears witness to this once numerous clan of hillbillies, though most of the Workmans have now either died or left those mountains.

When she was a young woman, my grandmom fell in love with my poppop, a blue-collar man from Philly who was in the Air Force. After a quick marriage and a brief stint in Myrtle Beach, they moved back to the Philadelphia area, where they soon bought the house they would live in until their deaths, just a few years ago.

As the saying goes, you can take the girl out of the holler, but you can’t take the holler out of the girl. Grandmom remained hillbilly to the core until her dying day, despite the comfortable suburban lifestyle Poppop’s trucking career provided. There was no evidence that my Poppop’s strong Philly accent or that of all her neighbors ever made so much as a dent on grandma’s West Virginia way of speaking. No, she never lost her accent or mannerisms. I grew up being called a “sweet patooty” and hearing farts referred to as “shootin’ bunny rabbits.”

She also never lost her ability to sing the hymns she learned as a girl in the little Pentecostal church her family went to – even after she developed severe dementia.

After my family moved to Central Asia, we would attempt video calls with Grandmom and Poppop. We first noticed that she started forgetting that different members of her family were no longer living. Then, she started forgetting our kids’ names and faces. Eventually, she struggled to remember the names of even her grandkids that she had known for decades, including my name. Through all of this, as Grandmom lost more and more of her mental clarity and physical function, Poppop’s steady gentleness with her was a remarkable thing to behold.

In time, it became challenging to know how to hold a conversation with Grandmom. However, I could always get her to remember and talk clearly about her childhood, even when the dementia seemed to be worse than ever. Often, she would speak of the hymns she sang as a girl. Her favorite was Rock of Ages, “Rock of ayges, cleft for mee… Let me haaad maaself in theeee…” I was amazed at the shift out of mental fog and into crisp clarity that would seem to take place when I would nudge Grandmom to focus on this season of her life and the songs that she had learned at such a young age.

This was doubly encouraging to me because my grandmom had always shut down spiritual conversation. Any mention of God, the Bible, sin, or the gospel would unleash a polite but impenetrable barrage of words declaring Grandmom’s confidence in her own goodness. In all the years before the dementia started, there was no evidence that she ever humbled herself to admit that she was a sinner in need of forgiveness. This was true even though her own son, my dad, had died while proclaiming this message as a missionary in Melanesia.

My dad’s death, of course, devastated his parents. Poppop seems to have eventually come to faith, a changed man, in the years following. But Grandmom was immovable. No conversational tactic could get through her defenses.

However, once she developed dementia, I noticed a willingness to talk about and dwell on hymns, like Rock of Ages, that did contain explicit gospel messages – “Let the water and the blood; from thy wounded side which flowed; be of sin the double cure; wash from sin and make me pure.“

Tragically, I do not think that my grandmom ever believed in Jesus. But if there is any hope, it would be found in the fact that hymns like Rock of Ages were a major part of the soundtrack of her final days. When all else was fading away, gospel truths put to a catchy melody and a West Virginia twang were on her mind and on her tongue. Perhaps they found their way into her heart and soul as well. She passed away in 2022.

My grandmom’s story taught me about the power of music for remembering and reproducing truth. The songs that Grandmom learned as a barefoot girl in a little mountain church stayed with her – for eight decades. They stayed with her when almost everything else had been forgotten.

This makes me want to double down on teaching our own children good, gospel-explicit songs. Apparently, they can remain with them until the end, even if they do not embrace the faith of their parents. God has somehow created music to be a thing strong enough that it can hold its own in the labyrinth corridors of memory, even against decades of unbelief, and even against the most formidable mental illness. A woman might forget the names of her own children and grandchildren. But she will remember the words of the songs of her childhood.

This season of ministry in Central Asia has brought with it an unexpected emphasis on local worship music. I suddenly find myself with four eager local guitar students (some of whom are former guerrilla fighters), with other local believers writing new songs and poems and asking for help with them, and with requests from many quarters for local-language songs that are richer and deeper and more congregational. An area of our ministry that has, until now, largely gotten the leftovers now calls for more proactive emphasis. Local believers need to be raised up who can write local songs, hymns, and spiritual songs for the church and then go on to lead and play them skillfully.

Because of my grandmom, I know the potential impact of this kind of work. Through good songs, local believers can unstoppably retain and reproduce truths from God’s word as they go about their daily work in the bazar, if they end up in prison without a Bible, or even if they someday lose their minds and memories.

How amazing is this gift of music that God has given to us? And what a comfort as well. Even in old age, his truth can remain fixed in our minds, and that, by the power of a simple tune.

‘So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come. ‘

-Psalm 71:18

*holler is a Appalachian form of hollow, a small valley.

We need to raise 31.7k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash.com

A Strange Aversion to White Guy Monologues

One of the most curious examples of poor contextualization in Central Asia is how opposed most missionaries are to preaching. By and large, missionaries feel strongly that the indigenous church plants and churches in this part of the world should replace preached sermons with participatory Bible discussions. And they feel even more strongly that if preaching must be present at all, then it should absolutely not be the foreigner doing it.

The reason this is poor contextualization is that these feelings and opinions seem to be based entirely on the missionaries’ own opinions, culture, training, and baggage, and not on that of the locals at all.

Yet very few missionaries seem able to see this.

Most foreign workers here would heartily resonate with the idea that, as I heard it put yesterday, “I didn’t come here to reproduce white guy monologues.” But few are asking themselves why they feel this way – and crucially, whether or not any of their local friends feel the same.

Instead, much of the missionary community has become an echo chamber, reinforcing the idea that preaching, and especially foreigners preaching, is bad contextualization – and therefore to be discarded. As it turns out, however, this is a huge assumption. And one, as I’m increasingly convinced, without any local evidence to back it up.

See, on the level of cultural values and practices, our Central Asian locals highly prize experts and expertise. Whether in the realm of education, government, medicine, art, or religion, when locals want to learn or teach something, they seek out an expert who will proceed to educate the community (often giving out certificates when they’re done). This teacher, ironically, will almost always do this by means of a monologue, a lecture. In fact, the same word is used in our local language for any kind of public teaching like this, whether it be an address, a speech, or a sermon. Every day, all day long, this kind of public oratory is happening here on television, on the radio, on social media, in tribal gatherings, in schools, and in meeting halls. The idea of the wise expert is so prominent and respected here that in our community of Caravan City, one of the most honorable ways to greet a random man on the street is to address him as “Teacher” – whether he actually is a teacher or not.

But perhaps, one might think, it’s different in spiritual settings. To the contrary, week in and week out for 1,400 years, locals have been going to a mosque to hear a monologue, an Islamic sermon. Well, what about before Islam came? Our area had a strong presence of ancient Christianity. Weekly Christian sermons would have been happening in local churches here for 500 years before Islam arrived, with some of the most famous preachers being originally from other nations in the region. What about before Christianity, then? Turns out our area also had a strong Jewish community, which means that weekly Jewish public reading of the Law & Prophets and teaching based on it would have been taking place in the local synagogues for several hundred years before the coming of Christianity. This is quite the history. We are looking at over 2,000 years of local precedent for preaching of one sort or another.

Not surprisingly, given this precedent, if you were to gather a group of our Central Asians today who want to learn about the Bible and then ask them what they expect that kind of activity to look like, they would tell you that they want to be taught (i.e. lectured) by a religious expert. And if possible, they would prefer that the expert be a credentialed foreigner.

Do most missionaries listen to them when they express these expectations? Do they honor this contemporary local preference, one backed by thousands of years of local precedent? Nope. Instead, they assert that preaching is Western, not actually contextual. And they then proceed to import a form that is radically foreign – informal, inductive group study, casually facilitated by a “coach” or “a trainer of trainers” – someone who is not supposed to have the authority of a teacher or an expert. Then, these missionaries go on to assure themselves that they are, in fact, using methodology that is so much more contextual and effective than previous generations of colonial missionaries with their imported Western methods.

To be clear, our locals do not gather on their own for informal, inductive study of a religious text, facilitated by a “coach” or “trainer” or some other Socratically-minded sort-of-but-not-really-leader. There is no local precedent for this kind of methodology. So, when locals are told over and over again by the foreign Christians that they have to do this in order to be good disciple makers, they initially find it very disorienting. This disorientation leads to questions like, “Why are we awkwardly meeting in a house and not in a church or official space?” “Who is in charge here and why aren’t they taking charge of this time?”, “Why won’t the person who is supposed to be the teacher tell us the correct answer instead of hinting and asking us these unfamiliar questions?”, and “Do you know a real priest or pastor who can actually explain things to us?”

Sadly, our locals are also not trained by their education system in critical thinking. This means they can’t easily jump into reading a text, summarizing it in their own words, and finding its main point. And because they’re from a high context, high power distance culture, they often don’t know how to comfortably navigate these informal, “organic” times of group Bible study. Yes, they can certainly learn how to do these things over time. I myself have trained many local believers in group inductive group Bible study (for reasons I’ll get into below).

But the key thing I want to draw out first is the sheer magnitude of the disconnect going on here. Many missionaries in our region are convinced they are doing something closer to the local culture by choosing informal, inductive group study instead of preaching. And yet in reality, the exact opposite is happening. This can only mean that the missionaries are deceiving themselves, importing a radically foreign form that is far stranger to locals than preaching would be, and all the while believing they are doing the complete opposite.

Once you see how upside down all of this is, you can’t unsee it. It would be like a foreign exchange teacher coming to the US who is convinced that bowing is the more authentic way that Americans greet one another, and that waving or shaking hands are outdated foreign forms. So, he insists on bowing and making all of his American students bow also when they greet him and one another. The American students don’t know why this foreign teacher keeps insisting that they bow to one another, since it’s not something they’ve naturally been brought up to do. This teacher is not operating in the normal cultural code of form and meaning as they understand it. But the teacher tells all his colleagues back home that he has adopted this method of greeting in order to be more American in his relationships, more like the locals. It’s not just that he’s getting it wrong. He’s confident in his take on American culture, when in reality, he’s actually deluded, the one who is, in fact, guilty of importing the foreign method. To make our analogy even more complete, imagine that the vast majority of foreign exchange teachers in the US believe this same thing.

Why is the blind spot regarding preaching so powerful among missionaries among the unreached, especially if it’s not being reinforced by the locals themselves? Here, I think a number of powerful factors are combining. First, there is the place where Western/global evangelical culture currently finds itself – a place of overreaction to the structures and methods of the past. This pendulum-swing away from the methods of our forefathers includes strong negative vibes regarding things like institutions and preaching. Missionaries are misdiagnosing the unhealthy churches they grew up in and placing the blame erroneously on things like preaching and formal organization. They end up on the field, not exactly sure what a healthy church is, but awfully convictional about the fact that they don’t want it to look like the churches back home, the very churches that are funding them.

Second, popular missiology and missions training drill into new and veteran missionaries a false narrative about what is and is not effective and contextual on the field. Even if a missionary personally benefited from preaching and enjoys sitting under it themselves, all the loudest voices from missiology and pre-field training tell them that that 45 minute sermons are something must be left back in the homeland, and not something to introduce among the baby churches of their focus people group – who, it is claimed, deserve the opportunity to do church in a more pure, New Testament manner, unsoiled by modern Western accretions like preaching.

Third, missionaries bring preconceived notions with them about people groups in this part of the world. They carry deeply held assumptions about what is normal for Muslim people groups, such as the belief that they will prefer to meet in house churches and do discussion-based study, if only the foreigners would get out of the way and give the locals the chance to be true to themselves and their culture. Preconceived notions are unavoidable. But they must be tested once we are actually living among a people group, and if necessary, discarded.

In the face of this powerful triad of their own cultural baggage, the voices of the missiologists, and their own assumptions, missionaries can spend years on the field completely blind to the fact that their aversion to white guy monologues is mostly a reflection of themselves, and not really a reflection of the locals at all.

However, preaching is good contextualization. I believe this, yes, because it fits with the desires, expectations, and forms of this particular culture. But that point only matters if the form itself is, first, biblical. I firmly believe it is biblical, although when it comes to this question in particular, the theologians and pastors do not agree with the missiologists. Whenever this happens regarding biblical interpretation, I’ve learned you almost always want to trust the theologians and pastors, not the missiologists. This is because the former group is more gifted and wired to be careful with the text of Scripture, while the latter group is often gifted and wired as passionate pioneers and practitioners. This otherwise good gifting comes with an unfortunate downside – the temptation toward sloppy use of the text to justify mission methods. For example, when mission leaders claim that faithful preaching as we’ve known it in church history is not required because it’s not a method rapid or reproducible enough to “finish the task.” As the logic goes, 1) Our church/disciple multiplication methods must catch up to the rate of lost people going to hell, 2) Preaching isn’t rapidly reproducible enough for this exponential rate of growth, therefore, 3) Preaching must not be biblical and should be replaced with participatory Bible studies not dependent upon a qualified teacher – just like we see in Acts!

In reality, the biblical case for preaching is really not that hard to establish from even a cursory overview of the New Testament. Jesus preached monologues to his disciples and others, such as the sermon on the mount (Matt 5-7). The apostles preached evangelistic monologues, as recorded in the book of Acts, as well as preaching to groups of only believers (Acts 2, Acts 20). The book of Hebrews is a good example of a local church monologue, a sermon for believers, adapted into a written form. The New Testament church found its primary model in the Jewish synagogue, where preaching and teaching – monologues – were taking place weekly in the first century (Acts 13:13-43). Finally, add to all this biblical witness the uniform witness of church history that preaching is an apostolic practice (1 Tim 5:17) handed down to us from generation to generation of God’s people.

Because we can draw clear lines like this connecting preaching to the Bible, and clear lines connecting preaching to the strengths and forms of our local culture, I therefore believe that preaching is sound and important contextualization. Yes, even if it’s a foreigner doing it. That leads me to the position that those on the mission field who reject preaching are, in fact, doing poor contextualization. This is because they are missing, first, that it’s biblical, and second, that it’s locally effective. Good contextualization should be able to see both, but for some reason, many missionaries can’t yet perceive either.

Okay then, since I believe preaching is a sound method, does it then follow that group inductive Bible studies are poor contextualization? Not at all. Inductive Bible study is, in fact, sound and important contextualization as well. First, this is because it can also be easily grounded in the Bible (Acts 8:26-35, 17:11, 18:26). But second, when it comes to how inductive Bible study connects to the culture, the way in which it is good contextualization is different from the way that preaching is good contextualization. Inductive Bible study is good contextualization because it directly connects, not with a strong precedent in the local culture, but with a crippling weakness in the local culture. Remember, good contextualization will not only utilize redeemable inside forms but also introduce outside forms intentionally when there is an area of the local culture that is non-existent or woefully underdeveloped.

This is why, over the years, we have labored to preach and to raise up preachers while also laboring to lead inductive Bible studies and raise up locals who can do the same. Both forms are good contextualization because they are both biblical, though one runs with the grain of the culture while the other runs against it. Both, ultimately, serve the church. They are not meant to be pitted against one another, but to powerfully work hand-in-hand.

To do contextualization well, we must be able to see the local culture for what it actually is. Unfortunately, the scales of our own cultural background, assumptions, and training can blur our vision and prevent this kind of clear-sightedness. This is what seems to be going on given so many missionaries’ opposition to preaching in unreached places.

Today’s missionaries among the unreached overwhelmingly have an aversion to preaching, to white guy monologues, or even local guy monologues, for that matter. Missionary echo chambers keep reinforcing this belief. My hope is that someday they will come to see this for what it truly is – a strange aversion indeed. And one that is not ultimately serving the local believers.

We need to raise 32k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash.com

A Song on the Day When Sorrow Comes to an End

“We Long for That Day” by 20Schemes Music/His Estate

This is a new song for me, but one I’m very thankful to have learned from our international church here in Caravan City. Like we see in this song, I really appreciate the way that 20Schemes Music/His Estate blends stirring melody with blunt and biblical lyrics. How many worship songs do you know that include lines like, “Nowhere left to hide for the abuser?”

Last week, I was at a small conference with a couple dozen cross-cultural workers also engaged in reaching our people group in this region and in the global diaspora. The most open segment of our people group and the one with the most churches is also the one who has witnessed the most wartime atrocities in this past decade. Over the days we met, we heard tragic testimony from several believers of all of the evil they’ve witnessed, yet how in the midst of it God is powerfully building his church.

Since we were singing songs in both English and our local language, I was asked to lead a couple of the worship times. Reflecting on what we had heard from these local believers, I chose this song as one of the English ones we sang. It was new for maybe everyone there, but, I hope, well worth the learning curve.

This is the chorus: 

We long for that day when Jesus comes again
When sorrow and pain will all come to an end
When justice is done and evil cast away
Oh, may we all be found in Christ that day

We need to raise 32k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.

Two international English-speaking churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Why Does John Mention That He Outran Peter to Jesus’ Tomb?

In recent years, I’ve heard increasing references to the apostle John’s comments that he outran Peter as they ran to see what had happened at Jesus’ tomb (John 20:3-6). Often, these comments are focusing on the potential humor in that John, now writing as an old man, still seems to point out that he really was faster than Peter – even when Peter had a head start. If true, there is a relatable humanity in this that is, in fact, funny. It seems to remind us that John was a dude just like the rest of us who enjoyed some good competition. But one preacher I heard a few years ago went as far as to say that John was actually sinning here in pridefully inserting these lines into his account. I was taken aback by this suggestion made from the stage to a megachurch of several thousand. Did this preacher really believe that inspired scripture contains a narrator making comments of sinful and petty one-upmanship?

As I’ve chewed on these brief details included in John’s Gospel, I think we have an explanation that makes a lot more sense than either of the above. See, the gospel of John was written much later than the other three gospels, even decades later. Because of this timing, it is apparent that some of what John is doing in his different accounts is clearing up misunderstandings that had taken root in the early church in the decades following Jesus’ ascension.

Consider John 21:20-23:

Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them, the one who also had leaned back against him during the supper and had said, “Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?” When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” So the saying spread abroad among the brothers that this disciple was not to die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die, but, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?”

In this account of Jesus’ post-fish-breakfast conversation with Peter, John gives us details that are not included in any of the other gospels. Why? Well, his overall purpose of the book is evangelism and assurance. He wants his unbelieving readers to know that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, so that they will have faith in his name (John 20:30). Likewise, he wants his believing readers to be strengthened in their confidence in this gospel. But in this passage from John 21, we also see one of John’s other purposes in writing. People in the early church were saying stuff that wasn’t accurate. So, John was out to clear things up. The Christians of John’s day commonly believed that Jesus had said John wouldn’t die. John wants us to know that this is not an accurate understanding of what Jesus actually said.

This brings us back to the curious details that John includes regarding his footrace with Peter to the empty tomb. Given that the resurrection of Jesus is the absolute center of the faith, a core component of the gospel itself, without which everything falls apart, it makes sense that the early believers would want to know with confidence the play-by-play details of its earliest witnesses. Now, it’s clear that some of the believing women, like Mary Magdalene, were the first witnesses. But which apostle, which of the twelve, was the first one to witness the empty tomb?

What if a disagreement existed in the early church based on different oral traditions, with some insisting that it was John and others insisting that it was Peter who first saw that the body of Jesus was missing? In this case, this is where John helpfully steps in and provides the needed clarification. Was John first, or was Peter first? Yes.

John outran Peter. So, he technically made it to the tomb first. However, for whatever reason, he did not go inside. Instead, Peter, true to form, charged right in. So John was first to the tomb. But Peter was first inside the tomb. Both oral traditions would have been true when understood correctly.

If there were indeed dueling ancient accounts about which apostle was the first witness to the empty tomb, this account would have cleared all that up. And this motive for including these details, to me, seems to fit much better with the rest of the book of John, where John seems extra careful to not draw attention to himself. For example, John refers to himself in the third person as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” rather than simply using “I” or even his own name.

Why does this matter? Well, even though it may cause us to chuckle to imagine John getting in one last dig at Peter, that kind of view doesn’t fit very well with a high view of scripture. If John did this, it would not be him writing honestly and repentantly about things he had done wrong in the past, like Peter writing through Mark about his denial of Jesus. Rather, it would be him somehow gloating while writing inspired scripture. As if while being carried along by the Holy Spirit, he would have been able to write, “Ahem, I just want you to know that I was really the faster man.”

No, in my opinion, this kind of interpretation of these details says far more about our own age and how we read ourselves into the text than it tells us about John’s actual purpose and context. Instead of this, I suggest that we consider this passage to be one of several where John intentionally includes details that helpfully clear up things that in his day were becoming muddled among the believing community.

Thankfully, whatever John’s original intention in including these details, the overall point of the passage couldn’t be more clear. The tomb was empty. Jesus had risen. Nothing would ever be the same.

Today, we celebrated that truth at a mountainside picnic service with dozens of Central Asian believers. They sang, preached, prayed, and danced, proclaiming that the resurrection has made them new – made them members of God’s forever household. Mary, John, and Peter’s surprising message is still spreading 2,000 years later, still transforming all who believe it. Even in the Islam-dominated mountains of Central Asia.

Happy Easter, dear friends. He is risen.

If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here.

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Wilkimedia Commons.

The Revenge of The Rotisserie Chicken

Around five years ago, we had just returned to Caravan City after a medical leave in the US. After this absence, plus all the general strangeness of the year 2020, we were eager to get back into some healthy rhythms with our team.

Our people group had mercifully dispensed with the lockdowns after three or four months of going along with the global consensus. But by the summer of 2020, most in our area felt that further lockdowns were something only wealthy countries could afford. The workers and shop owners in the bazaar needed life to get back to normal so that they could survive. So, they threatened protests. The government, to its credit, listened, allowing our area of Central Asia to return to a degree of normalcy much sooner than the rest of the world. Mandatory face masks in malls and airports and bans against big mosque funerals were some of the only restrictions that hung on for another year or so. Other than that, our people group more or less went back to normal life.

This meant that our team could begin face-to-face meetings again, something that I, as the team leader, was very eager to see happen. At that point, we were a year or so into trying to lead a deeply divided team, and only six of those months had been in-person opportunities to build deeper trust and community. Results had been mixed. Some of the team were supportive, some still seemed quite distrustful. So, in addition to planning intentional structured time together, focusing on things like the 12 Characteristics of a Healthy Church, I also wanted us to spend lots of good unstructured time together – ideally while enjoying good food. I had seen in the past how the humble kebab could be a force for team unity. And I was hopeful that by adding a meal to our weekly team meetings, we might all become better friends as well as better teammates.

The challenge is always finding a weekly meal situation that achieves the magic combination of good, reproducible, and affordable. As part of trying to figure this out, a timely conversation with my wife led me to the distinct impression that the ladies on the team were not in the place to take on this added burden.

However, there seemed to be a good option that would check all the boxes – street rotisserie chicken. At the time, we lived in a working-class neighborhood that had its own small bazaar of sorts, centered around a central intersection. Two or three of the small restaurants or fast food places at this intersection proudly displayed outside on the sidewalk slowly-rotating spits of glossy roasting chicken, dripping with sour and salty seasoning and tempting passersby with their wafting aroma. You could buy a whole bird for the equivalent of $6 USD. To me, it seemed like a great solution, especially since a chicken came on a bed of rice, onions, and pickled veggies, all wrapped in fresh flatbread.

When the day came for the next team meeting, I made sure to go a little early to get the roasted chickens. This was earlier in the day than anyone else was buying lunch chicken, but the seller assured me that they were indeed fully cooked, using the same word for roasted that locals use for falling deeply in love. I drove home, rotisserie chickens in hand and optimism in my heart, ready to begin a new season of team life and meals. I had seen in the past the power of solid hospitality paired with studying sound principles together. And I was sure this combination wouldn’t let me down.

What I didn’t know is that these seemingly good-smelling birds would, in the end, turn traitors. Alas, as the sons of the prophets once cried out in alarm, there was ‘death the pot’ – or, at least, food poisoning.

The meeting itself and the following meal went well. But later on that evening, our family started feeling terrible. Kids were lethargic and passing out for naps when they normally wouldn’t. Multiple members of the family started vomiting. And mental fog and physical achiness came over our bodies. Wondering if it had been the food, we texted one member of the team. They said they felt great. So, we turned next to the LPG heaters that had been blazing all day long in our little cement and tile house. It was an unusually cold week, and we were running them more than we normally would. Could it be carbon monoxide poisoning? We googled the symptoms. Alarmingly, they seemed to line up.

I didn’t know much about carbon monoxide poisoning, but I knew it was nothing to mess around with. Every winter there are locals who die from it because they leave their kerosene or LPG heaters on too long during the long winter nights of no electricity. It wasn’t worth waiting around to find out. No, as we had done in previous winters and would do again, it was time for a short-term house evacuation to somewhere with better electricity. While there, we could figure out what was going on and recuperate in a simpler and warmer environment.

Teammates of ours had recently moved into a 24-hour power apartment not too far from us, but they were out of the country for a while to have a baby. We asked if we could stay at their place to recover, and they kindly agreed. So, we packed up our bags and our nauseous and miserable children and drove down the road to the new and shiny apartment towers where their place was. The grass border of the parking lot outside was lined with newly replanted palm and olive trees wrapped in Christmas lights, imports from far away. As soon as we parked and stepped out of the car, one of my sons promptly blessed one of these palm trees with a generous regurgitation of chicken and onions. All we could do was pat him on the back and thank him for not losing it in the car. I was worried the guards would scold us for letting this happen to the pristine landscaping, but thankfully, they didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps they were dads themselves and mercifully chose to let my son puke in peace.

We had just managed to make it up to the 23rd-floor apartment before other members of the family needed to take their turns again. For the rest of the evening, we alternately blessed God for the fact that there were multiple bathrooms and felt bad to be throwing up so much and so often in our friends’ house. We would definitely need to do some deep cleaning when we recovered. Admittedly, there were certain points while lying in the fetal position on the bathroom floor when I wasn’t quite sure I would recover. Over the next day or two, we reacquainted ourselves with the rotisserie chicken lunch in one way or another again and again and again until we were left lamenting that we couldn’t possibly have anything more left in our innerds.

I’ve only had food poisoning a few times in my life, but each time I’ve been struck by the wild intensity of the pain that pulses and stabs in the stomach area. This distinct pain, in fact, is what made me revisit the possibility that it had not been carbon-monoxide poisoning after all, but actually the food. This was a welcome thought, as the latter seemed to be the lesser of the two evils.

After texting a few more teammates, I found out that, sure enough, they were also in a bad way. In fact, at least three-quarters of our team was down with symptoms of food poisoning – almost certainly from the chicken I had bought so cheerfully. Alas, my attempt at blessing my team with good food had gone disastrously wrong.

Eventually, we all recovered our strength. It’s amazing what a few days of rest, hot showers, and 24-hour electricity can do for recovering health in the cold, grey Central Asian winters. Unfortunately, the idea of eating meals together after team meetings was not one that anyone wanted to revisit anytime soon. And the poisonous rotisserie chicken that I had bought became a running joke on the team anytime we spoke of eating food together.

After this, the team continued to stumble on toward better relationships with one another and a better posture toward the church planting work. But we’d have to do so without the help of communal meals with the whole team, something that I continued to regret. It probably wasn’t a make-or-break issue, but to this day, I wonder if certain hard things later on would have gone better had we found a regular time to break bread all together.

My Muslim friends will sometimes tell me how dangerous and unhealthy they believe pork is, as if anyone who eats it is crazy and simply asking to get sick. Often, I will point out to them that they eat something almost daily that is just as (if not more) dangerous when undercooked – poultry, like street rotisserie chicken. That stuff, I will them with all the authority of a wizened old war veteran staring off into painful memories far off, that stuff can kill you.

Of course, that’s no reason to stop eating rotisserie chicken (or pork for that matter). We’re just extra careful now to make sure it’s been cooking on the spit for a good long time. Better to have dry chicken than an entire church planting team taken out for days. And ever since then, we’ve managed to avoid causing any more widespread food poisoning on the different teams we’ve been a part of.

As for my teammates with the apartment, for reasons that don’t come into this tale, they never moved back into that same place. This was probably for the best, considering my family’s days of violent and messy convalescence there. My family also quickly afterward ordered carbon monoxide alarms from the States and made sure to have them on our walls at our house and each place we lived afterward, just in case. We ourselves now live in a 24-hour power apartment. This means when winter comes around, we tell our colleagues who still live in traditional homes that our place is available should they ever need a similar tactical retreat from vengeful poultry, or even just from a house whose systems have collapsed in the coldest week of the year.

We’re now back living in Caravan City, so we occasionally see that same palm tree my son inadvertently fertilized with the remains of his lunch. No joke, it’s looking great, unusually healthy and vibrant for a palm tree in this city of extreme climates. My wife and I chuckle when we point it out to one another, remembering the rotisserie chicken disaster of late 2020. Perhaps our pain at least served to strengthen this one tree, fellow transplant that it was, far away from its native climes.

In the end, I still believe that missionary teams (or any team, really) should eat regular meals together. This is a simple and important way to build the kind of warmth and relationship needed for working well together. But just like any good thing, achieving this is not without its risks, and it can sometimes go unexpectedly wrong. Yes, feed your team. But also, do your best not to poison them.

If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here.

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash.com

A Proverb on Wishes vs. Diligence

The tree of wishes is a tree that’s fruitless.

-local oral tradition

I recently heard this local proverb for the first time. It points to the wisdom that wishes don’t actually change anything. No, we must live in the world as it actually is, a world that requires work to achieve what we desire. Apparently, we have a saying in English that is similar, “If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.” I’m not familiar with this saying, but it makes sense. Beggars don’t ride horses because wishes don’t actually result in horses. Wishes don’t result in anything – unless they are transformed into action.

Solomon agrees, “The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied” (Prov 13:4). Solomon tells us that wishful thinking is often linked to being a sluggard. And diligence is so important that it makes the difference between a satisfied soul and a soul that gets nothing, a soul that’s fruitless.

We’ve also seen here in Central Asia that it’s not just sloth that can lead to fruitless wishful thinking. This kind of posture can also come from a culture enslaved to fatalism. If a people group doesn’t believe that God actively intervenes in their daily lives, if they don’t believe that their actions can be used by God to make a significant difference, then they are not likely to translate their wishes into action. After all, if everything has already been determined and God is distant, then what’s the point?

Western culture is very active when it comes to trying to turn desires into reality. Sometimes this borders on being naively optimistic. But the underlying belief that we really can change things through our efforts has deeply Protestant (and biblical) roots. In contrast, the culture here has been cut off from the wisdom of God’s word for so long that they’ve largely lost this practical agency and optimism of the book of Proverbs, even though old local proverbs like the one about the tree of wishes still linger. Thankfully, the Bible is now available in our local language. That means that little by little, its wisdom will be leavening the worldview of our people group, especially that of the believers.

Long-term, this will mean much less sitting underneath the wishing tree – and much more planting, pruning, and picking from trees that actually satisfy.

If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here.

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photo from Unsplash.com

Seven Points on The Careful Justice of Hell

Our age doesn’t naturally resonate with the justice of an eternal hell. Whether in the West or here in Central Asia, the spirit of the age means that the default for most is that hell feels unjust. This hasn’t always been the case. There are periods of history (e.g. the Middle Ages) as well as people groups throughout the history of the world for whom an eternal hell resonated and made all the sense in the world. But for most of us now, something has changed. This particular part of God’s reality has been so successfully suppressed in our cultures and consciences that even the most faithful believers struggle to feel that hell is just, even if they affirm that it is so in their minds and words.

This is certainly true of me. And it has been true for countless Central Asian friends of mine over the years. In this, pressing into the details and nuances of what has been revealed about hell has been helpful. In particular, this effort has helped me to both believe and feel more deeply that the justice of hell is a fitting, careful justice. I, like many, am tempted to feel that an eternal hell is a careless kind of ‘justice,’ a broad-brushed thing involving so much eternal collateral damage. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Deuteronomy 29:29 says that, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” There is much about hell that has not been revealed. We trust in the just and loving character of God for those (for now) unanswerable questions. But when it comes to what has been revealed, here we should lean in and pay attention to what the scriptures are saying or hinting at regarding the reality of hell. Here are seven of these points that I find myself often coming back to in conversations about eternal judgment.

First, God’s punishment for sin has been the same from the beginning and will be the same until the end of history. The law laid down in Eden still holds true. Sin deserves death, both physical death and eternal death in hell (Gen 2:17, Rom 6:23). God will justly uphold this law for every human being ever created. Their sin will be justly paid for with death. This will be either their own deaths or, for believers, the death of the only acceptable substitute – Jesus Christ, the lamb of God. God justly applies this law to every single person, with no exceptions. He is perfectly consistent in this.

Second, every human being is heading to hell because they have personally suppressed the light they were given. Romans 1-3 is clear. The entire human race has suppressed the light of God they have – whether this was the revealed, written word of God or merely the truths written on their conscience and visible in nature – that there is a God who is deserving of true worship. We have all suppressed this light and in its place turned to idolatry. This is universal.

Some shepherd boys recently asked me if I was a Muslim or a kafir, an infidel. I was a little taken aback by the sharpness of their question and simply told them I was a Christian, but later I thought more about how I should have answered. Because we have all equally suppressed whatever light of God we were given and in this willingly become his enemies, we are all, in fact, kafirs – every single one of us. This is square one, a good starting point for understanding how isolated or even seemingly good people could still deserve to go to hell.

Third, hell will justly reflect the degree of light which we have rejected. Even though everyone who does not believe will end up in hell, hell will not be the same for everyone. While what has been revealed tells us it will be terrible for all, it also tells us that hell will be worse for some than others. Jesus reveals this when he speaks of the Galilean towns that did not repent when they had the opportunity to see the ministry of the Son of God face to face (Matt 11:20-24). They had access to a stunning degree of God’s light, yet they rejected it. Because of this, their judgment will be worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah, who only had access to a much smaller degree of God’s light. Dante is not completely off in suggesting that there are levels of hell. While we don’t know the details, Jesus tells us that God’s justice will carefully reflect the degree of access someone had to God’s light. More light rejected equals more judgment in eternity.

We instinctively feel that the man on the island is in a different situation than the one who grows up in a Christian family and rejects the gospel. Even though both are condemned for rejecting the light, God’s careful justice also acknowledges the differences that are in fact there.

Fourth, there is no repentance in hell. We tend to assume that once someone goes to hell, their eyes are opened and they genuinely plead with God for forgiveness while God callously ignores their change of heart. But what is the evidence for this in the Bible? On the contrary, the Bible seems to show us that hell will be full of worldly sorrow, not godly sorrow. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31), there is no sense that the rich man has been truly humbled. Yes, he doesn’t like being in pain and he doesn’t want his brothers to experience the pain of hell. But that is the very definition of worldly sorrow – I’m upset about my sin because its consequences make me feel bad, yet the grief doesn’t lead me to repentance (2 Cor 7:9-12). The rich man still pridefully presumes to order Lazarus (and even Abraham!) around, showing he has not experienced the godly sorrow of true repentance. The New Testament’s language of weeping and gnashing of teeth are images of worldly sorrow and regret (Matt 13:42). They are not images of repentance. No, those in hell will never repent, but continue sinning forever, which means they are day by day adding to the justice of their sentence.

Fifth, the eternal nature of hell is just given that sin is committed against an infinite God. Many of us have heard the helpful illustration that argues for the fitness of an eternal hell due to the fact that sin is an assault against an eternal and infinite God. Hit my brother, so it goes, he might hit me back. Hit my neighbor, he takes me to court. Hit the president, I may be shot by his bodyguards, or at least locked up for a long time. The position of the one assaulted justly warrants different consequences for the same kind of sin. We know that this is true in this world. So, what if we assault the king and creator of the universe, the infinite one? Then we receive eternal consequences befitting of that crime. This is another point that, together with the lack of repentance in hell, helps us begin to feel how the eternality of hell could be just.

Sixth, those in hell will not appear the same as they did here on earth, but will be radically changed into a form that reveals their true nature and fits their eternal environment. We struggle when we picture an unbelieving family member or friend in hell, and rightly so. This current age is a mixed one, when sin and a fallen nature mingle with the remnants of the image of God in every human being (Gen 9:6). Because of this broken yet still present image of God in every human, every person still alive is rightly deserving of dignity and compassion, even though a fallen sinner. But this mixed existence where sin and dignity intermingle is a temporary one. The time is coming when every one of us will be changed (1 Cor 15:52). This change will display our true natures, whose sons we really are – children of God or children of the devil. It seems as if this change happens fundamentally yet partially after death, and then fully in the future resurrection when both believers and unbelievers are raised with new bodies (Dan 12:2, Acts 2:15, Rev 20:5).

Have you ever thought about what kind of resurrected body God will be giving those who are raised into eternal condemnation? For resurrection always implies embodiment in the original languages of the Scriptures. It seems that, like he always does, God will be giving the inhabitants of hell bodies that are appropriate for their environment. Cherubim and seraphim are made for heaven’s throne room, so their bodies reflect this, covered in wings and eyes and fire appropriate for God’s presence. Fish with their scales and gills are made for the sea and birds with their wings for the air. Humans are made to be gardener-worshipper-kings, with fingers and faces that reflect this. This principle applied to hell means that whatever the resurrected bodies of those in hell look like, were we to see them we would affirm just how fit they are for their dwelling place. Our problem is that we project the bodies appropriate for this sphere onto another one, hell (and heaven for that matter), and this leaves us feeling that things aren’t quite right with this picture. Indeed, they aren’t right, for we are projecting bodies into environments they are not appropriate for, like stumbling upon a panda bear in the Sahara desert – it does not belong there.

C.S. Lewis in his sermon, The Weight of Glory, explores this future transformation that will see believers and nonbelievers become what they truly are:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations… it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

The scholar Anthony Hoekema also explores what happens with the image of God in believers in his book, Created in God’s Image. Hoekema shows from scripture how one day the image of God in believers will be not only be restored, but perfected in a way that outshines even what Adam had. Non posse pecare as Augustine put it, no longer able to sin. Glorified humanity will enter fully into “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).

We should remember, however, that believers and unbelievers are on inverse tracks all throughout the scriptures. What takes place among the redeemed in redemptive history is always reflected in the negative among the lost. This means that there is something that will happen to the lost that is the opposite of glorification – a terrifying thought. Likely, the broken image of God among the lost will on that day be completely lost, fully replaced by the image of Satan – and their spirits and bodies will show this, just as ours with their glorified image of God will shine like stars forever and ever. “For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matt 13:12).

If we were to able see unbelievers who are now in hell, or see them as they will be in whatever form future hell takes in the new heavens and new earth, then we would feel that they are exactly where they should be. Everything about them would reflect this, just as angels so clearly belong in heaven, just as everything about glorified believers will fit so perfectly with a new earth.

Seventh, our failure to feel the justice of hell reflects how little we understand the sinfulness of sin. Hell does not feel just to us because we are a people blind to how evil sin actually is. Or, in the case of believers, we are a people recovering from that blindness. Were God to truly open our eyes to see the darkness of the sin in our nature and in our actions, we would not struggle in the same way with the justice of hell. In fact, we’d probably struggle more with the scandalous nature of God’s forgiveness. It’s curious to me that former ages so much more exposed to suffering and oppression than we are struggled less with the concept of an eternal hell. It’s as if they had opportunity to see more clearly firsthand just how sinful sin actually is. And so their feelings about justice and hell were better aligned to what is revealed in God’s word.

Sin is so evil it doesn’t just make us unworthy to be in God’s presence. It makes us downright incompatible. Our very substance as sinful beings cannot draw near to the substance of God’s being without being exposed to eternal death. He is a holy, consuming fire, after all (Is 33:14, Heb 12:29). This is his nature. And his justice by its very nature will burn and afflict sin eternally. That is, unless we are changed to somehow be compatible with that fire.

This is no less than what is promised in the gospel, not only forgiveness but also transformation. We will be changed so that the holy fire of God’s nature will not afflict and torment us eternally, but will instead delight and empower us in its beauty (Is 33:15-17, 1 John 3:2). We will praise him forever because at last we will see hell clearly for the fitting and careful justice that it truly is.

Yes, one day we will also say about hell, “Hallelujah! The smoke from her goes up forever and ever!” (Rev 19:3). When this occurs it will be because our eyes are finally fully open. We will see the careful and fitting justice of God. And we will know and feel that it is good.

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