Recently, something took place here that was so spot-on for our people group that I knew I’d simply have to write about it.
Mr. Hope* – as his name translates in English – is a local believer who reminds me of a gnarled old war veteran. He’s not fought in a literal war himself, but he has been a believer since the 1990s. This means that he’s been a part of four or five local Central Asian churches that have imploded and, eventually, disappeared. Now in his third decade of faith, he has been a direct witness to the brokenness and messiness of the bride of Christ as it has struggled to take root in the difficult soil of Mr. Hope’s people group. No doubt he also contributed to some of these implosions. The difference is that he has, unlike so many others, been willing to give the local church yet one more try. And praise God for that.
Mr. Hope carries himself as a man worn down by trials and by lots of disappointment. He often wears a bit of a scowl on his broad, wrinkled face. He manages to crack a smile and respond with honorable greetings when addressed by others. But you can sense that he’s still wary of trusting the others, especially the other local believers. He also occasionally drops bombs – and does so publicly. He might try to take over a service with some unexpected strong objection, opinion, or warning that leaves the leadership struggling to know how to respond to him respectfully and yet still help the meeting continue in the direction it really should be going.
This happened again at a recent meeting. My wife and I are currently members at the international church, so although we attend all of the services of this local language church plant in order to lend support to our teammates and lead worship, we were not at this members-only meeting. According to the missionary pastor, Mr. Hope stood up in the middle of the meeting and dramatically announced that because of serious and various concerns he had decided to leave the church plant and join another group. Then, he simply left.
The rest of the members present were left somewhat confused. Where had this come from? Even though Mr. Hope had had some friction with other members and the leaders from time to time, most thought things were at a relatively good place, all things considered. Regardless, the member’s meeting needed to continue. Among the important items on the agenda that night was a vote to begin devoting a portion of the church’s giving toward pastoral support – a massive weakness in the churches of this region and a vital form of obedience that would need to be learned in order for this church to one day be truly be healthy.
The day after the meeting, the pastor called Mr. Hope to see what he could find out.
“Is everything okay, Mr. Hope? We weren’t sure what had happened to make you decide that you are leaving the church.”
“Oh yes, everything is fine,” Mr. Hope responded. “I just wanted to know if people truly loved me.”
“But… Really?… What do you mean?”
“Well, I knew that if I left a meeting in that way and no one called me, then that would mean the other church members didn’t really love me. But because you and several others have called to see how I’m doing, now I know that you really love me.”
“So… you’re not leaving the church?”
“No! Of course not.”
Our friend the pastor was left both relieved and likely a little perturbed. I couldn’t help but laugh when he told me the story later that week.
“That is so like our people group!” I laughed, then turned to explain to some of our newer teammates.
“We’ve also had a lot of this kind of thing happen to us. It’s like locals’ somewhat extreme way to fish for affirmation. They might call you up, tell you they’re upset with you and say all kinds of things that feel to us like shaming and blaming. But most of the time they just want to hear that you love and respect them and really value their friendship, even though it’s been a while that you’ve been able to call. Simple affirmation usually defuses most of it.”
It’s true. Our locals have inherited a culture where causing drama is one of the more common responses to feeling a lack of affirmation. To those of us coming from the West, it can feel a bit like we’ve gone back to junior high. Do we really need to resort to these kinds of tactics just because you’re feeling insecure about yourself or our relationship?
While some of this is in fact due to unhealthy – even destructive and exhausting – strategies of communication and relationships, part of it is also due to the fact that our locals live in a culture where friends, relatives, and even mere associates are constantly affirming one another verbally. This clicked for me at a recent Simeon Trust preaching training. Several times during breaks, one of my local friends would come up behind me, squeeze my shoulder, and say something to the tune of, “You lion brother of mine!”
As I thought back on my close friendships with men like Darius* and Mr. Talent*, I realized that they were always doing things like this as well. Spontaneous, poetic verbal affirmation was consistently coming out of them toward those around them, and towards me. Having grown up here, this is now second nature to them.
We’ve long known that our people are hyper-sensitive to criticism or even loving critical feedback. But what I’ve now come to realize is that they are also sensitive to the absence or even decrease of spontaneous verbal affirmation. It seems that one of the primary ways our locals stay encouraged and keep hopelessness at bay is through these kinds of constant verbal exchanges.
Needless to say, Westerners are usually not very good at this kind of on-the-fly poetic affirmation. When I think of those Westerners who are my closest friends and colleagues here, we barely ever compliment and affirm one another directly. Rather, most of our affirmation for one another is implied, understood, indirect. Every once in a while, we’ll come out with some direct affirmation, but it’s not super common, and it’s certainly not second nature.
Alas for the local believer who becomes good friends with a Western Christian. While the local has been programmed by his upbringing to expect heartfelt affection to result in a positive deluge of direct verbal affirmation, he must now learn the hard way that when it comes to his Western mentor, he’ll have to read this, most of the time at least, between the lines. It’s a bit like the classic confused husband who thinks his wife should be able to simply intuit his love for her because he works hard to provide and protect. Wait, she needs me to tell her regularly that I love her? Doesn’t she know that already? The wife, on the other hand, can’t understand why her husband doesn’t love her anymore.
If Central Asian believers need to grow by not creating relational drama in order to get affirmation (and they do), then Western believers need to grow in their willingness to regularly verbalize bold affirmation. I’m not very good at this, but I’ve been experimenting recently, especially with my local friends who work regularly with Westerners here. So far, the results are good. The effect of a spontaneous shoulder squeeze and proclamation of “Ah, my only begotten brother!” seems as if I’m giving them a glass of cold water while they wander in a parched and desert land. They light up.
I don’t know how much of this dynamic played into the situation with Mr. Hope. But now that I know of his recent stunt at that member’s meeting, I’ll be more careful to show verbal appreciation for him in future interactions – and pray that over time, his knowledge of Christ’s affection and stunning statements of love for him will ground him when he’s feeling insecure or unappreciated.
He may be a grumpy and gnarled veteran of church implosions. But in Christ, he is a son, an heir of the kingdom, a royal priest, a beloved brother, and even a future judge of angels. These are stunning titles, rich and even divinely sanctioned. I have the sense that even Mr. Hope would light up were we to spontaneously put an arm around him, and proclaim them over him.
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*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security
This local proverb speaks of the power and efficacy of slow, steady, diligent work. This kind of work is compared to a king enthroned – weighty, authoritative, influential. It reminds me of Proverbs 12:24, “the hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor.” According to both our local oral wisdom and Solomon, authority is the natural result of long-term labor that has proven wise, fruitful, and effective.
One of the very interesting things about this season in our area of Central Asia is that we are now seeing the good fruit that has come from missionaries who years ago chose the slow and steady route to church planting. In multiple cities now, church plants that both locals and movement-driven missionaries said would never work are actually thriving. And, wonder of wonders, they are raising up faithful, humble, qualified local leaders. Yes, their road has been very messy and involved much suffering. But they have kept their hand to the plow and kept going, one plodding step at a time.
I heard this past week about a local pastor who has approached our former team in Poet City to ask them for help in leadership development. As is modeled by most foreign organizations, this local leader has relied on ministry programs and salaried positions to raise up other leaders. But this approach keeps failing him. This is because ministry salaries and positions cannot create faithful character, though they sure can wreck the character of young and immature potential leaders. However, this pastor has seen from afar as young men like Darius* and Alan* have been raised up over a number of years to now be a faithful elder and faithful elder-in-training, respectively. And this evidence of slow labor speaks with a kind of authority all its own.
The slow route of faithful shepherding will always lap the seemingly fast route of exciting methods. And when rushed and shallow work inevitably collapses due to an inadequate foundation, other work will suddenly be elevated, enthroned as it were. If this newfound authority is then accompanied by a humility based on the fact that the principles and methods employed were not really our own at all but merely an attempt to be faithful to God’s word – then that newfound influence can be put to good, even eternal, use.
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*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security
It took me a long time to remember the local word for speed bump. This word, like thousands of others in our Central Asian language, is a loan word from a larger regional language. The words borrowed from this particular larger tongue simply won’t stick as easily in my brain as the native words of our local Indo-European one, or those borrowed from other related languages. This is because this other language is from a different language family altogether, so when I hear this kind of new word I feel like I’ve got nothing to connect it to, nothing in the broader structure of language forms and meaning that I can hang it on. It feels like random syllables of sound floating in space that I just have to memorize with no help from context whatsoever. It would be like learning English if English were infused with thousands of random Chinese words. The sound and meaning clues of these Chinese words would be from an entirely different system than the rest of the English language being learned.
No, I eventually learned the word for speed bump because it was shouted at me over and over again on a drive with Hakkan*, a former guerilla fighter and father of Zoey*, one of my wife’s good village friends. Hakkan, a strutting and mustachioed patriarch in Underhill village, is the kind of character who believes that foreigners can understand your language better if you say everything more slowly – and much louder.
“A.W.!”
“Yes, elder brother Hakkan?”
“WE’RE EATING GOOSE TODAY!”
“Wow, why are you all troubling yourselves so much on our behalf?”
“NO! YOU ARE OUR GUESTS! SO WE WILL EAT THE FAT GOOSE! LOOK AT THIS HUGE KNIFE I WILL BEHEAD IT WITH!”
Hakkan always got a kick out of showing off his huge knife, especially when my wife was around, whose name he could never quite remember. Instead, he called her a mashup of Islamic names that, if tortured enough, bore a slight resemblance to my wife’s name.
“SAIF-ADI! I’M BEHEADING A GOOSE! A FAT GOOSE, EH?! HAHA!”
Anyway, during one of our many trips to visit his household, the family planned an outing to a nearby city. Something was wrong with their vehicle, so they asked me to drive us all in our SUV. In true village style, nine or ten of us piled into our seven-seater as we began the drive to this nearby city. First, we drove about a half hour down a road with ancient and modern village ruins on our right and melon fields and a large lake on our left. Then, at the end of the lake, we turned right and began to zig-zag our way up a mountain. Our destination was on the other side, in the next valley over from Underhill village. I had once looked down on this city from a different mountaintop with my friend, the Sufi Mullah.
As it turned out, this road was full of unmarked speed bumps. In recent years, traffic speed cameras have begun popping up in the larger cities and even some of the popular intercity roads. But for decades, and still to this day in most places, the most effective method of combating the maniacal driving tendencies of the local men is to force them to drive over dozens and dozens of punishing speed bumps.
Now, I consider myself a pretty good driver. But, for the life of me, I have the hardest time registering an oncoming speed bump, especially if it’s the same color as the road and otherwise relatively unmarked. It’s so bad I’ve sometimes gotten actual airtime from hitting speed bumps way too fast. Yes, dear reader, say a prayer for the poor suspension system of our family vehicle.
Hakkan was in the front seat with me that day as I drove this particular mountain road for the first time. And every time that I managed not to see a speed bump in time (which was quite often), Hakkan would brace himself and yell,
“TASA!!!” which, of course, is the local word for speed bump.
On that drive, I heard, “TASA! A.W.! TASAAA!!!” so many times that the blasted loanword finally stuck in my brain.
Eventually, we made it down the other side of the mountain and to our destination. I thought I had driven pretty slowly overall, but I distinctly remember Hakkan’s younger teenage daughter in the backseat moaning from carsickness,
“I have died, ohhh, I have died!”
Hakkan, as always, was somehow scowling and smiling at the same time, looking like he could kill you but like he’d rather make you laugh and show you some large knives.
It’s been years since that day when the word for speed bump finally stuck. But today, as my family once again drove into the mountains, anytime my wife spotted a speed bump for me she would impersonate Hakkan from that outing long ago,
“TASAAA!!!”
As for Hakkan, I haven’t heard from him ever since he tried to recruit me to help him get a second wife without his first wife or daughters knowing about it. He had somehow met a migrant African worker in a nearby hospital who knew English but not much of the local language. So, Hakkan called me up to get me to translate for their secret plans for polygamous matrimony. For my part, I was very disappointed in Hakkan and told him I wanted nothing to do with it. That seems to have put a damper on our relationship.
However, this being Central Asia, sooner or later I’ll hear from Hakkan again and he’ll pretend like nothing ever happened. And when that day comes, I’ll tell him how thankful I am that because of his help, I finally learned the word for speed bump – and that every time we hit one in a bad way, we think of him.
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.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security
“Where is your ID card, teacher?” demanded the soldier at the checkpoint.
“By the Qur’an, I… I must have left it back in my car at the university. I’m just riding along now to drop these guests off in Caravan City and then returning right away,” responded our host from the front passenger seat, clearly kicking himself for forgetting this important piece of documentation.
“Where are you from?” the guard asked, eyes narrowing.
“I’m from this city. I’m of our people. And I’m a member of the _____ tribe, a well-known and respected tribe, as you know.”
“That’s right,” our driver chimed in. “He’s one of ours, from here, this city. And everyone knows his tribe’s reputation.”
“Elder brother, you need an ID, or I can’t let you through,” the guard said. “Do you at least have a picture of your ID?”
Our host searched his phone frantically for a picture, telling the guard he should have one somewhere.
As the guard waited impatiently, our driver tried a different strategy.
“I know Mr. Muhammad. He used to work here. Is he still around?”
Dropping the name of someone in authority here, I thought to myself, worth a shot.
The guard ignored him.
Unable to find a picture of his ID on his phone, our host tried another approach.
“Can I leave anything with you as a pledge that I will return tonight? My phone? Anything?”
The guard shook his head. Alas, three traditional strategies seemed to have failed – the appeal to tribal reputation, the appeal to a relationship with an authority figure, and the attempt to leave something valuable as a pledge of keeping one’s word. No, at this checkpoint separating regions, ethnicities, and political factions, modernity and its demands for photo IDs seemed to be winning the day. And yet there’s enough of a tug of war between the modern ways and the older ways in this part of the world that you never can quite predict which one is going to prevail.
“Come inside and talk to the captain,” ordered the guard.
Our host, it seemed, had one last shot. If this didn’t work, he’d have to leave us and taxi alone back to the city we had just come from.
A few minutes later, he reemerged, smiling and relieved. Turns out the current authority figure at this checkpoint was willing – after enough honorable haggling, that is – to bend the newer laws in favor of the much older ones. The mustachioed men with AK-47s decided to take a risk on our ID-less host because they were able to socially map him, attaching him to a broader community that they had been taught they could trust. Because our host belonged to a certain group, a certain tribe with a solid reputation, he was extended trust, even though they knew almost nothing about him as an individual.
The ironic thing was that we were all worried we’d face trouble at the checkpoints because two of us were Americans. In the end, the soldiers seemed not to take any notice of us at all, fixated as they were on whether there was still enough credibility in the name of our host’s tribe to let our him through without proper ID.
“Thanks be to God for the reputation of the _____ tribe!” I said. “I think I need a tribe to adopt me.”
Our local friends smiled and chuckled. Of course, I could never really be adopted by a local tribe. The local worldview would never permit it. Bloodlines, fatherlines specifically, are still the be-all and end-all of identity here. Kinship is fixed by biology and viewed as largely unchangeable.
It was a curious thing that I had just that same day given a talk where I’d said this older strategy of tribal trust was actually keeping the country stuck, held back from the kind of trust between diverse individuals that leads to true and healthy progress. But here, this same sort of group trust had just made things easier, unstuck, at least for our little party with its simple mission of dropping us Americans off after a long day of conference activities.
I was reminded that there’s always a context for why a certain culture is the way it is. Even if certain traditions now seem hopelessly counterproductive, at one point they were adopted because they were needed, they worked, or they seemed the wisest of all the available options – perhaps the only option. Not unlike a counselor approaching relational strategies learned in childhood that are now causing havoc in an adult’s life, wise observers of culture should also be careful to give respect where it’s due. There are always reasons why certain habits or customs exist. These reasons may be good or they may be bad. But go deep enough and we will inevitably find that they have a logic to them, and often one that makes some decent sense.
There are reasons why our locals, now an overwhelmingly urban people, are still so tribal in their approach to trust. It was only a generation or two ago that the tribe was still everything, absolutely central to survival, let alone success. Your tribe protected you, arranged your marriage for you, and secured justice for you. Your tribe gave you your identity, an imputed reputation of honor and strength that meant you could navigate life with a name that carried weight, opened doors, and caused rivals to think twice before trying anything.
Of course, along with all of these benefits came solemn obligations. Show up to fight for the tribe when called. Advance the honor of the tribe through your own personal actions. Purge shameful members of the tribe when necessary. And yes, only truly trust those who belong to your tribe or to its close allies – never those who don’t.
Alas, now that our focus people group is 85% city dwellers, this old tribal strategy of trust is proving completely insufficient for the complex needs of 21st century life. Neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, governments, and even churches are now made up of those from different tribes. How do you effectively cooperate with others when the wisdom you’ve inherited is that you should never trust someone who’s not a tribal relative? How can any institution be healthy if you distrust almost everyone from the get-go, when the slightest mistake or sin by others simply proves what you already knew, that all these others are bad, untrustworthy types who are ultimately against you?
No, in spite of occasionally getting you through a government checkpoint, the dominance of the tribal trust approach is daily undermining just about everything in this society, not to mention the establishment of healthy local churches. This problem of trust, when manifested between local believers, is one of the toughest nuts to crack for cross-cultural workers in this part of the world. In general, the local believers are still operating in a default mindset related to tribal trust. “I only trust family and those I grew up with” is a sentiment I’ve heard countless times from local believers, usually in a conversation where I’m trying to convince them to risk by gathering with and trusting other brothers and sisters in the faith.
We’ve learned to leverage a local proverb about trust to push back against this, which usually buys us at least a good conversation about Christian trust and trustworthiness. And we’ve also learned that this is an area where we cannot afford to wait for the locals to feel ready to change. Those who have waited have found that locals’ willingness to trust others (which they pray is just around the corner) never actually materializes on its own. They then end up stuck in an ever-growing network of secret, one-on-one Bible studies with locals afraid of meeting with others. No, this is an area where missionaries need to very proactively lead in terms of modeling, exhorting, and even pushing toward diverse, non-oikos gatherings from the beginning. Practically, this means the believers we invest the most time with should be those who are most willing to risk gathering with others. If locals want to study the Bible with a foreigner, they should mainly be offered opportunities to do this which assume the presence of other locals.
This “throw them in the deep end” trust approach not only fits the messy Jew-Gentile-slave-free composite churches planted by the Apostles, but for us it has also proved unexpectedly effective – if you stubbornly stick with it for a few years. Turns out that once the first solid core of believers emerges (usually after a couple of implosions) that has learned it is possible to build trust with one another, then it becomes so much easier for those who come after them. Yes, it’s a tough ask to make of the locals, but it doesn’t take too long before they come to experience the benefits of something they previously thought impossible – the slow and steady growth of trust between believers who have no natural kinship ties, but are together becoming a new spiritual family. Unfortunately, decades’ worth of movement-driven methods here that make more allowance for locals’ fears of gathering with one another have so far failed to result in actual churches that last. Once again, our corner of Central Asia proves to be where all the popular missionary methods come to die.
Long-term, what is ultimately needed is a biblical renovation of the local worldview when it comes to trust, one that provides better tools for understanding trustworthiness. These tools can lead to Christian flourishing within the local church. Then, as the church leavens its host culture there is also the long-term possibility of broader societal flourishing as even those who don’t believe go on to learn a wiser way to trust others.
We should be wary of the assumption that the biblical understanding of trust is basically synonymous with the Western approach, even though the way Westerners trust one another has undoubtedly been deeply shaped by the Bible. Western trust has some real strengths in its overflowing optimism and risk-taking nature, strengths that do indeed echo biblical ideas of “hoping all things, believing all things.” But Western trust also assumes a general culture of honesty. Again, this assumption is probably there because of the Bible’s long-term influence on the West. But this posture of assumed trustworthiness does not work so well in other cultures that value honor or craftiness over honesty. Western trust defaults can therefore put the local church in other cultures at greater risk of attack from deceivers and wolf-types. No, we do not want Central Asian believers to merely start trusting one another as if they were Westerners. Rather, we want them to trust one another as people of the Word.
For a long time, I have been chewing on the question of where to start when it comes to building a biblical theology of trust. At last, I think I’ve arrived at some initial clarity, or at least spotted a few trailheads, as it were, that can eventually lead to a more biblical understanding of trust.
First, a biblical understanding of trust must begin putting one’s trust ultimately in God, and not in man (Ps 62:5-8). Like many other paradoxes in the Christian life, the best way to learn to trust others is to realize that you can’t ultimately trust them. Only God is worthy of 100% trust. Everyone else will, at some point, let us down. This is because we’re all sinners, and we’re all limited. Only God is perfectly holy and perfectly infinite in his reliability. When we put the weight of our deepest trust on God and not on other humans we’re actually then more free to risk and trust others – because we don’t ultimately depend on them, but on God. The book of Jeremiah goes so far as to say the one who trusts in man is cursed, while the one who trusts in God is blessed (Jer 17:5-7).
Second, a biblical understanding of trust must be shaped by the wisdom literature. Scripture doesn’t often use the term trustworthy for people. But it does use other terms that are related to it, terms such as wise, upright, righteous, and blessed. These are all characteristics that are upstream from trustworthiness. The wisdom literature in particular is full of proverbs and discourses on what it looks like to be this kind of person. For the one on the hunt for what constitutes biblical trustworthiness, the wisdom literature is a goldmine. Consider Psalm 1, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly; nor stands in the way of sinners; nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the Law of the Lord; and on his Law he meditates day and night.” Or, Proverbs 9:8, “Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you; Reprove a wise man, and he will love you.” Or, Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” From these sample verses from wisdom passages we see that the trustworthy person is one who 1) is shaped by God’s word instead of being shaped by sinners, 2) happily receives correction, and 3) is merciful to others. Do you know someone like this? Chances are good you can trust them.
I also find it very interesting that the wisdom literature is so individualistic in its understanding of wisdom – and therefore trustworthiness. Ancient Israel was a tribal society and had a culture that was more collectivist than individualist, not unlike many Eastern cultures today. It could have very easily fallen into very unhealthy forms of tribal trust. In fact, some of the carnage in the book of Judges may be evidence of this. But whereas blessings and certain obligations are given out tribally, the wisdom literature zeros in not on the group but on the individual when it builds out its understanding of what is means to be wise, upright, righteous, blessed, trustworthy. This means a pivot toward assessing individuals’ trustworthiness rather than tribes’ is not a move toward becoming more Western, but toward becoming more biblical.
Third, a biblical understanding of trust must be shaped by the examples in the Bible’s narratives. Men like Joseph, Daniel, and Nehemiah, and women like Ruth are strong examples of what a trustworthy person looks like. In their stories, we see both competence and character, two key domains of trustworthiness when it comes to individuals. The stories of these faithful saints and others present us with real-life examples of what a trustworthy believer looks like, even under extreme pressure. The apex of all of these biblical examples is of course Jesus, the trustworthy human par excellence.
Fourth, a biblical understanding of trust must be shaped by the New Testament’s qualifications for leaders. The New Testament’s passages on elders and deacons (1 Tim 3, Titus 1, Acts 20, 1 Pet 5, Acts 6) set forward qualifications for leadership in the local church. As many have pointed out, there is nothing exceptional about these qualifications. Rather, they simply paint the picture of a believer who is mature enough to be able to lead God’s people well. As such, they are great standards for all believers to strive toward. But in addition to this, they also make a great framework for trustworthiness. Take the elder qualifications for 1st Timothy 3, for example. You can trust someone who longs to care for God’s people, is faithful to their spouse, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not a lover of money, who manages their household well, etc.
As I said above, these categories are an initial attempt to outline a biblical approach of trust. There are likely more ‘trailheads’ like these from Scripture that emerge as we dig deeper into this topic. But even starting with these four would help local believers – and let’s be honest, us Western missionaries too – think much more biblically about trust, rather than just going with the flow of our native cultures.
Tribal trust has been undermining the establishment of healthy churches in Central Asia (along with just about everything else in society). Therefore, local believers must learn how to move away from this binary group approach to trusting others where you are either ‘in the group’ and therefore viewed as completely trustworthy or ‘out of the group’ and so viewed basically as a saboteur waiting to pounce.
That being said, even tribal trust is not to be completely discarded according to the Bible. Let’s not forget Paul’s rather blunt generalizations about Cretans. And more importantly, if we observe the reputations of individual congregations in the New Testament (e.g. Col 1:4, Rev 2-3), we see there is still a way in which we can wisely bear a tribal name of sorts. And while belonging to a church with a sound reputation should not be the only or primary filter used for gauging someone’s trustworthiness, it sure is a helpful secondary category to lean on.
Yes, even though I can’t be adopted by a Central Asian tribe, I have over the years been adopted by several local spiritual ones. This reputation will not get me through government checkpoints (not yet, anyway). But, man, does it result in joy and trust with other brothers and sisters who have heard of the faithfulness of the different churches we’ve been members of. “You were members at _____ Baptist Church? We’ve heard of it. Solid preaching! And solid people.”
We may yet have a long way to go in building a biblical theology of trust. But by the grace of God, we are on our way. And once we and the local believers learn how to trust one another according to the Bible, well then, the gates of hell better watch out.
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.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
In this video, one of the members of the Great Commission Council shares a perspective I also resonate deeply with. Yes, ministry is costly. But so much more than that, it is a gift.
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.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
As the weather gets wintery in our corner of Central Asia, I’m reminded of my first winter here back in late 2007. Like many, I had wrongly assumed that because this area was some kind of desert, it wouldn’t really be that cold in the winter. After all, I was coming from having just spent a year in Minneapolis. So, I laughed off the suggestions that I bring serious winter gear like long johns. This was a mistake.
Our first few weeks on the ground did seem surprisingly mild for November. But then the rains started. And with the rains, the city suddenly got very cold. Overnight, the ACs and swamp coolers were switched off and the kerosene and LPG heaters turned on. To this day, the abrupt shift to winter weather still surprises us. Here in Caravan City, it just happened this past week.
This will be our first winter living in a 24-hour electricity apartment. But for that winter of ’07-’08 in Poet City, we were living in a typical cement, plaster, and tile local home. These traditional homes have a peculiar ability to absorb and radiate the cold such that the inside of the house often feels colder than the outside. Add to this the drastic power cuts that are normal during the winter and the fact that you can’t safely keep kerosene and LPG heaters on overnight, and the winters of this high desert region end up feeling much colder than those in the US, even though it doesn’t technically get as cold or have as much snowfall as our home city in Kentucky.
No, the issue is that in Central Asia, your house is freezing. All the time. I learned quickly that the ability to reliably get truly warm at home during the winter has quite the effect on how severe you feel the season to be. Add to all this the fact that the winter of ’07-’08 was the coldest one on record here in forty years and that our hodge-podge group of Western dude roommates didn’t really know how to handle a Central Asian house in winter, and you can see why we were very much in need of finding some kind of refuge of warmth and comfort.
For me, one of these oases was the Central Asian bathhouse. My jaded musician friend, Hama*, had introduced me to this glorious descendant of Roman bathhouses, tucked away in the alleyways of the bazaar. The traditional pillar of community hygiene offered as much steam, hot water, and sweet chai as one could handle. But because the bathhouse was frequented mostly by elderly local men who tended to bathe naked, no one seemed to want to come with me. Not even when I told them about the giant hairy man in a Speedo who would scrub your back and give you a painful massage for a mere $3.
Thankfully, there was one oasis of warmth that we could all go to together. And that was The First Coffee Shop in Poet City. That winter, this establishment became like our second home.
The history of coffee shops here is an interesting one. Coffee was more popular than tea in this region during the Middle Ages and for most of the Western Age of Exploration. But according to one source I found, it was actually the American War of Independence that shifted our region’s preferred source of caffeine. The Americans famously boycotted British tea, turning instead to Brazilian coffee for their patriotic caffeination. And so America has been a majority coffee-drinking nation ever since. But the loss of the American market meant that the Brits were in need of new customers for all of their product. They turned to Central Asia, specifically, Persia. This caused all kinds of religious dilemmas for the Persian Islamic clerics, who scrambled to proclaim fatwas declaring how drinking the infidel-supplied tea in this way was sinful and haram, but drinking it in this way was fine and halal.
Eventually, the forces of the marketplace (and the fact that black spiced chai with lots of sugar is delicious) overwhelmed whatever strong opposition there may have been in the beginning. And so the residents of Central Asia have now become majority tea drinkers, swapping places with those rebellious American colonists. However, as recently as 100 years ago, travelers to our area still spoke of coffeehouses instead of teahouses. The beverage had changed, but the older name still stuck. But by the time I came around in 2007, even the name of these traditional establishments had shifted to be teahouses, chaihouses to give a direct translation.
Yet until 2007, there were no coffee shops, at least not in the modern Western sense of the term. However, some enterprising local who had spent time as a refugee in Europe came back to his home city and decided he would change that. This was just in time for our team, who would retreat to this coffee shop on the long dark days with no electricity so that we could get some hot coffee, use some internet, and even use a Western toilet instead of a squatty potty. One should not underestimate how refreshing this particular combination can be.
On dark evenings we would meet up there as well, enjoying fingir, the local form of french fries, plus local pizza – which comes without tomato sauce and instead with a criss-crossed drizzle of mayonnaise and ketchup on top. Adam* would often join us, entertaining us with hilarious stories from his childhood and encouraging us by recounting opportunities he’d recently had to share the gospel.
We Westerners are funny when it comes to our coffee shops. Like a moth to a flame, if you build it, we will come. We really do love ourselves some coffee, internet, and a cozy-productive atmosphere. In fact, if anyone ever wanted to collect serious intel on those Westerners (or missionaries) that live in a given city, setting up a coffee shop could be quite the effective method. Especially if said coffee shop also had its own generator so that it has power when the other neighborhoods have gone dark on winter evenings. Needless to say, we were very loyal customers and became very fond of that place. I wrote not a few emails there to a girl I (mistakenly) thought I was supposed to marry. And it was there that I tried to wax eloquent during my first attempt at blogging.
Today, the cities of our region are positively overflowing with Western-style coffee shops. The owner of the beloved First Coffee Shop in Poet City was truly ahead of the curve. Unfortunately, his groundbreaking business ended up eventually overshadowed by the newer, hipper, and shinier Coffee Shops of those who followed in his footsteps. The First Coffee Shop was still around during my vision trips with my wife during the 2010s, but it was noticeably emptier. Then, at some point during our first term, it closed for good.
These days I’ve been frequenting a legit third-wave Coffee Shop here in Caravan City, the first place where you can get not only decent espresso drinks but also offerings like good filter coffee, pour-overs, and bottled cold brew. As far as I know, it’s the first one to be opened in our region that truly operates at international standards of quality (or coffee snobbery, depending on your perspective). They’ll soon be opening a branch back in Poet City as well, meaning it took eighteen years to get from the first Coffee Shop of any kind there to the kind of place where you can saunter in and order a Chemex.
But I was there, long ago in the cold and dark winter of 2007, to witness the first one. Seeing these shiny new establishments the newbies take for granted I feel a bit like Elrond – “I was there, Gandalf… I was there… 3,000 years ago,” sipping a bitter and musty Americano as the black wind from the mountains moaned outside, thankful that any kind of Coffee Shop existed at all, that I could get warm, get online – and that they had a Western toilet.
The First Coffee Shop in Poet City is now long gone. But today, on American Thanksgiving, I raise a toast, a metaphorical cup of very bad coffee, to that pioneering establishment. You were an oasis of warmth during a brutal winter that was, in the words of an Irish teammate, “positively Baltic.” By sitting at your tables we were refreshed and strengthened in a season when we were new missionaries who were very much in over our heads – and freezing to boot. And for that, I will always be very grateful.
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.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security
It was the first time I’d ever been asked this question. And it wasn’t asked in jest, but in earnest. My new friend, Jonah*, really meant it.
“Of course!” I replied, “When Jesus forgives you he forgives you of all your sin, all your shame, all your mistakes, and all your background and past. His blood even covers all the sins you’re going to do in the future.”
Jonah took in my response. Then told me he was getting goosebumps.
This past Friday was Jonah’s first time attending a church, first time getting his hands on a Bible, and first time hearing the gospel. One day a foreigner on the bus next to him asked him to help him figure out how to pay. That foreigner was a Christian and a member of our international church. That was how Jonah showed up at the church that morning, and how he and I were then able to talk at the fellowship lunch that followed.
Like many here, Jonah is trilingual. His father is from our focus people group, his mother from a neighboring people group, and he also has decent English. Here, they don’t believe people can be biracial, so Jonah identifies fully with his father’s people group, even though he’s fluent in both tongues. While talking, he and I did the dance where we tried to figure out whether communication would be smoother and more natural in English or in the local language. We used both languages interchangeably for a while, but when we got to spiritual things we moved mostly into his ‘father tongue.’
After the post-service fellowship meal, held at a member’s house, the pattern here is to go around the room and to have everyone share one or two things they found encouraging from the service. I leaned over Red*, who was sitting between us, and whisper-explained the format to Jonah, who then scribbled some notes in Engish and passed them to me. He nervously wanted to make sure that what he had to share was appropriate.
He shared three things with the group. First, that this was his first time attending a church. Second, that he loved the joyful singing. “Sometimes there’s a kind of singing in the mosque, but it’s not happy, more like mourning.” And third, that he was shocked by a sentence he’d heard during the service – that Jesus died so that we might live.
Imagine being a thirty-something-year-old man and hearing this idea for the very first time. This was Jonah’s situation. When he heard this truth it left him stunned. Jonah then concluded his sharing by telling the group that he was ready to become a Christian and wanted to go as deep as possible in learning about Jesus.
“Well, first, start by reading your New Testament carefully,” I told him when he later expressed to me the same desire to become a Christian and go as deep in as he could.
I asked Jonah about his story and why he was so ready to follow Jesus despite knowing almost nothing about him. He told me that even as a child he had always felt that Islam was wrong. Then, one day during work he fell off of a three-storey building. This had somehow not killed him, despite the doctors believing he was done for. Here, he showed me the scars on his neck from where he had been intubated in a desperate effort to keep him alive.
“I know that Jesus saved my life,” Jonah said to me matter-of-factly.
I didn’t press him on how he knew this, instead deciding to press into the gospel. Like so many locals, Jonah seemed to have had some kind of experience of Jesus’ merciful power. In the beginning, they tend to think this makes them Christians. We know that it does not. What it does do is blast open a wide door for gospel proclamation.
I proceeded to walk through a basic God-Man-Christ-Response outline with Jonah, which he listened to with rapt attention. When I was talking about the need for repentance is when Jonah dropped his unexpected question about if Jesus was willing to forgive him for being a Muslim.
The way that Jonah listened to me as I shared the gospel reminded me of the first time Darius* heard the gospel years ago. Some need to hear the gospel a dozen times before they begin to feel its beauty and power. Others? They feel it right away. As if the thing they have been searching for all their life has suddenly and wonderfully been set before them. Initial response isn’t everything, but neither is it nothing. The natural man doesn’t find the gospel message compelling. Something is happening in Jonah.
I pray that this encouraging early response to the gospel is genuine, good-soil faith. Importantly, he’s agreed to meet up weekly with one of the leaders of our church who is a native speaker of his mother’s tongue. They’ll be walking through the book of Mark together.
Pray for Jonah to be faithful in this commitment to Bible study. The Lord knows where his heart is. If I had to guess, he may have just this week entered the kingdom. Or, he may be right on border, right on the cusp of the new birth. Yet these thing are mysterious, so it might turn out that he needs another six months. Pray regardless. If he does turn out to be a new brother, then I’ll be sure to let you know.
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.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security
From the viewpoint of the empire the most troubling areas in Roman Asia were the two sore spots of Armenia and Judaea. Armenia was the focus of unending trouble with Persia. It had always been more oriental than Greek or Roman. Traditionally, despite its fierce pride in its own independence, it had come to be regarded as a fief of the Parthian emperor’s second son, and thus it was at first more a Persian than a Roman client-kingdom. Rome began to claim it as part of its own sphere of influence after a Roman victory in 69. B.C., in the days of the Republic, but only after three hundred years of tug-of-war between Rome and Persia did it finally turn Western, and then as much because of Western Christianity as of Roman power. Christian merchants are said to have been the first to introduce the new faith into the kingdom, but the “apostle to Armenia” was the great Gregory the Illuminator, who converted the Armenian king, Tiridates I (261-317) around the end of the third century. All Armenia, it is said, quickly became at least nominally Christian a decade or two before the conversion of Constantine. For this reason Armenia is often called the first Christian nation, though such a claim, as we shall see, must be qualified.
-Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. I, pp. 8-9
Just tonight while having dinner with some Iranian believers I heard them use the term Gregorian Orthodox when referring to the ethnic Armenian Christians of their homeland. When they said this, I wondered which Gregory was being referred to. Well, it seems this would be him, Gregory the Illuminator, the one whose ministry led to the official Christianization of Armenia. However, let’s not forget the brave Christian merchants who were the true pioneers and ‘apostles’ of Christianity in that land who undoubtedly prepared the ground for Gregory’s later success.
The other ancient kingdom claiming the title of ‘first Christian nation’ would be Osrhoene, another small client state constantly fought over by Rome and Persia. Its capital was the city of Edessa, in modern-day şanliurfa, Turkey. It’s interesting to note that it was not Rome that first attempted the merger of Christianity and the state. Rather, it was these two minor border kingdoms, one of which most have never even heard of.
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.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
The rental car employee behind the desk looked strangely like a Central Asian Laurence Fishburne. And he spoke with a similar self-assurance. I half expected him to pull out some colored pills and start telling me about the nature of reality.
“But I need my passport to travel between cities,” I countered.
“Inshallah they will accept your residency card instead. But in order to rent a car, you must leave your passport with us here. Otherwise, the police will penalize us. You’ll get it back next week when you bring the car back.”
I shot a questioning look at my wife. She shrugged with resignation and sipped her chai, signaling that she’d be happy to let me make the call on this one.
Leaving your passport overnight with someone else is never a good idea in a region like ours. The normally stable security situation might suddenly spiral out of control, calling for a quick evacuation. In fact, even as we sat in the car rental office on that sunny afternoon, missiles had just the previous week cut through the sky directly above our city, en route from one country to another as they took turns hitting each other in another round of geopolitical saving face.
But all indications on the ground were that our security status quo would continue. And we needed to get our son to his first ever Discipleship Now gathering happening for expat teens several hours away in Poet City*. Worst case scenario, my family could fly out of the country without me while I tracked down rental car Morpheus to get my passport back as the country melted down.
In this whole exchange, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the time I’d been required to leave my passport overnight in order to check out a library book. Yes, a library book. If you’ve never thanked God for the common grace that causes people to return rental cars and library books, you probably should. Because when this common grace is absent from a society, they will go to extreme measures to guarantee you bring their stuff back.
Years ago, the government of our region conducted a rather controversial referendum when every other government told them not to. So, to punish them for going ahead with it, the rest of the other governments did their best to lock our region down. Airports were closed, borders sealed, and Shia militias massed nearby preparing for a potential invasion. One border crossing remained open, plus one air route through an unfriendly airport that included a substantial fine. So, we still technically had two ways out if needed (when it gets down to only one way out, that’s usually the trigger for an evac). Things went on like this for a good several months, and thankfully, never got any worse. The Shia militia, for example, never came to town, in spite of Mercenary Dan’s* dire predictions and attempts to sell me armed evacuation transport.
In the end, diplomacy seems to have worked out an uneasy resolution. Its effect was such that ever since that time our region has been weaker, less prosperous, and less functional, but still mostly free and peaceful. Compared to war or invasion, that’s not a bad outcome. However, during the crisis itself, things got pretty sketchy there for a while. It was not a time to go without your passport – especially not for a library book.
But here was my dilemma. I had to write a term paper for a class I was taking online called History and Religion of Islam. It was an excellent class, even though it had a very heavy workload. For example, we had to read Ibn Ishaq’s massive official biography of Muhammad in only one week. I would not recommend this. If you’re working with Muslims, this is an important book to be familiar with, but please, be kind to yourself and read it over the course of several weeks or months.
For my term paper, I had settled on the topic of the Islamic conquest of our people group. Search as I might, I could not find a single book or even article in English that addressed this historical event. Much of this has to do with the identity of our people group. Even though they were definitely around back then, and in great numbers, they were a seminomadic mountain people. Authors tend to write history about the civilized cities in the plains and the majority people groups, not the nomadic minorities. No, the sources were almost nonexistent, so to put together a narrative of the conquest I would need to find a sentence in a chapter here, a paragraph in a book there. To do this, I would need to make use of Poet City’s public library.
Poet City is known as a city of writers. And in fact, the culture of writing, selling, buying, and discussing books is strong. But this does not mean that it has a good library. Something has gone wrong in the culture such that the same locals who would never steal cash from the overflowing money changers’ tables in the bazaar would steal a book from the library. Perhaps it is because the library is viewed as an impersonal institution rather than an entity connected to one’s relational network (thus requiring more honorable conduct). Because of this, the library is a neglected, distrustful place.
However, I had heard that there was a small English section, one which might include books about our area’s history. Upon visiting one afternoon, I found it. It was dusty, tucked away in a side area that few seemed to visit. But I couldn’t have been more excited. There were several books written by local historians that had been translated into English. These were books you couldn’t find online. The only way to read them was the old-fashioned way, by getting ahold of a rare physical copy. I had found gold.
It was when I went to figure out the checkout process that I discovered they wanted to confiscate my passport.
“No one is allowed to check out a book unless they leave us their national ID card or passport.”
“Uh, really? Why is that?”
“So that the books don’t get stolen.”
“I’m not going to steal the books. Isn’t there anything else I can leave? My phone number, my address?”
“No, dear, we will only accept your passport.”
“But you know we are in a security crisis. We are foreigners. We might be told to leave the country at any moment. And for that, I’ll need my passport.”
The librarian stared at me, not impressed with my argument.
“OK,” I continued, “where is the passport kept?”
“Here, in the library.”
“What if we are told to leave at night after the library is closed? Could I come and get my passport?”
“No, you would have to wait until the next morning to get it back.”
“I’m so surprised by all of this. There must be another way.”
“You can talk to the library director,” the librarian said, “but he will not agree to let you take a book out unless you give us your passport as a pledge.”
In the end, the library director and I were able to work out a compromise. He would keep my passport in his personal briefcase and take it home with him at night. We would exchange phone numbers. In case of emergency, I could call him in the middle of the night to return the books to him and get my passport back. This arrangement might seem even more sketchy to a Westerner than leaving it in the library. But in Central Asian culture, I sensed that making this kind of personal arrangement with the director actually moved things into more reliable honor-shame obligation territory, and out of the territory of institution and policy where locals might excuse themselves from any responsibility if it happened to be inconvenient.
Still, it was far from ideal. And I was pretty sure that if my teammates were in the country, they would never go for it. But we were on our own for this stretch of the crisis, so we would need to muddle along through the different risks as best we could.
Now, it probably says something about how much of a history nerd I am that I would take this kind of risk. But I have to say, it was totally worth it. How so? Well, one of those books contained the only local account of the Islamic conquest ever discovered.
The Arabs devastated the valley* Abducted girls and women Massacred the heroes Extinguished the fire altars
This stanza of a longer poem of lament was discovered about a hundred years ago on a pottery shard in a farmer’s field. Written in an older form of our people group’s language, and using an old Christian alphabet, it’s the only known source from our people group from the period when they were conquered by the Islamic invasions of the mid-600s. All the other sources are written by the victors in official Islamic histories of the conquest a couple hundred years later, such as the accounts of the famous Islamic historian Al-Tabari. But this source that I stumbled upon was not only local, written by the conquered, but it was probably written much closer to the events themselves as well.
In contrast to the common narrative among our people group that they converted to Islam peacefully, these lines of verse tell a different story. According to this source, the Islamic invasions resulted in the devastation of their home areas. Women and girls were carried off as sex slaves. Defending soldiers were slaughtered. And the local Zoroastrian fire temples were destroyed.
The existence of this kind of local witness is quite a remarkable thing. It confirms what the Islamic sources later say. The conquest wasn’t peaceful. It was jihad. It was a bloodbath. And there it was, hidden away in an obscure book in a neglected library.
I spent that evening at home skimming the books I had checked out and taking pictures of the pages that I needed for my paper. Then, first thing in the morning, I rushed back to the library to return the books and get my passport back. The library director seemed surprised that I was back for it so soon. But for my part, I was not wanting to extend our risky arrangement any more than was absolutely necessary. Having accomplished the goal of the risk, it was now time to return to safer ground.
It was not too long after this that we found ourselves suddenly crossing the last remaining land border and making good use of those passports. A family wedding provided a good reason to get out of the pressure cooker, even if only temporarily.
Among our other activities during our three weeks in the US, we quickly applied for second passports. The laws in our host country were shifting and it looked like we’d have to send off our passports for a month or two to get a new kind of residency visa. But having two passports for each member of our family would mean we could do this and still be able to travel at a moment’s notice if needed.
And, just in case, if we needed to safely check out a library book or rent a car? Well, then we could do that too.
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.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security
In the 1800s, most missionaries who worked in the Muslim world worked among the ethnic Christians of the region. The theory was if these spiritually-dead ‘Christian’ communities were reawakened and genuinely came to faith in Jesus, then the gospel would flow from them and penetrate the majority Muslim community. Sadly, this compelling theory proved to be completely wrong. The historic animosity and barriers between the minority Christians and the majority Muslims instead prevented the gospel and church plants from flowing from one community into the other. This was true even though the minority community was fluent both in their native Christian languages (Armenian, Syriac, etc.) and in the language of the Muslim majority (Persian, Turkish, Arabic). There were encouraging exceptions now and then, but largely, the original theory was based on a wrong assumption, that missionary engagement with a minority language group would lead to the majority language group also being reached.
Today, a kind of reversal of this story is taking place. Many are assuming that our unengaged minority people groups can be reached by missionaries focusing on the majority language groups.
Specifically, the unengaged people groups of our region keep getting passed over by both large organizations who want to ‘maximize their impact’ as well as by the small number of specialized missionaries explicitly trained to learn two languages in order to church plant among such minority groups. On paper, it makes sense. Most, if not all, of the members of our area’s minority language groups can clearly understand the gospel in one of the more dominant regional languages. This is because they have grown up as minorities needing to be fluent in a national or regional language in order to go to school, do business, and navigate government processes. Were someone from these minority groups to come to faith, the thought is that they could then join a church that worships in one of the majority languages that they know.
With this kind of bilingualism or trilingualism being the long-term situation on the ground, our minority language groups get categorized as having access to the gospel – and therefore not as urgently in need of missionaries as those minority groups that cannot clearly understand the gospel in the languages of their neighbors. There is a clear logic to this ‘triage of lostness’ that I do not completely disagree with. Those who can understand the gospel in another language because they are bilingual or trilingual are not in the same situation as those who cannot currently hear the gospel in any language they can understand.
However, I believe there is a faulty assumption that comes along with this valid distinction. And that assumption is that because the minority group can speak the majority language(s), the gospel and even church plants will then actually flow from the majority group and into the minority communities. Essentially, the assumption is that fluency or near-fluency in a dominant language means the primary barrier to the gospel for these minority groups has been removed. So, if missionaries are present planting churches in the majority language, then the outworking of this assumption is that this is sufficient for passing over these minority language groups. They will be reached, eventually, through the dominant languages.
It’s a sound theory, but alas, it doesn’t hold up on the ground. At least not in our corner of Central Asia. I wish this weren’t the case. But we must work with the lost as they are, and not with the lost as we wish they would be, nor as we thought they would be back when we were in training.
Unfortunately, the witness of decades of gospel work here has shown that apparent access to the gospel through majority languages itself doesn’t remove the necessary barriers keeping churches from taking root among these minority groups. It removes one barrier, yes, but there are apparently other barriers in place that keep the gospel from penetrating these minority groups in a significant way. This means that the ability to clearly understand the gospel in a majority language should not be used as the only or primary filter for considering whether certain groups should receive missionaries who learn their language or not.
What will it take to reach these minority groups? The same thing it has taken to plant churches among our focus people group (itself a minority group in its country, but big enough to be a dominant language group compared to these smaller language communities I’m discussing). What is needed is a long-term commitment to engage a people group in the language that is closest to its identity. This helps answer the objection that some of these groups are functioning as if they have two heart languages. Sure, they may be fluent in two or three languages. But only one of them bears their name. And for most of these members of minority language groups, the language that bears their name is still the language they dream in, talk to their spouse in, curse in, and pray desperate prayers in.
The missionary who does the hard thing and learns that tongue (often in addition to learning one of the majority languages – probably 6-8 years of labor) will find himself doing ministry with greater power, skill, and trust than were he to simply do ministry in the majority language. Yes, to learn someone’s mother tongue when no one from the outside has ever learned it before gives you serious power in conversation, and I use that term intentionally. This is a natural power in communication that the Spirit can then also infuse with spiritual power when he sees fit. If you have ever learned even a phrase or two in a minority tongue then you know what I am talking about (or if you’ve ever been stuck in a foreign land and experienced the immense relief that comes over you when someone addresses you in good English). Along with power comes skill, the ability to speak clearly and compellingly in the intimate language a person uses with their parents, their lover, and their children. And with all of this comes trust. After all, by learning this tongue no one else will take the time to learn you have led with an incredible display of honor, respect, even love – and that for a language that is usually ignored, suppressed, or mocked. The locals will come to trust you and share their secrets with you in a different way than if your relationship was only in the majority language. You have learned their heart language, so they’re more likely to entrust their heart to you. This is simply the way humans work.
So, what are the barriers preventing the gospel from naturally flowing from our majority language groups to our minority language groups? Well, as we’ve established already, it’s not the lack of a shared language. The minority groups are fluent in the majority languages. Rather, there seems to be a complex web of factors that prevent our good theory from working in reality, that prevent the gospel and churches from taking root in these communities. These interlocking barriers would be things like majority-minority identity preservation, distrust and animosity between communities, and the fact that seeing a church in your neighbor’s language and culture might not actually convince you that this Jesus thing is actually an option for people like you.
If none of your ancestors have ever believed in Jesus, then this last barrier often requires a peculiar kind of demonstration. Often, it requires a Jesus follower from the outside entering into your language and culture and awkwardly attempting to model all this for you. “God knows your language and he knows and loves your people, my friend,” they will try to tell you in your mother tongue, while probably butchering the grammar of that sentence. This, believe it or not, can have a similar effect to having witnessed some kind of miracle.
We may feel like we can cross minority language groups off the list if they can hear the gospel in the majority languages of their country. But at least for our area of Central Asia, this would be a tragic mistake. These groups have been bilingual or trilingual for hundreds of years and not lost their distinct ethnic and linguistic (and sometimes religious) identities. They aren’t going away anytime soon. And they aren’t being reached ‘downstream’ from the work being done in the majority languages. No, it’s going to take something much more proactive, intentional, and downright stubborn for churches to be planted among these minority groups.
We need gospel laborers. We need trailblazers. Those who are willing to question missiological laws and ask the hard questions about why solid theories aren’t actually proving true on the ground. Eight years of your life to learn two languages is totally worth it if it means churches planted among a language group that has never before had gospel witness in its own culture and tongue.
Unreached language groups can be reached. But the best way to do this is by preaching the gospel to them in their own language, not in the language of their more powerful neighbors. This is true even if they are bilingual and even if they say you don’t have to. Learn that unknown tongue. See what the Lord does with that sacrificial labor. It will be so hard. And it will be so worth it.
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.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Entrusted to the Dirt 
