I remember having New Testament scholar Tom Schreiner visit the small cohort of pastoral apprentices I was a part of. He had come to teach on Romans 7 as our cohort was working through the book of Romans for that first year. We all waited eagerly to hear his take on the debate about whether Paul is speaking of a believer an unbeliever in the famous Romans 7 “I do not do what I want” passage. I myself was torn. It seemed to me that if I focused on the slavery language in the passage, the person Paul spoke of must be an unbeliever – because only unbelievers are slaves to sin. But if I focused on the divided-man language, then it must be a believer – because only believers are internally divided over their own sin.
Schreiner landed somewhere unexpected. “I say wrong question! This passage is not focusing on whether someone is a believer or an unbeliever. This is anyone who is trying to justify themselves by keeping the Law.” I can’t say that I’m totally settled on this passage yet. But I think most days I agree with Schreiner.
Human religion can be defined as anyone trying to justify themselves through good works – be they a believer or an unbeliever. In this sense, religion is anti-gospel. In the gospel, we are justified by God’s free grace alone – without any expectations placed on us to earn that relationship. There is an older sense of the word religion that did not carry this meaning, but conveyed more the sense of true spirituality, and in this older rendering we could say that the gospel is true religion in a world of false religion. Regardless, the term religion seems to be taking on more of this sense of striving in order to appease God.
I find it helpful among my peers in the West and my peers in Central Asia to divide gospel from religion in this linguistic sense. It resonates with them and proves to be helpful to distinguish the Bible’s teaching from moralism. Many of my peers in the West have been raised to function as if they were saved by grace, but continue to stay in God’s favor by works of the Law. My Central Asian friends have straight up been told their whole lives that they can only be saved by keeping God’s shari’a, his Law. Their society has lots of literal pharisees walking around, like the Salafis, who grow their beards long, cut their pants short, and despise the normal folk as lesser-than.
All of this is the context for why I find this song so helpful. Some in the West want to use this “Jesus is not religious” language to water down the need for church or holiness in the Christian life. I’m not part of that camp at all. But like every other true believer out there, I am a recovering legalist, daily striving to remember that because of Jesus, God delights in me regardless of my performance today. And this song helps me do that.
I am particularly blessed by the bridge, which starts at 3:07. “Meet your maker, smiling bright.” Some days it’s really hard to believe that this is true – that God really smiles at the thought of me. And yet this is what the gospel means for all of us who are now adopted as sons and daughters of the king. He actually lights up at the thought of us. Remarkable.
“There is learning the culture so we can function well in the guest room, drinking chai and being polite. But then there is a whole deeper level to the culture when you are invited into the family spaces of the home.”
A colleague shared this wise advice with me the other day. His family had just been affirmed by a local brother as the best foreigners he had seen when it came to functioning well in local culture. So I passed on this feedback to my colleague – and asked for all his notes! But as is so often the case, this family’s progress in learning the culture had been a process more intuitive than systematic, more of an art than a science. Some are just natural artists. They sense their way forward, catching the culture as it were. But I have wondered for a long time if there are ways to make culture acquisition more visible for the benefit of all learners, whether we have a high CQ (cultural quotient) or not.
The truth is that culture acquisition is much harder to track than language acquisition. And language acquisition is itself a very subjective and slippery thing to measure. But culture? It’s everywhere and yet at the same time invisible. At least language has academic systems like the ACTFL scale that can provide some handles to know where a learner is at. To my knowledge, nothing like this exists to measure culture acquisition. Perhaps tools have been developed for specific cultures, but is there a universal tool that can be used to approach any culture and provide some kind of a systematic roadmap for studying it?
Sarah Lanier has charted helpful categories between “warm climate” and “cold climate” cultures in her book, Foreign to Familiar. Lingenfelter covers similar ground in his book, Ministering Cross-Culturally.
An anthropologist specific to our people group has opened my eyes to the importance of categories such as kinship, honor and shame, fear and gossip, the modern state, gender roles, the body, and fate.
I’ve also stumbled into some very different categories I haven’t heard discussed, but which impact our work greatly, such as how a people group is oriented towards institutions and formal organization.
On a practical level, beyond these underlying worldview categories are the important life ceremonies. How does a culture recognize pregnancies, births, birthdays, circumcisions, coming of age, graduations, engagements, marriages, new homes, sicknesses, deaths, etc?
In spite of all of these important areas of culture (and so many more) running in the background, most of us merely acquire just enough of the target culture to become functional. Then we plateau. It mirrors language acquisition in this way. Without a conscious effort to keep intentionally learning, the mind naturally settles in to a level that is merely workable for daily life. This might work well for a season, but it’s often not sufficient for navigating conflict and crises, and it can prevent us from doing deeper contextualization that might lead to breakthroughs.
This post is a call for careful thinking that leads to an accessible method of measuring culture acquisition. If it already exists, it is obscure and not known to the broader missions community (at least my circles). If it does not exist, then it would greatly serve the global church for one to be developed.
We need to fight the tendency to plateau – especially those of us working in cross-cultural contexts. To do this, we could use a map whereby we are able to have some better handles on this whole idea of culture acquisition. If I could give my family and my colleagues a tool like this that could give them some idea of where to focus next, that would be a very practical help for our work.
No one’s ever told us about circumcision rites before? Let’s cover that next. The local culture’s understanding of circumcision (if they practice it as ours does – tragically on girls as well) is bound to be imposed upon the scriptures that speak of it. We would be wise to know what context locals are bringing to that Bible study. But without a map or a tool prompting us to ask about things like this, we could miss it entirely. Plateauing might not seem that serious, but examples like this help illustrate why pressing on in a comprehensive understanding of the culture can make all the difference.
We were a strange crowd, to be sure. My two Iranian friends and I, along with a cowboy hat-wearing older veteran, walked into a twenty-four-hour diner. It was the kind of local place that was local before local became hip and trendy. Squat and grimy, the building sat an intersection just across from a liquor store. It’s had probably passed its prime sometime in the 1960s. However, this particular restaurant was just down the hill from our first apartment, and it had served us well during my wife’s first pregnancy. Middle of the night burger or omelet cravings had gotten me in the door, and my nonconformist tendencies kept me occasionally going back.
One of the differences between the Middle East/Central Asia and the West is the availability of decent middle of the night restaurants. It’s quite easy here in our adopted part of the world to head out with friends at midnight to find somewhere to get shwarma or tea. But in the US, things tend to shut down long before midnight. This is a minor but legitimate cause of sadness among those who have experienced the vibrant (and family-friendly) night culture of the so-called Muslim world.
It was past 11 pm and our crew was hungry. *Chris had been hanging out with us all evening. He had come to faith recently while in prison and was now a struggling new believer. He was an Air Force veteran who wore cowboy hats, yet carried a secret affinity for the Turkish language and Middle Eastern culture from his many years of being stationed there. He had met the three of us at church, and my Iranian friends, *Reza and *Saul, hit it off with him right away. They, like many Iranian refugees, had spent years as refugees in Turkey, and they spoke Turkish well. Reza’s English was decent, but Saul’s wasn’t. So Chris took to energetically interpreting the Sunday sermon into Turkish the back row on Saul’s behalf. Yes, it was a little distracting, but I was thrilled to see Chris find a meaningful way to serve when the body gathered for worship.
Together we ambled down the hill toward the diner, conversing in a mixture of English, Turkish, Farsi, and the Farsi-related minority language I had studied. The ladies (my wife and Reza’s new girlfriend) were going to follow us after a few minutes. I led the way as we strode into the diner.
Immediately upon entering we felt the atmosphere of the place tense up. Like in some kind of classic Western, the elderly men sitting at the bar turned and stared. The elderly waitresses paused their dish drying and egg frying and raised their eyebrows. The music from the jukebox was the only thing that made any noise for one very pregnant moment.
Being a young white student with dark brown hair, I was only occasionally mistaken for being of some other ethnicity. Even though I had received lots of stares overseas, I hadn’t experienced this kind of welcome in the US before. But side by side with my Iranian friends, with their darker olive skin and jet black hair, for a second I experienced what it was like to be scanned as an outsider by a small crowd of older majority-culture Americans. It was sobering. I’m not sure what they did with Chris. He actually fit in there quite well, given the cowboy hat and tucked in plaid shirt.
However, acting as if nothing had happened, we made our way over to a booth and sat down, translating the menu for our friends. If you’ve never introduced Iranians to the concept of hash browns, french toast, and grits before, you’re in for a fun challenge. We ordered some breakfast plates with plenty of bacon (as a practical celebration of Jesus’ declaring all foods clean) and settled in for some more conversation and hot drinks.
The ladies soon arrived as well and sat down at the booth behind us. I noticed that the serving staff were eyeing us as we leaned over the bench and talked and laughed with ladies’ table. When the waitress came to take their order, she leaned over and asked my wife, “These men bothering you, hun?”
“No. Thank you,” said my wife with a smile. “This is my husband. These are our dear friends.”
The elderly waitress raised her eyebrows and shot us a skeptical glance, and went back to the griddle.
Turns out the only way Chris knew how to speak Turkish was loud. And before long you could tell the few regulars at the bar were twitching a little bit. I encouraged Chris and my friends to keep it down a little. But we were having a good conversation about their testimonies, and it was hard to contain their excitement.
I felt stuck. I didn’t want to make these older locals uncomfortable, but I was bothered as well by what looked like textbook prejudice against language and skin color. One man made his way out the door – maybe because of us. The ironic thing was that my friends might look like intimidating foreigners, but they were actually very respectful and peace-loving, sitting and smiling and talking about Jesus. The others in the diner might relax considerably if they could somehow know this.
It was then Chris pulled a bold and shrewd move. When the waitress came to refill our coffee mugs, he turned to her and asked in a voice loud enough for the whole place to hear.
“Can you believe it?! This man (Saul) was put in prison in Iran because he chose to believe in Jesus! Can you imagine what it would be like to be arrested for being a Christian? Wow. I’m so glad I know him. Give ’em some more coffee, will ya? Incredible, right?”
The waitress took a moment to process this unexpected information. And just like that, some kind of bubble burst. The waitress relaxed. The whole place seemed to change as Chris’ outburst registered. Surprised myself, I took note that Chris had managed to overcome an atmosphere of prejudice by announcing Saul’s experience of persecution as a Christian. The unfamiliarity and suspicion – and perhaps racism – had been undermined by connecting these strangers to something that ran deep in those older white Americans’ worldview – a valuing of Christianity, at the very least on a cultural identity level.
As I think back on this event, it’s a small echo of other occasions where we’ve seen political, racial, or ethnic suspicion quietly undermined as we’ve been able to share with traditional Westerners about how Jesus is saving Muslims. Yes, cultural and nationalistic Christianity which views “the other” as the enemy runs deep. Every culture has its own equivalent of this, so it’s not just a Western problem. Move overseas and you’ll see what I mean. The good news is that there are some back doors that can surprisingly undermine this common sin among professing Christians, in the West or elsewhere.
Yes, even many true believers feel threatened by those different from them. But for those who are indeed believers, their love for Jesus – and often missions as well – really does ultimately run deeper than this fear or pride. This is simply one of the effects of having a new heart. Their own “Iranians” may have previously been thought of as the enemy, but hearing testimonies of God’s grace from these same enemies tends to break categories for these demographics in fascinating ways. Hearts warm as the common ground of being forgiven sinners is built, and brows furrow trying to figure out how to square this affection with previous attitudes. A good slow thaw is underway.
To this day, 30-something Reza continues to attend a senior men’s bible study – at a diner – leveraging this same dynamic in a way that challenges these grey-haired men and turns them into adopted grandpa-types. He has even started visiting country churches on a rotation in order to serve Jesus in this way! He shows up, turns heads, makes friends, shares about his background and how wonderful Jesus is, and people end up feeling differently about those Far-iners.
We live in an age aflame with controversy about race, immigration, and culture. How are we to help those who are older or more traditional, and who tend to be swept up in the particular prejudicial temptations of this globalizing age? How can we transform the atmosphere of racist diners – or churches – such that there is room for conversation and relationship that leads to dignity and love?
Perhaps by aiming boldly for the love that, for true believers, always runs deeper than love of nation, language, and heritage. Invite missionaries to share at churches struggling with these issues about the mighty things God is doing among those considered political or cultural enemies. Have believers from diverse “other” backgrounds share their own stories of God’s grace. This is in one sense a Trojan horse. It is a tactical, indirect move to tap into a deeper affection that will over time undermine other anti-gospel affections that might seem to dominate a person’s worldview or social media account.
Our world tries to deal with prejudice-prone people by either excusing them or by writing them off as racists and publicly shaming them. There is a better way. Let’s strive for creatively and shrewdly aiming for the deepest affections, and see what miracles God might work.
…and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3:10-11 ESV)
This magical world, though full of adventure and surprise, is no longer full of dread. Rather, Christ has trodden all pathways before us, and at every crossroads and by every tree the Word of God speaks out. We have only to be quiet and listen, as Patrick learned to do during the silence of his “novitiate” as a shepherd on the slopes of Sliabh Mis.
This sense of the world as holy, as the Book of God – as a healing mystery, fraught with divine messages – could never have risen out of Greco-Roman civilization, threaded with the profound pessimism of the ancients and their Platonic suspicion of the body as unholy and the world as devoid of meaning.
“Covenant! We don’t know anything about covenant. All we have is contract…”
I was talking to a local believer who was about a year into his faith. He was beaming as he spoke, grinning from ear to ear.
He continued, “In Christianity, marriage is a covenant. In Islam, it’s just a contract. Everything is like this. Even our religion is like a contract. It can all be canceled. It can all be broken.”
“Really?” I asked. “Do you use the word for covenant for anything? Is there no meaning for that word in your language?”
“The only thing we use the word covenant for is Jihad. That’s it.”
I shook my head, feeling simultaneously the joy of deeper insight into the local culture and not a little corresponding trepidation. We are trying to church plant in a culture whose only understanding for covenant looks like Al Qaeda.
“But I love our church covenant,” said this local brother, holding up and waving around the paper it was printed on. “I’m so glad we read it together at our regular meetings. We need to learn how to live like this!”
The brother speaking with me is a member at an English-speaking international church here in Central Asia. He has been growing by leaps and bounds and leading family members to Christ. Ironically, many missionaries would be quick to dismiss the use of a Western church covenant in this context as a failure to contextualize. Paternalists, they might claim. Yet once again, part of grandpa’s traditional Christianity proved to be surprisingly effective contextualization. My local friend was delighting in how the concept of covenant had hit a blind-spot in his worldview – and had changed everything.
Yes, there were conditional covenants in human history that were similar in some ways to contracts. But covenants are deeper than contracts. They are sacred. They involve blessings and curses. They warrant abundant life when fulfilled and are worthy of lament and judgement when broken. When we dig into the meaning of the New Covenant in the Scriptures, we find that it is eternal – once for all – accomplished by the loving sacrifice of Christ (Heb 9:26). It is this truth of covenant love that transforms our relationship with God, our membership in spiritual assemblies, and everyday Christian marriage. It is the foundation of our gospel hope. That God will unfailingly keep his covenant with us, come fire, death, or even the end of the world. The local translation renders God’s covenant-keeping love as “love-unchanging.”
Imagine living in a society where your bond with God, with others, with your wife… is just a contract. Easily broken given the terms and conditions. Not secure. Fragile. Temporary.
Our local women go into marriage with tens of thousands of dollars of gold and contractual terms. In the event of divorce, they take all the gold with them, like an insurance payment. It’s almost as if they are planning from the beginning on the marriage being broken. And why not? All it takes in a religious family is for a man who is angry at burnt rice to cry out three times, “I divorce you!” And it’s over. His wife is now a divorcee. She takes her gold. And her shame.
If I had grown up in this kind system – and then found Jesus – I would be beaming and waving my church covenant around just like my friend was. Oh the joy of knowing in your soul that there is something stronger than a contract – and that the God of the universe offers it to you freely.
Time is like a sword; if you don’t cut it, it will cut you.
Local Oral Tradition
This is a surprisingly time-oriented proverb among our focus people group, which is typically event-oriented. Things are changing because of globalization and urbanization, but most locals here still consider time as more like a lazy river that must be traveled. It is linear, yes, but not something to be dominated. But then comes this sharp proverb out of nowhere, perhaps functioning as a warning against those who might get a little too relaxed when it comes to the use of time. I guess no matter how a culture is oriented to time, there is always some kind of lifestyle that represents a failure to make use of the potential that time affords.
Were I to teach on the biblical truth of “making the best use of the time, because the days are evil,” (Eph 5:16) I would likely reference this local proverb by way of illustration.
We have the early rains and the late rains in this part of the world. Other than that we don’t get a lot of clouds. Currently we’re experiencing the late rains, and this has meant some stunning mixes of sun, rain, grey and dusty brown clouds – and even a huge rainbow. Desert dust storms in the air means we have our share of ugly drab days, but they also add a whole new range of color combinations when added to rain clouds and sun. Picture purple lighting jumping from one chocolately-pink cloud to another in the midst of a late afternoon sunshower – over a landscape that has suddenly bloomed in bright green.
I’m trying to learn more about what it means to meditate visually on the beauty of God in creation and art. I have made some good strides when it comes to tapping into the power of music (aural beauty), but when it comes to engaging my spiritual affections with my eyes? Well, I’m very much a beginner. Today I was prayer walking in a nearby park and as I enjoyed the young olive trees and the distant mountains, this song about the beauty of God came into my mind.
I’ve listened to this song for several years now. But that shift at 2:45 still hits me every time, “When we arrive at eternity’s shore…”
Check out “You’re Beautiful” by Shane and Shane in the YouTube clip above.
“With the way most plant churches among Muslims, we end up attracting only the rejects and the freaks,” said my friend with a scowl. “You’ll never start a movement that way.”
While spoken with some concerning overstatement, my friend’s comments were coming out of observations made within contemporary missiology, noting the largely ineffective traditional methods of church planting among Muslims. The shoe often fits. The congregations started by evangelical missionaries among Muslims have often attracted mostly the poor, the outcasts, and the mentally unstable. As the theory goes, most evangelical missionaries among Muslims have not focused enough on reaching the honorable leaders of the community – the patriarchs, chiefs, mullahs, and others. When these leaders are bypassed and the majority of attention is shown to those on the fringes of society, joining a movement to Jesus is prevented from being viewed as a real possibility by those in the mainstream of the culture – and especially by the leaders. And as I wrote in my previous post, these mental categories of “Not an option for people like me” or “It’s an option for people like me” really can make a practical difference in the mysterious interplay of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility.
I feel this critique. It is true that those of us coming from the West often bypass the societal leaders of an honor-shame community. We often do this even without thinking about it. “Why should I go visit the mullah or the neighborhood strongman? Can’t I just move in and get to work building relationships?” I myself have not done the best job of honoring the community’s leaders through preemptive visits of respect. I am wired as a grassroots, bottom-up reform kind of guy. And sometimes I just forget. Other times, a part of me wants to ignore these domineering leader types just to mess with their sense of self-importance. Perhaps this is the red-blooded American in me that has inherited some distaste for hierarchy and classism? Yet there is wisdom in considering how showing honor to those in positions of authority helps us to have a good testimony (Rom 13:7), creates space for us to cause some trouble, and may even open the door for these leaders to embrace a costly belief in Jesus – and perhaps for others to follow them. I need to be more balanced in this area.
And yet whenever this conversation comes up, I hear this line from church history echo in my mind, “These are the true treasures of the church.” This sentence was spoken by Lawrence (Lorenzo – from Spain), archdeacon of Rome in the year 258. Emperor Valerian had issued an order to have all the leaders in the Roman church killed. And as the one in charge of the church finances, he had ordered Lawrence to turn over the church’s treasure, and he would be spared. Lawrence asked for three days and then slyly distributed all the church’s money to the poor. He then marched the poor, the crippled, and widows into the presence of the emperor and when asked about the church’s treasure, proclaimed, “Come out and see the wondrous riches of God.” He was, of course, then put to death. Tradition says that he was roasted on a fire and that he also had a witty sense of humor. “I’m well done, turn me over!” he is alleged to have said while being killed (thereby becoming the patron saint of the poor and of chefs at the same time). I like this guy.
When Deacon Lawrence proclaimed the poor and the broken as the true treasures of the church, he was echoing Paul.
For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31 ESV)
And he was echoing Jesus, who proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor, and who scandalously befriended the sinners, tax collectors, and the demonized rejects.
This area is yet another tension we face as missionaries. We do attract the outcasts. And some of them are remarkably broken. Broken people take a lot of time and investment and while on the slow road of healing can wound many others around them. They are not always the most stable foundation for a new church. I often beg God to bring us stable locals who will not implode our fledgling groups because of their deep trauma and broken pasts. Yes, we are all broken to some degree. And yet we live in a region of the world with very recent (and ancient) scars from war, dictators, genocide, sanctions, and other horrific experiences. It seems as if everyone here is traumatized in one way or another. And this makes church planting in this place at times seem utterly impossible.
What are we to do? An ideal approach would seek to minister to both the outcasts and the leaders, improbable as that initially seems. This much is clear – In the end, we must not hinder the “little children” from coming to Jesus. The kingdom of God belongs to them. It would be just like God to build the foundation of the church among my focus people group on the nobodies and rejects, just like Jesus did 2,000 years ago with his group of motley Galileans. Does this openness to the “rejects and freaks” hinder a movement from taking place? The research may claim this, but I doubt it. That’s just not how the kingdom of God works. If it does prove a hindrance to multiplication, then so be it. It’s a risk I’m willing to take. What genuine believer, after all, could actually choose a movement of Christians that is mainstream and respectable, but not open to the broken and the outcasts? Is this really a better alternative? If I have to choose, I will opt to gather with those who repulse the respectable.
On the last day I would rather stand with the orphans and the widows than with those this world honors. This simply seems to be the route more consistent with the heart of God as displayed in the ministry of Jesus. That may mean we end up less “effective” in the metrics of missiology. But does that really matter when the king returns? Rather, we would be wise to pay attention to how he characterizes the ministry of his true, known, followers: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it unto me” (Matt 20:40).
My current language helper is a man who has heard the gospel countless times. He has been helping my colleagues and partners learn the local language for several years now. And that means he has gotten a steady and gloriously unrelenting dose of gospel truth for a long time. He has not professed faith. However, he has read much of the Bible, even memorized portions, and has distanced himself considerably from Islam. He now considers himself a Qur’ani, a type of Muslim who rejects all the Islamic Hadith (authoritative traditions) and the Muhammad they describe. Much of everyday Islamic practice and theology is dependent on the Hadith. Limiting one’s self to the Qur’an alone is to essentially embrace a faith that is considered heretical to most Muslims. My hope is that this is only a way-station for my tutor, evidence that he has grasped the deeply different message of the Bible and that he is seriously (though slowly) wrestling with it.
When I have a local friend like this, I’m not always sure how I should proceed with direct evangelism when they have had so much truth shared with them by so many and have not yet responded. There is a danger of their heart being hardened as they get used to hearing the same message and yet there is also the possibility of one more good word shared being the straw that breaks the camel’s back (in a good way). I will often chew on if there are ways to expose them to other complimentary things that could add to the case made by gospel words they’ve heard so often.
Many of us tend to do this with family members and friends who have heard a great deal of gospel truth and yet are not yet believers. We weigh whether right now is the best time to go direct. Or, if now is a better time to let what has already been shared rest on their heart and mind, and to instead focus on modeling a gospel-transformed life, exposing them to beauty or hospitality or friendship or other categories that could play a part in their eventual surrender to Jesus. It’s a tension. I try to navigate it by regularly praying for opportunities to share the gospel. If the gospel is on the tip of my tongue, and I’m praying for chances to go direct, then I feel a much greater peace about not sharing it directly sometimes in relationships like this.
One of my supporting emphases with my tutor has been to share with him a lot of information about how people from his people group and other people groups are becoming followers of Jesus – and about the history of ancient Christianity in Central Asia. What am I trying to accomplish in this? Well, this tutor has grown up in a society where the overwhelming amount of his fellow countrymen are Muslims and can’t imagine being Christians. It’s not even considered an option. In the mysteries of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, there is something in the human mind that tends to be more spiritually open to those social streams that have precedence among one’s neighbors and ancestors. Those are viewed as the honorable, good, or at least decent, options.
For example, in my focus people group a person can be a Muslim. That is what is assumed and what is held out as the ideal. But interestingly, at least two other groups have managed to establish themselves as possibilities for identity – something a local could embrace and still be considered basically a member of his people group. These two groups would be the communists and the Zoroastrians. In the mind of most locals, it’s best by far to be a Muslim. But if you absolutely must apostatize, then it’s on some level acceptable to become a communist or a Zoroastrian. These are tolerable options. To become a Christian? That’s still not considered an option on the table.
Hence my attempt to share a lot of stories and data with my tutor about believers from his people group and region, current and past. I want his brain to begin to shift such that by repeated exposure to the idea that others like him have followed Jesus, he might begin to think and feel that it is an option for him as well. Now, I am under no illusions that this is the key to him being born again. The lightning of gospel conviction will have to strike. Only the Spirit can do that. And yet, switching metaphors, I am going to put as many rocks as I can out on top of the icy lake in hopes that when the sun rises, the ice will break and all the rocks will sink to the bottom. Perhaps the sun will even warm those stones such that the ice breaks sooner because of their presence.
I remember hearing a missions trainer years ago share about something he called the hundred monkeys principle. Apparently thousands of monkeys at some point were introduced to an island where there had previously been no monkey population. Researchers studied how they adapted to their new environment. These monkeys were not used to the ocean and so stayed a safe distance away from it. One day an adventurous monkey decided to take a bath in the ocean. The rest watched from their perches in the trees and didn’t join him. After a while of this monkey bathing alone, one more monkey joined him. It was only the two of them for the longest time, until at last there came a third. The number of monkeys not afraid to bathe in the ocean increased one-by-one, incrementally, until it reached ninety nine monkeys. But to the researchers’ amazement the following day there were thousands of monkeys bathing in the ocean. This 99th monkey represented some kind of sociological tipping point for the monkey population. A switch flipped somewhere internally. Now bathing in the ocean was actually a mainstream option.
Similar things happen with human populations. A given custom is viewed as not possible for “people like us.” The early adopters get persecuted and kicked out. But one day, if the adopters keep on increasing, that same custom is viewed as an acceptable option. As I recall, the other possible outcome of reaching this tipping point might not be a general acceptance of the new belief or custom, but could also be large-scale persecution as that movement is suddenly viewed by the mainstream as a very serious threat. Drawing on memory alone, I recall hearing this tipping point being somewhere in the range of 10% – 13%. Any sociologists or missiologists out there will have to correct me if this is off. For a parallel in the West, pay attention to the increasingly-heated rhetoric on immigration once the foreign-born reach this same threshold.
By sharing (safely) with my tutor about others from his people group who have believed, I am trying to nudge him to be more open to being one of the early adopters – and maybe someday even part of the tipping point. We’re a long way from that percentage currently as I write this post. There are always those who must be the first. And their salvation is extra miraculous in that they take a step that no one from their people group has ever taken before. Surely there is some special honor for these pioneers in eternity. But my tutor doesn’t have to be the first. And though I can’t fully explain it, he needs to know that. I am under obligation to do anything that I can do to remove unnecessary barriers to the gospel – cultural, sociological, whatever, such that the gospel itself is the primary offense. Normalize the idea of people like him following Jesus, and that could be one of the many steps the Holy Spirit uses to prepare him for that piercing moment of new birth.
After all, there’s no sense wrestling with the idea of being the first monkey to ever wash in the ocean when you’re actually monkey number forty seven. Others have blazed the trail, so let’s know and feel that deep down inside, and then turn back and consider the invitation yet another time.
The question of when the Church of the East began, defined as the start of missionary activity east of the Euphrates, leads directly to the conflict between Nestorian tradition and the testimony of textual criticism. No fewer than ten names appear among those who claim to have been the first to carry the Good News to the east. Tradition and scholarship do concur, at least, regarding where Christianity first took hold, namely in Edessa (Urfa) and Adiabene (northern Iraq). Reports that the Three Kings or the pilgrims who had been in Jerusalem at Pentecost were the first missionaries to the Parthian Empire clearly belong in the realm of myth. Likewise, we must not concern ourselves with the traditions about Peter, Benjamin and Bartholomew, who are associated with India, as well as Lycaonia, Ethiopia, and Arabia and Armenia. Abha was, for his part, simply a companion of Mar Mari. The names of St Thomas, Mar Addai, Mar Aggai and Mar Mari however, ought to be taken seriously, especially since they occupy the first four places in the official chronology of the patriarchs of the Church of the East.
Baumer, the Church of the East, pp. 14-15
I actually disagree with the author here about the pilgrims from Pentecost being only a possibility in the realm of myth. We have a precedent in Acts in the example of Antioch for normal believers leading the way in witness, with apostolic leaders being called for once a community of Christian faith has taken root. If it happened that way for Syrian Antioch, why not for the two of the major cities on the highway East of Antioch, Edessa and Adiabene (Arbela)?
But there does seem to be some evidence for the early arrival and work of Thomas, Mar Addai (St. Thaddeus), Mar Aggai (St. Haggai), and Mar Mari (St. Mares). Notice how the Aramaic-ization (is that a word?) of these names and titles makes them feel a little foreign to the Greek-icized names of the New Testament – and how, at least for me, seeing the familiar forms of the names makes them feel more at home as the successors of what we read about in the book of Acts. These language shifts are actually a fitting example of what was likely the gospel’s first departure from the Greco-Roman world into a neighboring cultural and linguistic sphere. Not that Greek wouldn’t have had some speakers in Mesopotamia, but it was definitely majority Aramaic-speaking. It’s not surprising then that the first evidence we have of the gospels being translated out of Greek and into another language takes place in Adiabene.
Entrusted to the Dirt 
