The Bearded Robber

I was fifteen. My friend’s dad, uncle John, had just invited me to join them on an overnight hike to a mountain waterfall. We would be a party of four, one near-deaf missionary uncle and three scrawny high school kids. This particular hike was to prove fun, scary, and shaping. It was shaping in that being invited into the accessible adventure of the mountains around our missionary school compound in Melanesia launched me into dozens of hikes over the next few years. Hiking would become a place where I could try my hand at manly things like risk, endurance, sleeping in the rain, and eating cold hot dogs because the matches were too wet to get the fire lit. But this hike was the first one, so I was green and a bit nervous, though excited as well.

Uncle John’s hearing had slowly diminished due to tinnitus, the same condition my dad had had before he had passed away. By the time of our trek into the mountains, he had completely lost hearing in one ear and could only partially hear with his other ear with the aid of a hearing aid. He relied heavily on lip reading and was overall very quiet, though always very kind to me. He has since gotten cochlear implants. I’m told after having his hearing implants he became a man transformed.

This particular hike was nothing too challenging. Initially there was about forty five minutes of trekking, first down a paved road, then on some muddy ones flanked by high grass, then over a river on a swinging wire bridge, then on muddy footpaths into the foothills. There were a few villages we would pass through in the foothills before we started climbing the grassy and wooded slopes in earnest. In all it was about two and a half hours to our destination, a waterfall and swimming hole that lay between two steep spurs of the mountain.

The afternoon was sunny and we made good headway, somewhat bemused and embarrassed by the village grandmothers’ excited offering their granddaughters to us in marriage. At last we made it up and down several small ridges and to the waterfall. We swam and cooked dinner, and by the heat of our campfire somehow managed to provoke the emergence of thousands of small black beetles from the earth, which promptly overwhelmed our campsite. Still, the beans from a can were good (food always tastes better on a hike) and after the beetles dispersed we had a pleasant evening sitting around the fire and listening to the sound of the waterfall. Sleepiness came on fast and we all passed out in the tent without too much trouble. Cicadas and waterfalls make for good background noise.

I woke up in the middle of the night, startled. By the shadows on the wall of the tent and the rustling sounds, I knew that someone was shuffling around our campsite. We knew that we were running a slight risk of being robbed by going on this hike. Opportunistic local men were known to sometime accost foreign hikers and to rob them while threatening them with machetes, and sometimes homemade shotguns. But knowing the local language and carrying very little cash and flashy gear on us, we weren’t sending the kind of signals that might normally entice a robbery. We were almost locals ourselves, living down in the valley. And many women from the villages we had passed through were employed as household helpers on the missionary compound. Still, someone was definitely moving around the campsite. It did seem we were about to be robbed.

Perhaps they would just take the gear around the fire and leave us alone? I prayed. Then the zipper on the tent started moving. And my heart leapt into my throat. The tent door slowly unzipped, zzzzziiiiizzzz, opened, and in the deep darkness I saw the silhouette of a bearded man (most locals wore beards). He was looking right at me. He silently pointed at me with his hand and made the motion for me to roll over. He seemed to be telling me to lie down and not make any unnecessary noise. I didn’t know what to do. The others in the tent seemed to be fast asleep, so I started to roll over, but also started to try to reason in the local language with this criminal about the shamefulness of his actions.

“What you are doing is bad and shameful.”

“We don’t have any money on us.”

“We’re just here to respectfully spend the night in this good place.”

“We’re not rich tourists, we’re just missionaries that live down in the valley.”

“Do you not see that this is shameful? It’s very shameful. It will bring shame on your village and your people and no one will come to see your beautiful land!”

He wasn’t even acknowledging that I was speaking. What to do? I shot a glance over to uncle John’s sleeping bag. Suddenly I realized that it was empty. I gasped. They took uncle John! And he’s completely deaf at night without his hearing aid. Things were seeming much worse than I thought. Violent crime was indeed increasing in the culture. Was this going to turn into a hostage taking?

Heart pounding, I ventured a peek outside the tent door flap. The figure was crouched by the fire, messing with it. Suddenly a flame jumped up. And in the light of the fire I saw that the criminal I was desperately reasoning with was… bearded uncle John. Stirring a can of beans. Relief and embarrassment swept over me. Oh no, he had heard all my desperate negotiating! But wait, had he? No, impossible, his hearing aids were out. He hadn’t heard a thing! And that’s why he hadn’t responded. I began to laugh at myself and settled back into my sleeping bag for the rest of the night.

At breakfast I shared the story of “the robbery” with the rest of our little hiking crew and we all had a good laugh together. Apparently uncle John had woken up in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep. But what was he doing staring me down and ordering me to roll over like that? Turns out he was trying to indicate that I could move over and use his inflatable sleeping mat. But in the midnight blackness I thought he was a robber, and he must have thought I was at least a little daft myself. Why is this kid staring unresponsive at me like that? My wife still tells me that I’m the worst at lip-reading, so there’s that.

The hike wrapped up without any further incidents and for the three of us skinny MK’s, we had been initiated into the sore and muddy joys of hiking. It was a small thing for uncle John to do that with us high school guys. Just a quick overnight hike. But for me, it turned out to be much more meaningful than either of us could have known at that time. As the youngest sibling of a single-mom household, there just weren’t very many men who invited me to do things with them when I was growing up. Ministry men are busy with ministry. And I was shy. In spite of good intentions, invitations like this hike were seldom extended. I had lots of great role models from a distance to watch, but precious few opportunities to have an adult man show me how to do something adventurous or practical so that I could then do it on my own.

But this hike to the waterfall was easy enough to be repeated – and built on. My buddies and I were soon hiking to the top of the ridge and beyond – eventually summitting the three highest peaks in the country. Uncle John had set some time aside from his ministry responsibilities and shown us some fatherly kindness, and this one gesture had unlocked a world of adventure that was just plain good for us hormonal teenage boys. We needed to test our limits, to risk, to have some adventure. We needed to get arrested by tribal war parties (as would later take place) and learn the hard way the value of having a rain plan – a soaking wet sleeping bag in a patch of jungle on top of a mountain is a very effective tutor! We needed to learn that continuing on in the fog and the dark at 14,000 feet when your guide has left due to altitude sickness is a very bad idea. And learn we did, through many misadventures and near-misses. It was wonderful. We muddled along on our disastrous hikes and somehow learned some good lessons about what it meant to be Christian men.

The year my son was born, 2012, was notable for a tragic reason. It was the year that children born outside of wedlock in the US surpassed those born within it. The doctors in our Louisville, KY, hospital already at that point didn’t quite know what to do with a husband who was there for all the appointments and for the birth itself. They awkwardly tried to address only my wife, not sure if they were supposed to acknowledge me as well. From that year on, the majority of children in my homeland have been raised in single-parent or broken households.

This creates a great need. So many boys are growing up without dads (and daughters, too). Now that I’m a dad I remember the kindness uncle John showed me by inviting me along on that hike. Even one gesture like that was potentially life-changing for me. Men of the Church, let’s lift up our eyes and look around us. Are there any boys growing up without dads that we can sometimes invite into our lives? I’m sure they would love to learn a practical life skill, to go on an adventure, or to just spend time with a kind man who is already an adult. Even if we only have time for this every once in a while, we might be surprised at what might come of it.

Whether they show it or not, I can tell you this, they’ll be grateful for an invite.

Photo by Derek Owens on Unsplash

Not Demigods

969 years. Although by our standards the pre-flood people lived long lives, one of the purposes of this genealogy was to be a polemic against Mesopotamian mythology, in which people lived for tens of thousands of years. Babylonian texts record the lives of ten kings who were demigods and lived exceptionally long lives in pre-flood times. The Sumerian King List names eight kings prior to the flood who lived a total of 241,000 years. The OT criticizes such myths; humans lived long lives before the flood, but they were not demigods who lived for an exaggerated amount of time.

ESV Archaeology Study Bible, p. 21

I find this to be an interesting note on the purpose of the pre-flood genealogy in Genesis. Who knew that a pre-flood life of 969 years at that time of Moses’ writing might come across as awfully conservative? If you want to peruse the Sumerian King List, you can do so here.

Photo by Corbin Mathias on Unsplash

A Proverb on the Painfully Obvious

A night’s moon appears in the evening.

Local Oral Tradition

Here is a proverb for those times when no argumentation should be necessary. When the facts or conclusions are just blatantly apparent for all to see.

“But are you sure this email promising me the riches of a dead African ruler if I just share my bank account info is a scam?“

“Come on brother-man, a night’s moon appears in the evening.”

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash

A Song on the Coming Feast

My heart is regularly encouraged by meditating on the coming marriage feast of the lamb. Seeing this future event by faith – and the innumerable feasts that will follow it in eternity – has been a source of repeated help and hope for my family. The words of this song by Sandra McCracken have helped in this regard for a number of years now. The feel of McCracken’s original fits well with this age of suffering saints who await the feast.

Lo and behold, the song also now has a Christian Soul Cover – a style which, at least for me, feels like music that previews the joys of the feast arrived. I find I am helped by both styles, resonating as they do with the already/not yet nature of these promises. I’ve posted them both here for your consideration. 

We will feast in the house of Zion 
We will sing with our hearts restored 
He has done great things we will say together 
We will feast and weep no more 

We will not be burned by the fire 
He is the Lord our God 
We are not consumed by the flood 
Upheld protected gathered up 

In the dark of night before the dawn 
My soul be not afraid 
For the promised morning oh how long 
Oh God of Jacob be my strength 

Every vow we’ve broken and betrayed 
You are the faithful one 
And from the garden to the grave 
Bind us together bring shalom

“We Will Feast in the House of Zion” by Sandra McCracken

How the Baby Turned

We were on a short family getaway, staying three days at a spot where our Central Asian mountains meet a lake. It was early Autumn, still warm enough to swim during the day, but getting chilly at night. The pleasant winds of the fall were coming off the mountains, complementing the September sun which shone off the lake and the yellow-brown mountains. I’ve always loved the feel of fall in this part of the world – brief and subtle though it is. It seems to only last two weeks – a calm golden respite in between the burning summer and the freezing winter.

My wife was seven months pregnant with our third child – and the little guy was facing the wrong direction. He was breech. We were hoping to have the baby in-country, and to have a natural birth, uncommon though that is for most of the local doctors. So we were praying hard for him to turn, as it would too risky to proceed if he stayed head-up. We were also coming close to the deadline by which my wife wouldn’t be allowed to fly, so it was getting a bit urgent.

On the last full day of our time away, I decided it would be fun to do some multitasking. I had fond memories of swimming in this same lake in years past, but on the other side of the mountain from where we were staying. I recalled a place that even felt kind of like a beach. But to find it, we’d have to do some exploring. The multitasking was that we were in need of finding a new baptism spot for our local friends. A dunking was fast approaching, and just like every other time, we found ourselves wishing we had thought more ahead about finding a spot with just the right combination of privacy, publicity, deep enough water, and natural beauty. This particular kind of spot continued to elude us. And while kiddie pools have their own advantages, we were hoping for some better options.

For some reason I majored on the baptism piece when proposing the day’s plans to my wife and forgot to really major on the beach-with-the-kids part. She wasn’t thrilled with our family rest time being taken over in this way, but kept these thoughts mostly to herself. So we started off, winding around the switchbacks of the nearby mountain. After fifteen minutes we made it to the top with its stunning views of the lake and other peaks, then began the descent down again. My wife was already regretting having agreed to this plan. Mountain switchbacks are not particularly compatible with being in the third trimester.

Once we reached the bottom of the mountain, I found a dirt road that looked like it went toward the lakeside. But it dead-ended in a village, with curious goats and village children looking bewildered at our presence there. So we turned around and bumped back down the track toward the main paved road. Once again we found another dirt road that looked promising, but this one also dead-ended, disappearing into a pasture filled with boulders. We stopped to reassess and listened to the lowing of the cows and the grumbling of our children. By this point I could tell the physical discomfort and frustration of my wife at this misadventure was reaching a critical point.

“Let me try just one more road,” I said with a hopeful grimace. We found a gravel road this time that looked much more promising. I turned off the main road, hoping that this artery would be the one that got us to the shore. Then, amid the rumbling and vibrating of the car, we began to rumble ourselves and argue about what exactly we were doing on this misadventure.

As it turns out, I had (not for the first time) managed to synthesize several ideas in my own mind, and forgotten to kindly spell those things out for my wife. She was, understandably, frustrated by what this optional ministry jaunt was turning into. Breakthrough came when she realized that I was also really hoping for a special time as a family at this elusive beach, and wasn’t just out on a work task – and after I apologized and owned that I had failed to share as openly as I should have.

Then suddenly she gasped.

“What is it?!” I asked.

My wife’s eyes were wide and she had a curious look on her face.

“I don’t know, I just felt the strangest thing in my stomach… I think the baby turned!”

“Really?!” I asked.

“Yes, I’m pretty sure he just did a flip. I’ve never felt anything quite like that before. Must have been all the bumpy roads! Ha!”

The car continued to shake as we drove along and we began to laugh at ourselves. Of course God would answer our prayer right in a moment where we were feeling significant marital tension, out in the middle of nowhere on a misadventure.

All of the sudden, the road turned and crested a hill, and there below us was a muddy and rocky shore, sloping down toward the water’s edge.

“We found it!” And there was much rejoicing in our by-now-very-dusty SUV.

We proceeded to spend a sweet time together, swimming in the warm water, building castles out of rocks, and getting grossed out at the mud suction that pulled us in halfway up to our knees. Plus we had brought a picnic blanket and chocolate, which makes everything more pleasant. It turned out to be an afternoon full of good memories, after all.

Our third-born did indeed flip around that day, in an answer to prayer. An ultrasound later confirmed this. Though given unforeseen complications, he actually ended up being born through a C-section, an adventure of its own. But those bumpy roads and the baby flipping enabled us to move towards the birth with greater confidence that we were indeed supposed to stay in our country for the delivery, in spite of the unknowns.

We chuckle now as we remember this particular answer to prayer. Our God’s ways of answering his people’s prayers will never cease to amaze – and sometimes, even to amuse.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

First to the (Eastern) Jew

The Church of the East owed its rapid expansion in Mesopotamia to the Jewish Diaspora as well, for the earlier missionary efforts to the east of the Euphrates, which presumably began towards the end of the first century, met with particular approval in Jewish circles. The numerically significant Jewish Diaspora in Mesopotamia, which included nearly a million people, had resulted from the earlier Assyrian and Babylonian invasions…

The defeat of the second Jewish uprising of 132-135 CE resulted in an additional wave of Jewish immigration to Parthian Mesopotamia, but also to Arabia and India.

Baumer, The Church of the East, p. 12

Here we see the expansion of the gospel East from Antioch and across the border into the Parthian empire followed the same pattern we see repeatedly in the Pauline missions in Acts. The gospel tended to take root first among the Jewish diaspora community, then spilled over into the gentile population.

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

Please, Call Me Bob

Last night we were having dinner with some dear friends, one of the few families that has served here for more than a decade. They shared a story with us about the power of the title, pastor, here in this culture. In spite of being an ordained minister back in the West, learning the local language, and doing residential church planting work, many of the local believers were markedly more responsive when a visiting pastor from the outside would show up. All of the sudden, they would bring out great spiritual questions and want to sit and receive training – when they had resisted these very same things when offered in their language by a man who knew them and was actually living among them – because a real pastor was now present. My missionary friend, by doing the work of a church planter under the radar in a place where you can’t do so officially, was regularly not granted the respect given to someone who could afford to use the title of pastor or missionary openly.

“He’s been sacrificing everything for you for years! And you only show interest when the foreign pastor shows up? That’s the power of that title in this culture!” his wife said at one point.

What is going on here? Shouldn’t the one who does the labor of a pastor but can’t use the title for security purposes be granted the same level of respect as one who can use the title openly? At least part of this dynamic has to do with what is called high power distance and low power distance cultures.

Every culture has to deal with the unequal distribution of power within its own society. The difference between high power distance and low power distance cultures is how they think about what kind of power arrangement is most ideal. For those in low power cultures – like the West – we mentally and emotionally prefer to envision a culture where power is shared more equally. We don’t like authority figures to have too much more respect or power than their followers have. But those in high cultures actually value there being a big difference between how much respect and power is given to authority figures. In a low power culture, a more just society is one where everyone is treated equally. In a high culture, a more just society is where everyone is treated according to their status.

This comes out in interesting ways. Have you ever noticed how majority culture, middle-upper class Westerners have an aversion to titles? “Please, call me Bob,” a doctor might respond after you’ve just addressed him as Doctor so-and-so. However, this is not necessarily the case even in minority cultures in the West. In the US, African American and Hispanic cultures tend to put a higher value on the use of titles. Pay attention to the church signs and you’ll see what I mean.

High power cultures really value titles. They also value other signals of status, such as differentiation in dress and living standards. Framed certificates are displayed proudly in the workplace. Even in the home, titles for older siblings can often be used in place of their first name. To call an older brother (or any man) by his first name only can be taken as a grave offense. “Where’s your respect, you young whippersnapper?” The respectful maintenance and visibility of the hierarchy of power (age, class, position, etc.) is understood to be one of the cornerstones of a just and healthy society.

This is the unique situation my missionary friend found himself in, here in Central Asia. We, coming from a low power culture, deal daily with these strong dynamics of a high power culture. We live and work in a place where the use of the title missionary or pastor would actually accomplish a lot. But for security purposes, we can’t actually use these titles. And methodologically, we’re not always sure that we want to use them, given the ways these dynamics are often abused by local leaders. A local wolf in sheep’s clothing has no qualms about applying these titles and status symbols to himself, and thereby tapping into the honor the culture automatically extends to anyone who flaunts them. Domineering leadership is a real problem here, in basically every kind of authority. This gives us pause about merely taking on these authority status symbols uncritically. Yet to ignore them altogether is also not a very good option, because that often signals that we don’t actually think we have any authority at all.

Now, the Scriptures were written in high power cultures. The cultures of the ancient near east and the Greco-Roman world definitely held to the ideals of high power distance. And yet the word of God spoken into those cultures strikes an interesting posture. It both affirms the reality and goodness of authority, and the need to honor it appropriately, while also affirming the ideal of servant leadership and the equal dignity of every person (1 Pet 2:17, Eph 6:1, 1 Tim 5:17, Luke 22:26, 1 Pet 3:7). Going further, a common theme in books such as Luke and James is “the great reversal” where those the world does not honor are the ones who end up most honored by God: children, the poor, gentiles, and sinners (Luke 13:30, Matt 19:14, James 1:9-10, 1 Cor 1:26).

So, what are we to do when navigating these differences between low and high power cultures? We need to be able to study the whole counsel of the word on this topic, then study our own personal culture, and finally, study the different cultures we are interacting with.

We need to have a practical theology of power and authority. Again, the Bible affirms that authority is established by God (family, government, church, etc.) and therefore it is good and not to be rejected (Rom 13:1). However, our fallenness means that all authority here tends to be warped by sin (Gen 3:16, Ezekiel 34). Power in this age needs to be redeemed and transformed – but cannot discarded while living in the real world as God created it. What does redeemed and transformed authority look like? Jesus and the Apostles model this for us (Luke 22:27). Now, in the local church, the priesthood of all believers is to be celebrated, as is the special role of leaders within the body (1 Pet 2:9, Eph 4:11). Those with natural power are to rejoice in how the gospel makes them lowly. And those without natural power are to rejoice in how the gospel lifts them up (James 1:9-10). There are times when the use of titles is inappropriate, according to Jesus (Matt 23:1-12). And there are times when the use of titles can be done for the sake of godly respect (Mark 3:14). Wisdom, love, and context make all the difference here.

We also need to know our own cultural bent. If you are a Westerner reading this, it’s helpful to realize that we live in a culture that has serious issues with the very idea of power and authority itself. Western culture is philosophically bent towards living in a fantasy where power differences don’t have to exist. Yes, this even affects missionaries. Some have experimented with this fantasy in the house churches they plant overseas, trying to get rid of the role of a teacher or preacher altogether. However, being fantasy and not reality, this never works for the long term. Sooner or later leaders, teachers, and preachers always emerge. We might cringe when our local friends use respectful titles for us, but why is that? Where does that cringe originate? The Bible or some kind of cultural reaction we’ve inherited and continue to propagate? We need to take an honest look at our own power distance preferences and make sure we can pinpoint what is biblical and what is personal.

Studying the local culture’s power distance preference is also crucial. How do they envision the ideal distribution of power in society? And why? What of this needs to be redeemed and what needs to be rejected? In our local culture, I am thrilled that our local believers are trained from their youth to respect the elderly and to use respectful titles for them. This good cultural value needs to kept and deepened via gospel motivation. But the prideful arrogance that so often comes once a title like pastor has been bestowed – and the idea that this title is some kind of status for life that can be genetically passed onto children – that practice needs to be done away with among the new community of faith.

As with so many of these spectrums of culture, there are going to be cliffs on either side, expressions of a low power preference and those of a high power preference that clash with biblical principles. If you are flirting with the idea of getting rid of teachers in the local church, you’ve gone too far – just as you are if you believe that the pastor controls the decisions of the members of his church. Yet there’s going to be a range of expressions in the middle that are faithful to scripture, yet still feel very different from one another. It’s just not necessary that a church in Kentucky give a visiting speaker a special scarf in a public ceremony (complete with photos) after his sermon. But for Nepalese churches, this is highly honorable in the sight of all. When in Kentucky, privately give brother “Bob” an envelope containing an honorarium as a thank you, and that will do just fine.

Practically, it will be helpful for high power distance believers to wrestle with ways they can publicly honor the “least of these.” This will be radically counter-cultural. Just as it will be helpful for low power distance cultures to think about if there are particular ways they need to give “double honor” to the leaders and authority figures among them, as so much of the popular culture is raging against this – and even the leaders themselves might squirm when honored!

Fellow missionaries and anyone involved in ministry, let’s be sure we are making these decisions with scripture-informed intentionality, and not merely out of cultural default. This will take some work. But it will be work that will result in a community that leverages power differentials in a compelling and other-worldly way. In this world reeling from the abuses of the power and the abusive reactions to the abuses of power, this kind of redemption of power distances is desperately needed.

Photo by Mariah Solomon on Unsplash

*For more on high and low power distance cultures, see F. Scott Moreau’s Effective Intercultural Communication

Relativism, Silver Bullets, and How to Kill Vampires

The following is an excerpt from an article I’ve been working on regarding missionary methodology.

“A wrong orientation toward missionary methods is one of the quiet cancers eating away at the health of the evangelical missions world. For the purposes of this article, we will distinguish between two errant camps demonstrating an incorrect orientation. These are the methodological relativists and the silver-bullet-true-believers. And sometimes missionaries jump from one camp to the other, depending on how hard a given term has been.

The relativists, for their part, have seized upon a real cross-cultural dynamic and have taken it to the extreme. They have found that certain principles can be applied in different places in wildly divergent, even contradictory forms, while still communicating that same principle or meaning. Hence the universal idea of respectful greetings means one kisses another man’s wife in France while not acknowledging the presence of another man’s wife in a country like Afghanistan. Radically different forms communicate the same meaning in different cultures, while other times the same forms can communicate radically different meanings from one place to another.

The relativists apply this idea across the board, believing that all or most forms and terms are ultimately relative, can be redeemed, and in the process filled with biblical meaning. This error is what Insider Movement advocates are flirting with as they advocate for Messianic Muslims, calling Mohammad a prophet, and the like. It is what one of the patron saints of missiology, Roland Allen, himself flirted with a hundred years ago as he wrote of finding “The Christ within Hinduism.” It is the error informing the Bible college missions major who floats replacing water baptism with an equivalent ceremony communicating burial and resurrection due to the negative reaction to water baptism in the Islamic world.

What this camp misses is that method always has a bearing on meaning, whether that bearing be small or large. This is true at least because methods and forms don’t emerge in a vacuum, but rather emerge in a historical and cultural time-slice with those stubborn clinging barnacles of previous and contemporary meaning. Nevertheless, the philosophical aspects to this way of thinking about the fluidity of forms and meaning are very attractive to intellectually-oriented cross-cultural workers who are frustrated by the slow growth of their work. This camp ends up being broader than scripture in the applications and methods of their work.

The camp of the silver-bullet-true believers falls into a different error. The true believers come to feel that there is only one faithful or effective method for a given context. They latch onto a method (often one proven more-or-less effective elsewhere) and vigorously seek to apply that method in their ministry. Sometimes these have been good methods that were developed in contextual conversation with a specific place and culture. But the true believer, whether the developer of that method or a proselyte, at some point decides it should go global.

Whether it’s oral bible-storying, T4T, CPM, DMM, Any3, 4 Fields, POP, the Camel Method, DBS, or myriad other methodologies, these practitioners can rival any cage-stage Calvinist in their devotion to their newfound creed. The practical plans and positive outcomes that many methods promise prove to be very attractive to workers who long to see the gospel spread quickly in their resistant context. Sometimes this camp is made up of those who are more pragmatically wired, but not always. Many members of this camp are committed to getting their methods from scripture. The problem is that they latch onto one portion of scripture, whether descriptive or prescriptive, and elevate it as the biblical model. They fail to balance it with the rest of the examples and commands of scripture. Unlike the relativists, the true believers end up being narrower than scripture in the applications and methods of their work.

What is to be done to remedy a missions world prone to relativism or silver bullets? Alas, many missionaries on the field are practicing their craft in ways that are broader or narrower than scripture would permit – and this is causing real damage. Instead, the remedy demands that missionaries have a clear understanding of biblical principles and a firm grip on the range of faithful applications of those principles.

To illustrate, let’s return to the vampire lore. Missionaries are like a group of villagers arguing about how to kill vampires in light of a spate of recent attacks. One group argues that yes, the old tomes teach that vampires can be killed by a silver knife, a stake, or a bullet… and yet, whatever is a metal weapon “in essence” should also be equally valid – at the end of the day metal is metal and weapons are weapons and silver shouldn’t have any greater effect than iron or steel. That silver stuff is probably just encrusted tradition, but now we are enlightened enough to truly grasp the metaphorical essence of what those texts were really getting at. So, let’s be sure to hit them with the big guns that were so good at taking out that human army from that other kingdom.

The other group of villagers argues that the earliest tomes deal mostly with the use of silver knives. Silver knives were used in the first generation that fought vampires and proved to be remarkably effective. To deviate from this original path is to risk too much and to fail to unleash the true promise of a vampire-slaying movement like was seen in the days of old. And after all, silver knives are much more reproducible than other options.

No doubt these villagers argue back and forth with case studies, journal publications, and moving personal anecdotes. What is needed to clear up this mess is a gnarled old village guard willing to step into the fray and proclaim through his missing teeth, “The idea is silver weapons, you fools!” Not broadly weapons “in essence”, and not just silver knives, but silver weapons. Make it too broad and you risk losing all effectiveness (and getting turned into a vampire yourself). Make it too narrow and you unnecessarily limit your effective options. After all, who wants to only have a silver knife when you could also have a revolver full of silver rounds in the chamber? These villagers need to recognize the key principle (silver) in the appropriate scope of its application (weapons that can pierce the heart).

Missionaries, like our vampire-besought villagers, should desire to be armed with the right kind of spiritual weapons and to be competent in and carrying as many of them as possible, skillfully applying them to particular situations.”

For more on this topic, see Seven Pitfalls and Seven Questions Toward Healthier Methodology.

Photo by Jay Rembert on Unsplash