Tag: Contextualization

Western Missionary, Know Your Handicaps

When it comes to today’s Western missionaries, we are very aware of the handicaps of our forbears. That is, we know all too well what the weaknesses and blind spots were for Western missionaries in past eras. They often conflated Western culture with Christianity, they built massive missionary compounds, they held onto church power too long, they didn’t contextualize, etc. You can go and read Roland Allen if you want a deep dive into the problems of the Western missions movement in the early 1900s. The problem is that we’re often unaware of our current handicaps, how contemporary Western missionaries bring their own unique weaknesses and blind spots to the field, and then proceed to do missions work that is, well, handicapped by these postures.

The following is a list of handicaps that, in our experience, most Western missionaries bring with them to the mission field. Yes, there are exceptions to these trends out there. Yes, most of these weaknesses also correspond to a particular strength of Western culture. And yes, this list is in some places shaped by our particular context in Central Asia. But I think many of these handicaps continue to show up globally as Westerners are sent out to fulfill the Great Commission. It’s because I care so deeply about that holy calling that I want other Western missionaries to have a greater self-awareness of these handicaps – and to pivot accordingly. If we remain unaware of these forces acting upon us from our own cultural background, these default postures, as it were, we will be unable to effect the kind of change we so hope for.

This is a longer post, so buckle up. Or, if helpful, you can scan the headings below and read the points that stick out to you.

We come to the field and leave as radical individualists. A typical prospective missionary will announce to his pastors that he has been called to the mission field and then expect their blessing. Then, when leaving the field, he will likewise announce to his colleagues and the local believers that God has called him elsewhere. Often, these decisions are made in private, with the hard-to-refute claim that God has spoken, and without the counsel of the broader believing community. Instead, we should be carefully involving faithful pastors and our church community in these momentous and costly decisions.

We treat locals as projects rather than genuine friends. Westerners are very goal and task-oriented. Often, this means we treat locals on the mission field more like projects than as actual spiritual peers and friends. They can’t help but sense this, and, long-term, it impedes our work’s effectiveness. We need to embrace a posture of spiritual equality and genuine friendship with locals. Yes, we are called to make disciples, but those disciples should also be becoming some of our very best friends.

We trust in our expertise instead of in the power of the Word and the Spirit. We Westerners are good at planning, preparing, studying, and strategizing. The problem is we often put our trust in these efforts, rather than pursuing them with our trust rooted in the power of God’s Word and God’s Spirit. This might seem like a subtle thing, but it makes all the difference. At the end of the day, do we work hard and trust in our expertise or trust in God’s power? The secret is that trusting in God’s power often means we’ll work even harder.

We are terrified of contaminating the local believers with our Western culture. We are desperate to not repeat the mistakes of the old colonial missionaries, which means deep down we are very afraid that we will ruin the indigenization or local ownership of our work with our own cultural imports or upfront presence. This fear is so strong that it will often keep Western missionaries from obeying clear biblical commands, such as the commands to do ministry by example, to teach, preach, baptize, and form churches. The better posture is to recognize that some cultural mixing is inevitable, so we should simply be aware and proactive in it, putting it always under the microscope of what is loving and faithful to scripture.

We prioritize culture over the Bible. Again, because we are so afraid of changing local culture, we will often shrink back when local culture clashes with the Bible. This is especially tempting in areas of costly obedience, such as church discipline, bold witness, churches that mix members of enemy people groups, etc. But every culture is fallen. And that means that when any aspect of culture goes against the Bible, we go with the Bible, come what may. This is vitally important for modeling for local believers how they can transform their own culture over the long haul.

We prioritize the shallow areas of culture while remaining ignorant of the deeper areas of culture. The ironic thing is that, for how much we Westerners talk about the importance of contextualization, we’re not very good at it. Instead, many missionaries fixate on the external, shallow aspects of culture while failing to recognize the deeper aspects of the culture where contextualization is truly needed. In our context, way too many missionaries are worried about locals sitting in chairs rather than on the floor when they should be worried about what to do about things like the deep patron-client and honor-shame commitments and assumptions that our locals have. While still prioritizing the Bible over culture, we Westerners also need to push much deeper into understanding local cultures and worldviews, and learning the local language well.

We dismiss certain practices or methodologies simply because they feel old-fashioned, traditional, or foreign. Good contextualization has nothing to do with how a certain form feels to us and whether it reminds us or not of uncomfortable things from our history or upbringing. Good contextualization is about making biblical principles and practices clear and compelling in a local language and culture. We Westerners have our own cultural and religious baggage, but we need to do our best to put that aside so that we don’t dismiss certain forms out of hand when they are both biblically permissible and locally effective. I may not like pews or cross necklaces. But that has everything to do with my background, and is, in fact, irrelevant when it comes to good local contextualization.

We don’t understand how forms carry meaning. Not every word, cultural ritual, or religious practice can be redeemed. First, the Bible outright prohibits certain forms, such as idols. In addition, some forms in a local culture simply carry too much anti-biblical meaning, such that locals will not be able to embrace a new meaning given to them, no matter how compelling a case we foreigners make. Other forms can be contested, and perhaps redeemed over time. Some are ripe for redemption. In our context, the term Muslim cannot be redeemed, even though its original meaning in Arabic is simply one who submits to God. However, the old Central Asian New Year holiday (Nawroz) is currently being contested by local believers and filled with Christian meaning. And the local word for the all-powerful creator God has already been redeemed and redefined biblically by the local believers.

We are drawn to silver bullet methodologies rather than the slow and steady path of healthy growth. Western culture programs us to be drawn to the new, the big, and the fast. This means that Western missionaries are vulnerable to methodologies that promise unprecedented results in record time. I believe much of the popularity of insider movement and movement methodologies like DMM is playing into this handicap of Western culture. But similar to how monetary investments grow, the healthiest long-term growth is in the slow, steady investment that brings in exponential returns after decades, not in a matter of a few short months or years. By way of analogy, we should want our work to be like forests of oak that cover the mountainsides, not grass on the rooftops. This is the kind of healthy work that we see in the New Testament, as well as in church history, punctuated though it is with occasional periods of miraculous growth.

We are dogmatic about our methodology and casual about our dogma. Human beings will be dogmatic about something. It’s inescapable. Western missionaries, reacting to the past again, tend to hold their dogma with a loose hand, while holding their methodologies with a dogmatic fervor. This belies a common mistake where we confuse principles with strategy, and go on to treat locally-specific strategy and tactics (methodology) as fixed and universally applicable, while forgetting about universally applicable principles undergirding the methodologies. A wiser way forward is to hold our methodologies with a looser hand, while holding to our Biblical principles and dogma with more conviction. The art of theological triage is especially helpful here.

We are anti-institutional. Popular Western culture is jaded when it comes to institutions and is experiencing an era of post-institutional ferment. That means Western missionaries are not naturally drawn to things like organizing, building, and institutionalizing. In fact, many methodologies tell us that it’s these specific things that will kill movements of the Spirit. We need to realize that much of the pull of organic, casual, low-hierarchy, house church-style Christianity for us is because of our own cultural moment, and not necessarily because it is effective locally or even biblical. Yes, house church is a good biblical option, but the way many Western missionaries go about it often leads to contextual ineffectiveness and spiritual compromise.

We have problems with authority. Many Westerners have been raised with this as one of our primary maxims: “Question Authority.” As a culture, we have lots of baggage with the concept of authority, and, because of this, we tend to not think very clearly about it. But one thing we do know about authority, we distrust it. However, whether we like it or not, we live in a world where authority exists. God created the universe to be a hierarchical one; healthy societies are those that honor just and proper authority, and even in the most natural of friendships, someone will always take the lead. Authority itself is fundamentally good, not bad, even though it is fallen. But Western culture tends to reverse this, or to pretend that authority isn’t really needed. Not only has this infiltrated much of our thinking about society, and men’s and women’s roles in the home and the church, but it’s also seeped into our missiology and our bearing on the mission field. Practically, this is a major factor in why we are drawn to certain methodologies and why we fumble so badly in societies that view authority more positively.

We cannot easily define a biblical church. Many Western missionaries on the field practice a missiology of reaction. We don’t know exactly what kind of churches we are trying to plant, but we know that we don’t want them to be like the churches back home. Often, this is a sign that we haven’t had the chance to truly develop a biblical ecclesiology. We also come from a culture that has, because of its radical individualism, lost most of its good instincts when it comes to church. Because of this, we can’t easily define what a biblical church is. In truth, every missionary should be able to easily describe a healthy biblical church, even in their sleep. Somehow, something so central to the work of missions has become one of the most common handicaps of Western workers on the field. We desperately need to learn frameworks that summarize the Bible’s teaching on this subject, such as 9 Marks or 12 characteristics of a healthy church.

We make the mission field a laboratory for our church fantasies. Because most of us don’t have a biblical ecclesiology, we can fall into making the mission field a laboratory for our personal fantasies about church. If we’ve had bad experiences with authority, we might try to plant churches that have no official leaders or teachers. If we feel like church membership or preaching are really Western accretions, then we might try to plant churches without them. If we have ideas about what authentic, pure, New Testament Christianity was really like, we can turn local believers into our guinea pigs. No, churches on the mission field shouldn’t look exactly like the churches back home do, but they are not our personal laboratories. The underlying elements should be the same, even if they are clothed in a different language and culture.

We think we are above the local church on the mission field. Many Western missionaries do not become accountable members of churches on the mission field. Instead, we prefer to keep our membership in our sending churches, even after faithful churches are planted in their context. This is often because joining a local or international church feels like it will be such a time commitment, and missionaries know their time is precious. The problem is that, because of this, many of us missionaries inevitably move out beyond any real spiritual accountability, which, long-term, must be local accountability. Zoom calls and a visit every few years will not cut it. We might live like this for decades, assuming that we are a special category of Christian who exists for the local church but not under the local church. But such spiritual free agents fail to model for local believers what faithful membership looks like, as well as dangerously expose themselves to great spiritual risk.

We use truisms to avoid exercising our legitimate spiritual authority. “I don’t want to build my own kingdom.” “I want to stay out of the way.” “Let’s trust the Holy Spirit.” “Locals are really the ones who need to take charge, after all.” We Western missionaries will commonly use phrases like these to excuse ourselves from taking spiritual leadership in missions contexts. The thing about all of these statements is that they seem so humble. But often they serve to cloak the fact that, because of our post-colonial angst, or our methodological commitments, or our simple insecurity, we don’t want to exercise the legitimate spiritual authority that we have as ambassadors of Christ. These statements often cloak a false humility and keep us from modeling spiritual leadership for local believers, leaving them to depend on the fallen leadership models they have from their own cultural background. We Westerners need to understand that our current issue is not that we love leading or being upfront. It’s that we are terrified of it.

We hold up our personal church size preference as the ideal. Everyone has a personal church size preference, whether we recognize it or not. And each church size has its own size culture that comes with its own positives and negatives. The problem is that we missionaries often latch on to our favorite size church and start thinking that this size is the biblically faithful way to do church. I once fell into this kind of thinking, back when I was a house-church-only advocate. As with methodology, so with church sizes. The underlying characteristics of a healthy church are universal and scalable. They can be implemented in a Philippian house or in a Jerusalem congregation of 3,000.

We have arbitrary definitions of reproducibility. Reproducibility is all the rage in popular Western missiology. And for what it’s worth, reproducibility is a biblical concept. But Westerners often throw this term around without defining it and without recognizing that their own understanding of what is reproducible is very arbitrary. 2 Timothy 2:2 speaks of four generations of believers, but it does not give us a timeline in which this multiplication is supposed to take place. We like to stick our own preferred timelines onto the text, but that not only leaves us importing our own ideas into the Bible, but also poorly prepares us to discern what sort of timelines are truly needed in our local context. Again, what are we going for? Oak forests or grass on the rooftops? And should that affect how we think about reproducibility?

We rely on salaried positions for raising up leaders rather than waiting for the slow and steady work of character growth. The quickest way to see ministry results and see leaders emerge in Central Asia is to hand out salaried positions. Unfortunately, most of these results will prove to be short-lived. The hard truth is that believers are not ready to handle salaried leadership positions in any culture until they have a proven track record of leading regardless of the money. But we Westerners are so eager to show results in our work that we are often tempted to skip the long, slow path of character development by means of salaried positions. This is made all the easier by the fact that the Western church has such a culture of generosity, where funds for this kind of thing are so easily come by.

We are hyper-focused on our people group to the exclusion of others God brings into our circle. Many Western missionaries have intentionally set their sights on an unreached people group. This is admirable, for without this kind of specific focus, many of these populations will continue to be without gospel access. The question is whether or not this kind of focus should be an inclusive or an exclusive one. Many of us will neglect to care for other believers or seekers around us, even if God puts them right in our path, because they are not from our people group. God forbid, they might even be other foreigners who require some of our time. Instead of this, we would be wise to maintain a determined focus on our main people group, while also trusting that if God brings us believers from other groups, he has a good reason for that. This past year, we befriended a believing family from Zimbabwe who had moved to Caravan City for a job opportunity. One year on, they had to unexpectedly move to Poet City, where they are now attending our previous church plant and encouraging our dear friends there. We had no idea when we invested time in them that they would later go on to invest in local friends like Darius and his church. We should not let a specific people group focus prevent us from caring for the broader body of Christ as well.

We are afraid to own the strengths of Western culture. Even though this is a post largely about the current weaknesses of Western culture, I would be remiss to not mention that one of those weaknesses is refusing to admit the strengths of Western culture. Western culture, like all cultures, truly if imperfectly reflects the image of God. It has also been deeply shaped by the Bible and by Christianity. This means Western culture has both real natural strengths and real Christian strengths. We missionaries from the West need to realize that we can be honest and thankful for these strengths without getting anywhere near sinful ethnocentrism or racism. I love how Western culture is so full of hopeful optimism, how it emphasizes hard work and honesty, how it dignifies the individual, and how it advocates for freedom of religion. I hope that Central Asian culture becomes more Western in these ways, without losing its distinctive strengths. We Western missionaries don’t serve our local friends by pretending our culture is all bad. Rather, we should model for them a humble and honest posture towards our native cultures.

We over-prioritize physical safety. Westerners are safer than ever, yet we continue to be more and more fixated on physical safety. This means we are often the first to bolt in case of security crises and the first to recommend our local friends flee in the face of serious persecution. There is often wisdom in fleeing danger, but we Western missionaries need to be aware of what we are modeling for local believers. Are we teaching them how to be afraid, or how to trust God in the face of danger? These are difficult calls and require much wisdom. But part of that wisdom is knowing that we come from a culture positively obsessed with physical safety.

We give up if something doesnโ€™t seem to work quickly. We Westerners tend to start strong and optimistic. But if our work doesn’t prove fruitful relatively quickly, we tend to lose heart and move on to greener pastures. What this means in difficult contexts like Central Asia is that Westerners give up after the first or second implosion of their church plant, feeling that this must mean they have been doing something wrong. This is often accompanied by a dramatic conversion toward a different kind of methodology as well, usually one where the Westerner is insulated from the same kind of disappointment. Often, if the missionary had simply kept pushing and plodding a little longer, their church plant would have stabilised. The key here is to understand that Western culture, with its expectations of quick formulaic success, doesn’t often set us missionaries up for the kind of stubborn faithfulness truly needed on the field.

We trust others naรฏvely. When it comes to other people, we Westerners tend to view everyone as trustworthy until proven otherwise. But in cultures saturated with deception, betrayal, and hypocrisy, many people are simply not naturally trustworthy. Just as we have been trained by our culture with a bent toward authenticity and trust, others have been trained with a bent toward duplicity and distrust. And while this can make for lots of cross-cultural misunderstandings in normal relationships, it can spell disaster when a divisive person, abuser, or wolf comes to prey on the church. These predator types will run circles around us Westerners if we do not learn to be more shrewd and discerning in how we extend trust and responsibility to others. A good way to compensate for this weakness is to extend trust in small ways until someone’s trustworthiness can be proven over time – and to be ready to move quickly and with unity when a predator is revealed.

We confuse niceness for love. It’s been said that the first ‘commandment’ for Western evangelicals is “Thou shalt be nice.” But often, biblical faithfulness requires doing and saying things that do not feel nice, at least not on the surface. Pointing out sin and the need for repentance doesn’t feel nice. Neither does church discipline, nor standing up for women not preaching in church, nor telling someone they shouldn’t take the Lord’s supper because they’re not a believer. But each of these things is, in fact, loving. Something in Western culture has primed us to confuse niceness with love. We would do well to define love biblically and to know that that is true kindness.

We try to pretend we’re not rich. We Western missionaries are often much wealthier than our local friends. Sometimes this is true across the board. Sometimes, it may not be true in material wealth, but it is true in terms of connections, opportunities for upward mobility, or even things like books. Western culture emphasizes how we are all equal, so we are uncomfortable acknowledging these differences in wealth. We try to ignore them, but this doesn’t fool our local friends. A better way forward is to follow the Bible’s specific encouragements for the rich. We who are rich in this age are to glory in how the gospel humbles us, and makes us beggars just like it does every other sinner. We are to be rich in good works, generous, and eager to help others with the wealth we’ve been entrusted with. It’s not sinful to be rich, which is good, because in some of these ways, we are stuck with our wealth. But it is sinful to not seek to be faithful stewards of what we’ve been given.

We prioritize a vague Christian ‘unity’ over defined partnership. Most of us Western Christians have drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid that says ‘doctrine divides, Jesus unites.’ We care deeply about unity in the body of Christ, but the way we pursue that unity is by downplaying or sidestepping our very real differences and convictions. This is not the kind of unity that can really hold together when things get hard. Instead, it’s far better to define our unity, acknowledging where we have common ground, where we have serious differences, and what kinds of partnerships that frees us up for. This kind of posture not only equips me to partner in some way with (almost) anyone, but it also keeps me from the mistaken position that I should only partner with those who think exactly as I do. Again, the practice of theological triage here makes all the difference.

We don’t understand the importance of infrastructure for long-term impact. If previous generations of Western missionaries got sidetracked by having to maintain massive missionary infrastructure, recent generations have swung to the opposite extreme. The reality is that missionary families and local believers, after local churches have been established, need things like schools, employment, Christian marriages and burials, theological education, and decent healthcare in order to stay and establish a solid long-term presence. Even owning property instead of renting can mean a greater ability to withstand persecution. With church planting remaining as the vital core of missions, we need to recognize the importance of infrastructure for more effective long-term Christian presence and witness in a given context.

We try to erase those we’ve fallen out with. When Western missionaries part ways because of conflict, as we so often do, we try to memory-hole our former colleagues. We fail to mention the key part they played on our team or in our ministry, instead preferring to avoid mentioning them altogether. Instead, we should honor them as Luke honors Barnabas in the book of Acts. We can be honest about the fact that we parted ways because of conflict. But we should also be honest and grateful for how God used these brothers and sisters in our work.

We make saving people from hell our central motivation. I’m thankful that so many Western missionaries on the mission field still believe in hell. This is a courageous posture that shows real theological spine. However, some very bad things happen when we make saving people from hell our central motivation in missions. First, we come under immense pressure because of the crushing weight of the multitudes around us every day, headed to a Christless eternity. I’ve heard missionaries say that they can’t sleep at night because of this pressure. Second, this pressure leads to the development of unhealthy, rapid methodologies that try to do the math to see how many people need to hear the gospel in X amount of time, given things such as the current population growth rate and death rate. Turns out a hell-centered motivation is still a man-centered motivation. Instead, the glory of God and his future words of approval, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” should be our primary motivation.

We get offended when others disagree with our methods. We Westerners really struggle with the concept that someone can truly be for us, or love us, while deeply disagreeing with our lifestyle or methods. Christians understand how this is possible when we consider that homosexual friend or relative we have. But when it comes to our practices on the mission field, we missionaries feel that other missionaries or pastors back home should not be critiquing our work if they are truly for us. Rather, we need to realize that others being concerned that our work isn’t healthy or biblical is, in fact, one very important way they can show us Christian love.

We are not aware of why we respond to conflict or suffering the way we do. Many Western missionaries arrive on the field without going through the kind of counseling that helps them understand how they respond to conflict and suffering, and why. Without this sort of wisdom, when conflict or suffering comes, we often fall into old, sinful patterns or blow up all over our colleagues. The fact is that there are deeply personal patterns of sin and unbelief and aspects of suffering in our stories that shape how we respond when things get hard. We need to carefully bring the word of God to bear on our stories so that we can recognize wrong responses to conflict and suffering, remember where those things come from in our story, and choose to now walk in the light.

We signal to our spouses and kids that our work is more important than they are. Countless missionary kids grow up with the sense that their parents’ work is more important than they are. Their parents never tell them this, but in so many ways, that is the signal that is sent. We need to be aware of this message that goes hand-in-hand with our Western approach to work and ministry, and to directly combat it, both in word and deed. May the next generation of Western MKs grow up knowing deep down that while their parents often had to sacrifice family time for ministry, they were always more important to mom and dad than the ministry was.

I’m sure this long list is not conclusive, but these are some of the common and major handicaps that we have seen Western missionaries bring with them to the mission field. For the sake of the nations, we need to be aware of these default ways that we have been shaped by our culture and to seek to reform our approach accordingly. The weaknesses of Western missionaries a hundred years ago are mostly very different from our weaknesses today, and in some cases, on the opposite end of the pendulum.

What then should we Western missionaries do to compensate for these handicaps? Here again, in summary, is what I recommend:

Come to the field and leave the field with the careful counsel of the believing community.

Build deep and rich friendships of spiritual equality with local believers.

Trust ultimately in the power of God’s Word and Spirit rather than your expertise.

Don’t let fear of contaminating culture paralyze you, but be intentional in the culture mixing that will inevitably take place.

Prioritize the Bible over culture, especially when it seems costly.

Go as deep in language and culture as possible.

For good contextualization, be open to all of your biblical options, even the ones that feel old-fashioned or foreign.

Carefully assess cultural forms and their meanings to see if they should be redeemed, contested, or rejected.

Remember that healthy work is often slow, small, and time-tested, and don’t be pulled in by the silver bullet methodologies.

Hold firmly and graciously to your convictions and beliefs, but hold your methodologies loosely.

Organize effectively and build institutions.

Embrace the goodness of authority and seek to exercise it and submit to it biblically.

Learn how to easily define and explain what a biblical church is.

Instead of making the mission field the lab for your church fantasies, reproduce sound churches that have the same core ingredients as all healthy churches everywhere.

Whenever possible, become an accountable member of a church on the mission field.

Exercise your legitimate spiritual authority as an ambassador of Christ by leading, teaching, baptizing, and in general modeling Christian faithfulness by example.

Embrace all the Bible’s options for church sizes and enjoy each season of church that God gives you.

Define reproducibility as broadly as the Bible does, and be aware of any arbitrary personal timelines for this that you may be bringing with you.

Make godly character and its development the strategy for raising up leaders, not salaried positions.

Stay committed to reaching your focus people group without neglecting the other believers and seekers God brings your way while you do this.

Be open, honest, and thankful for the strengths of Western culture.

Take wise risks and beware of the West’s infatuation with physical safety.

Keep going, even if faithful work takes decades to bear fruit.

Trust others wisely and shrewdly test for trustworthiness, knowing that some are enemies of the cross

Love others faithfully, even when that means you’re accused of not being ‘nice.’

If you are a Western missionary, you are wealthy; seek to steward it well.

Pursue defined partnership and clarified unity.

Invest in infrastructure for the future of the local believers.

Honor those you’ve fallen out with.

Make God’s glory and affirmation your central motivation, rather than hell.

Be open to others’ concerns about your missionary work.

Learn how you respond to conflict and suffering and why.

Make sure your kids know they are more important than your ministry.

Embrace this kind of posture, Western missionary friends, and we will have, by God’s grace, compensated for many of our cultural handicaps. And I believe our lives and work will show the difference.

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 give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

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

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so Iโ€™ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts Iโ€™ve written so far. You can peruse that here.

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

Photo from Unsplash.com

Peace – A Poem by a Local Believer

Peace
by Shepherd H

My God is a God of peace, and he loves his sons
He stands at heartโ€™s door, guest of whosoever wants
His fatherly warm embrace, open to his children
His words are like a joyful flower garden
If any walk in his way, he also will be Godโ€™s guest
Two thousand years ago, his blood he sacrificed
Only Christ is God, truth, purity, and generosity
If a disciple of Jesus, youโ€™ll not perish in any difficulty
How happy I am when I hear Godโ€™s Word! 
The water of faith fills my mind and my heart

This is my translation of another poem by the late local poet, Shepherd H, which focuses on the peace that the Father gives, the sacrifice and exclusivity of Jesus, and the effect of God’s word upon the heart of a believer. The poem also contains several biblical images that are also very Central Asian.

The first is that of hospitality. Central Asian culture highly values warm and lavish hospitality, and, in this poem, God is portrayed as both potential guest and potential host. He is ready to come and honor whosoever would open their heart to host him. And he is ready in turn to host any who would walk in his way. Hospitality in Central Asia is often reciprocal like this. One family hosts another and then gets invited by that same family in turn, in a long-term contest of outdoing one another in showing honor.

This theme connects with passages like Revelation 3, where Christ knocks at the door and offers to come in and eat with the one who would repent. It also echoes the book of Luke and elsewhere, where Christ is portrayed as the great host of God’s kingdom.

The second Central Asian image is that of a joyful flower garden. In the high desert browns of this part of the world, the locals adore their small plots of green grass and bright flowers. They often give lavish care to these little oases of greens and pinks and yellows where they will sit on summer evenings sipping chai and munching on cucumbers and sunflower seeds. The words of God are compared to this kind of garden. A place of joy, life, refreshment, and refuge.

This theme, of course, echoes Eden, which in turn is echoed by the temple and the promised land, and is fulfilled in the new heavens and new earth.

In a similar vein, the word of God is also compared to water, water of faith that fills the poet’s mind and his heart, just as locals might drench their trees’ roots morning and evening to keep them alive, healthy, and even fruitful in the deathly summer heat. The fig trees, for example, eagerly soak up the water and then go on to give the sweetest of fruit even in the hottest part of the year. So the believer delights to soak up God’s word and, in turn, bears the fruit of the Spirit even in the midst of suffering – fruit such as the title of this poem, peace.

This final theme reminds us of Jesus in John 4, the living water. Of this water, Jesus promises, “The water that I will give him will becomeย in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.โ€

An internal spring of overflowing eternal life? A gift? No wonder the poet says, “Only Christ is… generosity.” And no wonder he is so happy.

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 give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

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

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

Photo from Unsplash.com

The Earliest Painting of a Biblical Scene

The earliest known painting of a biblical scene comes from a house in Pompeii, the Roman vacation town destroyed in a volcanic eruption in A.D. 79. Just as wisdom is one of the emphases of this blog, this first known biblical painting also focuses on wisdom, depicting one of the most well-known scenes where its power is put on display. The painting (which you can see here) is unmistakable to anyone who knows their Old Testament. It shows King Solomon discovering the identity of the true mother by shrewdly calling for the baby in dispute to be cut in two, which is recounted in 1st Kings 3:16-28.

In an unexpected addition, it seems the artist also painted Socrates and Aristotle into the bottom left-hand corner of the painting. These two foundational Greek philosophers are observing the scene from the margins, looking on in admiration or astonishment as the elevated Solomon dispenses his wise judgment.

What this curious painting seems to tell us is that the Bible and its teaching were present even in this holiday town beloved by the Empire’s rich and influential citizens. The fact that it was painted on the wall of a home like this likely means that there were well-to-do Jews, proselytes, or God-fearers who lived in Pompeii, perhaps even early Christians. I think it likely that whoever commissioned this painting was from a Greek or Roman gentile background, hence the inclusion of Socrates and Aristotle. Viewed in this light, the painting is a kind of apologetic, arguing that the apex of Greco-Roman philosophy points, from the margins as it were, to the superior wisdom found in the revealed Word of the God. This would echo the kind of approach that Paul takes when preaching in Athens at the Areopagus – “As some of your own poets have said” (Acts 17:28).

If a gentile was the one who had this scene painted so prominently in his home, it could be a way of him arguing that his believing in the God of the Jews was not, in fact, a betrayal of the Western pursuit of wisdom, but rather, its unexpected and true fulfilment.

You can read more about this fascinating painting here at Biblical Archaelogy Society.

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? We need to raise 26k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. You can help us with this here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

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

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

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Church Membership Is Inescapable

I recently listened to CS Lewis’ address, “The Inner Ring,” for the first time. I was struck by these paragraphs, where he describes the ambiguous ‘inside’ that exists in so many human groupings.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline…

There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside…

Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognised the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the Russian Army, or perhaps in any army. But you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the school ring was almost in touch with a Mastersโ€™ Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of an onion. And here, too, at your Universityโ€”shall I be wrong in assuming that at this very moment, invisible to me, there are several ringsโ€”independent systems or concentric ringsโ€”present in this room? And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Ringsโ€”what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.

Lewis is so helpful here in drawing our attention to the fact that every group of humans has an inside group and an outside. So, when it comes to church membership, the question is not whether a church will have a membership or not. It’s really whether that membership is a defined system, or whether it is “unwritten” and ambiguous. In the real world, it’s either one or the other.

This is such a needed clarification because once we’ve framed the situation in these terms, we’re then able to ask which approach really is the most helpful, kind, and loving. At our current stage of Western culture, clear and formal lines that include some and exclude others tend to feel unkind and unloving, narrow, inauthentic.

But if, because of this, we choose to forgo a clear system of membership in our churches, we are in fact choosing to hand over the authority for drawing the inevitable inside/outside line to the fuzzy, shifting, and often cruel complexities of group social dynamics – returning as it were to the kinds of relational vibes that governed who the cool kids were (and were not) in middle school. I, for one, do not want that kind of system to be the controlling factor in who is considered a ‘real’ member of my spiritual family. Even worse, in places like Central Asia, the inside group is simply defined by who is currently in the good graces of the strongman pastor.

The thing that Westerners are so worried about implementing in their own countries or on the mission field, because it doesn’t initially feel nice or contextual, is the very thing that, in the end, proves to be truly loving and truly contextual. Because when church membership is implemented in a way that applies the Bible’s inside/outside lines, so that there are clear qualifications and a clear process in (and out), then membership is open to so many more kinds of people. It shouldn’t matter what your social background is, what your ethnicity is, what your personality is. It shouldn’t matter what your interests or hobbies are, your personal clothing style, what your political orientation is, or what your age or gender is. All of these differences that naturally sort humans into little cliques at work or school, all of them are put aside in the church, so that the doors to the local kingdom embassy might be thrown wide open to all born-again believers who are ready to obey Jesus.

Western evangelicals need to wake up and realize that church membership is inescapable. Their churches will always have an inside group, whether they realize it or not. In this way, membership is a lot like contextualization; everyone does it, all the time. To be wise and loving, therefore, we must learn to be intentional and biblical about 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? We need to raise 28k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. You can help us with this here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

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

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

Photo from Unsplash.com

How Sheep Stomachs and Kalashnikovs Can Lead to Better Preaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo from Unsplash.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo from Unsplash.com

A Strange Aversion to White Guy Monologues

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

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

Yet very few missionaries seem able to see this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Consciously Multilingual Mesopotamia

This is a region of so many world firsts for linguistic innovation. Unlike Egypt, China or India, its cities and states had always been consciously multilingual, whether for communication with neighbours who spoke different languages, or because their histories had made them adopt a foreign language to dignify court, religion or commerce. This is the area where we find the first conscious use of a classical language for convenience in communication, as a lingua franca, an early apparent triumph of diplomatic pragmatism over national sentiment.

-Ostler, Empires of the Word, p.34

Here, Ostler is referring to ancient Mesopotamia. This is a region – like our own area of Central Asia – that has been ‘consciously multilingual’ for as far back as we have records. This is a different posture toward language than many of us are used to who come from societies more in the monolingual tradition of ancient Egypt or China.

In a multilingual culture, a person is raised to assume that multiple languages will be heard and used on a daily basis. To gain a competitive advantage, as well as just for the convenience and joy of it, many will pick up two or three other languages in addition to the mother tongue spoken in their home. These societies do not assume that language use is a zero-sum game, where the use of one language inevitably means the demotion or withering of others. Rather, there is often a pragmatic long-term bilingualism or trilingualism. In one city close to us, many are even quadrilingual, using four languages on the regular. And they’ve been like this for countless generations.

Given the strengths and weaknesses of different languages, I prefer this approach that chooses to have not just one, but multiple tools in one’s toolbelt of tongues. For example, English may be fantastic for its motley plethora of specific nouns and adjectives (case in point – motley and plethora). On the other hand, English is a rhyme-poor language. So, for poetry, I’ll take our Central Asian tongue.

The Jerusalem Talmud would also concur with this position that languages have unique strengths: โ€œFour languages are pleasing for use in the world: Greek for song, Latin for battle, Syriac (Aramaic) for dirges, Hebrew for speech.โ€ Even God himself must have, for reasons of his own, chosen Hebrew and a short detour into Aramaic for biblical revelation until the coming of Christ, and then chosen Greek for the revelation that followed. Among his many reasons for this, one of them must have had something to do with the nature of the languages themselves – not that they were more holy or somehow superior, but that they were somehow more useful.

When it comes to missions, all this means that when sharing the gospel with a multilingual people group, we should be like the ancient Mesopotamians. We should feel free to share as soon as possible in a language they understand, even while we gauge over the long term which language might lead to the strongest advance of the gospel among them. The ancient inhabitants of Ur had a ‘diplomatic pragmatism’ when it came to their language use. Our own ‘spiritual pragmatism’ in language use should be shaped by whatever leads to the clearest and most compelling proclamation over the long haul. That might mean learning two languages, perhaps first a dominant (and often easier) trade language to see some friends come to faith and then a much more difficult minority mother tongue to see those friends formed into a church that goes on to multiply faithfully among its people group.

We also need to be careful that those of us from predominantly monolingual societies don’t impose limitations upon our multilingual friends that simply aren’t present in their language worldview. For example, the churches of one of our sister people groups hold all their Bible studies and church services in two languages. Their mother tongue is used for worship, prayer, discussion, and preaching. But the Bible is always read and studied in the national language. This is because they cannot read or write in their mother tongue. Yet because of the school system, they are highly literate in the national language. So, they simply switch back and forth as needed. To outsiders like us, this may seem a highly inconvenient or unsustainable system. But to a multilingual people group, this is fine. “We use this language for this part and that language for that part. What’s the issue here?”

We need to be careful that when it comes to big decisions like who gets a missionary and who doesn’t, who gets a bible translation or not, and whether or not we will make the costly investment to learn a second language, we are truly seeking to understand how ‘consciously multilingual’ people groups actually function.

They have a kind of freedom toward language that may be hard for us to grasp at first. It may challenge some of our categories. But if we can join them in that freedom, then we may be able to leverage it for the spread of the gospel.

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

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

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

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Good Contextualization Introduces Outside Forms

Many missionaries assume that contextualization means learning the local culture so that you can do things as the locals would do them – that good contextualization means not introducing outside, foreign forms. But what happens when the local culture and the local ways of doing things actually prevent indigenous believers from obeying the Bible? In this case, contextualization means learning how the local culture is weak and what must be added to it so that Christian faithfulness might result. Yes, there is a time when the good contextualizer intentionally brings in outside forms for the sake of the indigenous church.

We must sometimes import things like structures, forms, and methods from other cultures in order for a locally specific Christian culture to emerge. If our missions paradigm rules this out from the beginning, then our contextualization will be half-baked and we will find ourselves stuck in work that never breaks out of the chains imposed on it by our people group’s particular brand of fallenness. Herein lies another common blindspot of contemporary missions.

The brokenness and beauty of every culture mean that certain biblically-necessary categories and forms remain, ready to be discovered and redeemed – while other necessary things have long since disappeared or been gutted entirely. Take language as one clear example. Some unreached peoples, incredibly, retain a good word for atonement. However, others have no word for grace. The former word/form can often be redeemed, filled, and clarified with biblical meaning. The latter word/form must be introduced – and that from the outside.

Sometimes the issue is not language but what a culture lacks in terms of forms or models of organization. Our locals have the hardest time prioritizing the weekly gathering of believers. Local believers are willing to meet in their own homes for years on end with foreigners, but will not prioritize the weekly gathering with other locals if left to the structures, models, and motivations of their own background. Without the right kind of contextual intervention, they end up stuck in this disobedience for the long term.

There are several reasons for this problem of gathering that have to do with our local culture. First, when it comes to Islam, mosque attendance is optional, with prayer at home being a ‘good enough’ equivalent. In addition, there is no such thing as mosque membership. Mosque worship, as it turns out, is a surprisingly individualistic and casual affair, despite what it looks like from the outside when we see those rows of bodies bowing in unison. Political party membership does exist locally but it is a purely patron-client relationship, where locals are paid small monthly salaries to secure their loyal vote and occasional attendance at party events (which may include election-time vehicle convoys that honk and dance their way down our street at 1 am).

The one place that locals will show up regularly and religiously is family gatherings. It might be the weekly family picnics that happen in the spring and fall. Or, the weekly family visit to the grave of a sister who tragically died in her youth. But when Mom or Dad say it’s a family gathering, you have to be there. Locals will cancel everything else in order to be in regular, faithful attendance at family events.

All this means locals have no good indigenous models or tools for exercising committed attendance and membership outside of gatherings of blood family. Add to this the massive issues of trust that exist in this culture – and it’s easy to see why locals won’t/can’t gather weekly with the church. That is, unless they are pushed and helped to do so.

The two indigenous churches that we’ve been a part of have largely cleared this hurdle. How? In addition to the steady drip of faithful preaching and discipleship on these topics (“The local church is your true family!”), they have also introduced foreign structures such as church membership, church covenants, and church discipline – all of which helpfully require and reinforce regular attendance. Remember, none of these are structures that could be sourced in the local culture. As I wrote above, there’s no real model for meaningful membership and faithful attendance here outside of physical kinship. As for church discipline, locals are shocked when they learn about Matthew 18 and often swear that it would never work here. And as for covenant, the only local shell left of this crucial concept is the twisted doctrine of jihad.

This lack meant that the missionaries connected with these two churches made the choice to introduce these foreign structures and concepts (which I would contend are universal biblical concepts that always require local expression). This was not because they were ignorant of the local culture or secretly believed in the superiority of Western ways. No, it was because they were working hard to go as deep as possible in the local language and culture. And while they were doing that, they contextualized. They learned that local culture didn’t have the forms and structures necessary for obeying Jesus. So, that practically meant that forms needed to be borrowed, introduced, and adapted as needed.

The ironic thing is that many missionaries initially look at the use of outside structures like this and think it is sloppy colonial-style missions that just wants to copy/paste what’s been done in the West. What they are missing is that good contextualization shouldn’t merely do as the local culture does. Neither should forms or methods be ruled out simply because they feel old-fashioned or Western to us, the missionaries. No, real contextualization learns a local culture so well that it sees where its weaknesses are, and then it responds accordingly. It’s not about us or our baggage or our desire for some kind of pristine and isolated contextualized Christianity. It’s about helping the locals obey the Bible and working with them to find faithful ways to apply biblical principles in their context. If an imported form fills a crucial gap that would not have otherwise been filled, then so be it. Introduce that word for grace or that helpful process for interviewing those who want to be baptized. Trust me, the locals will find a way to make that form their own anyway. They always do.

Yesterday, we heard of some friends who are going to introduce a system of formal membership into the network of believers they’ve been working with for years. Now, these missionaries are some of the most knowledgeable and deferential when it comes to the local language and culture. They are veterans of great skill and experience. But the locals they’ve been discipling, like many of those we’ve worked with, will not of their own initiative prioritize the weekly gathering in the way they should. So, after years of teaching, modeling, and pleading with these locals, our friends are now going to roll out a system of church membership and see if that helps. They are bringing in an outside form in order to free their local friends from their specific cultural weaknesses – so that they might better obey Jesus.

My prediction? It will work. Not only that, but they will find this to be one of the most contextual things they’ve done so far.

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

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

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

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A Culture of Spontaneous (And Divine) Affirmation

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.

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

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