Chickens, Checkpoints, and Zombie Lawyers

“You’ve got to save me, sir.”

“What’s the issue, my brother?” the politician said over the phone.

“I was driving from desert city to mountain city with my chickens for sale. I had all the official paperwork ready. I passed the last checkpoint for desert city without a problem, but they wouldn’t permit me through the first checkpoint of mountain city.”

“I see.”

“I asked them why and they just said, ‘We’re not letting you through.’ So I turned around to go back to desert city, but now they wouldn’t allow me through that checkpoint either! Now I’m stuck in no-man’s-land, me and my chickens, between these two blasted parties. What can I do?”

“Well,” responded the politician, “The only thing you can do is try to get some barbecue supplies, and start roasting those birds for lunch.”

That is a real conversation that happened recently, as reported by the politician. He was on a show TV show ranting about the absurdity of our region’s checkpoint system and the indignities it thrusts upon the normal people of the region who are just trying to live and make a living. My friend, Adam*, told me this story yesterday, then later sent me the clip.

“Bro,” he said, laughing on the line, “One time I was in a bus going through that same checkpoint. When they stopped us, I was the only one they made get out. You know, ‘Come with us, Mr. Adam,’ and all that. Anyway, they took me over to their little plastic shed and sat me down to ask me some questions. They made me empty out all the contents of my bag and kept asking me if I had any guns on me, trying to act very concerned about security. Then the guard talking to me up and leaves the room – and leaves his AK-47 on the chair right next to me!”

“He gets back to the room and tells me they didn’t find any gun after all. So I said to him, ‘Well, I found a gun for you, the one you left for me right here on this chair!'”

These checkpoints didn’t used to be there. After all, these two cities and the surrounding areas they control belong to the same people group. But in previous decades there was a civil war between the two parties that control these cities, and the checkpoints went up. There are now around eight of them on the two-and-a-half hour drive from one city to the other. Any time tensions flare up between the political parties, the checkpoints get more onerous, the politicians and bureaucrats using them to enact their personal vendettas against one another.

The particular checkpoint area Adam was telling me about is where the front lines of these two tribal-mafia-style political parties meet. In between them is a no-man’s-land, perhaps half a mile long. There’s a small cement mosque in this area intentionally painted in the colors of both of the political parties, but it’s not fooling anyone. This is no longer technically a war zone, but it could become one at the drop of a hat. In the meantime, it seems designed to just make things harder for everyone.

You’ll probably be waived through the last checkpoint as you leave one territory, but then be greeted with at least the suspicious body language of a soldier leaning in your window wanting your ID, what you were doing in that other city, and just what exactly you plan on doing in our city. There’s even a linguistic element to this, with both cities having different dialects, perhaps comparable to a Scottish vs. Texan accent. They seem to enjoy placing guards at these checkpoints that emphasize these dialect differences for some kind of Shibboleth effect. In the beginning it was very confusing for me, but after a while it became a sort of challenge to see if I could not only understand their questions but even respond in the right dialect. When we got it right the guards would be so charmed by these goofy Americans attempting their dialect that they would usually just wave us through. We eventually found this even more effective than the otherwise sound principle of “speak English to the men with guns.”

“Our moving truck was stuck in that no-man’s-land for hours one time as well,” I told Adam. “When we moved from mountain city to desert city we had a lawyer who told us not to worry about the paperwork, because he’s got patronage.”

“Oh no, you had a zombie lawyer!” Zombie is one of Adam’s favorite terms for someone who is essentially an inside member of the very corrupt bureaucracy of his country.

“Yes, well this zombie lawyer told us that because his sister was so important in the government, instead of paperwork, we should just give him a call and he’d work his magic to get us through the checkpoint. Well, he was wrong. They let our moving truck through one of them, but not through the other, and it was stuck there for hours.”

“In the end, the only way we got through was by calling in a favor from Ahab*. Remember him?”

“No! The snake?”

“Yep, the super deceptive guy who split the church. Well, someone called him because his brother is somebody important in the secret police. So, with the help of both of these very shady men we finally got our stuff through. It was a nightmare.”

“Bro, the zombie lawyer and the snake, that’s a bad day. Maybe it would have better to just have a barbecue, like the chicken guy!”

I am so grateful for friends like Adam who can help me laugh at the absurdity of it all.

I have also become more thankful for the common grace of open roads within the same country. My local friends are amazed to hear that you could drive for hours and hours in the US and through multiple states and never have to stop for a checkpoint. I remember hearing the bad news during the Covid culture wars that blue states were talking of putting up vaccine checkpoints at the borders of red states, and suddenly blurting out to the radio, “No, no, no, you do not want to start that game!”

We laugh about our checkpoints, but they can be an expression of the banality of evil. Sin makes people fools. And evil uses systems full of fools to make things complex and annoying that should be simple and easy. It’s like a system-wide equivalent of the demon-possessed man, Weston, in Perelandra, when he decides to wear Ransom down by simple repetition of his name over and over again.

“Ransom… Ransom… Ransom… Ransom… Ransom… Ransom…”

“What!?”

“Nothing…”

“Ransom… Ransom… Ransom.”

But foolish systems like this don’t stop at mere nuisance. They can actually contribute to oppression of the poor and of hard-working laborers. Why should that chicken farmer be prevented like that from doing work that serves his family and serves his neighbor? It can even hinder gospel work. As Westerners, we navigate these checkpoints relatively easily. But our Latin American colleagues are given a much harder time since they physically resemble those from an enemy people group. We’ve even had to factor the risks of these checkpoints into contingency conversations with local believers, in the chance that they would someday need to flee from one city to another.

One Christmas, we decided to try to use the checkpoint system to do some simple seed sowing. We got a bunch of small, fancy chocolate boxes, one for each checkpoint. The plan was to give one out with a small portion of scripture each time we were stopped and to tell them that today was the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, our savior. As is customary on any big holiday, we would hand over the gift with a hearty “Congratulations!” Or, literally-translated, “May you be holy!”

The Muslim checkpoint guards really didn’t know what to do with us, but we at least succeeded in providing them with something unusual to talk about later, some chocolate to eat, and perhaps some scripture that would sit on their shelves like a spiritual time bomb. Most don’t know that Dec 25th is Christmas, thinking that New Year’s Day and Christmas are the same thing. The guards didn’t give us a hard time that day, instead smiling bemusedly as they waved us through.

Perhaps my favorite checkpoint story came late one afternoon. We pulled up to the checkpoint, the kids asleep in the back seat, my wife nodding off in the front.

The guard leaned in, looked at me, looked at my wife, and then squinted hard at me.

“Tell me, brother, what exactly are you doing with that foreign woman?”

I couldn’t help smiling as I explained to him that that foreign woman was actually my wife, that we were both foreigners, et cetera, et cetera. To this day, it’s a line my wife and I will recite to each other, one way the absurd checkpoint system has now contributed to our family’s lore and oral tradition.

So I guess the checkpoint system hasn’t been all bad. But it’s mostly bad. And I hope they do away with it all someday – and that they didn’t make that poor guy have to barbecue his chickens.

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*Names changed for security

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Burying the Talents of the Great Rewarder

A number of months ago I was reading the parable of the talents to my kids at bedtime. There was nothing unusual about the night. I was leaning against the doorframe to the bedroom they all currently share, Bible open in my hands. The lamp was turned off in their room to help them settle down and I was relying on the hallway light for my reading. The plan was simple as always. Read a little bit, discuss a little bit, sing a song or two together, pray, give kisses and hugs goodnight, and finally, navigate multiple attempts to get out of bed again for various and sundry reasons. It was a typical night, not the kind of time I would have predicted for the conviction of the Spirit to fall.

We were almost finished our reading through the book of Matthew and that night had come to chapter 25, verses 14-30. The parable of the talents will be well-known to most of you, but if it’s not you can read it here and I’ll also post it below. The summary is that a master leaves on a long journey, entrusting three servants with three very large sums of money (called talents). The first one receives five talents, about 100 years’ worth of wages for a laborer. The second receives two talents, about 40 years’ worth of wages for a laborer. And the third receives one talent, roughly 20 years’ wages. The first two servants spend the following lengthy period investing their master’s money and both double the amounts they received. The third servant goes off and buries the money he received. When the master returns, he affirms the faithfulness of the first two servants and then rewards them with both increased authority and joy. But the third servant explains that he played it safe and merely stashed his master’s money away. He says he did this because he knew his master’s character to be harsh and stingy. The master, in turn, strongly rebukes him, telling him that if he knew this he still should have at least put the money in the bank, where it could have collected interest. He then commands that the one talent be given to the first servant, and that the wicked servant be cast out into the “outer darkness,” essentially into hell. The parable ends with the third servant losing even the amount that he had preserved, while the first two servants receive even more than the enormous amounts they had ended up with.

This is a parable I know well, and have read dozens and dozens of times. But for whatever reason, when I read it this time (and read it for my kids, no less, not for me), clarity and conviction fell hard. The familiarity of the passage meant that I’d never really understood the whole bit about the master’s character. But I suddenly realized that this was at the very core of the parable. The wicked servant says of the master, “I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” Essentially, “You are a stingy, exacting man, so I didn’t risk doing costly work that would go unrewarded. I played it safe and stashed your money away.” In Middle Eastern culture, then as well as now, stinginess is viewed as one of the very worst vices.

I was struck with a question I’d not thought of before. What was the servant doing all those years when the other servants were busy trading for the increase of their master’s wealth? Presumably, looking out for his own wealth. And why? Because he did not believe that it would be worth it to risk spending all those years and all that sweat, only to have his master come back and take it all from him. If he invested for his master, he would labor and sacrifice and risk, and for what? A stingy master? No, thanks! He would instead do the minimum, follow the letter of the law, try to serve two masters. His master had given him this money to keep safe, so he would do that – and no more.

The other two servants seem to have had a radically different view of their master’s character. We see this from their actions. They do spend a long time using what their master had entrusted to them to generate even more wealth for him. How are they able to do this? Well, the parable tells us that they are faithful. In one sense, this is enough. Faithful servants seek to obey their masters above and beyond what they are asked, as if they are working as unto God, not unto men. But it seems that the whole back-and-forth about the master’s character is giving us a clue that the other servant’s must not have believed that their master was stingy and harsh. Rather, they must have believed that in the end, their master was a rewarder. The end of the parable shows us this was indeed his true nature. But also consider how often Jesus speaks of heavenly rewards in the book of Matthew alone (5:12, 5:46, 6:1, 6:2, 6:4, 6:5, 6:6, 6:16, 6:18, 10:41, 10:42). Then, take the radical statement from Hebrews 11:6 that to please God, one must believe that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. No, this faith in the master’s character is the difference between the two servants’ faithful risk and the other’s wicked self-interest.

These truths cut to my heart because I was in a long season of doubting God’s character. After seven years of costly ministry on the field, preceded by seven years of costly ministry in the US, I felt like we were in shambles. We had worked hard for our master and even seen what he had given us multiplied many times over. A few dozen had come to faith, a church had been planted, hundreds had heard the gospel, missionary teams had been strengthened and served – tens of thousands of words had been written. But our health, our faith, our finances, our prospects? These all looked pretty bad. My heart had settled into a posture where I was counting up the cost, and feeling like God was harsh and stingy. I was no longer open to risking for God in the same way, instead feeling like I needed to take care of myself and my family’s future. Sure, I knew I would keep doing the essentials – trying to pray and read my bible, trying to write, trying to encourage others, doing bedtime devotions with the kids. I wouldn’t get rid of the talent entrusted to me – but I just might bury it.

“Is this really what I think of God’s character?” I thought to myself as read the cynical words of the third servant to my kids that night. “…a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed…”

I finished the parable and paused in my reading, quiet, sad, and somehow grateful to feel the sharpness of the Word after a long season of numbness.

“Dad?” my oldest son asked, wondering about my extended silence.

“Huh?… Oh, right. Um, what song should we sing?”

“The fruit of the Spirit’s not a coconut!” piped up our youngest. Ah, yes, a classic.

We proceeded to finish the bedtime routine, but I knew I would be chewing on Matthew 25 and this train of thought for some time to come. Deep down, I had felt that there was a part of me that still believed that God is not stingy, but instead a generous rewarder. That everything, absolutely everything, would be remembered and reflected in that eternal weight of glory being prepared for us. But this faith had been slowly buried under shovel-fulls of sorrow, self-pity, and spiritual fog.

In the following months the theme of God as a rewarder, and the resulting joy of those who out of this truth risk and suffer (and are therefore the most fully alive of any of us), jumped out at me from passage after passage. I saw it shouting at me from the Beatitudes, from Hebrews 11, from 2nd Corinthians 4, even from grumpy Naaman the Syrian risking seven dips in the muddy Jordan. I remembered how it was the truths of the coming resurrection that shook me out of seasons of spiritual depression in the past – one of the reasons I had initially chosen to highlight that theme in my blogging. Slowly, the faith to risk because of God’s character returned, until I found myself one night hearing my wife telling me she was now ready to attempt a return overseas. In fact, she was playfully kicking me while she said this, asking me what was taking me so long to join her.

There were a number of powerful truths that combined to open my heart again to risk again, whether that means ministry overseas or back again in the States someday. But the first life-giving blow came from the parable of the talents, from a seemingly-normal bedtime with my kids, and with it the resolve to no longer doubt the character of my master.

He is the great rewarder. His commendation awaits. I must not bury his talents, but invest and risk them. Risk them all.

[14] “For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. [15] To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. [16] He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. [17] So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. [18] But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money. [19] Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. [20] And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more.’ [21] His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ [22] And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.’ [23] His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ [24] He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, [25] so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ [26] But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? [27] Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. [28] So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. [29] For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. [30] And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Matthew 25:14-30

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When Leonard Cohen Tried to Hijack Communion

Here’s a leadership skill we don’t speak of very often: how to shut someone down who’s trying to take over your meeting or church service. Everyone in ministry who has tried to lead meetings has seen the need for this ability at least once or twice. A participant has their own agenda, and whether its conscious or not, they are going to assert themselves and try to overrule the leadership’s plans for this particular gathering. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the smaller your church, the easier this can be to do. When this happens, it’s a particular test of both the leader’s wisdom and spine.

I’ve seen some pastors who are very gifted at this. Some divisive brother stands up in a member’s meeting and the leader knows he’s going to try to platform something he’s been arguing about with the pastors. So, the pastor issues a quick rebuke and command to sit down. And amazingly, the man obeys.

Needless to say, I do not have this particular manifestation of the Spirit. I lack the force of personality and charisma to respond in this way. Yet I have still faced my own share of others trying to hijack meetings I’m supposed to be leading. One week, a visiting Central Asian believer started a heated debate in our church service, claiming that we were unfaithful for serving grape juice instead of wine for communion – and this in an Islamic context. Another man aggressively tried to change the language of our Bible study mid-meeting to one that served him better. Never mind it was the weaker language for everyone else in the group. Yet another man (a visiting leader no less) forcefully coopted the man with the guitar and made our church vigorously sing several more worship songs at the end of the service because “that was what would please Jesus.”

We learned the hard way to never mention a church picnic until the very end of our meetings because the ensuing heated discussion about where to go, what food to prep, how to buy such food, and who should be invited would inevitably get out of hand. If you are new to this blog, you need to understand one thing about our Central Asians. They take their picnics very seriously.

As I said, I’m not very gifted in publicly shutting down disruptive people and getting the meeting back on track. But as with any act of service to the church, sometimes you need to do it anyway, regardless of gifting. In all of the situations above, I did my best to muddle through it, trying to balance gentleness and respect on the one hand, and firmness and authority on the other. Knowing that I lack natural authority in these settings, I’ve learned that much of the work needs to done outside of the meetings to build spiritual authority – via grace-based respect, trust, and loyalty with the other believers. This is so that they will follow a gentle leader in a tense moment when a strong charismatic leader would seem to be more effective. It’s also very helpful to have established the purpose and agenda of the meeting clearly and publicly beforehand so that you can more easily head off any unexpected attempt to take over.

Sometimes attempted hijackings are unintentional, and simply come from the toddling faith of new believers. My wife and I were laughing about one of these situations just the other day, a situation that involved (of all things) a song by the late Canadian singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen.

Our church plant had gathered in a nearby cabin to hold a Christmas service. Gathering like this allowed us to have an “indoor picnic” as it were, even though the weather outside was frigid. As part of this half-day gathering, we also held our weekly service, in which we would take the Lord’s supper.

My teammate and fellow temporary elder had preached, focusing on the Magi’s visit to Jesus, so that meant it was my week to lead the service. As I introduced the communion time, and walked through our three conditions for participation (faith, baptism, a heart ready to repent), one of the ladies from our team and one of the local ladies got up, getting ready to distribute the torn flatbread and chai cups containing grape juice.

Sitting to my right was Timothy*, one of the believers who only gathered with us once a month or so due to security fears. He and his wife had been regular attenders during their first year, but after the church had been visited by the security police, they had come around a lot less. However, they could almost always come to any sort of picnic event we held, since they felt that these kinds of social events gave them greater cover if questioned by their Islamic cleric relatives.

Timothy and his wife were still pretty young in their faith, certainly lacking in discernment, but the genuineness of their faith and affections was apparent. One time we visited them only to find out that Timothy’s wife was very excited because some kind of a local spiritualist woman had told her that she could discern that Timothy’s wife had been a Christian in a previous life. She was thrilled, feeling that this was a validation of her faith now in Jesus. We of course had to tell her that reincarnation is not biblical. Thankfully, she accepted this correction with humility in spite of her previous excitement.

When we practiced communion at this church plant, we would first explain it, then pass out the elements, then take a minute of silent prayer together. This time of silence was so that we would all have a chance to examine our hearts and confess sin to God as necessary. This was often followed by believers getting up and quietly repenting to one another before they then partook of the bread and juice. Most weeks, whether that was taking place or not, whoever was leading the service would end the time of silence by praying out loud, then lead the group in eating the bread and remembering Christ’s body broken for us, and drinking the juice and remembering Christ’s blood shed for us.

During this Christmas service, I remember being encouraged by how things were progressing. “Fencing the table,” excluding some present from communion, had been so hard for the local believers in the beginning. But they were truly taking ownership of it now, skillfully explaining in hushed tones to nonbelievers present and unbaptized believers why it was better for them wait to partake in communion until they could meet all three of the conditions I had laid out.

The elements were distributed and the time came for the minute of silent prayer. As I bowed my head I suddenly heard a song playing loudly from a smartphone. I peeked to my right. It was coming from Timothy’s phone. His head was bowed, but he was holding his phone up, clearly playing it for the benefit of the group in this moment of self-examination. Right away, I realized I knew those guitar chords. I knew those lyrics “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.” I had known them ever since the movie Shrek had popularized the song for my generation. It was Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

In spite of its hauntingly beautiful melody and use of the term Hallelujah, this song is not a spiritual one. It is, at best, about the dark side of love. But it also contains lyrics that hint at darker sexual themes. The tricky thing is that it’s written with clear allusions to the biblical stories of David and Samson. So, many in the West play it at weddings and funerals, hearing these biblical allusions and Hallelujah repeated over and over and think that it must be some kind of spiritual love song. Timothy, with his intermediate English, had made the same mistake. And through him, Leonard Cohen was hijacking the service, taking it in a direction it did not need to go.

Timothy, to his credit, was just trying to serve the body in this simple way. He had found a beautiful song that he thought was a Christian one. But I knew that one of those “save the meeting” moments was upon us. Here we were, in the middle of communion, and I realized that we were about to be serenaded by “You saw her bathing on the roof; her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you” – and other lyrics that get even more awkward. Even if most of the locals would miss it, at least a third of our group were native English-speaking teammates and kids.

It was time to pivot. Bold leadership was called for. So, our silent prayer ended extra early that night. I’m sure it wasn’t this bad, but I remember awkwardly clearing my throat and belting out an extra loud prayer right before the whole roof-bathing part of the song. The group seemed to jolt awake, interrupted in the middle of their prayers of confession by a service leader who seemed unusually twitchy. An intentional glance from me at Timothy’s phone meant he got the message, and duly tapped off the music mid Hallelu–

Hijacking averted.

The rest of the evening went well. The fellowship was sweet, the food was celebratory, the gospel was shared, the electricity stayed on. Timothy did come over at one point to see if he had made some kind of mistake with the song. I assured him that I knew his heart was to serve the other believers as they were praying, and not to worry about it. I knew he was sensitive enough to not try that again without talking about it beforehand.

My wife and I laugh whenever we remember this incident. You really can’t predict the kind of things you’re going to face in the messiness of local church or church planting ministry. But meeting hijackings are not always this innocent, nor always so easily averted. Paul speaks of the importance of order in the church service and calls for quick action against the divisive man (1 Cor 14:40, Titus 3:10). Jesus models this as well with a number of his sharp, public rebukes and redirections (Luke 13:15, Luke 11:27-28, Matt 16:23). Faithful leaders need to do likewise.

For those who are leaders or who aspire to be so, we need to be ready to intervene against hijackers. Some of them will be wolves, dangerously trying to mislead the flock. Some will merely be misguided believers with good intentions. Wise leadership will be willing to guard against any and all attempts to take over – even if they come from dead Canadian musicians on a Central Asian’s smartphone.

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*Names changed for security

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Persian Missionaries Had Reached the End of the World

Before the end of the first century the Christian faith broke out across the borders of Rome into “Asian” Asia. Its first roots may have been as far away as India or as near as Edessa in the tiny semi-independent principality of Osrhoene just across the Euphrates. From Edessa, according to tradition, the faith spread to another small kingdom three hundred miles farther east across the Tigris river, the kingdom of Adiabene, with its capital at Arbela, near ancient Nineveh. By the end of the second century, missionary expansion had carried the church as far east as Bactria in what is now northern Afghanistan, and mass conversions of Huns and Turks in central Asia were reported from the fifth century onward. By the end of the seventh century Persian missionaries had reached the “end of the world,” the capital of T’ang-dynasty China.
Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 1, pp. xiv-xv

If you want to look up these locations on a map, their contemporary names are as follows:

Edessa, capital of Osrhoene – Şanliurfa, Turkey

Arbela, captial of Adiabene – Erbil, Iraq

Bactria – Region including Kunduz, Afghanistan, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Chang’an, Capital of the T’ang dynasty – Xian, China

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What Missionaries Fear About House Church and Big Church

Floor mosaic from Byzantine church in Capernaum, built on top of a 1st century house that may have been Simon Peter’s

Last week I wrote on some fundamental struggles inherent in the house church and “big” church models; namely, house churches struggle to organize naturally and big churches struggle to multiply naturally. Today, I want to address two common fears present when Christians or missionaries move from one model to the other, either from house church to big church (i.e. churches that meet in other dedicated facilities), or from big church to house church. My hope is that awareness of these fears and concerns will lead to greater freedom among missionaries or other believers who might need to shift models for good reasons.

For our context in Central Asia, both models of church are truly helpful and needed. We were surprised by this, having assumed that the house church model would be the only one possible and strategic. But we eventually learned that for many in the cities, and especially those with any kind of government salary, they were far more willing to meet in more traditional big church settings than in homes. This has been the majority of the believers we’ve been personally in relationship with during our time on the field. Believers from the villages, however, or those with more conservative relatives, have proved far more willing to meet in security-conscious house church gatherings.

The posture that led to freedom was realizing that we could plant healthy New Testament churches in either model. It was not an either/or. We and our colleagues could faithfully plant a more open big church in the city or plant a semi-open house church in the village, depending on the ministry context God placed us in. These models were helpful with the particular fears of locals regarding persecution. Those more at risk of government persecution were helped to meet in a more “respectable and sanctioned” setting. Those more at risk of family persecution were helped to meet in a more private setting. For any readers concerned that this sounds like pragmatism, I would contend that this is instead simply a way to apply Jesus’ command to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” in a context where local believers are like sheep among the wolves (Matt 10:16). Different contexts will bring their own reasons, but I continue to contend that both house church and big church models are helpful and needed just about everywhere.*

What are the fears that missionaries struggle with when switching from a big church to a house church, or from a house church to a big church? Here, I’ve seen two primary concerns emerge in my own heart and in the hearts of others as we’ve had to go back and forth over the years. When moving from a big church to a house church, we fear that house churches are not spiritually safe. And when moving from house church to a big church, aside from concerns about reproducibility, we fear that big churches are not spiritually authentic.

When moving from a big church model to a house church model, many doubt if the house church approach is spiritually safe. Here’s what I mean by that. Believers might doubt that the house church model can adequately protect against heresy. How can adequate pastoral oversight exist in a group which seems so small and informal? Or they might doubt that such intimate gatherings can happen without being hijacked by immature or deviant people who are present. There may also be fears that without the same kinds of institutional structures there is no guarantee of longevity – the house church could simply dissolve and disappear over night. Or, that house churches are particularly prone to domineering-leader rule.

These fears are not illogical, but rather quite natural for someone who has come from a big church background. Such a believer is used to the structures and size culture of a bigger church providing a measure of safety against these possibilities. More pastors and more centralization can indeed mean better protection against false teaching. The way big churches tend to run their services, and even the size of the congregation, makes it harder for an individual to hijack the meeting. Big church formal organization and even buildings are aids to longevity. Bigger congregations can indeed balance pastoral power. But if we are honest, none of these things have protected countless big churches from heresy, hijacking, dissolution, or dictatorial leaders. The benefits of a certain size culture are helpful aids, but they are not the main thing that protects a church from these dangers.

Yes, all of the above dangers can indeed befall a house church – and I’ve seen all four – but that doesn’t mean they are inevitable. If the planters, leaders, and members of a house church are committed to becoming a healthy New Testament church, then they can fend off these dangers just as effectively as any big church can. It starts with the commitment to obey the Scriptures in everything commanded regarding the structures and life of a local church – even in those areas that feel less natural given the small size of the group, like intentional and organized leadership, membership, giving, discipline, etc. From that core conviction, faithful leaders and members then combat heresy, rebuke divisive people, hold their pastors accountable, and continue to gather as a church for the long-term – just like any other church would.

Remember that all of the churches in the New Testament that we know of were house churches. The majority of churches in the first three centuries continued to be house churches. And in many contexts of persecution and mission throughout history (even in the West) have seen periods of faithful house churches and house church networks. There is good precedent for faithfulness in this model, and for the potential for house churches to be spiritually safe. It’s not about the model, it’s about the faith and obedience of the believers within it.

However, the missionary who goes the other direction, who moves from steeping in house church Christianity to attending a big church, will be faced with a very different fear – that big church is not spiritually authentic. I remember wrestling with a lot of cynicism when attending big churches after a year and a half in house church contexts. How was I to know that the worship team (with their smooth, planned transitions) was truly worshipping and not just putting on a show? There seemed to be so much room in a group that size to fake it, to wear masks, and to just go through the motions. How could I know what the other believers were really going through when the group was not ten, but two hundred strong? The majority of the room was just passively receiving, and not actively using their spiritual gifts. These were things that were much less likely given the size culture of the house churches I had been attending.

These fears make a lot of sense when you consider the perspective of someone coming from a house church background. But once again, honesty compels us to say that there are plenty of house churches that also struggle with believers faking it, hiding what’s really going on, and sitting passively instead of using their gifts to build up the body. Their smaller size has not made them immune to these dangers, even though it makes it somewhat easier to combat them. Again, it’s not the model, it’s the faith and obedience of the believers within it.

In a big church where the planters, leaders, and members are committed to being a New Testament church, they will labor to build structures and a culture that promotes spiritual authenticity, transparency, and as many members using their gifts as possible – even when these things feel less natural for a church of their size. This is why so many big churches are committed to having things like small groups, ministries focused on particular demographics within the church, and discipleship classes. They are seeking to create house-church-like structures within the broader body that can account for those things that can’t take place in the large corporate gathering.

We should remember that very early on, Christians, many of whom were raised in the synagogue model, renovated homes into larger dedicated worship spaces. One very early example of this is in Capernaum and may have been the very house where Simon Peter once lived. Certainly, for the past 1,700 years, when believers have had the chance to worship publicly and become a big church, most have chosen to do so. The sheer number of believers in the Jerusalem church and their temple porch gatherings (Acts 5:12-14) show us that larger worship gatherings do not automatically cancel out spiritual authenticity – or at least the apostles didn’t believe so.

God is the God of both small and big churches. There can be a beautiful redeemed simplicity to a healthy, organized house church, just as there can be a beautiful redeemed complexity to a healthy, multiplying big church. Both can be spiritually safe, both can be spiritually authentic. We need to be aware of our own fears and making sure that we are not relying merely on the strengths of certain size cultures, even those strengths are are present and helpful. Instead, we need to rely on the power of God’s word to build his church, whether we meet in a house or in a building with a steeple.

Rather than a posture of skepticism or fear, we need to embrace a posture of humility and service. If you feel the big church service is lacking authenticity, then model it yourself so that others might also enter into it. If you feel the house church is lacking in spiritual safety, then get to work putting the things in place that will better guard the church. Remember, it’s not ultimately about the model, it’s about the faith and obedience of the believers within it.

*Even in the West, consider the advantages the house church model could provide for those less able to benefit from larger services – those struggling with substance abuse, the disabled, those with sensory issues, etc.

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons

One Very Problematic Persian Rug

“Mr. Talent* was taken into custody by airport police.”

“What? Why?” I rubbed my bleary eyes in the hotel room bathroom, trying to understand what my wife was saying on the other end of the line.

“They found the AirTag in the rug and thought it was a spy device.”

“Oh no.” I tried to keep a low voice since my brother was still asleep in the hotel room.

“He came to pick up the rug today, just like you asked him to. But then they detained him. Mark* kept trying to get ahold of you, but couldn’t reach you, so he called me. I didn’t really know what was going on either and I also couldn’t get through to you. Where have you been?”

“Oh no. I’m so sorry. We’ve been passed out in a hotel room in Doha. We missed our connecting flight and they put us up in a hotel in the city. We didn’t get any sleep last night, so we got to the room and have been sleeping like dead men for the last four or five hours.”

“You’d better call Mark.”

I rang my teammate Mark right away, still standing in the hotel room bathroom. A similar conversation ensued with Mark, but with the welcome news that Mr. Talent had been released, though only after much haggling and persuasion on the part of Mark.

“They thought the AirTag was a spy tracker of some sort. I pulled up the Apple website and insisted that it’s a normal consumer device that lots of people use. But they’d never seen one and didn’t want to believe me. Why did you have one in the rug again?”

“Well, last time we flew back they lost two of our suitcases for good. I didn’t want that to happen this time around. I didn’t think it would cause any issues though. Don’t lots of people use them now to keep their bags from getting lost? They really thought it was a spy device?”

“Apparently they’ve never heard of them in our city. And you know how sensitive they are about spy stuff here. They were pretty freaked out, gave Mr. Talent a very hard time about it. I was able to talk us out of it eventually, but we’ll need your help to resolve things.”

“Understood.”

I shook my head. All this for a rug.

Poor Mr. Talent, our servant-hearted, ever-loyal friend. Then again, there was that time he had gotten me and Mark detained when he took us on a surprise outing with AK-47s.

So, how had we gotten here? Well, a number of months into our medical leave in the US, it was looking like we’d need to resettle in Kentucky for the long-term. A friend and former missionary had given me some good advice before I took a trip back to Central Asia to sell everything.

“Even if it’s costly, bring back whatever household items are special for your family. Trust me, it’ll be worth it, because it will mean a lot to your wife and kids.”

We didn’t have too many household items that were special for our family. But we did have a beautiful blue Persian rug. We had bought it at the beginning of our second term and for a number of years it had been a central piece of our family’s hosting and spending time with one another. It carried sweet memories of chai visits from neighbors, Covid lockdown dance parties with the kids, Bible studies with local believers, and nights where we all slept on the rug because the living room was the only room warm enough or cool enough to sleep in. Yes, it’s normal for missionaries to have to liquidate their households over and over again. But, I decided that if I could, I would try to save this rug.

However, at the end of our surprisingly successful five day trip (quite possibly the most efficient five days of my life), this rug stood out as a very problematic outlier. First, we had had to do research to make sure it wasn’t illegal to bring an Iranian-made rug into the US. It wasn’t technically illegal, but none of the shipping companies would touch it. We knew that some visitors had successfully brought back rugs on planes before. So then we decided to get it specially cleaned, folded, and plastic-wrapped for air travel, a process that wasn’t complete until late on our final night. We thought we would simply pay a little extra for the weight and size of the rug, but that it wouldn’t be too bad.

When we checked in, however, the counter staff informed us that the rug was six kilos too heavy to be allowed as oversize baggage. It would have to be sent as airfreight, but only if the airline approved it – and this wasn’t for certain.

An anxious conversation in a side office and a new plan gave us a bit of hope that everything might still work out. If the airline agreed, they would hold the rug for us, the following day Mr. Talent would come get the rug from the airline office, find out the price to ship it as air cargo, get approval from me via WhatsApp, and transfer the rug to air freight. They wouldn’t be able to send it to Kentucky, but they could get it to Philadelphia, the city where my brother lives. Then somehow from there we’d figure out getting it halfway across the country.

The next day, our plan B worked reasonably well – until the rug was scanned upon exiting the departure area. That’s when the scanner found the AirTag, and the airport police proceeded to detain Mr. Talent.

A number of hours later, after Mark had successfully sprung Mr. Talent from airport jail, my brother and I walked around Doha. I was eager to hear from Mr. Talent about the possibility and cost of air freighting the rug.

When he eventually called, I did my best to make amends for the fact that I had just gotten him arrested, making sure to pepper the conversation with multiple respectful titles like “my only-begotten brother.” But I could tell from his voice that even Mr. Talent’s enthusiasm for helping was wearing thin. Still, we had come so far, and I didn’t want to give up now. Would that not mean that Mr. Talent’s detention and all our efforts so far would have been in vain?

Mr. Talent then told me the price they were asking. I had to take a minute. It would cost more than the price of the rug itself to send it via airfreight. Yes, Persian rugs in Central Asia cost only a fraction of what they do in the West, but the air freight fee was still no sum to sneeze at. Yet there wasn’t time to hesitate, a decision needed to be made. I sighed and bit the bullet. If we were to live in the West for years to come, I really wanted to have that rug around to remind us of our beloved Central Asia. I told Mr. Talent to pay the hefty fee, and told him I’d reimburse him from our furniture sale money. Finally, it looked like all would be well. In several weeks, the rug would arrive in Philadelphia and my brother would pick it up for me.

The weeks passed quickly and one day my brother got a call from the air freight department of the Philly airport. The rug needed to be processed by customs, so he’d need to come in to fill out some forms.

Unfortunately, once he arrived at customs they told him there was a $180 per day fee to hold the rug, and that they had no way of telling him how many days it would take them to complete their processes. It could be weeks they might have to hold the rug until they got around to it.

“Please give us your license and sign these forms,” the customs guy said.

My brother absorbed the bad news, did the paperwork, but in the process also managed to joke around and make friends with the customs guy. This natural ability of my brother’s has always impressed me. It’s a gift he got from my dad and grandfather, a genuine delight in people that leads to spontaneous friendship – something that can also come in handy in a tight spot.

As he drove away from the airport, my brother filled me in on the ever-mounting cost of this whole rug endeavor. No one could say how many days they would hold it, nor what the total charge might be. But it was likely to be in the thousands of dollars. After my brother hung up, I slumped in my chair, processing the bad news. I should have just sold the rug with our other stuff and been done with it. Was I just stubborn and foolish to keep going like I had? And was there even a way out now? How do you balance the intangible value of keeping something like your family’s favorite rug with the very real fiscal costs that just seem to keep mounting?

An hour later I got another call from my brother. He was laughing.

“You won’t believe what just happened. When I was at the airport earlier, they forgot to give me back my license. I was laughing and talking about our trip with the customs guy and so neither of us noticed that I didn’t have my license when I left. I’m halfway back to my house when my new friend calls me up, horrified that he had caused me to drive without my license, and he tells me to come back right away. He felt so bad for his mistake that he said they would expedite things and process the rug right away. I’ve got it with me now in the car!”

I smiled and shook my head. Praise God the rug saga was finally coming to an end. And my brother – what a champ.

The rug sat folded up in my brother’s basement for a few months until he could make a trip to Kentucky, when he brought it to the little parsonage where we were staying. Sadly, it was too big for the living room, so once again we had to put it in a basement, still folded up and plastic-wrapped.

But at least we had it now in the US to remind us for years to come of our life in Central Asia. And once we found a long-term house to live in, the beautiful Persian rug would once again be one of our favorite places in the home.

But… then we decided we weren’t staying in the US after all, but moving back to Central Asia. And now I don’t know what I’m going to do with that blasted rug.

p.s. We did at last get to unfold and use the rug for an event with a partner church (pictured above). As soon as my wife suggested the idea, I was all over it. “Yes! Must use that rug for something!!!”

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*Names changed for security

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Cultural Contamination and the Sovereignty of God

One of the greatest surprises we experienced during our first term on the field was discovering that most of our locals did not want to meet in homes for Bible study or church. All our training, all the books, and all our expectations said that house church methodology was going to be the most effective form of church planting. We bristled at locals’ suggestions that we meet somewhere “real” for spiritual activities, like a church building. We cringed at how excited they seemed by all the trappings of Western church – sound systems, worship teams, pastors wearing collars, church budgets, even church buildings.

What took us quite a while to realize was that for our particular people group, this attraction to “official” Christianity was simply the result of where God had sovereignly brought their culture. As a newly post-tribal culture full of corruption and nepotism, and one exposed to the ravages of terrorism, they longed for order and healthy organization. They hungered for institutions that would balance strongmen, and the kind of solid, public Christianity that did not feel like a secretive ISIS Qur’an study. Our locals, the ones we were commissioned to reach, were deeply drawn to what to us felt like traditional, Western Christianity. And they found our ideas about house church movements unconvincing, even dumb. Even worse, none of their desires were technically unbiblical.

We were faced with an unexpected choice. Either we ignore the overwhelming feedback of the local believers, or we shift to a church planting strategy that risked looking very traditional and very Western, which missiology said was doomed to fail in an Islamic context. By God’s grace, our team eventually came around to the idea that the wiser thing was to contextualize to our actual people group, rather than what the books had told us was supposed to happen. We surrendered to the mysterious providence of God that had ordained that, for our people group, the most contextual and effective methods would feel, to us, like the most traditional and the least effective. This was the right call. When we let go of our fear of cultural contamination and started doing more traditional church planting ministry, the work finally began to get traction.

The missionary who believes his Bible knows that God is utterly sovereign over the trajectories of the world’s people groups and nations (Acts 17:26, Deut 32:8). There is no development which God has not ordained – and this includes developments of cultural transmission. After a missionary has labored hard to make the gospel the only stumbling block, yet still finds that the locals have adopted some of his home culture, he can rest in the sovereignty of God. The power of the indigenous church has not been forever ruined because the missionary (or someone else) introduced a certain service order which the locals have eagerly taken ownership of. No, God is sovereign, even over cultural transmission. In fact, the transmission that he ordains may become one of the particular strengths of the new indigenous church, such as when Middle Eastern believers gain a witness because Jesus (and emulating their missionary mentor) has made them more direct and honest in their speech.

Looking to missions history, we see many examples of how the sovereignty of God was working through the very culture the missionary introduced along with his gospel work. The missionary Bruce Olsen, in his book, Bruschko, writes of the farming improvements he introduced to South American tribes, which greatly improved their crop yields. The Lisu people of China became known as a singing people for Christ because the missionary who reached them, J.O. Fraser, was an accomplished pianist. And the illiterate, pagan Irish surprisingly became the great scribes and missionaries of Europe in the centuries after the fall of Rome. Why? Because Patrick had taught them of the love of Christ – and the love of books.

As in any area of practical theology, the sovereignty of God is no excuse for laziness or carelessness. Missionaries should be conscious of the ways local believers are adopting Western versus local forms, and act as mentors who try to guide this messy process. But we must embrace a deep trust in the sovereignty of God as we seek to plant healthy indigenous churches. Their cultures exist in their unique historical positions for God-ordained reasons. They are drawn to certain things and repelled by other things for God-ordained reasons. “The secret things belong to the Lord,” but we know that at least some of those reasons of providence are so that many will hear the gospel message, understand it, believe it, and become the indigenous church.

God is sovereign, even when one culture bleeds into another. Our approach to the fear of cultural contamination begins with the Bible’s call for direct ministry in word and deed and call to guard against false gospels. It ends with a deep trust in the sovereignty of God. Alongside these truths we draw from cross-cultural common sense, which invites us to take a realistic view of how cultures and relationships actually function. And we also lean into personal humility, which asks us to remember our equality as well as our limitations.

When missionaries are shaped by these truths, they are helped to keep the danger of cultural “contamination” in its place – as a real, but secondary danger. Gospel workers should keep a wise eye on it, but not let it be a primary driver of their missiology or become a fear that keeps them from the timeless task of preaching the gospel, making disciples, and planting churches.

This post is part of a series. Total series posts are:

1) Cultural Contamination and Scripture’s Emphases

2) Cultural Contamination and Missionary Common Sense

3) Cultural Contamination and Personal Humility

4) Cultural Contamination and the Sovereignty of God

This post was originally published on immanuelnetwork.org

To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.

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

Photos are from Unsplash.com

A Freezer Full of Pork Sausage

There was a season early on in our marriage where we were very broke. At the time we were doing ministry with Muslim refugees in Louisville, KY. We were seeking to make ends meet through a combination of free rent (since we lived in a refugee resettlement apartment complex and put on community events for the residents), part-time support from Christian friends given through NAMB, and sales of looseleaf Central Asian chai. Needless to say, things were tight.

One of our partner churches was a very small church in the rural midwest. There were around twenty members, and most of them would have also been struggling to get by. I remember one prayer meeting where a man confessed, in tears, that he had been bitter about eating only deer meat. He couldn’t afford to buy meat from the grocery store, so his family had to rely on what he shot for their protein. The man asked for prayer that he would be grateful for the deer meat that God had provided them.

The financial support from this church wasn’t much, but it meant all the more knowing that they were giving to us out of their poverty, in a way that reminded me of how the Macedonians had given to Paul. There is a danger of falling into an entitlement mindset when we live off the giving off other believers. Churches like this keep me awake to the wonder of Christian generosity.

One winter, we drove out to spend the weekend with them and the pastor told us that they had recently butchered some pigs and, from them, made a bunch of pork sausage. I didn’t grow up in the rural US, but I did grow up in Melanesia, where pig meat is the most prized and expensive of all meats. Anytime you found out you were going to eat pig, this was cause for celebration. Here was a link between the residents of the midwestern cornfields and the mountain peoples of my childhood. Though here it would not be slow-cooked by hot rocks in a pit in the ground, but fried up in a cast iron skillet.

Truthfully, on that trip I had felt a little disappointed that the church hadn’t been able to give a bit more in the way of funding. Though, of course, I was happy to find out they were planning on sending some pork sausage home with us. I could not have predicted just how much they were planning to send.

When it was time to load up our car, the pastor filled up an entire cooler’s worth of freshly-made pork sausage and fresh deer meat. As I recall, the cooler was very heavy as I stashed it next to our son’s carseat in the back of our little ’95 Honda Civic. We said thank you over and over for this lavish gift and the pastor and his wife just waved us off, smiling and downplaying it all.

This gift proved to be extra helpful because this was a season where our apartment was constantly full of guests, many of them Muslims. We were committed to opening our home throughout the week to host our refugee friends for lunches, dinners, and late night chai and sweets. These meals gave them a small taste of the community they missed so much and also led to spiritual conversations. But, of course, all of this meant we were regularly emptying out our fridge, freezer, and cupboards in order to feed everyone.

Now, however, we had a freezer full of meat that we couldn’t serve to most of our guests. Muslims are forbidden to eat pork. And we would never dare serve pork as even part of a meal when we were hosting Muslims, since they would find it to be so offensive and disgusting. Yet we had pounds and pounds of pork sausage in our freezer. This meant that my family had meat just for us that lasted for several months. Like Elijah and the widow’s oil, the pork sausage seemed like it would never run out. Throughout one of the most difficult financial seasons for our family, we had abundant meat to eat – and that of the most delicious kind.

In seasons of support-raising, like this one, I am reminded of the sweet provision that came from our friends in that little rural church. My wife and I have brought up the pork sausage many times over the years as an example of God’s kind and unexpected provision. He really will take care of us, whether that’s by hunting deer, monthly support, or even a freezer full of pork sausage.

Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:31-33, ESV

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 kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

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Three Things Missionaries Should Be Able to Talk About in Their Sleep

Every trade has certain areas of knowledge that a respectable worker in that trade should be able to teach on the spot. These areas of knowledge would be the fundamentals of that kind of work, the basic frameworks, principles, and formulas that lead to good work being done in that field. Imagine an electrician being unable to easily respond to a question about how electricity works, or a doctor who’s not able to provide an overview of the body’s main systems. We rightly expect that professionals should be able to respond to impromptu questions about the core of their respective fields – and that they would even be able to do this in their sleep. If they can’t, we are right to question the quality of their work.

Three things every church planting missionary should be able to teach on the spot are 1) What is the gospel?, 2) What is a true believer, and 3) What is a healthy church?

If a missionary is not able to provide a biblical summary on the spot for each of these fundamental questions, then how are the locals – with the added difficulties of different language, culture, and background religion – ever going to grasp these concepts as clearly as they need to? I’m not arguing against long sermon series, bible studies, books, or seminars on each of these topics. These are absolutely needed. Mainstream missiology might discount the importance of this kind of deep teaching, but it will continue to be essential for effective frontier church planting, just as it’s always been in the past.

We reformed-healthy-church types, however, sometimes provide the theological treatise and forget to equip our teams and disciples with the practical tools needed to both remember and then faithfully summarize that truth with anyone, anywhere, and at any time. We might differ with missionaries who espouse movement methodology, but they have understood one principle extremely well – if you can’t put your ecclesiology on a napkin, your disciples are highly unlikely to be able to remember it and pass it on to others.

Over the years, here are the three basic frameworks that I’ve used to summarize the Bible’s teaching on 1) What is the gospel?, 2) What is a true believer? And 3) What is a healthy church? All of these are borrowed from others, sometimes with a slight reworking here or there.

First, what is the gospel? Here, I’ve long used the four word summary of God, Man, Christ, Response to summarize the heart of the good news.

God is the holy and good creator. Man, created good, rebelled and is now cursed with death and hell. Christ is the God-become-man who was the perfect sacrifice for our sins on the cross and who rose from the dead, conquering death, and who now reigns forever. Anyone who responds to this message with repentance for their sins and faith in Jesus will be saved now and for all eternity. I’ve written previously on how we’ve used this 4-word framework as a regular part of our church plant’s services, with encouraging results.

Second, what is a true believer? Here I’ve used a simple two-point framework. A true believer is someone who 1) confesses the gospel message and their faith in it, and 2) shows evidence in their life of the new birth.

A true believer must confess with his mouth that Christ is Lord (Rom 10:9). So, if someone tells me they believe the gospel, but they can’t tell me what the gospel is (even in the basic spiritual language of baby believers), then I’m not ready to say true faith is present. An accurate verbal confession must be present, though verbal confession is not enough. They must also believe it in their heart. And since we can’t see their heart, we must look for clear evidence of the new birth, evidence of the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in their life (The book of 1st John is a great place to explore this). When both are present, even in seed or sapling form, then I’m ready to affirm that person’s faith and to start discussing baptism.

Third, what is a healthy church? Here, I’ve leaned heavily on the IMB’s 12 characteristics of a healthy church framework, which itself seems to have leaned on the 9 Marks framework. The problem is it’s very hard to remember 12 characteristics. So, as a new team leader a number of years ago I worked to try and find an acronym that would be unique/absurd enough to remember. The best I could do was “5 ships get a mop.” The five ships are Discipleship, Worship, Leadership, Membership, Fellowship. And GET A MOP stands for Giving, Evangelism, Teaching/Preaching, Accountability/Discipline, Mission, Ordinances, and Prayer.

This framework for remembering the characteristics of a healthy church is the most cumbersome of the three, but I have seen teams effectively trained in it and able to then reproduce it with others. This involved a good long season of running through this framework in each team meeting, until the team members were sick of it – which meant they now knew it well enough to write in on a napkin when their local friend asked them what a church was supposed to be like. What I’ve not done yet for this framework is find a way to make it memorable not just in English, but in our local language.

Each of these frameworks is a practical tool for ministry. If I’m interacting with a Muslim or with a local who thinks the gospel is “do more good than bad,” then I can rely on the four words gospel summary in that conversation with them. If a local thinks he is a Christian, but has merely made a shift of mental and emotional allegiance because he hates Islam, I can use the two points of the true believer framework to help him see he’s not yet a true Christian. If I’m sitting down with a first-generation local pastor who has never seen a healthy church, I can bring up the 12 characteristics of a healthy church and ask him how he envisions applying the Bible’s vision for the local church in his own congregation.

But they’re not just convenient tools. They are trustworthy summaries of the rich biblical teaching on each of these topics, which believers should be hearing taught in the normal life of the church. In this way, they can serve local believers in their struggle for the truth just like that peculiar hand gesture of the ancient church served them – pointer finger and middle finger extended to acknowledge the two natures of Christ, thumb, ring, and pinky finger touching to confess the Trinity (see photo above). We should learn from the ancient church that truths that are constantly under attack and at risk of misunderstanding or twisting call for faithful, reproducible ways of holding onto them.

These tools themselves are meant to serve the saints so that they are better equipped to remember and share the inspired Word of God. That means these tools are not themselves the main thing, but rather merely a pointer to the main thing. Therefore, we shouldn’t hold too rigidly to any of these tools or frameworks. The point is, like a good tradesman, to be able to remember and give a helpful answer on the spot for the core areas of knowledge in your field. These three frameworks, or other solid ones that you might come up with, serve to do that for the particular labor of church planters and missionaries – a field where eternity itself is at stake.

These kinds of tools also equip us to serve all believers, regardless of their literacy level. Many of the unreached and unengaged people groups of the world – not to mention many of the poor and working class in the West – are primarily oral in their abilities and preferences. Or they’re only functionally literate, meaning they can read and write when needed, but they don’t choose to do so for pleasure. When we train believers in memorable oral frameworks, we equip all the saints, regardless of their literacy level.

Test yourself. Could you, right now, summarize for a friend the message of the gospel? The difference between a true Christian and a false one? Those elements that characterize a healthy church? If you find yourself unsure of your ability to do this, consider memorizing one of these frameworks, or other good equivalents. Doing so will not only lead to greater clarity in your own mind, but also equip you to lead others also into a better understanding of these fundamental truths.

All Christians should desire fluency in these topics. But missionaries especially need to be “skilled master-builders” when it comes to the gospel, conversion, and the local church (1 Cor 3:10). After all, if they do not have mastery in these central truths, they will not be able to entrust them to local believers. We can guard the gospel and right doctrine by making sure those we send, those we train, and we ourselves know these three things deeply – deep enough to be able to talk about them in our sleep.

To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.

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

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The No Man’s Land of Cross-Cultural Friendships

Sometimes, friends from another culture experiment with violating the norms of their culture around you. It’s as if your foreignness creates a little bubble where they can safely break certain cultural laws of behavior and decorum. This is usually all fine and well – but only if you know it’s happening. When you don’t know it’s happening or don’t see it coming, it gets downright confusing, as nobody knows which rules are still in effect.

Why is your local friend not fighting you when you offer to pay for their lunch? Arguing over the bill is the respectable thing to do. Is that male student making casual eye contact during conversation with your wife because he is being inappropriate, or because he finds it refreshing that foreign women will actually talk to him like his sisters will? Did that person really just accept your honorable yet hypothetical offer to buy them a very expensive plane ticket? How did they miss the cues of what is, after all, their culture, not yours?

Our local friends can see when we are doing our best to become acceptable outsiders in their culture. But because we can never fully become cultural insiders, they must meet us part-way, which means altering some of their behavior for our sakes. One principle of cross-cultural relationships is that whenever genuine relationship is present, cultural adaptation is always flowing both ways, whether this is recognized or not. We become like our friends, and it’s always been this way.

Sometimes, however, your friends jump at the chance to do things differently, and when they do that without explaining what’s going on, you can get caught quite flat-footed. Here, I am reminded of a local friend who came to stay with us one summer. Last-minute hosting for a night or two is very normal in the traditional culture of the area. But local wisdom says that guests are like fish – after three days they start to stink. This friend stayed for nine nights, and all indications were that he intended to keep staying. Exhausted, we eventually planned a trip out of town so that we had a mutually face-saving way to kick him out.

Another example of this happened right after our youngest was born. My wife had made the brave choice to give birth in-country, and the experience was, shall we say, mixed. Because the umbilical cord was around our son’s neck, the doctors decided a C-section was necessary. When administering the anesthesia into her spine, however, they poked too many holes in the spinal cord lining. This meant that a lot of my wife’s spinal cord fluid escaped, leaving her bedridden for a week and with a tremendous headache and pain whenever she viewed light, or tried to sit up or walk around.

The upside of giving birth in-country was the care we received from the believing foreigners and locals. Our fridge quickly ran out of space for all the food we were given, and many local friends came for the congratulatory post-birth visits, which typically last 15-20 minutes. Local culture is practical in this way, respecting the family by visiting, but also giving a nod to the fact that moms who have just given birth aren’t in much shape to host. In our case, my wife was bedridden in a darkened room and in no shape for even much conversation, so I did my best to serve chai and sweets to the guests, show off the newborn in between feedings and diaper changes, make conversation, corral our kids, toggle the house electricity as it came and went, and make regular trips back to the bedroom to see if my wife needed more pain meds. Not for the last time, I thought to myself how utterly practical the extended family model of living is, where these responsibilities would be spread out among various relatives, and not all fall on one parent.

Most of our friends gave their gifts, read the room, and after twenty minutes or so announced they had to be going, politely refusing my multiple offers for them to stay longer. One couple, however, got caught in the foggy no man’s land of cross-cultural relationships I have described above. When I protested their departure – “But it’s still so early!” – they looked at one another, smiled, and then sat back down. Oh no, I thought to myself, it’s happened again. The wires of our different cultures have crossed. Three hours later, they were still there.

When midnight came, I was utterly at a loss for how to communicate that it would be super helpful if they left. I really didn’t want to offend them. The husband was a new believer with a very sensitive and emotional personality. His wife, not yet a believer, was literally a sniper in the local armed forces. So, I just kept the chai and sunflower seeds flowing and became an expert in how my wife was supposed to eat a gnarly flour/sugar/oil paste that locals swear by for a post-birth recovery diet. After all the visits, we had ended up with a massive bowl of the stuff in our fridge.

Sometime after midnight, our guests stood up again and announced they really needed to be going. This time, I couldn’t bring myself to honorably protest. Instead, I squeaked out something open to interpretation like, “Wow, what a time we’ve had, eh?” and we proceeded to say goodbye dozens of times as we shuffled out the door, through the courtyard, and to the outer gate.

I went back inside and saw that there would still be about 20 minutes of electricity before it would shut off for the night.

“Are they gone?” my wife groaned when I went back to check on her.

“Yes, they just left,” I said.

“Wow, they are… sweet… but what happened? Why did they stay for four hours?”

I just shrugged, “I have no idea…”

“Hey,” I smiled, “want some of that yummy paste stuff?”

My wife made a gagging face, laughed, regretted laughing, and proceeded to settle down for a couple hours of sleep before our son’s next feeding.

If you have cross-cultural friendships, look out for the no man’s land, when because of contact with you, your friends begin unexpectedly experimenting with their own rules. When this happens, the normal rules go out the window – and you may find yourself very much in the fog.

To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.

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

Photos are from Unsplash.com