House Churches Won’t Organize, Big Churches Won’t Multiply

When it comes to the contentious issue of whether to plant house churches or “big” churches, we’ve long advocated for both. True, our particular corner of Central Asia needs both because of its own issues – half our locals are afraid of family persecution and feel they can’t risk getting caught in a public church service, the other half are afraid of government persecution and feel they can’t risk getting caught in an illegal house meeting. But though these particular issues might be unique to our region, I would advocate that most contexts around the world would be helped to have both kinds of churches operating in a complementary relationship. There are tremendous strengths as well as weaknesses to house churches. The same goes for “big” churches, churches that meet in their own facility or another third space.

To account for these accompanying weaknesses, wise intentionality is needed so that churches can mature and become truly healthy. This intentionality will look a little different for each, due to the particular size cultures of these two main types of churches. In short, house churches will need intentional organizing and big churches will need intentional multiplying. Left to themselves, most house churches will naturally multiply, but will not naturally organize. And most big churches will naturally organize, but not naturally multiply.

Here it may be helpful to refer to a tool we’ve used in our ministry in the past, the 12 characteristics of a healthy church, broken down into three typical stages.

This diagram is simply a visual summary of what the Bible teaches about the local church’s necessary components. It also demonstrates the typical three-stage order in which these components tend to develop – and the two places of common roadblocks. Many house churches do not progress from stage one (Formative church) to stage two (Organized church). Many big churches do not progress from stage two to stage three (Sending church). When you consider what is most natural given their different size cultures, these roadblocks make a lot of sense.

House churches don’t have difficulty feeling the need to multiply. It becomes painfully clear to most present when a house group has grown too large for its space. There’s no more room to sit, the hallways are clogged, there’s no place for members to park their cars, the children are overrunning the meetings, the neighbors are complaining. House churches do have difficulty, however, in organizing. The small size of their group means that those present don’t often feel the need for intentional systems of giving, leadership, covenant membership, and accountability and discipline. The sense is that if these things are necessary, then they can happen organically, by group consensus.

This is why house churches need wise leadership that calls them to organize. By failing to intentionally organize, house churches miss out on the spiritual power that comes from biblical church order as well as leave themselves vulnerable to attack. Each of the characteristics in the organized church stage can sometimes happen organically. But wise organization means they will happen – and in a thought-out biblical way. When the church faithfully applies scripture to its own structure, when it does what the church is meant to do, spiritual power follows.

On the other hand, house churches that don’t organize are leaving themselves vulnerable to strongman, domineering leadership. If the church is not intentional about things like plural leadership, membership, giving, and discipline, the most likely outcome is that one man will fill that vacuum. He will be the sole leader. He will control the money. Membership and discipline will be simply whoever is in his good graces or not.

In addition to these points, organizing well means better relationships with any big churches that are in the area, who are often suspicious of house churches and their aversion to organize in ways that signal trustworthiness. This is very true in Central Asia and the Middle East, but it’s a dynamic present in the West as well.

Big churches, on the other hand, need wise leaders who will call them to multiply. Organizing happens more readily because big churches have met the size threshold where members and leaders naturally sense the need for better systems and structures. One hairy members meeting is all that is required for this revelation to occur. But because of the size culture of big churches, the most natural thing to do is not to multiply, but to simply keep growing. Without the physical stimulus provided by an overly-packed house, big churches will not naturally feel the need and the goodness of multiplying. Instead, as the church grows, the needs grow, and the felt sense that more people are needed to fill important roles.

Even in big churches that do believe the importance of multiplying through church planting, many will not know how to do this. So, intentional efforts will need to be made to teach and model what it looks like to raise up qualified leaders and send them out. When this happens well, the church will know the costly joy of sending away their best. Counterintuitively, this “loss,” this self-giving of multiplying makes a church healthier, as well as more obedient to the great commission. On the other hand, when church multiplication is not done, the church risks growing inward and stagnating.

It’s important to realize that house churches can organize just as faithfully as big churches. Big church advocates tend to doubt this. And big churches can multiply just as faithfully as house churches. House church advocates, in turn, doubt this. The actual organization and multiplication can and should look different, reflecting the different needs and abilities of these different models. But the principles underneath these forms should be the same. The key conviction here is that the local church can be fully expressed in both models. It’s not about the model, it’s about the intentionality of the leadership and members to pursue a biblical ecclesiology.

On the ground, many house churches won’t organize and many big churches won’t multiply. We need to be those able to help them do so, and thereby help them step into the fulness of the Bible’s vision for the local church.

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While We Eat Wittenberg Falafel

He agreed to meet with us to study the Bible. Now to see if he really means it.

Ali* is a friend from an unengaged people group. Reza* first introduced us to him when he was a newer refugee in the US. In the years since then, we’ve hung out and discussed the gospel in the US, hung out and discussed the gospel when he moved back to Central Asia, and hung out and discussed the gospel again now that he’s moved back to the US. We laugh about how we keep following one another from one side of the world to the other. But much more than I have, a whole network of believing friends have spent time with Ali and shared the gospel with him.

Ali is one of those confusing unbelievers who doesn’t seem to be drawn to the message of the gospel – nor to be particularly offended by it. His loosely-Islamic live-life-to-the-fullest beliefs don’t seem to have budged in the years since I’ve known him. But he’s clearly drawn to Christian friendship and Christian community. He’s a happy, generous, charming, loyal friend, the kind of guy sure to liven up any gathering. To know Ali is to know that he would give you the shirt off his back if needed – or round up his relatives to bust you out of jail.

All this means I find myself now at a loss when it comes to how to talk to him about spiritual things. My words and the words of so many friends just haven’t seemed effective. Neither has a rich exposure to Christian community. I still try to intersperse my conversation with truth, putting out spiritual hooks as it were, but I find myself surprisingly unsure of how and when to press. This means I’m grateful for other believing friends who do feel free to open up direct gospel conversation with Ali when we are together.

Last night, Reza, Ali, and myself got together at a local Middle Eastern cafe and restaurant. Turns out it was a place Reza had not been to since his days an unbeliever. This environment had him reflecting and talking about the craziness of his life back then and the difference that the grace of God has made since. I finished up my falafel sandwich and nodded gratefully as Reza directed the conversation to Jesus and to what his claims mean for Ali.

As Reza and Ali sparred back and forth in their happy and direct way, politely passing the hookah hose to each other in turn, I felt myself more and more able to enter into the conversation, attempting to play wingman as Reza led. The goodness of this was not lost on me. Here was a friend I had led to faith and taught to share the gospel, who was now years later showing me the way.

There were three points in the conversation where Ali seemed to be internalizing what we were saying in a different way. First, in agreeing that Jesus is the only sinless prophet, and that his birth and life is utterly unique. Second, in perhaps understanding for the first time our claim that as God-man, Jesus was able to die because of his humanity, even though God cannot die. Third, in hearing a metaphor for imputation in which a country’s president honors the son of a war hero for the sacrifice his father has made for the country, even though the son has done nothing other than exist in relationship to his father. This final illustration seemed to help him understand Reza’s biblical argument that we could be accepted by God based on our relationship with Jesus’ as our sacrifice and advocate.

I don’t know if last night’s conversation indeed shifted anything within Ali or not. However, I was encouraged to hear him reference previous in-depth conversations about the gospel, some from years past. He does remember those, I found myself saying internally. Ali’s manner is such that I am tempted to feel that all the truth and love that he’s been exposed to simply bounces off and is soon dismissed or forgotten.

At the very end of the conversation, Reza pivoted toward the importance of actually reading the Bible, rather than just talking about things. I shared with Ali how things had shifted for Reza when we moved from regular debate into regular study of the book of Matthew. As we spiraled around the idea of the three of us meeting to do this, it seemed like Ali actually agreed. There’s always a Central Asian Insh’allah (God willing) noncommittal dynamic when making plans with friends from this part of the world. So the proof will be when Reza and I make a plan and send a concrete invitation.

But it seems as if Ali has agreed to study the Bible with us. After a good long while of feeling like our words have been utterly powerless, I am excited to expose him directly to the words that are like “fire, like a hammer that shatters a rock” (Jer 23:29). I want my jovial friend to know true joy. But for that to happen, we’ll need more power to break through his spiritual blindness. To paraphrase Luther, in the end, all we can do is expose him to the Word, keep eating falafel with friends, and pray the word has its effect. In the end, the Word does everything.

I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philipp and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.
Martin Luther

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*names changed for security

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The Night of the Cane Toads

It was good to be a missionary kid in Melanesia the 90’s and 2000’s. Internet existed, but it was dial-up, pre-social media, and not yet in our pockets. This meant we had the chance to be a bit more creative with our boredom. One way that we did this was by doing our part to maintain a strong culture of pranks among the teenagers on the missionary base.

I have fond memories of toilet-papering different missionary’s houses, launching water balloons at the high school seniors giving rides to girls on their motor bikes, lobbing stink bombs and cough bombs into living rooms full of movie watchers, and causing other (mostly) harmless mayhem of this variety.

On a typical Friday night, many of the junior-highers and high-schoolers, whether base kids or dorm kids, would be out milling around, playing dodgeball, riding motorbikes, or hanging out in small groups. But some nights, especially during breaks when the dorm kids went back to the tribal areas, it seemed like everyone had already made plans, and no one was coming out. The base was dark, quiet, and lonely. One might wander around hoping to find someone to talk to, only to encounter the shadowy local security guards with their bows and arrows, or the ever-present cane toads who would stage a nightly mass invasion of our soccer field and basketball courts.

One quiet Friday night like this, I was out sitting on a cement wall with a couple other boys from my class and two girls. The girls cheerfully announced that they would have to go soon, because a group of them had secured the privilege of using the only hot tub on the base. We couldn’t believe it. Only one house at the far western edge of the base had a jacuzzi, set up under a covered balcony outside. And since this was the only hot tub on the base, perhaps in the entire province, it was a big deal if anyone ever got to use it. Apparently, five or six of the girls from our class had made arrangements, some kind of girls’ night – and we were definitely not invited.

As I recall, they seemed to enjoy flaunting this to some extent, which didn’t do much for the mood of those few of us who would be left by ourselves on a boring Friday night. So, after the girls left, I had the thought of pranking this girls’ night, thereby killing two birds with one stone. We’d find something fun with which to occupy ourselves, and we’d also get some revenge on our female classmates for their ill-advised flaunting.

But what to do for a prank? We knew where they would be and roughly what time they would be there. What sort of prank would rise above the common ones, and go down in the annals of MK prankery as truly worthy? Slowly, an idea formed in my mind. Maybe we could “recruit” the cane toads in our cause.

Cane toads, if you’ve never seen them, are a large, brownish yellow, invasive species of toad that have taken over Australia and Melanesia. They are appropriately warty (being toads) and as I mentioned above, they would emerge at night and hop all around the open lawns and sports areas of our school, looking for bugs to eat. It was all too easy to catch one, or if needed, a whole bucket of them. One just had to watch out for the poison glands, and the toad pee.

We agreed on a plan. We would collect an entire bucket of toads, sneak up on the hot tub, and while our classmates were enjoying themselves without a care in the world – dump the entire bucket of gnarled amphibians into the jacuzzi with them. It would be a lightning sneak attack followed by us immediately melting away into the darkness.

The three of us boys commandeered a large yellow plastic bucket from somewhere and went down to the basketball courts to collect our little coconspirators. It didn’t take long to fill up the entire bucket and soon it was full of a wriggling and hopping mass of cane toads – maybe around twenty of them. They had peed on us quite a few times, but we brushed this off as simply the cost of victory.

Casually and unobtrusively, we made our way all the way across the base, waving at the few people we passed and trying not to smirk when they looked askance at the moving contents of our bucket. Soon we were at the edge of a small field, just across from which stood the gate of the target house, and just beyond that, the wooden lattice that shielded the hot tub. It was perfect. The lattice would block our approach, meaning the girls would have no idea we were sneaking up on them until the very last second.

We snuck across the field and opened the metal gate as silently as possible. The hinges creaked and we froze, considering whether to abort the mission. But it seemed to go unnoticed. We could hear laughter and see movement behind the lattice. Now was the time to strike. We snuck as close as we dared to the lattice – and then we attacked. With a movement that took only a few seconds, we bolted around the side of the lattice, dumped the bucket of toads into the frothing waters of the hot tub, and then sprinted back into the darkness.

As we ran as fast as we could down the dirt roads, we wondered why there wasn’t any screaming. There had been some initial shrieks of alarm as we had shot into view, dumped the bucket, and took off. But after that, there wasn’t the kind of reaction we were expecting. I later found out that we had dumped the bucket so quickly that the girls hadn’t been able to tell what was in the bucket. Some thought it was just some brown leaves. However, soon they started to see and feel big brown-legged things – many of them – moving around in the foamy water. And then the screaming started.

We were halfway across the base when we heard the blood-curdling screams, and lots of them. Feelings of satisfaction and victory mingled with those of alarm as we realized that that level of screaming would probably trigger some kind of response from security. Still, we laughed as we ran. The night of the cane toads would be one those girls would never forget.

We later found out that all but one of the girls had leaped out of the hot tub in terror once they realized it had become the equivalent of the second plague of Egypt. One of the girls, however, who had grown up in a tribal village, stayed in the hot tub and began matter-of-factly plucking the slowly boiling toads out of the jacuzzi. At some point they had all been removed, hopping off into the nearby field, with only a few who had become casualties of the conflict. The girls then got back to enjoying their evening. And of course, plotting their revenge.

For our part, we greatly enjoyed boasting about our triumph for weeks to come and telling the story over and over again. We knew they would try to get us back, but really, what could they do?

One afternoon I came home and noticed that my mom was acting suspiciously. Mildly concerned, I turned down the hallway toward my room and was suddenly greeted by a cane toad, sitting in the middle of the hallway, looking at me condescendingly. I knew this probably meant something bad, so I hurried to my room and flung the door open. Rather than my normal bedroom with its usual high school boy decorations and trappings, I was instead greeted by a suffocating amount of pink – pink everywhere. The walls and the surfaces had been absolutely covered in hearts, girly decorations, and Precious Moments paraphernalia. And in the midst of the barbie-style devastation were two more cane toads. The girls had gotten their revenge, and not only had they recruited toads. They had gone so low as to recruit my very own mother. Touché.

It took an awfully long time to get all that pink out of my bedroom and to return it to its proper masculine state. But even as I cleaned and fumed and plotted how to escalate this vendetta, I remembered the quality of the shrieks after we had successfully completed our mission, and I still felt that it had been worth it. Yes, the night of the cane toads had been most definitely worth it.

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A Call to Start Seminaries Among the Unreached

As the situation currently stands, no believer in our people group of five million can attend seminary in their own language. No, seminary is not a prerequisite for faithful ministry, but the formal study of theology in an academic setting has often proved to be an incredible blessing for pastors and their churches. I sometimes wish I had a marketplace degree, but I have also seen how my bachelor’s and master’s in theological studies have borne hundredfold fruit in the different ministry settings I’ve ended up in.

However, in our corner of Central Asia, there’s also a practical need. The government won’t allow a church to be legally registered unless it has an indigenous pastor who has a master’s degree in theology. This requirement seems to be partly just making things difficult for non-Muslims, and partly a reflection of the culture’s high valuing of training, experts, and certificates.

In our context, we believe that if there is a path toward legality, then the honorable and Christian thing is to pursue it. And this is our long-term goal. Yet knowing that we need to obey God and not man, we have proceeded with starting undocumented churches anyway, even as we pray and scheme of how to someday meet these high requirements. Some of the churches that have been started are able to temporarily come underneath the legal covering of the small number of churches that are registered. Our church plant did this after being raided by the security police a number of years ago. But in a patron-client culture, this sort of relationship can often come with strings attached.

Even worse, some churches get around this legal requirement on their paperwork by claiming as their pastor one the handful of locals who in years past attended seminary in another country – although these freelance “pastors” no longer attend any local church and they lead questionable lives. These men know the power they exert over the churches they have these made deals with. It’s a dynamic ripe for extortion.

We believe that only men who are qualified and faithful according to passages like 1st Timothy 3 and Titus 1 should be pastors, regardless of seminary training. We believe that we should pursue legally registered churches. Yet the government requires seminary. Yet there is no seminary available in the language of local believers. You can see the bind.

The path forward for the long-term is to work to see a crop of believing men armed with master’s degrees, some of whom will be biblically qualified to be pastors. Toward this end, our first two local believers have started online programs, albeit only because they are fluent in other languages and were provided scholarships. Frank* has been involved in Southeastern seminary for a couple years now, taking classes in their Persian-language track. Alan* recently started taking online classes in English at SBTS. But few local believers know another language at the level required for theological training, which brings its own advanced collection of terminology and writing requirements.

Could non-residential theological training be set up with groups like Reaching & Teaching or Training Leaders International? Someday, yes, but currently we don’t have the minimum number of local pastors required to qualify as a site for these ministries. Eventually, partnering with these groups may be an answer to our need for this kind of training. But in our situation we need seminary training that will help raise up pastors, not just training for pastors who already exist.

“But seminaries aren’t reproducible,” says mainstream missiology. To that I would simply say there are thousands of them, all over the world. They are clearly reproducible, perhaps not according to someone’s arbitrary or preferred timeline, but reproducible nonetheless. Previous generations built these institutions all over the place. We, having reaped the benefits, now claim they are not really worth building.

Given these realities, I’d like to put out a call to start new seminaries in strategic unreached cities. Recent online conversations have highlighted that far more aspiring professors with PhD’s exist than there are open seminary positions. My costly request is that some of these men take the incredible training they have received and use it to start new seminaries overseas. Yes, starting a seminary in a foreign city will be much harder than plugging into a job in pre-existing school (itself still very hard work). But, in the West we have a backlog of potential professors. And in much of the rest of the world we have a theological famine.

To highlight our specific context, our people group has a hub city which would provide easy geographic access to students from the surrounding areas. This city even has enough freedom whereby an evangelical seminary could be established legally. Initially, there could be three tracks: one for classes offered in English and two for classes translated into the main languages of the regions. Some professors could then learn the local languages and eventually teach in them. After a few years, gifted local graduates could also be ready to teach. This city also has a healthy international church and a new MK school, so families of professors would even have believing expat community available. Starting a seminary in a city like this is far from impossible. But we lack the PhD’s, the funding, and most important – the men willing to take the risk.

It would take a unique individual to head something like this up, someone who is not only a gifted academic, but who is also a starter and administrator – and potentially also good at learning languages. Or, this could be pulled off by a team of professors where these gifts are distributed among them. My alma mater, SBTS, was founded by a team of only four professors. The first year they only had 26 students.

If you have a holy ambition to teach in a seminary context, have you considered doing so among the nations? You could found a seminary in a place today considered unreached that plays a pivotal role in raising up hundreds or thousands of trained pastors, scholars, and missionaries – some of whom might someday bring the gospel back to your homeland.

If this post stirs something in any of you out there, then I would love to hear from you. Let’s start the initial conversations that could one day give birth to new seminaries among the unreached.

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*Names changed for security

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The Prisoner-Scholar and a Bible For His People

Since 2011, our people group have had the complete Bible in their language – both Old and New Testaments. This is an amazing thing. The translation and publication of the Bible into any language is usually a long tale with many different players. Someday, I’d like to put that more detailed story together. For now, this is the summarized version that I’ve managed to piece together through various conversations over the years. So, consider this a rough draft of the tale, not yet history in the carefully-researched sense.

The story begins with Kamal*, a prolific writer and educator among our people group during the turbulent 1970s. Kamal was a short man who always wore a distinctive floppy scarf-hat and had a passion for his people group’s suppressed language. In spite of this politically dangerous interest, Kamal’s reputation as a scholar and writer was so strong that he was put in charge of the education department of his province. However, it didn’t take much to fall foul of the ever-changing governments of the country during that era. Kamal seems to have written something or to have held a position that put him in hot water with whichever military dictator was in charge at that point. He was imprisoned in the south of the country, far away from the mountainous homeland of his people.

Many years later, when I attended his memorial service, I learned that it was while he was imprisoned and not yet a believer that he first committed to translating the Bible for his people. Apparently, Kamal had a dream where Jesus straight up told him to translate the Bible into his language. Kamal, wisely, agreed that he would. But he was in prison. How was he to accomplish this enormous project? God provided the means through a new cellmate, a Syriac priest – who had an old Syriac Bible with him. Kamal and the priest could communicate in the trade language of the country, so it seems that the priest would translate from Syriac into the trade language and then Kamal would craft each verse into his native tongue.

By the time he was let out of prison, Kamal seems to have come to faith and to have written a manuscript of the gospel of Luke, made up of loose papers. He moved back to his home city and neighborhood, just a few alleyways down from where my family recently lived in our old stone stone. There, he continued to write and teach, unsure of what to do with the Gospel of Luke manuscript that he kept in secret. Given the political and religious climate of the time, it was much too dangerous to attempt to work on it or publish it openly.

Just a few weeks ago at Cross Con ’24, I learned that this is where a Lebanese ministry leader enters the story. This now elderly leader told me that he had come to visit Kamal’s country, having independently developed a desire to see the Bible translated into Kamal’s language. This was a time of political intrigue, assassinations, and guerrilla warfare, so this ministry leader had to be very cautious as he asked around to see if there were any believers who would help him begin the translation. Somehow, he was directed to Teacher Kamal’s house, where a relieved Kamal handed him his precious stack of papers and told him to take them back to Lebanon to keep the translation moving along. At least at that point, the project was too dangerous to conduct inside the country.

Over the next couple decades, an international coalition of believers worked on the New Testament translation together. From what I understand, these were believers in Lebanon, Germany, France, and eventually back in Kamal’s country also. At this point much of the translation was being done from German, though later work was to be done directly from Greek and Hebrew. By the time the 90’s came, a British Bible translator, Alex* was living in a different city of Kamal’s region, and took on leadership of the project. Alex put together a translation team, including Kamal, and in the late 1990’s the New Testament was published. Although there were many revisions to come, the involvement of writers and poets like Kamal from the beginning gave the text a rich literary beauty in the local tongue.

By the time I was on the ground in 2007 as a green 19-year-old, this New Testament had been updated and had been eagerly adopted by the the community of local believers. The next year, Hama*, one of my close friends and a new believer, also managed to get his hands on one of the few early drafts of the complete Old Testament. I remember opening the massive three-ring binder with him and gazing together for the first time on Genesis and Psalms in his mother tongue. Hama treasured and studied this early text for years to come.

In 2011, the complete Bible was published for the first time. Decades of work by Alex, Kamal, the ministry leader from Lebanon, and others had led to the complete word of God now being available in our people’s heart language. Some communities of believers loved this 2011 text so much that they flat-out refused to use later revised editions, and started circulating illegally printed 2011 Bibles for their house churches – thus proving that KJV-only-style controversies are unfortunately not unique to the west.

The political and religious climate, while never calm, had grown much calmer since the 70’s. This has meant long stretches when this complete Bible can be spotted for sale in the bazaar’s book shops. To this day, someone on our teams might snap a picture when we see one prominently on display and send it to each other, “Look what I spotted in the bazaar today.” The government has even allowed a local church to set up at a huge annual book fair to sell these Bibles and other Christian books.

In spite of this measure of freedom, we still have many locals who don’t know that the Bible exists in their language. I’ve always loved asking if a given local knew that God’s word was available in their language. When they said no (as they often did) I would pull a print Bible out of my bag or open up a Bible app on my phone and show them a text like John 1:1, one of my favorite texts for explaining the divinity of Jesus. “You believe the eternal word of God became a physical book, right? Well, this verse says that the eternal word of God became a man.”

As I referred to earlier, I got to attend the memorial service for Kamal a few years ago, led by Alex and others. This was a public event, where hundreds of locals came out to honor the great writer. Few, however, knew of his role as the first Bible translator of their people. To my great delight, this part of Kamal’s story was told publicly, and a plea made for the attendees to read this book to which Kamal had devoted so many years of his life.

Kamal was obedient to the work that God gave him to do. So was the leader from Lebanon, and Alex, and many others. This has meant that as a church planter I have had the most important of all tools available to me – a Bible in the local tongue. It has meant that when I find a verse that seems a bit off in the word choice or grammar I have the privilege of simply emailing Alex for it to be considered for a future update. Sadly, most of the feedback these men get these days is suggestions and complaints from foreigners and locals for places where the the text needs to be revised!

Yet when we come to our senses we all realize what a great debt we owe these men. They have done something that is foundational for everything workers like myself try to accomplish. Cliche as it might seem, we really do stand on their shoulders. Many are aging fast and looking to hand off their work. Some of them are no longer with us, like Kamal. But I thank God for each of them, and someday I hope to write more of their stories.

Because of Kamal, the prisoner-scholar, his people now have a Bible. And that changes everything.

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*names changed for security

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Don’t Rule Out a Burning in the Bosom

My wife and I had the honor of serving at the recent Cross conference in Louisville, KY. As members of the Great Commission Council, we were there to interact with students who had questions about missions and to attempt to provide them with wise and experienced counsel. Overall, we loved the conference. Over three days, 11,000 students and leaders sat under preaching, breakouts, and panels that focused on local church-centered missions. If there are students in your church or ministry interested in missions, I’d highly recommend they attend Crosscon ’25. Sadly, many that we trust in missions circles have serious concerns about theological drift at Urbana, but Cross aims to be a student missions conference that loves missions, loves sound theology, and loves the local church.

One of the days featured a panel on Decisions and Calling. As with much of the content, this panel session was rich in wisdom and practical, biblical guidance for young people wrestling with whether or not God might be calling them to the mission field. The framework presented focused on discerning the will of God through pursuing what is clearly revealed in scripture for a holy life, recognizing what our personal opportunities are, and submitting to what our church thinks we should do. Sound counsel for an age of radical and subjective individualism.

As my wife and I debriefed afterward, there were only two things that we would would have added to this important discussion (These are things I believe the panelists would agree to as well, but you can only say so much in a given session). The first would have been mentioning that skill is also an important part of discerning if someone should be heading toward the mission field or not. While character is the foundation, and knowledge is essential, there are some abilities that really need to be present for a good potential missionary.

Not least among these is what has sometimes been called cultural intelligence. Practically, this is the ability to make deep friendships across cultural and linguistic lines. If someone wants to reach the nations for Jesus but all of their friends here in the West look just like them, something doesn’t quite line up. Since most in the West now live in areas with some level of access to cultural and linguistic diversity, it’s not unreasonable for churches to look for these kinds of friendships as one marker of whether or not God is calling someone into missions.

There are other skills as well, but here I’ll just mention that the vast majority of missionaries also need to be able to teach. This might seem blatantly obvious, but a surprising number of missionaries end up on the field with very little actual teaching experience in their local church. Please, make sure that your missionary can do a decent job teaching and/or preaching in his own language and culture before you send him to teach or preach in a foreign one. If you are sending missionaries as church planters, then evidence of this skill is absolutely essential (1 Tim 3:2). Don’t neglect to train women missionaries in this skill also since so many of the unreached peoples around the world are also highly gender-segregated.

In addition to this, I felt that the Decisions and Calling panel should have left more room for the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in giving holy ambitions on an individual level. The panel pushed back against what was too much of an emphasis on a “burning in the bosom” in generations past. But I think we should be careful that we don’t rule out a kind of specific passion personally received which compels someone to reach the nations for Christ. It is not the only way to have a “real” missionary calling. But biblical example and church history show that this kind of individual calling really happens sometimes.

Paul had a holy ambition to preach the gospel where Christ had not been named (Rom 15:20). Timothy had a gift (perhaps connected to evangelism) uniquely imparted to him by the laying on the hands, which he was to fan into flame (2 Tim 1:6-8, 4:5). St. Patrick experienced dreams that convinced him he was to return to Ireland as a missionary. Hudson Taylor and Adoniram Judson also experienced personal calls to missions soon after coming to faith.

Yes, there are some like Nik Ripken, author of The Insanity of God, who simply read the great commission and decide that they are supposed to be a missionary. That’s one side of the spectrum. Then there are people like me. As a freshman in college, I was hypothetically open to missions, but definitely not open to working among Muslims. Then I found myself sitting in a Baptist church presentation where a missionary played a video of a night baptism in the Middle East. As I watched, my heart burned and I heard these words clearly spoken to my soul, “Go to the [people group name], go to the Muslims.” And there are countless experiences in between.

Just like we see in the Scriptures, God rarely calls anyone into ministry in the same way. The burning bush wasn’t repeated for anyone else. Neither was the Damascus road experience. Jesus’ calling of Peter and Andrew was very different from Nathaniel’s. Sometimes people go into missions in a style more akin to the authorship of the book of Luke. They do a lot of careful research and build a very good case that they are called to be a missionary. Other times it’s more like the Apocalypse (Revelation) of John. No research there, but instead rapt attention paid to some very unexpected things that have been seen and heard. Will we really say that one is more spiritual or valid than the other? And what would be our biblical grounds for doing so?

The very understandable position in reformed circles is to dial down the talk of missionary callings and burnings in the bosom. But we need to be careful lest we rule out valid ways in which the living Spirit works, lest we get pulled into an experience of following God that is only cognitive and not also open to the way the Spirit mysteriously leads through our affections. We also must be careful of a posture where we hypothetically believe that God can clearly communicate specific callings to his people, but where we assume that will never actually happen in our circles. We must know our own tribe and place in history and these particular ditches we tend to fall into.

A personal calling to the mission field must always be submitted to the wise counsel of local church leadership and put through the filters of character, knowledge, skill, and opportunity. But along with that, we need to have a category for a spectrum of calling experiences. Like our personal testimonies, some will seem more natural, others will seem more dramatic. Both are supernatural.

Why did I experience a calling to the mission field that was more like a burning in the bosom? Who knows? Maybe it was because of weakness, and the Lord knowing that I in particular would need that crystal clarity when things got hard. Perhaps others are steadier than I am and so their holy ambition was clarified through simple circumstances or logic. It’s hard to say.

I love wisdom, the pursuit of it, and I love frameworks built upon it. I love missions that is infused with sound theology and rooted in healthy church emphases. But I do not want to rely so heavily on these things that I discount the possibility of the clear, personal, affective guidance of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer. To do so would be to deny things I have seen and heard, yes, but more importantly, things that are in church history and in the word itself.

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The Shame of a Prodigal Daughter

Several years ago my wife and others hosted a Valentine’s Day outreach for local women. As a part of the event, they read the story of the prodigal son from Luke 15, and led a discussion about its meaning and implications.

Surprisingly, when they asked the local ladies what they thought about the father’s response to the return of his wayward son, these ladies responded that the response was right and good. “That’s what a father should do for a son.”

Either my wife or one of our teammates then posed the question differently. “What if it had been a prodigal daughter rather than a prodigal son?”

At this question, the mood of the room shifted dramatically. Everyone knew that a prodigal daughter should never be welcomed home and forgiven like that. No, if it had been a daughter rather than a son who had dishonored her family by wasting her inheritance on prostitutes in a far country, she would be a dead woman. She would never be welcomed home with joy and celebration. Instead, if she showed her face again the men of the family would have to kill her in order to restore their honor in the eyes of the community.

In this situation, because of their own culture these local women didn’t feel the shamefulness of the younger son’s actions, even after it had been explained to them. But when the connection had been made with an equivalent example from their own culture, then the weightiness – and the scandalous nature – of the father’s actions sunk in.

Much has been made of the connections between contemporary Middle Eastern/Central Asian honor-shame cultures and the cultures of the New Testament era. And there are many similarities. These cultures are certainly closer to one another than they are to the modern west. Yet there are also some very significant differences that mean a direct understanding or resonance with New Testament era culture shouldn’t be assumed.

One major difference would be the way in which our Central Asian culture places the burden of the family’s honor almost entirely on the conduct of their women (at least in part a downstream effect of Islam). The honorable reputation, community standing, and future prospects of the extended family all hinge on whether the community believes the young women and the married women are sexually pure and faithful. If I had to quantify it, I’d say it’s something like ninety percent of family honor that comes down to this. The other ten percent is made up of whether or not the men are hospitable, loyal patrons and clients, not thieves, not drunkards, not gamblers, and if they come from a line of honorable fathers.

The men do have a small part to play in maintaining the family honor, but in general they are given all kinds of grace and freedom to go out and sow their wild oats. At the end of day, they are the beloved sons who will be welcomed home by mama and papa and all will be forgiven. The same cannot be said for the daughters of the family. One misstep – or one nasty rumor – can spell disaster for them. This is why the women of our people group are so much more observant in their Islam. It’s also why believing women are outnumbered by believing men by about ten to one. If you feel that this is terribly unjust, you are right.

So, what does the gospel laborer do in this kind of situation where the culture means the locals do not understand and feel the point of the parable? In our telling of the story, should we replace the son in the parable with a daughter? Not at all. Though it may be tempting to do something like this, we must remember the proper roles of the word and the culture when it comes to communicating God’s truth. The word of God is where all the authority and the grounding of our teaching comes from. The culture, on the other hand, is what we use to illustrate.

Rather than replacing the prodigal son with a prodigal daughter upfront, instead we need to explain what this parable would have meant and felt like to the original audience. Then, we use a comparable example of shamefulness and scandalous forgiveness from our target culture to help our hearers wrestle with the offensive grace communicated by Jesus in this parable. In this way, we are being faithful to God’s powerful word as it was originally revealed, and we are also doing our best to help our audience understand it with both their heads and their hearts. This is in fact just what the ladies on our team did during their Valentine’s outreach.

Any of us reformed-types who scoff at the study of culture out of a professed trust in the word of God are missing something important here; namely, that effective teaching and preaching requires more than faithful exegesis of the text and argumentation. It also requires faithful illustration and application. To do all of this you must study the text first, and then study your people.

As with any culture, the honor-shame dynamics of our Central Asian culture contain both hindrances and helps when it comes to making sense of God’s word. Though they are wrong to place the burden of family honor almost solely on the shoulders of their women, they are not entirely wrong in their belief that sin means that someone must die in order for honor to be restored.

From the very beginning, sin deserves death (Gen 2:17). This divine law has never changed. Their culture simply needs to universalize it. Instead of just women who have allegedly shamed the family, every single individual deserves death because of how he has fallen short of the glory (the honor) of the Father. The amazing good news is that a perfect Son has been killed so that we don’t have to be. He has died in our place and has taken upon himself the righteous anger of the shamed Father. By doing so, he has also satisfied the demands of divine honor (Mark 10:45, Rom 3:21-26).

The local women at the Valentine’s outreach shuddered when they thought of the forgiveness of a prodigal daughter. But such a daughter’s shame is not any greater than their shame, or my shame. The sacrifice of the divine Son means that we no longer need to kill our children to restore the family honor. Someone else can cover that shame and restore honor in the only court that really matters, the eternal one. Whether prodigal sons or daughters or prideful older sisters or brothers, we must all turn from our futile attempts to deal with our sin and shame and trust in him alone.

For any of those local women, to let go of their hard-fought honor and to admit their true shame is a terrifying thing. How could it not be when your conformity has been enforced all your life at knife-point?

But some will. And those who do will know the amazing warmth of the Father’s welcome – and the wonder of his undeserved honor.

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Seven Years of a Weekly Gospel Review

“Did you have the same evangelism professor when you were in seminary?”

“No, why?”

“Brother, he used the four words! And he explained them just like we do every week in our service!”

Because of his stellar English, *Alan is our first local believer to take online classes at Southern Seminary. As we talked about how his Intro to Evangelism class went, he was beaming. He couldn’t wait to tell me how so much of what he had learned in the class fit with what he had seen modeled by the missionaries and older believers in his little Central Asian church. I laughed as Alan said things like, “Now I understand what you guys were trying to do!”

Though tempted, I did not say, “It’s about time, brother!”

Every week for the last seven years or so, our team has included a five minute portion for gospel review in our church services. To do this, we’ve leaned on the four word summary of the gospel common in reformed circles: God, Man, Christ, Response. We’d either have the person leading the service or one of the members lead this time.

After seven years, here are a few of the effects of this weekly practice:

Local believers in our church are over time able to faithfully and easily articulate the gospel, and understand how it is different from mere theological statements like “God is love,” as well as how it is different from works-based false gospels. When transferring membership to a church in another city, the pastor told us that *Frank and Patty had shared one of the clearer gospel presentations they’d ever heard in a membership interview.
The stable framework of the four words review allows the church leaders to weave in the breadth and depth of the gospel and its many facets in a slightly different way each week, while never departing from the simplicity of the message. At times when I’ve led this time in the past I’ve shared with the congregation the quote that the gospel is “shallow enough for a child to wade in and deep enough to drown a theologian.” This can equip the body with a flexible framework for evangelism rather than a rigid formula.
Unbelievers attending the service are sure to hear the gospel presented clearly by the congregation in the service, and not just by the preacher in the sermon. Unbelievers who are regular attenders can even end up sharing the gospel four words with others!
Every member of the missionary team gets weekly review and practice in presenting the gospel in the local language. This is a great step toward equipping newer teammates in local-language evangelism – and in sharpening even advanced speakers as they hear new phrases and forms.

Back-translated from the local language, this weekly gospel review sounds something like this:

[Leader] “Like every week, we want to review the message of the gospel together. This is the message that is the heart of everything we believe and teach. When those who don’t yet follow Jesus believe this message, they are saved. And we believers also need this message every day in order to be faithful. In this church, we use four words to summarize the gospel message of Jesus Christ. So, what are the four words that we use to do this?”

[Congregants] “God… Man… Jesus Christ… Response.”

[Leader] “That’s right, God, Man, Jesus Christ, Response. When we say ‘God,’ what do we mean by that?”

[Congregants] “God is the creator of everything.” “God is love.” “God is holy.” “God is spirit.”

[Leader] “Yes, God is the holy and loving creator. But what do we mean when we say ‘Man?’

[Congregants] “Man is a sinner and criminal.” “Man was created good, but we messed it up and rebelled.” “Man is lost and cannot save himself.”

[Leader] “So, what do we mean with the third word, ‘Jesus Christ?’ Who is he and what did he do?”

[Congregants] “He’s the final sacrifice for our sins!” “He’s the bridge between man and God.” “He died on the cross for our forgiveness and rose from the dead.” “He’s our rescuer who makes us right with God again.” “He is the son of God.”

[Leader then clarifies any important points of the gospel missed in the responses]

[Leader] “Because this message is true, what do we mean by the fourth word, ‘Response?’ It has two parts.”

[Congregants] “Repent and believe!”

[Leader] “Yes, everyone must repent of their sins and of trying to save themselves, and believe that Jesus is the only savior. If they do this, the promise of God is that they will be saved and become part of the family of God and have eternal life. All of us should memorize these four words, God, Man, Jesus Christ, Response, so that we can share this good news with our friends and family, and so that we can be encouraged ourselves everyday in the gospel. The order of the words is not as important as their meaning. There are many good ways to share the gospel, but when you use these four words you know you are sharing the heart of the good news.”

There are many ways to faithfully review the gospel in our weekly services, but this simple method has served us well in our cross-cultural, small church context. Do you have a way in which the gospel is made crystal-clear in each of your services? Are the congregants being equipped to better know and better share the gospel by that regular rhythm? Is it simple enough? Is it flexible enough?

To be honest, we originally started this weekly corporate gospel review time without much forethought. But seven years later, I’m so glad we did. We stumbled into something that has truly served the body well.

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*Names changed for security

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Mr. Jamison for the Win

Note the traditional parachute pants, they will feature in this story.

The trip had been remarkably efficient. Six months into our medical leave I had traveled back to Central Asia with one of my brothers in order to close down our house and pack, give away, or sell everything. At that point, it seemed that we would need to remain in the US for some years to come and I was determined to not leave the work of closing down our household to my teammates.

In the first four days of a five day trip, we had sorted everything, packed suitcases and a massive rug to bring back, held a sale for expats, set aside bags of stuff to donate to refugees, attended a baptism picnic, attended a funeral which led to a sleepover, preached at the church plant, and managed to spend some good time with most of the local believers. Somebody must have been praying for us because I don’t think I have ever been more efficient in my entire life.

One final step remained before we could turn over the keys of our old stone house to the landlord. My local friend, Adam, who had been mostly healed of paranoid schizophrenia, had assured me it would be a simple one. He knew a guy who bought household goods in bulk so that he could sell them secondhand in the bazaar. Once our sale was finished, Adam would bring in the reseller, we’d agree on a price, and then the reseller’s men would clear everything out. I didn’t worry about this final step because it seemed to be so simple.

However, once the resellers assessed our remaining household goods, things began to get complicated. We had estimated that a conservative value of the remaining goods was around $2,000. But because of the business model, we’d likely need to settle for half of that. The resellers, for their part, offered us $300. And wouldn’t budge.

Now, there is a kind of robust bargaining that is common in our Central Asian culture, one where the various parties haggle back and forth and mutual respect and even enjoyment stay a part of the conversation. This negotiation began that way, but it was quickly turning into a very unhappy one. Both Adam and I were shocked at the price they had given, and after pushing them as hard as we honorably could, they were only willing to come up to $350. The resellers seemed insulted that we didn’t seem to agree with their assessment that our goods were basically worthless.

We sat there in what used to be our living room as the resellers repeatedly complained about the economy and insulted the quality of the household goods we were trying to sell them. My frustration was building, making it harder to think and speak clearly in the local language. What the resellers continued to call worthless were mainly items we had bought from other missionary families and good quality stores. There were Persian rugs, kitchen appliances, solid beds, good tools, and a nice exercise bike – the kinds of things you buy when you’re thinking about items that will serve a family for a decade or more.

More than this, these were household goods that had been purchased for my family and that my family had used, enjoyed, and taken care of. Some, like an espresso maker, were Christmas gifts to one another that we couldn’t carry back. Selling them at a decent price was hard. Selling them at the price the resellers were insisting on felt like a punch to the gut. I shook my head, knowing that we did indeed need to make some money off of these items. We had moved back to the US in late 2022. Inflation made it a terrible time to try to set up a new household in America.

“I mean, look at all this junk,” the reseller started up again. “Can you point out one item to me that has any real quality or value?”

“Yes,” I insisted, “yes, I can. Look at that area rug, it’s in great condition. And that water cooler and purifier as well. And that exercise bike is solid, it’s the kind of thing you’d pay $100 for at the exercise stores in the marketplace.”

“Ha!” scoffed the reseller. “If I buy this junk for more than $350, there’s no way I’ll be able to make any kind of profit off it.”

He turned to Adam, “These foreigners don’t understand. Tell him, this is all worthless. That bike (hah), that bike is worthless.”

Adam, to his credit, just sat there looking perplexed, but clearly not agreeing with the conduct of the reseller he had earlier been so positive about.

We were at an impasse. We needed to get rid of the stuff. The next day was our last one, and we needed to turn over the keys to an empty house. Should we risk trying to find another reseller? We might run out of time.

At that moment, we heard a knock at the door. It was a mustachioed neighbor wearing the more informal traditional outfit of a collared shirt tucked into baggy parachute pants, pulled up to the belly button. He had asked earlier if he could come by to see what was still for sale, but we had completely forgotten about him.

Adam and I tried to shake ourselves out of our frustration with the resellers and stood up to give the warm and respectful greetings expected between men and neighbors in even the most informal situations. The resellers, not knowing the neighbor, stayed seated, stewing.

What followed could be called providential irony.

“Wow, look at that exercise bike!” the neighbor said. “Is it for sale? I’ve been wanting one just like it! Can I try it?”

For whatever reason, at this point Adam switched back to his British English in his reply, gesturing grandly, “Give it a try, Mr. Jamison!”

Our neighbor, not named Mr. Jamison, and not knowing English, nevertheless seemed to understand. He climbed on the exercise bike, still wearing his traditional baggy pants. He smiled widely as he pedaled in front of me, Adam, my brother, and the sullen resellers.

We all sat there watching him, the enthusiasm of this kind neighbor pedaling away on the exercise bike like some kind of pleasant song that wakes you up from a bad dream.

“This is nice! I’ll pay you forty dollars for this.”

“We’ll take it!” Adam called out, probably louder than he had been intending, and both of us shot a meaning-filled glance at the resellers.

“Can I look around some more? Is there more for sale?” asked the neighbor. Adam told him he could go explore the goods in other rooms.

“You know,” Adam leaned over and said to me in English, “I think I might be able to find another reseller. Should we risk it and send these guys off?”

“Definitely,” I said.

We told the resellers we would be getting a second opinion and they huffed and puffed their way out of the house and the courtyard, remonstrating that we’d never find a better price than they had offered.

The arrival of the neighbor had come at just the right time. It was a small thing, but it shook us out of our death spiral of a conversation with the resellers, and gave us courage for one more risk before the trip was up.

“Who’s Mr. Jamison?” my brother later asked me. “That was hilarious. Why did he call the neighbor that?”

“I have no idea. But that neighbor’s timing and what he did with the exercise bike? That was perfect. Tonight it was definitely Mr. Jamison for the win.”

Later that night, Adam somehow found some more resellers, who were happy to pay $650 to take everything else off our hands. And we were happy to oblige them.

The next day, we closed the courtyard door to the old stone house and turned in the keys to the elderly landlord, who drank chai with us and cried at our departure.

Back in America, my family used some of the money from the sale of our stuff to buy a good used Toyota Sedan from a family in our church. The license plate said “NED,” so we decided the car’s first name should be Ned.

But his last name we proclaimed Jamison. Ned Jamison.

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Trying to Find the Basement

“It’s like there’s a basement where there are some very dark things. We know it’s there, but we can’t find the door to it. If only we could get down there, then we could actually bring those things out into the light, and hopefully get to dealing with whatever it is.”

I remember sharing this sentiment with a veteran missionary and pastor in our region of Central Asia a couple years ago. We had been discussing the remarkable ineffectiveness of the missionary work among our people group over the last couple of decades.

Since the early nineties, a very significant number of gospel laborers and an astounding amount of funding has gone into planting churches among our people group. Most of it seems to have failed. Most of those who have professed faith are scattered or have fallen away from the faith. Most of the churches that have been started have imploded. Most of the workers have left.

Over the years, I have grown in conviction that at least two things are necessary to see this situation change. The first is the irreplaceable work of slow, steady, faithful ministry by example that is backed by prayer. Whatever else is needed, this is needed more. The locals must taste and see over the long term the beauty of a healthy local church and how faithful Christians live. Forget novel and exciting methods. As veteran missionaries once told us, “mostly they need people who can show them how to suffer well.”

Yet alongside of this, I share a conviction with some of the other veteran workers that there are some significant pieces of the culture that we are still somehow missing. It feels a little bit like what I’ve heard of black holes in space. You can’t see it, but you know something is there because of the destructive evidence being exerted on its environment.

A young local pastor told me that he believes the failure of the missionary work might be because his people are under a spiritual curse, some kind of hardening of heart because of all the times their ancestors committed genocide against the ethnic Christians of the region. I do not pretend to know very much about intergenerational spiritual realities, but perhaps this brother is right. Could there be some kind of spiritual bind that can only be broken by the Church’s Daniel-like repentance for the sins of the past?

Or is it that we foreigners simply need to press even deeper into understanding the hearts and minds and culture of those we are desperately trying to reach? On the one hand, the gospel’s effectiveness is not dependent on missionaries becoming expert anthropologists. On the other hand, stories like Peace Child and Bruchko are real, where gospel breakthrough happened when the missionary was able to wed the good news to some aspect of local culture or myth/memory that seemed to have been sovereignly planted there for that very reason. “In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. Yet he did not leave himself without witness” (Acts 14:17).

However, I hesitate because in the case of our people, it feels like we are not so much in need of finding something good that has remained as much as finding something dark and twisted that needs to be torn out – less redemptive analogy and more cultural exorcism, as it were.

At the very least, alongside prayer for spiritual breakthrough, a more systematic study of the culture will not hurt. Whereas missionaries to remote tribal peoples are trained to do this very kind of exhaustive cultural study, most of us in our region have taken more of a posture that assumes that if you systematically study the language, you’ll get the culture thrown in as well. But we have found this to result in some big holes. Some, merely odd. Some, very concerning.

I’ll never forget when a leader in training in our church plant told us very matter-of-factly that there’s a special spiritual word you can use to command the soil not to decompose a body until you can rebury it elsewhere, and it will obey you. He claimed to have seen this work on a body buried for over a month. And he seemed to have no idea that this folk religious/sorcery belief was incompatible with Christian belief and practice.

How many more beliefs are just like this, unseen beneath the surface, only emerging in times of crisis, in times that expose what someone really believes about the nature of life, death, and the spiritual realm? And are any of them regularly sabotaging church plants and relationships between local believers because they continue to go unknown and thereby unaddressed?

One of the reasons I’m excited about my new role when we head back to Central Asia is that it will require regular and deep study of the culture. The plan is for this study to then lead to biblical and contextual resources that address the things that emerge – including those things that emerge from “the basement.”

Some of it is not hidden at all, but well-known. As of yet there are no Christian resources in our language that take evil things like wife-beating, female circumcision, and honor killings head on. This must change.

God willing, it will. And sooner or later, God’s people will bring some light into that basement – and get to work banishing the darkness.

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