A Family Update

This is the email update we just sent out to our prayer list. I haven’t posted many of these here to my blog, but wanted to do so for this one because it provides a good overview of the road we’ve walked over the past year or so.

Fourteen months ago we left Central Asia for an extended medical leave, not sure if we would be coming back. After seven years laboring to see healthy churches started among our focus people group, our bodies and hearts were showing the strain – even though we had tried hard to find a posture of sustainable sacrifice. One teammate put it best, it was like we had patched most of the many holes in our boat, only to realize when we slowed down that the boat was still full of water. And it would take a long time to bail it out. Our medical personnel, counselors, and teammates told us it was time for a season bailing water, rest, and hopefully, healing.

The year that followed was a strange one. We moved back to Kentucky, put the kids in a full-time school for the first time, plugged into regular counseling, saw numerous doctors, and wrestled with our future. It’s hard to wait. Hard to wait for healing. Hard to wait for clarity. And it was hard to come to terms with the costs we’d incurred as a family. I (A.W.) for the first time found myself profoundly doubting if the costs of mission are actually worth it, if God will actually take care of those who are sent. Sure, good fruit around them comes from their ministries. But what about them? What about their hearts, their bodies, their kids?

In the midst of a season where we felt great perplexity and disorientation, when God himself seemed distant, God’s people were not. We were surrounded by steady, kind, faithful Christian friends and family. I remember realizing that God was showing his nearness to us through his people. In the midst of this community we felt like we could stay in the US, if that was what God would ask. But what if he asked us to go back overseas? Could we do that if he asked? All we knew for a long time was that we did not have enough clarity to commit to either. So we waited some more.

In the meantime, our health improved. And even though we didn’t get complete clarity on the causes of the different health challenges affecting our family, we gained much insight into more effective prevention and treatment. Slowly our hearts began to heal also. During the fall, we received an invitation to return and serve in a city we lived in four years ago. Our response to this invitation surprised us. We were actually open to it! We decided that we’d pray, get counsel, and make a decision by the new year.

On Christmas Eve, we said yes. We feel that returning is the right next step of obedience, the right next step of faith in a God who is truly trustworthy and a rewarder, even in suffering. Some things will be different upon our return. We’ll be going back with one of our partner organizations, though still in close partnership with our former org teams and churches. The role that we’ve been invited into is one of content creation. I (A.W.) will be overseeing the creation and translation of solid local language articles, books, and hopefully also audio and video resources. The aim will be to give the fledgling churches, new leaders, and new believers among our people group true, compelling, and beautiful resources that will help to establish them more deeply in their faith – resources that will help healthy churches get planted and endure, which has been our aim from the beginning. This role will allow my wife to focus more on family during this season, and allow us to find the right posture as a family to support the crucial ongoing church planting work.

We are hoping to move back to Central Asia in August of this year. This time around, we will be raising support. So that means we’ll need a solid network of individuals and churches who will commit to regular support or one-time gifts, and in this way to partner with us. Would you consider supporting us in this costly, yet practical way?

We have immediate need of one-time gifts that will help us transition onto support, and then we will building our monthly support and moving fund over the next six months.

As always, we will continue to be in desperate need of your prayers and friendship as we head back into this wonderful and difficult labor. We know that many of you have kept on praying for us, because we’ve experienced some very clear answers to prayer over this past year. Not the least of which is the recovery of our faith to trust again that the costs are indeed worth it. Worth it now, by faith. And worth it in the resurrection, by sight.

We’ll be sending out more updates soon. But for now we wanted to tell you how God has been faithful to us and how he has opened up a new door of service back overseas. We’d love prayer for the following things:

-For God to continue growing our trust in Him, no matter where we are

-For wisdom in shepherding our kids through yet another transition

-For God to raise up a solid network of supporting individuals and churches

-For our ongoing efforts to help local believers from a distance get theological education, be supported in ministry, and start businesses

-For the church plants that have been started in our region to grow in maturity and health

In Him,

A.W. Workman and family

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

Cultural Contamination and Personal Humility

Pride is such a slippery sin, one that often masquerades as wisdom, sound strategy, or simply holding to the “correct” position. For so much of the contemporary missions world, the right position, the strategic thing, is to avoid transmitting our own culture to those we are leading at all costs – even if that means not leading, not preaching, and not modeling crucial aspects of the Christian life for indigenous believers. This kind of posture often feels like humility, but its assumptions about local believers prove to be anything but humble.

For example, missionaries who long to see exponential growth and even movements among their focus people group will often refuse to preach sermons directly to locals. They believe that this is a Western Christian form that will be foreign to the locals and bad for church multiplication. Many will persist in this posture even when local believers repeatedly request that they preach to them and even when the local culture is one steeped in Islam, where a mullah or imam (checks notes) preaches a sermon in the local mosque every Friday. No, the missionary persists in what he maintains is the humble thing to do, refusing all opportunities to preach the Bible to local believers. He might tell himself that by doing this, he is humbly refusing to build his own kingdom, and he is saving the indigenous church from the pollution of Western forms. In reality, he is pridefully elevating his own opinion or training over the good desires of local believers and the clear commands of scripture.

In previous posts, we’ve noted how the Bible’s emphases and cross-cultural common sense help to guard the missionary from this powerful fear of cultural contamination, from the specter of their culture being passed on to their disciples and thereby wrecking indigeneity. This current post adds personal humility to the list of guardrails that keep us from being frozen or misled by inflated fears of cultural transmission.

The first point of personal humility that missionaries must embrace is that local believers are not inferior to us (Col 11:3). Everyone is equal at the foot of the cross, both in our sinfulness as well as in our new nature as believers (1 Pet 2:9). Local believers are our equals in Christ, even as we seek to mentor them in the faith. This spiritual equality means that local believers are indeed increasingly able to sift their own culture and borrow from other cultures as a means of reforming their own. Should they be trained in discernment so that they don’t believe that everything Western is also Christian? Absolutely. We don’t need a hands-off posture that gives local believers no guidance at all. But neither do we need a posture that desperately tries to shut the door to any possible cultural transmission. As we have previously noted, this is not a real-world option.

I remember the first time I realized that “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” had been translated into our Central Asian language and was a regular part of house church services. I was so disappointed. My personal feelings about this song were connected with Bible camp altar calls that felt manipulative, with a fundamentalist Christianity that was decisionistic and fixated on secondary issues. Yet here it was, being sung from the heart by persecuted local believers.

My bubble of indignation burst when a fellow missionary who had grown up in India told me that the song wasn’t actually American, but originally from a first-generation Christian of tribal north India. This information served as a very helpful rebuke. As it turns out, my culture had also borrowed this song from another, and the Lord had used it in the testimony of countless thousands. Even though I felt that the song’s value was largely gone for my generation, I knew enough about its history to know that it had been used mightily in American generations past. Yet here I was, upset that some unthinking missionary had translated this song into the local language. Even if that had been the case, who was I to say that the local believers shouldn’t even be exposed to a Christian song that had been mightily used of the Spirit elsewhere? Did I really believe them to be my equal when it came to discerning what would and would not edify the church? Proper biblical humility moves us away from this kind of “cultural appraisal for me, not for thee” posture.

Second, embracing humility can remind us that culture is often a deeply entrenched, stubborn thing and that we should not over-inflate our own ability to change it. The locals in Papua New Guinea may now wear T-shirts, jeans, and flip-flops, but they still take their children to the witch doctor if they fall seriously ill. The culture has only been Westernized at a surface level, but not where it counts. Similarly, Western missionaries might lament that Central Asian Christians now sit in chairs instead of on the floor in their services. However, they should be lamenting that local believers still believe that a lone, strongman pastor is the only kind of leadership that is “real.” Proper humility recognizes that it takes the work of God to change these deeper core levels of culture; thus, it’s not something we have the power to do accidentally. Remember, Jesus says that we do not have the power to even make one hair of our heads black or white (Matt 5:36).

Local believers are our equals in Christ, who become increasingly wise to appraise aspects of foreign Christian cultures as they grow in their faith. It is not our job to work so hard to shelter them from our Western culture that we refuse to do direct, lead-by-example ministry. Furthermore, we are, apart from the Spirit, impotent to change the deeper layers of culture. We need to stop assuming that we are so influential and so popular that we might turn everyone into Westerners without ever meaning to.

Rather than postures that reflect hidden pride, we need to embrace a biblical humility, one that focuses primarily on doing the Lord’s work. A posture of true humility will, in the end, be the most effective for preventing the wrong kind of cultural transmission, and bringing about healthy indigenous 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

Photo by Eila Lifflander on Unsplash

Cultural Contamination and Missionary Common Sense

Want to know one of the deepest fears of contemporary missionaries? Being labeled a colonialist. Missions books and pre-field trainings are full of examples of how previous generations of missionaries got it wrong, exported their culture along with the gospel, and thereby hamstrung the growth or even existence of the indigenous church. The average well-educated Westerner will go to great lengths to avoid the shame of being labeled a racist or a –phobe of any sort. The average Western missionary will go just as far – perhaps even further – to make sure the dreaded colonialist label never sticks.

This deeply-imbedded cultural fear often works its way out in a missiology of reaction. What ends up crystal-clear for the average missionary going to the field is what he should not be like – those old-school colonial missionary types. So, when missions methods are proposed that keep the missionary always in the background, never leading from the front, the missionary becomes an easy convert. In these methodologies (also chock full of promises of exponential success), the missionary has found a compelling philosophy that keeps him from leading groups in Bible study, from preaching, from baptizing locals, and even from calling out the darkness of local culture when necessary. In his zeal to not be a colonialist missionary, the gospel worker focuses overtime on preventing any of his culture from being transmitted through his ministry.

In a previous post, we’ve seen how the Bible’s strong emphases on direct gospel ministry and protection against false gospels provide a helpful response to this kind of missions thinking. How might the experience of seasoned cross-cultural missionaries also inform this fear of being a cultural colonialist, a cultural contaminator?

Thankfully, cross-cultural wisdom and common sense also bring some needed correction to the missionary mortified at the thought of passing on some of his culture to his local friends. To start with, those with long-standing cross-cultural relationships will tell you that cultural transmission is, in fact, inevitable.

When we love someone, we are shaped by them.

Spouses’ personalities and body language become more like one another as they age. Likewise, friends from different cultures slowly absorb traits from one another’s lives. This is simply how human relationships work. When cross-cultural relationships exist, culture will be transmitted whether we want it to or not. This is because group as well as personal cultures are porous and dynamic, constantly flowing back and forth and naturally interacting with the other cultures around them. Naivete says we can stop cultural transmission entirely. Wisdom and experience say it will happen, so let’s seek to notice it and be intentional about it.

Similarly, culture can never be transmitted without being changed in some way, localized as it were. No one can emulate another in one hundred percent the same way. No, even the sincerest emulation still gets colored by the unique traits and personality of the individual or group that has been influenced. Once again, experience shows us that cultures never receive anything without putting their own spin on it. Yes, the Melanesian church of my adolescent years sang “Rock of Ages” in English in their services. But the timing, the pitch, and the fact that every single verse of the song was sung was most definitely not Western, but more akin in style to the tribal dirges of their ancestors. When this kind of exchange occurs, does it represent a coercive act of culture invasion or a consensual act of culture adoption? Must we insist that the former category is the only possibility? Or can we admit that indigenous cultures – not just our own – possess enough agency to adopt and transform foreign forms willingly?

One more point of cross-cultural common sense is that cultural transmission can be either good or bad. This much should be plain to the Christian, even if it’s not to the secular academy. Strangely, even among Christians, it is assumed to be bad when a Western missionary’s culture influences local believers. But why is this the default assumption when an unreached culture is influenced by a missionary who is 1) steeped in and shaped by God’s word, and 2) who comes from a culture that has had widespread exposure to God’s word for hundreds of years? In most cases, the cultures of the unreached have either been cut off from God’s word for hundreds or thousands of years or have never had access at all. This isolation from God’s truth always means the presence of areas of horrendous darkness in these cultures – strongholds of evil such as female circumcision, cannibalism, honor killings, or witchcraft. Regarding areas such as these, Western missionaries should be actively trying to change the culture. Yes, some cultural transmission can be good, even godly.

For a global missions culture dominated by the fear of being called colonialist, cross-cultural common sense and wisdom bring a welcome correction. Cultural transmission is inevitable inhuman relationships, and therefore calls for intentionality. Culture transmitted is always localized in some way. And some forms of cultural transmission are necessary in order to combat the works of the enemy. When considered alongside the Bible’s ministry emphases, personal humility, and a deep trust in the sovereignty of God, this common sense wisdom can help free the missionary from a fear-based missiology – and lead to one built on a better foundation.

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

Photo by DLKR on Unsplash

This post was first published on the Immanuel Network blog.

Cultural Contamination and Scripture’s Emphases

Among the many forces that shape contemporary missions, fear of cultural contamination looms large. Missionaries, and Western missionaries in particular, often feel and express a deep aversion to passing on aspects of their own culture to those that they reach through their ministry. Suppose Western missionaries of the past falsely equated Western culture with Christianity. In that case, the pendulum has now swung to the far extreme, where cultural transmission, “contamination,” is now felt to be one of the worst things a missionary could ever do.

This fear is not without warrant. Some churches around the world, planted in previous eras of missions, have failed to take root as truly indigenous because of their Western trappings. The country of Japan comes to mind as one example where the indigenous population has not accepted Christianity as genuinely belonging to the Japanese – at least not in the modern era. In societies like this, Christianity is held at arms’ length, viewed as belonging to the foreigner, and not truly an option for those who identify with their own people group.

Yet an overcorrection to this danger in modern missions has led to an even worse situation. Missionaries are refusing to obey clear commands and examples in scripture out of a professed desire not to export Western culture. Following popular methodologies -themselves driven partly by this fear of cultural contamination – they shrink back from biblical ministry, necessary roles, and spiritual authority. These missionaries convince themselves that by not preaching, not baptizing, not modeling, and not leading church plants, western culture will not influence the locals, the locals will take ownership of the faith, and the Church will be set free to reproduce. All kinds of concerning methods emerge out of this sort of posture. One egregious example would be a mission leader recently forbidding his team members from reading the Bible in indigenous homes due to a commitment to orality and a fear of “Western” literate methods making inroads.

Yes, a desire to keep the Gospel – and not culture – as the only stumbling block is biblically warranted (1 Cor 9:22). The Jew/Gentile divide among the Romans was rife with issues of conscience and culture, such as which days were to be considered holy, and what foods should or should not be eaten (Rom 15). Church history also shows us that these concerns can have real historical validity. In an era where China was repeatedly humiliated by foreign powers, Hudson Taylor rightly understood that many of his Chinese hearers were stumbling not only over his message, but also over his explicitly foreign appearance. However, in the centuries since Taylor became the first missionary to wear the Chinese hair queue, the pendulum has swung far indeed – into territory that Taylor, a committed cross-cultural preacher, would hardly recognize.

What is to be done to course-correct? Our obsession with avoiding cultural transmission must be corrected by the clear commands and warnings of scripture. A survey of scripture’s commands regarding the missionary task shows that the overwhelming emphasis of these passages is not on the need for the minister to check himself in order to protect his cross-cultural disciples from adopting his culture (Matt 28:18-20, Matt 24:14, Rom 10:14-17, Rom 15:20, 2 Tim4:11-16). Rather, the emphasis falls on the importance of direct gospel ministry – the kind of ministry that can be seen, caught, and followed. In other words, the Bible emphasizes ministry by direct example. Consider the weight that Paul – a self-professed Hebrew of Hebrews – gives to emulating his own manner of life when writing to the Gentile Macedonians in Philippi. “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. (Phil 3:17 ESV).” Apparently, Paul did not seem to think that if Macedonian believers imitated the life of a Jewish Cilician, they would no longer be able to reach their pagan neighbors effectively.

What of scripture’s warnings? Far from emphasizing the evils of cultural contamination, scripture instead highlights the dangers of false-gospel contamination (Gal1:6-8, 2 Cor 11:4, 1 Tim 1:3). This danger comes through things like false teaching, wolves in sheep’s clothing, a lack of holy living, or even a loss of love (Rev 2). Once again, the weight of biblical emphasis indicates that these dangers are far more of a threat to the spread of the Church than missionary cultural transmission.

In future posts, we will consider how a good dose of cross-cultural common sense, personal humility, and a deep trust in God’s sovereignty all help to guard the Church and its missionaries from falling into this pitfall of modern missions. Nevertheless, it is appropriate that any missionary who finds himself frozen by the fear of contaminating the indigenous Church first wrestle with the Word of God and its dominant emphases: Do direct ministry by example and watch out for false-gospels. With these emphases in place, the guard rails are set, and the missionary is now free and ready to keep a wise eye out for where cultural preference might indeed be causing barriers to the gospel.

Any return to a more biblical missiology must be shaped primarily by the Bible’s emphases, and not dominated by our modern fear of cultural contamination.

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

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

This post was first published at Immanuelnetwork.org

The Hidden Glory of the Unengaged

Jesus says that the angels rejoice when even one sinner comes to repentance (Luke 15:7). What then might take place in the heavens when that sinner is the first in the history of the world to worship God from a particular language or culture? What kind of angelic rejoicing might result when not just an individual but a congregation from hitherto-alienated people, at last, join the great choir of tongues and nations worshiping the lamb? This is not a hypothetical situation. We live in an age when the Church of Christ continues to advance steadily, bringing gospel light to even the hardest-to-reach people groups on the planet – although thousands of these groups still await the coming of their very first ambassador. These groups are the unengaged, the people for whom there is not yet even a single team committed to church planting among them.

Revelation 21:22-27 speaks of the kings of the earth bringing the glory and honor of the nations into the new Jerusalem. This implies that there are distinctive kinds of honor, unique forms of glory for different groups of human peoples, IE ethnic groups – and that these glorious differences will somehow be present even in eternity (c.f. Rev7:9). These verses in Revelation 21 would have painted initially the picture of rich and diverse royal caravans bringing the material goods of the nations into New Jerusalem (e.g., the queen of Sheba visiting Solomon). Yet any primary survey of the world’s peoples will quickly observe that their unique strengths, their particular beauty, also consist of their distinct cultures and languages. And these deeper characteristics of what it means to be a given people group represent some of their most genuine riches.

Central Asians, for example, are natural at extravagant hospitality. Americans stand out for their optimistic, problem-solving approach to life. East Asians model respect for elders such that Koreans may not even call their older siblings by their names but by the respectful titles of older brothers and sisters. Languages also have inherent strengths, with each tongue having a rich vocabulary corresponding to its culture’s emphases. Some languages excel in communicating the abstract or technical (looking at you, English). Yet others, in the beauty of the poetic. Some have given birth to intricate grammar systems so complex it is said that no one over forty can learn them. Yet other languages stand out for their simplicity and efficiency, as is seen in the wondrous flexibility of the world’s pidgins and creoles.

Where do these various cultural-linguistic strengths come from in the different people groups of the world? They come from the presence of the image of God among the individual members of that language or culture (Gen 1:27). For even in unengaged people groups that have had no gospel access whatsoever, the image of God given at the creation of Adam and Eve continues to linger. It is present in each new generation, though marred and broken by the effects of sin and death. The presence of this broken image among these peoples still speaks as a witness to the reality of the creator. Together with creation, this image reflects(although dimly) aspects of who he is and what he is like (Acts 14:17). But it also gives gifts, areas of strength in each person, language, and culture. These are places where the goodness of God’s creation still generously overflows even after millennia of sin and death.

Sadly, in the unengaged people groups of the world, these strengths are primarily used in the service of the enemy. Without the presence of a believing community, these gifts are a window of God’s glory only in their witness to his common grace and to His coming judgment. However, when a missionary engages this kind of people group, when the first individual or group of locals are born again, what has been concealed or latent is suddenly revealed. It’s as if a long-buried treasure is suddenly exposed to the sunlight. Or, torches that have not been lit from the birth of that culture and language are suddenly set ablaze. The result is glory, the real beginning of the glory of the nations, now at last truly reflecting the glory of God. The unique strengths and honor of a people group, whether great or small, can now be used for the first time in praise of the King.

Extravagant hospitality can now be offered from a motive of gospel love, even to the poor who cannot extend an invitation in return (Luke 14:13). Western optimism can now be grounded in the sobriety of the wisdom literature and matured by an unshakeable faith in God’s promises. Eastern respect for elders can now be done “as unto the Lord” and no longer out of mere cultural duty or fear of shame (Col 3:22). Languages suddenly become vehicles for psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs – for the eternal word of God itself as it is preached and as it is translated. In all these things, God’s universal truth and beauty are displayed through the unique facets of local expression.

There are multiple biblical motivations for missions, for going to the most challenging and remote corners of the earth to bring the gospel to those who have never heard the name of Christ. Hell is real (Rev 20:15). The love of Christ compels us (2 Cor 5:14). The glory of God calls for universal proclamation (Ps 96). Yet among these motivations, we may forget that missions is also a chance to take part in revealing hidden beauty, the unleashing of latent glory. Every missionary who risks the costs and dangers of going to the unengaged also has a chance to play a part in, even to be there to witness, the glory of the unengaged, finally unveiled to the praise of God.

Undoubtedly there is a special kind of joy in heaven when a given language and culture becomes a vehicle for the praise of God for the very first time. Who can tell with what anticipation the angels await the sound of new hymns sung in the language of the Luri, the power of preaching in Shabaki, and mission endeavors planned and carried out in the style of the Hawrami? And it’s not only heaven that will taste this joy. No, it will also be present in the hearts and tears of the missionaries who are honored to witness this glory unveiled and in the gatherings of their sending and supporting churches as they hear the incredible news from afar.

Revelation 21 is going to come to pass. God’s eternal glory and beauty will be reflected in the unique honor and glory of each of the nations, in each of the world’s remaining unengaged people groups. The costs of reaching these groups will be high, and the losses dear. But as we send and go, let us keep this vision of this coming joy before us. In eternity we will see the glory of the nations flowing into the new Jerusalem. And we will see the beginnings of this hidden glory even now by going to the unengaged.

This post was originally published on immanuelnetwork.org

A Practical and Powerful Bible Tool For Every Christian With a Smartphone

There are certain tools and resources that have passed the longevity test. These tools have proven useful, not just for a season, but for the long-term. I want to recommend just such a tool today.

The Compare feature on Youversion’s Bible app is the kind of tool I have used countless times over the last seven years in order to read scripture side by side with speakers of other languages. This Bible app doesn’t just provide scripture free of charge in 1,950 languages (Which is a stunning thing in itself. Can you imagine Tyndale’s reaction if he knew we had Bible access like this?) But it allows a reader to work through an entire passage in multiple languages side by side, with the texts parallel to one another on the screen of your smart phone or tablet. In our multilingual world, this is an extremely practical tool for Christians eager to share the truth of Scripture.

You can use this feature if you are sharing the gospel with someone from another ethnic or language background and want to make sure the individual verses you are sharing are clear. Instead of only showing your friend a verse in English, you can at the same time be showing it to them in their mother tongue (And in this way also know that you are indeed showing them the verse you mean to). Or, you can use this tool in a Bible study with others as you work through a broader passage, one parallel verse at a time, again, having two or more languages in front of you on your phones’ screens for the sake of clarity and understanding – both yours and theirs.

I have also used this feature to continue growing in my knowledge of other languages. Since I’m very familiar with the text of the Bible in English, it’s an easy way to learn new vocab and grammar in another language. And I’ve recommended this practice to many of my English students as a way to expose them to the Bible while they strengthen their English skills, one parallel verse or passage at a time.

This kind of practice not only helps with language acquisition, but also with language retention. Like our physical muscles, our languages need a little bit of regular exercise in order to not atrophy. A few Bible verses a day keeps that language’s part of the brain online in a surprising way. In this vein, whenever I listen to a sermon I have the Bible app’s Compare feature open in front of me for this very purpose. I’ve found the act of code-switching between Bible languages during a sermon helpful both for the insights as well as the questions that emerge.

What if you are aware of a Bible translation that exists, but it’s not included in the 1,950 languages currently on the app? Youversion provides a form for it to be added (Click My Language is Not Listed on the drop down menu and they’ll get back to you). Several years ago I filled out the request form, asking that the trade language translation I grew up with in Melanesia be added to the app. To my surprise, after a few months, there it was. I could now read the Bible in English, my Melanesian trade language, and my focus Central Asian language side by side. This is a true gift because it means that even if I’m the only one in Central Asia who speaks that particular Melanesian tongue, I can not only keep my knowledge of it alive, but even be edified by the Word while doing so.

I was recently speaking with a missionary friend who didn’t know of this tool, so I wanted to put it out there in case it might serve others who are involved in sharing truth across language barriers. For so many, the realities of immigration now mean that even without leaving our home nations we have neighbors, community businessmen, and fellow classmates from other nations. Few immigrants and refugees ever have anyone from their host nation ask genuine questions about the language they spoke growing up. And many speakers of other languages have no idea that the Bible has been translated into their language. This then can be a great way to invite someone into reading God’s word. Ask about their mother tongue, show them that you have a Bible in their language on your phone, ask them if they’d like to have it on their phone also, then invite them if they’d like to meet up another time for coffee or tea to read some together.

Our team in Central Asia has been able to “distribute” dozens upon dozens of Bibles in this way, with some of them being downloaded the very first time we meet someone and get into a spiritual conversation with them. For long-term or short-term teams, or for any Christian eager to share the Bible with others, this really is a tremendous tool for getting scripture into people’s hands, and for reading it side-by-side.

If you want to use this Compare feature, here are the steps:

Dowload the Youversion Bible app from the App Store or Google Play.
Set up a free account on the app.
Click the Bible button on the menu at the bottom of the screen.
At the top of the screen, choose the passage and English translation. This version will be your default until you change it.
Tap on a verse to select it.
Click on the Compare button from the menu that will pop up when you tap on the verse.
At this point, only the selected English verse will appear on the screen. Click on the Add Version button at the bottom of the screen.
Click on the Language button at the top of the screen in order to select versions in other languages.
Click the magnifying glass button at the top of the screen to search the 1,950 languages.
Tap the language you want.
On the next screen, tap on that language a second time in order to add it to the Compare page.
You should now see the verse you selected in your chosen languages side by side on the screen. Click on the Next Verse or Previous Verse buttons to navigate through the chapter.

I hope you find this tool as practical and powerful as I have. And to the team at Youversion, my sincerest thanks.

Timely Provision of an Unlikely Kind

Every parent knows of the dicey situations you might find yourself in when you’re away from home and your kid has a clothing crisis. Here I recall walking down the sidewalk in Queens, New York, carrying my one-and-a-half-year-old. It’s a freezing December evening, and she is swaddled up in her mom’s Middle Eastern scarf. But apart from that she’s only wearing a diaper. This is because she had an epic blowout while we were eating at a Turkish restaurant with a friend. And while we had an extra diaper, we did not have extra clothes. So after dinner, we shuffled back to the hotel as quickly as we could, hoping the meanface worn by most passersby was just typical New York, and not because our daughter’s bare chubby legs were sticking out into the winter wind.

I was helping change my youngest son into his pajamas the other day when I was reminded of yet another similar incident. While lending this bedtime assistance, I saw that my son was wearing a pair of blue briefs with a bright red, yellow, and green band. On the band is a repeated pattern of the word Wonderful and a black print of what is clearly a cannabis leaf.

“Hey love, we still have the marijuana undies?” I called to my wife down the hall.

“Yep! Hand-me-downs,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

These particular briefs had actually belonged to my son’s older sister, though this is no fault of her own. Well, not entirely.

At some point your kids start desiring to pack for themselves when the family goes on trips. This will eventually be a wonderful thing, I’m sure. But for a good number of years it introduces just as much trouble as any potential time it might save.

It was about a year ago that we found ourselves packing for a team retreat at a mountain lake town. Our previous team-building sessions with some new teammates had been sabotaged by local ministry crises, so we were going to try again, but this time we planned to get out of town to make the interruptions at least a little less likely. There’s almost no acceptable reason for not answering your phone in our local culture, but one of the few exceptions to this tyrannical rule is if you are out of the city. So, we packed up and drove an hour through the mountains to a nice lakeside hotel. We were all looking forward to a few days of encouragement, getting to know one another better, and some measure of rest. Even the biggest dust storm in decades didn’t dampen our spirits.

After the first evening of sessions, our family arrived back at our room. The plan was for each of the kids to get a quick shower before bed. Well, somewhere in the course of this process my wife discovered that our daughter had forgotten to pack any undergarments. In spite of her best packing intentions, our daughter had simply forgotten to pack any of this crucial form of clothing. My wife and I both deflated when my she told me the bad news. It was now 9 p.m. and neither of us wanted to head out into the dusty night to problem-solve this kind of issue at the end of a day of travel and meetings. We just wanted to get the kids in bed and get some rest ourselves.

But maybe, just maybe, some of the stores in the little tourist town’s bazaar would still be open and have something that could work. We decided I should try to go hunt down some children’s undergarments. If I found some, then I wouldn’t have to make the drive down to our city and back the next day and miss a half day of the retreat. We remembered passing a few women’s clothing stores as we drove through the bazaar, but it was a very small town with a marketplace that focused mostly on swimming and picnic supplies for tourists. I figured I had maybe a 50/50 chance of accomplishing my mission.

Girding up my loins, I drove down the mountain road to the little town and began weaving my car systematically through the streets of the small bazaar. Most of the stores were closed, with the exception of tea houses, shawarma shops, and alcohol stores. I had just about given up hope when I made it to the very last street. One narrow closet of a store remained to be checked.

Proclaiming my peace upon the store attendant, I entered and did a quick scan. Hair dryers, makeup, adult pajama sets, and other similar items filled the shelves from floor to ceiling. These were good signs. I tried to look casual as I made my way to the very back of the store. And there I spotted a thing of glory. A dusty bin on the floor full of a random assortment of kids briefs.

“There it is!” I said to my self in the local language, much more loudly than I had been meaning to. As other missionaries can attest, there is a special kind of victorious joy that floods one’s soul when the very item you have been searching for is suddenly found in the bowels of a foreign market. Providence cares for us in many ways, and these oh-so-practical provisions in unexpected places certainly count as one of them.

However, I soon I realized that the trick would be finding something the right size. Most of these undergarments were for apparently massive children and my daughter was a very skinny seven-year-old at the time. After I had picked through the entire dusty box, I found three pair that would have to do. One was neutral, and probably too big. Two seemed to be a better size. Of these two, one was clearly for girls, and illustrated with flowers and goofy Asian cartoon characters. Passable, I thought to myself. And the third pair, which was the one I was most confident would actually fit, was none other than the pair of boys’ Rastafarian-themed underwear which I have described above.

I squatted on the dirty tile floor of the shop considering the best path forward. Was I a bad dad for considering buying my child an undergarment emblazoned with cannabis leaves, self-proclaimed as Wonderful? However, since they might be the only ones that truly fit, the more practical side of me soon won out. Clean undies trump many things. I would get my daughter at least two pair that should fit, and if any uncomfortable questions are raised about the nature of said plant emblazoned on its band, we could always use it as a teachable moment. It’s never too early for a little Christian worldview formation, right?

Having made my decision, I couldn’t not spend a moment chewing on certain unanswerable questions. Who in their right mind had decided to design such a garment for kids? Why had their supervisor at the clothing factory approved this idea? What country and continent had this pair of briefs originally come from? Jamaica? And what kind of strange and Wonderful journey had brought them to this dusty bin in an obscure mountain town in Central Asia? Alas, there are no answers to questions such as these, so I rose, attempted to purchase them with a nonchalant demeanor, and stepped back out into the hazy night air.

Much relieved to have actually found something, I celebrated by buying myself a late night chicken shawarma sandwich (to be consumed immediately), and some Snickers bars (to be consumed in the hotel room). It may have been a needle in a haystack, but by the grace of God I had found something passable at the very last store I could have checked. Our children would be fully clothed. The team retreat was saved.

I definitely had to stifle a laugh the other day when I realized that these marijuana undies had made it all the way to America with us. The many adventures of the traveling cannabis underpants continue. Indeed, they are being put to good use as a hand-me-down for a missionary kid, so they have found a noble use in the end, despite their murky beginnings.

“What is real missionary life like?” many ask. Well, there are the days when you find someone divinely prepared to hear the gospel message. And those are good days. And then there are the days when all you can find is some cannabis-themed underwear for your kids when they’ve forgotten to pack any of their own. And those are good days too. Turns out the small graces of laughter and timely provision can be a mighty thing amidst the many ups and downs of missionary life.

No, I will not scoff at the timely gift of even these pagan underpants – but yes, I will laugh. And someday, when they’re old enough, I think our kids will too.

Photo by David Gabrić on Unsplash

*Just in case it isn’t clear, I would like to say that I do not support the recreational use of cannabis plant/marijuana for Christians or anyone. Though I hear it was used to make some decent parachutes during WWII.

Support this writing with a one-time gift

Support this writing with an ongoing gift

Not Forever, Yet Still Meaningful

“Make sure they know their commitment doesn’t have to be forever to be meaningful.”

I recently shared this tip with a friend who was struggling to build a core team for a new church plant in eastern Kentucky. He had another informational meeting coming up, and since I wouldn’t be able to make it, I was eager for those at the meeting to be free from the false choice of a never-or-forever commitment to living and serving in the mountain town chosen for the church plant.

Many tend to view a commitment to missions or church planting as a life calling to a certain place or people group. And for some, it is. Church history says that Timothy eventually settled in Ephesus, ministering there until he was martyred as an old man. Patrick gave his life to Ireland. But for Paul and others who were part of his apostolic band, several months or years here and there seemed to be the norm.

For lead church planters, there is an important distinction to understand between the planter-pastor calling and what can be called an apostolic planter calling. Planter-pastors aim to plant a church and then to pastor it for the long-term. For those who are called to an apostolic planter ministry, their leadership over the church plant is meant to be temporary from the beginning, and they aim to go on planting other churches. These planters have a gifting that echoes that of Paul, where churches are started and then handed over to long-term elders, and it’s in this sense that I’m using the term apostolic, without here getting into the debates about whether there is an actual apostolic gifting or office for the church today.

Having been involved with both North American and cross-cultural church planting, it’s curious to note that the planter-pastor approach is the dominant model and assumption for North American church plants, while the apostolic planter model is the dominant model and assumption for planting churches cross-culturally. The conversations tend to be very different in these two spheres of church planting regarding what is necessary for a church plant to be successful. Preaching is a great example of this. For North American church plants, a strong gift of preaching is held up to be absolutely necessary. But for cross-cultural church-planting, preaching is often downplayed or even jettisoned altogether. Given these drastic differences, there needs to be more cross-pollination between missionary planters overseas and church planters in North America who are planting in their own language and in near-culture contexts. This is necessary so that neither are stuck in their own echo chambers. But that is a separate post.

What I want to focus on today is that just as some lead church planters are called to a life commitment and others to give a much shorter time, so the members of a church planting team can also be called to either kind of commitment. But perhaps because the planter-pastor model is the dominant one in North America, those considering joining a core team of this kind of church plant tend to assume they are being asked to commit decades to the church plant and focus city. This is, understandably, a very big ask. So it’s no wonder that many church planters heading to hard places in North America have a difficult time recruiting a team.

Yes, some will be called and gifted with a life-long commitment to a new church plant and new city. But this kind of long-term calling will not be the case for everyone, and is not necessary in order for team members to make a meaningful contribution to the church plant. The mid-term category for missionaries serves as a helpful example here. Many will go overseas for one to three years and then return to their home countries. Not only is this a very formative time for them, it can also be a crucial support for the long-termers on the ground. And eternally-significant ministry can take place in that kind of time frame as well. Gospel seeds can be sown and friends can come to faith and discipled. Churches can even be established.

If this is the case overseas, why would it not be the case when church planting team members will be ministering in their own language and in a near culture? While studying the local culture will still be important, this kind of church planting has the massive advantage of the team, from day one, already being fluent in the local language – with the exception of some local slang and idioms, of course. This is still just enough ignorance to be dangerous, but you can’t get away from every possibility of risk and embarrassment in this kind of service. Nor would you want to, since everybody ends up more humble and happy when they can laugh at themselves.

Calling for mid-term length commitments, say one to five years, might not only free up more people to commit, but could also keep them from unnecessary shame and disorientation when they are a number of years in and are burnt out, or simply need to transition to a setting that’s healthier for their family. Being in a season ourselves where our family’s health raises a lot of questions about our future in Central Asia, it can be profoundly disorienting to rethink the next several decades when we had thought the path before us was more or less clear. Whether overseas or in city church plants in North America, many families end up needing to make significant moves somewhere in the five to ten year range. This often has to do with kids getting older, the costs of serving in a hard place piling up, and some kind of natural human cycle where we get restless and tend to lose hope of real change actually happening in this particular range of years (check out the most common years for divorces to take place). Rather than recruiting all teammates with a decades-long vision, there may be some wisdom in anticipating these dynamics and calling for shorter commitments as well. That way, even if someone decides it’s time to transition after their five years are up, this is a chance for celebrating their faithfulness, rather than an unexpected blow to the team that yet another member of the core team is leaving.

There are downsides to calling for midterm commitments. Investing in midterm teammates can take a long time, so it’s a blow when all that investment feels like it’s leaving after only a few short years – and then you have to do it all over again with someone new. That kind of turnover on a team can be discouraging and heavy. Wisdom is needed to make sure this is actually paying off. But when we remember that we are not just investing in these teammates for what they can do for the work, but we are investing in them as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, those who will go on to serve elsewhere, then we can better bear these costs. We might not see as much return on the investment as we had hoped for in our local work, but we can trust that all faithful sowing will eventually bear fruit, both in the person themself as well as in the future churches they are a part of.

Starting something new is a tricky thing. This is just as true of churches as it is of anything else. There is a very subjective sense of momentum and growing stability that can make all the difference in others buying into the vision and taking the risk to join a church plant. Given this fragile dynamic, the simple presence of a few more faithful people can make all the difference in the early years. For those unsure about long-term callings or doubtful that they could in good conscience commit to decades, hearing that they can make a real difference by giving a specific year or three might turn a “No” into a “Yeah, by God’s grace, I think I can do that.”

It may not be forever. But that doesn’t mean means it’s not meaningful. After all, Paul only spent three years in Ephesus, and even less time elsewhere. The choice need not be never-or-forever. A few good years sown in faith as part of a church plant in a hard place may yield more of a harvest than we could ever anticipate. We may not be able to give decades, but could we give a year or two or five? It’s a worthy thing to wrestle with.

Photo by Lukas Allspach on Unsplash

Support this writing with a one time gift

Support this writing with a repeating gift

Two Types of Language Learners

Language learning. It’s the 500-pound gorilla that first term missionaries everywhere must learn to dance with. Though often, this experience feels less like a dance and more like our metaphorical gorilla is simply sitting on your head.

I had the advantage of growing up a bilingual TCK, which does help. The shift from two to three languages seems to be easier for the brain than the shift from one to two – something about the mind having already learned once to express reality in an alternative system of thought/speech forms makes it that much easier to do it again. A second or third language gives your brain additional categories, more hooks on which to hang the grammatical concepts or vocab of whatever language you’re learning next. For example, my high school Spanish got me familiar with verb conjugation based on person and number, a category that served me well when I started learning our local Central Asian tongue. But no matter how much experience you have with languages, it always takes a lot of time and hard work to master another one – and this often requires two to five years. Therefore, anything that makes it somewhat easier is extremely valuable.

I’m no trained linguist, but as a language-learning practitioner (and one who has worked closely with many others) I’ve observed two main kinds of language learners, two main patterns of wiring when it comes to learning an additional tongue. There may be technical terms for these language learning styles out there, but for the purposes of this post I’ll call them the Analytical and the Intuitive language learning styles. Essentially, every language-learner I’ve engaged with on this topic seems to fall into one of these two camps, creating something like a 50/50 divide.

These styles or preferences differ from one another in how they relate to the structure – the grammar – of the language. The mind of an Analytical learner craves and needs understanding of the language’s structure very early on, often proving unable to absorb vocab and dialogue without it. If required to learn and reproduce phrases without this structure, the mind of an Analytical learner protests and complains – “How am I supposed to learn this if I don’t understand what these parts of speeches’ roles are, what they are doing in the sentence, the rules that govern them, and how it all fits together?!” An Analytical learner needs a map of the language, a blueprint of sorts, and only when they have this can they begin to truly learn the individual parts. It’s as if the mind then relaxes and is free to learn because it now knows where to place the hitherto-disjointed pieces. These pieces are then no longer felt to be disembodied and random, but part of a logical system, part of a whole.

The mind of an Intuitive learner functions in the complete opposite way. An intuitive learner’s mind cannot take in or understand the language’s structure, its grammar, without a large foundation of listening, phrases, and dialogue. If presented with grammar lessons at the beginning of language learning, their mind will tend to reject the information, since it feels like it has nothing concrete on which to hang these abstract rules and systems. These learners crave jumping in headfirst and using the language, getting conversational with practical, everyday language. Only after a solid season of this will their brains start to desire and accept the Why behind the words and phrases they have been hearing and using. They need to feel out the rules first, and only directly study them later. Rather than needing a map, these learners need to go and explore the streets on foot as it were. After they have done this they will then be able to rightly orient themselves with the big picture.

All human beings learn their first language as Intuitive learners. Our brains naturally absorb the structure of our mother tongue by constant observation and trial and error. We absorb the rules naturally and indirectly. Then, once we are in school, we are directly and explicitly taught the structure of our language. We approach grammar study in school in an Analytical way. This means that for everyone who has studied grammar in school, we all have at least some experience learning our own language in both styles. But whether because of brain plasticity or something genetic, around half of us develop an Analytical learning preference, while the other half continues to prefer Intuitive learning.

How do we know which wiring fits us? Even without learning another language, there may be some clues that you already have. First, how did (and do) you feel about studying the grammar of your own language? Does this feel good to your mind, or more akin to the angst of getting a cavity filled – necessary, but definitely not enjoyable? Does “seeing” the invisible structure of your language bring you joy or make you want to go to sleep? If grammatical concepts make your mind tingle pleasantly, chances are you are an Analytical learner. If you’d really rather get back to what you feel is the real language, then you’re probably Intuitively-wired.

These categories tend to flow over into other areas of learning as well. A friend who works as a chef told me this week that he has always loved learning the why, the science, behind what is happening in cooking. Knowing this makes him feel more free and equipped to create and enjoy cooking food. This means there is a very good chance that my friend would be an Analytical language learner. Get that man some grammar early on, and he will feel so much more free and equipped to persevere in language learning. Paying attention to how you prefer learning in other areas is another clue to how God has wired your brain to learn language.

Why are these categories are so important to understand? Because enjoyment and perseverance in language learning are on the line here, and this because language learning programs tend to favor one style or another. Put a language learner in a program that favors the other kind of mind, and they will very quickly want to pull their hair out, and/or quit. Put a learner in a program that fits with their respective Intuitive or Analytical style, and greatly increase their chances of actually learning that language. Too often learners are handicapped by the wrong approach, and mistakenly come away thinking they are not really gifted to learn language at all.

Several dynamics mean that language learners continue to get placed in programs that lead to deep frustration. The first issue is simple ignorance of these learning preferences. The learner, teacher, or facilitator might not know that these variations exist, so how can they know which style the student best aligns with? Second, it is a lamentable human tendency to project our own wiring onto others. So, if we successfully learned a language in a certain way, we naturally feel that everyone else should be able to learn in this same way also. We might even go on to publish and distribute our favored method, making big claims about the universality of our approach. And this leads to the third issue, that of methodological rigidity. Just as missionaries might latch onto a silver-bullet church-planting strategy, so they tend to latch onto a language learning methodology as the way to do it, rather than a way. Here the same common sense logic applies to both church planting and language learning – it’s a very hard job and people are very diverse, so we should want to keep all of our healthy options on the table. Sadly, many new missionaries on the field are locked into a language learning approach that is given the weight of law, when it should really only be treated as a helpful option, one that very well may need to be tweaked or even discarded.

My wife and I are wired as Intuitive language learners. This meant that we wanted to jump in right away into collecting phrases and doing conversational practice. I remember having some grammar lessons in the US before going to Central Asia, but almost nothing from those lessons was retained by my brain. Instead, six months into an Intuitive learning approach (GPA), I suddenly found my mind unexpectedly hungry for some rules for things like the way that near/far and singular/plural demonstratives were acting in my new adopted language. A grammar summary from a teammate on the logic of how to say “these bananas, those bananas, this banana, etc.,” made all the difference here. And even though we found ourselves in a learning program that mostly fit our style, we were also crucially allowed a great degree of flexibility to pursue more Analytical lessons as needed. And we made generous use of this freedom, changing up our program significantly every few months. I believe that this flexibility is what allowed us to reach the advanced level of language in the time frame that we did. Because for us, flexibility to pivot when needed meant we were able to continue (mostly) enjoying the language learning process.

And yet many of our colleagues have found the same programs we used, the same lightly-structured approach favoring Intuitive learning, to be positively life-sucking. They dream of having an official language school, where an Analytical approach to the language could result, for them, in greater freedom and joy in language learning. And I wish the same for them, because God has apparently wired our minds differently. Why should they be compelled to learn in the same way that I did? No indeed, get those folks some grammar, and fast! But please don’t make me study it until I’m ready. In this way we may all learn to get that 500-pound gorilla off our heads, and perhaps even begin to dance with it.

Photo by Patrice Audet on Unsplash

Strongmen vs. The Structures of a Healthy Church

When modern dictators fall the societies they ruled tend to flounder and splinter. This is because they have previously been gutted. A dictator, in order to increase and maintain his power, needs to systematically weaken all other institutions of civil society that might serve as independent centers of power and organization. So he goes after religious institutions, the media, voluntary societies, other branches of government, etc. He will often permit a shell of these institutions to continue, but will appoint loyal cronies to head them up so that they no longer pose any legitimate challenge. The longer this goes on, the more a society is gutted of healthy systems and structures that it could use to organize and unify itself once the dictator is removed. Like some kind of ravenous fungus, a strongman consumes and replaces healthy systems and institutions as he feeds off his people, slowly choking the organizational life out of society.

This explains why certain Middle Eastern countries have done so poorly since the removal of their dictators in recent decades. During long decades of dictatorship, true civil society was turned into a zombie of its former self or driven underground. Often, the only network of institutions strong enough to endure the long stranglehold has been the conservative mosques, buttressed as they are by their religious ideology. Thus, when a dictator of a Muslim country falls, the West’s hopes for the emergence of a unifying liberal coalition are disappointed again and again. They liberals can’t seem to organize effectively, and it’s no wonder. All the institutions of the liberals and moderates were practically destroyed ages ago. Into this power vacuum then steps the Islamist fundamentalists, the only ones placed to organize and take over the uprising – even if said uprising began as a majority liberal movement.

An interesting parallel exists here between these political realities and the state of many churches in the Middle East and Central Asia – indeed, anywhere in the world where the culture tends to reward domineering leaders. As in society as a whole, a strongman over the church tends to take the rightful place of other legitimate systems and structures. Look at the few churches that exist in these areas, and you will notice a curious absence of things like healthy membership, responsible giving and finances, congregational accountability and discipline, and plurality of leadership. Instead of covenanted members, belonging to the church is equated with those who are loyal to the strongman. Instead of transparent finances, the pastor controls all the money. In the place of congregational discipline for its own members, you have the favor or displeasure of the leader. And there is no healthy plurality, just one charismatic, domineering personality that leaves no room for any legitimate pushback or accountability.

If we return to my preferred napkin diagram of a healthy church (described in a previous post), we see that a strongman completely replaces all of the characteristics of a healthy church that we would see in stage two, in what I’ve called an organized church.

Now, this diagram is simply a tool I’ve used to quickly summarize the characteristics of a healthy church as they relate to the typical stages a church plant goes through. Not all of the characteristics are rigidly sequential, but I would contend that the three stages of Formative, Organized, and Sending are a common pattern in how church plants develop – and, for our purposes today, that there is a qualitative difference between what is present in a formative church and what is there in an organized church. That difference lies in the intentional organization and systematization of what had previously been a gathering of believers functioning more organically.

A bible study that has really taken off might gather regularly for fellowship, worship, teaching, prayer, and discipleship. They might share the gospel regularly with their friends and neighbors. All of these things are biblical and good. And while they can be organized into systems, they don’t have to be organized in order to be done well. They don’t demand careful planning and organization. They can exist in an organic fashion for a very long time with only basic plans put in place. The same cannot really be said for the characteristics in stage two. These require careful thought and planning and implementation if they are to even exist in a church plant. And they will not ever exist in a healthy way without great intentionality that leads to the birth of good systems. In fact, to simply wing the structures of stage two is to play with deadly fire that will burn many.

This required intentionality and creation of systems and structures explains why the elements of the organized church stage are absent or so underdeveloped in many house churches. These characteristics are complicated and time-consuming to figure out and it’s simply easier to keep punting their development until some future date. Often, there is a great deal of ignorance about how to actually begin to teach and then roll out things like membership, plural leadership, and discipline. This is why groups like 9 Marks focus so heavily on reviving both the knowledge and the practical details of good ecclesiology for the Church. Even those committed to these things in principle can often botch the implementation. I’ve often heard it said that the number one mistake of reformed church planters and church revitalizers is appointing elders too quickly.

However, this is so far assuming that the church planters, missionaries, and members want to see these systems developed. But often, past experience and current methodology commitments mean that the preference is for things to stay organic and natural (And this often has roots in Westerners’ own cultural moment of being post-institutional). Stage two will just happen naturally, it is claimed, as the Spirit eventually gets around to leading the locals into how to be a biblical church. Missionaries can live in a fantasy where the kinds of intentionality and organization required in their own culture for the church to function well are actually considered bad, or at least not really necessary in the more pristine cultures of foreign lands. Some even view focusing on the characteristics of stage two as bad for church multiplication, the kind of thing that leads to the terrible “I” word that is alleged to kill movements of the Spirit, institutionalization.

When you pair these Western postures with cultures already prone to domineering leadership, you get a lethal cocktail. The missionaries aren’t interested in pushing for organized church characteristics in their church plants. They want things to stay organic and rapidly multiplying. Locals, never having before known the power of a spiritual family organized in a healthy way, default to how their families, mosques, and government are run – strongman rule. Soon, a strongman does emerge who then goes on to make the church his own little fiefdom. The missionaries become perplexed and discouraged at what has happened, and either fall in line themselves or are eventually run off when the strongman feels they are a threat to his monopoly. The end result is a sick church, one without biblical membership, giving, leadership, or discipline. Biblical mission, often the final characteristic to be developed, will also never happen through this kind of church where a spiritual dictator has settled down to feed on the sheep.

If we do not plant churches with a willingness ourselves to lead in the development of stage two characteristics, we do a great disservice to the local believers we are claiming to serve. Like a society naively asked to go vote after decades of dictator rule, we set them up for failure. A power vacuum will always be filled. And in strongman societies, little dictators spring out of the ground like so many narcissus flowers in the Central Asian fields of spring. Local churches all over the world desperately need systems of healthy giving, leadership, discipline, and membership. How will they know what these structures look like if we do not intentionally teach and model them? Or do we really believe that these systems will somehow contaminate indigenous churches more so than the inevitable strongman who will take over in their absence?

Should stage two characteristics of a healthy church be contextualized? Absolutely. And yet here we must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. An imperfect effort to contextualize a system of membership is far better than never initiating formal membership because we are afraid of some kind of Western contamination taking place. Covenants can be modified for the pressing needs of specific contexts. Membership lists and vows can be oral rather than written and signed. Leadership can be chosen and honored in ways that are locally sensitive. The Scriptures provide ample room to carefully apply the principles of church organization to a given culture. “All things should be done decently and in order,” (1 Cor 14:40) does not mean you should simply copy/paste the systems of First Baptist Church back home. But it does mean we should give serious attention to the right ordering (organizing) of the church. As Paul said to one church planting team member, “This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you” (Titus 1:5). What was asked of Titus in his cross-cultural setting is still asked of us today.

Strongmen will never coexist peacefully with healthy systems that can hold them to account. They will always seek to prevent their emergence or to choke the life out of them if they are present. On the other hand, the best way to prevent the people of God being ruled by these domineering men is to order the church wisely, even if this involves great intentionality and careful organization. Protecting the church means organizing it so that it might fully display the glory of God – not only in its organic love and obedience, but also in its wise systems and structures.

Photo by Rob on Unsplash