Ever wonder what was going on in Acts 14 when the Lystran crowds respond to a miraculous healing at the hands of Paul and Barnabas by proclaiming them Hermes and Zeus? Check out this helpful background context:
The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men. This phrase recalls a well-known mythological story. One day Jupiter (Zeus) and his son Mercury (Hermes) disguised themselves as mortals and visited a thousand homes in Phrygia. Each denied them hospitality until Baucis and her husband, Philemon, opened their humble home to the gods. After feeding the guests with their best food, the elderly couple soon realized they were hosting divine visitors after the wine flagon constantly refilled itself. When Jupiter and Mercury warned them about an impending flood that would destroy their wicked neighbors, Baucis and Philemon fled to high ground. After the flood, their lone-standing home was transformed into a magnificent temple. When asked their one wish, Philemon and Baucis requested to die together. Many years later, while caring for the temple, the couple began to sprout leaves, and the two were simultaneously transformed into trees in the sight of their neighbors.
It is little wonder that Paul and Barnabas were treated as they were, for the crowd thought Jupiter and Mercury had possibly returned. Barnabas, as the older of the two, was undoubtedly identified as Jupiter, while Paul, as the speaker, was perceived to be Mercury, the messenger god.
-ESV Archaeology Study Bible, note on Acts 14:11-13
As it turns out, the locals in Lystra did have a category for a pair of normal-looking men showing up and performing miracles. Recalling this myth that allegedly recounted events from neighboring Phrygia, the Lystrans put two and two together and wrongly assumed that Paul and Barnabas were the gods come to visit in human guise once again.
What I’ve heard said of children can also apply to the unreached or unchurched unbelievers – they are wonderful observers, but terrible interpreters. This story demonstrates the importance of explaining the meaning of our actions to the unbelievers as quickly as possible. Otherwise, they will use their pagan worldviews to project shockingly wrong meanings onto even the ‘normal’ Christian things we’re doing.
During our season of doing refugee ministry and living in a poor apartment complex in Louisville, we had all kinds of people regularly coming in and out of our apartment. This was because we were hosting game nights, weekly community meals, and Bible studies. Imagine our shock when an older African-American friend and ally, Miss Mary, informed us that the word on the street was that we were running some kind of prostitution ring – and that my wife was the pimp!
Unbelievers will come up with all kinds of wild and crazy claims to try to make sense out of the things we’re doing in ministry. In one sense, this is not entirely surprising. Believers sharing the gospel and making disciples are, after all, like the apostles, turning the world upside down. Until the Holy Spirit grants spiritual sight, it’s hard to know what to make of this.
In addition to this, the story of this crowd’s reaction in Acts 14 also makes a subtle case for the necessity of mother-tongue ministry. I believe that trade language ministry, like Paul and Barnabas are doing here in Greek, is valid, biblical, and often effective. But here we see how quickly things go wrong in part because Paul and Barnabas don’t understand what the crowds, speaking in Lycaonian, are saying about them. Once they find out, things have gotten so out of hand that their attempts to shut it all down almost result in blasphemy and do result in Paul ultimately getting stoned. Yikes.
No wonder Paul later asks for prayer that he might make his gospel proclamation clear (Col 4:4).
We should find out any day now if we’ve met our goal and are fully funded for our second year back on the field! If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
The category of Unreached People Group has recently been getting some (justified) pushback. This is true for multiple reasons.
First, the term has been defined by missiologists primarily in sociological, ethno-linguistic terms, not in biblical-theological terms, which undermines its claim to be the way to apply the Bible’s panta ta ethne (all the nations)emphasis. See more on this here.
Second, even a cursory reading of Paul and Luke shows that their main categories for the unreached are primarily geographical, not ethnic and linguistic (Acts 1:8, Acts 19:10, Rom 15:23). In our circles, David Platt has been influential in restoring some of this emphasis on reaching both unreached peoples and places.
Third, the category of UPG has been applied to so many different kinds of lost people that need evangelizing that it is in danger of losing much of its meaning. Do global youth count as a UPG? Because I’ve been to a gathering where that claim was made from the platform. Or, how about Canadian hockey players? When everything is an unreached people group, nothing is. The term is being robbed of its meaning through sloppy usage.
Fourth, even the official UPG definition of less than 2% evangelical is, in the end, somewhat arbitrary. This threshold was chosen as the benchmark by which an indigenous church was considered self-sustaining and able to reach the rest of its people. But this percentage was only chosen by a committee after the original 1970s sociology 20% threshold was deemed too difficult (Hadaway, p.17).
All this means that the authority of this category of UPG has often been overstated and misapplied. It is not the biblical category for understanding the unreached, nor the only way to understand the barriers that prevent certain groups from hearing the gospel.
When it comes to what is the best matrix or lenses for understanding who the unreached really are, three things need to be acknowledged.
First, churches and mission agencies that seek to be good stewards of their people and funds need a way to prioritize this kind of work over that kind of work. And to do this, they will need a faithful and practical way to understand and categorize lostness. The concept of UPG has, in this way, been a helpful improvement over the older modern state category of organizing missions efforts. When you only view the world through a political modern state framework, there really are going to be thousands of ‘hidden peoples’ that get overlooked.
Second, merely discarding this kind of lens that prioritizes ethno-linguistic groups that have little or no access to the gospel will likely mean that the vast majority of missions funding and personnel keep flowing to those peoples and places that already have strong indigenous churches. It’s still only 1% of missions money and 3% of missions personnel that are going to UPGs, while 99% of funding and 97% of missionaries serve in contexts that are considered ‘reached.’ This imbalance still exists even with all the hype around the idea of UPGs that has been there for the past few decades. I don’t know how this is possible. But jettisoning the UPG category does not seem like it will help this gross imbalance of resources.
Third, the Bible does not have one lens or category by which it defines or tracks the gospel’s global spread; Instead, it has a handful. One of these is ‘peoples’ or ‘nations’ (Matt 28:19). Clearly, the main difference in view here with this terminology is what we would now call ethnicity, even if these terms can also be used by the biblical authors to refer to all the Gentiles in general. But another lens that the Bible uses is ‘all languages’ (Is 66:18, Dan 7:14). That means that language is another valid barrier recognized by the Bible that God will overcome. Geography and political borders, as mentioned above, seem to be a further kind of lens, valid enough, it would seem, to be the main way Paul was thinking about places being reached or not. Ultimately, I find it instructive that the best-known verse on this subject, Revelation 7:9, includes not one, but multiple categories of lostness:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands,
Because the Bible’s emphasis seems to be that the gospel will overcome all the barriers dividing lost humanity, wisdom suggests putting all of these biblical categories in our toolbelt and not arbitrarily limiting ourselves to one.
In our region of Central Asia, one unreached people group shares the same language as another group considered reached. Here, differences in ethnicity and religion mean the gospel is not bridging from one group to the other.
But we also have minority people groups in our area that share the same ethnic name as the majority group, but that have their own, distinct mother tongue. Here, the barrier to the gospel is language, not ethnic self-identification.
However, there are also places like North Korea, where a political border prevents gospel access to an unreached population that shares ethnicity and language with its kinfolk to the south.
Friends, the ethnicities, language groups, tribes, and places that are currently without a witness, believers, or churches are that way for a reason. They are exceptionally hard to reach. We need all of these biblical (and practical) lenses to, first, not overlook them, but also to keep them prioritized for the long-term effort it will take to see them actually reached and worshipping Jesus.
No, not in some frenetic and misguided way to get Jesus to come back more quickly, but as a way to truly fulfill the Great Commission, which is still our marching orders. Matthew 24:14 has been abused. But that does not rob it of its actual meaning, which is that the Church’s posture will be one of preaching the gospel to all the nations when Christ returns. Paul’s holy ambition was to take the gospel to places where Christ had not already been named (Rom 15:20). Even as we seek to thread the interpretive needle right, we must not lose this emphasis.
To do this well, we need to recognize the multiple lenses the Bible gives us to think about concepts such as the unreached. If we need to put the category of UPG back in its proper place, then so be it. But let’s make sure it still has a seat at the table.
We only need to raise 2k ($160 per month) to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
This may sound odd, but if you ever plan on baptizing someone – meaning you yourself are the one to put them under the water – then you would be wise to get some practice beforehand.
All kinds of things can go wrong when immersing someone in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Just to mention a few of the mishaps that have occurred when I’ve baptized others, there was that one time when we baptized someone in moving water but didn’t think about how she was facing upstream. This meant that the river water not only went up right up her nose but, she claimed, all the way up into her brain.
Then there was the time we planned a baptism service in January with the assurance that the host would heat the water in the kiddie pool outside. After we arrived, he informed us there had been no electricity all morning. That meant the new believers coming up so symbolically out of the icy water also came up shrieking like Nazgul.
Another time, we failed to get a local believer’s kneecaps under the water when we dunked him. Hopefully, that doesn’t mean he’ll be raised without these crucial joints in the new heavens and new earth.
Neither am I alone in committing these kinds of baptism blunders. It’s not uncommon for the baptizer to botch the trinitarian formula in the excitement of the moment and suddenly find himself sounding like a modalist. Nor is it uncommon for the baptizee to forget to plug their nose and bend their knees, the latter of which means their legs fly up as their torso goes down, while the baptizer scrambles to not themself get pulled under. Even worse, baptizees who wear white garments experience a real-life version of that terrible dream where, for some reason, you’re in front of the church wearing only your skivvies.
All of this is exactly why my pastoral ministry professor in college took our class out to a local church so we could practice ‘baptizing’ each other. He warned us of many of the common blunders, taught us a tried-and-true technique for the actual physical dunking itself, then had us practice on one another. This was solid training, if somewhat unorthodox, the kind of hands-on activity that ends up serving you very well in ministry when you have to baptize someone for real.
No, we didn’t actually say the trinitarian formula when practicing, so we were careful in that way to not be disrespectful toward this weighty and beautiful ceremony. But yes, it was also a lot of fun. I think I got ‘baptized’ by my classmates five times that day. I am a Baptist after all, so I know that there’s only one dunking that actually counts. All the others before (or after) the one-and-done sign of the new birth are merely the equivalent of a rather short bath.
But you know one thing that training didn’t talk about? What to do with the microphone.
Turns out, my very first baptism blunder was dropping the microphone in the baptismal water. Thanks be to God (and to whatever deacon or sound guy set it up); it was a cordless mic. Here’s how it happened.
Reza*, my refugee friend, had at long last agreed to be baptized. As with his journey to faith, this involved lots of intense discussions. In the end, we got an exception from the elders so that a pastor could do a membership meal with him instead of an official interview. And Reza would also be free to swear by the church covenant and statement of faith orally, rather than signing them. Both of these decisions were, I felt, wise and kind concessions given the fact that ‘interviews’ and signing ‘confessions’ were so closely related to secret police interrogations in my friend’s culture and family background.
The Sunday night of the baptism finally came, and Reza and I found ourselves alone in the old stone church basement. Reza was wearing a poofy white baptism robe with dark clothing underneath. I was also wearing a similar robe, but underneath I had on a borrowed set of one of the elders’ big rubber waders.
I was excited. Reza had come such a long way. His sustained resistance to church membership had been much more of a struggle than I had expected. But he was clearly born again. So, he needed to follow Jesus in step one of discipleship: go under the waters of baptism.
Since he was the first person I’d ever baptized, I was mentally running through the steps I’d learned from my class. Reza, for his part, was freaking out.
He knew that once news of this step reached his dad, there would be blowback. Even though his dad was an agnostic leftist refugee on another continent, it would still bring shame on the family for Reza to do something so drastic as leave his sophisticated cultural identity to become a Christian – and a Baptist at that. Sure enough, soon after the baptism, his dad did cut off all his financial support for Reza.
I did my best to reassure Reza that he was doing the right thing, that any time we follow Jesus in risky obedience, joy and freedom follow. It didn’t seem like he fully believed me.
However, before we knew it, time was up. We were being summoned up the little winding stairs into the old baptismal. Reza’s resolve seemed to strengthen as he walked up the stairs, nervous but seemingly determined to go through with it.
The little tank we waded into was from the early 1900s. It was a hexagonal shape, with the front half of the hexagon facing the congregation. It had a foot or so of a glass railing at waist height, and two white wooden pillars at the front hexagon corners that held up the roof. The back wall of the hexagon was an old painting that attempted to portray a Jordan River scene of reeds and flowing water in faded blues, greens, and browns.
Reza was handed the cordless mic first. He took the manuscript of his testimony in his hand, gripped the mic in the other, and looked up at the crowd. Then he started reading.
Steadily, and with growing conviction and volume, Reza read of how he had been raised by his political and irreligious family, how he had gone deep into fundamentalist Islam as a teenager, how he had experimented with Hinduism and Buddhism in college, and how he had at last fallen into a hedonistic lifestyle after arriving in the US. Systematically, he laid out how all of these other paths had led to utter emptiness. Then he shared how he had learned about Jesus, how he had come to realize that the gospel was not only completely different from all other religious or philosophical systems, but true, and powerfully so.
When Reza ended his testimony, the room erupted in loud applause. A huge grin broke out on his face. Any sense of double-mindedness was now gone. He was ready.
I took the microphone, looking at my friend with deep affection and respect, and said,
“Reza, because of your profession of faith, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Then I turned, set the mic on the small ledge at the back of the baptismal, and turned to position myself correctly for the dunking.
Noises and shouts of alarm from the audience suddenly interrupted me. Before I could figure out what people were yelling about, I heard a loud PLOP.
I shot a glance down toward our feet and there was the mic, bubbling and slowly rotating on the bottom of the tank.
Oh no! I realized, I’ve dropped the mic!
Turns out that the little ledge behind me that I had set the mic on was not flat after all, but slightly sloped so that any water could find its way down and off of it and back into the tank. As with water, so with microphones, apparently. The mic had rolled in a quick semicircle and right into the drink.
Reza shrugged toward the crowd and shouted, “Eh, it happens!”
The crowd laughed, and I found myself both thankful for Reza’s charisma and struggling to bend over in my stiff rubber waders to get the mic. Snatching it, I quickly placed it somewhere more secure.
I was somewhat embarrassed but also laughing. It was simply too much of a joyous event to let a little mishap like that get in the way. So, I called out again, this time without the mic,
“Reza, because of your profession of faith, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!”
Reza put his left hand on his nose and gripped that arm’s wrist with his right hand so that I’d have a good handhold, just as we’d practiced. I put my other hand behind his back and set my stance so as not to drop him. He bent his knees and went under, white robes splaying and flowing out in the water. After what seemed to me a long moment, I pulled him back out.
Once more, there was thunderous applause. As well as more laughter. Then the congregation started singing a rousing a cappella Doxology.
Reza and I hugged and went, dripping, down to the basement, where we hugged again. He was beaming.
“Brother,” he said, “I have never been this happy in all my life. I am so happy right now, I am so alive. Obeying really does lead to joy! I’m so glad I did this. I love Jesus so much!”
It was one of those moments I will always remember. Every time I give the same kind of counsel to some other Central Asian believer who is afraid that obeying Jesus won’t be worth it, I’m transported back to that old stone church basement and to that scene of soggy Reza beaming in his big goofy baptismal robe. Yes, following Jesus in risky obedience will always lead to greater joy and greater freedom. Always.
The microphone, alas, did not make it. One of our pastoral assistants later informed me that this rather expensive mic could not be salvaged. Although they apparently held onto it for a while in hopes of framing it for me.
And, of course, it was a good many years before I could be involved in baptism conversations at that church without somebody getting in a joke about how I dropped the microphone into the baptismal water. As a young leader, it was good for my humility.
Should you, dear reader, ever find yourself needing to baptize someone, and suddenly feeling quite unprepared, here are a few very important and practical questions to keep in mind.
First, are they a true believer who can proclaim the gospel through their testimony?
Second, under the leadership of their pastor or missionary, are they being joined by baptism to a church or are they themselves the start of a new one?
Third, do they know how to plug the nose and bend the knees, and to not wear white clothes?
Fourth, are they facing downstream and in water that is somewhat warmer than a Siberian lake and deep enough to get all of them under?
Fifth, have you practiced the trinitarian formula enough so that you don’t end up baptizing like a heretic?
And finally, if mics are involved, do you have a plan for keeping them fully out of the water?
There are, of course, other important considerations for baptisms in general as well as on a case-by-case basis. But hopefully this list can get you started as well as highlight a few common and not-so-common blunders.
Go then, and baptize those new disciples. And don’t worry if you end up making some baptism blunders of your own. One way or another, get them under the water and pull them out again, and they’ll come up beaming, ready to risk for Jesus.
We only need to raise 3k ($250 per month) to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Sometime around when our Iranian Bible study ran afoul of Mohler’s security and fell apart due to claims of espionage, Reza* had a dream in his small Louisville apartment. In his dream, a man was nailed to a sort of tree. The bleeding man spoke to him with kindness and told him he loved him. Reza didn’t know who he was, though he couldn’t help but feel like he knew his voice from somewhere in his past.
Upon waking, he asked his secular Turkish roommate who he thought the man in the dream might be.
“Really, bro? That’s Jesus, of course. Everyone knows that.”
It wasn’t long after that dream that Reza reached out to see if I wanted to hang out again. Walking up and down Frankfurt Avenue, Reza didn’t tell me about his dream. Instead, he and I discussed his diplomatic questions about what Christians believe about various topics. It seemed like he might just be making polite conversation, since he knew I was studying theology. But at some point, I asked him if he’d like to study the Bible one-on-one with me. To my delight, he agreed.
We started in the book of Romans but quickly shifted to Matthew. Romans was pretty tough to understand since Reza knew so little about Jesus, coming as he did from a more secular, leftist Iranian family. And I was hopeful that Matthew’s very Middle Eastern way of building the case for Jesus as Messiah might prove just as helpful for my new Iranian friend as it had for Hama* back when I was doing my gap year in the Middle East.
Reza, as I would quickly learn, was very sharp, very stubborn, and from a family of proud dissidents to boot. Once, when the Iranian president had visited Reza’s prestigious high school and held a time of Q&A, Reza had seized his opportunity to publicly ask the turbaned politician some very awkward questions. The president, of course, was not used to being called out like this, and by a kid no less, so Reza was blacklisted. That’s how things go in Iran, and an accumulation of similar developments like this is why Reza and his family eventually fled the country.
This defiant spirit was the same posture that Reza brought to our study of the Bible. So, as we sat in the sparse living room of our first apartment and my pregnant wife poured us chai after chai, Reza and I fought over every single millimeter of the claims of the gospel. Gone were the diplomatic questions, and out came all the guns and missiles of Reza’s intellectual and worldview bunker. There were times when the discussion got so heated and Reza seemed so offended that I was sure that he wouldn’t come back. But he did, week after week, for months on end. And every night as we fell asleep, my wife and I would pray that somehow God would break through Reza’s defenses.
As her first pregnancy wore on, my wife started falling asleep earlier and earlier in the evening. Often, after a valiant effort to stay awake and present for the discussion, Reza and I would look over to see her passed out in an armchair. It was on one of these nights, after we had sent my wife back to bed, that the breakthrough came.
Reza and I had made it, a millimeter at a time, up to Matthew 9, the story of Jesus forgiving the sins of the paralytic – and proving he had the authority to do so by healing the man’s legs as well.
There was something about this story that hit home for Reza. He wanted to know if Jesus really had the authority to forgive sins. I didn’t know it at the time, but Reza’s embrace of the worldly college lifestyle was weighing heavily on his conscience. Since he was more of a materialist than a Muslim at heart, I found it curious that, in this miracle story, he didn’t question Jesus’ ability to heal a paralytic. No, it seemed that Reza’s thinking was, in fact, largely in line with Jesus’ logic in the passage. Healing paralysis is small potatoes compared to forgiving someone’s sins. After all, a good prophet can do the former. But only God himself can do the latter.
I assured Reza that, yes, Jesus indeed had all authority to forgive sins, even his sins, even that very night. This story proved it. The whole Bible proved it. We sat in silence for a few minutes as the effect of this truth washed over Reza. Gone were the intellectual objections and the cultural offenses. Now it was simply Reza and his sins facing the stunning claims and power of Jesus Christ.
The realm of the spirit is, for now, invisible. But I could have sworn I saw a change that night. There was something about Reza’s response to our study in Matthew 9 that felt qualitatively different. Although it was raining heavily outside, Reza insisted on walking the short distance alone back to his place. He spent that walk thinking, praying, and feeling the rain wash over his body, just as it seemed the grace of God and the beauty of the gospel were washing over his soul.
As soon as he left, I texted a group of close friends to pray for Reza, telling them that it seemed like he had come closer than ever to really grasping the claims of the gospel.
“He seems so close! Or is maybe already a believer! Pray!”
Then I went back to tell my wife the good news.
“Hey, love. Wake up! I think Reza may have become a Christian tonight!”
With some difficulty, she rolled over and propped herself up on one arm.
“Wait, what? Reza got saved? Oh no, I missed it!”
And then we prayed together for him one more time.
As far as I can tell, Reza did indeed come to faith that night. But there was another part of his story that I didn’t learn for years to come.
Often, believers look back on their story and, over time, see more and more of the ways that God was drawing them to himself, preparing them years before they ever heard the gospel. These parts of their story aren’t in their testimony early on, but they tend to get added in over time, as God reveals more and more to them just how active and present he had been in their lives all along.
This was very much the case with Reza.
As a boy in the mountains of southwestern Iran, Reza had become unexpectedly paralyzed. After about a week in this condition, he had a dream in which a man appeared and told him that he was going to heal him. In the dream, the man touched Reza’s back and told him that he was going to roll him over. When Reza woke up, he was not only able to get up and walk, but also to go out later that day and play soccer with his friends. His grandparents, who took care of him, were stunned, unable to explain this miraculous recovery.
Years later, and some time after coming to faith, Reza realized why the voice in his dream about the man nailed to a tree had seemed so familiar. It was the same voice as the man who had appeared in his childhood dream and healed his paralysis so many years earlier. The man who had told him that he would heal him was the same man on the tree who told him he loved him.
No wonder the story of the paralytic man from Matthew 9 had such an effect on Reza. Some part of him already knew that Jesus had the authority to heal the lame. What he didn’t know was that this also meant he had the authority to forgive his sins.
But just like the man in Matthew 9, Reza reached out in faith that somehow, hope beyond hope, this could be true, that Jesus could work this deepest of all healings, the forgiveness of sin.
And just like that first paralytic so long ago, Reza walked home, a new man.
We only need to raise 9k ($750 per month) to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Three English-language international churches in our region are in need of faithful pastors. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
*names changed for security
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
“No, we didn’t want to join a church, and we didn’t start one. I didn’t come here to plant a church and didn’t want to get pulled into all that would entail. I came here to translate the Bible. And for a number of years, the expat house fellowship that we led every week went great. But in recent years, we’ve had to deal with some serious sin issues among those who attend. And let me tell you, I have spent so much time trying to deal with these problems that I have found myself thinking maybe it would have been more efficient if we had just started a church in the beginning after all!”
I found this confession from an older missionary very insightful.
Here was another admission that one of the primary reasons for so many missionaries sidestepping the local church on the mission field is the Western value of task-driven efficiency. This value is often a strength of Western culture, but when it causes us Westerners to neglect other areas of biblical faithfulness, such as a week-in-week-out commitment to a church in our community, it becomes an idol. In this case, this missionary couple was so focused on their good task of translating the Bible that they decided that joining a local church on the field, or planting one, would take up too much of their time, time that they felt would be better stewarded by a singular focus on the task they’d been sent to do.
A huge number of missionaries overseas are not members of local churches on the field. Nor are they interested in doing the work to transform their team or coalition of missionary partners into an organized church. A few of them will have more advanced reasoning for this, sometimes related to missiologist Ralph Winter’s sodality vs. modality framework (a position to be analyzed in a future post). Other missionaries serve in places with no churches, no churches healthy enough to join, or no team or locals to form into a church. But many coming out of the West simply no longer have the biblical instincts or ecclesiology to feel that they should join or form a church on the field. “Isn’t it enough to meet weekly for bible teaching, songs, and prayer? Wherever two or three are gathered, right? Isn’t my team my church?” Add to this posture that joining or starting a church seems so, well, time-consuming, and it’s no wonder that the Western missionaries who do join churches on the field, or start churches that they then join, are the oddballs.
No, many, many missionaries think that the best thing is to retain their membership in their churches back in the homeland while they perennially sidestep the local church in their actual geographic locale. This all too common posture in the name of stewarding the time is both misguided and shortsighted.
The missionary’s confession I began with is a good example of what can go wrong when missionaries on the field commit themselves to what I’ve dubbed elsewhere, ‘weekly missionary chapel’, instead of joining or starting an actual local church. This family thought things would be simpler with a loosely defined house worship gathering every week with a bunch of other missionaries. Even when a good international church was planted in their city, they chose to stay separate from it and continue their house fellowship.
However, that earlier simplicity disappeared once serious sin arose among the attendees. Why? Well, there were no recognized pastors for this gathering, just a small team of casually-designated ‘leaders.’ There was no real system of membership, just a vague agreement among the missionaries attending about who was allowed to come (no locals, mind you). There was no mechanism for church discipline because from the very beginning, the aim of this group was to not be a church. The missionaries attending this group who ended up in sin were members of their sending churchesback in America, so what kind of spiritual authority could the ‘leaders’ of this group really exert over them?
As wise Central Asians say, “Pray, but tie your camel tight.” And as wise Westerners says, “Fail to plan, plan to fail.” Set out to establish an efficient pseudo-church but haphazardly leave out a bunch of the biblical stuff that feels too time-consuming, and you are asking for trouble. Those biblical structures are there for a reason.
And yet, for most missionaries, it continues to feel simpler, more focused, and more efficient to sidestep the local church on the mission field. However, as we’ve seen, this means that when there are serious problems to deal with, they then have to quickly cobble together new systems to deal with them. Yet because they’re intentionally not a church, they don’t have clear biblical guidance or precedence for the structures and mechanisms they build. Instead, they’re just depending on their own wisdom and on what seems practical. Dealing with conflict and sin is always time-consuming, even in a healthy church, but reinventing the wheel and cobbling together solutions in this way ends up taking so much more time in the end (not to mention how it ends up hurting people).
Consider how coming to an agreement on a doctrinal statement may seem very time-consuming. But that process is far more efficient in the long run than suddenly having to figure out what to do every time a missionary with doctrine quite different from yours wants to join your house group.
Hammering out a church covenant also seems like a laborious process. But it’s far more efficient than having to explain in the middle of mess after mess why certain behaviors and not others justify expulsion from the group when you’ve never mentioned them before.
Taking time away from your main ministry to disciple believers from other people groups – maybe even in English – might seem like a costly side quest. But it’s not nearly as inefficient as your team burning out because you tried to live for a decade on the mission field without truly being connected to the Body.
These are just a few examples of how joining a local church on the field or planting one may seem inefficient in the short term, but in the long run will counterintuitively mean actually going faster. When conflict comes, there are biblical mechanisms to deal with it. When issues arise, clarity on how to navigate them already exists. When your gifts fail, the diversity of the local church comes to the rescue. Investing in the local church always pays off, and often in ways we never could have predicted.
Missionaries, let’s not sidestep the local church on the mission field. Let’s either start one or join one. If we’re in a context where this isn’t possible, we should pray and work for that to eventually change. Let’s not continue to pretend that church membership in a body on another continent is a good long term posture for our families – good stopgap measure though it may be. And please, let’s not hold ourselves aloof from the local church for the sake of efficiency.
After all, we are not called to be efficient above all else. We are called to be faithful. And that will often involve things that, at least initially, feel quite inefficient indeed.
We only need to raise 15k ($1,250 per month) to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
The plan was simple. And at no point was it supposed to involve bedbugs or mafia-style van transfers.
I was carrying luggage needed for two single gals from our church who were headed to Western China for six months. They were flying out from a different part of the US, so we would meet up in the Beijing airport, then take the final flight together to the city where our missionary friends were living. On the way, my route had me spending the night in Guangzhou. Since the airport hotel had looked like it might break the trip budget, and I was at the time a youthful 26-year-old missions pastor, I just planned on sleeping in the airport.
Shortly before midnight, I had just got the bags from baggage claim and was scanning the airport for good spots to camp out, when the light started turning off. Airport staff then started shooing people out of the buliding. It didn’t seem like I would be able to sleep in the airport after all.
The airport emptied remarkably quickly, and I found myself following the signs for the airport hotel. What else was to be done? Close to the external doors, I was approached by a kind-looking middle-aged Chinese woman holding a laminated paper that said ‘Airport Hotel.’ She didn’t speak English, and I didn’t know any Chinese, but we nodded enthusiastically at one another to indicate that I was looking for the thing her sign advertised. She then motioned for me to follow.
True, the picture on her sign didn’t have any branding on it or necessarily look like the airport hotel I had seen online, but perhaps it was another one nearby. After all, major airports tend to have multiple airport hotels. If it were a different hotel, chances were good it would be more affordable.
We walked out to the curb and got into a small white van, where the big bags were lugged into the back. I settled in for what I assumed would be a short transfer. Sure enough, after only a few turns, we pulled into the parking lot of a big, shiny hotel.
This was where things started to get weird. Rather than dropping me off at the door, they pulled up next to an identical small white van in the parking lot. Then, they transferred the bags from one van to the other, indicating that they wanted me to also get into the back of the second van.
I didn’t know any Chinese, and they didn’t know any English, so I motioned questioningly toward the airport hotel fifty or so yards away. The two men driving the second van shook their heads and pointed at the back of the van. At this point, the first van with the woman drove off. I tried to ask if they were taking me to another airport hotel, and it seemed like maybe-possibly-hopefully that’s what they were trying to tell me in Chinese.
So, in what was not my soundest of travel decisions, I got in the back of the second van, hoping for the best. As soon as we started driving away from the hotel, I realized I may have made a serious mistake. I had no international data on my cell phone. I had no way of contacting anyone as I, and the bags I was supposed to be safeguarding, were driven away from the airport and into a strange and foreign city.
As the next half hour passed, I became increasingly concerned. We had left the major roads and had entered what I can only describe as the bowels of the city. We drove through tight alleyways full of wires, puddles, and humming neon signs advertising local establishments that had clearly seen better days. I am typically quite good at problem-solving in a pinch, but as we drove deeper and deeper into the dark maze of alleyways, I was utterly at a loss for what I should do next. I decided I might as well sit tight until we reached our destination, and simply try to make the best of things once we arrived – even if that meant I was soon to find myself robbed, stranded, or hostage to the Chinese mafia.
As I chewed on how my poor wife and toddlers might never know what became of me, I made a promise to myself, one I have largely kept to this day, to never travel again without some kind of way to contact others, some kind of working mobile data. And to keep an eye out for kind-looking middle-aged foreign women holding signs who turn out to have nefarious intentions. I chewed on this last one, especially. If it had been a young, attractive woman, I would have been more on guard. But her appearance, like that of a friendly 3rd grade teacher who just wants to tell you about the book fair, had been remarkably disarming.
At last, the van came to a stop. I leaned over and glanced up out the window. To my surprise and relief, I saw a faded hanging sign, one with the unmistakable shape of a plane on it. The building we stopped in front of was the sketchiest, smallest, and dirtiest airport hotel I had ever seen. But it was, in fact, some kind of lodging establishment. It was only fifteen feet wide or so, and three or four stories up, sandwiched in a row of other similar establishments that dripped and smoked and bulged and sprouted blackened wires and old AC compressors.
My erstwhile captors groaned and complained as they heaved the girls’ very heavy and very bulky suitcases up to the half room that functioned as the lobby and front desk. Then, they simply drove off into the darkness, leaving me with an older, jaded-looking man who seemed the proprietor. He was very unhappy that all I had on me was a credit card and gave me some kind of a talking-to, which, of course, I understood none of. When he was done, I simply smiled and shrugged and motioned that I had no cash on me whatsoever.
Resigned, the man muttered and walked me back out into the alley, where he pointed up the street toward a dilapidated ATM. To my great surprise, one of my cards worked. The clerk took something like $15 from me in Chinese yuan and then took me up to my room.
By this point, I was exhausted and more than ready to pass out on the little bed. But even though disarming middle-aged Chinese school teachers had not been on my threat radar, bedbugs definitely were. My wife and I had already faced them a couple of times, an unfortunate but common outcome of living in refugee communities in Louisville’s South End. I had learned the hard way the vital importance of always checking the sheets and seams of the mattress near the head of the bed for the tell-tale black spotting and little shiny bumps that indicate an infestation.
As soon as I knelt down and pulled back the sheet, I knew it was bad. There was not only widespread black spotting, but lots of the little reddish-brown bumps as well, evidence that baby bedbugs were growing. That meant the grown-up ones were also nearby, ready to munch on my Yankee blood as soon as I fell asleep.
By the grace of God, my main concern in that moment was not how to avoid being a midnight snack for bedbugs, but how to avoid accidentally infesting the home of the missionaries we were on our way to stay with. They’d had such a rough go of it already and were currently alone, the only missionaries in their city of several million. The last thing they needed was their missions pastor to bless them with a stubborn infestation of Guangzhou bloodsuckers.
So, I hatched a plan. I remembered that bedbugs don’t travel on bodies. They travel on clothes and luggage. So, I piled the bags up high on a table in the far corner. Then, I made the decision that the most loving thing to do was to sleep naked with my clothes for morning safely hung up in the shower. The bugs may get a free meal, but they would not get a free ride to Western China.
I fell asleep remembering a Korean friend from Bible college who was petrified of spiders and had to sleep on an old mattress on the dorm floor one night. Terrified, she poured out her heart to God in prayer, asking for angelic protection from the bugs – and awoke in the morning to see a dozen nighttime arachnids and insects seemingly struck dead by the angel of the Lord, legs up in the air, forming a little ring around the mattress where she had slept. Perhaps the deliverer of Hezekiah and my Korean friend would guard me as well from my own little army of six-legged foes.
I slept remarkably well considering these bleak surroundings, and woke up downright refreshed. I didn’t notice any dead bugs in a ring around me, but neither did I notice any bites or blood streaks on the sheets. I scanned my body for bugs, hopped in the shower, dressed, and went downstairs to greet the same grumpy man who had welcomed me the night before. He offered me some pork bawza dumplings. Anytime you get to have some form of pork for breakfast, things are on the upswing.
From there, things were remarkably smooth. Back to the airport. On to Beijing, where I met up with the two gals from my church. Then, on to our destination in Western China. The girls got their stuff there safely, I got to visit a family on the field who had not had anyone come to visit them yet, and – God be praised – I did not infest their apartment with bedbugs.
On a later trip, we visited some Chinese friends in Guangzhou and had a wonderful time, seeing a very different side of the city and the culture than I had on that fateful night when I was traveling solo. But my wife and I still laugh (and shudder) as we think about that night when I rode that sketchy second van down into the bowels of the city, thinking I was getting kidnapped by some kind of East Asian mafia.
Thankfully, it was not a kidnapping, only a relatively modest con job, one where the disarming lunch lady and her associates duped unwitting passengers into staying somewhere they’d never have chosen to stay willingly. It had that slimy deceptive feel to it, you know the one, like when that free breakfast suddenly turns into a wild eyed attempt to sell you a timeshare. Except that even timeshare presentations don’t mean you have to sleep as naked sacrificial tribute to the bugs.
And yet, considering the various pieces that could have gone very wrong, overall I felt I had escaped relatively unscathed. I determined that next time I’m stuck in an airport quickly shutting down, I’ll just pay the outrageous rate to stay in the legit airport hotel. That day would, in fact, come, many years later, far away in frozen Munich, dragging my exhausted kids in tow. But that is a tale for another post and another day.
For now, good night, sleep tight, and well, you know the rest…
If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? We need to raise 23k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. You can help us with this here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Every believer who shares the gospel has a relationship or two with unbelievers that they don’t quite know what to do with. This might be a family member, a friend, or a coworker, someone who has heard the gospel many times, yet has not embraced it. Their bearing toward the gospel can run the spectrum from super friendly to somewhat hostile, but for whatever reason, they still want to be in regular contact with you. Or, in the case of family or coworkers, they are somewhat stuck in a relationship with you.
For my American readers, today is July 4th, Independence Day. That means you may even today find yourself at a cookout with just the sort of person I’m describing.
The question is, what should our posture be toward these sorts of people? Should we go on sharing the gospel when they seem so, well, hardened? Should we keep investing precious time and relational energy into those who have rejected the gospel so many times, especially when there are others who have never heard?
The answer, I believe, is a nuanced yes. In this post, I want to share how I have tried to navigate this over the years, in hopes that these principles and practical suggestions might prove helpful to others also wrestling with this.
First, we should aim to be sure that the gospel these individuals have rejected is actually the gospel, and not a misunderstanding of it. Far too often, we think someone has rejected the gospel when they’re actually rejecting a caricature of it. Remember, lost people are spiritually dead. Dead people do not naturally and easily comprehend the meaning of the good news you are sharing with them. They misconstrue what we are saying constantly. It often takes a lot of repetition before it becomes clear that they are rejecting the gospel from a place of having firmly grasped its message. Even Paul asks for prayer that he might make his gospel message clear (Col 4:4). But lost people can reach a place of rejection from understanding. As one of my Central Asian friends recently said to me when discussing how Jesus takes our curse upon himself, “I’m a Muslim and not a Christian, but wow, I can see how this is the heart of the Bible right here.”
He sees and understands the heart of the Bible. But he doesn’t believe it. Since that’s the case, what do I do with him?
This brings me to my second point. If this person is still open to spiritual conversation, then from here, I’m still going to aim to regularly seed my conversation with biblical truth. If, at this point, my friend has heard the message of the gospel clearly a good number of times, I will often back off from repeatedly pressing to the center of the gospel itself, instead looking for opportunities to inject all kinds of other aspects of the truth into our conversations. My hope in doing this is to impress upon my friend how the gospel affects and transforms everything else. I want to focus on the fruit of the gospel, the power and change that the gospel and the rest of God’s truth bring, in hopes that my friend will then want to revisit the gospel itself from one of these different angles.
Paul reminds the Romans that God’s kindness is meant to lead them to repentance (Rom 2:4). It may be that some simple but genuine remarks upon God’s kindness in a conversation are what lead to breakthrough. Or, it may be talking about how the faith transforms marriage and parenting. Or, how eternity and resurrection give us an answer for the countless desires we have that in this life will never be fulfilled. Sometimes it feels unnatural or redundant to revisit God, Man, Christ, Response yet again, but there are a thousand other angles of truth I can touch on in conversation that can strengthen and support that central refrain.
Injecting my conversation with spiritual truth also gives me a sense of whether or not my friend or relative wants to get into the claims of the gospel in this particular moment or setting. Believers can, with practice, learn how to naturally and tactfully fold spiritual truth into our everyday conversations. And every time we do that, it functions like an indirect invitation. If we are continually and graciously opening the door like this, there is no need to force unbelievers through it. If they are ready and willing, they will often take the conversation to the next step – and sometimes even reveal the specific questions they are wrestling with. This approach is a great way to not only see if unbelievers are open to spiritual conversation but also to keep the conversations in a place where our friend or relative feels that they consented to once again discussing these weighty and personal things.
For long-term relationships, this sense of consenting to the spiritual conversation is very important. We want to avoid being seen as the person at work or family gatherings who forces gospel conversation on others against their will. In the long run, this type of posture will serve more to close doors than open them. Rather, we want others to see us as those who genuinely care for them, genuinely believe the gospel, and truly enjoy speaking about Jesus.
Third, when someone has repeatedly rejected the gospel through my words, I want to double down on winning them with my life. As Peter says about wives married to unbelievers,
Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct.
– 1 Peter 3:1-2
We must use words to make sure that the unbelievers in our lives have clearly understood the gospel. But after that point, there are times when it is not only appropriate, but even faithful to focus on displaying the gospel to them ‘without a word.’ Similar to seeding our conversations with other aspects of biblical truth, we can show by our lives and actions the power and the difference that the gospel makes.
One refugee friend who came to faith when I was a newlywed told me that observing my marriage was a big part of how the gospel came to make sense for him. I was surprised by this, since we were so new at the whole marriage thing, but I praised God for it nonetheless. This brother and I had argued about the gospel for months on end. At times, I was convinced we were getting nowhere. But the whole time, he was not just arguing, but also watching.
This point helps us know what to focus on when we’re not sure what to do next with an unbelieving friend who has rejected the gospel. But it’s also particularly helpful for family and friends who have made it clear to us that the door is closed for any conversation about spiritual things. What do we do with that kind of relationship? In spite of all the pushback against that “preach the gospel, when necessary use words,” quote, the fact is that our lives do, in fact, ‘preach’ something. At least in the fact that they powerfully illustrate, apply, and argue for what we’ve already verbalized and would like to verbalize again.
Fourth, we should consider how to stay in relationship with unbelievers who have rejected the gospel, even while we prioritize others who are more open. We are called to redeem the time and untold numbers Jesus’ sheep are out there, just waiting to hear his voice (Col 4:3, John 10:16). We should not be spending all our time on those who have clearly heard and clearly rejected the gospel. At the same time, we do not want to cut off those who have heard and rejected and who are still open to relationship with us. How should we thread this needle?
One practical way to do this is to have regular gatherings that are open to all. These sorts of gatherings are places where you can always invite that stubborn or seemingly hard-hearted unbelieving friend, even if most of your time is spent elsewhere investing in those who are showing a genuine openness. When we were doing refugee ministry in the US, we hosted weekly community meals together with our community group. This was a time when we could invite all of our unbelieving friends for a no-expectations gathering of food and community. Similarly, when I was an English teacher in Central Asia, we had a weekly conversation cafe. If I didn’t feel I should prioritize a certain friend who had heard and rejected the gospel, I nevertheless had a time when the relationship could be maintained, and we could see each other.
Because the Holy Spirit is sovereign over salvation, not me, I want to keep the relationship going in the chance that, defying expectations, this person really is seeking the truth. Regular gatherings of this sort mean I have a place to invite all of them to, even while the bulk of my time goes to prioritizing those friends who are responsive to the truth.
The other advantage of having regular ‘bucket times’ like this is that unbelievers can, in this way, be exposed to believing community. This could have been a point by itself, since there is great power and wisdom in getting our unbelieving friends and family into places where they can see Christian friendships displayed. The Bible says our love for one another proves the incarnation and proves that we are Jesus’ disciples (John 13:35, 17:21). That’s one powerful apologetic. Also, we never know if exposure to some other believer with very different gifts than we have might be the key that leads to breakthrough for that unbeliever we’ve made so little progress with.
Fifth, we can continue to pray for those unbelievers who have repeatedly rejected the gospel, those whom we just don’t know what to do with. I remember reading how George Müller prayed for decades for one of his friends’ sons to believe. He didn’t give up praying for this young man, even after so many years had passed. Decades later, he repented and believed. There is great power in persistent prayer, even for those for whom we see no hope that they will ever believe. Spiritually, they are no harder to the gospel than we were before we believed. One sovereign word from God is all that is needed to break their resistance and to flood their hearts with the love of Christ. We might not know if we can or should say another word about the gospel to certain individuals. But we can keep praying for them. If they are still alive, the verdict is not yet out on their soul.
Sixth, and last, there is a category in scripture for unbelievers who reject the gospel and are therefore to be cut off by us, though still in hopes that they might be open at some point in the future. Jesus calls them ‘pigs’ and ‘dogs’ and in other places commands the disciples to wipe the dust off their feet in protest against their rejection (Matt 7:6, 10:14). It seems that there is a kind of evil and violent rejection of the gospel message that can occur, one that responds to pearls of gospel glory with fangs and violence or scandalously shameful rejection. The points I’ve made above are not for this kind of person, perhaps with the exception of persevering prayer. No, the purpose of this post has been to help us with those unbelievers who want to or have to stay in some kind of peaceful relationship with us.
For long-term relationships with unbelievers, seek to make sure the gospel is clearly understood. Seek to saturate your conversations with all kinds of spiritual truth. Seek to win them with your lives. Seek to invite them into community even when you can’t prioritize them. And pray for them with perseverance.
I am deeply troubled about my unbelieving friends who have heard the gospel so many times yet have not bowed the knee to Jesus. Like my Central friend who can pinpoint the heart of the Bible, I know that their situation is a very dangerous one. They have been exposed to so much light, and if they ultimately reject it, their fate will be worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah. And I will have been to them the aroma of death (2 Cor 2:15-16).
And yet, at the same time, I’m so thankful for my unbelieving friends who keep coming back around, even though they’ve rejected the gospel so many times. I desperately hope that if they are still open to friendship with me, then there may be some part of them that is also open to friendship with Jesus. The verdict on their soul is not out yet.
No, if they’re still living, there’s still hope.
If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? We need to raise 26k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. You can help us with this here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Long ago, in late 2007, I took my first flight into Central Asia. I expected it to be significant. All first flights into a new place bring their own excitement and anticipation. But I did not expect it would turn out to be quiteas colorful as it turned out to be.
Our motley crew of a team had been sitting on the floor of the old Dubai regional airport, which was not at all like the shiny new international airport we had just flown into. Most of us were signed up for six months of serving in Central Asia. Another couple of single guys and I were considering staying a full year. Our mission was to do relief and development work, along with evangelism and discipleship, hopefully laying the groundwork for a long-term church planting team. However, our coworkers on the ground had recently been chased out of the city we were supposed to serve in, escaping only by hiding underneath a car in a gun battle between terrorist assassins and local security forces. So, we were to land in another city, Poet City* in fact, and to be an ‘office in exile’ as it were. The idea seemed to be to figure it out as we went, and to do our best not to cause problems for the long-term personnel who were already living there.
However, at this point, we were still sitting on a dirty airport floor, camped out near what was (hopefully this time) our actual gate. Near us was a crowd of men from Bangladesh, also sitting and lying on the tile floor. They looked like they had been there for a while. It also looked like we were going to be on the same flight. In fact, these twenty or thirty men had been stuck in the airport for several days, caught in a deceptive migrant labor scheme. We later learned that they had been told they would be traveling to Mediterranean Greece to work in restaurants. Instead, they were being flown to the deserts of Central Asia to be street sweepers, and their passports by this point had already been confiscated, trapping them into doing a job they had never signed up for. In God’s strange sovereignty, some of these men would later come to faith through the faithful work of another missionary.
After what seemed like a very long time and not a little confusion, our plane was finally ready to be boarded.
Walking out onto the blazing tarmac, I caught the faded name on the side of the aircraft – the national carrier of a faraway former Soviet Republic. Must be a rental. The inside of the plane did little to reassure me. The plane itself was an older craft. The cream walls were stained brown, and the flimsy legs of the seats seemed like they might snap off if you leaned too strongly to one side. Even the paint on the lit no-smoking signs was cracking, creating an interesting glowing web design that sprawled outward.
This seemed to be only the second time for many of the Bangladeshi men to be on a plane. And they were still quite giddy at this new experience – the lights, the seats, and the free snacks. They kept pushing all the buttons, apparently just to see what they did. The Russian stewardesses, for their part, mostly ignored them. Some of the men, like the guy next to me from Dhaka, were obviously nervous. He didn’t know how to fasten his seat belt, so I leaned over and helped him, asking him questions about his homeland to try and put him at ease.
Soon, the intercom crackled, and the captain came on. But instead of the usual message of welcome and flight information, he informed us that there was something wrong with the plane’s landing gear. For our safety, we would need to disembark and get on another plane.
Everyone groaned. Our flight was already hours late.
Ten minutes later, we were still sitting on the plane when our captain came on the intercom again, announcing to everyone that he had, in fact, been mistaken.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we will be taking off shortly. There is nothing wrong with the plane’s landing gear. Really. There is nothing wrong with the aircraft. Let me just say one more time that everything is perfectly OK. There are no problems with our aircraft… so… don’t be worried… again, our landing gear is… fine. [crackle, crackle, silence].”
After this very reassuring speech, we all joined the man from Dhaka in being more worried than ever. One Central Asian businessman in the front stood up and demanded to be let off the plane, but it was too late. We had already started taxiing to the runway, and the flight attendants forced him to sit back down.
The engines roared, and soon we were airborne. We were all in this together now, Americans, Central Asians, Bangladeshis, and even our stern Slavic flight attendants. Scenes flashed in my mind of what it might mean to land on a Central Asian mountain runway with our “perfectly OK” landing gear. But being somewhat accustomed to flying in sketchy aircraft overseas, these thoughts soon faded from my mind.
Before long, the air in the plane took on a distinct odor, just as the regional flights in Melanesia would, the inevitable result of air travelers whose culture pays no mind to deodorant, and who have been stuck in an airport for several days. This pungent yet natural smell was especially pronounced in the area where I was sitting. At some point mid-flight, our stewardess had had enough. Stopping in our area, she started shouting in a Russian accent, to no one in particular, that the shoes should be put back on.
“Poott shooz ohnn! Poott sshhoozz ohnn!”
I stared at my feet. I stared at my neighbors’. Everyone’s shoes were on… so we all just stared back at the stewardess. Met with these dozens of blank stares, she let out a frustrated huff, gave up on her remonstrating, and got back to serving drinks. The man from Dhaka and I had some tea. Unlike airplane coffee, surprisingly horrid stuff, I have always found tea at 36,000 feet truly delightful.
Eventually, we began seeing lights dotting the blackness below. We began our descent, neared the runway, prayed for our landing gear, and then breathed a sigh of relief as the landing gear did indeed perform “perfectly OK.” Praise the Lord.
To top it all off, upon landing, all of our Bangladeshi friends broke out in rapturous applause. Even the grumpy stewardesses couldn’t help but crack a smile.
Soon, we were off the plane into the chilly air of a Central Asian November night. We got through customs surprisingly quickly, grabbed our bags, and most of the team hopped in a car. This left me and the two other college-age guys standing on a curb, alone, in the dark. Over to one side, we noticed a man chilling with an AK-47 and a cup of chai.
Welcome to Central Asia. What had we gotten ourselves into?
If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? We need to raise 26k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. You can help us with this here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
I recently listened to CS Lewis’ address, “The Inner Ring,” for the first time. I was struck by these paragraphs, where he describes the ambiguous ‘inside’ that exists in so many human groupings.
There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline…
There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside…
Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognised the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the Russian Army, or perhaps in any army. But you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the school ring was almost in touch with a Masters’ Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of an onion. And here, too, at your University—shall I be wrong in assuming that at this very moment, invisible to me, there are several rings—independent systems or concentric rings—present in this room? And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.
Lewis is so helpful here in drawing our attention to the fact that every group of humans has an inside group and an outside. So, when it comes to church membership, the question is not whether a church will have a membership or not. It’s really whether that membership is a defined system, or whether it is “unwritten” and ambiguous. In the real world, it’s either one or the other.
This is such a needed clarification because once we’ve framed the situation in these terms, we’re then able to ask which approach really is the most helpful, kind, and loving. At our current stage of Western culture, clear and formal lines that include some and exclude others tend to feel unkind and unloving, narrow, inauthentic.
But if, because of this, we choose to forgo a clear system of membership in our churches, we are in fact choosing to hand over the authority for drawing the inevitable inside/outside line to the fuzzy, shifting, and often cruel complexities of group social dynamics – returning as it were to the kinds of relational vibes that governed who the cool kids were (and were not) in middle school. I, for one, do not want that kind of system to be the controlling factor in who is considered a ‘real’ member of my spiritual family. Even worse, in places like Central Asia, the inside group is simply defined by who is currently in the good graces of the strongman pastor.
The thing that Westerners are so worried about implementing in their own countries or on the mission field, because it doesn’t initially feel nice or contextual, is the very thing that, in the end, proves to be truly loving and truly contextual. Because when church membership is implemented in a way that applies the Bible’s inside/outside lines, so that there are clear qualifications and a clear process in (and out), then membership is open to so many more kinds of people. It shouldn’t matter what your social background is, what your ethnicity is, what your personality is. It shouldn’t matter what your interests or hobbies are, your personal clothing style, what your political orientation is, or what your age or gender is. All of these differences that naturally sort humans into little cliques at work or school, all of them are put aside in the church, so that the doors to the local kingdom embassy might be thrown wide open to all born-again believers who are ready to obey Jesus.
Western evangelicals need to wake up and realize that church membership is inescapable. Their churches will always have an inside group, whether they realize it or not. In this way, membership is a lot like contextualization; everyone does it, all the time. To be wise and loving, therefore, we must learn to be intentional and biblical about it.
If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? We need to raise 28k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. You can help us with this here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
A Peruvian, a Pakistani, a Filipino, a Central Asian, and an American get pulled over at a checkpoint.
No, this is not the start to a bad joke. But it is, in fact, how I learned that locals believe Christian clergy can do black magic.
In truth, you never can predict when these kinds of insights might emerge that reveal what the locals really believe. On this day, our source of cultural illumination surprisingly appeared from one of the least enjoyable parts of living in Central Asia. That is, the inescapable, and often petty, government bureaucracy, military checkpoints on the road being one particularly tedious expression of this.
For this particular trip, I was on an outing with four friends, and we were coming back from a long day of exploring some fascinating ancient sites together. Three of them (Peruvian, Pakistani, and Central Asian) had just finished a year-long pastoral internship under the leadership of the Filipino brother, himself a TCK who now serves as one of our pastors in Caravan City. We had been planning for some time to take this kind of trip together. And the timing of it, coming just a few days after the internship finished, made it a fun and celebratory time.
We knew that our unique carload, itself a sort of mini UN, would likely raise eyebrows at the half dozen checkpoints we’d need to pass through during the day. So, all of us had our documents on us. All of us, that is, except for the Peruvian brother. His documents were with the lawyer for his visa renewal process. However, we weren’t worried. He had pictures of his IDs, something accepted by the guards when the visas and passports of those traveling are tied up in other layers of bureaucracy elsewhere. No ID on you for some random reason? Big trouble. No ID on you because your lawyer is (so you say) getting your visa renewed? No problem! Carry on.
The checkpoints proved seamless all day long, until the very last one, as we were on our way back late at night. Here, as soon as the guard laid eyes on the Peruvian and heard us begin to say that he didn’t have his documents, he ordered him to head inside the station for further questioning. The soldier made this snap judgment and began to walk away without letting us plead our case, so I yelled out as quickly as I could,
“But… respected one… he’s of the people of Peru… his documents are with the lawyer for his visa renewal!Visa renewal!”
Missionaries from Latin American countries have both the advantage and the disadvantage of looking like they are from our region, Central Asia. It was likely that the guard had assumed from appearances that the Peruvian was from a neighboring rival people group – and had therefore plopped him into some sludge-slow process of window and desk hopping seemingly designed to be as convoluted as possible.
This last-minute plea seemed to cause the guard to reconsider and relax a little bit. He turned back to us, still told the Peruvian to go inside to a certain room, but allowed the Central Asian brother to go with him for the sake of interpretation.
The rest of us sat in the car and hoped for the best, barely fending off yet another guard who approached and attempted to send us all inside.
As we waited in the dusty darkness, the Peruvian and the Central Asian made their way into the captain’s office. From a similar situation in the previous weeks, I knew the room’s layout followed the standard formula. Large and pretentious desk facing the door, hard couches lining the walls, plenty of ashtrays and tea tables, a rickety swamp cooler whirring in the window, and photoshopped pictures of benign-looking government strongmen up on the walls.
The captain was not in a good mood, so our friends were not making much headway trying to explain their case. That is, until the Central Asian dropped the fact that the Peruvian was actually a pastor. This was, in fact, true. He had been a pastor in Peru and had originally been sent to pastor a team of Spanish-speaking missionaries before later joining the internship for more training.
There is something in the wiring of our local Muslim Central Asians, such that once they find out a man is actually a ‘priest,’ their entire bearing towards him changes for the positive. We’ve seen this dynamic so often here over the years that we’ve begun to joke that rather than hiding the pastoral background that many of us have (as is the norm), we should instead start going around wearing protestant clergy collars. At least in government offices, this contextualization of our garments would make a huge difference. In this, Central Asia has proved yet again to be utterly different from our assumptions of how it would be.
Accordingly, the captain decided that, since our Peruvian friend was a priest, there was no issue here whatsoever, and that he could go his way. However, in parting, he also slipped in a joke to the Central Asian brother.
“Ask him if he could do some black magic for me,brother, har harhar.”
Finding discretion to be the better part of valor, our friends took the opportunity to smile and leave quickly, rather than staying to correct the captain that, no, as a pastor, our friend most certainly did not and would not do black magic. As no true pastor should.
“Wait,” I asked my friends when they were back in the car, “locals think pastors do black magic?”
“Yes,” the Central Asian brother replied, “I’ve heard it from my older relatives many times. They used to go to some kind of ethnic Christian priest to get him to do spells and charms for them – things having to do with fertility or love, especially.”
Apparently, some of the clergy from the local ethnic Christian communities had, over time, fallen into acting like the local Islamic sheikhs, themselves having fallen into acting like the older mages, shamans, and witch doctors so common all over the world. Appease and manipulate the spirits for your own blessing and the cursing of your enemies. The same demonic strategy used in the Melanesia of my childhood, recycled here with just a smidge of Central Asian monotheistic veneer.
I was reminded of how I’d heard that even one of the few evangelical pastors among our people group had himself started acting weird in these ways, sheikh-ish, making people who asked for healing to drink Bible verses he’d written on little pieces of paper. I wondered if he had also grown up hearing from his relatives of how this was simply what Christian clergy are supposed to do.
I’m very glad this bit of local data emerged, even though it came through something as tedious as a government checkpoint. Who knew that this was something so commonly assumed among our locals, lurking down in the basement shadows of their worldview? Now we know. And now we can proactively teach against it. No, true pastors should not and do not have anything to do with black magic. Yes, they may be involved in the occasional miraculous healing or quiet casting out of a demon. But this is not magic; this is simply the Holy Spirit at work in the normal life of the local church.
No, Mr. Captain of the checkpoint, we won’t do black magic for you. But if you hear us out, we can tell you about something infinitely more powerful.
We need to raise 28k to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Entrusted to the Dirt 
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