Tag: Missions

The Importance of an Inclusive Focus

If you have been called, sent, trained, and deployed to reach a certain people group on the mission field, how exclusive should you be in your focus? How many things should you make a commitment NOT to do so that you can achieve your aim?

There’s one phrase I keep finding myself saying as a team leader, “It’s an inclusive focus, not an exclusive one.”

When it comes to language learning, strategy, and teaming together, I find many are wanting to draw hard lines beyond what I’m actually asking for – and beyond what the Scriptures are asking for. The default often seems an embrace of an either/or mindset, rather than an steady emphasis on one thing wisely paired with an openness to the unexpected opportunities the Spirit might bring.

“If our goal is to share the gospel in the local language, we shouldn’t share the gospel in English, right?”

No, while we push to get to gospel fluency in our focus language, by all means share the gospel in whichever language is most effective for clarity and for that person!

“If our goal is to plant healthy churches among this people group, should I turn down my neighbor from that other people group if he wants to study the Bible with me?”

No, while the majority of our time needs to be focused on the people group we have been called to reach, let’s not use that calling as an excuse to not extend basic Christian love and discipleship to others that are open around us. Who knows? Maybe that unexpected person will be the key to breakthrough among our focus group. If there’s no partner who can study the Bible with that person, then you are the one who should do it.

“If I’m focused primarily on our house-church planting strategy, that means I shouldn’t mix with the international-church strategy people, right?”

No, cross-pollination and the visible unity of believers bring far greater benefits that outweigh the possible costs of mixing with likeminded believers who have a slightly different strategic focus. We need many faithful strategies to reach our city, and we need to be fluent in as many of them as possible. We need relationships of trust with those involved in different strategies as we will very likely need to lean on one another in the future – especially if the work really takes off.

“Because we are supposed to be devoting our time to language learning, evangelism, discipleship, and church planting, I really shouldn’t invest time in that life-giving hobby of mine, right?”

Once again, no. If playing the piano, rock climbing, or blogging (!) are life-giving for you, you’d better invest in that. These kinds of things are important for our wholeness and flourishing on the field. God has made us to do more than ministry – to create, to play, and to rest. We need to trust him as we invest in those things, especially when we can’t see any immediate ministry payoff.

In my experience, many default to an exclusive focus mindset and would not agree with my positions on the above questions. I believe this often comes from fear. If I don’t draw these hard lines, how am I to be protected from the dreaded mission drift? Well, mission drift is a real danger. It’s important that we regularly assess ourselves to make sure that we are primarily focused on the things we are supposed to be primarily focused on. That’s what team vision, meetings, regular rhythms, and goals are for. And yet the unintentional effects of an overly exclusive focus are often a lack of openness to what the Spirit might be doing in our context and frustrated colleagues who feel their consciences are being bound. Not to mention the fractured relationships and lamentable absence of healthy unity among likeminded groups on the field.

Far better that we embrace a posture of inclusive focus. We can learn that target language and freely share in English (or any other tongue) when we need to. We can labor to reach our focus people group and still find ways to serve the open among other people groups. We can focus on the strategy that we think will be most effective and still find healthy ways to partner with other strategies. We can still be faithful missionaries and pursue some life-giving hobbies for the good of our souls.

I think my greatest worry with an exclusive focus mindset is the assumption that we know the details of how the Spirit is going to bring awakening in our particular context. Don’t get me wrong. We know the main plan – Share the gospel, make disciples, plant churches, put it on repeat. He has been abundantly clear on that front and we don’t need to question “his heart for this land” in that regard. But why are we so cock-sure that we know the will of the Spirit in the minute details of lifestyle, strategy, and contextualization which are not made clear in scripture?

Given the unexpected ways the Spirit moves, it seems far wiser to embrace an inclusive focus posture. Be about learning your target language. Devote the bulk of your time to your people group and your strategy. But not exclusively. Rather, be about these things with an openness that acknowledges our own blind-spots, limitations, and inability to predict where the lightning of the Spirit will strike next – and that our particular work is not the only thing the Spirit is doing in our context.

Let’s make our plans with great intentionality and wisdom. And yet regardless of what missiology says, if the Scriptures have not made certain things a law, then please let us also not make them laws. Let us instead hold our focus intentionally and loosely, and not let it close us off to the unexpected work of the Holy Spirit.

Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash

It’s Not Real If There’s No Certificate

Those who have spent time in this part of the world soon realize the importance of things appearing official. Seals, stamps, big desks with name plates, suits, important-looking dossiers… and certificates. One must not underestimate the importance of certificates in Central Asia.

One of the core questions of a worldview is this: What is real? In Central Asia, this coincides closely with what is respectable. In fact, if something is informal or unrecognized, if it doesn’t reach a certain threshold of respectability, then in a very real sense it’s not understood to be serious or real.

One of my close friends who grew up in this region told me a story from his youth. A respected teacher offered to give him private lessons without pay on a certain subject. My friend thought this was a kind offer and took him up on it. However, when his father found out about this he was not pleased at all, even though this situation was saving him money and giving his son a superior educational experience. “No,” said my friend’s father, “If you are not in the paid class, then you will not receive the certificate. And without the certificate, it’s not real.” My friend promptly withdrew from the free private tutoring and joined the paid group class. And in time he received his certificate.

Notice how the free private tutoring was not valued by my friend’s father because it would not have produced the all-important certificate. In this case and many others, Central Asians will often prioritize a certificate over the actual value of the content they are learning. This is not because they do not recognize quality of education. It’s simply that they believe that most education without the paper proof – sealed and signed and hung on the wall – is not really real at all.

The certificate is indicative of a broader trend that runs throughout the entire culture. Central Asians are loath to attach themselves to anything that has not sent the appropriate signals of seriousness and respectability.

Enter a global missions movement of post-institutional Westerners that focuses on planting organic, grass-roots, informal discipleship groups and house churches, and you have a situation ripe for misunderstanding – and ripe to be rejected as not really respectable or real. While many missions methods focus on the importance of reproducibility (not an unbiblical concept, depending on how it’s defined), few methods that I’m aware of are really asking hard cultural questions about respectability and reality. The Westerners make their pitch for house church and the locals wonder why they should be expected to risk their necks for something that seems so unplanned and so flimsy, so unreal. A crisis of trust emerges between the local believer and the missionary. Do these foreigners I have entrusted myself to actually have a plan?

However, the fact that most of Central Asia also contains some measure of government or societal persecution means that it’s often impossible or at least very tricky to start a church in a way that would be considered respectable – even if you could find a missionary willing to help start said respectable church (which might end up feeling very old-fashioned and unreproducible to them). So the Westerners end up with an aversion to the forms of church the locals are more naturally drawn toward, while the locals have a cultural aversion to the forms of church the Westerners are excited about. So much for contextualization.

The Westerners, in their own cultural stage of post-institutional ferment, can’t understand why Central Asians aren’t into house church, as their training had assured them they would be. The Central Asians, only recently emerging from a tribal past, recently urbanized, and seeing in their own society corrupt and phony institutions, are starving to experience healthy organizations and institutions. They can’t understand why the Westerners seem to be so against all the markers of respectable entities. But these things seldomly get spoken of openly.

In our previous city, a local believer with terrible English was an extremely loyal attendee at the international church. Knowing he was receiving very little spiritual edification by his attendance at this registered English service, his expat friends repeatedly urged him to join the local-language group they were trying to start. He stubbornly resisted, seemingly unwilling to commit, always talking about the need for a complex plan for that kind of a group to actually work. The verbal explanations about simply following the Bible that he was repeatedly given were not having their desired impact. One day while chewing on these things, I encouraged one of his mentors to try an experiment. I told him to write out their strategy, plan, and biblical principles for their local group and to present it to their friend as a thick portfolio. Feeling like anything was worth a shot at that point, they indulged me and did this very thing. The experiment worked. The thick stack of paper outlining their plans for this local church startup made something switch in our friend’s brain. It was real now. And as such, he was willing to risk for it. He started visiting their local group the next week.

Again, it will not be possible in much of Central Asia (or the Middle East) to plant officially-recognized, fully open local churches. But I am concerned that many of our favorite forms, because of where we are coming from culturally, are somewhat repellent to our Central Asian friends, because of where they are culturally. We dream of flat, bottom-up movements that never institutionalize (“forever young”) while they dream of hierarchical, top-down healthy institutions that are mature and serious. If house churches are popular among the hip middle-class residents of the Pacific Northwest, we should ask why that is, and we should not really be that surprised that they might not resonate with war-weary Central Asians. Somehow, we must find the areas of overlap between our cultural preferences and missions books, and what Central Asians consider real enough to risk for.

We may not choose to give out certificates, but if not, we should wrestle seriously with why our local friends are so upset if we do not. When it comes to what Central Asians think is real and respectable, how can we at least meet them half-way? When locals start new organizations, associations, or entities, what elements do they consider necessary in order to be viewed as legitimate?

We shouldn’t claim to be serious about contextualization if we do not wrestle with what our local friends believe is actually real. I might not care at all about a stamped piece of paper. But I am not planting churches based on my personal cultural preferences. Or am I?

Photo by Lewis Keegan – Skillscouter.com on Unsplash

A Blast of Honorable Words

How is verbal communication different in an honor-based Central Asian society versus a justice-based Western society? And what does that mean for cross-cultural workers and the establishment of a new culture among local believers?

In the field of intercultural communication, honor orientation and justice orientation refer to how a culture thinks about right and wrong. Honor-oriented cultures tend to believe that what is honorable is right and what is shameful is wrong. The way the community views a certain action or person is what is most important. A person is wrong if the community says he is wrong – even if he did not commit the thing he is accused of. Justice-oriented cultures tend believe that an action is right or wrong by nature of the action itself. A person is guilty if he does something wrong regardless of the community’s knowledge or lack of knowledge of it. He is similarly innocent even if the community believes he is guilty. This orientation toward honor or justice deeply impacts the way a culture thinks and speaks.

Our local Central Asian culture is strongly honor-oriented. Justice tendencies are there deep down as well, but they are woefully underdeveloped. As such, all action, including communication, is done in order to gain and preserve honor and to avoid or decrease shame. Honor and shame function like a kind of currency which can be given or taken away by the community. Local culture is intractably built around the honor of the patrilineage, the line of males and attached family members extending back into history and into the future. The communication of the individual affects the honor or shame of his patrilineage and his honor or shame is in turn affected by the actions and communication of the other individuals within his extended family, especially on his father’s side. For a Western culture parallel, consider the treatment of family honor and shame in Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice. In this classic novel, the scandalous speech and behavior of a younger sister puts all her sisters’ marriage prospects in serious jeopardy. For no honorable man would attach himself to such a shameful family.

Our Central Asian neighbors aspire at all times to honorable communication, which is understood locally to be high-volume speech that reflects the values of the culture: generosity, respect, hospitality, purity, and loyalty. In order to advance the honor of the patrilineage and avoid shame, locals go above and beyond in what seem to outsiders to be very lavish verbal expressions of respect – almost blasting clouds of honorable words in the general direction of the respectable recipient. In place of simple greetings, locals will effortlessly proclaim a stream of pleasantries and blessings upon the person they are greeting, machine-gun style, even if merely passing an acquaintance on the street, and even while simultaneously speaking on the phone with someone else. This honorable verbosity is typical not only of greetings, but also of farewells, requests, and replies. In these interactions both parties work to make sure their own honor and the honor of other party is affirmed in a public and highly verbal way. Sometimes this is done with such speed, skill, and genuineness as to leave Westerners stunned that any human society could be so poetically respectful. Other times, well, Jane Austen again provides us with a comparable, if exaggerated, figure in the over-the-top verbosity of the character, Mr. Collins. Listen to how Mr. Collins praises his patroness and relatives ad nauseam, and you will get a window into how this kind of “honorable” flattery can get off-balance for some in these types of cultures.

Sadly, because of this honor-orientation locals will also lie, stretch the truth, or deflect in order to avoid bringing shame to themselves or another party. This is often simply expected as a normal part of civility. If someone feels they cannot refuse an invitation honorably, they will often accept, while planning to cancel later. Or, the phrase Inshallah is used as an indirect no, where the will of God in circumstances takes the fall for the local not wanting to respond in the affirmative, and thus shame is assumed to have been avoided. These practices have led to a deep disillusionment among locals who know that many praise them to their face, and then quickly insult them behind their backs. We’re all hopelessly two-faced has become a sort of curse that many feel they cannot escape.

Christian workers among this kind of culture need to be aware of this honor-orientation of the culture and the ways it will pose challenges not only for daily life, but also for effective gospel communication. There are many areas in which Christian workers can contextualize their own communication toward this honor orientation. Lavish and respectful greetings, farewells, requests, and offers can all be made with genuine love and sincerity that is even deeper than that of the culture itself. This is possible because believers have a relationship with the God who is blessing all the nations through Christ. Care can be taken to speak of difficult things in contexts and ways that will not make the recipient feel in danger of unnecessary shame. The question can regularly be asked: “Is there a way I can carry out my spiritual work with this friend in a way viewed more honorable by the family and the community?”

Nevertheless, many aspects of gospel work will inevitably be viewed as shameful by the community. Christian workers will need to emphasize Christ’s enduring shame for the joy set before him (Heb 12:2) as a model for themselves and their local friends. There are many ways in which Westerners can grow in indirect and honorable communication that does not involve deceit. The ministry of Jesus actually provides a fascinating case study here. However, local believers will also need to learn to repent of the ways in which their honor-shame orientation has often led to lying and duplicity. Ultimately, the goal is that speech normally leveraged for the honor of the physical patrilineage will be instead be leveraged for the honor of God and his household of faith.

How can I honor my heavenly father and his family with all of my communication? Provided the idea of honor is infused with its biblical content, this is not a bad filter at all to be controlled by.

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

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

-For more on Honor vs. Justice communication, see Scott A. Moreau’s Effective Intercultural Communication

Photo by Darpan Dodiya on Unsplash

He Thinks the World is Round!

When I was a tenth grader my family visited some dear friends working among a very remote tribe. This tribe lived on the tops and sides of several remote jungle ridges which sloped down to the roaring convergence of two major rivers. It is one of the more beautiful and remote places I’ve ever seen. As it would have taken three days to walk to this tribe from the nearest road, we were flown in on a missionary Cessna to the airstrip that the villagers had recently built.

Because of lack of space, this airstrip was built on a short slope, complete with a steeper slope and drop-off at the end. When landing, the upward slope would help the plane slow down. When taking off downhill, the pilot had to make sure he had enough speed once he reached the end of the dirt and grass airstrip. If not, his plane would be smashed into the canopy of trees far below. This had already happened to one plane belonging to someone trying to fly out sacks of coffee beans. Surprisingly, this wasn’t the greatest danger to the pilots. Their worst nemesis turned out to be the village pigs that would tear up the airstrip in their search for edible roots and sometimes run out in front of a plane, causing a collision that could be fatal for all parties involved. It may have been at this same airstrip that this type of collision took place in following years. The plane and the pig were totaled, but the pilot was miraculously spared.

The older Korean missionary couple that we were visiting (Papa S and Mama M) had become like grandparents to us. So this visit to their tribal location was a very sweet time. I learned a lot from their wisdom about how to live a lifestyle that was closer to that of the villagers and how to think more communally about our belongings (like tools) for the sake of the gospel. As they worked to translate the Bible with their local teammates from a neighboring tribe, they truly modeled relationships of equality and dignity, even given the vast education, cultural, and material differences.

My older brother and I spent the days sitting outside in the sunny ridge-top yard of their modest tribal house, reading (my first of several attempts at reading Desiring God took place here), having fun with the hornbill bird that had adopted our friends, and telling stories with the small crowd of villagers that were almost always present. While we didn’t know the tribal language, enough of the tribesmen knew the trade language for us to be able to communicate easily. However, most of the elderly and the children did not know the trade language, so our conversations took place with a constant background hum of the tribal tongue as they interpreted and remarked and made jokes. I’ve often characterized my Melanesian tribal friends as quick to laugh, quick to joke, and quick to fight – a fascinating combination of playful and dangerous, honor-bound yet always wearing their hearts on their sleeves. As is also true of so many of my Central Asian friends, they make the most wonderful of friends and the most daunting of enemies.

Friendly hornbills make for pleasant, if goofy, companions.

One afternoon my mom had decided to bake some chocolate chip cookies in a wood-fired stove Papa S had made from a metal barrel, the kind of barrel that gasoline for the generator came in. Her hippy-missionary skills would prove to be remarkably successful, but as we waited we got into a fun conversation with a group of villagers about distances from their village to other places, such as where we lived, and how far it was to other countries. We were struggling to explain to them just how far away America was when I remembered that there was an inflatable globe inside the house. I went and retrieved it.

I sat down on a split-log bench. With my impromptu geography class huddled around me, I began to show them their country, the countries next door, and all the way on the other side of the globe, the country my parents were from. Confusion followed. This may have been the first time they had ever seen distances displayed on any kind of a map, let along one shaped like a ball. We talked about what their village would look like to a bird or a plane (the same word in the trade language), what their province would look like if they went higher up, and then what the round planet earth would look like if someone were able to go even higher. It began to sink in. Or so I thought.

Then, someone shouted something in the tribal language and the distinctive communal laugh burst forth. I’ve never seen this anywhere else in the world, but in that Melanesian country, when crowds laugh, they laugh in unison with a climax of a joyful and high-pitched whoop, something like dozens of voices all together exclaiming, “Hahahahaaha…Ha wheeeeee!” This would happen when someone did something funny or embarrassing in front of church, or when a rugby player got taken down in a particularly epic tackle. But this time apparently I was the joke!

I was finally able to get a translation of what was going on. “He thinks the world is round! The skinny white boy thinks the world is round! This is too much!” My short-lived geography class was falling apart as villagers, still laughing, began to make their way back to their huts to tell the story.

“But,” I protested to the few who remained, “It’s true! The world is round like a ball!” To no avail.

“Son,” One man said to me, “Look around you. Are we not on top of a mountain? Look at the horizon. Is it not flat? The world is definitely flat. We simply cannot believe what you are saying when we see this with our own eyes.”

My geography lesson had been an educational failure, however much comedic relief it may have brought to the village that week. I left scratching my head at the whole thing. Munching on a cookie and trying to place myself in their shoes, I began to realize just how outlandish my claims must have seemed to them. If the oral tradition of your ancestors, the only human source of wisdom and education you’ve ever had, claimed the world was flat, it was going to take a lot more than a random sixteen-year-old foreigner with a ball to convince you otherwise. Such is the power of a community’s self-evident truth.

I’ve often thought of that tribe in the years since as I’ve spoken with those in the West or in Central Asia, challenging the accepted truths of their culture with the universe as the Bible presents it. Incredulity sounds remarkably similar, regardless of language or culture. “What? You actually think homosexuality is a sin?” “What? You don’t believe that Islam is the fulfillment of Christianity? Everyone knows that.”

Group-think is universal. We are each limited in our perspective by our own unique cultural-historical time-slice, just like my village friends who thought I was crazy for suggesting the earth is round like a ball. Hence why we need a God who is outside of creation and yet who speaks his truth into it (props here to F. Schaeffer) – an eternally unchanging source of stable truth that takes things we feel (or learn) are absurd and helps us see that they are in fact true, wise, and beautiful. This is why missions is necessary. Yes, so that we can learn things that are true about geography – all truth is God’s truth, as they say. But even more important, so that we will be able to actually respond to the remnant whispers of conscience and stop trying in futility to save ourselves through appeasing and manipulating the spirits (as in Melanesia), through hoping our good deeds outweigh our bad (as in Islam), and through trying to be true to our authentic selves (as in the West).

The world, the earth, is round. And man cannot save himself through animism, religion, or whatever pop morality is dominating Twitter today. Rather, he must be saved by the Son of God, who became a man, lived a perfect life, died a sacrificial death on the cross, rose from the dead, and ascended to be at God the Father’s right hand. The God who is outside of creation and yet speaks into it has told us that this is the only way to be reconciled to him. Perhaps the way in which we’ve heard that message conflicts with the prevailing wisdom of our tribe – but so be it. The path toward truth often begins with a terrifying realization that our tribe has been woefully wrong about many, many things.

Photos by ActionVance and Axel Blanchard on Unsplash

Making The Best of Imperfect Systems

Want to know one of the seldom-mentioned keys to staying healthy on the mission field? The ability to make the best of imperfect systems. A kind of practical trust in God’s sovereignty that results in patience, kindness, and flexibility when confronted by broken, different, or merely imperfect systems. These systems might be local ones. Or they might be the systems of your team or organization. Regardless, none of them are perfect. Some of them are frankly bad, and even the good ones can have glitches – just enough to send you over the edge on a day when your culture shocking is beginning to smell like a 110 volt appliance plugged into a surging 220 volt outlet. Is something burning?

Since our return to Central Asia we’ve spent abundant time in government and private offices as we’ve sought to renew our visas and lease as well as help teammates with their own paperwork. These systems and processes are not very efficient. They don’t always seem logical. They are unpredictable in a hurry up and wait kind of way. If we let them, they could be a considerable source of stress and anxiety.

But how exactly am I advancing the kingdom of God if I let the frustrations of these systems send me into a rage, or even into a judgmental smolder? If the Central Asians are even frustrated by the system, wouldn’t it better commend Christ if I can model a radical patience, joy, and cooperativeness in these sorts of situations? But these blasted local bureaucrats are keeping me from being able to do the ministry work! I know these thoughts well. But what if the open door to do the work will actually come through my membership in the new humanity being on display in the midst of a creaking and broken system?

Sometimes we make it through the local systems admirably, not only holding it together, but even displaying Christ-like kindness and patience. But it takes a toll. Then we get that email from a coworker. Someone at the home office requests something that feels out of touch or unreasonable to us. They should know better, those blasted Christian Westerners! Can’t they see this is so inefficient or redundant? Turns out we can spend all our grace on our local friends, and then become downright curmudgeons with our teammates and organization. We vent our wrath at the language system, the mentoring system, the financial system, the lack of a system, etc., etc.

We live in a broken world, full of broken systems. How are we to do God’s work in this kind of place?

And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:14–18, ESV)

Yikes. Not my natural response to imperfect systems, but absolutely what it is needed. But where does the power to live like this come from, to actually be patient with them all and give thanks in all circumstances?

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. (Romans 8:28–30 ESV)

Imperfect systems, even broken systems, are encompassed by the phrase “all things.” Even they are a part of God’s good plan for your day, for your ministry – for your glorification. A practical trust in God’s sovereignty means that when you spend an hour to get across town in traffic and the office manager is randomly not in today, or it’s some obscure holiday no one told you about, or your water tanks at home are inexplicably empty, that you lean into that frustrating situation as a good gift from your father. Practicing sovereignty means you are gracious and flexible when the organization’s deadline is not a good fit for your unique situation. It means these frustrations are melted away by the warmth that comes from meditating on our eternal brotherhood with Jesus, or the unbreakable chain of God’s good plan for us in our salvation (foreknown, predestined, called, justified, glorified). These kinds of meditations will not only power healthier responses. They are the only effective fuel for healthy system reform.

The ability to make the best of imperfect systems. Not in some positive-thinking shallow way. But the kind of flexibility that’s rooted in God’s sovereignty and spilling over in patience and thanks – this can save us from burnout, or worse. It’s a seldom spoken of virtue of those who last overseas in a long-term and healthy way. For those of us on the field, we need prayer to grow in this way. For any considering missions, begin praying this way for yourself. There are many things I’m learning about lasting on the field and what makes a healthy team. This one, simple as it may seem, is growing year by year in its practical weight and implications.

Show me a worker who is able to make the best of imperfect systems, and I believe you will have shown me a person who deeply understands the grace and patience of God.

Photo by Ruben Mishchuk on Unsplash

The Sweetness of Sabbath

One big shift from our first term overseas to our second? We finally got serious about taking a weekly day of rest. When we were new as a family on the field, our initial experience was that the pace of life in Central Asia was much less frenetic than it was in the US. We didn’t feel the same need to protect a certain day for a sabbath rest. Life was more fluid, which meant our week felt naturally interspersed with pockets of life-giving and restful things. By the end of our first term, this had definitely changed. Language learning, team conflict, culture fatigue, online seminary classes, messy local relationships, security crises, and a newborn (number three) were all taking a toll. It took us several months to recover from the residual stress once we went stateside. And my wife still ended up spending a night in the ER five months in, with some kind of severe panic attack that had initially appeared to be something much worse.

We felt the Lord was being crystal clear with us. We needed to get serious about sabbath again, about building in a day of rest for our family, and about pursuing a concept we came to refer to as sustainable dying. Yes, we are called to die for the gospel, but perhaps it would better honor Jesus if we died more sustainably over forty years as opposed to four? We eagerly read the books Reset and Refresh by David and Shona Murray with wide eyes as we read about all these ministry folks burning out in their forties – while we had just entered our thirties and were experiencing all of the same symptoms. In this sense, I’m not sure we’re so very different from all of our millennial peers in ministry. We’re all hitting this point pretty early.

I remember being struck by the concept that God did not create us as disembodied spirits, but as embodied humans. This means we have God-given, good limitations to our work and our physical bodies. To pretend that these limits don’t exist is therefore not honoring to God, but is to live in rebellion to his good design in his creation. I had been living out of sync with the fabric of God’s creation, which has a good, but limited nature. I had been living this way for as long as I could remember, pretending that if I regularly pushed my body beyond what was wise, God would give grace and it wouldn’t matter for me – was it not for the sake of the ministry, after all?

We were also hit hard by the idea that we don’t rest because the work is done. We rest because the work is never done. This is particularly helpful for confronting the challenges of the fluid and never-ending work of the mission field. When you don’t have regular work hours and you are surrounded by a sea of lostness, it’s awfully tempting to let ministry come into every part of the day and the week. But this can mean that the missionary never actually rests from the work. There are always more pages of vocab to review, more calls to make, more invitations to respond to, more emails to send, more broken things to attempt to fix. But resting because the work is never done shifts rest from being something that we’ve earned to being something that is proactive. It becomes an acknowledgment even that though there’s so much more work to do, we can’t possible do it well if we don’t refresh our bodies and our souls.

We leaned into the biblical theology aspects of rest. We rest because God rested, and we want to be like him. We rest because he commanded Israel to rest and in that command we see his good designs for them. We rest because Jesus rested in the tomb after completing his atoning work on the cross. We rest because we’re not saved by our work, but by our souls resting in the work of Jesus. We rest because the new creation is coming, where rest will be perfected. And we want to be a preview of that day to our local friends and foreign colleagues.

And practically, at this point, we also rest just so that we can stay out of the ER for a little bit longer. We’ve flirted enough with serious anxiety issues to realize that it’s serious business to guard against their going mutant and taking over.

We try to guard our Saturdays as our regular day of rest. It’s taken quite a while to find out what actually works for our family – and what actually works for Central Asia. The age of our kids affects this (8, 6, and 2), meaning that it’s important that plan some kind of outing or activities on our rest day so that they don’t go stir-crazy. We usually go out to eat somewhere and try to spend time at a park. My wife and I will often find quiet corners of the house to get in some reading. We’ll also do some different kinds of work, but only if the work feels refreshing because we don’t do it every day. Washing the dishes and listening to a language history podcast is in this category for me.

The issue with Central Asia is that the more you are known, the more you are called, texted, and visited (even unannounced) by your growing circle of friends and acquaintances. And this is a culture where there is little to no understanding of a “day off” from relationships and people. Locals get quickly offended if you don’t answer your phone right away. This makes a sabbath day a little tricky. But we discovered that there is always one acceptable excuse to not answering your phone and your gate. I’m so sorry, we were out of the city at that time. We began to see that the locals did have a method for regular rest, one connected to their all having ancestral ties to certain mountain villages. Everyone here has a village, even if they live in the city. The wealthy ones even build new picnic houses in mountain valleys in imitation of village life. Almost all city dwellers, rich and working class, get out of the city regularly, even once a week for some. This is a common practice all over Central Asia, as I’ve learned from speaking to colleagues in other countries.

A couple of years ago we started chewing on the idea of finding a picnic house that we and our team could rent and use regularly. After two years of praying, some of our partners secured one recently. It’s a small cement, plaster, and tile cabin with a green lawn area and a small fruit tree orchard. We split the rent with four other families so the cost is extremely reasonable. Now we aim to make the forty five minute drive into the mountains twice a month or so, and to spend our other days of rest at home as usual. So far, it’s been wonderful. The chance to be up in the mountains, in the cooler weather, the silence, the green, has been life-giving. Having grown up in Melanesia (as somewhat of a pyro) I’m also thrilled at the chance to build campfires with my kids. They’re not big enough yet for spending the night at the picnic house to be more restful than coming back home, but we’ll get there soon.

Previously, we and our colleagues had leaned very heavily on trips out of country for rest and vacation. But with regular security crises and the sheer cost of travel across international borders, we were already wrestling with the need to get better at local rest. Then 2020 happened. And suddenly the whole world was closed off to everyone, not just to those of us serving in this corner of Central Asia. We heard one refrain from so many of our believing friends back in the West: Yes, it’s been hard, but we are thankful for the chance we’ve had to slow down. Life was crazy before the lock-downs.

Figuring out rest for any of us Westerners, hard-wired workaholics as we are, is quite challenging. Figuring it out in a foreign culture and in a year like this one, well, let’s just say it’s only by the grace of God that we have been able to find some restful rhythms. And yet our creator did make us for this, so at some point I believe all of us will start to feel a day of rest becoming more natural – and we’ll wonder how we ever did without it. We are beginning to taste this reality ourselves. When our Saturday is necessarily claimed by something unavoidable, we feel sad about this and brainstorm about how we can compensate for it. Other weeks, like this one, we push hard and work with freedom, knowing that a day of rest is close at hand – and I’ll get to sit around a campfire in the mountains with my kids… which is mostly restful. If only we could get the two-year-old a little less enthusiastic about throwing things onto the fire.

Photo by Julien Moreau on Unsplash

His Honor Will Have Departed

My painter friend has provided valuable insight a couple of times now into how local culture thinks about money. A year and a half ago he was my point-man for the different renovations we needed to do once we had finally located a house to rent (a process that involved somewhere around fifty realtors!). It was an interesting working experience, and in the hottest part of the summer. My focus was on fixing things thoroughly so that this house could provide several years of stability for my family, while my painter friend was always pushing back and telling me not to spend so much money. I didn’t quite know what to do with the fact that my contractor kept trying to discourage me from employing him and his contacts on further projects!

One day I asked him about whether we should put iron bars on our ground floor front windows. Our house is essentially a cement row home, with a front that faces the street and sides and a back that connect to other houses’ walls. Envision the narrow Philadelphia row homes from the film Rocky, turn them into cement/plaster/tile structures, and you’ll be getting close. We have a skinny house front facing the street, a small tile courtyard with a gate, and we have a back roof that we can walk out onto. The door to the roof and the window have metal bars on them. But unlike some of our neighbors, we don’t have bars on our ground floor door and windows. The painter’s response was interesting.

“Nah, you don’t need ’em.”

“Why do say that?” I asked.

“Listen, if anyone’s gonna rob a house, he’s gonna do it through the roof, where the nosy neighbors can’t see it happen. Neighbors are always watching who comes and goes through the front of the house.”

Well, that’s a bit unnerving, I thought to myself. Better take note of that for future Bible studies.

“Nah,” he continued, “You’ve got bars on your roof window, so you’re fine. Besides, everyone knows that your a Westerner and Westerners are different with their money.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“Westerners keep their money in banks! Everyone knows that. I bet the cash you have in your wallet right now is the only cash you have around this whole house, right?”

I nodded.

“See? Nothing to worry about. No one will bother to rob Westerners because you’re not stuffing tens of thousands of dollars into a mattress or hole in the wall like we locals do. All your money is in a bank. It’s not worth it.”

What an interesting and unexpected perspective, I thought to myself. Growing up in Melanesia, crime and robbery were a big problem. Westerners had to be extra careful. Here, being a Westerner might mean I’m less likely to be robbed!

Fast forward a year and a half to last night, and we were having dinner with my painter friend and his wife. Once again, I found him to be an unexpected source of insight into theft and money. He began laughing and telling us about some foreigners he saw in the money exchange bazaar taking pictures of the tables piled high with stacks of cash.

“That’s a strange thing for all of us foreigners in the beginning,” I said, “Those tables are just sitting there with thousands of dollars on them, yet no one tries to steal anything! Your culture has an amazingly low rate of theft. It’s really unique. What’s going on there?” I asked him. “Even nearby surrounding cultures aren’t like that.”

“Well,” my painter friend said, “If anyone tries to steal anything, the police and the secret police will be after him right away. He doesn’t stand a chance. Sometimes you don’t even need the police! The crowd will take care of him. Stealing is such a shameful thing.”

(I remember experiencing a similar thing in Melanesia. A man had robbed one of my classmates. We were able to yell and holler and send a crowd chasing him down. The police saw him rounding a corner, pursued by an angry mob, and they decided to arrest him and rescue him from the wrath of the mob. Might have saved his life.)

My friend continued to elaborate, “For us, it’s a matter of honor and reputation. To be known as a thief is one of the worst reputations you can have. You’ll never get rid of it. You’ll never be able to marry a local girl. Their families won’t let them marry a thief.”

“Really?” we responded.

“Even his father will be marked forever. People on the street will say, ‘Look at that man, his son is a thief!’ And his son will never be able to marry. Oh yes, they will all say, ‘Look at that man, his son is a thief.’ Indeed, his honor will have departed.”

A teammate leaned over to me to emphasize this final phrase, “Did you catch that?” he said, “His honor will have departed.” I nodded. Now there’s a phrase to memorize for those seeking to communicate the fallenness of humanity. All of us have sinned, and all of our honor has departed.

“So that’s why thieving and robbery are so rare?” we asked.

“Yes!”

“But what about government corruption?”

“Ha!” My friend responded, “Yes, we have a lot of that. The normal people don’t steal, but the political class? They’re sneaky. They steal billions in deceptive ways. Such is our situation.”

And such is the surprising nature of theft and money in our corner of Central Asia. In general, you don’t have to worry about pick-pockets, people breaking into your car, or kids stealing from shops in the bazaar. But you have a project worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Watch out. At that point the thieves will come calling.

Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash

An Unexpected Calling

I never wanted to work among Muslims. Having grown up in Melanesia, I had always assumed that if God called me to be a missionary, I would work with tribal animists. That would seem to make the most sense. Then, when I was an eighth grader on furlough in the US, the attacks of September 11th, 2001 took place. Living in the Northeast at the time, my school was directly affected by the attacks as a few students’ parents commuted to Manhattan for work every day. This and the ensuing War on Terror were my only real exposure to Islam. I knew that there were many Melanesian tribes asking for missionaries to come and live among them. And I knew that most Muslim countries were busy kicking missionaries out. Deep down, I think I didn’t want to work with Muslims because of these negative impressions. Why would anyone want to work with those who don’t want them to come? I wondered.

I have now been doing Muslim ministry for about thirteen years. So what changed? In brief, Muslims became real people to me, I became passionate about the overwhelming need, and God told me to go.

My first Muslim friend was a Somali refugee in Minneapolis named Uncle Abdi. I had volunteered for an English tutoring program where students would come a few times a week and help Somali refugees with basic English. It was in this context, sipping clove-heavy Somali chai and celebrating with students the fact that the English word finger is actually pronounced fingar in Somali (An easy one! Fingarrr!), that I came to really care about these dear people. They were very devout in their Islam, probably the most devout group of Muslims I’ve ever encountered. They were fiercely defensive of Islam and critical of Christianity. They had seen some terrible things happen in their homeland. They had interesting habits like dyeing their hair red with henna to show they had gone on hajj, or pilgrimage. They struggled, as I did, to adjust to the realities of the Minneapolis winter. We were a long way from the Somali desert and the warm Melanesian valleys. So we shivered together and became friends. And for the first time, Muslims were not some intimidating category. They were real people.

Around this time I began to also learn about the dire need for Christians to share the gospel with Muslims and to plant churches among them. I remember hearing that in 2006 there was only one missionary for every one million Muslims in the world, that the majority of those living in poverty worldwide were Muslims, and that the Muslim world had historically been one of the hardest and most neglected places for church planting. I heard of one Bedouin group who had only received two missionaries. One had died and the other had converted to Islam. I wrestled with a Somali camel herder’s quote, “If you can put your church on the back of my camel, then I will believe Christianity is for us.” I scrolled through the Joshua Project’s list of least-reached people groups. The vast majority? Muslim. What was to be done so that Jesus would get the glory he is due among the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims? I sat under John Piper’s preaching, coming alive to the glory of God and the joy of the nations. A passion in my soul was growing.

Finally, while listening to a presentation about about the state of the church in a certain Middle Eastern country, I felt an unmistakable “Go” from the Holy Spirit. Not sure what that meant since I was only part-way through my freshman year, I reached out to the speaker’s organization and was surprisingly accepted for a gap year in the Middle East.

The ways that God calls his people to serve as cross-cultural missionaries are as diverse and varied as the missionaries themselves are. For some, it’s simple biblical logic that compels them. “Jesus commanded us to go, did he not?” For others, a particular moment of spiritual clarity, hearing the leading of the Spirit. For others, they join in their spouse’s calling, as my dad did. In church history, many were called through dreams. I find it strange that many of us tend to assume most others were initially called to missions in the same way we were.

For me, God called me to work with Muslims through Muslim friends like uncle Abdi the Somali, through a growing passion for the great need, and through a moment of unusual spiritual force and clarity. Go to the Muslims. That call continues to be confirmed every time I’m sitting down with a Muslim friend, drinking chai, and sharing about Jesus. There is a particular joy, freedom, and empowering that I experience in that kind of setting that has come to be my personal definition of calling. Eric Liddell said, “When I run, I feel his pleasure.” Well, I keenly feel his pleasure walking through passages of the Word with Muslims for the very first time, watching as the Spirit gives them spiritual eyes to see the beauty of Christ and how it is so much better than works-based religion. What is the kind of ministry or service in which you feel the greatest freedom, joy, and empowering of the Spirit? It may be that that’s where you’re supposed to focus in serving the Church.

It’s good for me to recall these things in this season of plodding ministry. The call to prayer is blaring outside my windows. My heart is tired from friends leaving and the good but heavy costs of team leadership. We have not seen all that we had hoped to in these thirteen years. And yet it’s good to be reminded again of how this all came about. An unexpected calling, yes. But a good one, the one the Lord knew that I needed. I would never have thought that the coffee gardens and mountains of Melanesia (plus the arctic winter of Minneapolis) would have prepared me to be working in Central Asia. But here I am. And here I hope to be for a good many decades.

Photo by K15 Photos on Unsplash

A Proverb On What Reveals Character

Through travel and business a friend is revealed.

Local Oral Tradition

This local proverb points out two life situations which tend to reveal someone else’s character – making long journeys together and doing business together. It’s near-impossible to keep up appearances forever in either of these situations. Sooner or later the real person is going to show up – whether good or bad. Sometimes that experience can forge two strangers into the fastest of friends.

Locals tend to tell me that they never come to trust anyone who isn’t part of their inner family and friendship circle – their oikos, in missiology terms. Yes, we have massive trust issues in this part of the world, which does not bode well for church planting. So I push back with this proverb from their own culture, which usually means they end up conceding the point with a surprised laugh and nod. Such is the power of known proverbs in Central Asia! (If only the heart could be fully convinced so quickly). Then, if they are believers, I modify it and tell them that for true believers it’s through repentance that a friend is revealed. Trust between naturally-disconnected believers can and will be built, despite the protestations of the most jaded Central Asian or missionary. But it will be built not primarily by travel or business, but by the hard work of ongoing repentance.

Photo by Vaida Tamošauskaitė on Unsplash