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.
If you talk to Muslims about the Bible, or if you read the Qur’an, you’ll very quickly realize that Islam doesn’t teach that there are four gospels. No, the Qur’an, and the vast majority of Muslims, assume that Jesus came and revealed one book, called The Injil, i.e. The Gospel (Surah Al-Ma’ida 5:46). The Qur’an seemingly has no idea about the four separate books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Why is this?
Some of this seems to be due to the Qur’anic worldview and its assumption that all true prophets bring their own heavenly book revelation with them for their specific people, such as the alleged ‘scrolls of Abraham’ (Surah Al-Ala 87:19). These prophets and their books are said to all contain the same basic message about turning from idolatry toward worship of the one creator God because the day of judgement is coming.
This is the narrative that Mohammad claimed about himself (Al-Ma’ida 5:48). Then, to try to defend his own prophethood when challenged, it’s also a narrative he forced onto the story every other prophet. Of course, everyone who has actually read the Bible knows that this is not true of every prophet, and not even true of many of the prophets the Qur’an is aware of, such as Abraham and Elijah. It’s not even true of Jesus. He didn’t come revealing a book from heaven; rather, he was the revealed Word of God, and his disciples later recorded his life and ministry in the four gospel accounts. This is yet another piece of evidence that Mohammed likely didn’t have access to a Bible he could read, though he does seem to have had access to lots of Jewish, Christian, and heretical oral tradition floating around in seventh-century Arabia.
However, this week I learned that there may be an additional reason why the Qur’an doesn’t seem to know that there are four gospels. This reason has to do with an early church figure named Tatian, who is a rather complex figure. Discipled by Justin Martyr, Tatian later returned to his home area of Adiabene, old Assyria, what is today N. Iraq, and proceeded to write a fiery treatise, “Address to the Greeks,” on why Christianity is superior to Greek beliefs – but also how he believed the East to be vastly superior to the West in general,
In every way the East excels and most of all in its religion, the Christian religion, which also comes from Asia and is far older and truer than all the philosophies and crude religious myths of the Greeks.
Significantly, Tatian seems to have been the first figure in church history to attempt to translate some of the New Testament into another language. Tatian combined the four gospels into one account, translating this work into old Syriac. This book was called the Diatessaron, and for several hundred years it was the primary form of the gospels used in the Syriac-speaking Christian world of the Middle East and Central Asia. A standard translation of the four canonical gospels didn’t take its proper place among the Syriac churches until a few centuries later. Tatian himself eventually drifted into some problematic asceticism and was proclaimed a heretic.
Here’s where Tatian connects with the Qur’an’s ignorance about the existence of four separate gospels. The Diatessaron was very popular in the broader Syriac-speaking region – a region that overlapped considerably with the territory of Arab kingdoms and tribes. Biblical scholar and linguist Richard Brown puts it this way in his paper, “ʿIsa and Yasūʿ: The Origins of the Arabic Names for Jesus,”
For several centuries, the Diatessaron was the standard “Gospel” used in most churches of the Middle East. When the Quran speaks of the book called the “Gospel” (Arabic Injil), it is almost certainly referring to the Diatessaron.
Why doesn’t the Qur’an seem to understand that there are four gospels? There is a good case to be made that this Islamic confusion about the actual makeup of the New Testament goes back to a well-intentioned project of an early church leader.
In this, there is a lesson to be learned about the unintended consequences of pragmatism in mission contexts. It’s not hard to see how those in the early church, like Tatian, might have felt that it would be more practical and helpful to have one harmonized gospel book instead of three very similar synoptic gospels and one very different Gospel of John. For one, it would have been much cheaper to copy and distribute. Books were very costly to produce in the ancient world, often requiring the backing of a wealthy patron. In addition, a single harmonized account would have also seemed simpler to understand, rather than asking the new believers in the ancient Parthian Empire to work through the apparent differences between the timelines and details presented in the four separate gospel accounts.
What could be lost if the Word of God were made more accessible in this fashion? Well, for one, this kind of harmonization loses the unique message and emphasis present in the intentional structure and editorial composition of each book. The authors of the Gospels were not merely out to communicate the events of Jesus’ ministry. They were also seeking to communicate the meaning of those events by how they structured their presentation of them. For example, consider how Mark sandwiches Jesus’ cleansing of the temple in chapter 11 between accounts of Jesus cursing the fig tree. This structure is intended to communicate to the reader that the cursing of the fig tree was a living (and dying) metaphor of the fruitless temple system of the 1st century – and its impending judgment.
Tatian’s pragmatic decision cut off Syriac-speaking believers from so much of this crucial meaning because he did not simply translate the four individual gospels. Further, he also inadvertently contributed to confusion among the ancient Arabs about the nature of the Injil, a confusion that was later codified in Islam and continues to trip up Muslims to this day, creating doubts in their mind about the validity of the four gospels.
If you find yourself in conversations with Muslim friends about this question of why there are four gospels instead of one, knowing this background might prove helpful. The Qur’an itself doesn’t know that there are four gospels. This is because of its own errant understanding of prophethood – an understanding, unfortunately, aided by some ancient and pragmatic missiology.
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. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Christians, too, were scattered by the catastrophe but with a significant difference. Theirs was a living Messiah who had called them to a world mission and whose good news of the gospel was for all peoples. Instead of turning inward, they moved out across the world. Most of them were Jews, however, and as they went they found that the Jewish communities of the Diaspora were a natural ethnic network for the beginnings of Christian advance. This was particularly true in oriental Asia. The surviving records of the earliest Christian groups in Asia outside the Roman Empire almost always have a strong Jewish-Christian tinge, as we shall see.
–Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol I, p. 10
The quote above, which refers to the scattering of Jews and Christians after the temple’s destruction in A.D. 70, describes a pattern certainly true of our own area of Central Asia. The earliest Christians here in Caravan City* 1,900 years ago, seem to have been Jews. This is evidenced by the fact that the earliest leader of the Christian community here has a Jewish name, a localized form of Samson.
When locals ask me why the Jews rejected Jesus and his message, I am always quick to point out that that simply isn’t the whole picture. Early Christianity was majority ethnically Jewish for its first generations, even though Gentiles eventually came to outnumber their Jewish brethren. The early church was very much a community characterized by what Moffett calls a “strong Jewish-Christian tinge” for a very long time (as an aside, this is yet another reason why any form of Christian anti-Semitism is so absurd).
This passage also reminds me of a pattern that keeps emerging in the church planting efforts among our focus people group. That pattern is that it’s often communities of displaced locals that are more open to the gospel and who provide the first foothold for communities of faith. Our people group is divided by multiple national borders. Those who live outside of the region/country where they grew up are almost always quicker to come to faith and bolder and more open when it comes to living out their faith when compared to those living in their original community.
I recently visited a nearby country where some of the most encouraging fruit among our people group is emerging. There, I saw that God seems to be significantly using this dynamic of displacement. Displaced members of our people group are coming to faith in surprising numbers and taking risks that allow others displaced like them, as well as the actual local locals, to see the love and power of the new birth and the local church. As these others see these things, they are then won by and to them and also then able to reproduce them. Here in Caravan city, we are seeing a similar dynamic in the church plant we are connected to – a church plant now reaching those of this city, but whose initial core was made up of foreigners and members of our people group from a neighboring country.
Much of this is because the power of tribe, family, and patronage network can be a suffocating thing. But when locals are given just a degree or two of freedom from those systems of social control (often through geographical distance or economic independence), this can free them up to more easily become a good core member for a church plant, which can go on to later reach and integrate those native to a given city or area.
Some missionaries might be concerned about this kind of method, since churches are being started primarily with transplants that aren’t fully indigenous, according to how most would understand that term. But both in early Christianity and in our own corner of Central Asia, it’s these very transplants who are providing the foothold that leads to the locals being reached. It’s an indirect investment, yes, but one that very much seems to be worth the risk in the long run.
We need to raise 31k 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. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
One of the most curious examples of poor contextualization in Central Asia is how opposed most missionaries are to preaching. By and large, missionaries feel strongly that the indigenous church plants and churches in this part of the world should replace preached sermons with participatory Bible discussions. And they feel even more strongly that if preaching must be present at all, then it should absolutely not be the foreigner doing it.
The reason this is poor contextualization is that these feelings and opinions seem to be based entirely on the missionaries’ own opinions, culture, training, and baggage, and not on that of the locals at all.
Yet very few missionaries seem able to see this.
Most foreign workers here would heartily resonate with the idea that, as I heard it put yesterday, “I didn’t come here to reproduce white guy monologues.” But few are asking themselves why they feel this way – and crucially, whether or not any of their local friends feel the same.
Instead, much of the missionary community has become an echo chamber, reinforcing the idea that preaching, and especially foreigners preaching, is bad contextualization – and therefore to be discarded. As it turns out, however, this is a huge assumption. And one, as I’m increasingly convinced, without any local evidence to back it up.
See, on the level of cultural values and practices, our Central Asian locals highly prize experts and expertise. Whether in the realm of education, government, medicine, art, or religion, when locals want to learn or teach something, they seek out an expert who will proceed to educate the community (often giving out certificates when they’re done). This teacher, ironically, will almost always do this by means of a monologue, a lecture. In fact, the same word is used in our local language for any kind of public teaching like this, whether it be an address, a speech, or a sermon. Every day, all day long, this kind of public oratory is happening here on television, on the radio, on social media, in tribal gatherings, in schools, and in meeting halls. The idea of the wise expert is so prominent and respected here that in our community of Caravan City, one of the most honorable ways to greet a random man on the street is to address him as “Teacher” – whether he actually is a teacher or not.
But perhaps, one might think, it’s different inspiritualsettings. To the contrary, week in and week out for 1,400 years, locals have been going to a mosque to hear a monologue, an Islamic sermon. Well, what about before Islam came? Our area had a strong presence of ancient Christianity. Weekly Christian sermons would have been happening in local churches here for 500 years before Islam arrived, with some of the most famous preachers being originally from other nations in the region. What about before Christianity, then? Turns out our area also had a strong Jewish community, which means that weekly Jewish public reading of the Law & Prophets and teaching based on it would have been taking place in the local synagogues for several hundred years before the coming of Christianity. This is quite the history. We are looking at over 2,000 years of local precedent for preaching of one sort or another.
Not surprisingly, given this precedent, if you were to gather a group of our Central Asians today who want to learn about the Bible and then ask them what they expect that kind of activity to look like, they would tell you that they want to be taught (i.e. lectured) by a religious expert. And if possible, they would prefer that the expert be a credentialed foreigner.
Do most missionaries listen to them when they express these expectations? Do they honor this contemporary local preference, one backed by thousands of years of local precedent? Nope. Instead, they assert that preaching is Western, not actually contextual. And they then proceed to import a form that is radically foreign – informal, inductive group study, casually facilitated by a “coach” or “a trainer of trainers” – someone who is not supposed to have the authority of a teacher or an expert. Then, these missionaries go on to assure themselves that they are, in fact, using methodology that is so much more contextual and effective than previous generations of colonial missionaries with their imported Western methods.
To be clear, our locals do not gather on their own for informal, inductive study of a religious text, facilitated by a “coach” or “trainer” or some other Socratically-minded sort-of-but-not-really-leader. There is no local precedent for this kind of methodology. So, when locals are told over and over again by the foreign Christians that they have to do this in order to be good disciple makers, they initially find it very disorienting. This disorientation leads to questions like, “Why are we awkwardly meeting in a house and not in a church or official space?” “Who is in charge here and why aren’t they taking charge of this time?”, “Why won’t the person who is supposed to be the teacher tell us the correct answer instead of hinting and asking us these unfamiliar questions?”, and “Do you know a real priest or pastor who can actually explain things to us?”
Sadly, our locals are also not trained by their education system in critical thinking. This means they can’t easily jump into reading a text, summarizing it in their own words, and finding its main point. And because they’re from a high context, high power distance culture, they often don’t know how to comfortably navigate these informal, “organic” times of group Bible study. Yes, they can certainly learn how to do these things over time. I myself have trained many local believers in group inductive group Bible study (for reasons I’ll get into below).
But the key thing I want to draw out first is the sheer magnitude of the disconnect going on here. Many missionaries in our region are convinced they are doing something closer to the local culture by choosing informal, inductive group study instead of preaching. And yet in reality, the exact opposite is happening. This can only mean that the missionaries are deceiving themselves, importing a radically foreign form that is far stranger to locals than preaching would be, and all the while believing they are doing the complete opposite.
Once you see how upside down all of this is, you can’t unsee it. It would be like a foreign exchange teacher coming to the US who is convinced that bowing is the more authentic way that Americans greet one another, and that waving or shaking hands are outdated foreign forms. So, he insists on bowing and making all of his American students bow also when they greet him and one another. The American students don’t know why this foreign teacher keeps insisting that they bow to one another, since it’s not something they’ve naturally been brought up to do. This teacher is not operating in the normal cultural code of form and meaning as they understand it. But the teacher tells all his colleagues back home that he has adopted this method of greeting in order to be more American in his relationships, more like the locals. It’s not just that he’s getting it wrong. He’s confident in his take on American culture, when in reality, he’s actually deluded, the one who is, in fact, guilty of importing the foreign method. To make our analogy even more complete, imagine that the vast majority of foreign exchange teachers in the US believe this same thing.
Why is the blind spot regarding preaching so powerful among missionaries among the unreached, especially if it’s not being reinforced by the locals themselves? Here, I think a number of powerful factors are combining. First, there is the place where Western/global evangelical culture currently finds itself – a place of overreaction to the structures and methods of the past. This pendulum-swing away from the methods of our forefathers includes strong negative vibes regarding things like institutions and preaching. Missionaries are misdiagnosing the unhealthy churches they grew up in and placing the blame erroneously on things like preaching and formal organization. They end up on the field, not exactly sure what a healthy church is, but awfully convictional about the fact that they don’t want it to look like the churches back home, the very churches that are funding them.
Second, popular missiology and missions training drill into new and veteran missionaries a false narrative about what is and is not effective and contextual on the field. Even if a missionary personally benefited from preaching and enjoys sitting under it themselves, all the loudest voices from missiology and pre-field training tell them that that 45 minute sermons are something must be left back in the homeland, and not something to introduce among the baby churches of their focus people group – who, it is claimed, deserve the opportunity to do church in a more pure, New Testament manner, unsoiled by modern Western accretions like preaching.
Third, missionaries bring preconceived notions with them about people groups in this part of the world. They carry deeply held assumptions about what is normal for Muslim people groups, such as the belief that they will prefer to meet in house churches and do discussion-based study, if only the foreigners would get out of the way and give the locals the chance to be true to themselves and their culture. Preconceived notions are unavoidable. But they must be tested once we are actually living among a people group, and if necessary, discarded.
In the face of this powerful triad of their own cultural baggage, the voices of the missiologists, and their own assumptions, missionaries can spend years on the field completely blind to the fact that their aversion to white guy monologues is mostly a reflection of themselves, and not really a reflection of the locals at all.
However, preaching is good contextualization. I believe this, yes, because it fits with the desires, expectations, and forms of this particular culture. But that point only matters if the form itself is, first, biblical. I firmly believe it is biblical, although when it comes to this question in particular, the theologians and pastors do not agree with the missiologists. Whenever this happens regarding biblical interpretation, I’ve learned you almost always want to trust the theologians and pastors, not the missiologists. This is because the former group is more gifted and wired to be careful with the text of Scripture, while the latter group is often gifted and wired as passionate pioneers and practitioners. This otherwise good gifting comes with an unfortunate downside – the temptation toward sloppy use of the text to justify mission methods. For example, when mission leaders claim that faithful preaching as we’ve known it in church history is not required because it’s not a method rapid or reproducible enough to “finish the task.” As the logic goes, 1) Our church/disciple multiplication methods must catch up to the rate of lost people going to hell, 2) Preaching isn’t rapidly reproducible enough for this exponential rate of growth, therefore, 3) Preaching must not be biblical and should be replaced with participatory Bible studies not dependent upon a qualified teacher – just like we see in Acts!
In reality, the biblical case for preaching is really not that hard to establish from even a cursory overview of the New Testament. Jesus preached monologues to his disciples and others, such as the sermon on the mount (Matt 5-7). The apostles preached evangelistic monologues, as recorded in the book of Acts, as well as preaching to groups of only believers (Acts 2, Acts 20). The book of Hebrews is a good example of a local church monologue, a sermon for believers, adapted into a written form. The New Testament church found its primary model in the Jewish synagogue, where preaching and teaching – monologues – were taking place weekly in the first century (Acts 13:13-43). Finally, add to all this biblical witness the uniform witness of church history that preaching is an apostolic practice (1 Tim 5:17) handed down to us from generation to generation of God’s people.
Because we can draw clear lines like this connecting preaching to the Bible, and clear lines connecting preaching to the strengths and forms of our local culture, I therefore believe that preaching is sound and important contextualization. Yes, even if it’s a foreigner doing it. That leads me to the position that those on the mission field who reject preaching are, in fact, doing poor contextualization. This is because they are missing, first, that it’s biblical, and second, that it’s locally effective. Good contextualization should be able to see both, but for some reason, many missionaries can’t yet perceive either.
Okay then, since I believe preaching is a sound method, does it then follow that group inductive Bible studies are poor contextualization? Not at all. Inductive Bible study is, in fact, sound and important contextualization as well. First, this is because it can also be easily grounded in the Bible (Acts 8:26-35, 17:11, 18:26). But second, when it comes to how inductive Bible study connects to the culture, the way in which it is good contextualization is different from the way that preaching is good contextualization. Inductive Bible study is good contextualization because it directly connects, not with a strong precedent in the local culture, but with a crippling weakness in the local culture. Remember, good contextualization will not only utilize redeemable inside forms but also introduce outside forms intentionally when there is an area of the local culture that is non-existent or woefully underdeveloped.
This is why, over the years, we have labored to preach and to raise up preachers while also laboring to lead inductive Bible studies and raise up locals who can do the same. Both forms are good contextualization because they are both biblical, though one runs with the grain of the culture while the other runs against it. Both, ultimately, serve the church. They are not meant to be pitted against one another, but to powerfully work hand-in-hand.
To do contextualization well, we must be able to see the local culture for what it actually is. Unfortunately, the scales of our own cultural background, assumptions, and training can blur our vision and prevent this kind of clear-sightedness. This is what seems to be going on given so many missionaries’ opposition to preaching in unreached places.
Today’s missionaries among the unreached overwhelmingly have an aversion to preaching, to white guy monologues, or even local guy monologues, for that matter. Missionary echo chambers keep reinforcing this belief. My hope is that someday they will come to see this for what it truly is – a strange aversion indeed. And one that is not ultimately serving the local believers.
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I recently made a short trip back to Poet City with my oldest son and Rocky*, a local believer and pastoral intern here in Caravan City. My oldest son was participating in a 2-day discipleship gathering there for expat teenagers. As for Rocky, he jumps at any chance he gets to visit Poet City. This is because he’s in a serious relationship with one of the single, believing women at our former church. This kind of relationship is a big deal, given how few mature believing singles there are among our people group. We’re all rooting for them and doing what we can to help. For me, this includes long road trips full of relationship counsel that’s mostly along the lines of “Don’t worry, bro. This too is normal, trust Jesus, be humble and steady. Don’t sweat the small stuff, that’s not the kind of thing that matters anyway in a healthy marriage.”
After we dropped off my son at a house completely overrun with excited and awkward teenage TCKs (God bless that volunteer team), we drove across the city for dinner with a Bible translator. There, over pizza, we got updates on the status of the Scriptures in some of our minority languages. Then, we were off to the narrow alleys of our old bazaar neighborhood to secure our lodgings at an old Catholic church. Our plan was to then drop in on the men’s discipleship meeting, now led by my local friends Darius* and Alan*, an elder and elder in training, respectively.
However, this being Central Asia, the day’s schedule didn’t exactly go as planned, so it was 10 pm before we finally made it to Darius’ place. By that time, all the other believers had left. And Darius was once again hosting a crew of six unbelieving friends. This cadre of skeptics has kept coming back, week after week, for Bible study, arguments over the gospel’s claims, and games and chai late into the night. They have become such regulars – and so disruptive to discussions that were supposed to be for believers’ discipleship – that Darius and Alan were forced to divide the evening. 6 – 8 pm is for believers’ discipleship, and 8 pm – late is for rowdy apologetics and card games. This has been going on for quite some time now.
Rocky and I arrived, gave big hugs to Darius and Mohammad the photographer (still somehow not a believer), and respectfully greeted the crew of guests. We settled into what looked to be an evening of catching up with Darius, eating sunflower seeds, and playing card games like Pit, an old stock-exchange-inspired card game that I hadn’t played since I was a kid. This particular game involves so much shouting that we decided the most appropriate name for it in the local language should be “Donkey Bazaar.”
Like that evening long ago when Darius first heard the gospel, I read the room and thought it would be a night mostly given to relationship building, not deep spiritual conversation. I was wrong.
During one lull in the games and conversation, photographer Mohammad walked over to the coffee table with its growing piles of sunflower seed shells and chai cups and made a show of removing a Bible from it, kissing it, and placing it on a nearby bookshelf, higher than all of the other books. This is how local Muslims are taught to respect Qur’ans. Mohammad and I are close, so I thought I would offer him a friendly correction over this behavior.
“Brother Muhammad, what are you doing? That’s not a Qur’an, that’s a Bible! You don’t need to do all that showy religious stuff with it. Remember, it’s not the book itself that is the important thing, it’s the truth the book teaches. We are those who focus on the inside reality, not those who respect the physical exterior while neglecting what really matters.”
“No… you should respect both,” responded one of the visitors who was sitting to my left. I turned to him and noticed that he wore a big beard, almost Salafi-style.
And that’s how the next three hours of evangelism, apologetics, and gesticulating conversation got started. I had unintentionally provoked one of my favorite evangelistic topics with Muslims, how it’s not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out of him. Starting from that topic, we went all over the place. How can we say the Trinity is a logical belief? Do we really believe these friends deserve a literal eternal hell? How can we say God is perfect if he experiences ‘negative’ emotions like sadness? Wait, Noah and Moses and David all made sacrifices that point to Jesus?
While I opened the door and made some decent contributions in the beginning of the conversations, more and more I sat back and let Rocky and Darius take the lead. What a joy it was to watch them faithfully unpack the gospel and the word of God with conviction, clarity, and winsomeness. This, I thought to myself, is one of the sweetest rewards of being a missionary. Getting to tag-team with faithful local brothers. Getting to see them powerfully sharing God’s Word.
The conversation ended sometime around 2:30 am. Afterward, the three of us debriefed and prayed together for these unbelieving friends. There were points in the conversation where it seemed that at least the bearded one had been wrestling with some very healthy fear and possibly conviction as we spoke about heaven, hell, and the only way of salvation. I learned that a couple months previous, he had finally admitted that Jesus is God, dragged kicking and screaming to this confession by countless hours of Alan’s apologetics. However, this shift within his beliefs had scared him so greatly that he immediately went on pilgrimage to Mecca the week afterward, trying to reground himself in Islam. That’s the kind of thing you only do if you know that you are nearing the point of no return, nearing apostasy.
After praying together for the Word to do its work, Rocky and I took our leave, at last settling into our Catholic lodgings shortly before 4 am. We eventually went to sleep, still feeling energized from the “food to eat you do not know about” of getting to share so much truth together (John 4:32).
Two mornings later, I met up with Alan for coffee and told him about what had happened a couple nights previous. He started laughing.
“Brother!” he said, “I think at last I’m becoming a true Calvinist.”
“Oh yeah? Well… good!”
“Yes, I have been trying my hardest to convince those guys of the gospel for the past few months. And all of my best arguments have come up short. I’ve tried everything. Honestly, if the Spirit doesn’t give understanding, nothing we say can make a difference.”
“Amen,” I said, knowing exactly what Alan was talking about. I think God particularly enjoys demonstrating this to guys like us who are drawn to theology and apologetics – who might be tempted to spend more time speaking of beautifully coherent systems based on God’s word rather than God’s Word itself. Yes, unless the Spirit infuse with power, all our most brilliant arguments are, in the end, impotent. As the song says, All is vain unless the Spirit of the Holy One comes down.
It started snowing outside the cafe as Alan and I continued our conversation.
“The reason I didn’t see you guys that night is because I hadn’t heard you were dropping in,” Alan said. “And unlike every other week, that night I left early. I was so discouraged and so tired from everything seeming to fail, that I just told Darius that I was going home to sleep.”
“But now I know,” he continued, “that even if we’ve given up, if God wants a man to hear the gospel on a given night, he will bring brothers from three hours away to make sure it happens.”
Alan and I laughed together, encouraged at God’s kindness in still choosing to use us even in all our short-sightedness. I encouraged him (and myself) again not to rely on our own logic, wisdom, or words, but on the power of God’s Word. He alone holds the power of salvation. Yet he delights to work through his Word as it is spoken through his people.
If God wants a man to hear the gospel, then that man isgoing to hear the gospel. One way or another, heaven will arrange earth so the will of the king is carried out.
What an honor to get to be part of this.
[9] Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, [10] declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’ [11] calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it. (ESV)
Isaiah 46:9–11
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.
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This is a region of so many world firsts for linguistic innovation. Unlike Egypt, China or India, its cities and states had always been consciously multilingual, whether for communication with neighbours who spoke different languages, or because their histories had made them adopt a foreign language to dignify court, religion or commerce. This is the area where we find the first conscious use of a classical language for convenience in communication, as a lingua franca, an early apparent triumph of diplomatic pragmatism over national sentiment.
-Ostler, Empires of the Word, p.34
Here, Ostler is referring to ancient Mesopotamia. This is a region – like our own area of Central Asia – that has been ‘consciously multilingual’ for as far back as we have records. This is a different posture toward language than many of us are used to who come from societies more in the monolingual tradition of ancient Egypt or China.
In a multilingual culture, a person is raised to assume that multiple languages will be heard and used on a daily basis. To gain a competitive advantage, as well as just for the convenience and joy of it, many will pick up two or three other languages in addition to the mother tongue spoken in their home. These societies do not assume that language use is a zero-sum game, where the use of one language inevitably means the demotion or withering of others. Rather, there is often a pragmatic long-term bilingualism or trilingualism. In one city close to us, many are even quadrilingual, using four languages on the regular. And they’ve been like this for countless generations.
Given the strengths and weaknesses of different languages, I prefer this approach that chooses to have not just one, but multiple tools in one’s toolbelt of tongues. For example, English may be fantastic for its motley plethora of specific nouns and adjectives (case in point – motley and plethora). On the other hand, English is a rhyme-poor language. So, for poetry, I’ll take our Central Asian tongue.
The Jerusalem Talmud would also concur with this position that languages have unique strengths: “Four languages are pleasing for use in the world: Greek for song, Latin for battle, Syriac (Aramaic) for dirges, Hebrew for speech.” Even God himself must have, for reasons of his own, chosen Hebrew and a short detour into Aramaic for biblical revelation until the coming of Christ, and then chosen Greek for the revelation that followed. Among his many reasons for this, one of them must have had something to do with the nature of the languages themselves – not that they were more holy or somehow superior, but that they were somehow more useful.
When it comes to missions, all this means that when sharing the gospel with a multilingual people group, we should be like the ancient Mesopotamians. We should feel free to share as soon as possible in a language they understand, even while we gauge over the long term which language might lead to the strongest advance of the gospel among them. The ancient inhabitants of Ur had a ‘diplomatic pragmatism’ when it came to their language use. Our own ‘spiritual pragmatism’ in language use should be shaped by whatever leads to the clearest and most compelling proclamation over the long haul. That might mean learning two languages, perhaps first a dominant (and often easier) trade language to see some friends come to faith and then a much more difficult minority mother tongue to see those friends formed into a church that goes on to multiply faithfully among its people group.
We also need to be careful that those of us from predominantly monolingual societies don’t impose limitations upon our multilingual friends that simply aren’t present in their language worldview. For example, the churches of one of our sister people groups hold all their Bible studies and church services in two languages. Their mother tongue is used for worship, prayer, discussion, and preaching. But the Bible is always read and studied in the national language. This is because they cannot read or write in their mother tongue. Yet because of the school system, they are highly literate in the national language. So, they simply switch back and forth as needed. To outsiders like us, this may seem a highly inconvenient or unsustainable system. But to a multilingual people group, this is fine. “We use this language for this part and that language for that part. What’s the issue here?”
We need to be careful that when it comes to big decisions like who gets a missionary and who doesn’t, who gets a bible translation or not, and whether or not we will make the costly investment to learn a second language, we are truly seeking to understand how ‘consciously multilingual’ people groups actually function.
They have a kind of freedom toward language that may be hard for us to grasp at first. It may challenge some of our categories. But if we can join them in that freedom, then we may be able to leverage it for the spread of the gospel.
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.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Many missionaries assume that contextualization means learning the local culture so that you can do things as the locals would do them – that good contextualization means not introducing outside, foreign forms. But what happens when the local culture and the local ways of doing things actually prevent indigenous believers from obeying the Bible? In this case, contextualization means learning how the local culture is weak and what must be added to it so that Christian faithfulness might result. Yes, there is a time when the good contextualizer intentionally brings in outside forms for the sake of the indigenous church.
We must sometimes import things like structures, forms, and methods from other cultures in order for a locally specific Christian culture to emerge. If our missions paradigm rules this out from the beginning, then our contextualization will be half-baked and we will find ourselves stuck in work that never breaks out of the chains imposed on it by our people group’s particular brand of fallenness. Herein lies another common blindspot of contemporary missions.
The brokenness and beauty of every culture mean that certain biblically-necessary categories and forms remain, ready to be discovered and redeemed – while other necessary things have long since disappeared or been gutted entirely. Take language as one clear example. Some unreached peoples, incredibly, retain a good word for atonement. However, others have no word for grace. The former word/form can often be redeemed, filled, and clarified with biblical meaning. The latter word/form must be introduced – and that from the outside.
Sometimes the issue is not language but what a culture lacks in terms of forms or models of organization. Our locals have the hardest time prioritizing the weekly gathering of believers. Local believers are willing to meet in their own homes for years on end with foreigners, but willnot prioritize the weekly gathering with other locals if left to the structures, models, and motivations of their own background. Without the right kind of contextual intervention, they end up stuck in this disobedience for the long term.
There are several reasons for this problem of gathering that have to do with our local culture. First, when it comes to Islam, mosque attendance is optional, with prayer at home being a ‘good enough’ equivalent. In addition, there is no such thing as mosque membership. Mosque worship, as it turns out, is a surprisingly individualistic and casual affair, despite what it looks like from the outside when we see those rows of bodies bowing in unison. Political party membership does exist locally but it is a purely patron-client relationship, where locals are paid small monthly salaries to secure their loyal vote and occasional attendance at party events (which may include election-time vehicle convoys that honk and dance their way down our street at 1 am).
The one place that locals will show up regularly and religiously is family gatherings. It might be the weekly family picnics that happen in the spring and fall. Or, the weekly family visit to the grave of a sister who tragically died in her youth. But when Mom or Dad say it’s a family gathering, you have to be there. Locals will cancel everything else in order to be in regular, faithful attendance at family events.
All this means locals have no good indigenous models or tools for exercising committed attendance and membership outside of gatherings of blood family. Add to this the massive issues of trust that exist in this culture – and it’s easy to see why locals won’t/can’t gather weekly with the church. That is, unless they are pushed and helped to do so.
The two indigenous churches that we’ve been a part of have largely cleared this hurdle. How? In addition to the steady drip of faithful preaching and discipleship on these topics (“The local church is your true family!”), they have also introduced foreign structures such as church membership, church covenants, and church discipline – all of which helpfully require and reinforce regular attendance. Remember, none of these are structures that could be sourced in the local culture. As I wrote above, there’s no real model for meaningful membership and faithful attendance here outside of physical kinship. As for church discipline, locals are shocked when they learn about Matthew 18 and often swear that it would never work here. And as for covenant, the only local shell left of this crucial concept is the twisted doctrine of jihad.
This lack meant that the missionaries connected with these two churches made the choice to introduce these foreign structures and concepts (which I would contend are universal biblical concepts that always require local expression). This was not because they were ignorant of the local culture or secretly believed in the superiority of Western ways. No, it was because they were working hard to go as deep as possible in the local language and culture. And while they were doing that, they contextualized. They learned that local culture didn’t have the forms and structures necessary for obeying Jesus. So, that practically meant that forms needed to be borrowed, introduced, and adapted as needed.
The ironic thing is that many missionaries initially look at the use of outside structures like this and think it is sloppy colonial-style missions that just wants to copy/paste what’s been done in the West. What they are missing is that good contextualization shouldn’t merely do as the local culture does. Neither should forms or methods be ruled out simply because they feel old-fashioned or Western to us, the missionaries. No, real contextualization learns a local culture so well that it sees where its weaknesses are, and then it responds accordingly. It’s not about us or our baggage or our desire for some kind of pristine and isolated contextualized Christianity. It’s about helping the locals obey the Bible and working with them to find faithful ways to apply biblical principles in their context. If an imported form fills a crucial gap that would not have otherwise been filled, then so be it. Introduce that word for grace or that helpful process for interviewing those who want to be baptized. Trust me, the locals will find a way to make that form their own anyway. They always do.
Yesterday, we heard of some friends who are going to introduce a system of formal membership into the network of believers they’ve been working with for years. Now, these missionaries are some of the most knowledgeable and deferential when it comes to the local language and culture. They are veterans of great skill and experience. But the locals they’ve been discipling, like many of those we’ve worked with, will not of their own initiative prioritize the weekly gathering in the way they should. So, after years of teaching, modeling, and pleading with these locals, our friends are now going to roll out a system of church membership and see if that helps. They are bringing in an outside form in order to free their local friends from their specific cultural weaknesses – so that they might better obey Jesus.
My prediction? It will work. Not only that, but they will find this to be one of the most contextual things they’ve done so far.
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.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
I’ve heard it said that if a believer from our region faithfully endures persecution long enough, his unbelieving family will eventually come to respect him for it – and will even boast about him to their Muslim friends and neighbors.
“This is our son. He became a Christian and for years we were awful to him because of it. But he put up with all of it and is doing better than ever. What a man!”
This past week I heard a testimony where this has actually happened. Now that we’re back in Caravan City*, we are once again fellow church members with Brother Ahmed*, the local believer who once taught me that jihad is the only understanding of covenant in his culture.
Ahmed was testifying because a group of us who were part of the church back in 2020 were spending the evening together, sharing how God has been faithful to us over the past five years.
“You know that things with my family were terrible after I became a Christian,” Ahmed shared. “Especially on my dad’s side. For three years they cut me off and wanted nothing to do with me.”
Shunning like this is one of the more common forms of persecution used against believers here. It’s a pressure mechanism meant to cut them off from their primary support network and publicly shame them back into conformity. In a culture where the family network is everything because there are almost no trustworthy public institutions to rely on, this is often a devastating blow.
Ahmed continued,
“Last year my middle brother came back from abroad and asked to stay with us. We were happy to have him live with us while he was looking for a job. At least, that was the reason he gave us for his visit. He later admitted that our dad had sent him to spy on us.
“My family was convinced that I had become a Christian so that I could live a wild life of sinful freedom. But instead, my brother saw my life, my marriage, and even interviewed a lot of the people I work with.
“After a few weeks, my brother admitted to me why he had really come. Then, he said to me, ‘I now see that becoming a Christian has made you a better man, not a worse one. In fact, you are a much better man than I am!’
“I am so thankful to God because after some very difficult years I now have a good relationship with my family, they respect me a lot, and we can see them all the time.”
I was so encouraged to hear Ahmed’s testimony to God’s faithfulness. Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way. However, my sense is that many more local believers could have healthy and respectful relationships with their families if they just hold on a little longer. The temptation many face is to believe that the broken relationship will be that way forever. But kinship ties go so deep in this culture that even when someone has shamed the family through something as drastic as apostasy, there still remain deep desires for relationship underneath all the persecution.
In the meantime, what local believers need to be reminded of is that faithfully enduring their family’s shaming is a way God has given them to accrue true honor (1 Pet 2:7). And not just in God’s eyes, but that even their unbelieving family may someday come to see their stubborn commitment to Jesus as honorable. Those of us in relationship with local believers can and should encourage them in light of this to remain “steadfast, immovable” knowing that heaven’s approval is sure – and their family’s eventual approval is not as impossible as it might seem today.
It’s interesting also to note his family’s stated concern – “We thought becoming a Christian would make you a bad man.” If this same fear is shared by other families whose children follow Jesus, then perhaps efforts could be made to get word back to these families of local believers – good gossip as it were – about how Christian faith has actually made their shunned family member even more of an upright and honorable person.
As for Ahmed, he was beaming as he sat next to his local believing wife (something he also once felt was impossible), testifying to how kind God has been to him.
Many believers grieve the loss of their families after they come to faith. This tragic outcome is often unavoidable, even for the most winsome of witnesses. Yet it is not impossible for believers from Muslim backgrounds to hold fast to Jesus and to eventually be reconciled to their Islamic families. May we pray and labor accordingly.
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*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security
If you know very much about international churches, then you know that they have a poor track record of planting indigenous churches in the cities and countries where they worship. International churches often meet in English and focus on serving the foreigners, the expats, the migrant workers, and other non-locals. Their culture is often ‘Global-Westernish’ and their mission is usually a simple one – provide spiritual care and community for the foreigners. When they do this well, they can be vibrant and healthy spiritual communities for their members, even if they have very little impact on their host city’s native residents. However, when they do their job poorly, they can function like lowest-common-denominator expat clubs that model neither sound doctrine nor biblical Christian community.
It’s no wonder many missionaries have been taught to stay as far away as possible from international churches – especially if their goal is to learn the local language and culture and plant healthy indigenous churches. The fact is that very few international churches have ever gone on to plant indigenous, local-language churches.
But this may be changing.
In the last twenty years or so something has been happening in the international churches that meet in the unreached cities of the 10/40 window. Starting in the UAE, a handful of these churches committed to becoming healthy, biblical churches. Of course, as this took place they naturally developed a heart for missions and church planting. As these international churches were reformed, they then got involved in planting and reforming other international churches. A small network of related churches took shape and soon began to spread to other countries and continents. Before long, churches were being planted among other non-English-speaking migrant populations as well in the cities where these international churches ministered.
All of this was, of course, encouraging. But it didn’t mean that most missionaries suddenly viewed international churches as having much of a role in reaching the indigenous population. Sure, some locals joined these churches as members and worshipped in English. But there was precious little evidence that these churches were going to be strategic in planting churches for the locals. After all, where could you point to say that this had ever happened, instead of the international church simply sidetracking the missionaries from their difficult task? Because of this, most missionaries held them at arm’s length, despite growing calls from these churches for missionaries themselves to join them and to help them reach the locals. Some missionaries held this posture because of the poor or confused ecclesiology that is all too common among cross-cultural workers. But even missionaries who loved the local church had major concerns regarding contextualization and time investment when it came to this unproven idea that international churches could result in indigenous church planting.
Looking back on my own family’s experience, our concerns were three-fold. First, we were concerned that the international churches in our area were not healthy enough to play a central role in our church planting efforts. This was the case during our first term in Poet City. The international church there during that season chose a squishy pragmatic road when it came to things like expositional preaching, women preaching, gospel clarity in the services, and unbelievers taking the Lord’s supper. We felt we couldn’t be members there and work through this church, but rather had to work around them until they were willing to draw some more biblical lines.
Our second and third concerns had to do with vision and commitment. Would international churches actually embrace a robust vision of planting healthy local-language churches? And would they then be able to make the long-term sacrifices needed to actually pull off such a vision? Planting indigenous churches requires a massive investment of time, sweat, and ongoing problem-solving. It’s complicated enough to care for your own flock in one language and one broadly shared culture, let alone all the complications that come with trying to plant churches in a different language and culture. Noble intentions simply wouldn’t be enough.
At the beginning of our second term, and at that point newly living in Caravan City, we were connected to an international church that was actually healthy. This was deeply encouraging for us, as we were in need of some solid pastoring after a messy first term where we had struggled through language learning, team conflict, and planting a church in the house of a wolf. But what was doubly encouraging to us was that right as we were joining this church, they adopted a specific vision to see local-language churches planted.
It took about five years, but in the last few months they have done it – planted a local-language, indigenous church. As I reflect on how they’ve done this, a number of distinctives stand out. My hope would be that other international churches with a heart to plant indigenous churches can learn from the approach of our church here in Caravan City, not as some rigid methodology, but more as an example of sound principles and practices that can be wisely applied to different international contexts.
First, Caravan City Baptist Church (CCBC, as I’ll call them here) was committed to becoming a healthy, biblical church. Rather than finding its center in a vague mission to ‘provide welcoming community for as many expats as we can,’ this church committed to learning what the Bible had to say about the nature and characteristics of a local church – then they set about implementing it. This meant they focused on the gospel being clear, on a biblical understanding of conversion, and on fleshing out the characteristics of a healthy church. This pursuit of becoming a local church faithful to the scriptures was primary. If this meant certain expats left because they didn’t want to be part of a church that practiced accountable membership and church discipline, then so be it. This kind of posture evidenced a faith that believes a healthy church will, in the long run, be far more powerful and effective than one whose primary commitment is to be nice. It also meant that they would be able to model the kind of healthy church beliefs and corresponding structures strong enough to endure even in a place like Central Asia.
Second, CCBC adopted a specific vision to plant indigenous churches. At least in Central Asia, though I’d warrant just about anywhere, indigenous church planting doesn’t happen naturally. No, church planting requires a specific vision and commitment. CCBC adopted a vision to itself be an English-speaking church that would seek to plant local language-specific churches. This clarity for the church members and leadership meant that they were then remarkably receptive to missionary types like us when we began to talk specifics with them about what this kind of commitment would actually entail. Notice the sequence of what happened here. A clear vision (1) led to the kind of practical posture required (2) to plant churches across linguistic, cultural, and ethnic barriers.
Third, CCBC freed up its members for local language ministry. “As a missionary here, you need to know that we consider your ministry to the locals as your primary service to this church. We’re not going to seek to overload you with other service commitments to the church body because we know that ministering to the locals requires so much. Instead, we want to shepherd you and encourage you in your goal of seeing a local church plant.” We were stunned to hear this early on from the pastors at CCBC. It really is quite hard to be a healthy member of an English-language church and to seek to do local language ministry day in and day out. Trying to be a meaningful part of one church while trying to plant another can easily wear anyone out. If you’ve kids, then this is even harder. So, knowing we had this kind of freedom from the leadership to not be at every church event was deeply helpful.
Fourth, CCBC invested in local language resources and contexts to reach and disciple locals. The church leadership was intentional about getting solid resources translated. For example, back in Poet City, we used CCBC’s translated church covenant as a model for the one we created for the local church plant there, as well as a book on biblical eldership. They purchased ear-piece interpretation devices for the English services, a helpful way to serve locals who have come to faith when no local church in their language exists for them yet. CCBC’s leadership also supported the formation of local language home groups that met during the week, small groups of believers that were crucial for locals who were not able to experience deeper fellowship and encouragement during the English gatherings.
Fifth, CCBC opened up temporary membership for those who didn’t know English. As locals came to faith, they were welcomed into membership in the international church in the same kind of process that foreigners were, albeit facilitated by translation. Often, there were major language barriers, but structures like the local language home groups and in-service interpretation meant that these locals were able to be grafted into the body in a meaningful way even though everyone understood that it was not a viable long-term solution. Because of this, members and leaders who spoke the local language carried a special burden in this season to make sure those locals attending who didn’t speak English were truly being cared for and growing, and not falling through the cracks.
Sixth, CCBC had an elder who learned the local language. This pastor cared for the locals as they were coming to faith, led the home group they were a part of, and has now gone on to pastor the indigenous church plant as they seek to raise up local elders. I view this piece as extremely important. Having an elder, and not merely members, committed to learning the local language and leading a church plant not only provides better shepherding for the locals in the transition period, but it also keeps the indigenous church plant front and center – prioritized – for the busy church leadership and staff.
Seventh, CCBC had elders who continued to make English language pastoral ministry their main focus. While one elder and other members in the church took up the mantle of reaching the indigenous population, the majority of the elders stayed focused on the ministry of word and prayer in English. Just as an international church where no leaders learn the local language is less likely to ever plant an indigenous church, so an international church where all of the pastors are cross-cultural missionaries focused on the locals is also unlikely to do so. The international church must remain a strong and healthy body itself in order to one day become a mother church. At CCBC, this necessary health was greatly helped by the fact that the majority of the elders were not neck-deep in language learning, but in shepherding people in their own language.
Eighth, CCBC was willing to take the slow, proclamation-centric path of church planting. In a city where many were saying that only DMM-style, secretive oikos house churches would work, CCBC instead chose to focus on straightforward evangelism, discipleship, preaching, and modeling to open, mixed groups of locals. They didn’t squirm over foreigners leading, preaching, and baptizing, since for a number of years foreigners were the only ones biblically qualified to do so. Of course, the longterm vision was (and is) to see indigenous churches led by locals. And so far, the local church plant has one local elder in training and one local deacon, both faithful and trustworthy men. This is a remarkable amount of progress compared to most of the church planting work here. CCBC took the slow route, which in the end has proved to be faster than other methods that promised rapid church planting movements. Yes, it took five years from the initial attempts to gather locals together. And those early days were very hit-or-miss. Our family was there for those initial discouraging days, when some weeks no locals would show up to study the Bible in spite of dozens having been invited. But when, after four years, we moved back to Caravan City, we saw the same thing we had seen in Poet City. When the missionaries are willing to do direct Pauline ministry by example, when they are willing to be the stable core of an indigenous church plant for a decade or so, healthy churches get birthed. Churches that last.
Now, there are many missions contexts around the world where international churches are not possible. So I’m not saying that they are the key ingredient to cross-cultural church planting. But I am excited about the emphasis in circles like CrossCon on international churches because I believe the dominant missionary narrative that they are a distraction or even a hindrance to indigenous church planting is wrong. Rather, international churches can and should actually plant indigenous churches, and therefore serve as a strategic part of missionary efforts to plant churches among unreached people groups. It will take some specific commitments and actions for this to happen, the most important of which is a commitment to themselves become a healthy, biblical church that does faithful ministry. But if they do this, then I believe we can see all around the world what we are seeing here in Caravan City, an international church that actually plants an indigenous one.
The international church in Poet City is in need of a pastor. This church is in a much better place than it was during our first term, and eager for a faithful shepherd to lead their English-language church, which includes many members who are cross-cultural church planters. This role is partially funded and partially support-raised. If you have a good lead for a potential pastor, reach out to me for more details.
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*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security
Entrusted to the Dirt 