Tag: The Church

The Three Perpetual Enemies of the Church

I once stumbled upon a commentary on the book of Revelation that provided a helpful framework regarding the three foes of the Church in all ages*. This was some years ago now, and, regrettably, I no longer have the details of the commentary in order to source it fully here. But here is the gist of the author’s argument.

In the visions of Revelation 12-19, Satan is shown attacking the people of Christ by means of three main enemies. The first enemy is a beast that emerges from the sea, which seems to symbolize physical persecution. The second enemy is a second beast, a false prophet, representing spiritual deception. The third is the great prostitute of Babylon, who represents worldly seduction. The Church faithfully resists these enemies and their attacks, and ultimately, each enemy is destroyed forever.

This framework came up again this week as we met with a friend whose work focuses on aiding and advising persecuted believers in our region. We were discussing the very common objection we tend to receive when seeking to counsel local believers in these situations.

“You don’t understand. You have a Western passport and can flee whenever you need to, back to a country where you are safe and not under attack for your faith like we are here.”

How is a Western missionary supposed to respond to an objection like this? At first glance, it seems true. I can use my blue passport to easily flee if I experience death threats. Most of my local friends do not have this option.

One good response is to point out that Jesus’ commands for faithfully facing persecution (such as the incredibly helpful Matthew chapter 10) are true regardless of circumstantial differences between believers. It’s not from my personal authority that I encourage my local friend to be faithful unto death, if necessary, and to never deny Jesus. These are the eternal commands of God himself. And even if I never face the same kind of threats, I still have the spiritual authority to humbly call my believing friends who do to obey God’s word.

To shirk back from this is to fall into the same kind of trap as men who feel they can’t speak against abortion because they aren’t female. Don’t fall for it.

But along with this, we should also not be afraid to point out that there is no church that is not under some form of attack. In all ages, in all cultures, in all locales, the dragon is attacking the bride of Christ. He is coming after her by means of the violent beast, the deceptive prophet, or the seductive prostitute. His chosen combinations of these enemies will tend to vary. But take any faithful church anywhere in the world and apply this framework, and you will see it waging spiritual warfare against either persecution, or false teaching, or worldliness, or all three at once.

I remember once visiting a believing couple who had fled Afghanistan and been resettled in the US. During our visit, we watched a short video made to mobilize prayer among Western churches for the persecuted Afghan church. This short video said something like, “Satan’s power is very strong in Afghanistan.”

I’ll never forget how the Afghan brother with me that evening responded. He scoffed.

“That’s not right,” he said, “Satan is much stronger here in America than in Afghanistan.”

This brother responded this way because he was reeling from having transferred from a context where the beast was the primary enemy to one where the great prostitute was the greatest threat. He had learned how to faithfully stay and faithfully flee violent persecution, but he had not yet learned how to live under the drip-drip-drip daily attacks of worldly seduction. It seemed far easier to him to defend against the one attack than the other.

In reality, each of the church’s three perennial enemies is equally deadly. The church militant may experience seasons of sweet relief from one or two of these enemies, but she must always be on guard. It’s often the case that even as one seems to have retreated that the others are quietly growing strong and beginning their nighttime raids.

Friends, we are not calling believers under persecution to do anything unique or different. They must defend the church against the enemies of Christ, just as all Christians everywhere must do. They must faithfully endure to the end, just as we must. Their churches must defend against the beast, the false prophet, and the great prostitute, just as our churches back home must also do.

To become a Christian is to join the front lines of spiritual warfare and to be handed spiritual weapons and armor.

“Welcome, brother, we’re so glad you’re here. Now plug that gap.”

Do our local friends feel like they are fighting spiritual warfare, and we are not? This may have to do with what we are modeling. Perhaps we have ourselves grown lazy and tired on the battlefield and are acting more like the wealthy Roman nobles feasting in Pompey’s camp at Pharsalus than the focused and battle-hardened centurions in Caesar’s that would soon overrun them.

But it may also have to do with how we are framing things. Perhaps we have forgotten that, until Christ returns, this is the age of the church militant, when the task of every believer and every church is to “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Eph 6:11). This is just as true of the old churches in the West as it is of the baby churches on the frontiers of Central Asia.

The three perpetual enemies of the church will continue their attacks until Christ returns. But they are fighting a losing battle, a long defeat. Every day, Christ and his Church are gaining ground. And in the end, the beast, the false prophet, and the great prostitute will be utterly destroyed, and we will enter into the sweet rest of victory.

Until then, we fight. All of us.

*Not to the exclusion of the classic formulation of Satan, sin, and death as the three main enemies of the church, but a different and complementary way to frame 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? You can give 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.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here.

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

Photo from Unsplash.com

A Song on God’s Delight in Church Monotony

“Skipping Church” by Dave Whitkroft KD Music

Long ago, when I first started this blog, I posted the following quote from GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Last year, singer-songwriter Dave Whitkroft reached out to me to let me know that he had written a song inspired by this same quote. When I looked it up, I was intrigued by the premise of the song, which asks if God ever, like us, tires of the weekly repetition of normal local church worship gatherings. This was not a question I’d ever considered before.

I’ve really enjoyed listening to this song in recent months and being reminded of God’s childlike “Do it again” delight, his ability to exult in the monotony of our simple weekly worship. The lyrics of the song artfully contrast our struggles to desire attending church, given things like “that family in the middle row” that’s “had it in for me for years,” (ha!) with God, who doesn’t grow old or weary and who continually shouts “Encore!” for even the most average service proclaiming his truth.

Whatever aspect of weekly church rhythms it might be that tempts us to occasionally skip out, may this song encourage us, like the singer, to grab our keys and go gather with God’s people anyway. After all, our Father is strong enough and ‘young’ enough to delight in every single church service, just as he delights in every single sunrise.

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 give 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.

Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here.

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

Mics in The Water And Other Baptism Blunders

This may sound odd, but if you ever plan on baptizing someone – meaning you yourself are the one to put them under the water – then you would be wise to get some practice beforehand.

All kinds of things can go wrong when immersing someone in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Just to mention a few of the mishaps that have occurred when I’ve baptized others, there was that one time when we baptized someone in moving water but didn’t think about how she was facing upstream. This meant that the river water not only went up right up her nose but, she claimed, all the way up into her brain.

Then there was the time we planned a baptism service in January with the assurance that the host would heat the water in the kiddie pool outside. After we arrived, he informed us there had been no electricity all morning. That meant the new believers coming up so symbolically out of the icy water also came up shrieking like Nazgul.

Another time, we failed to get a local believer’s kneecaps under the water when we dunked him. Hopefully, that doesn’t mean he’ll be raised without these crucial joints in the new heavens and new earth.

Neither am I alone in committing these kinds of baptism blunders. It’s not uncommon for the baptizer to botch the trinitarian formula in the excitement of the moment and suddenly find himself sounding like a modalist. Nor is it uncommon for the baptizee to forget to plug their nose and bend their knees, the latter of which means their legs fly up as their torso goes down, while the baptizer scrambles to not themself get pulled under. Even worse, baptizees who wear white garments experience a real-life version of that terrible dream where, for some reason, you’re in front of the church wearing only your skivvies.

All of this is exactly why my pastoral ministry professor in college took our class out to a local church so we could practice ‘baptizing’ each other. He warned us of many of the common blunders, taught us a tried-and-true technique for the actual physical dunking itself, then had us practice on one another. This was solid training, if somewhat unorthodox, the kind of hands-on activity that ends up serving you very well in ministry when you have to baptize someone for real.

No, we didn’t actually say the trinitarian formula when practicing, so we were careful in that way to not be disrespectful toward this weighty and beautiful ceremony. But yes, it was also a lot of fun. I think I got ‘baptized’ by my classmates five times that day. I am a Baptist after all, so I know that there’s only one dunking that actually counts. All the others before (or after) the one-and-done sign of the new birth are merely the equivalent of a rather short bath.

But you know one thing that training didn’t talk about? What to do with the microphone.

Turns out, my very first baptism blunder was dropping the microphone in the baptismal water. Thanks be to God (and to whatever deacon or sound guy set it up); it was a cordless mic. Here’s how it happened.

Reza*, my refugee friend, had at long last agreed to be baptized. As with his journey to faith, this involved lots of intense discussions. In the end, we got an exception from the elders so that a pastor could do a membership meal with him instead of an official interview. And Reza would also be free to swear by the church covenant and statement of faith orally, rather than signing them. Both of these decisions were, I felt, wise and kind concessions given the fact that ‘interviews’ and signing ‘confessions’ were so closely related to secret police interrogations in my friend’s culture and family background.

The Sunday night of the baptism finally came, and Reza and I found ourselves alone in the old stone church basement. Reza was wearing a poofy white baptism robe with dark clothing underneath. I was also wearing a similar robe, but underneath I had on a borrowed set of one of the elders’ big rubber waders.

I was excited. Reza had come such a long way. His sustained resistance to church membership had been much more of a struggle than I had expected. But he was clearly born again. So, he needed to follow Jesus in step one of discipleship: go under the waters of baptism.

Since he was the first person I’d ever baptized, I was mentally running through the steps I’d learned from my class. Reza, for his part, was freaking out.

He knew that once news of this step reached his dad, there would be blowback. Even though his dad was an agnostic leftist refugee on another continent, it would still bring shame on the family for Reza to do something so drastic as leave his sophisticated cultural identity to become a Christian – and a Baptist at that. Sure enough, soon after the baptism, his dad did cut off all his financial support for Reza.

I did my best to reassure Reza that he was doing the right thing, that any time we follow Jesus in risky obedience, joy and freedom follow. It didn’t seem like he fully believed me.

However, before we knew it, time was up. We were being summoned up the little winding stairs into the old baptismal. Reza’s resolve seemed to strengthen as he walked up the stairs, nervous but seemingly determined to go through with it.

The little tank we waded into was from the early 1900s. It was a hexagonal shape, with the front half of the hexagon facing the congregation. It had a foot or so of a glass railing at waist height, and two white wooden pillars at the front hexagon corners that held up the roof. The back wall of the hexagon was an old painting that attempted to portray a Jordan River scene of reeds and flowing water in faded blues, greens, and browns.

Reza was handed the cordless mic first. He took the manuscript of his testimony in his hand, gripped the mic in the other, and looked up at the crowd. Then he started reading.

Steadily, and with growing conviction and volume, Reza read of how he had been raised by his political and irreligious family, how he had gone deep into fundamentalist Islam as a teenager, how he had experimented with Hinduism and Buddhism in college, and how he had at last fallen into a hedonistic lifestyle after arriving in the US. Systematically, he laid out how all of these other paths had led to utter emptiness. Then he shared how he had learned about Jesus, how he had come to realize that the gospel was not only completely different from all other religious or philosophical systems, but true, and powerfully so.

When Reza ended his testimony, the room erupted in loud applause. A huge grin broke out on his face. Any sense of double-mindedness was now gone. He was ready.

I took the microphone, looking at my friend with deep affection and respect, and said,

“Reza, because of your profession of faith, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

Then I turned, set the mic on the small ledge at the back of the baptismal, and turned to position myself correctly for the dunking.

Noises and shouts of alarm from the audience suddenly interrupted me. Before I could figure out what people were yelling about, I heard a loud PLOP.

I shot a glance down toward our feet and there was the mic, bubbling and slowly rotating on the bottom of the tank.

Oh no! I realized, I’ve dropped the mic!

Turns out that the little ledge behind me that I had set the mic on was not flat after all, but slightly sloped so that any water could find its way down and off of it and back into the tank. As with water, so with microphones, apparently. The mic had rolled in a quick semicircle and right into the drink.

Reza shrugged toward the crowd and shouted, “Eh, it happens!”

The crowd laughed, and I found myself both thankful for Reza’s charisma and struggling to bend over in my stiff rubber waders to get the mic. Snatching it, I quickly placed it somewhere more secure.

I was somewhat embarrassed but also laughing. It was simply too much of a joyous event to let a little mishap like that get in the way. So, I called out again, this time without the mic,

“Reza, because of your profession of faith, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!”

Reza put his left hand on his nose and gripped that arm’s wrist with his right hand so that I’d have a good handhold, just as we’d practiced. I put my other hand behind his back and set my stance so as not to drop him. He bent his knees and went under, white robes splaying and flowing out in the water. After what seemed to me a long moment, I pulled him back out.

Once more, there was thunderous applause. As well as more laughter. Then the congregation started singing a rousing a cappella Doxology.

Reza and I hugged and went, dripping, down to the basement, where we hugged again. He was beaming.

“Brother,” he said, “I have never been this happy in all my life. I am so happy right now, I am so alive. Obeying really does lead to joy! I’m so glad I did this. I love Jesus so much!”

It was one of those moments I will always remember. Every time I give the same kind of counsel to some other Central Asian believer who is afraid that obeying Jesus won’t be worth it, I’m transported back to that old stone church basement and to that scene of soggy Reza beaming in his big goofy baptismal robe. Yes, following Jesus in risky obedience will always lead to greater joy and greater freedom. Always.

The microphone, alas, did not make it. One of our pastoral assistants later informed me that this rather expensive mic could not be salvaged. Although they apparently held onto it for a while in hopes of framing it for me.

And, of course, it was a good many years before I could be involved in baptism conversations at that church without somebody getting in a joke about how I dropped the microphone into the baptismal water. As a young leader, it was good for my humility.

Should you, dear reader, ever find yourself needing to baptize someone, and suddenly feeling quite unprepared, here are a few very important and practical questions to keep in mind.

First, are they a true believer who can proclaim the gospel through their testimony?

Second, under the leadership of their pastor or missionary, are they being joined by baptism to a church or are they themselves the start of a new one?

Third, do they know how to plug the nose and bend the knees, and to not wear white clothes?

Fourth, are they facing downstream and in water that is somewhat warmer than a Siberian lake and deep enough to get all of them under?

Fifth, have you practiced the trinitarian formula enough so that you don’t end up baptizing like a heretic?

And finally, if mics are involved, do you have a plan for keeping them fully out of the water?

There are, of course, other important considerations for baptisms in general as well as on a case-by-case basis. But hopefully this list can get you started as well as highlight a few common and not-so-common blunders.

Go then, and baptize those new disciples. And don’t worry if you end up making some baptism blunders of your own. One way or another, get them under the water and pull them out again, and they’ll come up beaming, ready to risk for Jesus.

We only need to raise 3k ($250 per month) to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

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

*Names changed for security

Photo by Nate Neelson on Unsplash

Church Membership on The Mission Field is Inefficient – Or Is It?

“No, we didn’t want to join a church, and we didn’t start one. I didn’t come here to plant a church and didn’t want to get pulled into all that would entail. I came here to translate the Bible. And for a number of years, the expat house fellowship that we led every week went great. But in recent years, we’ve had to deal with some serious sin issues among those who attend. And let me tell you, I have spent so much time trying to deal with these problems that I have found myself thinking maybe it would have been more efficient if we had just started a church in the beginning after all!”

I found this confession from an older missionary very insightful.

Here was another admission that one of the primary reasons for so many missionaries sidestepping the local church on the mission field is the Western value of task-driven efficiency. This value is often a strength of Western culture, but when it causes us Westerners to neglect other areas of biblical faithfulness, such as a week-in-week-out commitment to a church in our community, it becomes an idol. In this case, this missionary couple was so focused on their good task of translating the Bible that they decided that joining a local church on the field, or planting one, would take up too much of their time, time that they felt would be better stewarded by a singular focus on the task they’d been sent to do.

A huge number of missionaries overseas are not members of local churches on the field. Nor are they interested in doing the work to transform their team or coalition of missionary partners into an organized church. A few of them will have more advanced reasoning for this, sometimes related to missiologist Ralph Winter’s sodality vs. modality framework (a position to be analyzed in a future post). Other missionaries serve in places with no churches, no churches healthy enough to join, or no team or locals to form into a church. But many coming out of the West simply no longer have the biblical instincts or ecclesiology to feel that they should join or form a church on the field. “Isn’t it enough to meet weekly for bible teaching, songs, and prayer? Wherever two or three are gathered, right? Isn’t my team my church?” Add to this posture that joining or starting a church seems so, well, time-consuming, and it’s no wonder that the Western missionaries who do join churches on the field, or start churches that they then join, are the oddballs.

No, many, many missionaries think that the best thing is to retain their membership in their churches back in the homeland while they perennially sidestep the local church in their actual geographic locale. This all too common posture in the name of stewarding the time is both misguided and shortsighted.

The missionary’s confession I began with is a good example of what can go wrong when missionaries on the field commit themselves to what I’ve dubbed elsewhere, ‘weekly missionary chapel’, instead of joining or starting an actual local church. This family thought things would be simpler with a loosely defined house worship gathering every week with a bunch of other missionaries. Even when a good international church was planted in their city, they chose to stay separate from it and continue their house fellowship.

However, that earlier simplicity disappeared once serious sin arose among the attendees. Why? Well, there were no recognized pastors for this gathering, just a small team of casually-designated ‘leaders.’ There was no real system of membership, just a vague agreement among the missionaries attending about who was allowed to come (no locals, mind you). There was no mechanism for church discipline because from the very beginning, the aim of this group was to not be a church. The missionaries attending this group who ended up in sin were members of their sending churches back in America, so what kind of spiritual authority could the ‘leaders’ of this group really exert over them?

As wise Central Asians say, “Pray, but tie your camel tight.” And as wise Westerners says, “Fail to plan, plan to fail.” Set out to establish an efficient pseudo-church but haphazardly leave out a bunch of the biblical stuff that feels too time-consuming, and you are asking for trouble. Those biblical structures are there for a reason.

And yet, for most missionaries, it continues to feel simpler, more focused, and more efficient to sidestep the local church on the mission field. However, as we’ve seen, this means that when there are serious problems to deal with, they then have to quickly cobble together new systems to deal with them. Yet because they’re intentionally not a church, they don’t have clear biblical guidance or precedence for the structures and mechanisms they build. Instead, they’re just depending on their own wisdom and on what seems practical. Dealing with conflict and sin is always time-consuming, even in a healthy church, but reinventing the wheel and cobbling together solutions in this way ends up taking so much more time in the end (not to mention how it ends up hurting people).

Consider how coming to an agreement on a doctrinal statement may seem very time-consuming. But that process is far more efficient in the long run than suddenly having to figure out what to do every time a missionary with doctrine quite different from yours wants to join your house group.

Hammering out a church covenant also seems like a laborious process. But it’s far more efficient than having to explain in the middle of mess after mess why certain behaviors and not others justify expulsion from the group when you’ve never mentioned them before.

Taking time away from your main ministry to disciple believers from other people groups – maybe even in English – might seem like a costly side quest. But it’s not nearly as inefficient as your team burning out because you tried to live for a decade on the mission field without truly being connected to the Body.

These are just a few examples of how joining a local church on the field or planting one may seem inefficient in the short term, but in the long run will counterintuitively mean actually going faster. When conflict comes, there are biblical mechanisms to deal with it. When issues arise, clarity on how to navigate them already exists. When your gifts fail, the diversity of the local church comes to the rescue. Investing in the local church always pays off, and often in ways we never could have predicted.

Missionaries, let’s not sidestep the local church on the mission field. Let’s either start one or join one. If we’re in a context where this isn’t possible, we should pray and work for that to eventually change. Let’s not continue to pretend that church membership in a body on another continent is a good long term posture for our families – good stopgap measure though it may be. And please, let’s not hold ourselves aloof from the local church for the sake of efficiency.

After all, we are not called to be efficient above all else. We are called to be faithful. And that will often involve things that, at least initially, feel quite inefficient indeed.

We only need to raise 15k ($1,250 per month) to be fully funded for our second year back on the field. If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can do so here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.

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

Photo from Unsplash.com

Honoring Those We’ve Fallen Out With

A photo of Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov (right)
The same photo, but with Nikolai Yezhov later edited out after a purge

The very human temptation after falling out with other Christians is to attempt to memory hole them. We try to speak and live as if they were not a significant part of our story. This is true even of church leaders and missionaries, who are, sadly, not at all immune to serious conflicts that lead to parting ways with formerly close friends and colleagues.

I have often heard Christian friends describe feeling completely cut off from dear friends after making a difficult and costly departure from their previous church or organization. “It feels as if we’re dead to them now.”

Even when Christians have a falling out with one another and serious conflict, why do we treat one another in this way? Why the attempt to sever the relationship, to memory hole or erase others from our past? Perhaps it’s a strategy of self-protection. It’s painful to open up that hurt part of ourselves again by bringing them up in conversation, or by giving them their proper place in the story of our church or missionary team. It may simply feel too complicated to know how to relate to them or to speak about them, given the fact that the story is no longer a simple, encouraging one with a happy ending. Even worse, perhaps it is the sin of bitterness and unforgiveness that causes us to treat one another this way.

This attempt to erase other Christians from our lives is not, however, what we see modeled by Paul. In the book of Acts, we see Paul and Barnabas have a very serious falling out over whether or not to partner with John Mark again after he had abandoned them on a previous missionary journey. We’re told by Luke, the author of Acts, that the disagreement became so sharp that Paul and Barnabas parted ways, with Paul and Silas heading one direction and Mark and Barnabas heading the other (Acts 15:36-41).

The book of Acts is honest, though careful, in its treatment of this conflict. Luke, the author, is writing this second volume with Paul as one of his primary sources. And there’s no evidence that, at the time of this writing, Paul had reconciled yet with John Mark, something we see hints of in later New Testament books (2 Tim 4:11). No, the book of Acts ends with Paul and his team seemingly still separated from Barnabas and his team. And yet, pay attention to how honorably the book of Acts speaks of Barnabas and his crucial role in the early church and in the early ministry of Paul himself.

Acts 11:24 says of Barnabas, “he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith.” The awkward conflict between Barnabas and Paul doesn’t cause Paul and Luke in the writing of Acts to retcon Barnabas’ generosity (Acts 4), his key role in defending Paul in Jerusalm (Acts 9), his bringing Paul to Antioch (Acts 12), or how he accompanied Paul on the first missionary journey and stood with him at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 13-15). No, despite their eventual parting of ways, in the book of Acts, Barnabas is honored and given his proper place in the story.

Consider what this kind of truthful and generous telling of the story might have done in the heart of Barnabas were he ever able to read an early manuscript of Acts. How much healthier the cultures of our churches and organizations would be if we were to similarly honor those we’ve fallen out with. How much healthier our own hearts would be.

What do we lose if we speak honestly and respectfully of brothers and sisters who made significant investments in us, in our churches, and in our ministries, even if we must also honestly say that they later left because of conflict? What do we lose if we remember them, not just as individuals, but even corporately as churches or organizations? Doesn’t this better honor God’s mysterious sovereignty and how he writes our stories to include these glorious and messy relationships? Doesn’t this better point forward to the coming resurrection, when each of us will delight in one another once again and every relationship will be reconciled?

Yes, there are a minority of conflicts in which it is right and proper to cut someone off and to avoid speaking of them. This would be for divisive Titus 3 wolf-type figures, those who have proven to be exceptionally dangerous or false brothers. But the vast majority of Christian conflicts are not with these sorts of threats to the church. No, they are with other saints, sinners saved by grace, just like us.

The coming resurrection means that all Christian relationships will, in fact, outlive our local churches and our ministry organizations. Thus, seeking to maintain Christian friendships even with those who have left our particular temporary community is an appropriate pointer to this coming future reality.

The resurrection, the new heavens and new earth, means that every relationship story between genuine believers will have a happy ending. Paul and Barnabas may or may not have reconciled in this life. But I can guarantee that they are reconciled now, in the presence of Christ. And that reconciliation will only grow stronger and more beautiful for all eternity.

This is also true of us, brothers and sisters. So, let us honor one another, even those we’ve fallen out with.

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.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons 

Church Membership Is Inescapable

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.

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A Strong Jewish-Christian Tinge

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.

*names of people and places changed for security

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A Strange Aversion to White Guy Monologues

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 in spiritual settings. 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.

We need to raise 32k 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.

Photo from Unsplash.com

Good Contextualization Introduces Outside Forms

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 will not 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.

Photo from Unsplash.com

How One International Church Actually Planted An Indigenous Church

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

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