The Achilles heel of the church planting efforts in our corner of Central Asia has been the absence of faithful and qualified local leaders. Many missionaries have handed over leadership too quickly and men who might have eventually become faithful pastors instead fell into “puffed up conceit and the condemnation of the devil” (1st Tim 3:6). Other local men grew impatient and seized power, position, and ministry money before they were ready. All too often, promising leaders that long-term missionaries were faithfully discipling got lured away when an outside organization showed up looking to hire a local to head up their imported formulas for disciple-making movements. Persecution and burnout have also played their role in running off local leaders.

Were you to diagram it, you’d see four stages local believing men go through. First, there’s the new believer stage. This is the stage with the highest numbers. Next is the maturing disciple stage. A good number make it from stage one to stage two. Then, you have the potential leader stage. There’s a smaller number of men in this stage, but they are very encouraging men of vision and potential. But the fourth stage is that of a qualified and faithful leader. Almost no one has passed that last threshold.

This week Darius* was voted in as the first local elder of our church back in Central Asia. According to one of our colleagues there, the local believers were engaged, asked thoughtful questions of the elder candidates, then prayed hard for the two new pastors after voting them in. Darius and one of our other teammates have been in an elder-in-training season for about a year and a half, a development partially prompted by my family’s unexpected departure from the field. Now they are the very first elders to be tested and voted in congregationally. It’s taken seven and a half years for this to happen, seven and a half years for us to at last see a local man raised up for pastoral ministry.

This church was birthed at a Christmas party in December of 2016. Frustrated that none of the isolated local believers were willing to attend the house church services we were offering in their language, we experimented by inviting them to a Christmas party – one that involved teaching from the word, worship songs, and some prayer. Some of the very same believers who refused to come to a house church service told us how much they had enjoyed the teaching, songs, and prayer at the Christmas party. We invited them back for another gathering the week after – and at some point broke the news to them that what they were enjoying were in fact the basic elements of church. Once they had tasted it, they weren’t nearly as reticent to come back.

But that first group didn’t exactly result in a church. Hama and Tara soon fled the country. One man lived too far away to attend more than quarterly and another proved not to be a believer. We had a very explosive falling out with Hamid after we held firm on the exclusivity of Christ, so as far as we knew he was gone for good. Only a single gal who would later turn out to be the daughter of a spy and Harry would gather with us somewhat regularly – and Harry inconsistently because of pressure from his violent and conservative tribe. Six months into every other week producing no local attendees, and we almost pulled the plug on the whole thing.

Thankfully, we just barely decided on continuing to meet, believing that if the locals didn’t know how to gather in a steady, weekly fashion, then we’d just have to model for them what that looks like. Every week we’d all text and call our own small networks of isolated local believers and seekers we were studying the Bible with. And every week our team would wait anxiously, chai and sunflower seeds set out and ready, hoping for maybe two or three locals to show up this week.

The turning point came when Ahab’s family started attending regularly. Finally, we gained some momentum and averaged about six to ten locals joining us every week in Ahab’s house, where we had moved the meeting. Unfortunately, as I’ve recently written about, Ahab proved to be a very dangerous wolf in sheep’s clothing. Yet God was still working even as that danger lurked. During that season Mr. Talent and Patty and Frank came to faith and went under the water on a freezing January day. By spring 2018, we were seeing several dozen locals gathering every week, Harry and Ahab were seen as potential elders-in-training, and we thought we were in the clear – a church was being born before our eyes.

Then Ahab almost blew it all up. We extracted the church from his house and moved the meetings into the international church building. Only five or six of the believers stuck with us, but we were encouraged that there was still any church left at all. It was in this season of damage control that we met Darius and he came to faith and was baptized. He was, amazingly, captivated by the beauty of the church – the traumatized group of local believers and foreigners who had just barely survived a wolf attack.

This was when my family transitioned to the States for a season and then back to a different city in Central Asia. But during the two years that we were gone, the church continued to grow under the leadership of our colleagues, in spite of serious opposition. During this time, it was raided once by the security police and then later experienced another implosion due to another attendee who was some kind of spy from the militant regime to our East. Harry had been appointed a formal elder in training in this season and we had high hopes that he would be our first local leader. Sadly, this implosion and its relational fallout led to his leaving the church for the next year and a half.

When we eventually moved back to help this church in 2021, the church had once again entered a period of steady growth. Alan and others came to faith and Adam was rescued from his crippling schizophrenia. Our team realized that it was time to go official. We had been a church with informal membership and other structures for a few years by that point. Now it was time to step into the fulness of the Bible’s vision for a local church. And that meant formalizing membership and drafting a Central Asian church covenant. Shortly before we once again left in late 2022, the church had covenanted together and was openly committed to pursuing all twelve characteristics of a healthy church.

One of those characteristics is biblical leadership. This means seeing local elders and deacons raised up who are qualified according to passages like 1st Timothy 3 and Titus 1. A few other men and I have functioned as temporary lowercase-A-apostolic elders for this church body up until now. But the goal was always to work ourselves out of a job. It just took much longer than we thought it would. I once heard a local pastor in a neighboring country say that in their context it took about seven years for a man who has come to faith from a Muslim background to be discipled and mature enough to lead in the church. So far this fits with our experience as well.

For several years we had been hoping that Darius would be the first local pastor of our church. But just like every other man who makes it into the potential leader phase, the attacks came – potent and often. He was approached by other organizations asking him why his church wasn’t making him a leader yet, why they weren’t paying him a ministry salary yet, and why he didn’t consider aligning with someone else who would recognize his clear leadership gifts. It was a hard fight, but Darius resisted these enticements one after another. He also hung in there through numerous bouts of cross-cultural conflict with us, his mentors. By God’s grace, he was able to see our heart for him, that we would be delighted for him to lead – but only at the right time and in the right way. And unlike so many other potential leaders, Darius chose the harder and healthier path, the path of humility (1 Pet 5:6).

My family’s departure in late 2022 sped things up a little bit, as it left only one teammate pastoring a still messy and growing church on his own. We knew this was going to be too much, so the plan was hatched to bring Darius and another newer teammate into official elder-in-training roles. The past year and a half have demonstrated that God has indeed given these brothers the knowledge, the gifts, and especially the character to be spiritual shepherds. This was joyfully and soberly affirmed this week by the members of the church.

It took seven and a half years for the first qualified local pastor to be raised up. But we truly believe that this is one of the most important keys to seeing healthy local churches planted that endure – and that go on to reach their own people and others with the gospel. So, even though seven and a half years has been quite the messy and costly investment, it has been, without a doubt, entirely worth it.

Darius is the first. May countless others come after him.

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*Names changed for security

Some of the most painful lessons of ministry are learned when a wolf in sheep’s clothing infiltrates your church. We had a wolf once, a local man I’ll call Ahab*, and it has taken me years to know how to write about it. The things we learned from exposing him, trying to counter him, and then responding to the carnage he caused have been forever branded on my soul. Wolf attacks leave scars, along with tragic losses among the true sheep. Pray that you never have to fight off a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but if you do, may these lessons we learned from dealing with Ahab help you to spot and deal with your own wolves with both wisdom and courage.

Wolves make excellent first impressions

The first time Ahab and his family visited our new church plant, we were thrilled. Here was a local believing husband and wife who also had believing teenage children – a true rarity in our corner of Central Asia. They were veteran believers, having come to faith nine years previous at a house church I had attended with Adam*, and later were members of another church when they’d lived in a different city. Ahab presented as a humble, happy, and wise middle-aged man from a more traditional background. But the most encouraging thing of all was how well he knew his Bible. To this day I’m not sure I’ve met another local man as well-versed in the scriptures as Ahab is. In spiritual conversation, Ahab demonstrated a deep knowledge of the Word. He had a thoughtful, serious personality, but he was also very fatherly, especially with small children. Our kids adored him with his affectionate greetings and gifts of cookies and pomegranate flowers.

Ahab’s sheep costume was (almost) flawless. Wolves will indeed show up wearing very convincing disguises (Matt 7:15).

Wolves come with mixed reputations

As soon as another missionary heard that Ahab and his family were attending our group, he warned us about him, telling us that Ahab and his wife had in previous years recanted their faith and returned to Islam, in order to receive financial gain. Apparently, there were pictures of them embracing a Qur’an next a smiling Islamic leader that proved this. This missionary also said that the family’s relationship with the Christians in their previous city had broken down completely and they had deceived and burned lots of people. The problem with this intel was that that generation of local believers was positively shot through with division and broken relationships and we also didn’t trust this missionary’s theological discernment. He had recently written off male-female roles in ministry as something that didn’t really matter, among other theological and ministry positions that felt so, well, “evangellyfish.” And we were newly partnering with another missionary who seemed to have more of a theological spine. He had been recently investing in Ahab’s family – and claiming to see evidence of true repentance and growth.

Our mistake here was assuming that a lack of theological likemindedness meant a lack of character discernment on the part of this other missionary – and that better alignment with our new partner meant he was correctly discerning Ahab’s character. These assumptions were dead wrong.

A wolf’s character cannot be hidden indefinitely. Their predatory heart will periodically emerge in predatory actions (Matt 7:16). This means that, like Ahab, wolves will tend to have a controversial past.

Wolves get deeply involved in the ministry and show great potential

We confronted Ahab about these claims of past apostasy and you couldn’t ask for a more (seemingly) humble and genuinely repentant response than the one he gave us. He admitted that the apostasy was true, but short-lived, and claimed to have already repented to everyone of this dark season in their life, and that he was willing to do whatever it took to demonstrate that repentance to us. Given our biases about the missionaries involved, we took Ahab at his word and pressed forward, encouraged.

Ahab soon became deeply invested in our house church. His family were the most faithful and some of the most engaged attendees. They introduced Frank and Patty to our group and even led them to faith. We were so encouraged to finally have some local believers who were committed to gathering weekly with the saints. Ahab soon offered his own home for our house church services and we quickly took him up on his offer. Our team leader was on furlough and pushing us to get the church meetings out of our own homes and into locals’ as soon as possible. This was viewed as one key toward reproducibility. So, all parties involved were thrilled when we moved the weekly service into Ahab’s home. It didn’t take long for Ahab to begin helping us with leading the prayer time and for us to invite him to join our weekly sermon-prep study with Harry*, the other local brother showing leadership potential. This was a weekly gathering that served as a place to invest in men who could be future leaders of the church.

Wolves tend to have a solid season of deep investment in the local church. This is how they build trust and gain influence.

Wolves are unpredictably harsh and judgmental

Every once in a while, Ahab would lash out in harsh and judgmental language when speaking of other local believers, pastors, or missionaries. These statements seemed inconsistent with his measured, wise speech that we typically observed. The tone of these outbursts seemed like it didn’t match the level of the offense nor the grace of the gospel that Ahab professed to be walking in. We took note of this, but viewed it as a discipleship issue that we’d need to help him with over time. In hindsight, it was evidence of secret sin brewing.

Like Judas lashing out at the woman’s gift of pure nard (John 12:5), wolves will sometimes let their true character show via harsh and surprisingly judgmental takes on other believers. This is evidence that there are some very bad things going on in their hearts.

Wolves are followed by lots of smoke, but expertly hide the fire

Ahab and his family’s mixed reputation seemed to follow them like a cloud of gnats they could never quite get rid of. Regularly, we’d hear serious concerns expressed by other missionaries or local believers that just didn’t seem to match what we were seeing with our own eyes. Ahab was one of our promising leaders in training, and nothing that we had witnessed ourselves gave us any solid evidence for the claims being regularly made by those outside of our church plant. But the claims just kept on coming. Surely, Ahab couldn’t be deceiving us so effectively. It must be the other missionaries and believers from other local groups. After all, they were unclear and squishy when it came to the gospel, true conversion, and healthy church, so they must have been confused about Ahab also.

As the wisdom of our forbears says, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Wolves can’t hide all the smoke they generate, but for a time they can expertly conceal the fire from those that they are focused on deceiving. Wise gospel laborers will keep an eye on men whose lives generate an unusual amount of proverbial smoke.

Wolves secretly divide the flock and the leadership for personal gain

“Is Ahab a good man?”

“Yes, he is a faithful member of our church. Why do you ask this?”

“Well, he approached me this week and told me to keep my distance from all you foreigners. He told me not to trust you, but to trust him. Listen, I left Islam to get away from this kind of petty division. If Christianity is no different, then I don’t think I want to be involved with you all.”

This conversation over dinner with a new believer was a turning point for me and my wife. We had been hearing of a lot of smoke, but here at last was something solid, and very concerning. Ahab had allegedly approached a promising new believer in secret and sought to sow division in the church. This new believer didn’t seem to have any advantage in mentioning this to us, but rather to be honestly asking about something that concerned him. Soon other evidence emerged that Ahab was secretly building personal loyalty with other new believers in the church, creating a faction of sorts. He seemed to be doing this by telling the new believers that we foreigners (and me in particular) were receiving fabulous amounts of money for baptisms and that we were withholding funds that were sent for local believers. He was making promises to the other locals that he knew how to get them access to ministry salaries, Christian conferences, and visas to Western countries.

As I looked into things, I learned that Ahab was also involved in slandering me to the other two missionaries who formed our three man church plant leadership until we could raise up local elders. To my great alarm, Ahab’s whispers that I was secretly out for power and control were being somewhat entertained by my gospel colaborers. Ahab’s desire in all of this was to be eventually in charge of the church so that he could receive a good ministry salary from groups in the West, along with funds he could use to set up a patronage network within the church.

When wolves feel secure in their position, they will begin to sow division among the saints and even among the leadership. They are very good at sniffing out existing tensions and then exploiting these (Titus 3:9-11). Their end goal in all these things is their own personal gain.

Wolves are gifted at twisting reality

There were several times that seemingly concrete charges were brought against Ahab. But whenever we would bring up these concerns, Ahab was able to expertly sow doubt in the informant, in the data itself, or even in our own experiences. After this season, I would learn that this kind of behavior has come to be called gaslighting in the West. A gaslighter is able to make you doubt that something really happened, and even able to make you doubt your own senses. We would go into face-to-face meetings with Ahab with clarity and conviction and come away feeling like we weren’t sure anymore what was really true or real. After Ahab had later been exposed, one local brother called him “an artist of lies.” In a culture given to lots of pervasive deception, this was quite the title. After upending reality, Ahab was then able to insert his own narratives into the confusion, with great effect. I remember meeting with my team leader and Harry, desperately trying to unravel the narrative Ahab was pushing on them about me. These two godly men knew me much better than they knew Ahab, and yet he was almost effective in convincing them that in the end, I was the real problem in this whole situation – and the true manipulator. It was terrifying.

Like the serpent in Genesis 3, wolves are able to create doubts about things that once seemed so simple and so clear, about reality itself.

Wolves turn good faith exhortations against those who make them

I remember meeting with Ahab and pleading with him from my heart to turn away from his divisiveness, that the church might not survive what he was doing. I poured out my heart to this man I thought was a brother, sharing very personal things with him and even areas where I had failed or could have done better. I was pulling out all of the stops to try to pull him back from the brink. While his response to me in person was good, he immediately took many of the things I had told him and weaponized them with others. Sometimes this happened even on the same day. I would gave him pearls, truths from God’s word and things from my heart, but he not only despised these, but then used them to attack. As each leader and local believer began to realize what Ahab was up to, he’d proceed to do this with them as well. We had trusted him with our hearts and he was now adeptly using all of this as ammunition to undermine us.

Wolves can be like the swine that Jesus describes in Matthew 7:6, who take precious truths and good-faith exhortations and instead of repenting, use them against you.

When exposed, wolves go on the attack

Humble men respond gently and reasonably when accusations are made against them. Wolves, when accused – or even as soon as they sense someone is beginning to suspect them – go on the attack. This stage is dangerous, but helpful. At last, the true nature of the wolf is being revealed to the broader community. In our church plant, Ahab started by attacking me. My grasp of the local language was stronger, so that meant I was spotting things sooner than my fellow leaders. Ahab picked up on the change in my posture toward him and did what he could to turn the others against me. There was a period where even the other leaders sided with him, but one by one their honest questions and desire to pursue things with fairness meant that Ahab turned on them as well. When this happened, it was like a spell was broken. All of the cobwebs of deceit that had been sewn were suddenly dissolved as the sheep turned on its erstwhile friends – and revealed its fangs.

When wolves in sheep’s clothing are recognized for what they are, they will not run. They will attack. In this attack stage, they will seek to cash in on whatever schemes of division, personal loyalty, and personal gain they have been working on.

Westerners are at a disadvantage when dealing with wolves

Ahab ran circles around us. The other missionaries and I were often caught flat-footed, unable to respond proactively to Ahab, instead reacting as he always seemed one step ahead of us. There are several reasons why I believe this to be the case. First, Westerners operate from a trustworthy-unless-proven-otherwise mindset in their relationships. We are extremely optimistic (some would say naive) in our approach to trusting others. This often works out well for us as that trust extended becomes the thing that actually inspires and creates trustworthiness in the other. But when we are dealing with a wolf, they are easily able to take advantage of this default posture of trust – and to turn it to their advantage. Because of our own cultural background, we just don’t have much experience dealing shrewdly with deceptive and manipulative people.

Second, Western missionaries will often default to trusting a local believer over a Western colleague because of the Western cultural guilt we can carry, plus the emphasis in much of missiology that the locals are always right and foreigners are unwitting contaminators and colonialists. This definitely proved true in our situation, and teammates later apologized to me for their default assumption that in cross-cultural conflict, somehow it is always the Westerner who has screwed things up. Finally, we receive little theological preparation for dealing with those the Bible calls wolves, pigs, dogs, and divisive men – even though these opponents of the gospel feature heavily in the New Testament’s description of ministry.

Wolves and other gifted deceivers are able to take advantage of individuals – and cultures – that operate from a default of extending trust. Westerners especially need to be aware of this and seek to grow in wise defense.

Wolves must be dealt with more swiftly and firmly than other types of sinners

One reason we were so stuck in our response to Ahab is that we didn’t agree on how the Bible would have us respond to someone like him. My teammates and I were at least on the same page that some form of church discipline was needed, but our missionary partner surprised us by saying that he didn’t believe that church discipline would be effective in the local culture. I learned from this experience that even among theological conservatives, it’s important to find out beforehand who is and who isn’t willing to exercise church discipline when the Bible calls for it. If, like we did, you find this out in the midst of dealing with a wolf, then its too late.

I’ve heard it said that some reformed churches have broken church discipline down into an extended process with dozens of steps, often stretched out over months or years. This can be a faithful application of passages like Matthew 18, where the sin is private and interpersonal. But there are other church discipline passages in the New Testament that call for much quicker action. These cases would involve situations such as public scandalous sin (1 Cor 5) and that of the man who sows division (Titus 3:9-11). Because of the danger of great harm to the church, these situations need firm and quick responses from the church’s leadership and members. Someone sowing division and slander in the body needs a quick, united, and firm rebuke. If they don’t repent and change after a first and second warning, then they need a quick excommunication. The danger to the body is simply too great as wolves are able to use extra time to turn the sheep and undershepherds against one another.

When division, deception, or manipulation is exposed in the body, these call for united and quick action. If these things indicate the presence of a wolf, then this swift and firm action is even more crucial.

Wolves cause tragic damage to the flock

We eventually learned that Ahab had begun receiving a secret ministry salary from another evangelical group in our region for having a church in his house. “The workman is worthy of his wages” was the justification for the deceptive claims he’d made to this group that he was the pastor of a separate church. When this emerged, we finally had unity among us leaders to move the church out of his house. When we announced this move at the end of a service (and still in such a way to try to help Ahab save face), Ahab publicly responded by announcing the formation of a new church. Several of the new believers then indicated that they’d already agreed to join Ahab in this breakaway group. They had been seduced by his promises of salaries, conferences, and visas.

Of these local believers, many then proceeded to fall away and to this day are still not gathering with any church, nor growing in their faith. The local brother who first shared with me about Ahab’s secret division is one of these. He washed his hands of us, and to this day is an isolated baby believer. The house church had grown to the point where 20-30 locals were gathering with us on a weekly basis. After this implosion, only 6 continued to gather with us as we changed our location and extracted ourselves from the wolf’s house. Our partnership with the other conservative missionary didn’t survive this season either. Amazingly, even though his eyes were now opened he decided to keep working with Ahab’s family – until he too was irreparably burned by him a couple of years later.

Wolves will seek to devour the flock (Acts 20:29). And the damage they cause can last for generations.

Wolves are inevitable as the gospel advances

Our natural impulse after everything imploded was to use the benefit of hindsight to blame ourselves. There were so many places where we should have, could have, would have done things differently could we go back in time. But one of the truths that comforted me in the wake of the Ahab mess was that wolves are promised as a part of faithful New Testament ministry. Even Jesus had a wolf among his closest followers. Perhaps not every local church will have to fend off a wolf, but many will. When sheep are being gathered and fed, sooner or later, wolves will come around looking to fill their stomachs. When this happens, we can fall back on the fact that we have not only been warned, but the Word of God even equips us to fight off the predators that would seek to devour the flock.

Wolves are inevitable as the gospel advances. Jesus had Judas, the believers in Ephesus had their own fierce wolves emerge after Paul was gone (Acts 20:29). Many of us will face our own “Ahabs.” Wise believers will seek to prepare for this common danger to the church – and act when the wolves are exposed.

God turns even wolf attacks for good

It took a long time to heal from what happened with Ahab. My wife and I had nightmares about the man for about two years afterward. Many of the local believers were scattered, but some eventually came back, now sobered and on the lookout for other “artists of lies” who might try to divide with promises of worldly gain. Our relationships with the other missionaries involved were largely strengthened by the horrible ordeal we’d gone through together, even though apologies needed to be said and trust cautiously built again. And we learned vital lessons that will hopefully serve us and others in many other contexts. In short, God was faithful to use for good what the enemy intended for evil. The costs were real. But so were the ways in which God’s grace and faithfulness shone throughout and after that whole season.

God can even turn wolf attacks into opportunities for the display of his power and glory (Rom 8:28, 2 Cor 8:9). I see this now in part in everything that happened with Ahab, and I look forward to seeing it more fully in the light of eternity.

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

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

*Names have been chaged for security

Photos are from Unsplash.com

Here’s a leadership skill we don’t speak of very often: how to shut someone down who’s trying to take over your meeting or church service. Everyone in ministry who has tried to lead meetings has seen the need for this ability at least once or twice. A participant has their own agenda, and whether its conscious or not, they are going to assert themselves and try to overrule the leadership’s plans for this particular gathering. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the smaller your church, the easier this can be to do. When this happens, it’s a particular test of both the leader’s wisdom and spine.

I’ve seen some pastors who are very gifted at this. Some divisive brother stands up in a member’s meeting and the leader knows he’s going to try to platform something he’s been arguing about with the pastors. So, the pastor issues a quick rebuke and command to sit down. And amazingly, the man obeys.

Needless to say, I do not have this particular manifestation of the Spirit. I lack the force of personality and charisma to respond in this way. Yet I have still faced my own share of others trying to hijack meetings I’m supposed to be leading. One week, a visiting Central Asian believer started a heated debate in our church service, claiming that we were unfaithful for serving grape juice instead of wine for communion – and this in an Islamic context. Another man aggressively tried to change the language of our Bible study mid-meeting to one that served him better. Never mind it was the weaker language for everyone else in the group. Yet another man (a visiting leader no less) forcefully coopted the man with the guitar and made our church vigorously sing several more worship songs at the end of the service because “that was what would please Jesus.”

We learned the hard way to never mention a church picnic until the very end of our meetings because the ensuing heated discussion about where to go, what food to prep, how to buy such food, and who should be invited would inevitably get out of hand. If you are new to this blog, you need to understand one thing about our Central Asians. They take their picnics very seriously.

As I said, I’m not very gifted in publicly shutting down disruptive people and getting the meeting back on track. But as with any act of service to the church, sometimes you need to do it anyway, regardless of gifting. In all of the situations above, I did my best to muddle through it, trying to balance gentleness and respect on the one hand, and firmness and authority on the other. Knowing that I lack natural authority in these settings, I’ve learned that much of the work needs to done outside of the meetings to build spiritual authority – via grace-based respect, trust, and loyalty with the other believers. This is so that they will follow a gentle leader in a tense moment when a strong charismatic leader would seem to be more effective. It’s also very helpful to have established the purpose and agenda of the meeting clearly and publicly beforehand so that you can more easily head off any unexpected attempt to take over.

Sometimes attempted hijackings are unintentional, and simply come from the toddling faith of new believers. My wife and I were laughing about one of these situations just the other day, a situation that involved (of all things) a song by the late Canadian singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen.

Our church plant had gathered in a nearby cabin to hold a Christmas service. Gathering like this allowed us to have an “indoor picnic” as it were, even though the weather outside was frigid. As part of this half-day gathering, we also held our weekly service, in which we would take the Lord’s supper.

My teammate and fellow temporary elder had preached, focusing on the Magi’s visit to Jesus, so that meant it was my week to lead the service. As I introduced the communion time, and walked through our three conditions for participation (faith, baptism, a heart ready to repent), one of the ladies from our team and one of the local ladies got up, getting ready to distribute the torn flatbread and chai cups containing grape juice.

Sitting to my right was Timothy*, one of the believers who only gathered with us once a month or so due to security fears. He and his wife had been regular attenders during their first year, but after the church had been visited by the security police, they had come around a lot less. However, they could almost always come to any sort of picnic event we held, since they felt that these kinds of social events gave them greater cover if questioned by their Islamic cleric relatives.

Timothy and his wife were still pretty young in their faith, certainly lacking in discernment, but the genuineness of their faith and affections was apparent. One time we visited them only to find out that Timothy’s wife was very excited because some kind of a local spiritualist woman had told her that she could discern that Timothy’s wife had been a Christian in a previous life. She was thrilled, feeling that this was a validation of her faith now in Jesus. We of course had to tell her that reincarnation is not biblical. Thankfully, she accepted this correction with humility in spite of her previous excitement.

When we practiced communion at this church plant, we would first explain it, then pass out the elements, then take a minute of silent prayer together. This time of silence was so that we would all have a chance to examine our hearts and confess sin to God as necessary. This was often followed by believers getting up and quietly repenting to one another before they then partook of the bread and juice. Most weeks, whether that was taking place or not, whoever was leading the service would end the time of silence by praying out loud, then lead the group in eating the bread and remembering Christ’s body broken for us, and drinking the juice and remembering Christ’s blood shed for us.

During this Christmas service, I remember being encouraged by how things were progressing. “Fencing the table,” excluding some present from communion, had been so hard for the local believers in the beginning. But they were truly taking ownership of it now, skillfully explaining in hushed tones to nonbelievers present and unbaptized believers why it was better for them wait to partake in communion until they could meet all three of the conditions I had laid out.

The elements were distributed and the time came for the minute of silent prayer. As I bowed my head I suddenly heard a song playing loudly from a smartphone. I peeked to my right. It was coming from Timothy’s phone. His head was bowed, but he was holding his phone up, clearly playing it for the benefit of the group in this moment of self-examination. Right away, I realized I knew those guitar chords. I knew those lyrics “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.” I had known them ever since the movie Shrek had popularized the song for my generation. It was Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

In spite of its hauntingly beautiful melody and use of the term Hallelujah, this song is not a spiritual one. It is, at best, about the dark side of love. But it also contains lyrics that hint at darker sexual themes. The tricky thing is that it’s written with clear allusions to the biblical stories of David and Samson. So, many in the West play it at weddings and funerals, hearing these biblical allusions and Hallelujah repeated over and over and think that it must be some kind of spiritual love song. Timothy, with his intermediate English, had made the same mistake. And through him, Leonard Cohen was hijacking the service, taking it in a direction it did not need to go.

Timothy, to his credit, was just trying to serve the body in this simple way. He had found a beautiful song that he thought was a Christian one. But I knew that one of those “save the meeting” moments was upon us. Here we were, in the middle of communion, and I realized that we were about to be serenaded by “You saw her bathing on the roof; her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you” – and other lyrics that get even more awkward. Even if most of the locals would miss it, at least a third of our group were native English-speaking teammates and kids.

It was time to pivot. Bold leadership was called for. So, our silent prayer ended extra early that night. I’m sure it wasn’t this bad, but I remember awkwardly clearing my throat and belting out an extra loud prayer right before the whole roof-bathing part of the song. The group seemed to jolt awake, interrupted in the middle of their prayers of confession by a service leader who seemed unusually twitchy. An intentional glance from me at Timothy’s phone meant he got the message, and duly tapped off the music mid Hallelu–

Hijacking averted.

The rest of the evening went well. The fellowship was sweet, the food was celebratory, the gospel was shared, the electricity stayed on. Timothy did come over at one point to see if he had made some kind of mistake with the song. I assured him that I knew his heart was to serve the other believers as they were praying, and not to worry about it. I knew he was sensitive enough to not try that again without talking about it beforehand.

My wife and I laugh whenever we remember this incident. You really can’t predict the kind of things you’re going to face in the messiness of local church or church planting ministry. But meeting hijackings are not always this innocent, nor always so easily averted. Paul speaks of the importance of order in the church service and calls for quick action against the divisive man (1 Cor 14:40, Titus 3:10). Jesus models this as well with a number of his sharp, public rebukes and redirections (Luke 13:15, Luke 11:27-28, Matt 16:23). Faithful leaders need to do likewise.

For those who are leaders or who aspire to be so, we need to be ready to intervene against hijackers. Some of them will be wolves, dangerously trying to mislead the flock. Some will merely be misguided believers with good intentions. Wise leadership will be willing to guard against any and all attempts to take over – even if they come from dead Canadian musicians on a Central Asian’s smartphone.

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*Names changed for security

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