Tag: The Church

A Central Asian Church’s Treasures

Were you to accompany me to the Central Asian church where my wife and I help lead worship, to sit with us in our usual row, and to look around you, this is what you would see. 

Up at the front, the young local elder is leading the introduction to communion. He’s doing a good job explaining the meaning of the Lord’s Supper and who should or should not partake. He smiles as he unpacks all this, but he’s got dark circles under his eyes. He’s grieving the loss of a relationship with a believing gal in Poet City whom he had been close to marrying. He’s having a lot of trouble sleeping because of this, crashing at other believers’ places several times a week to try and find some relief. As the only believer in an unbelieving and unhealthy family, home is understandably not the most restful place nor the best place to get counsel when struggling (single men here continue to live at home until married). 

Just in front of us, on the right, is another young single brother. He’s a tall, awkward 20-year-old whom the members of the church love dearly in spite of his cage-stage Calvinism (fueled by his line-by-line reading of The Institutes through Google Translate). This young man is a voracious reader and aspiring writer. But he’s been wearing hoods and hats to church for a month or so now, ever since his dad blew up at him again because of his faith and shaved off part of his hair, an action taken only when someone has deeply shamed the family. He’s waiting for it to grow back and trying not to mention it.

In front of him is a single American brother, one of our teammates, manning the PowerPoint. After getting a brain tumor and miraculously surviving, he decided he’d like to spend the rest of his days on the mission field. Language learning doesn’t come easy to him after brain cancer, but he’s exemplary in his diligence, and he shares the gospel with as many taxi drivers as he can. He’s one of our kids’ favorite grown ups around for many reasons, including that he likes to show them funny clips of The Lord of the Rings dubbed into our local language. Central Asian Gandalf at the bridge of Khazad-Dum is fast becoming one of our family’s inside quotes.

At the front on the left, sits another elder and his family, dear American friends of ours and the ones who planted this church over the last several years. We got to be a part of some of the earliest (unsuccessful) attempts to gather living room groups with them back pre-Covid, and it’s been such a joy to move back to Caravan City and to see how their faithful perseverance has led to the birth of a new, healthy local church – the first open and healthy local language church in this large city. These friends are not flashy, but humble, gifted, steady plodders, the kind of people willing to gently but stubbornly follow the Bible and call local believers to do the same. Six years ago, their church planting plans were dismissed by others in the city as neither contextual nor realistic. Now, the church they’ve planted is becoming an example to the missionary community of how church planting can actually work in the hard soil of Caravan City.

Behind us is a short, middle-aged woman, one of a number of members who are political refugees from the country next door. She’s a faithful and kind church member, but she’s often struggled to find enough work. She was helping with childcare for some of the expat families in Caravan City, but most of them left during the war, meaning much of her income has since dried up. She and the others in her situation can end up stuck in our region indefinitely, sometimes for decades. They’re not fully legal, not able to go back home, and not able to travel on to another country. They often struggle with hopelessness as they consider their future. 

Behind her sit a greying middle-aged couple, some of the very first attendees of this church back when it was just a little group meeting in a living room. They are kind and dependable church members, and every week she prepares the delicious food that the church shares together after the service. But it’s been a hard year for their marriage. Their fights at home got so bad that it led their college-aged son, also a believer, to attempt suicide. Since then, and with much counsel, they seem to be doing better. As refugees themselves, finances have also been really tight given how the war has damaged the local economy. 

Near them sits a young man from Caravan City who came to faith last year, joined the church, then quickly went and married a Muslim girl. This was in part because of family pressure, but also a choice made against pastoral counsel. In spite of the great danger of this course of action, it seems that God has been merciful to him and granted him true repentance. His unbelieving wife now regularly attends the services with him and even desires to help out the church as she can. She is a genuine friend now to some of the other believing ladies, who hope that she will also come to saving faith. Her husband, quietly a poet at heart, often pulls me aside to share a new local proverb. He’ll also ask good questions about how to grow as a husband or evangelist, seeming to have a genuine desire to grow in real spiritual wisdom. I am also grateful for him as one of the few who can actually clap on beat.

Across the aisle from them sits a local brother in his late 30s, from a city a couple of hours away up in the mountains. He will tell you that he was a bad husband and father before believing, and that his apostasy from Islam to follow Jesus was the last straw for his wife. She and their kids separated from him, remaining in their native city while he moved to Caravan City for work. He’s worked a succession of hard jobs, such as driving a gas canister exchange truck on 18-hour shifts. Thus far, his wife has been unwilling to reconcile, even though she can see that he’s now genuinely changed in some significant ways. In spite of the constant grief of missing his family, this brother is also one of the church’s most mischievous members, regularly dropping witty remarks and engaging in good-hearted teasing. Even though we’re the same age, he loves to point out how many gray hairs are now salting my chin and head and how that means he’ll have to soon start calling me “uncle dear.” He’s also a gifted poet, composing line after line in his head and recording them on his phone as he drives around the city. He and the young Calvinist have become fast friends. Together with the brother who likes proverbs, they are shaping up to be a formidable evangelistic trio (in between the constant jokes about ‘Jan Kalveen’).

Near him is a young, quiet man with a short beard and glasses. He’s a new believer who came to faith in part because of a guy’s discussion night we were hosting in our apartment until the war started. A jaded, post-Islamic, post-Christian Jungian psychiatrist was a regular at the group. In spite of his dismissal of the gospel as merely one manifestation of the collective subconscious, he said he had a depressed patient who might be really helped by Christianity. He invited this struggling man to the group, where he heard the gospel from the trio mentioned above and others of us, accepting the invitation to come to church. Now, this quiet, bespectacled friend has been born again and is being discipled by the local elder.

In front of him sits a prospective member. He’s recently shared his testimony with the church, hoping they’ll accept his profession of faith in Jesus and welcome him into membership. His story echoed many others I’ve heard over the years, since it included a dream about Jesus, one that stood out from his other dreams so much so that he couldn’t seem to forget it for years afterward. That dream eventually led him to a Bible, and he came to faith somewhere in the middle of the book of Matthew, again, similar to many of my other local friends’ testimonies. 

Near him sit two more prospective members, a married couple. The husband had been a guerrilla fighter from the time he was a boy, and heard the gospel this from past year from our old friend, Frank*. Because of the terrible things he had seen and done, and the resultant PTSD, this man was terrified of sharing his testimony with the church, and his membership was stalled for a while. But he did so just this past week, speaking of the things he’d seen in careful, general terms, but speaking of the hope of the gospel in gloriously clear detail. He had told me beforehand that he was terrified of sharing the kind of things that would send his mind spiraling back into the darkness, from which he might not be able to come back. But Jesus gave him and his wife strength to testify, and they will soon be baptized, along with the brother who had the dream.

At the back stands the local deacon, another former guerrilla fighter now turned gentle servant of Christ. His two believing adult children are also members. His son helps with the soundboard every week and is a language helper for some of our teammates. His daughter, also a former soldier, joins us as a vocalist for the worship team most weeks, helps write new songs, and serves as the local language teacher at our kids’ TCK school. She was the first one to come to faith in the family, after her dad randomly found a Bible on the ground in the bazaar and gave it to her. Then, one by one, she prayed and led her dad and brother to faith as well.

She sits with her arm around another single gal who’s a believing member. Her father was a diplomat, so she grew up in multiple foreign countries before her family returned to the homeland. Her dad isn’t a serious Muslim, so he let her pursue this Jesus thing, believing it to be only a phase. But now that he understands it to be a long-term, serious conversion, he and her brothers have taken to regularly mocking her. Her mom takes a different approach. Whenever this young woman gets out her Bible to do her devotions at the kitchen table, her mom conspicuously gets out her Quran and starts studying as well – even mimicking her daughter’s highlighting of her holy book, even though good Muslims should never highlight or write notes in the Quran! With this kind of home environment, you can understand why she is visibly soaking up the chance to be around other believers.

With that, plus a few more foreigners and some local visitors, our scan of the room is complete. 

What would you make of this body of believers were you to see it in person like this? It’s mostly made up of messy, first-generation, young Christians. There are layers and layers of trauma, PTSD, anxiety, and dark, broken pasts. Most don’t have enough work. Many need to take a smoke break outside before and after the service, including the deacon. Most are not well-connected or well-educated or initially that impressive. All are fighting stubborn sins which occasionally (and publicly) blow up on the other believers – and that while living in a society that might turn on them at any second.

Would this motley crew of believers be the ones you would choose to turn Caravan City upside down? Are these the kind of strategic leaders who, as the members of the first healthy church, will lead to the inbreaking of the kingdom? 

Let’s remember what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:

26) Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27) But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28) God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29) so that no one may boast before him. 30) It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. 31) Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

Yes, my hope is that were you to visit this church with me, you would, as Paul writes of the messy Corinthians, see the very wisdom of God. Indeed, that you would perceive that you are seeing the very treasures of God and of the church, as an early church deacon in Rome, Lorenzo, once put it.

Every once in a while, I remember a conversation I had years ago in a Louisville coffee shop with a veteran missionary. He lamented how we’d never be successful church planters in Muslim contexts if we kept gathering “the freaks and the rejects, the nobodies.” I remember this statement, and I shake my head. The nature of the kingdom is so very different from what the missiologists assume will be effective or strategic. Yes, God sometimes saves the chiefs, the rich, the influential, those who have it together (in a worldly sense anyway). But so often his delight is to save and use the unexpected, the overlooked, those with dark pasts and a struggling present, those rejected by their families. Even the mischievous and poetic delivery drivers who are quietly grieving, and the former guerrilla fighters who still very much need to take that smoke break. 

Yes, were we to scan the room, we would see their rough pasts and their still somewhat rough present. 

But what of their future? Their future is that they will become more glorious than even the angels, that they will be the ruling and shining heirs of the resurrection. That is true of each of these believers I’ve described to you here. It is, for those who have eyes to see, what we could see in any true local church.

The foolish shaming the wise. The weak shaming the strong. The treasures of the kingdom. 

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. 

One of the international churches in our region is looking for an associate pastor and our kids’ TCK school is also in need of teachers for the 2026-2027 school year. 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

The Glory of the Impossible and Sending False Dichotomies to Hell

False dichotomies are foolish, dangerous, deceptive things. Believers fall into their trap when they overreact to the emphases and excesses of a different camp or previous generation. Ironically, these pendulum-riding believers often themselves go on to become the inverse example of the very thing they are critiquing. 

Instead of this, the way of wisdom is to give both sides their biblical proper weight, to thread the needle right, even if that means we often must hold complex, nuanced positions, right alongside our bold, black and white hills to die on. To do this well, a deep knowledge of the Bible and church history is invaluable, as well as deep insight into our current culture, context, and age. 

Alas, the relationship of the Church to global missions is full of these false dichotomies. One of these days, I’ll write a post exploring which of them seem especially prominent in our circles. For now, I just want to highlight one way in which the pendulum is once again acting like a wrecking ball and out there smashing things up once again.

Here’s D.A. Carson reemphasizing for us just how harmful these false dichotomies are:

“So which shall we choose? “Experience or truth? The left wing of the airplane, or the right? Love or integrity? Study or service? Evangelism or discipleship? The front wheels of a car, or the rear? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience? Damn all false antithesis to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ”

Indeed. Send all false dichotomies to hell, where they belong, including a particular false dichotomy currently gaining steam that pits biblical localism against biblical missions. 

Biblical localism could be defined as the idea that God calls the majority of believers to put down roots, to build families, to work faithfully, to live a quiet life, to serve their local churches faithfully, and to seek to leaven their communities and broader society with the light of God’s word. This is a good, hard, biblical lifestyle (1 Thes 4:11-12, Eph 4:28). 

Biblical missions could be defined as the idea that God calls the Church to send a minority of believers to leave their home communities in order to take the gospel across geographic, political, cultural, and linguistic barriers in order to plant churches – churches that then go on to practice both faithful localism and faithful missions. This too is a good, hard, biblical lifestyle (Matt 28:18-20, Rom 15:20). 

These ideas go hand-in-hand in the scriptures. They are not against one another. Rather, they uniquely sharpen and empower one another. The goers need the stayers, and the stayers need the goers. Both have a unique role in spreading the gospel in this age and pointing forward to the resurrection coming in the next. Both are taking ground and fighting the Church’s battles against her ever-present enemies, even though the dynamics on the front lines will vary from place to place. 

But here’s what’s happened. My generation, the Millennials, went out to save the world. With the not-so-good confidence fostered by all the “You’re a unicorn who can do anything you set your mind to!” messaging we ingested growing up, alongside the good gospel fire in our bones stoked by Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life, Platt’s Radical, and the missionary biographies of Paton, Judson, Taylor, and Eliot, we answered the call and laid it all on the line. 

Not surprisingly, a lot of us burned out – and that was a full decade before the previous generation had. If Gen X was hitting burnout in their forties, it came for us in our early to mid-thirties, or even earlier. Perhaps it was the young and restless part of being young, restless, and reformed that meant many of us didn’t prioritize rest, health, and sustainable sacrifice the way we should have. Yes, some of the costs we incurred were simply part of the deal, the normal and even noble suffering that comes from the Christian life in general and some unique trials of the missionary life in particular. But many of the costs were undoubtedly also due to our own lack of wisdom in things like Sabbath, embodiment, community, and the fact that the kids are not the unflappably flexible and resilient little beings we had been told they were. 

When we look back at the missions emphasis of recent decades, a lot of good work was done. We need to be honest about that fact. But the reality of many young families returning from the mission field quite broken also coincided with big shifts in the American/Western zeitgeist, specifically, the rise of things like therapy culture, Gen Z, Christian nationalism, Christian localism, massive inflation and wage stagnation, and the foundering of the New Calvinism’s unity on the rocks of Trump, Covid-19, BLM, and ‘woke’ vs. ‘based’ everything. 

Early on, all this led to some healthy pushback, which included books like Reset and Refresh by David and Shona Murray and Ordinary by Michael Horton. Much of this pushback was good and helpful. It reminded the Church that we needed to get more biblical in prioritizing rest and sustainability, and in also celebrating the radical nature of Christians who stay and invest in their local church and community for decades on end. Praise God for wise men and women who help to balance the pendulum. 

But I’ve noticed something shifting in the last couple of years. Reformed evangelical leaders who have been convinced by robust and uber-confident ‘happy warrior’ forms of Christian localism are also beginning to turn against global missions. Here are a couple of quotes that surfaced in recent months on my social media feeds that illustrate this. I post them here simply to illustrate. I admit I’m not familiar with the broader body of these men’s work, so they may nuance these statements elsewhere. Both are SBTS grads who speak at conferences, and we share a lot of mutual friends, so I would hope they are more balanced than they appear here. However, notice how they are drawing a stark dichotomy between foreign missions and localism – and how different this kind of talk sounds from what has been the evangelical church’s posture since the late 1700s. 

There needs to be a new and more biblically faithful version of “Don’t Waste Your Life” for the next generation.

I know many Christians who were afraid of wasting their lives and ended up chasing glory in foreign countries. But they screwed up their marriages and kids as a result. That’s actually wasting your life.

The updated version we now need is to call people to do something truly radical. Live an ordinary, faithful life of Christian service. Get married, start a family, have lots of children, work with your hands, plug into a local community, and serve a local church.

-Michael Clary on X

Notice the claims made here. 1) The book, Don’t Waste Your Life, was unbiblical, period. No mention of its context, intended audience, or what it got right. Suburban baby boomer retirement mindset, anyone? 2) Those who went overseas were only chasing glory. Is there no longer a biblical category of holy ambition that applies to taking great risks like this for the sake of the unreached, or does holy ambition only apply to those who stay and build? To say that it’s wrong to seek glory is to be out of step with both the Bible and the historic church (Rom 2:7). It’s how you seek glory that matters. 3) The costs to marriages and kids mean you’re the one who wasted your life. But what about the costs to families that come simply as part of faithful service? Is there no category for that in your theology? Or does tragic cost always equal unfaithfulness? 4) What is truly radical is marriage, kids, work, community investment, and long-term local church service. I guess Jesus, Paul, Patrick, Lull, and Paton weren’t good examples of Christian radicals? 

Here’s a response to the above post, but taking it even further:

Imagine disguising adventurism and avoidance of duty as the ideal, super spiritual thing. That is a great deal of the last few generations of evangelicalism in America and what was sold to young men and women. And we wonder why so few are married and have children.

Going to a foreign country (at other’s expense no less) – wow, you are so spiritual. You will get special services and a Sunday a month where we extol you and folks will especially pray for you… Working hard to take on a wife and have a large family and be productive and fruitful where you are and start a business that employs folks in your church? Oh, meh… unless we want more of your money.

Adopt kids from far flung nations? We will write entire books and have conferences about it… special services and recognition. Care for your actual neighbors and help their kids? Meh… yawn.

The problem? It’s been primarily rot and rubbish for a hundred years. Promoted primarily by people who don’t practice at all what they preach. I despise it so much at this point and the poison it is and has been to our nation and communities.

-John Moody on FB

This post claims 1) Missions is adventurism and avoidance of duty, and is the reason so few are having children. Is there no category for holy ambition or the faithful fulfilment of the Great Commission as the duty of the Christian? What about the fact that evangelical missionaries have far more children on average than evangelicals who stay planted in the West? 2) Going to a foreign country at others’ expense does not warrant special recognition or prayer. Those things should be for those who stay and build. Wait, must we choose one or the other? Who says so? What about 3rd John 1:6? 3) Missions has been promoted by those who don’t practice what they preach, and it is essentially poison to the American and evangelical community. I recognize the brother here is probably speaking from emotion, so, in turn, I would invite him to visit the graves of countless faithful missionaries scattered all over the world, including that of my own father in Melanesia and that of a good friend here in Central Asia. Would you say they didn’t practice what they preached when they were faithful unto death? How about their families that continue to grieve and trust God with their deaths? Are their examples of dying for Jesus poison for the American church? 

Here’s the thing. Both of these men I’ve quoted are truly onto something. There has been an underemphasis on faithful Christian localism in recent decades. And a lot of young evangelical families have come back broken from the mission field. Both of these things have been tremendously costly. We need to hear these points loud and clear. 

But we need to do so while avoiding the error they’re falling into – pitting localism against missions. To fall into this trap is to be captive by a spirit of the age that hasn’t been very prominent in about 300 years, but which seems to be staging an aggressive comeback. That wrongheaded spirit misses the fundamental point that missions exists in part because there can be no Christian localism in places where there are not yet any Christians.

One of the reasons people like me do what we do is because we dream of the day when our unreached people groups are filled with healthy churches that are transforming their society from the inside out. We long to see churches filled to the brim with faithful local Christians who settle down, get married, have kids, start businesses, influence their neighbors and government, and yes, support their own missionaries who go on to expand the kingdom across new frontiers. 

Further, we live every day knowing that our family can only do what we do because there are a hundred faithful families who sacrifice by staying. That is an honor and a duty that we do not take lightly. But this is the way the kingdom has always worked, and it is what it will take to see faithful Christian localism expressed in every corner of the earth. We risk, we suffer, we accept this glorious and frustrating nomadic lifestyle for the sake of those who will one day be able to put down roots. If our families are broken in the pursuit of that vision, then weep with us, help us get wiser, and help us untangle which parts of our suffering were wrongheaded and which parts were noble and good and honor Jesus. 

But don’t so rashly throw out the very thing that has made your calls to Christian localism possible in the first place. After all, if not for the radical, adventurous missionaries of the past, there would be no Christian West to try to save or recover. As our Central Asian locals say, “Don’t cast stones into the spring from which you drink.” A little bit of historic self-awareness would serve the new Christian localists well. Pioneer missionaries are, in fact, those who take the beachheads that one day lead to the establishment of a healthy Christian localism in those contexts.

Friends, the pendulum is swinging hard. The conversation is shifting. And many are in danger of drifting away from the biblical emphasis on missions, risk, and losing everything for the sake of the gospel. Many young men no longer desire to become leaders, and many young families and singles coming to the field are so concerned with mental health and work-life balance that they no longer understand the logic of sacrifice. I find myself longing more and more for older, stranger voices, like that of Samuel Zwemer, to wake us back up to some of these historic but out-of-fashion truths. Yes, men like Zwemer were unbalanced in their own ways, but perhaps hearing from them again is actually what we need to respond to these new challenges – and actually thread the needle right. 

If you’ve never read Zwemer’s address, The Glory of the Impossible, it’s a stirring challenge from a very different era. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here is an excerpt as well:

The unoccupied fields, therefore, are a challenge to all whose lives are unoccupied by that which is highest and best; whose lives are occupied only with the weak things or the base things that do not count. There are eyes that have never been illumined by a great vision, minds that have never been gripped by an unselfish thought, hearts that have never thrilled with passion for another’s wrong, and hands that have never grown weary or strong in lifting a great burden. To such the knowledge of these Christless millions in lands yet unoccupied should come like a new call from Macedonia, and a startling vision of God’s will for them. As Bishop Brent remarks, “We never know what measure of moral capacity is at our disposal until we try to express it in action. An adventure of some proportions is not uncommonly all that a young man needs to determine and fix his manhood’s powers.” Is there a more heroic test for the powers of manhood than pioneer work in the mission field? Here is opportunity for those who at home may never find elbow-room for their latent capacities, who may never find adequate scope elsewhere for all the powers of their minds and their souls. There are hundreds of Christian college men who expect to spend life in practicing law or in some trade for a livelihood, yet who have strength and talent enough to enter these unoccupied fields. There are young doctors who might gather around them in some new mission station thousands of those who “suffer the horrors of heathenism and Islam,” and lift their burden of pain, but who now confine their efforts to some “pent-up Utica” where the healing art is subject to the law of competition and is measured too often merely in terms of a cash-book and ledger. They are making a living; they might be making a life.

Bishop Phillips Brooks once threw down the challenge of a big task in these words: “Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle.” He could not have chosen words more applicable if he had spoken of the evangelization of the unoccupied fields of the world with all their baffling difficulties and their glorious impossibilities. God can give us power for the task. He was sufficient for those who went out in the past, and is sufficient for those who go out today.

Face to face with these millions in darkness and degradation, knowing the condition of their lives on the unimpeachable testimony of those who have visited these countries, this great unfinished task, this unattempted task, calls today for those who are willing to endure and suffer in accomplishing it.

-Zwemer, The Glory of the Impossible

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. 

One of the international churches in our region is looking for an associate pastor and our kids’ TCK school is also in need of teachers for the 2026-2027 school year. 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

Lessons Learned in Wartime

We’ve never been this close to a war before. We’ve had near brushes with terrorism, yes, and we’ve been through our fair share of unpredictable geopolitical crises. But thirteen consecutive days of missiles and drones being (mostly) intercepted and exploding in the skies around our city? This is a qualitatively new experience. 

We are learning some interesting things. Here are a few of them: 

The sound of certain incoming or intercepted missiles is just like that of a normal low-flying plane being suddenly interrupted by a distant firework. 

Other weapons, such as ballistic missiles or C-RAM air defense systems, sound a lot scarier. 

The smell of missiles and drones intercepted nearby is just like that of fireworks or cheap firecrackers. 

The line between wide-eyed curiosity and genuine fear is a fine one, crossed at different places for different individuals, and often unpredictable even for oneself. 

X (formerly Twitter) is a powerful resource for both real-time security updates (I’m talking even seconds after an explosion is heard) as well as lots of misleading photoshopped or AI images. 

Having contacts with access to detailed intelligence and analysis is far more helpful than relying on official government communication. 

Knowing the local language and having lots of local friends is priceless when it comes to risk assessment and situational awareness. 

Iranians, God bless them, when backed into a corner, will not respond the way Westerners expect them to. One of my best friends back in the West is an Iranian, so I have seen this on an interpersonal level, and am now seeing it play out on the international level. Exhibit A: None of us would have ever expected our friends in Dubai to receive so many more attacks than we have here. 

Humor is important for processing times like this. We may or may not have used AI to insert Godzilla into one fake photoshopped image that claimed to show our city going up in flames, then sent it to a certain subset of friends that we knew would appreciate it. 

It’s good to have an internal room without windows set up with mattresses and 72 hours of water and food, just in case. 

It’s also important to make sure that if the boys play with Legos in said safe room, they clean them up. During an attack in the predawn darkness the other day, I heard my wife call out, “Gah! The only thing worse than a drone attack is stepping on Legos during a drone attack!” 

It’s far too easy to get lost in doom-scrolling for hours during crises like these, and to lose sight of important daily disciplines. It is stunning how the brain can turn to mush and motivation utterly evaporate when wars and rumors of wars take over our social media feeds.

Community, especially Christian community, is utterly essential. Wise precautions sometimes need to be taken, but nothing comforts and encourages the heart in wartime like gathering with other believers to sit under the word, pray, laugh, and lament together. Isolation leads to trauma. Face-to-face community leads to courage and resilience. 

1st Peter is a great book to preach during times like this. This is what the local language church just started preaching through at the beginning of the war, having planned beforehand to do so – something that was very obviously God’s timing. Last week, we started hearing the ‘fireworks’ in the distance while the pastor was preaching an overview of the book and expounding chapter 4 verse 8, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” After half a dozen muted explosions, the congregation was getting nervous. Wisely, the pastor paused to acknowledge what was happening and to pray. Then, he got back to the sermon. The congregation calmed down, then leaned into the remarkably applicable texts we were hearing. For our context, this was a good way to respond. Civilian infrastructure has not yet been targeted in our city, so we were just as safe sitting in the church gathering as anywhere else we could have gone. And if some stray crashing drone had somehow found us there, then what better way to go? After the sermon, we took communion and sang together. I, for one, was deeply thankful that we had chosen to gather.

Last lesson for now: There is an interesting place that is neither feeling compelled to stay nor compelled to go, but simply feeling free – free to stay and serve until something big changes or the war comes to an end. That’s where we currently find ourselves. We hope to steward this season and freedom well, as long or as short as it may be. 

May God grant peace and a swift and just end to this war. And may its end result in greater access for the gospel. Pray with us to that end. 

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. 

One of the international churches in our region is looking for an associate pastor and our kids’ TCK school is also in need of teachers for the 2026-2027 schoolyear. 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

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.

Photo from Unsplash.com

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

Photo from Unsplash.com