Tag: The Church

Two Very Different Dialects of Respect

I continue to be struck by the many ways that Western culture and Central Asian culture differ in showing respect. One way to summarize these differences would be that Central Asian culture primarily respects a person by elevating them, while Western culture primarily respects a person by equalizing them.

When a Central Asian meets another Central Asian, both are trying hard to show that they feel the other person is higher than they are. They show this through the many respectful phrases and titles they drop, as well as their body language. Both are careful to formally and expressively show that they are lower, and the other is higher. This goes on for quite some time until one finally relents and, with much protest, receives the preferential treatment.

When two Americans meet, both are trying to show that they feel that the other person is their equal. They do this by doing away with titles and by acting in a relaxed, casual, relational manner. Their body language is not rigid and formal, but loose and friendly. Both are careful to demonstrate that “you know that I know that you don’t think you’re better than me,” and vice versa. This might take place with very few words spoken at all, or with something as casual as a silent chin nod.

When a Central Asian and a Westerner interact, the Westerner might come away feeling that the Central Asian was way over-the-top and uncomfortably verbose in their praise. Are they for real? Do they have an agenda? The Central Asian might come away feeling that the Westerner was strangely cold or even rude. Have I offended them? Do they think they’re that much better than me?

These differences have a lot to do with our different histories and cultural makeup. The West, especially North America, is deeply shaped by a historical reaction against the hierarchies and class system of the old world. Some of the deepest values of Western culture are tied to the dignity of the lone individual, regardless of their background or current social status. Central Asia is still very much an ancient patron-client system, where, in the absence of sound impersonal institutions, one must acquire honor and status by securing the patronage of those above you and the client services of those below you. In this kind of system, honor, respect, and reputation are central to everything – even survival.

These differences in showing respect get highlighted for us in funny ways as we navigate (sometimes daily) between Central Asian and Western cultures in Caravan City. The international church, with its global-Western hybrid culture, tells first-time guests that they don’t want to embarrass them, so they can just quickly raise their hand to receive a visitor card. They want to honor them but also to treat them as equals, and equals aren’t eager to be singled out for recognition. The Central Asian church they planted, however, asks first-time guests to stand up and introduce themselves, knowing that the chance to be visibly elevated like this in a meeting is a great honor, and one that guests will feel deeply. Both churches then clap to welcome the newcomers, and both have acted honorably according to their respective cultures.

When it comes to introducing someone speaking up front at a seminar, a Westerner will want to humanize them, to tell the audience about their personality and their hobbies, maybe a funny story. And the Western speaker will often want to connect with their audience by showing a picture of their kids or grandkids. But if a Central Asian is introducing a speaker, they’ll want to focus on their qualifications and achievements, the things that have elevated them enough to be an expert worth listening to. The Central Asian speaker will begin their talk, not by trying to humanize themselves, but by offering detailed thanks to all of the other respected figures present or not who have made it possible for them to come and speak.

Of course, Westerners do quietly enjoy being elevated. And Central Asians quietly enjoy being equalized. But neither culture can quite bring itself to lead with these things. No, they are supposed to happen indirectly, as a sort of open secret. Westerners know that the double PhD is there and is very significant, but it might embarrass the speaker if we focus on that too directly, just like it would embarrass the Central Asian speaker if we focus too much on his hobbies, spouse, or grandkids.

Having made many mistakes hopping from one culture to the other, I can say that understanding these primary dialects of respect can go a long way toward navigating such different cultures well – or at least toward navigating them functionally. You really can communicate genuine care for a Central Asian by being thoughtfully respectful and by constantly trying to elevate them. But when you’re with that Westerner, all that usually feels a bit much. Instead, be relaxed, treat them as a friend and peer, and keep the compliments select and low-key.

It is a curious thing that such different-seeming behaviors can grow from the same root virtue of honor or respect. Yet they do. And both can be a way to put on true Christian love, because both can be found in the gospel itself.

The gospel both equalizes and elevates us. In its pure and powerful light, we are all seen to be equally made in the image of God, and each also equally sinful. Those now in Christ are all equally little prophets, priests, and kings, and heirs of the resurrection. Yet each one of us is also elevated through the gospel, raised from one degree of glory to another, with differing honor and rewards bestowed in this age as well as in the age to come. Our particular tribe of Christianity will tend to focus more on one of these truths than the other, usually depending on what culture we’re in. But they’re both there in the Scriptures. “Outdo one another in showing honor” (Rom 12:10) goes hand in hand with “All are one in Christ” (Gal 3:28).

What happens when believers from both kinds of cultures mix in the same church? Well, every church must develop one primary corporate culture in order to function. There is no way around this. There’s nothing wrong if the culture your church has naturally landed on is more Western or more Central Asian, especially if this is a good reflection of your members and your community. But there’s lots of room in relationships and personal interactions to care for people by attempting to speak their dialect of respect, as it were. If you’ve got a pastor or visitor from a culture that elevates, use titles and use body language that shows you’re putting them ahead of yourself. If you’ve got a pastor or visitor from a culture that equalizes, stick to first names, and treat them like you’re old friends.

Finally, saturate it all in love and grace. There’s no world in which you learn to perfectly operate in a different culture’s dialect of respect. And others will fumble yours as well. But humble, loving, and gracious believers don’t get bent out of shape about this kind of thing. In fact, when they look carefully, they can even see that these very different words and actions stem from the very same posture of the new heart.

We’ve got 19k of our 20k goal still to raise this summer. Would you consider supporting our work and the Church in Central Asia in this way? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region 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

Set a Guard over Your Lips

Ever wonder what the content that we write for local believers looks and sounds like? Below is an example of an article I wrote this past year in response to the widespread sin of gossip among the young churches of our area. You’ll notice some commonalities (like using local proverbs), but also that the style of the writing is different from what I normally post here. It’s deliberately simpler and more straightforward. This is both due to the need for translating it into our local languages but also the value of prioritizing clarity over style in content written to help new believers.

That being said, gossip is not a sin limited to the churches of Central Asia. I was challenged to grow in this area as I wrote this article, and I hope that others will be helped by it also. May we all grow in speaking the truth in love.

“Talk that has gone to a tongue has gone to a city.”

This local proverb refers to the incredible speed with which rumors or gossip about other people can spread. The idea is that if even one person shares information about someone with another person, then there is a good chance that soon the whole city will know. This proverb tells us about an aspect of local culture, that the culture is full of talk about other people, full of gossip. 

However, this Central Asian culture is not alone in struggling with sins of the tongue. Humans in general have always sinfully enjoyed spreading shameful or negative information about others. The book of Proverbs bears witness to how this was the case in ancient Israel around 3,000 years ago. 

Proverbs 18:8 says, “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to the inmost parts.” 

Because of our sinful nature, humans in all cultures, even those among God’s chosen people, have been tempted by gossip. This is because gossip seems to have a sweet taste in the beginning. However, after we have listened to gossip or shared it, it does not truly result in anything good. Instead, it results in destruction and division. 

Proverbs 16:28 says that, “A perverse person stirs up conflict. And a gossip separates close friends.” 

This verse says that it is a perverse person who stirs up conflict by talking about others. It says that this kind of person even separates the closest of friends through the harmful power of their words. In fact, our words are so powerful that the book of James says, “The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell” (James 3:6).

Friends, do you want your whole body to be corrupted? Would you like the whole course of your life to be set on fire? Or to have your tongue set on fire by hell? God’s word says these results and judgments happen to those who do not control their tongues, those who gossip about others. 

Beloved brothers and sisters, this is one of the most important areas where local believers will need to change their culture and their daily habits. 

Many years ago, I was preaching in a house church from the Sermon on the Mount. That day, we were focusing on the section where Jesus tells his disciples not to swear by anything, but to let their yes be yes, and their no be no. After the service, a believing husband and wife said to me, “This means we need a whole new language! We don’t know how to speak our language without swearing. We swear in almost every sentence!” 

Yes, when we follow Jesus, everything changes. And one of the most clear changes should be the way in which we speak. Even though we still speak our native language, the way we speak it might be so different that, in one sense, it will seem like a new language. Unbelieving friends, relatives, and neighbors might be shocked or confused when a local believer stops telling gossip about others. But this is what Jesus requires. He requires a way of speaking that is worthy of him, especially when it comes to how believers speak about one another. 

Ephesians 4:29 says, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”

This verse describes the standard for every believer. All of our words must be helpful for building others up, bringing benefit to those who listen. If any word or kind of talk does not do this, then we should not say it. Gossip or shameful talk about other believers always fails this test. It fails the test because it is not helpful but hurtful to the body of Christ. It fails because it does not build others up; instead, it tears them down. And it fails because it does not bring any benefit; instead, it brings division and conflict. 

Friends, from now on, you can use this verse, Ephesians 4:29, as a filter for everything you say. You can test every word, every sentence, according to this standard, and only say it if it is helpful for building others up.

Here, some might wonder about a situation where another believer is truly sinning or damaging the church. Should we not warn other believers about them? The short answer is no. Instead of talking about them, first, believers should go to that person and gently tell them their sin face-to-face (Galatians 6:1, Matthew 18:15-17). And when you do this, don’t tell anyone else about it. Only then, if that person doesn’t repent, should you tell one or two other believers about their sin. And this is only so that they can go with you to talk to that person about their sin. Once again, at this point, don’t tell anyone else about it except for this one or two others. If, after this second step, the believer who is sinning still doesn’t repent, then you should go and talk to the pastors in your church about that person’s sin. The pastors should then consider if it’s necessary to tell the church in an appropriate way, according to Matthew 18. 

At each of these steps, limit what you say about that sinning believer to what is truly helpful and necessary. Keep your conversations about their sin short and careful, and watch out for the temptation to give in to gossiping about rumors or even true details. As Proverbs 10:19 says, “When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise.”  

For example, you might see another believer lying to others about some area of his life. Without saying anything about this to anyone else, go to that believer yourself and gently talk to them about their lying. If they refuse to listen to you and refuse to repent, only then should you talk about their sin with one or two other believers so that you can make a plan to talk to the sinning believer together. If the sinning believer still refuses the counsel of this small group of believers, then privately share the situation with a pastor of your church so that, if needed, it can progress toward the next stage of church discipline. 

Brothers and sisters, even if someone is truly sinning, it is still gossip and still sinful to talk to others about that believer unless you are carefully following the Matthew 18 process that respects believers’ honor and privacy. The Bible calls us to “speak the truth in love.” Telling others about proven sin in another believer’s life may be telling them something true, but it is disobeying this command because it is not speaking that truth in a loving way. Loving other believers means we seek to keep their sins as private as possible, even while we help them to repent. This is what it means to love them and to love them truly, according to 1st Peter 4:8, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” 

Have you sinned in the way that you speak about other believers? Friends, all of us have. But praise God, we can repent of any sinful words that we have said. We can repent to God, and, if necessary, we can repent directly to those we have gossiped about. We can join the prophet Isaiah in saying, “‘Woe to me!… For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.” When we repent like this, we know that the blood of Jesus is powerful to cleanse us from our sin. 

Is it really possible to stop gossiping? Can someone who has gossiped about others all their life really learn a new way of speaking where they no longer do this? Yes, through the power of the Holy Spirit, every believer can have a new way of speaking that becomes a powerful witness to others that God can truly change us. 

Believers can learn to rely on the power of God in this area by regularly praying Psalm 141:3, “Set a guard over my mouth, LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips.” 

For many local believers who have grown up in a culture where gossip is so normal and accepted, this is a prayer they might need to pray every day. Probably multiple times every day. But God is faithful. Through his Holy Spirit, he truly can guard our mouths and keep watch over our lips. 

Believers gossiping about other believers is one of the greatest dangers that is destroying friendships and churches in this region. But when believers learn to speak in this new way, their speech will become one of the most powerful witnesses to the truth of the gospel. 

Yes, instead of having a tongue that spreads gossip to an entire city or sets our whole life on fire, we can have tongues that are instead like a tree of life, filling our lives with the wisdom and light of God. 

This summer, we are looking to raise 20k, half for our family’s support needs and half for the cost of writing, translating, and printing solid resources for local believers. Would you consider supporting our work and the Church in Central Asia in this way? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization. 

Pastors are needed for international churches in our region 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

Was the Multiplication of the Early Church a Miraculous Movement?

Most Christians today believe a narrative that goes something like this: The Early Church, full as it was of Holy Spirit power and apostolic witness, quickly saturated the Roman Empire through a miraculous exponential multiplication of believers and churches. This is supposed to explain how you eventually get an emperor like Constantine, who, a mere 300 years after the beginning of Christianity, sees the writing on the wall, embraces Christianity and makes it legal.

In keeping with this view, many missionaries today feel that to return to true, Early Church missions and church planting, we should also be aiming for exponential multiplication in terms that can only be described as miraculous. Faithful missions should look like the early church and the early church saw miraculous multiplication; ergo, we should also be seeing miraculous multiplication if we are truly ministering like the Early Church.

When missionaries have compared the rate of multiplication in traditional proclamation-centered, church-planting missions to the supposed rate of multiplication in the Early Church, many have come to the conclusion that the way we have been doing missions is all wrong. The fruit doesn’t seem to match what we’re supposed to see, what the Early Church saw, so there must be something fundamentally wrong with our methods and approach. This historical assumption (often paired with conversion rates compared negatively to population rates) is one reason why we’ve seen such radical attempts to rework missions into methodologies of rapid multiplication such as CPM, DMM, 4 Fields, POP, T4T, Insider Movement, etc.

But what if this historical narrative is wrong? What if what we find in the early Christian movement is instead a modest but steady rate of growth that leads to exponential gains over a long period of time?

Twenty years ago, as a college freshman, I read a book called The Rise of Christianity, by the sociologist Rodney Stark. A recent discussion with some others in Caravan City about DMM (disciple-making movements) reminded me once again about this book. It came to mind because the surprising thing that Stark claims and demonstrates is that Christianity conquered the Roman Empire, not through some kind of miraculous growth rate – but by a steady annual 3.5% growth rate that simply compounded over time.

What does this looks like? Brace yourself: A hundred Christians in Ephesus in a given year adding three or four more to their number the following year.

If Stark’s claims are true, then the early church grew not like someone suddenly winning the lottery, but rather much more like the steady as she goes compounding interest of your retirement account. Not like the explosive spread of a virus, but much more like a single tree that, given enough time, seeds a forest that covers a mountain range. Check out this chart below to see where a 3.5% annual growth gets you in 300 years.

Notice also what happens by the year 350, when the emperor-sanctioned religion is suddenly flooded with all kinds of Romans wanting to become Christians for all kinds of mixed motives. Up until the year 313, Christianity was illegal, marginalized, and sometimes persecuted, so those years are a better gauge of how Christianity grows through genuine new-birth conversion, rather than the Christianity as path to power or prestige growth that took place in the latter 300s.

It seems that missiologists may be despising the slow growth they see in our age without warrant, and based on a faulty understanding of church history. The issue is not that the timeless methods of evangelism, discipleship, church-planting, preaching, and building networks of healthy churches and Christian institutions are too slow. No, the issue is that the missiologists’ window of reference is too small. Rather than looking at the three decades of missionary labor that have taken place in our corner of Central Asia, for example, and claiming that it’s been an abject failure (“And so we need to rethink what the Great Commission actually means!”), they should be asking if the rate of growth represents a steady increase that could, given 300 years, look like that of the Early Church.

How might a 3.5% growth goal and 300-year perspective change how we think about the alleged hard soil of our ministry contexts? At least for our context, we suddenly seem to be ahead of the curve.

We may be wrong in our assumptions about the rate of growth in the Early Church. But we have not been wrong in believing that the growth was indeed miraculous. The preaching of the gospel across new geographic, linguistic, and ethnic barriers is a mighty thing. The new birth is always a stunning miracle. The planting of a new church is always impossible without the power of the Holy Spirit. The story of Christianity’s rise is truly an amazing one. As usual, it seems we have somewhat wrongheaded ideas about what is actually miraculous or supernatural.

Are there periods of history where the spread of the gospel was way faster than 3.5%? Of course. And it’s not wrong to look at them and pray to see a similar kind of awakening in our day. But let’s not deceive ourselves into thinking that true, apostolic Christianity always spreads like wildfire. It doesn’t. It more often spreads like a mustard seed, like a tree. Just like it did for the Early Church.

This summer, we are looking to raise 20k, half for our family’s support needs and half for the cost of writing, translating, and printing solid resources for local believers. Would you consider supporting the Church in Central Asia in this way? 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

Baptism and Welcome Songs by Local Believers

Last night we had a baptism. The brother I mentioned last week who came to faith somewhere in the middle of the book Matthew went under the water (in the somewhat-scary metal trough we’ve been using). Despite the nerves and a potential slip in the Trinitarian proclamation on the part of the new local elder, the immersed man also came back up again – surrounded by the hugs, applause, and singing of a room full of celebrating saints.

My wife and I and two local believers led worship during the service. These two local believers, the single former guerrilla fighter gal and the divorced poet/prankster dad, are both growing in their abilities as singers and as songwriters. That being the case, I wanted to share with you the translation of a couple of the songs they’ve written that are fast becoming staples of our local language worship.

Even in English, we don’t have a lot of good songs about baptism. A year or so ago, we realized that when it came to our local language, we had none at all. So, we asked this local brother if he would consider writing one. I sent him a collection of key verses that talk about the meaning and significance of baptism. And I asked him to write a song that would feel very local and singable on a baptism picnic with no guitar and only a bunch of believers clapping by the side of a river. He got to work on it, crafting a solid song with traditional rhyming couplets. We then worked on it a little more to make the theology present in the song just a little more robust. In the end, this is the very Central Asian song that was created. 

Arise O sisters and brothers, make respectful clapping
Today we have a celebration, for the sake of baptism!

Now arise and look, everyone prepare yourselves
He that is baptized, congratulate him!

Let all sing, give clapping with humility
Another person has been redeemed, by the blood of Christ!

As a sign of burial, we submerge him in the water
And a sign of new life, we bring him out again!

Through faith and water we are members of one another
Before we were estranged, now we are one in Christ!

Arise O sisters and brother, make a respectful clapping
Today we have a celebration, for the sake of baptism!

The melody of this song is quite celebratory and fun to sing either A Capella with just clapping or with guitar. Someday when we have more believing musicians here in Caravan City it will be really fun to sing it with a full band playing local instruments. I appreciate how the song is congregational, calling the church to respond rightly to this glorious act of obedience to Jesus. I also love how the song balances both the spirit of celebration while also teaching core truths about baptism. It’s a good example to me of how foreign and local believers can work together to craft something that could serve the church well for a long time to come.

More recently, the pastor of this church asked us to help create a good welcome song for the beginning of the service. The only one we had in the local language wasn’t so good, one of those odd evangelical songs that’s all about welcoming the Holy Spirit “into this place, into your gathering.” Because we’re not confident that we really should be focused on ‘welcoming the Spirit’ like this (does he not sovereignly create and indwell and fill the church?), we don’t really sing it and were more than happy to see if a better one could be written.

We followed a similar process to the one above, asking the single gal who does vocals with us most weeks if she would consider writing it. We knew that she had been writing a lot of songs on her own, but most of these were first-person devotional-style songs, not necessarily congregational “we” songs that teach and exult in truths from God’s word. It’s curious how this particular weakness of global worship music has somehow seeped into the first generation of believers here as well. Not that first-person, devotional-style songs are unhelpful in the proper context. But that context is not usually the gathering of the local church.

After sending her a number of key passages on the biblical theme of welcome, this is what she wrote. 

Where Christ is there is peace
For the weary and heavy laden
His yoke is easy, his burden light
Rest for mind and soul

Chorus:
We come with open heart
We welcome one another
We come humbly and rejoicing
God has welcomed us 

Sinners are welcomed 
In the presence of God our father
The heart is calmed in our Lord's presence
Christ has become our sacrifice 

Chorus:
We come with open heart
We welcome one another
We come humbly and rejoicing
God has welcomed us 

Children and elderly, rich and poor
All are called, let them come 
The mercy of God has made the way
Let all come, the door is open 

Chorus:
We come with open heart
We welcome one another
We come humbly and rejoicing
God has welcomed us

We ended up changing very little of the content since she had done such a good job of weaving in truths from multiple passages of scripture. But a group of us did work together to come up with the melody together. In the end, what’s resulted is a joyful and rich song of welcome for the local church. The melody is more of a fusion of Central Asian and Western styles compared to baptism song, but still close enough, we hope, to get long-term traction among the believers here.

This season has involved more opportunities to invest in local worship than we had anticipated. What a joy it’s been to be a part of the creation of good songs for the local church. Long-term, our hope is to see many new songs that are robustly biblical, delightfully singable, and deeply Central Asian, songs that teach, exult, and call believers to respond in faithfulness.

Although I must say, this kind of work is a bit addictive. Once you realize you can plug needed gaps in the worship of another language, you start looking at your own language and wondering why there is such a paucity of songs on certain topics.

Speaking of these gaps, why don’t we have good baptism songs in English? Somebody needs to get on that. The next time we’re in the US and a newly believing friend goes under the water, I want to be able to exult in song about what is happening!

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

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