I once took part in an intro to church planting class where leaders of different local church plants were invited to come in and share their wisdom. Being newly back in the US at the time, I was eager to compare notes with what I had seen in the Middle East.
Some leaders from a multicultural house-church plant visited our class one day. These leaders were also students at the seminary where I was working on my undergrad. I don’t remember much from their presentation, but one nugget of wisdom stuck with me and proved to be enormously helpful.
“Listen,” they said. “It’s awfully hard to be a working student who is faithful to your church and still find the time to reach out cross-culturally in this city. The busyness of life can make evangelistic friendships with internationals here very hard to fit in. But we have learned one very important lesson that’s made it more accessible.”
I leaned forward as they continued.
“It’s simply much more possible to live on mission when you are living next door to those you are seeking to reach. When we lived on campus, we found it much harder to find the margin to engage the lost. But when we moved into an apartment complex where many internationals lived, we couldn’t help but interact as a part of our daily routines. With intentionality, this actually led to friendships and chances to share the gospel.”
“Interesting,” I thought. I was a new student, kept very busy by my friendships with believers, my jobs, and my homework (especially NT Greek!). Yet I earnestly desired to find a few Middle Eastern friends with whom I could spend time and share the gospel. I already felt the difficulty of making this happen, living in a suburban-type neighborhood just off of campus in a duplex full of believers.
I took note of this piece of counsel and a few years later my new wife and I had the chance to put it into practice. We were given the chance to move into an apartment complex which had historically been one of the city’s main communities for refugee resettlement. This apartment complex had a reputation for crime and drugs, but after praying and both sensing God’s leading, we moved in.
The counsel I received several years previously proved to be sound. Engaging internationals missionally in America was indeed much more accessible when we lived next door to them and underneath them.
True, there were plenty of challenges. A gang of Somali youth tried to kick in our back door late one evening. The Cuban men shamelessly objectified any woman who dared walk down the sidewalk. We had to break up fist fights between Sudanese neighbors. One friend had a tooth punched out and another his phone stolen at gun point. And there were lots of roaches and bed bugs. Yep, we’ve had bed bugs. Multiple times (written with a shiver).
Yet there were also the chances to talk about Jesus late into the evening with Iraqis in their first year of living in the US. There were the Bible studies that incorporated Nepalese, American, Honduran, and Afghani friends. When many of our friends needed help, they could simply come by and knock on our door, or call us and we could rush over there – as when some Iranian friends called 911 because they couldn’t figure out how to turn off their central heating and needed help communicating clearly with the police that had for some reason shown up!
The first step of mission is access. In the ultra-busy life of the West, access to relationships with the lost is harder than it sounds. While not everyone is able to move into this kind of refugee community, it’s worth asking the question: Is there some way in which living in a different community might help me rub shoulders more often with the lost? Geography is not everything, but it’s one important piece that is worth thinking through as believers seek to live on mission.
Now, it’s certainly possible to have lost neighbors for years and to still not have any meaningful friendship with them. Prayer and intentional hospitality are key to tapping the potential that close geography provides. But after all, we are called to be a people who live prayerfully and intentionally in every area of life for the sake of the gospel.
Therefore, for some, that will mean moving for the sake of more natural access to your lost neighbors. It’s simply much more possible to live on mission when you are living next door to those you are seeking to reach.
I remember well the feelings of frustration and disappointment. After moving to Louisville, Kentucky, to finish school and work with Muslim refugees, four different work opportunities with ministry organizations had unexpectedly fallen through. Friends and mentors had encouraged me that these opportunities were a really good fit and surely would work out. Yet there I was, freshly back from the Middle East, jobless in a new city, and almost completely broke.
I knew the need. The Middle Eastern refugee population was woefully under-engaged by the thriving Christian community in Louisville. I knew what I had been called to, reaching Muslims with the good news of Jesus Christ. So why weren’t the pieces lining up like I had been told they would? If I were to be effective while a full-time student, I’d need the time to engage refugees that a paid ministry role provided. I wouldn’t have the opportunity I needed to go deep into the Middle Eastern community if I had to divide my week between my classes and a ‘normal’ job.
I remember pacing and praying in the upstairs apartment I’d moved into with some friends. I was alone that afternoon in the heat of a sticky Kentucky summer.
“God, you have been so clear with me about my calling, and the need is real… why aren’t you allowing this to work?”
I kept pacing, praying, and thinking. My heart did not want to reenter the secular workforce. I had a deep, inner resistance to this idea and a lot of thought-out reasons why I shouldn’t just go get a job ‘like a normal person would.’ I had a calling. God had been very clear about that. It had been demonstrated as being truly from the Lord through a year of testing it in the dust and wonder of the Middle East. So many had affirmed this and pledged willingness to support me financially.
And yet, there I was. There was no organization that would take me on and let me raise support through them to do Muslim ministry in Louisville. I was too new and unknown. Refugee ministry was not on mosts’ radars. And I was at a dead end. God was silent and I was basically penniless. Why had I made this move based on assurances and not based on an actual position offered?
It was then that this conversation started happening in my head:
“If you went to prison for Jesus in the Middle East, wouldn’t you accept that as from the Lord?”
“Well, yes, of course. That would be clear.”
“Even solitary confinement?”
“…Yes.”
“So being put in solitary confinement with no access to anyone, no one you could share the gospel with or disciple, that would still be enough?”
“Well, yes, because I would still have Jesus, and that would be enough.”
“So Jesus could call you to lose your ministry and go to solitary and you would accept that because you’d still have him.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Don’t you see? Your primary calling has never been to Muslim ministry, your primary calling has always been to Jesus.”
I stopped pacing. My brow furrowed.
“If you lost your ministry because of a season in prison, you’d still have Jesus, and you would see that as from his hand. So, what if Jesus asks you to step away from ministry now? To go out and get a normal job? Why would you not also accept that as from him? Is he not your real calling?”
Once these words were formulated in my mind, there was no undoing them. The logic was sound and biblical. I had never been called to a particular ministry in some kind of fixed, immovable way. I had only ever served at the pleasure of my king. And he was free at any point to ask me to change my role.
I would always be called to him. Other secondary callings were not forever and unchanging as this primary calling was.
What followed was peace – and a clearer view of my identity issues. Turns out I am prone to putting my identity and my value too much in my ministry, in what I do for God, in being a missionary. This is what was underneath my emotional opposition to going out and getting hired to do a typical college student kind of job. There was pride there, confusion, and some fear.
God’s plan was better. I would go on to work some good, normal jobs. I would tutor, mow lawns, paint porches, deliver furniture, deliver sandwiches – and learn hard lessons just like many of my peers of how to share the gospel with unbelieving coworkers in the workplace. I would learn how to still somehow reach out to refugees, even when I was working multiple jobs and taking a full credit load. My best friend, a refugee himself, would come to faith in this season.
When God eventually opened up paid ministry opportunities for me again, I was able to approach those roles with a greater humility and appreciation. I was also able to step into those ministries with much greater freedom, because the pressure of my value and identity was not placed on them. I knew my primary calling was to Christ and I sought to submit to the twists and turns of how he wanted me to live that out – ministry role or not. Some have said, “If God calls you to be a missionary, do not stoop to be a king.” I have learned that it’s just as true that “If God calls to to be a furniture delivery man, do not stoop to be a missionary.”
Yet I do find these old struggles cropping up again these days. Here we are, unexpectedly stuck in the US on medical leave, unable to return to Central Asia while the Covid-19 cases rage in our adopted city and region overseas. So far we’ve been unable to get permission to return due to the high-risk factors our family’s health poses. Once again, the work that we know we have been called to has been temporarily taken away.
But consider the needs! Are are we not called to plant healthy church among our Central Asian people group? Yes, but first we are called to Jesus. And he has asked us to stay put for now, to rest, to visit lots of doctors, to drink lots of iced coffee and eat lots of bacon (unavailable where we serve), and to write more than we have ever written before.
I don’t know exactly what God is doing in our extended season of transition. But I am comforted knowing that so many of us in the Church are wrestling with these very same identity issues at this time of global pandemic. I trust that God will help us to remember that our primary calling is to Jesus, and not to whatever ministry activities we may not be able to do right now.
So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” (Luke 17:10 ESV)
Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. (Luke 12:32 ESV)
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.
Frank* and Patty* were refugees from a neighboring country, but from the same people group we were focusing on. Already being political and social refugees, they added one more reason for their government to arrest them when they became followers of Jesus. We were initially cautious, waiting to see if their faith was genuine, but over time they proved to be some of the most faithful in our fledgling church plant – genuine pillars of consistency and faith.
Frank was a renaissance man, just as skilled in discussing ancient history books as he was in electrical and construction work. He was also hilarious, always ready for wordplay and practical jokes. Patty was barely literate, but a hard worker, hospitable, with a fiery temper and loyal spirit. Together with their daughter, they seemed to be a genuine household conversation, all three of them showing evidence of new life in the same season, and all three undergoing baptism together in weather so cold we joked God was preparing them to someday be missionaries to Siberia. You know it’s bad when those baptized shriek from the shock of the frigid water as they go under! But they came up alright, and after they stopped shivering, went on to laugh about their baptism waters of icy death.
Like many believers in our context, their faith for a season was demonstrated in front of their neighbors as an open secret. They showed that they were now followers of Jesus without yet stating it explicitly. To some extent, until something is verbalized in Central Asia, it is not yet acknowledged as fully real and threatening. Believers tend to witness in this way to their families for a while, talking about Jesus, reading their Bibles openly, and attending meetings with other believers. But when the direct questions come, “Have you left Islam and become a Christian?!” – that’s when the honor-shame persecution mechanisms kick in. Once it is spoken of in the bazaar, it has become reality, whether it is true or not.
One night, their neighbor took his gun and decided it was time for the truth to come out. He and his wife aggressively confronted Frank and Patty outside their house. They demanded to know if they had truly become apostates. Patty calmly and openly confessed that yes, they had indeed become true Christians and believers in Jesus. The neighbor and his wife proceeded to get even more aggressive, shouting and threatening and beginning to lay their hands on Frank and Patty.
The neighbor waved his gun in one hand and gripped Frank’s throat in the other, yelling into his face. Frank and his daughter kept their eyes on Patty, knowing that there was great danger in her fiery nature exploding on these neighbors. It had always been her personality to fight back even in response to small provocations, which here could lead to a dangerous escalation… and possibly to their deaths. So they desperately prayed. In their retelling of the situation, here’s what they said:
“We knew that she would start yelling and fighting back, but to our amazement, she was totally calm in the face of being attacked. We thought, ‘Patty has died. Who is this new woman who takes this abuse so calmly?'” Frank said this as his daughter laughed in agreement.
“It’s true!” she said. “Mom had never acted like that before!”
Patti was smiling as they said this, but you could see in her eyes that she was also deeply impacted by her experience that night.
“I have never experienced such a peace as Jesus gave me that night. It was totally different from anything I had known. I normally would have fought back! My family knows this. But instead I was so calm…” Patty said.
“It was a miracle,” their daughter said, smiling at her mom.
Frank, never one to miss the opportunity to joke around, said, “And we had just studied about persecution from Matthew 10 in the church meeting a few days before!”
Frank then rolled his eyes back and grabbed his neck with his hand, shaking his head to model what his neighbor had done, laughing while doing so.
“I just kept thinking as his hand was on my neck like this, ‘Now what was that second point of the sermon that brother AW preached? It would sure come in handy right about now! I know it was about something important in the face of persecution…'”
In spite of the seriousness of the situation, all of us laughed heartily together. What had happened was a miracle, or rather, the evidence of a miracle. The new birth had radically changed this family. Patty was calm in the face of an attack. Frank was making jokes about the death threats. Yes, they had had to flee afterward and had lost their housing – and also Frank’s job, tied as it was to the property their housing was on. Yet there they were, full of joy and laughing to the point of tears.
Sure, we often have to laugh about things like this in Central Asia as a way to cope with life in a region so full of tragedy. Haha, remember that time when you almost got blown up? But there was something else going on that evening. It was as if God’s face was shining on our friends. They had lost so much (again), yet they were full of joy, belly-laughing in the genuine blessedness that can sometimes be experienced by the persecuted.
The promises of Matthew were coming true.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:10–12)
When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. (Matthew 10:19–20)
It’s becoming somewhat well-known that many Muslims have a dream about Jesus as a part of their journey to faith. These dreams don’t save them, but they are often full of biblical language and imagery. They function as an important piece of how a Muslim comes to realize the gospel is true.
This dynamic might seem strange or suspicious to Westerners. But when we step back and take the big view of biblical history and church history, we see that God has regularly used dreams to advance his purposes. Among the faithful, spiritual dreams have not served to undermine God’s inerrant written word, which many believers are rightly concerned about.
It’s really only in the last couple hundred years in the West that spiritual dreams have become abnormal. Apparently, even the Southern Baptist Convention has a history linked to dreams. During the first Great Awakening, Shubal Stearns became the founder of the Sandy Creek Association, the Baptist church-planting movement in North Carolina that sparked the planting of Baptist churches all over the southern United States. Why did Shubal Stearns leave New England to plant churches in the South? According to the Baptist historian Gregory Wills, he had a dream where Jesus told him to. So he went to North Carolina and got to work. Church history overflows with these kinds of stories. Stearns’ story may be obscure, but Patrick’s is definitely not. Neither is the testimony of the late Nabeel Qureshi.
If God can use dreams to advance his purposes, it shouldn’t surprise us that the enemy would also seek to use dreams. It’s clear from scriptural example that God and angels have access to the dreams of believers and unbelievers (Gen 20:3, Gen 31:24, 1 Kings 3:5, Dan 2:28, Joel 2:28, Matt 2:12-13, Acts 16:9). It’s not quite as clear from scripture that the enemy has access to dreams (Deut 13, Jer 29:8), but if we remember that Satan and his demons are simply fallen angels, then by inference there is a case to be made that they also can have access to dreams. Many have certainly experienced this on the mission field.
Here is a prayer update from one of our teammates last week:
Pray for my friend. He has heard the gospel for many years and has always claimed to not care about spiritual things or eternity. Recently, he’s been straying from Islam and his mother received a dream warning her that her son was distancing himself from their faith. She confronted him, asked that he return to their faith, and he came back, more devout then ever. However, he confessed to me he is not satisfied and was disturbed by this dream. After sharing the gospel with him he now seems more open to following Jesus than ever.
What is going on when something like this happens? This young man has very close friends who are followers of Jesus who have been regularly sharing the gospel with him. Someone or something is playing serious defense. The enemy apparently sent a dream to this man’s mother, hoping that it would have the powerful effect of scaring them all back into a stricter Islam. Why would God allow this? Interestingly, it looks like this disturbing event might be used by God to make this young man even more open to Jesus than he was before. In other words, it may backfire.
Pray that it does.
We shouldn’t be overly fixated on dreams. Yet an honest survey of the scriptures, church history, and even contemporary evangelical missionaries makes a good case that we should probably find spiritual dreams somewhat normal – though always subject to testing by the word of God. Honestly, the modern propensity to make it merely psychological seems to be the outlier here.
What do we do when God or the enemy sends our friends a dream? Same as always – make a beeline to the Scriptures, share the gospel, and recommit to earnest prayer. Dreams do not save. But God does use them powerfully, and the enemy attempts to also.
Sometimes we don’t get the chance to follow up. In God’s mysterious plan, we get the chance to share spiritual truth or give scripture to someone, only to never see them again. We might never know until eternity how their story turned out. For me, the gas canister man seems to be one of those people.
Our region of Central Asia has electricity problems. To put it mildly. So natural gas (propane/LPG) canisters of the kind you see attached to a grill are a part of daily life. We use them indoors for our stoves, for space heaters in the winter, and sometimes to power water boilers. Trucks drive around our neighborhoods with loudspeakers playing ice cream truck-style tunes. But instead of a creamy chocolatey treat, you lug out your empty bottle of gas to be exchanged and waddle back inside with your new, stinky, full bottle – that hopefully didn’t get damaged when the driver threw it off the back of the truck. Yes, make a note to pray that your friends working in Central Asia don’t get carbon monoxide poisoning.
Over time, I learned that I could better schedule my gas bottle exchange and get better quality if I drove myself to the store in the bazaar where the ‘ice cream’ trucks get loaded up. There were a couple of men working at the particular store I frequented and one of them was definitely a Salafi. In our area this is a growing religious group. They adhere to a Saudi-backed understanding of Islam that seeks to return to what they believe is an earlier, purer form of Islam. This means that they are much more severe and strict in their application of Islam than your typical Muslim would be.
Salafis are visually conspicuous, sporting shorter pants than others, shaved upper lips, scraggly chin/neck beards, and usually wearing a religious hat or turban. Unlike most of their countrymen, they often insist that their wives wear gloves and the more conservative abaya or niqab, often covering all but their eyes. Salafis usually live peacefully with others, but word on the street is that they would be the first to sympathize with extremist groups were they to take power. Due to their strict adherence to Islamic law and open condescension toward the common people, they actually provide a pretty clean parallel with the pharisees when we are studying the Bible with locals.
“You know how the Salafis act, right? Well, the Pharisees were the Salafis of Jesus’ day.”
“Oooh, now we get it!”
I have certainly been guilty of writing Salafis off as those who would not be open to the gospel.
However, through several interactions with the Salafi gas canister man, I started noticing that he was actually respectful and kind to me, an obvious foreigner and infidel. One day I had my son with me as we ran our gas errand. Something about my interaction with my son made the man compliment us.
“You’re not Muslims, are you?” He then asked.
“No, we’re not. We are believers in Jesus.”
“Oh?” He responded. “You know the Bible’s been changed, right?”
“Well, the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel all contain promises that God’s word remains forever. No human is strong enough to change the words of God because God is powerful to protect his word. Just like he promised.”
The Torah (Tawrat), the Psalms (Zabur), and the Gospel (Injil) are the three parts of the Bible Muslims have heard about from the Qur’an. There is a great deal of confusion though in the Muslim world about how these three “books” relate to the Christian Bible.
To my surprise, the gas canister man didn’t dismiss my response. He was actually thinking about it.
“Yes, but you believe that Jesus is the Son of God. That is blasphemy.”
“Are you not a son of the mountains?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Well, the title ‘Son of God’ has a very deep and important spiritual meaning. It does not have a physical-sexual meaning as many think it does. ‘Son of the mountains’ doesn’t have a physical-sexual meaning either, does it?”
“No,” He continued, still thinking about what I was saying.
“Have you ever read the Bible in your own language?” I asked.
“I haven’t,” he said.
“Well, I have one with me. If you want to learn about what I mean, you should read this book. But don’t take it unless you are one who is truly thirsty for God and a genuine seeker of the truth.”
“I… would like to read it,” he said.
I went to my glove box where we kept a New Testament just in case of opportunities like this. I handed it to him and we said goodbye. I looked forward to asking him the next time I saw him if he was reading and what he was learning. But I never saw him again.
I kept coming back to the same shop, hoping to catch a glimpse of my Salafi acquaintance. But he had disappeared. Had he gotten fired for possessing a New Testament? Had he been run off by his male relatives? Or had he simply changed jobs and thrown away the precious book I had given him?
I’ve never had any clue as to what became of this man. My prayer is that he is now, somehow and somewhere, a follower of Jesus. I don’t lose sleep over this situation, but it does make me wonder about the strange providence of God. Why would I get the chance to give this man the Bible and never get a chance to follow up? This especially since there are so few believers that can lead him into understanding the book he now possesses?
In situations like this, we must simply rest in the sovereignty of God. I was allowed to play a small part in the life of the gas canister man. Maybe someday our paths will cross again. Maybe not. But we rest in the truth of John 10:16, that Jesus’ sheep will hear his voice. We get the privilege to be a small part of that story, whether we sow, whether we water, whether we reap.
If you read this post, pray for the salvation of the Salafi gas canister man.
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.
Many of us have simplistic understandings of persecution in the beginning. We latch onto radical ideas like “persecution purifies the church” and “the blood of the martyrs is seed” and perhaps we even long for persecution to come to our own churches so that we can experience these things. The reality is woefully more complicated.
The scriptures call persecution blessing when it is for Jesus and the gospel’s sake (Matt 5:10). But they also command us to pray for peaceful, quiet lives, free from persecution (1 Tim 2:2). They hold up examples of how God worked mightily through persecution (Acts 11:19), and tell us that it is inevitable for the godly (1 Tim 3:12), then they offer us warnings which reflect the first century believers who were getting persecuted because of their own sin, not because of Jesus (1 Pet 2:20). Even then it was complicated. The presence of persecution is not the fix-all some think it is. It actually makes the normal life and mission of the church very difficult, and sometimes impossible.
Here’s why I ask that you pray that God end persecution in places like Central Asia and that you also pray that if he doesn’t, he will grant the strength for believers to endure faithfully.
When we look at the history of the Church, we see a mixed result in contexts of persecution. Sometimes the church thrives and spreads like wildfire. Other times it is exterminated. Persecution led to the ascendancy of Christianity in the Roman empire. But next door in the Parthian/Sassanian/Islamic empires, it led to its eventual death. While we have examples like the house church movement in China, we also have examples like the Anabaptists of the Protestant Reformation. While some who fled west ended up surviving, those who fled east were never able to find refuge and were entirely killed off. Or what of the almost immediate extinction of Christianity in North Africa after the rise of Islam? Ever heard of the ancient church of Socotra? It existed for hundreds of years before finally disappearing. How do we make sense of these histories alongside of the heroic stories of Christian witness under Roman paganism or under communism? If we read church history we inescapably find that sometimes God allows persecution to be a spur for revival, but other times God allows it to be that which kills off an entire movement.
I started to get a taste for the complexities of persecution when it started happening to my own Middle Eastern/Central Asian friends. For a number of years I worked with refugees in the US. I was thrilled to find out that many of the Iranian refugees being resettled in my city were religious asylum-seekers. I had heard tales of the underground movement to Christ taking place in Iran. These refugee claimed to have left Islam, experienced persecution, and to have become Christians. The UN had now granted them a new life in the West. But my experiences with most of these Iranians were very disheartening. In the beginning they showed some desire to study the Bible and join a church, but the vast majority stopped showing interest after they figured out that the government wasn’t watching them and making sure they were attending church and staying true to their claim of being Christians. Once they realized it was not advantageous to be a Christian in America, they quickly abandoned their faith and lost themselves in materialism, drug use, or homosexuality. One close friend still possessed the blindfold put on him when he was imprisoned for being a leader-in-training in an Iranian house church. But this experience made him feel superior to other Christians and he balked at the idea of submitting himself to the accountability of a Christian community. So many Iranians quickly abandoned their faith after arriving in the West that the Iranian community passed around comics about it on social media. It was becoming well-known that (alongside a few who were genuine in their faith) a vast multitude was using Jesus to get a visa and then abandoning him as soon as they could.
My friends who came to faith after arriving in the US and I began to develop a serious skepticism towards refugees who showed up as formerly-Muslim Christian refugees. So many of them ended up falling away, consumed by the temptations and freedoms of the West. I started to learn that there were many ungodly reasons that people would identify with Jesus, even in contexts of persecution. Some identified as Christians out of a hatred of Islam, not out of a love for Jesus. Some did it as a way to stick it to their oppressive government or to display their attraction to Western culture. Some did it for promises of a salary and tickets to attend Christian conferences. Again, many did it simply as the ticket to a better life.
The UN was and is on to this dynamic. Their interviewers (most of them pagan) devise many kinds of methods to try to discern whether someone has truly become a Christian or not. But lacking spiritual eyes themselves, they are inept at recognizing the new birth. Instead, they rely heavily on signed baptism certificates, which has created an underground industry of sorts, where “seekers” approach churches or missionaries in the Middle East in pursuit of the coveted piece of paper. Some churches issue these freely, deciding that it’s not worth the effort to walk with someone until they can truly vouch for their faith. Others, like me and my coworkers, refuse to issue these certificates on principle, much to the consternation of local believers who, because of the UN requirement, believe we’re somehow denying them something integral to Christianity.
The presence of historic ethnic Christians in our part of the world also complicates the picture. The historic churches of the East lost the gospel a long time ago and have fallen into a system of religious patrilineage. This means you automatically inherit the faith of your father; you really have no other option. “I’m a Honda, you’re a Toyota, we can’t change that,” is how one ethnic Christian responded to one of my friends who had come to faith out of Islam. Ethnic Christians in the Middle East and Central Asia believe they are Christians because of their blood and because of their infant baptism. They cannot tell you what the gospel is. The overwhelming majority do not know that they must be born again and believe the gospel for themselves. This message has been buried under centuries of tradition, religiosity, and syncretism. If any do come to faith and begin to read the Bible for themselves, they are persecuted by their own community, just as might happen to a Muslim coming to faith. When the term “Christian” is used in our part of the world, it means a certain ethnicity, not a faith that transcends ethnicity. Therefore, missionaries had to come up with a tragic new term: CBBs, Christian-Background Believers.
Unfortunately, evangelical organizations that serve the persecuted and mobilize prayer do not deal with this distinction publicly at all. I’ll read reports written by evangelical Westerners about thousands of Christians experiencing persecution in a certain parts of the Middle East and Central Asia, when the reality is the number of true Christians is in the hundreds, if that. Where are they finding these thousands of supposed Christians? There are no “Christian villages,” unless they are referring to the ethnic Christian villages where they run off those who become born again for going against the traditions of their fathers. Is it tragic that ethnic minority Christians are experiencing persecution? Absolutely. But if you don’t tell your audience that they’re not actually believers, that many actually despise evangelicals, they will fail to pray as they should – that God would be merciful and save them out of their dead Christianity, alongside of ending the persecution. Many who have been killed and proclaimed martyrs by these evangelical organizations sadly never knew Jesus. They trusted in their father’s blood instead of Christ’s. This is worthy of great lament.
When our friends from a Muslim background believe, they often experience moderate persecution. By this I mean they lose jobs, get kicked out of their homes, and lose marriage prospects. Occasionally they experience severe persecution and are physically beaten, experience house arrest, or credible death threats. We know of two or three among our people group that have died for their faith. But even in the midst of these tragic things, those experiencing persecution are often brand new in their faith, and it becomes awfully hard to discern whether their father beat them because of Jesus or because they were simply disrespectful punks in taking their dad’s car to church when he told them not to. Many experience persecution because of brave, but reckless attacks against Islam. If they would focus on Jesus and the gospel more and stop talking so much about Mohammad’s child bride, their relatives might not get so angry and violent. Diving into the real causes of persecution and whether or not someone is inflating their story is woefully difficult – not to mention hurtful to those whose claims are legitimate. But what else is to be done? So many have been played by those who knew how to spin a good tale.
We want to err on the side of mercy, but if Westerners are too quick to intervene they can actually make it worse, facilitating a “believer drain” that prevents the local church from being able to take root. Once persecution escalates, a missionary or pastor find themselves in a minefield of less than ideal options. Each case can become all-consuming and difficult decisions must be made about if/when to intervene, when to wait and pray, how to provide emergency housing, whether to facilitate a way out of the country (which entails visas, tickets, housing, food) – and all of this when other local believers are divided and skeptical about the situation themselves. In a place without a network of local churches, a need exists to develop a persecution infrastructure that can respond when first-generation believers lose their housing, their jobs, or are in physical danger. But the logistics, money, and time needed to pull something like this off is daunting. So proactive persecution response tends to get put on the back burner until the next crisis, when the missionary is faced once again with the bad choice of doing nothing or harboring a new believer secretly in their own home.
While some local believers are set free from their fear by experiencing public persecution, others buckle, compromise, and even apostatize. One young man whose baptism I attended immediately recanted his faith after his father found out, threatened him with death, and then bribed him with the cash value of their house to return to Islam. They then both proceeded to hold his younger brother, a genuine believer, at knife-point while threatening his life. Another promising leader-in-training experienced brutal persecution from his coworkers and tribe, and managed to make it through with his faith intact, but the experience caused him to abandon the small church he had committed to help lead. Out of fear, many local believers have committed to never gather with other locals for worship, but only with foreigners – thus making church planting impossible.
Persecution is woefully complicated. And yet God uses persecution for the advance of his church. Does this mean I should pray for more persecution? No, just as I shouldn’t pray for more physical suffering because God uses that for my sanctification. Should we pray for “stronger backs to endure” as Brother Yun says? Yes, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pray for the persecution to stop as well. It’s a both/and, a fiery furnace type of prayer where we call on God for deliverance because he is able, and we proclaim that he will sustain us even ifnot.
We must never let persecution stop the spread of the gospel, and this requires a dogged commitment to be faithful unto death. Persecution can be a form of blessing, which purifies our faith. Yet seasons of peace are also a blessing, one which the Bible commands us to seek, where the church has time to do the deep work of discipleship, leadership development, and the sending of missionaries. The blood of the martyrs is seed, but let’s not make that formulaic. The seed will inevitably sprout, but that might or might not happen in this age; It will with all certainty happen in the age to come.
In the meantime, pray for the persecuted Church. And pray for those of us who are trying to plant churches in contexts of persecution. We are not sufficient for these things. Yet we pray to a Lord who is. He alone can untangle the heart-breaking complexities of persecution and weave them into glory.
There are some passages of scripture that we tend to merely skim before quickly moving on. For me, the genealogies were definitely that kind of content. Sure, I believed that all scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching and instructing in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16). But it was awfully hard for me to see how the genealogies would actually impact my life as a believer or be relevant in evangelism. “Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram” is not exactly the inspirational material that typically shows up on Christian embroideries. Sure, the genealogies served an important historical purpose, but I assumed that was about it. I would be proved powerfully wrong.
When my friend *Hama agreed to read the Bible with me, we started in the book of Matthew, probably for the simple reason that it was the first book in the New Testament which I had given him in his language (The Old Testament wouldn’t be published for another 8 years). As a twenty-year-old new to the Middle East, this would be my first time studying the Bible with a Muslim friend. So why not start with Matthew?
I was not expecting the first half of the first chapter to deal such a blow to my friend’s worldview.
“Bro,” Hama said. “Jesus is incredible.”
“I agree. But why do you say that?” I replied.
“Look at his family line… look at all of the prophets in his line. There are so many, starting all the way back at Abraham. Bro, I never knew this.”
“And?” I was not understanding why we shouldn’t just take note of this neat historical content and move on the meatier portions.
Hama’s eyes had that far-off look he got whenever his mind was working hard. He seemed conflicted.
“…Mohammad doesn’t have a family line like this… he doesn’t have any kind of lineage to compare to this.” Hama was disturbed.
I didn’t know this at the time, but genealogy, specifically thefather-line (patrilineage) is a cornerstone of Middle Eastern and Central Asian identity. You are who your fathers were. Their honor and their shame is imputed to you and your success and the success of your descendants depends on being able to draw upon an honorable reputation rooted in ancestry. A traditional Middle Easterner must be able to name their male ancestors at least to the seventh generation. Even though this is becoming a little less common among the modern and urbanized, it still is a primary lens through which people understand who they are and who others are. Your father-line makes a claim about you; it is a message in itself.
Hama was seeing something in Matthew in his first reading that I had never seen despite many years of devotions in Matthew, sermons, and bible classes. His Middle Eastern culture was helping him to understand implications of the text that I had missed as an American raised in Melanesia. In this and many other areas, Hama’s culture was not too far off from Jewish New Testament culture. He saw Matthew 1:1-17 as a devastating blow against what he had been taught his whole life – that Mohammad’s lineage was just as strong as that of the other prophets.
Yes, Islam maintains that Mohammad was descended from Abraham via Ishmael, but from Ishmael to Mohammad spans over two thousand years of plain old human without a whiff of inspired revelation. But Jesus, his line contained Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, David, and Solomon! And all of them descendants of Abraham through Isaac’s line, not Ishmael’s. Jesus’ claims therefore to be The Prophetof Prophets are bolstered by this amazing pedigree. Mohammad’s seeming emergence out of nowhere six hundred years later as “the seal of the prophets,” in this light, appears to be unnatural and not in keeping with how God acted in history – always sending his prophets through Isaac’s line and with a strong prophetic father-line.
It was a blow that shook Hama’s world. It’s easy to take for granted religious claims that everyone around you simply repeats your whole life. But when faced for the first time with a compelling counter-claim, that’s when we get a true sense of just how strong a case our belief actually has. Sure, everyone in the bazaar says that Mohammad’s descent from the prophets legitimized his claims. But Matthew, in a thoroughly Middle Eastern way, had just thrown down the gauntlet.
It wasn’t the only way in which God would vindicate the gospel’s truth to my friend Hama, the jaded wedding musician. But it was a powerful start. One that I at least had never anticipated. Yet this is exactly what happens when we work through scripture with those who are different from us. We see new aspects of the text’s meaning, not different meaning, but insights uniquely apparent to those from other cultures. The diamond gets turned to reveal new beauty that was there all along. The Holy Spirit uses passages we gloss over as the vehicle for his convicting work. This argues, by the way, for the importance of working through books of the Bible systematically in our cross-cultural evangelism and discipleship – we just don’t know where exactly in the text the lightning is going to strike. And it may be where you never expected it.
I read this week that Qantas has retired its last Boeing 747, the plane known as “the queen of the skies.” The queen retired with flair, drawing a kangaroo in the sky.
Since I grew up in Melanesia, the first 747 I remember seeing belonged to Qantas. It was a rainy night, probably in the Sydney airport. I was an almost five-year-old. I remember staring out the huge windows at an airplane of mythical proportions, a large red and white kangaroo logo emblazoned on the tail, shining in the rain and the flashing lights of the airport’s activity. In the mysterious ways that memory works, I actually remember it being a triple-decker plane, not a double-decker as it must have been. I spent years wondering why I no longer saw any planes with three levels, like I had seen in Australia. Eventually I realized that I must have seen it as larger than it actually was, time inflating the size of things in the style of the film, Big Fish.
I believe it was also a 747 that we took back to the US on that trip. My father had just passed away and we had packed up and left our host country without knowing what the future held. The pilot somehow heard about our situation and let my brothers and me come up and see the cockpit during the flight, an awfully kind and pre-9/11 gesture for him to make. At that age everything about flying was magical, the in-flight meals, the little toothbrush kits, and the ability to sleep curled up comfortably on the floor. I still love flying, though now I often feel less of the magic and more like an awkward T-rex crammed into a small metal tube (Plus we now have three little rex-lings to keep occupied, or at least kept from dumping their food trays and throwing up, which certainly changes the experience a bit).
I remember stepping onto the jet bridge in my flip-flops as we disembarked from that flight, crunching the snow let in at the jet bridge seam. I had never seen snow before. I took one last look back through the window at the front of the huge plane. Alas, it may be too late for me to ever get to fly on that mysterious upper level of the 747. But I am grateful for how that plane was used to ferry so many missionary families like mine back and forth from the field. Who knows how many thousands arrived safely to their fields of service through the common grace of the 747.
Farewell, graceful queen and sturdy vessel of my childhood travels. Like the steamships that took a previous generation of my forebears to their overseas labors, you also will be missed.
Darius* and I were meeting in a cafe to conduct an informal baptism interview. Leaning on things I had learned as a young pastor in the US, I was asking questions to gauge his understanding of the gospel and of baptism, looking for clear evidence of repentance and life change, and also casting a vision for local church commitment – the absence of which is the kryptonite of church planting among our people group.
“Darius, you know that many who come to faith among your people refuse to gather with other believers. They refuse to commit to a church body and instead try to follow Jesus on their own. Because of this choice they can never become mature believers and the church cannot be built up and multiply here. It’s a tragic thing.”
“Yes,” Darius nodded.
I continued, “When you get baptized you are not only proclaiming your commitment to Jesus, but you are also proclaiming your commitment to his people, the Church, Christ’s bride.”
Darius continued nodding in affirmation.
“Darius, I know there are many reasons why other local believers are afraid to gather with others to worship Jesus and to be the church… but in order to obey Jesus, we must be committed to do this, no matter what. If you say you are ready to get baptized, are you also ready to commit to gathering with a body of believers for the rest of your life, even if things get bad?”
Darius looked at me, a little puzzled.
Then he asked, “Why would I stop gathering with other believers? It’s because of the church that I became convinced that the message of the gospel must be true. When I saw your lives, how different all of you are, when I saw your relationships with one another (and here he cycled through the names of our small church plant of locals and foreigners), that’s when I knew the gospel was true.”
Darius was speaking as if what he was saying was the most obvious thing in the world, seemingly unaware of just how rare this stand was among local believers.
“I am a believer because of the church. So of course, I will gather with a church for the rest of my life, no matter what happens.”
There it was, Darius had taken his stand. I wanted to ask him to say it again, or at least to stand up and give him a big bear hug. After three years of pleading with local believing friends to gather with others, and mostly failing to convince them to actually do so, here for the first time was a brother who simply knew it deep down in his spiritual bones – to be a believer means to not forsake the assembly. Here was evidence that if exposed to a gathering of the saints early on, a local could actually have the importance of church as part of his new-believer DNA. Here was a fulfillment of the Bible’s promises about the power of The Church Observed. It was like stumbling onto water while traveling through the desert. It was wonderful.
We were departing soon for the US, and we were asked to plan to move to a new city after our return. But our last time worshiping with Darius and the other believers included a kiddie pool in a kitchen. Darius confessed his faith in Jesus and in the presence of witnesses went under the water and came back out again, his spiritual death and life in Christ now made visible through the waters of baptism.
To this day Darius has kept his commitment to Jesus and also to his bride, the church. May the Lord raise up an army like him.
Disclaimer: My hope in telling this story is not to stoke controversy. Christian freedom exists for the sake of love, not for the sake of freedom itself. The issue of alcohol is one in which many believers will come down on different sides, and that is OK. Let everyone be fully convinced in his own mind (Rom 14:5). I currently work for an organization that asks all of us to abstain from alcohol, and I do so willingly for the sake of the gospel. This story, however, tells how my first beer was among my Muslim friends, also for the sake of the gospel (and while with a different org). Theologically, I am bound by my conscience to thread the needle as I am convinced the Scriptures do: alcohol consumption can be done to the glory of God, but drunkenness is a sin. If it can be done for the sake of love and with a heart of gratitude, then it is good. If it becomes a master over us, it should be cut off. Believers, even within the same church, should have different practices based on these principles and their own consciences and struggles. My current abstention still gives me the opportunity to talk about gospel love and freedom, just as my first partaking did. How exactly did having a beer lead to gospel conversation with my Muslim friends? Read on and you will see.
It was late winter/early spring in 2008. I was a few months into my gap year away from college and working in the Middle East/Central Asia. My friendship with Hama*, whom I met in the music shops of the bazaar, was going deeper. We had hung out a number of times, in the bazaar, in the tea houses, and in the old public bathhouse – a cultural remnant in that part of the Middle East passed down from the Turks, who themselves passed it down from the Byzantines, who in turn got it from the Romans.
Hama and his circle of friends were not the kind of crowd I would have anticipated clicking with, myself a not particularly musical college kid who grew up a Baptist in Melanesia. They, on the other hand, were jaded wedding musicians. Wedding musicians, because their work consisted primarily of providing live music at local weddings, where local tradition demanded traditional melodies set to a techno beat by which the wedding guests could perform their hours of circular line dancing. Jaded, because Islam teaches that their work is unclean and forbidden. The mullahs (religious teachers) were not happy about the music itself, the way unmarried men and women held hands while dancing, and the way in which the continuation of this local culture put the people’s tradition in tension with Islam at every single wedding.
Given their reputation as sinners and drinkers, the wedding musicians were regularly denounced publicly by the mullahs in their Friday sermons, while these same teachers secretly approached them after hours to find out how they could contact loose women to sleep with. Surprise, self-righteousness and a system of works salvation always breed secret sin. Hama and his friends had a front-and-center view of this. So they were jaded, jaded by Islam and the hypocrisy of its leaders, and jaded by their destiny to be themselves bad Muslims just so that they could provide for their families. Yet what was to be done about it?
I initially didn’t think that Hama was very interested in spiritual things. He often railed against religious people, which left me unsure of how to share about my faith in Jesus. I had also received training that perhaps over-emphasized the need to earn the right to speak, which meant I felt I had to spend a long time demonstrating that I was different before I should verbally share the gospel. I later understood the importance of leading with the gospel in my relationships, but at this point, I was struggling to know when and how to speak with Hama about Jesus, and hoping and praying for a good opening. And listening, so much listening. Hama had a lot of processing to do after having returned to his homeland a year before, after six years as a refugee in the UK.
I remember the day the invitation came. Hama and his friends were going on a picnic in the mountains. They were going to bring the sunflower seeds and the fruit and the other essentials – and they wanted me to come and, specifically, to have a beer with them. Up to this point, I had dodged this issue as most of our time was spent in contexts where tea was the beverage. And while ungodly amounts of sugar were used in the tea, and it was strong, even addictive, I had been able to partake. But alcohol was a different matter. By this point, I had theologically arrived at the point where I believed that alcohol was permissible for some, but I was going to play it safe. Why take the risk? Why play with fire? That was where I hoped to stay. Before actually living in the Middle East, I had always thought that a life of ministry to Muslims meant abstaining from alcohol forever for the sake of witness. And I was ready to do that. Yet as I mulled over Hama’s invitation, I started to become conflicted.
Many of the normal, working people of our city drank alcohol, in spite of being Muslims. In fact, the majority of the men that I knew were social drinkers. The only ones who seemed to religiously abstain were the mullahs and their devotees – the Pharisees of the society, the whitewashed tombs, the self-righteous hypocrites. Who was I supposed to identify with? Would Jesus have a beer with the jaded wedding musicians? What am I supposed to do with the wedding at Cana and the fact that Jesus had a reputation as a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners? I committed it to prayer and chewed on it. What about my Christian friends in Melanesia, whose churches make this a hard and fast line for Christians? Nevertheless, as I prayed and thought it over, I felt that I should take Hama up on his invitation, that I should attempt to honor him and his friends by accepting their hospitality, even when it came to a beer, for the sake of Jesus, for the sake of love. Perhaps this could be a small way to demonstrate that they were not too far gone for God to still care about them. The savior had not come for the righteous, but for the sinners. I had become convinced that Jesus would indeed share a beer with the jaded Muslim wedding musicians.
So I went with Hama and his friends on their picnic in the mountains. I had my first beer ever while surrounded by Muslims in a country with a reputation for terrorism and Islamic extremism. Providence is not without a sense of irony. I choked it down and lamented the taste, but I didn’t regret the decision. As it turned out, beer would be the very thing that led to breakthrough in talking to Hama about Jesus.
Several weeks later, I was sitting with Hama in some kind of a restaurant-bingo hall. We were eating salty chickpea soup and losing consecutive matches of bingo when Hama held up his beer for us to look at.
“You know, the mullahs say that it’s not just the act of drinking this, it’s the substance itself that is unclean… What do you think about this? I’ve been watching the way you live, and you’re different from my friends in the UK and my friends here. You seem to be very religious, but in a different way. What do you think about alcohol being unclean?”
Here was my opening to share with Hama, the first time he had asked an open-ended question like this about my faith.
“Well, Jesus in the Injil (NT) teaches that it’s not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, it’s what comes out of him. It’s not all this external stuff like food and drink and clothing and beards that are the problem; it’s the evil desires in our hearts that come out of us in evil words and actions. True religion is about the heart, not about all these externals.”
That was it. That was all I got to share. One of Hama’s friends came and interrupted us, and I didn’t have an opportunity to revisit the topic that evening. But the next time we saw each other, two weeks later, Hama leaned over to me, wearing a more serious expression than was typical for him.
“Bro, I’ve been thinking for the past two weeks about what you said that night. About true cleanness and uncleanness. I want to know – can you teach me and my family the Bible? Would you want to do that?”
I tried to keep the surprised joy and excitement in my heart from exploding onto my face.
“Sure, um, I can do that.” Play it cool, man, play it cool. When I remembered that I’m pretty bad at hiding my excitement, I made an exit to the bathroom where I could be by myself, shout for joy, and praise God. One small nugget of truth, one small idea of scripture (about alcohol, no less), that’s all it took for the Holy Spirit to move in my friend’s heart.
When Hama dropped me off that night, I ran inside to get him a New Testament in his language. He gladly accepted it, and we agreed to discuss it the next time we met. Somehow, in the strange providence of God, He had used something I had never expected, beer, to be the breakthrough for studying the Bible with Hama. Hama later came to faith. We went on to use the presence of alcohol at mountain picnics and evening garden gatherings to be a regular springboard for evangelism with his friends. Jesus was faithful to work in Hama in the slow process of sanctification. Years later, he came under conviction that alcohol had too much mastery in his life, and he gave it up entirely.
Hama now lives in another country, and I live in a different city. But I still bring up what Jesus teaches about true cleanness and uncleanness whenever the subject of alcohol comes up among my Muslim friends, many of whom are eager to learn whether I drink or not. And now that I am under an agreement and don’t drink, I still get to proclaim gospel truth to them when I explain why I don’t: If God gives us a clean heart through faith in Jesus, then all foods are clean for us, and we are free to partake or not to partake for the sake of love.
The gospel is utterly different from man-made religion. Instead of working to cleanse ourselves of sin and shame, God gives us a new heart, which transforms everything. We proclaim this message with words, and we strive to model this with our actions and our choices. And that’s why my first beer was among my Muslim friends.
Entrusted to the Dirt 