They would never see it coming. No class would sneak off for their senior trip during the festive and lucrative Independence Day celebration. Yet that was exactly our plan, at least the first part of it. There were layers to our sneakiness. We would indeed skip out on Independence Day, but then we’d also pass the whole thing off as what was known as a fake senior sneak. Once everyone was convinced it wasn’t the real thing and that we were just spending the night somewhere nearby, we’d get on a plane and be gone for real. It was, in the language of Dune, “a feint within a feint within a feint.”
At our missionary kid school in Melanesia, the senior sneak was a proud annual tradition. Eleventh graders would work hard all year long hosting skate nights, cafe and restaurant nights, selling frozen burger patties, and doing other fundraisers in order to afford one secret and epic senior trip. Since we were living in Melanesia, the options were either to leave our school in the highlands to fly to one of the tropical coastal cities or even to take a trip to Australia. My class opted to stay in-country and go to a beautiful area none of us had ever been to, one famous not only for its peaceful and beautiful beaches but also for a historic WWII naval battle that took place nearby.
We planned to sneak during our school’s Independence Day festival because that was the one day no one would ever suspect. During the festival, each class set up booths and games to raise money for their class projects – picture fundraising activities like grease poles, dunking booths, and fake wedding booths where you could pay to have two very embarrassed classmates “married.” I remember one year cracking up as two mortified students were ceremoniously dressed up in ridiculous costumes and my older brother (the “reverend” that year) pronounced them man and wife, followed by a mournful tune on his trombone.
Anyway, the assumption would be that we’d need to work on Independence Day in order to raise more funds for our class trip. But we must have done a good job in our junior year’s work because these funds weren’t necessary for us to pull off a combined fake sneak and real sneak in one.
Our parade float was the first thing that gave any clue of our intentions that morning. Our float vehicle was a pickup truck. But instead of members of our class riding it in float-themed costumes, the truck bed had a bunch of life-sized cardboard cutouts waving out at the crowd. Each cardboard stand-in was wearing one of our class shirts and had the face of someone from our class glued onto it, grinning mischievously. On the sides and the back of the truck were large signs that read simply, “We Snuck!”
Layer one. The crowd saw the float going around and chuckled. “Clever! But surely they wouldn’t sneak, today of all days.” Slowly, the crowd realized that there were no twelfth graders anywhere. “Did they actually sneak?” By that time we, along with our class advisors, had been smuggled out of the base in big vans, heads down and giggling, trying to make sure that no one who just happened to be on the wrong side of the base that morning would spot our getaway.
Layer two. Once we escaped unnoticed, our destination was the one nice hotel in the nearby provincial capital town, named after the national bird. We would spend the day at “The Bird,” swimming at the pool and enjoying burgers and milkshakes. Meanwhile, our co-conspirators back at the base would spread the word that the seniors had been spotted at the hotel, clearly enjoying an overnight fake sneak. Everyone would laugh and assume that we would be back on base the next morning. But we had packed our bags for an entire week.
Layer three. The next morning, rather than drive back to the base, we drove to the airport and boarded a small Dash 8 plane to make our way to the nation’s capital city. We’d spend a day and a night there. While there, we visited a gold refinery, toured the one TV station in the whole country, and had dinner at a posh seaside restaurant. I remember ordering a massive mud crab for dinner, just for kicks. Its bright red color matched my gaudy red button-up and red lens sunglasses. Alas, the things we do when we are seventeen.
Layer four. The next morning we boarded another small plane to travel to our final destination. I was class president and I was thoroughly pleased at how well we had tricked everyone. Surely, how we snuck would long be spoken of in our school lore. The plans had gone off without a hitch and I for one didn’t think that there were any surprises left.
We were all settled into our seats but the plane seemed to be waiting for one last passenger. Someone stepped onto the plane. It was another American high school kid. That’sstrange, I thought to myself. He looked oddly familiar. Suddenly I jumped up, realizing who it was. He came down the aisle, beaming, and we gave one another a huge bear hug – and then we cried a little.
It was one of my best friends. His family had left unexpectedly during our junior year, his dad suddenly caught in ministry-ending scandal. When they had left we’d all wept together at the airport, not thinking we’d see each other for years to come. It was terrible. Another close friend was unexpectedly gone, our friendship cut off by some of the hardest of circumstances.
Somehow, our class advisors had managed to be even sneakier than we were. They had arranged for him to come all the way from the States to join us for our senior trip. Now he would get to be with us during the trip we’d worked so hard for together.
It was one of the best surprises of my life.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
If there is one restaurant that my family misses the most from Central Asia, it would be Curious Kebab. The name of the restaurant comes from the first name of its owner, his name being a local language term that I’m here translating as highly curious. But its semantic range also includes concepts such as excited, passionate, highly anticipating, etc. All of these possible definitions would be appropriate when describing how my family feels about this particular culinary establishment. We – and the others we’ve converted – feel that it’s the tastiest kebab spot in the whole country – if not the world.
If you were to visit me in the city we last lived in, and we were to set up a lunch meeting, I would definitely suggest we go to Curious Kebab together. Here’s what that would be like.
First, I would send you the pin for our old stone house on the northern edge of the bazaar. Neighborhood street names and house numbers are a fairly new thing, so most locals don’t use them and they’re not yet integrated into things like Google Maps. It’s better to just send a pin. Once you’ve arrived, I’ll come out of our courtyard gate and undo the chains strung up on our street, the neighborhood’s vain attempt to keep bazaar shoppers from taking over all our street parking. Once we’ve got you parked, ideally underneath the excellent shade of a sabahbah tree to protect your car from the heat, we’ll head downhill on foot toward the center of the bazaar.
We’ll most likely take Soapmakers Street, since that’s the quickest route, about an eight-minute walk. These days there’s no longer any soap being made here. Instead, the street is full of shops that sell birds, makers and sellers of traditional clothing and shoes, hardware shops, a smattering of tea houses full of old men, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. We’ll also pass a small hotel where we once had a short-term team stay. They’ve got a pet falcon in the lobby and very affordable prices, but all their rooms do have burns in the carpet from hookah use and are squatty-potty only.
Soapmakers Street is mostly trafficked by men and has narrow, uneven sidewalks. So, if there are women in our group or small kids, or if we need more protection from the sun or rain, we’ll instead walk down a different street a few blocks to the West, which I’ll call Juicemaker Street. This street is full of small fruit juice cafes, pharmacies, and shops that sell women’s clothing or jewelry. If anyone needs some gut strengthening before our kebab lunch, we might stop for a cup of fresh pomegranate juice. Most of the pedestrians on this main artery of the bazaar are women – about half with heads covered and half not – and the sidewalks are broad, even, and mostly shaded, which makes for a more relaxed experience for any ladies or kids in our group.
The arteries of the bazaar are set up roughly like a spider web, with the main roads leading down toward the old center. At the center of the bazaar is an impressive old colonial administrative building with statues and gardens. This faces the center of the intersection, where there’s a small covered pagoda of sorts which has been used in the past by traffic police but also used by dictatorial governments to hang dissidents. This center area of the bazaar is typically bustling with shoppers and sellers, traffic moving more slowly than the pedestrians, and the sounds of street musicians playing traditional melodies. If there are protestors, this is usually their destination, with the security police and their tear gas hard on their heels. But most days it’s a happy and energetic place, humming away under a massive painting of the mustachioed sheikh who led an uprising against the colonizers.
Just off of this intersection, there’s a small network of alleys, right at the corner of Soapmakers Street and the street named after the legendary blacksmith tied to our people’s origin myth. A small fruit and veggie sellers area congests the opening to this alley, so we would weave through the carts piled up with produce and duck into the first alley. After passing a dry cleaner and some shops selling CDs and electronic gadgets, we’d come upon another alley flanked by a bakery on the right and a tea shop on the left. A few paces up this tiled alley brings us to Curious Kebab.
Curious Kebab has its kitchen grill area visible through large glass windows that we can see as we approach. The windows display rows of sword-like skewers with ground lamb pressed on them and narrower skewers of chicken or beef chunks. There are also skewers lined up of bright red tomatoes. We can also see the furnace grill built into the back wall where the meat is cooked. We can see the small crew of two or three who work in this area, chopping vegetables, preparing the meat, and turning over skewers on the grill. This is usually where the man himself, Mr. Curious, will spot us.
“My American donkeys!” he will likely holler upon spotting us. Then he’ll come out, laughing, and give us fist bumps with his mincemeat-splattered hands.
This is a running joke between Mr. Curious and me and my friends. Our Central Asian people group finds donkeys downright hilarious and also somewhat disgraceful. The term donkey can be used both as a terrible insult and as an affectionate term, depending on how you are using it and for whom. To tell my best friend he’s a male donkey means I think he is brave and fearless – a Chad in contemporary internet parlance. But call someone a donkey, son of a donkey, and you better be ready for a fight. Mr. Curious, to have fun with all of this, has decorated Curious Kebab with pictures and artwork of donkeys on every wall. Somewhere along the line he started referring to us repeat foreign customers as his American donkeys. Because his eyes light up when he says this, and because he calls himself a donkey as well, it’s clear that for him this is meant as a backhanded term of endearment.
Mr. Curious, after greeting us warmly in his British-accented English, will insist that we go inside and find a spot to sit down. Inside the two small adjoining rooms that make up the restaurant, we’ll look for an open table and crowd around it. Because Curious Kebab makes excellent kebab and is only open for lunch, it’s almost always packed. We’ll need to wave down the server and tell him what we want. I highly recommend the spicy garlic kebab, a skewer of minced lamb meat with garlic and green jalapeño in it. It’s not very spicy by the standards of other cultures but does have a little bit of kick to it. This is the kebab that I and others claim to be the best in the country.
Mr. Curious worked in restaurants in the UK for over a decade and thus became one of the only local chefs willing to use garlic in his grilling, something that gives his kebabs their distinct flavor. This, and the fact that he only uses local sheep, specifically, the special lump of fat they have above their tails that other breeds of sheep don’t have. This fat is mixed in with the kebab meat and gives it a rich, buttery flavor. If you’d rather have chunks of chicken or beef (or liver) you can’t go wrong there either. Even when it comes to these, Mr. Curious’ special marinade sets them apart in terms of tenderness and flavor.
After ordering, a teenage boy will come by and ask if we would like to order any yogurt water to drink with our meal. If you order one, it will arrive in a personal silvery bowl for you to sip it from. Another server will bring fresh flatbread to our table and give each of us a plate of sliced radishes, lemons, onions, and garden herbs. After about ten minutes, our grilled meat will be ready and we’ll be set to eat. We will likely be the only ones in the restaurant that day to bow our heads and thank God for the food, so we’ll probably get a few curious looks as we do this. The other patrons of the restaurant are locals, but from all over the socioeconomic spectrum. Important-looking men in suits eat here, but so do builders, singers, and teachers. Each one seems to glance at the others a little warily, seemingly worried that their favorite hole-in-the-wall might be getting a little too well-known.
The kebab will be delivered on the plate and already off the skewer. But if you ordered chunks of meat it will come still on the skewer, so you’ll need to grab a piece of flatbread and use it to slide the steaming meat off of the skewer and onto your plate. Most locals will then proceed to enjoy their meal by tearing off a soft piece of the flatbread and using it to scoop some meat into their mouths. I like to mix in some onions or herbs into this bread bite as well. The result is fantastic.
During the meal we can speak with a measure of freedom about ministry stuff, though we’ll need to be careful in case there are English speakers eating nearby. But mostly the other patrons seem more interested in guzzling down their delicious lunch than in trying to figure out what the foreigners are talking about. Still, depending on our surroundings we may be able to talk with great freedom or need to wait until we’re somewhere more private to talk about “M” (missions) stuff.
After we’ve enjoyed our meal, Mr. Curious or one of the servers will come by and ask if we’d like to finish off the meal with the customary small glass of black sugary chai. If your stomach can handle anything more at this point, then I always recommend finishing a meal with chai. Another teenage boy will bring it by from the nearby tea house and we can enjoy it either at our table or at a small seating area out in the alley.
Mr. Curious might come by and talk some more once the lunch rush slows down. He likes to share about his philosophy of life, how he doesn’t believe it’s worth it to kill yourself for money. How he could make a killing if he kept Curious Kebab open for dinner also, but he’d rather spend time with his young family and his friends and enjoy a good drink. It’s all very Ecclesiastes. Mr. Curious is one of those locals who I pray to have a chance to talk more with. There are certain things about his bearing and his conversation that make me wonder where he stands spiritually. He’s tasted success working in high-end restaurants in London and turned away from it. He works hard but is not mastered by work, instead preferring to leverage work for things like spending time with his kids. His lifestyle and sense of humor also seem to indicate he’s not really that impressed with Islam but more likely to be of that breed of local men who saw through its hypocrisy a long time ago. If I’m honest, he reminds me of my friend Hama in the early days. One of these days, either myself or one of my colleagues will get to talk with him more about Jesus.
At this point, the meal is finished. We’ll head up to the counter to tally up our bill and Mr. Curious will tell us at least once that he doesn’t want us to pay. But we’ll insist and hand over the money to either him or one of the other grillers. Then, we’ll walk back out into the bazaar, either to explore its many alleys or to wander back up Soapmakers Street to my place.
The bazaar is humming, the tea glasses clinking, the smell of baking bread, roasting meat, and the gutter funk all mixing in the air. You are now one of the privileged few foreigners who have eaten at Curious Kebab, certainly the best kebab in the city – and possibly, one of the best kebabs in the world.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
The Achilles heel of the church planting efforts in our corner of Central Asia has been the absence of faithful and qualified local leaders. Many missionaries have handed over leadership too quickly and men who might have eventually become faithful pastors instead fell into “puffed up conceit and the condemnation of the devil” (1st Tim 3:6). Other local men grew impatient and seized power, position, and ministry money before they were ready. All too often, promising leaders that long-term missionaries were faithfully discipling got lured away when an outside organization showed up looking to hire a local to head up their imported formulas for disciple-making movements. Persecution and burnout have also played their role in running off local leaders.
Were you to diagram it, you’d see four stages local believing men go through. First, there’s the new believer stage. This is the stage with the highest numbers. Next is the maturing disciple stage. A good number make it from stage one to stage two. Then, you have the potential leader stage. There’s a smaller number of men in this stage, but they are very encouraging men of vision and potential. But the fourth stage is that of a qualified and faithful leader. Almost no one has passed that last threshold.
This week Darius* was voted in as the first local elder of our church back in Central Asia. According to one of our colleagues there, the local believers were engaged, asked thoughtful questions of the elder candidates, then prayed hard for the two new pastors after voting them in. Darius and one of our other teammates have been in an elder-in-training season for about a year and a half, a development partially prompted by my family’s unexpected departure from the field. Now they are the very first elders to be tested and voted in congregationally. It’s taken seven and a half years for this to happen, seven and a half years for us to at last see a local man raised up for pastoral ministry.
This church was birthed at a Christmas party in December of 2016. Frustrated that none of the isolated local believers were willing to attend the house church services we were offering in their language, we experimented by inviting them to a Christmas party – one that involved teaching from the word, worship songs, and some prayer. Some of the very same believers who refused to come to a house church service told us how much they had enjoyed the teaching, songs, and prayer at the Christmas party. We invited them back for another gathering the week after – and at some point broke the news to them that what they were enjoying were in fact the basic elements of church. Once they had tasted it, they weren’t nearly as reticent to come back.
But that first group didn’t exactly result in a church. Hama and Tara soon fled the country. One man lived too far away to attend more than quarterly and another proved not to be a believer. We had a very explosive falling out with Hamid after we held firm on the exclusivity of Christ, so as far as we knew he was gone for good. Only a single gal who would later turn out to be the daughter of a spy and Harry would gather with us somewhat regularly – and Harry inconsistently because of pressure from his violent and conservative tribe. Six months into every other week producing no local attendees, and we almost pulled the plug on the whole thing.
Thankfully, we just barely decided on continuing to meet, believing that if the locals didn’t know how to gather in a steady, weekly fashion, then we’d just have to model for them what that looks like. Every week we’d all text and call our own small networks of isolated local believers and seekers we were studying the Bible with. And every week our team would wait anxiously, chai and sunflower seeds set out and ready, hoping for maybe two or three locals to show up this week.
The turning point came when Ahab’s family started attending regularly. Finally, we gained some momentum and averaged about six to ten locals joining us every week in Ahab’s house, where we had moved the meeting. Unfortunately, as I’ve recently written about, Ahab proved to be a very dangerous wolf in sheep’s clothing. Yet God was still working even as that danger lurked. During that season Mr. Talent and Patty and Frank came to faith and went under the water on a freezing January day. By spring 2018, we were seeing several dozen locals gathering every week, Harry and Ahab were seen as potential elders-in-training, and we thought we were in the clear – a church was being born before our eyes.
Then Ahab almost blew it all up. We extracted the church from his house and moved the meetings into the international church building. Only five or six of the believers stuck with us, but we were encouraged that there was still any church left at all. It was in this season of damage control that we met Darius and he came to faith and was baptized. He was, amazingly, captivated by the beauty of the church – the traumatized group of local believers and foreigners who had just barely survived a wolf attack.
This was when my family transitioned to the States for a season and then back to a different city in Central Asia. But during the two years that we were gone, the church continued to grow under the leadership of our colleagues, in spite of serious opposition. During this time, it was raided once by the security police and then later experienced another implosion due to another attendee who was some kind of spy from the militant regime to our East. Harry had been appointed a formal elder in training in this season and we had high hopes that he would be our first local leader. Sadly, this implosion and its relational fallout led to his leaving the church for the next year and a half.
When we eventually moved back to help this church in 2021, the church had once again entered a period of steady growth. Alan and others came to faith and Adam was rescued from his crippling schizophrenia. Our team realized that it was time to go official. We had been a church with informal membership and other structures for a few years by that point. Now it was time to step into the fulness of the Bible’s vision for a local church. And that meant formalizing membership and drafting a Central Asian church covenant. Shortly before we once again left in late 2022, the church had covenanted together and was openly committed to pursuing all twelve characteristics of a healthy church.
One of those characteristics is biblical leadership. This means seeing local elders and deacons raised up who are qualified according to passages like 1st Timothy 3 and Titus 1. A few other men and I have functioned as temporary lowercase-A-apostolic elders for this church body up until now. But the goal was always to work ourselves out of a job. It just took much longer than we thought it would. I once heard a local pastor in a neighboring country say that in their context it took about seven years for a man who has come to faith from a Muslim background to be discipled and mature enough to lead in the church. So far this fits with our experience as well.
For several years we had been hoping that Darius would be the first local pastor of our church. But just like every other man who makes it into the potential leader phase, the attacks came – potent and often. He was approached by other organizations asking him why his church wasn’t making him a leader yet, why they weren’t paying him a ministry salary yet, and why he didn’t consider aligning with someone else who would recognize his clear leadership gifts. It was a hard fight, but Darius resisted these enticements one after another. He also hung in there through numerous bouts of cross-cultural conflict with us, his mentors. By God’s grace, he was able to see our heart for him, that we would be delighted for him to lead – but only at the right time and in the right way. And unlike so many other potential leaders, Darius chose the harder and healthier path, the path of humility (1 Pet 5:6).
My family’s departure in late 2022 sped things up a little bit, as it left only one teammate pastoring a still messy and growing church on his own. We knew this was going to be too much, so the plan was hatched to bring Darius and another newer teammate into official elder-in-training roles. The past year and a half have demonstrated that God has indeed given these brothers the knowledge, the gifts, and especially the character to be spiritual shepherds. This was joyfully and soberly affirmed this week by the members of the church.
It took seven and a half years for the first qualified local pastor to be raised up. But we truly believe that this is one of the most important keys to seeing healthy local churches planted that endure – and that go on to reach their own people and others with the gospel. So, even though seven and a half years has been quite the messy and costly investment, it has been, without a doubt, entirely worth it.
Darius is the first. May countless others come after him.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
“A.W.? How are ya? Daniel* here. Listen, I’ve got a job offer I want you to consider. Can you come by my office for some tea?”
Daniel was the middle-aged British manager of a five-star hotel in our Central Asian city. He had recently come to faith while attending the international church. I didn’t really know him very well, but I loved his story. It was just like God to bring this British man all the way to our corner of Central Asia for a hotel job so that he could hear the gospel and be born again.
I was not looking for a new job. I was happy and busy working as an English teacher while also engaged in cross-cultural church planting. But I was always on the lookout for good jobs for local believers or for other foreign believers who might move to our city in order to be Christian tentmakers.
After I arrived at the hotel, Daniel greeted me enthusiastically and offered me a chair and a cup of tea. Then he began to explain the situation.
“Right. So our hotel has a close partnership with the UN, given that their office is right next door.”
He indicated out his window to the unmarked building which was nestled into the hillside next to the hotel. So that’s where the UN offices are. I took note, thinking that I might need to visit them at some point if things got bad for certain local believers – something that did eventually prove necessary.
“Their foreign staff live here at the hotel during their six-month assignments. And we take good care of them. So they trust me and occasionally ask for my help with some of their internal workings.”
I nodded, sipping my Earl Grey and wondering where all this was going.
“Well, last month one of the vice presidents for the UN came to visit the UN office here. Problem was, someone dropped the ball at the local office so no driver was sent to pick up this VP – who then had to wait hours before finally being picked up. Well, as you can imagine, she was positively livid and gave the foreign and local staff quite the talking to. Do you know how the UN staff operate?”
I shook my head. In spite of seasons of doing relief and development work, I’d never been directly connected to the UN.
“Well, there’s a complete turnover of the foreign staff every six months. This means that just as the new foreign staff are learning how things are done, they are shipped off to another part of the world. Terrible way to run an organization if you ask me.”
I nodded in agreement.
“So it’s the local long-term staff who really know what’s needed, but of course, they’re the ones without any power to make decisions. Meanwhile, the foreign staff don’t even have time to get their heads on straight. Anyway, after the VP left our city, it was decided among the higher-ups that this type of mistake must never happen again.”
Daniel gave me a look as if he wasn’t sure if I’d believe what he was about to say next.
“They’ve created a new position for a long-term foreign employee to organize their airport pickups – and they’re going to pay this person $10,000 – $12,000 a month. Can you believe that?”
I sat back in my chair. “Wow, why would they pay that much?”
David threw up his hands. “It’s the UN. Who knows? Either way, that VP must have been very angry. But listen, they want me to send them recommendations for this job. It’s fantastic pay, of course. But the work is very very simple. They want someone to stay on top of the UN airport arrivals and oversee a team of local drivers so that all visitors are picked up and dropped off in a timely fashion. And that’s all they want them to do. They seem to be very serious on this point because they kept telling me that whoever they hire needs to completely ignore everything going on with projects and cases and such.”
“They’re even going to test people on this front during the interview,” Daniel continued, “which is why I wanted to meet with you. When you sit down with them they’ll ask you about your interest in the UN’s projects in the city. But you have to act like you know nothing and care nothing about any of it. ‘I don’t really care about food for refugees’ and all that. They’ll probably stage a phone call interruption and then ask you afterward what you overheard in the conversation. You’ll need to ignore it or pretend to ignore it. They’ll use it as a test. They told me if anyone shows the slightest bit of interest in anything other than airport pickups and drop-offs, they’ll absolutely not get hired. Once hired and the driving schedule is set, you’ll have most of the day to read, watch telly, take a nap, whatever. Just don’t poke your nose in anything else going on in the office, and you’ll be all set.”
On hearing this condition, I knew this kind of setup would never work for me, even if I had been interested. I would be way too curious about the different projects going on and way too bored if all I had to do was make sure the airport runs were happening on schedule. But what about solid believing friends back in the US still trying to pay down their student loans? Could be a Godsend for them. Maybe they could use all the extra time to learn the local language and build solid relationships with the local staff?
“It has to be a foreigner? They’re not open to hiring a local?”
He shook his head. “Has to be a foreigner.”
Listen,” Daniel continued, “I wanted to tell you in case you were interested. Or if not, maybe you could give me some good leads. They are really hoping I can help them find someone reliable.”
I thanked Daniel and told him I’d keep in touch if I had some friends who were interested. He promised to keep me updated.
“Just don’t forget,” he told me as I stood to say goodbye. “If you go for the interview, play dumb and uninterested in everything else UN-related – but don’t let them know I told you that,” he said with a wink.
I stood up to go. “See you in church this weekend?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
The actual interview process kept getting delayed over the following months, much to the disappointment of those back in the States I’d texted about the job. In the end, it was too good to last. Someone with some sense and power in the UN must have found out about this wildly overpaid new position and shut it down. Good for them. When local staff were only being paid $500 a month to work for the UN, paying a foreigner $12,000 a month to merely arrange airport pickups would have been a stunning example of resource mismanagement – even if we had been able to leverage it for other believers.
Bizarre situations like this remind me that at the end of the day, secular organizations – including the UN – are just collections of people – and people are nothing if not flawed and inconsistent. People make mistakes, get angry, overreact, underpay some people, wildly overpay others, and yet somehow still manage to do important work. A couple of years later, UN lawyers were key in keeping Patty and Frank from getting deported back to the country they’d originally fled from. God can certainly use large international bureaucracies like the UN for his purposes. And they can also be bloated, foolish, and corrupt. They’re not quite the evil entities anti-globalist Christians make them out to be. But neither are they exactly agents of light like my Central Asian friends expect them to be. Rather, they’re somewhere in between.
That means they can at times be leveraged for the kingdom. A well-placed believer working on UN refugee cases in our part of the world can make all the difference for a Christian family needing to flee the country or fight deportation. I’d bet that even a believer organizing airport runs could make a difference.
Who knows? God brought Daniel all the way to Central Asia to be a hotel manager so that he could save him. He just might bring you over so you could do wildly overpaid airport runs. If you were faithful to use that money for the kingdom, then that could be a pretty great story in itself.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Someone must have been praying for us. It was 2 am and I was strangely and suddenly wide awake. The house was silent and cold, so I rolled over to go back to sleep.
Suddenly, I heard the slam of the national electricity turning on and hitting our breaker box. Normally this would be followed by the cheerful chirp of our electric heater unit turning on. It used too many amps to run on the neighborhood generator and so was wired to only work when the limitless government power came on. But this time there was a distinct popping and fizzing noise. There could only be one explanation. Electrical fire.
We can’t predict how we’ll respond in crisis moments like this. When we’re suddenly faced with an emergency we are at the mercy of reflex, reaction, whatever random prep we may have received for said crisis, and the sovereignty of God. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to spring out of bed and into action. I sprinted to our little half kitchen next to the house’s light shaft (a feature in many local homes built to provide more natural light given all the power outages).
On top of the fridge, we had a little imported fire extinguisher covered in Persian script. I grabbed it, pulled the pin as I ran to the breaker box, and let it blast all over the small multicolored fire coming out of our wall. This was the first time I discovered just how messy fire extinguishers are. As the extinguisher sputtered out its final hiss, half the house had been covered with yellowish-grey dust. Yet the fire wasn’t completely out.
I peered into the breaker box and saw small flames still flickering in the innards behind the breakers. Plastic melted and oozed and the little flames flickered and threatened to grow larger again. Suddenly a random bit of trivia came into my mind. Somewhere in the distant past, perhaps while scrolling Facebook circa 2007, I had read that you could use cooking flour to put out kitchen fires. Well, I figured, if it works for cooking fires, it just might work for electrical fires too.
I quickly moved back to the kitchen and rummaged around in the darkness in the cabinet where we kept the flour. But how to get the flour into the intestines of our electrical box? It would need to be propelled somehow. I reached over to the dish drainer and snatched a spoon.
Our electricity was somehow still working and we didn’t dare try to touch the melted and smoking breakers now to turn it off, so we flipped on a couple of lights so that we could see what we were dealing with. We saw a large black scorch mark surrounding the breaker box and trailing up the formerly white plaster wall. I also saw the spoon I had grabbed – it was a little blue plastic toddler spoon.
Suddenly doubting the quality of my tools, I scooped the little spoon down into the flour bag, bit my tongue in concentration, and tried to accurately fling powder through into the gaps between the breakers and wires and back into the little flames in the innards. It was a messy job, but before long I had emptied the small bag of flour and the flames were finally out.
I looked over at my wife, smiling. It had worked. She was crossing her arms and judging me for some reason. Was it the spoon?
“You had to use the expensive American flour instead of the cheap local stuff?”
For the first time, I looked at the flour bag itself. Sure enough, I had grabbed the expensive American import flour, the kind my wife and a teammate had been so excited to find in the local grocery store and which she was probably saving for birthday cakes. The flour that wasn’t resting on the mangled wires like so much dirty snow was in a little pile at the base of the wall.
“Oops… well… the house didn’t burn down!” I said, making my point by smiling and pointing the toddler spoon at her. We stood there in our bedheads, bare feet, and pajamas, looking around through the dusty air, surveying the damage. It certainly could have been much worse. The unlikely trio of the Iranian fire extinguisher, the American flour, and the toddler spoon had successfully extinguished the fire before it had spread to anything else.
Of all the things most likely to kill us while living in Central Asia, I’d rank the electricity as number one. This was in fact the first of several electrical fires we’d have in the following years.
The causes of these fires came in layers. There was the issue of the inconsistent and aging government electricity supply. There were the supplemental neighborhood generators with their fluctuating voltage and parallel wiring systems that electricians often mixed up with the government wires. Then there were the locals who would hook up illegal power cables wherever they wanted like so many strands of a spider web, usually an attempt to get out of paying a bill. The quality of the hardware was lamentable – cheap wires, breakers, conductors, and wall sockets that melted and fried often enough for the missionaries to learn to rank them by most to least likely to burn up during a power surge. Finally, there was the construction of the houses themselves, where rebar inside of cement touched electrical wires and somehow caused even things like tile floors to conduct electrical current.
One American electrician came over on a short-term team and spent a whole three days trying to figure out why our house had live walls and floors and mysteriously dead outlets. In the end, he threw his hands up in defeat. Even now I can remember the feeling of sticking my hand into the washing machine and feeling a small current coming through the soggy clothes. One of our colleagues was even thrown across his roof as he tried to repair his swamp cooler (Praise God, he was okay).
When people hear about our corner of Central Asia they want to ask us about the dangers posed by wars, terrorism, crime, and persecution. They’d never guess that all of these dangers are not really that bad compared to that posed by the dodgy electricity.
Future missionaries, take heed. Learn some electrical skills while you can. Keep fire extinguishers on hand wherever you’re living in the world. And when all else fails, pull out the flour.
Just try not to use the fancy American kind.
***Update: I’ve been advised by someone who has been trained as a firefighter: Do NOT use flour to try to put out a fire like I did or you may experience a flour fireball. Instead, use baking soda/ bicarbonate of soda/ sodium bicarbonate or even salt or dirt as a safer option. Apparently flour can’t burst into flame if it’s not compact enough. Yikes!
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Some of the most painful lessons of ministry are learned when a wolf in sheep’s clothing infiltrates your church. We had a wolf once, a local man I’ll call Ahab*, and it has taken me years to know how to write about it. The things we learned from exposing him, trying to counter him, and then responding to the carnage he caused have been forever branded on my soul. Wolf attacks leave scars, along with tragic losses among the true sheep. Pray that you never have to fight off a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but if you do, may these lessons we learned from dealing with Ahab help you to spot and deal with your own wolves with both wisdom and courage.
Wolves make excellent first impressions
The first time Ahab and his family visited our new church plant, we were thrilled. Here was a local believing husband and wife who also had believing teenage children – a true rarity in our corner of Central Asia. They were veteran believers, having come to faith nine years previous at a house church I had attended with Adam*, and later were members of another church when they’d lived in a different city. Ahab presented as a humble, happy, and wise middle-aged man from a more traditional background. But the most encouraging thing of all was how well he knew his Bible. To this day I’m not sure I’ve met another local man as well-versed in the scriptures as Ahab is. In spiritual conversation, Ahab demonstrated a deep knowledge of the Word. He had a thoughtful, serious personality, but he was also very fatherly, especially with small children. Our kids adored him with his affectionate greetings and gifts of cookies and pomegranate flowers.
Ahab’s sheep costume was (almost) flawless. Wolves will indeed show up wearing very convincing disguises (Matt 7:15).
Wolves come with mixed reputations
As soon as another missionary heard that Ahab and his family were attending our group, he warned us about him, telling us that Ahab and his wife had in previous years recanted their faith and returned to Islam, in order to receive financial gain. Apparently, there were pictures of them embracing a Qur’an next a smiling Islamic leader that proved this. This missionary also said that the family’s relationship with the Christians in their previous city had broken down completely and they had deceived and burned lots of people. The problem with this intel was that that generation of local believers was positively shot through with division and broken relationships and we also didn’t trust this missionary’s theological discernment. He had recently written off male-female roles in ministry as something that didn’t really matter, among other theological and ministry positions that felt so, well, “evangellyfish.” And we were newly partnering with another missionary who seemed to have more of a theological spine. He had been recently investing in Ahab’s family – and claiming to see evidence of true repentance and growth.
Our mistake here was assuming that a lack of theological likemindedness meant a lack of character discernment on the part of this other missionary – and that better alignment with our new partner meant he was correctly discerning Ahab’s character. These assumptions were dead wrong.
A wolf’s character cannot be hidden indefinitely. Their predatory heart will periodically emerge in predatory actions (Matt 7:16). This means that, like Ahab, wolves will tend to have a controversial past.
Wolves get deeply involved in the ministry and show great potential
We confronted Ahab about these claims of past apostasy and you couldn’t ask for a more (seemingly) humble and genuinely repentant response than the one he gave us. He admitted that the apostasy was true, but short-lived, and claimed to have already repented to everyone of this dark season in their life, and that he was willing to do whatever it took to demonstrate that repentance to us. Given our biases about the missionaries involved, we took Ahab at his word and pressed forward, encouraged.
Ahab soon became deeply invested in our house church. His family were the most faithful and some of the most engaged attendees. They introduced Frank and Patty to our group and even led them to faith. We were so encouraged to finally have some local believers who were committed to gathering weekly with the saints. Ahab soon offered his own home for our house church services and we quickly took him up on his offer. Our team leader was on furlough and pushing us to get the church meetings out of our own homes and into locals’ as soon as possible. This was viewed as one key toward reproducibility. So, all parties involved were thrilled when we moved the weekly service into Ahab’s home. It didn’t take long for Ahab to begin helping us with leading the prayer time and for us to invite him to join our weekly sermon-prep study with Harry*, the other local brother showing leadership potential. This was a weekly gathering that served as a place to invest in men who could be future leaders of the church.
Wolves tend to have a solid season of deep investment in the local church. This is how they build trust and gain influence.
Wolves are unpredictably harsh and judgmental
Every once in a while, Ahab would lash out in harsh and judgmental language when speaking of other local believers, pastors, or missionaries. These statements seemed inconsistent with his measured, wise speech that we typically observed. The tone of these outbursts seemed like it didn’t match the level of the offense nor the grace of the gospel that Ahab professed to be walking in. We took note of this, but viewed it as a discipleship issue that we’d need to help him with over time. In hindsight, it was evidence of secret sin brewing.
Like Judas lashing out at the woman’s gift of pure nard (John 12:5), wolves will sometimes let their true character show via harsh and surprisingly judgmental takes on other believers. This is evidence that there are some very bad things going on in their hearts.
Wolves are followed by lots of smoke, but expertly hide the fire
Ahab and his family’s mixed reputation seemed to follow them like a cloud of gnats they could never quite get rid of. Regularly, we’d hear serious concerns expressed by other missionaries or local believers that just didn’t seem to match what we were seeing with our own eyes. Ahab was one of our promising leaders in training, and nothing that we had witnessed ourselves gave us any solid evidence for the claims being regularly made by those outside of our church plant. But the claims just kept on coming. Surely, Ahab couldn’t be deceiving us so effectively. It must be the other missionaries and believers from other local groups. After all, they were unclear and squishy when it came to the gospel, true conversion, and healthy church, so they must have been confused about Ahab also.
As the wisdom of our forbears says, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Wolves can’t hide all the smoke they generate, but for a time they can expertly conceal the fire from those that they are focused on deceiving. Wise gospel laborers will keep an eye on men whose lives generate an unusual amount of proverbial smoke.
Wolves secretly divide the flock and the leadership for personal gain
“Is Ahab a good man?”
“Yes, he is a faithful member of our church. Why do you ask this?”
“Well, he approached me this week and told me to keep my distance from all you foreigners. He told me not to trust you, but to trust him. Listen, I left Islam to get away from this kind of petty division. If Christianity is no different, then I don’t think I want to be involved with you all.”
This conversation over dinner with a new believer was a turning point for me and my wife. We had been hearing of a lot of smoke, but here at last was something solid, and very concerning. Ahab had allegedly approached a promising new believer in secret and sought to sow division in the church. This new believer didn’t seem to have any advantage in mentioning this to us, but rather to be honestly asking about something that concerned him. Soon other evidence emerged that Ahab was secretly building personal loyalty with other new believers in the church, creating a faction of sorts. He seemed to be doing this by telling the new believers that we foreigners (and me in particular) were receiving fabulous amounts of money for baptisms and that we were withholding funds that were sent for local believers. He was making promises to the other locals that he knew how to get them access to ministry salaries, Christian conferences, and visas to Western countries.
As I looked into things, I learned that Ahab was also involved in slandering me to the other two missionaries who formed our three man church plant leadership until we could raise up local elders. To my great alarm, Ahab’s whispers that I was secretly out for power and control were being somewhat entertained by my gospel colaborers. Ahab’s desire in all of this was to be eventually in charge of the church so that he could receive a good ministry salary from groups in the West, along with funds he could use to set up a patronage network within the church.
When wolves feel secure in their position, they will begin to sow division among the saints and even among the leadership. They are very good at sniffing out existing tensions and then exploiting these (Titus 3:9-11). Their end goal in all these things is their own personal gain.
Wolves are gifted at twisting reality
There were several times that seemingly concrete charges were brought against Ahab. But whenever we would bring up these concerns, Ahab was able to expertly sow doubt in the informant, in the data itself, or even in our own experiences. After this season, I would learn that this kind of behavior has come to be called gaslighting in the West. A gaslighter is able to make you doubt that something really happened, and even able to make you doubt your own senses. We would go into face-to-face meetings with Ahab with clarity and conviction and come away feeling like we weren’t sure anymore what was really true or real. After Ahab had later been exposed, one local brother called him “an artist of lies.” In a culture given to lots of pervasive deception, this was quite the title. After upending reality, Ahab was then able to insert his own narratives into the confusion, with great effect. I remember meeting with my team leader and Harry, desperately trying to unravel the narrative Ahab was pushing on them about me. These two godly men knew me much better than they knew Ahab, and yet he was almost effective in convincing them that in the end, I was the real problem in this whole situation – and the true manipulator. It was terrifying.
Like the serpent in Genesis 3, wolves are able to create doubts about things that once seemed so simple and so clear, about reality itself.
Wolves turn good faith exhortations against those who make them
I remember meeting with Ahab and pleading with him from my heart to turn away from his divisiveness, that the church might not survive what he was doing. I poured out my heart to this man I thought was a brother, sharing very personal things with him and even areas where I had failed or could have done better. I was pulling out all of the stops to try to pull him back from the brink. While his response to me in person was good, he immediately took many of the things I had told him and weaponized them with others. Sometimes this happened even on the same day. I would gave him pearls, truths from God’s word and things from my heart, but he not only despised these, but then used them to attack. As each leader and local believer began to realize what Ahab was up to, he’d proceed to do this with them as well. We had trusted him with our hearts and he was now adeptly using all of this as ammunition to undermine us.
Wolves can be like the swine that Jesus describes in Matthew 7:6, who take precious truths and good-faith exhortations and instead of repenting, use them against you.
When exposed, wolves go on the attack
Humble men respond gently and reasonably when accusations are made against them. Wolves, when accused – or even as soon as they sense someone is beginning to suspect them – go on the attack. This stage is dangerous, but helpful. At last, the true nature of the wolf is being revealed to the broader community. In our church plant, Ahab started by attacking me. My grasp of the local language was stronger, so that meant I was spotting things sooner than my fellow leaders. Ahab picked up on the change in my posture toward him and did what he could to turn the others against me. There was a period where even the other leaders sided with him, but one by one their honest questions and desire to pursue things with fairness meant that Ahab turned on them as well. When this happened, it was like a spell was broken. All of the cobwebs of deceit that had been sewn were suddenly dissolved as the sheep turned on its erstwhile friends – and revealed its fangs.
When wolves in sheep’s clothing are recognized for what they are, they will not run. They will attack. In this attack stage, they will seek to cash in on whatever schemes of division, personal loyalty, and personal gain they have been working on.
Westerners are at a disadvantage when dealing with wolves
Ahab ran circles around us. The other missionaries and I were often caught flat-footed, unable to respond proactively to Ahab, instead reacting as he always seemed one step ahead of us. There are several reasons why I believe this to be the case. First, Westerners operate from a trustworthy-unless-proven-otherwise mindset in their relationships. We are extremely optimistic (some would say naive) in our approach to trusting others. This often works out well for us as that trust extended becomes the thing that actually inspires and creates trustworthiness in the other. But when we are dealing with a wolf, they are easily able to take advantage of this default posture of trust – and to turn it to their advantage. Because of our own cultural background, we just don’t have much experience dealing shrewdly with deceptive and manipulative people.
Second, Western missionaries will often default to trusting a local believer over a Western colleague because of the Western cultural guilt we can carry, plus the emphasis in much of missiology that the locals are always right and foreigners are unwitting contaminators and colonialists. This definitely proved true in our situation, and teammates later apologized to me for their default assumption that in cross-cultural conflict, somehow it is always the Westerner who has screwed things up. Finally, we receive little theological preparation for dealing with those the Bible calls wolves, pigs, dogs, and divisive men – even though these opponents of the gospel feature heavily in the New Testament’s description of ministry.
Wolves and other gifted deceivers are able to take advantage of individuals – and cultures – that operate from a default of extending trust. Westerners especially need to be aware of this and seek to grow in wise defense.
Wolves must be dealt with more swiftly and firmly than other types of sinners
One reason we were so stuck in our response to Ahab is that we didn’t agree on how the Bible would have us respond to someone like him. My teammates and I were at least on the same page that some form of church discipline was needed, but our missionary partner surprised us by saying that he didn’t believe that church discipline would be effective in the local culture. I learned from this experience that even among theological conservatives, it’s important to find out beforehand who is and who isn’t willing to exercise church discipline when the Bible calls for it. If, like we did, you find this out in the midst of dealing with a wolf, then its too late.
I’ve heard it said that some reformed churches have broken church discipline down into an extended process with dozens of steps, often stretched out over months or years. This can be a faithful application of passages like Matthew 18, where the sin is private and interpersonal. But there are other church discipline passages in the New Testament that call for much quicker action. These cases would involve situations such as public scandalous sin (1 Cor 5) and that of the man who sows division (Titus 3:9-11). Because of the danger of great harm to the church, these situations need firm and quick responses from the church’s leadership and members. Someone sowing division and slander in the body needs a quick, united, and firm rebuke. If they don’t repent and change after a first and second warning, then they need a quick excommunication. The danger to the body is simply too great as wolves are able to use extra time to turn the sheep and undershepherds against one another.
When division, deception, or manipulation is exposed in the body, these call for united and quick action. If these things indicate the presence of a wolf, then this swift and firm action is even more crucial.
Wolves cause tragic damage to the flock
We eventually learned that Ahab had begun receiving a secret ministry salary from another evangelical group in our region for having a church in his house. “The workman is worthy of his wages” was the justification for the deceptive claims he’d made to this group that he was the pastor of a separate church. When this emerged, we finally had unity among us leaders to move the church out of his house. When we announced this move at the end of a service (and still in such a way to try to help Ahab save face), Ahab publicly responded by announcing the formation of a new church. Several of the new believers then indicated that they’d already agreed to join Ahab in this breakaway group. They had been seduced by his promises of salaries, conferences, and visas.
Of these local believers, many then proceeded to fall away and to this day are still not gathering with any church, nor growing in their faith. The local brother who first shared with me about Ahab’s secret division is one of these. He washed his hands of us, and to this day is an isolated baby believer. The house church had grown to the point where 20-30 locals were gathering with us on a weekly basis. After this implosion, only 6 continued to gather with us as we changed our location and extracted ourselves from the wolf’s house. Our partnership with the other conservative missionary didn’t survive this season either. Amazingly, even though his eyes were now opened he decided to keep working with Ahab’s family – until he too was irreparably burned by him a couple of years later.
Wolves will seek to devour the flock (Acts 20:29). And the damage they cause can last for generations.
Wolves are inevitable as the gospel advances
Our natural impulse after everything imploded was to use the benefit of hindsight to blame ourselves. There were so many places where we should have, could have, would have done things differently could we go back in time. But one of the truths that comforted me in the wake of the Ahab mess was that wolves are promised as a part of faithful New Testament ministry. Even Jesus had a wolf among his closest followers. Perhaps not every local church will have to fend off a wolf, but many will. When sheep are being gathered and fed, sooner or later, wolves will come around looking to fill their stomachs. When this happens, we can fall back on the fact that we have not only been warned, but the Word of God even equips us to fight off the predators that would seek to devour the flock.
Wolves are inevitable as the gospel advances. Jesus had Judas, the believers in Ephesus had their own fierce wolves emerge after Paul was gone (Acts 20:29). Many of us will face our own “Ahabs.” Wise believers will seek to prepare for this common danger to the church – and act when the wolves are exposed.
God turns even wolf attacks for good
It took a long time to heal from what happened with Ahab. My wife and I had nightmares about the man for about two years afterward. Many of the local believers were scattered, but some eventually came back, now sobered and on the lookout for other “artists of lies” who might try to divide with promises of worldly gain. Our relationships with the other missionaries involved were largely strengthened by the horrible ordeal we’d gone through together, even though apologies needed to be said and trust cautiously built again. And we learned vital lessons that will hopefully serve us and others in many other contexts. In short, God was faithful to use for good what the enemy intended for evil. The costs were real. But so were the ways in which God’s grace and faithfulness shone throughout and after that whole season.
God can even turn wolf attacks into opportunities for the display of his power and glory (Rom 8:28, 2 Cor 8:9). I see this now in part in everything that happened with Ahab, and I look forward to seeing it more fully in the light of eternity.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
When I was a young child, my family lived in one of the highlands provinces of our Melanesian country. Most of my parents’ colleagues lived one province over from us, near the central town of another mountain valley, the same one where I would spend my middle and high school years. There was one paved road between these two areas, known as the Highlands Highway. The drive from where we were living to the location of my parents’ quarterly meetings with their broader team took about two and a half hours and dropped the traveler’s elevation by about 1,500 ft.
The Highlands Highway is a storied piece of road for a reason. It winds around sharp ridges covered in misty mountain rainforest, over rivers that roar out of steep cuts in the mountainsides, and through valleys populated by enemy tribal groups regularly involved in blood feuds. On a given trip you might encounter a tribal, criminal, or police roadblock, a portion of the road missing because of a landslide, or a free-for-all as local villagers help themselves to the goods contained inside a tractor-trailer that has broken down or tipped over. Almost always, someone in your vehicle is going to get sick.
It was the morning of December 26th, the early ’90s, and I was a happy three-year-old sporting rubber boots and a curly mullet. I was happy because it was the day after Christmas and we had all received big plush teddy bears as gifts. These were hanging out in the back seat of our white ’80s Toyota Hilux pickup with my two older brothers. I was sitting on my mom’s lap in the front passenger seat, presumably enjoying the drive – until the hairpin turns started churning up my stomach.
My mom, ever practical in times like this, told me to stick my head out the window to throw up if I was feeling sick. My dad just kept on driving as I stuck my head out into the chilly wind, hoping that the wave of nausea would pass. It didn’t, and I began losing my breakfast. In later years, my brothers and I discovered that we all have distinct styles of throwing up. They would chuckle at mine, claiming that it’s like someone just turns on and turns off a faucet. The good side of this is that once I’m done, I’m done, and I can return to whatever I was doing previously with minimal bother. “You just threw up? You carry it well, brother,” as a fellow pastor would one day tell me. So, this particular bout of carsickness should have been over and done without too much of a story.
However, what my mom and I didn’t know was that one of my big brothers, the middle one, already had his head stuck out the back window. He may have been on the lookout for the local children who wait at the side of the road, selling small wreaths made of mountain flowers and ferns. Well, to his horror, he was suddenly hit in the face with his little brother’s vomit. So, he did what any six-year-old with a bad gag reflex would do in this situation. He pulled his head back into the cab and threw up all over the back seat, all over the new teddy bears. Our oldest brother, witnessing this carnage, couldn’t contain himself either and added to the horror by also vomiting all over the back seat.
What followed must have involved a lot of yelling as my dad rushed to find a spot to pull over and my mom tried in futility to contain the chain reaction happening among her children. Sadly, the teddy bears did not survive this experience. I assume they were left on the side of the highlands highway, perhaps to be carried off by some jungle animal.
The last thing I remember is driving into the main market of our destination town, a large area teeming with local people there to buy and sell garden produce. I was sitting in the back seat with my brothers – all three of us wearing nothing but our whitey-tighties, our underwear. We must have either been parked or were stuck in bad traffic because we were at a standstill and surrounded by lots of highlanders staring and smiling. The locals tended to stare as it was, but this time we especially felt it, like we were in one of those dreams where you are wearing no pants, but this time it’s come true in real life. I remember really wishing that we had tinted windows.
Now, we are not usually in full control of ourselves when we are about to throw up. But I did learn that day that if you are in a moving vehicle and about to lose your breakfast, it’s best to look behind you. If you do, you just might spare your brother from a rather traumatizing experience, spare your parents from one of the worst clean-up jobs they’ve ever been handed – and spare your new teddy bears also.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
There are a number of stories from my life that could go under a category called “How in the hand-holding picnic line dances of Central Asia did I end up here?” In spite of my heartfelt desire to pursue wise risk, I have periodically found myself in situations where those decisions instead led to circumstances somewhat dangerous, or at least absurd. For instance, one time I ended up working for an organization that turned out to be involved in international money laundering and harboring wanted fugitives. Believe it or not, they accomplished these crimes by recycling used clothes and shoes.
When I was finishing up university and heading into marriage, I was looking for more flexible work that would pay well. One day I was scanning the nonprofit jobs section of the (admittedly hit-or-miss) website, Craigslist when I came across a curious posting. An environmental organization was looking for drivers who could find new sites for their clothing and shoe donation bins. The gig was simple. Contractor drivers would travel around their part of the country asking local businesses if they would be willing to host one of these tall metal bins on their property as a service to the community and as a way to contribute to sustainable development projects in India and Africa. For each site you secure, you’d get paid $125, a sum which at that point equaled ten hours of my other work at a furniture warehouse. And I would get to set my own schedule – a very appealing thing to a flexibility-loving individual like me.
Interested in seeing if this was all legit, I applied, explaining in my email that while I was not necessarily an environmentalist myself, I was a Christian who did believe in the wisdom of creation stewardship and sound development projects overseas. I also had one year of experience in relief and development work in the Middle East. Apparently, this was enough to land me the job. I met the woman who would become my boss for an interview at the same coffee shop where my wife and I had hosted our engagement party. She was a mysterious figure in her sixties, of Danish ethnicity. She offered me the role after a relatively brief conversation. Given that she was married to a woman and also a card-carrying member of the pseudo-religious climate apocalypse culture, I found it curious that she didn’t seem too concerned about the fact that I was not only a conservative Christian, but a student at a Southern Baptist Bible college to boot. Not for the last time, I thanked God that humans really are remarkably inconsistent creatures.
I soon began my job and took to it right away. I had the freedom to drive around and stop at every gas station and corner store in a two-hour radius of my city and ask if they’d like to host a clothes and shoe recycling bin on their property. Even though I didn’t fully buy into the philosophy behind my new employers’ work, I could get behind the substance of it – keeping Americans’ excess clothing, shoes, books, etc., out of landfills and redirecting them toward more productive places. I was told that some of the best quality items would be donated in the US, the second tier items would be resold overseas, and others beyond redemption would be shredded so they could be used in other products, like the insulation inside car doors. The money from the items resold was said to go toward projects in India and Africa, such as farming methods that were better for soil, used less water, and led to better crop yields. Again, this is all stuff a Christian can support who understands that though this world is temporary, it’s still ours to steward responsibly.
In fact, the conversations I had with coworkers in this season became a good chance to sharpen my beliefs when it came to creation care. I came to see that when individuals, companies, and governments abuse the natural ecosystems around them, it’s almost always the poor who suffer. Given the strong biblical concern for the poor, we do well to care about commonsense protection of clean air, water, and soil. Globally and historically, when we treat the natural world out of a posture of “it’s all going to burn anyway,” we often thereby poison the orphan and widow. For a Christian, that should be something that’s very concerning. If you doubt what I’m saying here, just visit places like China in the winter and try not to breathe in the soupy-thick air pollution. Sadly, the workers in those cities will lose around five years of their lives from simply breathing in that poisoned air.
As I drove around rural Kentucky, I also spent a lot of time thinking about the wisdom of learning from God’s creation logic when it comes to many of the renewable cycles baked into natural ecosystems. I remember learning about the “waste is food” principle present in nature and chewing on how we could better emulate this wisdom of God’s creation in our societies. I remember talking about this with one of my pastors and bringing up our reliance on fossil fuels as something I felt was unnatural to the created order. He, however, told me not to forget that everything on our green earth is in fact dependent on a giant star of burning gas. Good point. Fossil fuel energy is a natural part of the created order, just something that we need to keep learning how to use as God has.
Ultimately, I came away from this season of working for pagan environmentalists having a more thought-out biblical theology of creation care. And for that I’m grateful. This can be a blindspot in American evangelicalism, and even more so now that it is so highly politicized. But there’s something to Lewis’ and Tolkien’s instinct to stick up for the trees in their writings. In the end, the heart of evil is to tear up and ruin creation, while God desires to see it gardened into an even more beautiful and productive version of itself. Our theology should somehow reflect these realities. Even as we seek to share the gospel and reach the nations, Christians should in their own small way plant gardens in Babylon – not out of some kind of apocalyptic panic, but as a nod toward Eden lost, and toward the coming resurrected Earth.
I also learned curious things about people and cultures while doing this job. The businesses most likely to say yes to this opportunity to host a free donation bin were those run by internationals, or by very liberal Americans. Gas stations run by South Asians and smoke shops run by white hippies were promising places to stop. But conservative Americans (many of them seemingly Christians) tended to bristle when I made my spiel. This was curious because when it came to other jobs I had worked where tipping was involved, these dynamics tended to be reversed. The conservatives tipped (gave) generously if you demonstrated you were willing to work hard, but they were not interested in anything that smacked of a handout. The fact that this was all free and easy and helped farmers in Africa seemed to make them even more suspicious. Then again, perhaps they were right to raise an eyebrow at this whole operation.
I had just successfully recruited one of my close friends to join me when some very strange revelations came to light. He and I were on a paid weekend trip to Atlanta where we attended a bunch of trainings/hype sessions with a number of other NGOs and companies that all seemed strangely intertwined with our org. Curiously, all of them were also headed up by someone from Denmark, people who had gone to university with our boss back in the 1960s. The whole vibe was like one big family reunion, though these were alleged to be independent organizations and companies involved in the used clothes market. Into this unusual context, my friend was forwarded some very concerning investigative articles.
Apparently, there was a reason all of the groups present at this weekend’s event in Atlanta seemed related. They were. They had all descended from a leftist professor in 1960s Denmark and his cadre of loyal students. Allegedly, when their radical movement was banned from Denmark, they went international, starting a network of companies, non-profits, and schools in multiple countries. They really were committed to environmentalism of some sort, and some project sites really existed in Africa and India. But they were also committed to money laundering. Some of the funds from the donations had illegally gone toward paying for a condo in Florida, where the founder of the movement had hidden for some years as he tried to elude Interpol. If this were true, then who knew where the funds from the bins we had placed were actually going? A few months previously, I had been asked to open up the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I had placed dozens and dozens of bins all over that metro area, work that could result in a substantial amount of money from all of the donations received.
My believing friend and I grew more and more alarmed as we read page after page of investigative reporting that accused our employer of some very egregious things. Even if this network of inbred entities was still operating legally in the US, things were beginning to feel awfully dodgy. There wasn’t yet the kind of fire that led to legal action, but there was a lot of smoke. And even worse, just the week before our organization had asked the two of us to represent them to our city council.
This is the point where the question dropped: How in the world had we ended up here? The two of us were preparing for gospel ministry. We were busy students, just trying to work hard and be faithful and save money to take care of young families. Now we were unwitting employees of money launderers. We knew that we didn’t have the time nor the connections to do the work required to verify or discount the many accusations present if anyone simply googled the name of our employer. So, we prayed – and then decided it was time to bail. Now that our eyes were opened to see we’d been working for some kind of shadowy hippy mafia, we were conscience-bound to get out, and that as fast as possible.
Our boss was very upset at us for quitting – and for asking questions. “I don’t dig into your strange religious background, do I?!” But she ultimately resigned herself to our position that we were in no place to prove or disprove the things we had heard, and that meant we needed to bow out. My friend and I explained that we wanted to someday be men who were above reproach. And this meant not working for groups allegedly involved in setting up recycling fronts for money laundering.
Many years later, I still see the tall green bins scattered around our city here in the US. They are looking quite faded and beat up these days, but their presence means the organization must still be functioning. Somehow, they must still be legal, still under a cloud of accusations, yes, but continuing to hustle nonetheless.
If there is a lesson to this strange tale it might be to stay away from job offers on Craigslist. Or, don’t be afraid to trust God and bail if you find out your employers are doing illegal things. Or, if you are in need of donating your used clothes in the US, then stay away from the tall metal bins you might see planted around your city. They are awfully convenient, and they claim to be helping the planet. But as far as I can tell, they belong to some kind of hippy mafia, people who want to use your old clothes and shoes for dodgy, and even wicked, ends. (My old shoes? Really, Evil? Really??)
Yes, let’s seek to grow in caring for creation. We are God’s redeemed gardeners, after all. But I’m sure that we can find a better way to do this than by donating to the hippy mafia.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
“When I was a young man and still a Muslim, they used to force me to memorize the prayers. And they made me regularly lead the mosque prayer time. I hated it.”
Samir* shuddered as he told us this, clearly not enjoying the sensations this memory brought with it.
Samir grew up as an Indian Muslim in East Africa, his family part of the large Indian diaspora there. Now, he’s a new member of our small group here in Kentucky. A few weeks ago, the men in the group were sharing our testimonies with one another when Samir confessed his struggle to pray publicly.
“To this day, I don’t really like to pray in public… I appreciate you guys’ helping me to grow in this.”
It was a humble and genuine confession, the sort of thing that many more mature Christians might hold back. The fact that Samir had shared this made me instantly trust him more.
“Brother, it’s not just you,” Reza* chimed in. “Maybe it’s a former Muslim thing. I have a similar struggle. Is that why I saw you praying off a notecard a few weeks ago?”
Reza was referring to a prayer meeting for one of our group leaders who ended up in the ICU after a terrible bike accident. Samir had contributed a two-sentence prayer to this time that I had found actually quite encouraging, mainly because of its unusual brevity and simplicity.
“Ha, yes,” Samir responded with a shrug. “Even that was really hard for me, but that’s what I could do.”
“It was great, brother,” Reza said. “And I’ve never thought about it before now, but that’s probably why public prayer is so hard for me as well.”
Reza shook his head, his gaze distant in self-reflection. The tentacles of Islam can take a lifetime to find and shake off.
Yet here were two believing men from a Muslim background openly recognizing what was underneath their resistance to praying in front of others. For both of them, it came down to past suffering, seasons of religious control and manipulation, and the resulting scars on their hearts – scars which they still struggled with, even though Christian prayer is so radically different from the Islamic Salat.
This knowledge means that both of these believers are now better equipped to respond to this resistance to obedience. It means they can now take a more targeted approach to the problem, applying biblical truth more like a sniper rifle, and less like a shotgun. And those others of us present are now also better equipped to encourage them – “Brother, you are utterlyfree to pray or not pray in public. God welcomes your words as a kind father, delighting to hear from you. And the Spirit gently helps all of us to pray when we don’t know how.”
This is the power of digging into our personal stories when it comes to growth in sanctification and obedience. I imagine these are the kinds of insights that make a counselor’s day.
Encouraged by my brothers, I also shared that night about some recently discovered roots of my own reluctance in prayer. For me, it’s not so much a resistance to pray in public, but a resistance to pray in crisis. I have long noticed in me an instinct toward anger when asked to pray when some crisis situation has suddenly emerged. It’s only recently that I think I’ve been helped to recognize where that comes from.
The morning my dad died my brothers and I were moved away from the porch and windows, where we would have seen my dad fighting for his life in the yard. A missionary aunt herded us into the living room and led us in prayer – prayers that God said no to. In the decades since, It seems that I have ingested a narrative that goes something like, “Don’t pray in the midst of a crisis moment. It doesn’t do anything. Do what you can in the moment. Pray later, when God is actually paying attention again.”
Instead of a reluctance to pray that comes from experiencing spiritual manipulation, mine is more tied to a deep spiritual disappointment – the idea that God doesn’t really listen when things are at their worst. To do what I don’t want to do, to turn to prayer when I’m in a desperate situation, I will need to apply biblical truth that addresses that particular area of unbelief. I will need truth and passages that speak of God’s nearness to his children in crisis.
That same week I encountered a similar thought from my daughter. I had asked my kids at bedtime what was stopping them from praying on their own. My daughter shared that every time she puts on a new insulin pump, she prays that God will not allow it to hurt. But every time it still hurts. This sense of being ignored by God and praying ineffectual prayers keeps her from risking prayer to God at other times.
I was so glad that she shared this with me because then we were able to speak about the nature of God’s promises when it comes to prayer. And as with Samir, Reza, and myself, this means I now know what is going on underneath the surface. With this insight, I can better care for her heart, even as I challenge her to be courageous and to keep on praying.
This cluster of conversations about resistance to prayer reminds me of the vital importance of believers acting as “soul doctors” for one another. We must help one another to see what so often we cannot see ourselves, as a counselor did for me, as Samir did for Reza, as I hope to do for my daughter.
Whenever there is internal resistance to follow Jesus in a given area, this comes from somewhere specific. Yes, it broadly comes from a sinful nature, the presence of the sinful flesh, the effects of the world and Satan. But within these broader categories, there are very specific roots in our stories – roots which, when exposed, can make all the difference.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
We’ve been so encouraged to be members of the Great Commission Council over the past couple years. The GCC is “a coalition of long-term missionaries from around the world who are dedicated to helping sending churches and mission agencies understand the greatest needs in modern missions.”
This year, a number of videos and statements that we’ve worked on together are beginning to be published. I’ll be periodically posting some of these short videos which will focus on topics such as what missionaries wish they knew before going to the field, important definitions, and missiology statements that we’ve been developing.
This video focuses on what one member of GCC wishes he knew before he went to the mission field. It fits well with something a brother at our church recently shared, that a biblical posture towards the lostness of the world should be “urgent, but not frantic.” As this video states, the longer someone is on the field the more they value relationships, knowing the language and culture, and the steadying truths of the sovereignty of God.
To support our family as we head back to the field, click here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Entrusted to the Dirt 