“It’s such a shame that they failed two of their children.”
I was in college, and my friend was referring to a Christian family with adult children, two of whom had gone off the rails into drugs and unwed pregnancy.
My friend had young children of her own, and as someone several years ahead of me, she was a mom I greatly admired. She and I both knew that she would certainly not fail her children. I tucked away this lesson: My children’s choices would be a reflection of me.
***
Around the same time, I attended a large children’s ministry conference where a seminar speaker declared that ADHD was not a real condition – a child who couldn’t pay attention or sit still was the sad result of bad parenting. As an elementary teacher, I suspected the speaker was wrong, but it didn’t stop me from being marinated in the idea that I was responsible for my children’s behavior.
“First-time obedience” was the mantra of my era of Christian parenting. None of this “count to three” stuff; you were not a good parent if you had to ask twice. If they didn’t obey, it was on you. Being a responsible, perfectionist person, I took this seriously. I was up for the challenge.
When I first became a parent, this worked. I’d been trained as a teacher. I knew how to hold children to high expectations without raising my voice or losing my cool. And my stubbornness could match the most strong-willed of children. I remember a fellow mom responding with amazement at how quickly my kids complied when summoned from the playground. Yep. I was not going to fail my children. No siree.
It worked, that is, until it didn’t work. Then it became a dumpster fire. And demanding “first-time obedience” became the gasoline that made the fire explode. With one child in particular, the more I dug in my heels and expected obedience, the more the opposite happened. As I increased the consequences, so did my child’s unhinged behavior.
I recently gave a seminar to a group of EFCA church missions leaders on how to create a missions culture at their church. This is a summary of that seminar…..
The missionary wall at Hillside Church in San Jose, California had over 40 pictures on it.
But missions leader Kim Coutts wanted something more. He didn’t just want his church to financially support missions, but for members to experience true partnership in missions. He wanted to create a culture of missions at Hillside.
It was 1996. Kim searched among ReachGlobal missionaries for a partner location, and settled on Tanzania, East Africa, where missionaries labored to reach Muslim coastal tribes and the Indian diaspora community.
Kim targeted key Hillside leaders to join on trips to Tanzania. On the very first team, Kim recruited both the elder board chairman and the lead pastor. Over the next eight years, Hillside would send 20 teams to Tanzania. Around 65 members participated, and a bolt of missions lightning spread like wildfire through the church, transforming many hearts to partner with international missions. For some, Kim’s missional focus set them on a new life trajectory.
Perhaps the best example is someone whose name is easily recognized within the EFCA: Kevin Kompelien. Kevin was the lead pastor of Hillside in the 90s, and the church’s partnership with Tanzania opened doors for him to serve in other parts of Africa. In 2006, Kevin was invited to become the Africa Area Leader for ReachGlobal. That led to deeper connections in the EFCA, and in 2016, Kevin was voted in as president of our movement.
Kevin Kompelien (right) with Rwandan church leaders
Imagine what God could do by creating a missions culture at your church. Do you have a passion to see missionaries cultivated in your own congregation? I recently asked several missionaries what their churches did to contribute to their desire to serve overseas, and I hope you are inspired by what they shared.
How do we spark a culture of missions?
1. Kindle a fire for missions in the next generation. Barna tells us that only 10% of Millennial churchgoers can define the Great Commission, so that’s a good place to start. But among young people, perhaps even more important is challenging underlying attitudes. Mobilizing Gen Z tells us, “[Gen Z has a] tendency to avoid risk. They have grown up surrounded by anxious adults, in a culture promoting safety as a priority, with devices that convey 24/7 the world’s trouble, personal conflicts, and cruel criticisms.” In trying to hold back a global pandemic, we may have inadvertently absorbed the idea that we need to prioritize safety above all else. But is this perspective compatible with the Great Commission? Elevate missionary stories – past and present – of those willing to count the cost to take the gospel to the nations.
2. Challenge their parents too. Perhaps this is just as important. Mobilizing Gen Z references Barna when explaining, “Career success and physical safety are the top concerns [of church-going parents]. Nearly half said, ‘I’d rather my child get a well-paying job than be a career missionary.’” In my experience in missions mobilization, I have seen first-hand that Christian parents are sometimes the biggest detriment to potential missionaries.
I also recently posted this one over at A Life Overseas:
The Hidden Super-Stars of Missions
I coach new missionaries as they prepare to go overseas. I’ve found I can often predict how quickly they’ll be able to raise support based on one crucial factor: whether they have an advocate who will come alongside them.
What do I mean by an advocate? Let me explain.
Raising support has got to be one of the most daunting experiences in any missionary’s life. So God’s called me to India, but I need you to fork over some cash so I can do it. Sound good? Awesome. What can I put you down for?
Let’s hope it doesn’t come out exactly like that, but it’s what missionaries dread. Raising financial partners has extraordinary joys, but it also comes with dark lows. It’s incredibly intimidating. Dozens – maybe hundreds – of friends ghosting their calls, emails that don’t get replies, events where no one shows up. It can be one of the most demoralizing experiences in a person’s life.
Who can turn that whole experience around? An advocate.
There was a lot I didn’t know when I adopted my children.
Since then, I’ve wondered a hundred times if we did right by our children when we adopted them. Adoption heals a wound, but I underestimated the depth of the wound and overestimated the ease of healing it.
Several months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on my advice for raising adopted children overseas. I turned it down. I can’t give advice on this because I’m still raising my children. Ask me again in ten years, and I’ll see if I have advice. Maybe only once I’ve heard what my adult children have to say about it.
For the bulk of their childhoods, Haven of Peace Academy shielded my children from the pain. They were different by being raised by white parents, but lots of children at HOPAC were different for lots of other reasons. Most were born in one country and raised in another, many were biracial, almost all knew what it felt like to navigate various cultures. My children were stuck between worlds, but so were all their classmates.
I ripped my children from Tanzania and dropped them into America in the spring of 2020, when the world had shattered into uncertainty, and racial anger that had festered for decades was exploding to the surface. We lived like hobos that spring with no place to call home, and the night in June that we arrived at my in-law’s house, there was a curfew over all of greater Los Angeles because of George Floyd rioting.
I wondered what world I had brought my Black children into.
Imagine telling your children about the things that people who look like you have done to people who look like them in the country you brought them to live in.
This month I turned 46 and every third grader knows that 46 rounds up to 50. I am officially middle-aged.
I know I’m supposed to have wrinkles but I worry if I’m supposed to have this many wrinkles. I have an expressive face which makes the dentist think she’s torturing me but really I’m just being expressive, and all that expression means a lot of wrinkles. But I’ve discovered that if you just reduce the lighting in your bathroom, half the wrinkles go away. I should market this on Shark Tank.
When I was young, my Gram told me I had good eyes. We would sit in her downstairs family room with the rust-and-gold-patterned carpet and she would do her bead crafts. I would crawl around on the floor and pick up the beads she had dropped and she told me I had good eyes. But the other day I was trying to thread a needle and reluctantly got out my reading glasses because I couldn’t see the darn thing. Apparently, I don’t have good eyes anymore. A kid spotted me with the glasses on and told me they made me look like a grandma and now that kid is locked in his room.
Here I am, caught in a life that feels like it should be eternal but every moment is only a second long. I live with the passage of time every minute of every day and yet it still surprises me. Every Christmas I exclaim that I can’t believe it’s already Christmas and every time I see a baby, I am surprised by how fast that baby has grown. I greatly anticipate the upcoming vacation or party, and then suddenly it’s over. I yearned for the baby to be potty-trained and the child to make her own sandwiches and the teenager to graduate but then I get there and look back with wistfulness.
So here I am at 46 and determined to no longer be surprised by the passage of time. Instead I find myself frantically grasping as it slips through my fingers. Johnny is my last child to be in elementary school, so my children are no longer young. On his birthday, he wanted me to physically bring his cupcakes to school instead of sending them with him, so I majorly inconvenienced myself and did it just because it was the last time.
My children don’t need me to brush their teeth anymore, but they need me to drive them and that makes me miss the brushing-teeth years. One evening when Gil was sick, I made two trips to school, two trips to church, and two trips to the soccer fields. In one evening. Won’t it be nice when in a few years we have our evenings back? I asked Gil. Yet simultaneously my heart beat empty at the thought of empty spaces at the dinner table, empty bedrooms. No. It won’t be nice at all, actually. It sounds dreadful.
My years of influence over them are flitting away like dandelion fluff. I think about how Grace will be able to drive on her own soon, and how nice that will be, and then I think about how I won’t get to hear her chats on the way home, and I don’t think that will be nice at all, actually. I think I want the future but really I want it to stay here, right now, in this moment. But I never get that.
By age 46, you would think I would be used to this already, but it’s like there’s something in my soul that knows that one day the Joy will arrive and time will stop and it will go on forever and ever. Perhaps that’s because I am a soul who is trapped in a linear existence but was created for eternity. And one day I’ll get there.
I spent my first years of life in suburban California, and I assumed every person on earth had a TV and a bike and a refrigerator that magically produced food. As a fish doesn’t know anything besides water, I couldn’t conceive of anything besides middle-class.
I moved to Liberia when I was six years old, and the boy on the other side of our fence ate frogs out of the swamp when his family ran out of food. I met girls who walked miles to haul water while I walked to my privileged international school. I later lived 16 of my adult years in Tanzania, where my rickety van and millepede-infested house felt like luxury. I didn’t have a dishwasher, a dryer or central air conditioning, but I had electricity and plumbing, and that lifted me above most Tanzanians.
I was a fish out of water, gasping for breath at the dichotomy between my life and theirs.
Now I’ve been back in America for two years, and I find myself slowly captivated by the middle-class ocean. The voices calling me from billboards and magazines and screens are persistent: You need more. You deserve more. It’s your right. I don’t want to listen, but I do.
Americans make up only 4 percent of the world’s population yet hold 31 percent of the world’s wealth. As a little girl, I dreamed of being a princess, and then living in Africa revealed to me that I already had royal status. How Rich Am I? tells me that even on my ministry income, I am richer than 94% of the world’s population. That can only be defined as aristocracy.
Americans spent over 10 billion dollars on Halloween this year, which is more than the entire GDP of 60 countries. Americans will spend around 900 billion dollars for Christmas, which is more than the GDP of 173 countries – all but 17. Just Christmas. Scientists estimate that if everyone on earth lived the lifestyle of Americans, it would take five planet Earths to support them all. Guess that means I should be “glad” most people are poorer than Americans.
Yet when I drive through neighborhoods of houses that look just like mine with a Starbucks and a Panera on every corner, when everyone around me goes to Disneyland and Outback Steakhouse, I struggle to put my head above the water and remember how most of the world lives. It’s easy to fool myself into believing that just about everyone has what I have, that I am in the majority. Or perhaps I’m poorer than the majority since I can’t afford pedicures, cruises and designer purses.
A friend in Tanzania wrote to tell us that he hasn’t had a job for a year, so could we front him the money to start a new business? And my immediate thought was no, because I just found out this morning that my child needs braces.
And my next thought was that I just chose braces over my friend’s desperation to put food on the table and pay school fees for his kids.
I like to pretend I’m not wealthy. Jesus said that to whom much has been given, much will be required, so if I’m not rich, He can’t require much of me. I can hunker down and pay for braces and not worry about people who need the money more than I do.
