Tag: Thoughts on Missions Page 7 of 13

Is your passion for the glory of Jesus Christ stronger than anything else?  Do you believe in the depths of your soul that he is the greatest treasure of the universe, and that heaven and hell are real?

You may envision the glory of adventure, you might be full of noble good works, and maybe new challenges thrill you.  But all of this will be crushed under the magnitude of the difficulty of learning another language, the isolation of being away from your home and culture, and the tears of your parents….or your children.

It’s got to be about Jesus, not you.  Not your fulfillment.  Not your vision.  Not your success. Ultimately, it’s got to be just about him.

If you are married, is your spouse steadfastly unified with you in this passion?  In work such as this, there is no such thing as a spouse that is along for the ride.  After Jesus, prioritize your spouse.  If God wants you to do this, he’ll make you united in your vision.  Or at the very least, he’ll give your spouse the willingness to humbly seek after that vision.

Are you willing to submit yourself to stringent accountability?  Hundreds of people will be keeping you accountable.  Every church who puts your picture on their wall.  Every person who writes a check each month.  Every child who prays for you at bedtime.  All of them will expect you to live a life of integrity and humility.  All of them will be expecting to hear from you regularly.  Are you—or are you willing to become—a good communicator?  Are you willing to vulnerably share with people beyond your group of close friends?  Are you even willing to share your life in front of large crowds?

Are you adequately trained?  Good intentions are great, but they are not enough.  You can have the most willing, servant-like heart, and yet be more of a liability than a help overseas. Do you have a valuable skill to share?  Education, business, agriculture, linguistics?  If you are planning to be a leader, administrator, or church planter, have you proven yourself first in your home country?  Are you an avid, dedicated student of the Word of God?  If not, then now is not the time for you to go.  Get trained first.

Are you willing to be more teachable than you ever have been in your life?  Forget everything you thought you knew about people. Be ready to reconsider what church looks like, what productivity looks like, what wealth and poverty look like. You’ll be starting from scratch with an entirely different worldview, and even right and wrong won’t seem so black and white anymore. Think every aspect of your theology is set in stone?  Get ready to have your world rocked.

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“Unlike many in the world, I’ve had the incredible privilege of never needing to worry about my daily bread.  Perhaps that’s why God allowed me to be deprived of my daily sleep.  And there are a myriad of other ways we can be sent into the desert involuntarily—cancer, hurricane, betrayal.”

I wrote how Choosing Missions Means Choosing the Desert at A Life Overseas.  But I think this post applies to any0ne who has chosen the desert–and that can look like adoption or foster care (or maybe parenting in general!) or church ministry or any kind of sacrifice made in the name of the Kingdom of God.

So this post is dedicated to those who, for any reason, have chosen the desert.  May God meet you there and show himself as your Bread of Life.

Missions Means Choosing the Desert

Earlier this year, I went through a season of insomnia.  A chaotic furlough, a new job, and lots of life change brought on anxiety, which bred sleeplessness, which bred more anxiety, until I was a mess.

I lay awake many nights and begged God, “You know I need to sleep.  You know I can’t function without it.  I believe you want me to be productive.  So why won’t you help me sleep?”

And the Word of God spoke to me through Deuteronomy 6:

Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.

There I was, wandering in the desert, feeling desperate, crushed, and abandoned by God.  Until I remembered that the desert is the very best place for God to meet me.   

He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna….to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

God caused you to hunger.  Just like sleep, bread is necessary for life itself, yet God wanted his people to remember that their very existence depended on God and his Word.

Thousands of years later, our Savior voluntarily went into the desert, and learned for himself that man does not live by bread alone.  And not long after that, he stood tall and declared himself to be our Bread of Life, sent down from Heaven.

Unlike many in the world, I’ve had the incredible privilege of never needing to worry about my daily bread.  Perhaps that’s why God allowed me to be deprived of my daily sleep.  And there are a myriad of other ways we can be sent into the desert involuntarily—cancer, hurricane, betrayal.

As insomnia helped me to understand the value of the desert, I realized that choosing missions is one of the ways we voluntarily choose the desert. 

In choosing missions, we leave behind our support structures:  family, church, friends.

Choosing missions means learning new ways of survival:  how to communicate, how to care for our children, how to provide for our basic needs.  Most of the time, we give up many of the comforts of home, whether it be as simple as McDonald’s Playland or as complex as feeling understood by the people around us.

Missions sometimes means we find ourselves in a spiritual wasteland:  a city where we are one of only handful of believers.  Where the oppression, whether seen or unseen, lies heavy on our shoulders.

Choosing missions means choosing the life of a stranger, an outsider.  We are often misunderstood.  We often feel alone, and as time goes by, we often feel disconnected in our “home” countries as well.  Like it did for our Savior, the desert brings on temptation strong and thick.  But unlike our Savior, we often cave to it.

So why, why, why do we choose this life?  Why on earth would we choose this desert? 

Because man does not live by bread alone, or cream cheese, or even Starbucks.  Man does not live by running water, or air conditioning, or indoor heating.  He is not sustained by paved roads, or fast internet, or stylish clothes.  He even does not live by English education for his kids, by real turkey on Thanksgiving or by cold Christmases and the smell of pine trees.

No.

We live by every Word that comes from the mouth of God. 

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I wrote this post for missionaries, but it’s a revision of something I wrote a few years ago, and it applies to anyone who is experiencing any kind of cross-cultural life (which really should describe almost everyone in the U.S.).  

A few years ago, a video started making its way around my Facebook feed–shared by lots foreigners who live in my part of Africa.  The video showed two African men shoveling sand.  There was a very large pile of sand to their left.  The two men were shoveling the sand into a wheelbarrow, filling it up, and then dumping it…two feet away.

The person filming this video obviously thought the men were complete idiots.  “Watch this!  Wait for it…wait for it…” she gleefully exclaimed.  And when the men dumped out another wheelbarrow of sand just inches away, she could be heard bursting into giggles.

By the time I saw the video, it had over 13 million views and 300,000 shares by people who obviously thought the men’s idiocy was equally hilarious.  I didn’t share it, but I had to admit that it did seem pretty amusing.

That is, I thought it was funny until two African friends set us all straight.  They explained:  While making concrete, in the absence of a cement mixer, a builder will use a wheelbarrow to measure.  One part cement, two parts sand, three parts gravel.  These men were not idiots.  They knew exactly what they were doing.  They were using the resources they had to do something that was actually quite rational.

Oh.

Oops.

I was terribly ashamed.  Not just for myself, but for the millions of foreigners who come to Africa and think that we know everything.  That one little video made me re-evaluate how I view my host country.  It made me wonder how many other times I had the same attitude of condescension about something I knew nothing about.

There was a tag on that video:  #TIA:  “This is Africa.”  This is a common hashtag in my part of the world, but foreigners often turn it into something demeaning.  For example, “Spent all day waiting for my car to be fixed, and then realized they ‘fixed’ the wrong part.  #TIA.”

But let’s step back a minute and take a look at that from a distance.  What is “TIA” communicating in this instance?  That everything always goes wrong in Africa?   That no one knows how to fix anything?  That we should have the expectation that everyone in Africa is an idiot?  What would the mechanic think if he read it?

As Christian missionaries, it’s easy to assume that we are above this kind of behavior.  After all, we’ve been vetted, interviewed, and scrutinized more than most people will be in their lifetime.  We’re supposed to be godly, right?  We’re supposed to love the nations, right?   Missionaries could never be racist….right.

Call it racism, stereotyping, or ethnocentrism, but one thing we need to get really clear is that it dwells in all of our hearts in some form or another.  If we’re really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we really do think we know what’s best.  Our way of doing things is really the most effective.  Basically, I am better than you.  Or at the very least, my culture is better than yours.

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I posted at A Life Overseas today, and this time I revised an essay I wrote on this blog two years ago.  It’s a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and I wanted it to reach a broader audience.

It must have hit a nerve, because six hours later, it’s already been shared 150 times.  

Many of your missionary friends are aching for you to read and understand this.  Even if you read my original post two years ago, please read this new one today.  It’s that important.

As I write today, a thought that is forefront on my mind is Haven of Peace Academy’s need for teachers for next school year.  We are at the point of feeling desperate (yet knowing–and remembering to believe–that this is God’s school and we can trust Him.)  I am deeply passionate about the important and very strategic ministry at HOPAC, and I want to shout, “Why is it so hard for us to find teachers?  And once we find them, why is it so hard for them to find support?”  How can I help churches back at home get this?

Maybe reading this today will help give you a different perspective.  I hope so.

In Defense of Second-Class Missionaries

Imagine what it would look like if western churches
hired their staff with the same priorities that they choose overseas missionaries
to financially support.

First of all, a Children’s Pastor would
definitely be out.  Not strategic enough; he’s only supporting the
children of believers.  Youth Pastor?  Also out, unless he
targets neighborhood kids.

How about a Music Pastor?  Or Pastoral
Counselor?  Nope.  Those are just support roles.  Not enough
front-line ministry.

Administrative Pastor?  Receptionist?  Good heavens.
 We could never dream of paying someone for those kind of inconsequential jobs. 

How about a Preaching Pastor?
 Well…..that’s if-y, but he probably doesn’t make the cut either.
 After all, he’s only feeding the Body.  Most of the time, he’s not
actually reaching the lost. 

So that pretty much leaves only the positions of Community
Outreach Pastor or Evangelist.  Yet how many churches
even have those paid positions? 

I’m not suggesting that churches go about firing
two-thirds of their staff.  I just want to talk about a double-standard I
often see.

Let me introduce you
to the class system among missionaries. 

Who is on the A-List?  Well, that would be
the Church Planters.  Among unreached people groups gives you A+ status.
 Pastoral Trainers and Bible Translators might be able to
squeak by with an A.

The B-List?  Doctors and other health workers,
community development and poverty alleviation workers, ESL teachers.

The C-List?  Administrators, missionary
member care, MK teachers, or anyone else considered “support.”

Whatever tends to be the current hot-topic
in “justice ministry” also often ends up on the A-List.  These days, that’s fighting human
trafficking.  It used to be orphan
ministry, but that’s pretty much been relegated to B-status now.  It’s cool, but not that cool. 

Granted, this class system doesn’t usually
originate with the missionaries themselves, but it’s come out of the culture of
missions in their home countries.  How
many missionaries have sat before missions committees back home who examined if
they fit into their “grid” of priorities? 
And often that grid looks exactly like the hierarchy I just outlined.

My husband and I worked for eight years in TCK
ministry at an international school. 
When trying to raise support, we called and sent information packets to
over 200 churches in California.  We heard back from two.  Churches
told us, over and over again, Sorry, but that ministry doesn’t fit into
our strategy.  

That all changed when we transitioned to theological
training of East African pastors.  Finally, we had churches calling us.
 It was nice.  But frankly, kind of frustrating.  We didn’t change
ministries so that we would become more popular with churches.  We
switched because that’s where God was leading us.  But the truth is, we
don’t consider theological training to be any more strategic, or any more exciting,
than what we were doing at that international school. 

Unfortunately, the missionaries themselves are often acutely aware of this
hierarchy, and it makes many feel like they are second-class. 

Read the rest here.  (And then share it!)