Lent Day 6: Thankful for mission

"I'm still shaking!" he pointed to the left, remembering the bullet hole in his car door. "I though he would kill me." Ken told us about how a gunman had walked up to his car, stalled in a Nairobi traffic jam. The shooter pointed a gun at him, demanded cash and valuables, and walked away between cars.

"Didn't anyone come to help?" we asked, sitting as a mission cohort in the safety of a classroom.

"No, everyone pretends they haven't seen anything. Foreigners are targets. The policeman ahead probably was in on it and stopped us so we could be robbed."

I've found a few quiet heroes like Ken over the past five years among a study group of men and women who risk their lives across culture. They learn languages, communication, and customs so they can tell others about Jesus, training nationals to preach and teach to their own people.

Today I'm in the classroom of an outstanding woman with tales of her own to tell. She and her husband will return full-time to the mission field this summer. Over the past four years, they finished their doctorates, carried a teaching load at a university, and traveled the world as missionary-trainers. There's nothing about them that would suggest heroic ministry yet their experience and records say otherwise.

I am so grateful that someone told my grandparents the Story. They told my parents, who told me. Someone - like Bev and Will who rank high among those I admire - risked their comfort and health to wrestle my tribe from our idolatry to the Living God.

Please pray with me today for such seemingly ordinary people, doing extraordinary things in the power of the Spirit. And if you have resources, don't delay. Consider sending $10, $25, $100 or more to someone in the directory at http://worldmissions.ag.org/. A new Family tribe will thank you for it.

Read more:

*Both men and women came, all whose hearts were willing. ... So the people of Israel—every man and woman who was eager to help in the work the Lord had given them through Moses—brought their gifts and gave them freely to the Lord. Exodus 35: 22, 29 NIV

*I will exalt you, my God the King; I will praise your name for ever and ever. Every day I will praise you and extol your name for ever and ever. Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom. Psalm 145:1-3   NIV

*Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. Jonah 2:8 (NIV) 

*The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. 1 Timothy 6:10

Moravian Prayer: Lord God, we confess our weaknesses. We need your help to turn away from the idols we have created. May we always put our trust in you and worship you - the one true God. Amen.

The Light of life

Missionary women often wrote about converts who were "rescued from darkness," and "brought into the glorious light." The repetition of language is striking as I'm re-reading letters and updates sent by early Pentecostal women to their supporters and families.

It's highly unpopular today -- offensive even -- to refer to other religions as "dark" or their adherents as being "blinded by the Devil." Further, it's considered prejudicial to say they have "come to the light of Christ" upon becoming Christian believers. But missionaries in the early twentieth century had no such hang-ups or demands to be politically correct. They said what they believed, that those without Jesus were utterly without salvation or spiritual sight.

I've noticed a pattern in most denominations: there's no point in being a missionary when missionary language is "cleaned up," where thinking shifts from bringing good news to the desperate to adding Christian myths to people who already are doing pretty well, and when the desperation of sharing the gospel dissipates. There's good in serving as a social worker, psychologist, educator, or helper. 

But following a call as a missionary thrust into a harvest with apostolic fervor to "rescue the perishing" and share the light of the gospel of Christ? Nope. Those fanatics disappear into a milieu of denominational do-gooders. The Story becomes secondary or vanishes altogether.

I'm refreshed by reading the letters. Through their suffering, through their rejection by the people they love, through their hardships, and because of their stamina, the women ground me in reality. 

They show that no matter how culture changes, human nature stays the same. Our condition is blindness, lostness, corruption, and an inclination to wickedness.

Yet, Truth also remains. The need to share God's loving provision through Jesus Christ endures.

Whom will you tell the Story today? Who is desperately in need of Good News? 

Read more:

*You light a lamp for me. The LORD, my God, lights up my darkness. In your strength I can crush an army; with my God I can scale any wall. Psalm 18:28–29 NLT

*When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." John 8:12 NIV

World Christianity

The dark wood floors gleam with polish, and the soft grey walls cool the cottage. I'm studying in a friend's place over the weekend, a home filled with lace, hand-hooked rugs, and pillows.

Yesterday I plowed through five or six books on my way through thirty for Friday's second exam. The information (contextualizing the Christian faith across cultures) is fascinating. I love the history of missionaries, their interaction with and love for people groups, and the missionary observations that informed the science of anthropology in the West. They pioneered, explorered, and adventured in surroundings completely strange to them.

Tracing the ongoing transformation of cultures is interesting. As missionaries sought to understand their fields of service, they translated works by world religions. By giving the text to the people, Buddhist, Shinto, Islamic, and Hindu systems resurfaced among their populations, morphing to shape and regulate their own cultures more strongly. Where Western culture was imposed along with the gospel, the Church separated from the indigenous culture within a generation or two. The gulf is almost insurmountable in some places today, with parallel cultures that can hardly identify with each other.

The feeling that Christianity is Western is unfounded: the faith is Middle Eastern in origin. Christians were in India from the first century, if Indian historians are accurate. A Chinese emperor erected a monument to Christians in his court in the seventh century. Buddhism reached Japan about the same time as Christianity - and it is not sidelined as a foreign system. (In the next generations, as Muslims have big families in Europe and migrate out, will Islam be called a Western religion?)

As I go through today's books, I am excited to read how Good News is good news everywhere. That God should send Jesus to give us abundant life, to let us be fully human in the moment, to reconcile us into the open friendship he made us for... how thrilling is that? It's time for a pause to say thank you. I'm happy to be part of world Christianity.

"Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. May your [peaceful and loving] kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven..."