Category / Missions

by johnkking

A Novice Insider? Really!?

Counter-Intuitives—A novice insider is more effective than highly trained, mature outsider.

If you have read my last two articles, you know that we focus on discipling disciple makers. Our goal in identifying a Person of Peace is not just to see him/her come to know Jesus or even to reach the extended family—our ultimate goal is to reach a community in such a way that they are discipled in how to reach another community.

While cross-cultural workers make significant contributions to Disciple Making Movements (DMMs), this counter-intuitive statement emphasizes the strategic value of insiders. But note, it explicitly highlights the value of a “novice” insider. Why? Why would we value novice insiders so highly?

True movements only happen when the process is infinitely reproducible. When your strategy depends on expensive, time-consuming practices, you will not launch a movement. Let me use an illustration to help you see the point. While American football is the most popular professional sport in the United States, it has not spread to other parts of the world. The name, football, is reserved throughout most of the rest of the world for what we call soccer. Why? Why is soccer so wildly popular throughout the world?

Soccer is infinitely reproducible. It is a simple game that demands very little equipment. You can travel most anywhere in the world and you will likely find a soccer field. If you travel internationally I encourage you to carry a couple of new soccer balls and a small hand pump. I assure you children will know what to do with a ball after you air it up and give it to them. They will be incredibly happy to put your gift to use.

When you train a Person of Peace to facilitate his/her extended family in discovering who God is, you are launching the reproductive engine of a DMM. Any of that first group can reproduce what they experience anywhere they have friends or family who are open to the gospel. The fact that this person is not highly trained is actually a blessing. Others recognize they too can do it because the process does not require Bible college degrees or decades of experience.

Most of the Western church models a slow form of reproduction because we make our Bible studies dependent upon highly-trained, highly experienced Bible teachers and preachers. By contrast, Disciple Making Movements tap into a sweet spot that every evangelist knows already. The best resource for evangelistic outreach is a brand new believer. The first two years after coming to faith is a fruitful sweet spot. One reason this is true is because most of their closest relationships are with not yet saved people. Another reason is the transformation in those years is the greatest—God’s impact on their walk is evident.

When God stirs the heart of a Person of Peace and brings a disciple maker into the picture, powerful things can happen. Stop spending your time frustrating people who do not want to hear the gospel (yet) and start using your time looking for the lost people God is preparing. This is where an abundant harvest arises!

by johnkking

Ready or Not, Here I Come

DMM counter-intuitives—“Share only where Jesus has prepared someone’s heart to hear.” Start with a person of peace (Luke 10:6).

Too often we butt in with a gospel truth where no one is interested in hearing it. Jesus warned his disciples, “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces” (Matthew 7:6). Why won’t we listen to our Savior?

For hundreds of years, traditional missions directs evangelists to walk into the middle of a village as the people return from their fields and proclaim in a loud voice, “We are here to tell you about Jesus and the Cross.” Many are ridiculed, beaten and martyred. Christianity seen as an invading religion provokes a violent response.

If indigenous evangelists keep getting driven out and even killed, how can there be a Disciple Making Movement? In Northern India a strategic coordinator returned to Scripture for an answer. He found it implemented the Person of Peace strategy outlined in the Gospels.

Initially no one believed the results. Over the next five years indigenous evangelists planted more churches than had been in the previous 50 years. Now there are more that 40,000 new churches in North India. The Person of Peace principle played a significant role in this Disciple Making Movement.

Believers among Unreached Peoples still face tremendous persecution. Yet, rather than being driven out and even martyred, the evangelists use the Person of Peace strategy and it allows them to share the gospel in places that earlier were totally closed to traditional methods. The principle is not new; Christ gave it to the disciples. God’s way is truly the best way.

How can I determine whether or not a person’s heart is prepared to hear the gospel? The great need, as my mentor puts it, is to be “overtly spiritual without being obnoxiously religious.” Every encounter with a person gives us an opportunity to talk about a spiritual reality. The goal is to quickly assess whether this person is currently open, or at least curious about spiritual things. Often people who are closed to religious discussions are intrigued by spiritual ones. Many who refuse to debate religious squabbles are intrigued by spiritual dialogue.

Some Persons of Peace are open to spiritual things because of things God has been doing in their lives for a long time. Note that Cornelius’s prayers and helping the poor had caught God’s attention (Acts 10:4). Lydia was gathered with a group of women for prayer along the river (Acts 16:13). By contrast, though, God used remarkable circumstances to open the heart of the Philippian jailor (Acts 16:22-34). Paul’s authentic spiritual conversations resulted in these two later encounters. But sometimes, like with Cornelius, the Person of Peace finds us! It is an incredible joy to be God’s speaker to a prepared heart!

by johnkking

Going Slow to Go Fast!

Recently I posted the following to my Twitter feed:

CPM counter-intuitives—“Go slow 2 go fast…focus on few 2 win many.” Equip indigenous family heads 2 facilitate discovery of God (Ax 10:33).

Since that is linked to my Facebook account, it showed up there, too. A Facebook friend commented, “Sounds like Confucius. Haha.” I chuckled with him. Later I realized that this is a pretty good way to describe the list of Disciple Making Movements (DMM) Counter-Intuitives.

These Counter-Intuitives are short pithy observations of typical things that happen in DMMs which swim upstream when compared to general mission/evangelistic practices. Let me unpack the one mentioned earlier by way of illustration.

“Go slow to go fast.” Every day the population of the world increases. The growth rate is significantly higher among the nations and people groups who are most resistant to the spread of the gospel. If we keep getting the results we have typically experienced we will grow further behind. This awareness pushes us to find quicker ways of spreading the gospel of the kingdom. Mass evangelism, for example, is an attempt to get the Word out to larger numbers of people at the same time in the hopes of going faster.

But what if the best way to go fast is actually to slow down? Sounds contradictory! We have found that Jesus actually modeled a “slow” method to reach the world. Mass evangelists have often taken us to the passages where Jesus spoke to multitudes as the grounds for their strategy. For example, they might say, “Jesus preached to a huge group through the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chs. 5-7). Yes, the multitudes overheard Jesus teaching on the Mount, but he directed it to the twelve that he had hand-picked. While the crowds heard, Jesus models the practice of intentionally training a few. He knew how fickle the crowds are prone to be. He knew he personally had only a short time to set in motion the process by which the world would hear the gospel. He was not going to turn the future over to the crowds; he was going to put it in the hands of his disciples.

If you want to disciple your youth group, hand-pick a few disciplers and train them to train, coach and mentor the members of the youth group. Spend most of your time pouring into them so they can and will reproduce what you are doing (not only discipling, but discipling disciplers). That is the way to produce fruit that lasts.

If you are called to reach a city, it will require you to focus on a few to reach the many. Duplicate this several times and equip them to duplicate it, too, and you have the means to reach the city.

But this Counter-Intuitive has another element that you should not overlook—the people you disciple should be seen by the target audience as insiders. Indigenous family heads are the best means to reach people groups who still have strong family-based systems.

When we transplant Western individualistic strategies into these places we set ourselves and our disciples up for failure. To pick-off an occasional person from these large, tight-knit families insures that they despise Christians. They view us much as we view a cult—“They’ve kidnapped and brain-washed the weakest member of our family!” Such a strategy only works in the Western individualistic worldview regions of our planet (and causes problems with some here, too). We will have greater success if we slow down and train an insider to facilitate a process by which his/her family discovers together who God is and how great his loving provision is for our spiritual needs. Rather than rupturing families, this strategy holds hope for the whole household to come to faith together. Even some of those who do not come to personal faith value being given the opportunity to consider it as part of the family.

But this process can be slower on the front end. You have to find such a person who is open to learning the process and facilitating the discovery. How in the world will that happen?

In Luke 10 Jesus sends the 72 out in 36 pairs. These teams are looking for “persons of peace”—those who are receptive to the peace that comes with the proclamation of the kingdom of heaven. They are not to go from house to house, but find and stay with the receptive person who is hospitable to the gospel. Focus on equipping this person to lead the family in a guided discovery of God’s nature and what surrendering to Jesus’ Lordship entails.

Luke reveals a story of just such a person in his sequel (Acts 10). Cornelius is an excellent example of a Person of Peace. He spends the three days between when he sends for Peter and his arrival gathering the people he influences and has them ready to listen to anything God will tell them to do. God’s Spirit still prepares people like this in our world. God wants the nations to come to know himself. His Son modeled for us a strategy of going slow in order to go fast. (The speed comes because the process is infinitely reproducible and new harvesters are able to come from the harvest. Disciplinig disciplers needs to become our strategy.

by johnkking

A Recommended Site

Many of the blogs I follow periodically tell their readers about other sites that they find useful. Today I want to recommend one to all my friends who are passionate about cross-cultural missions. It is the website archives of the International Journal of Frontier Missiology:

http://www.ijfm.org/archives.htm

At this site you will find the archives of twenty-seven years of articles that were written for this journal. The subject-matter in these volumes is thought-provoking and well worth your time.

Let me whet your appetite by suggesting you begin with an article written by Keith Williams and Leith Gray. The article addresses cross-cultural evangelism and is titled, “The Litte Phone that Could: Mobile-Empowered Ministry.” You can get a pdf copy by going to:

http://www.ijfm.org/PDFs_IJFM/27_3_PDFs/mobile_williams.pdf

The authors do a great job of weaving fascinating information about the rapid spread of cell phone technology throughout the remotest parts of the world with efforts to use this for the spread of the gospel. Keith is a church planter in the Arab World and he recently launched Mobile Advance (www.mobileadvance.org), an initiative focused on enabling the rapid, widespread, and effective implimentation of mobile phone ministry among the least reached people groups.

When a dramatized audio Bible was produced in the language of the people group that was being targeted, the missionaries assumed these nomads did not have access to any form of media player. But what they failed to recognize was these people were using their phones to listen to music and poetry as well as view videos.

Now they share individual Scripture stories on their phone during a visit. If the person shows enough interest, they transfer it by Bluetooth. When a person comes to faith in Jesus they are given an inexpensive mobile phone memory card containing the entire panoramic set of Bible stories. Such technology allows the message to go viral.

Read the article. It will stretch your imagination. I’m hoping we will become creative in finding ways to get the good news out.

by johnkking

Why Does Coming Home Feel So Strange?

Earlier this year I had a group of friends who came back to the U.S. after spending a year teaching English in Asia. They shared a range of emotions experienced through re-entry. Uniformly, they were surprised that the adjustment was so hard.

Each expressed that moving to this Asian nation had brought culture-shock. Speaking so little of the language compounded the cultural challenges. Knowing they were not staying long enough to gain fluency made it difficult to pour themselves into learning the language. Being employed to teach conversational English meant their job kept them focused on speaking their mother-tongue, too.

But that was last year. Now they are home. Their blond hair and pale skin no longer result in anyone staring. Why feel so odd being back in the States?

People in any culture are basically oblivious to how they are shaped by their upbringing. Many of us have little appreciation for what culture is until we are adrift in a foreign one. Paul Hiebert says, “Culture shock is the disorientation we experience when all the cultural maps and guidelines we learned as children no longer work…In a new culture much of our old knowledge is useless, if not misleading….We are overwhelmed by constantly having to face confusing situations and the strain of learning a new way of life” (Anthropological Insights for Missionaries, pp. 64-73).

But we are more prone to cut ourselves some slack when we move to a new country. Yes, we go with unrealistically high expectations for ourselves, but we are at least open to the likelihood of experiencing culture shock. But when we return home, the re-adjustment will be much quicker and easier, right?

Hiebert warns us, “After this initial excitement [of our return] subsides, we begin the serious business of reestablishing ourselves in the local culture. It is now that we begin to experience irritation and frustration. Things that once seemed so natural now look extravagant and insensitive in a world of need. People seem so parochial. They soon lose interest in our stories and turn to more important topics of conversation—changes in the latest models of cars, local politics, neighborhood gossip, and sports. We even find it hard to relate to our friends and relatives because they will not listen, or they will listen politely but do not seem to understand what we are trying to say….Our frustration is intensified by the fact that all this is so unexpected. We have become strangers in our own culture! We are put into new roles we did not expect. We are out-of-step with the lifestyles that once seemed so important but now seem so extravagant and self-centered” (AIfM, pp. 78-79).

Humor, flexibility, forgiveness and thankfulness are four antidotes to the stress of culture-shock. Whether we are leaving or returning, we need to remember that people are not laughing at us, but at our strange ways and faux pas. Laughing with them overcomes the fear of failure that often prevents us from trying something new. Remember that relationships are more important than plans and schedules. Be flexible. The Gospel is a message of grace. Forgiveness is at the core of our identity in Christ. Thankfulness rejoices at everything that goes well. Peace is often found in the company of joy and thanksgiving. Practice the gospel. Live kingdom realities.

When you re-enter, be sure to thank Papa God for the insight you have by gaining a second cultural lens. You are now able to see the world with greater depth (the distance between your two eyes creates your capacity to adequately judge depth). Realize no place is home, as it used to be. Recognize that we are pilgrims—we are just passing through!