deepbrew

“Generally speaking, with a few notable exceptions, those who go from one country to another as missionaries end up hindering rather than helping the cause of Christ.” That’s the second sentence in Bob Finley’s 2005 book Reformation in Foreign Missions. Finley says that Christians from rich countries should stop sending missionaries to poor countries. Instead, they should support indigenous missionaries.

The economic disparity between us and those we hope to reach is the main problem. People from industrialized countries, such as America, Canada, or Korea, appear fabulously rich when they go to poorer countries. “The foreigner’s presence is likely to breed covetousness and destroy any sense of self-sacrifice which may already exist among Bible school students or native workers in poorer countries” (12).

But trying to live on the level of the people is an inadequate solution. Missionaries who live in conditions as poor as the natives do often get sick, and end up spending so much time on the basics that they have little time to “do mission work.” The solution? “Go home where you belong and send your support money to an indigenous ministry whose missionaries can cope with the environment in which they have lived since childhood” (69).

Cultural differences between missionaries and natives often cause offense. The gospel is identified “with aliens who appear weird to those people” (11). Even though missionaries are usually aware of these differences and strive to transcend them, it often takes one or two generations before cultural barriers are overcome. Native missionaries do not experience this challenge.

Foreign missionaries often bring an attitude of superiority. “We are superior, they are inferior; therefore we have to go over there and train them” (12).

We must rethink missions.

Just last summer, I spent 4 months in Asia with IGo, a missionary training school. I experienced and learned life-changing truth. We examined missions from many angles—discussing key ideas like incarnational living and contextualization. We thought long and hard about how to transmit the Gospel from one culture to another. I returned with an ardent desire to pursue a missionary calling. My sister sent me Finley’s book, and now I’m trying to pull it all together.

But what about the Great Commission? It’s everyone’s question to Finley’s proposed reformation. He spends the first chapters examining the biblical model of evangelism and showing that we are not even close to imitating it. Finley believes and seeks to obey the GC, but not with traditional foreign missions.

And there are exceptions to his call to stay home—ways rich people like us could go and be effective.

We could immigrate. Permanently. Without support from a mission board. Marrying a native of the country would be the best way of doing this.

We could go as Bruce Olson went to the Motilones. Olson endured incredible hardships to get to know the Motilone tribe in Columbia, and after several years was able to bring the Gospel to them. It was miraculous. But he did not come as a rich foreigner/missionary. He came as himself—as a representative of Christ.

Going as a foreign student is another option Finley recommends. Foreign students will accept the gospel from a fellow student more readily then from a professional missionary.

Read the book, available at www.christianaid.org or www.amazon.com .

Missions is God’s work, not ours, and he uses all kinds of methods. I know for a fact that he has used and is using many traditional foreign missionaries.

I’m not convinced of all of Finley’s conclusions, but I am sure of one thing. Here we are, in a land where we speak the same language as the people, where there is no economic disparity, where we are familiar with the culture. We are blind if we do not see the opportunity, and disobedient if we do not go, make disciples, and baptize.

School starts Tomorrow.  At 9:00 I will be smiling happily and nervously at a crew of 20 7-12ers.  Am I ready?  Not overly.   But I can’t wait for the thing to start so I get a feel for this thing.  I don’t know if I’ve ever been more keyed up about something in my life.  Seriously.

I feel bad that I haven’t posted more about IGo.  I want to sometime post more pics, tell you more about it, put a few more plugs in for the place for the benefit of all you future students out there.  I will do that, once I get a few free moments.   Not sure when this is going to happen.

In other news….  Eric is still gone…  Only 1 yr, 11 3/4 months till he comes back.  Yes, life is a tragic vale of tears.  But… at least I get this whole huge room to myself.  Not that I really like that or anything.

In other news… my laptop is now luxuriating in 2 GBs of memory.  Ahh….  Yup, it’s real snappy like.  Can’t wait to see what it does once I stick Vista on it.  On the subject of memory, let me put a plug in for crucial.com, the only place to buy memory.  I ordered yesterday, opted for the 7-10 day free shipping, and the stuff arrived today, all the way from Idaho.  Not sure how they were able to pull that off, but hey, I was very happy.  Crucial’s stuff is top notch, too.

On another subject… Passion Camp was a wonderful wonderful weekend.  We were incredibly blessed by God.   The guys loved it, and we were all impacted with some seriously life-changing stuff.  I will never be the same, for sure.  God is incredible!

Another piece of news I was really happy to hear was that the 19 Korean hostages in Afghanistan are set to be released!  This is very positive!  We had prayed a lot for these folks last month.

Well, I will hopefully post a picture of my 20 brilliant future world changers on here soon.   Peace out.

My time in Asia has been one of the most incredible four months of my life ever. I learned so much about our God and his work in the world. I got to know so many amazing people. I traveled to fascinating places, and enjoyed all sorts of experiences.

This four month semester at the IGO consisted of 3 ministry trips and 3 three week terms of study. On the ministry trips I went to Dhaka, Bangladesh, the Karen Villages of Thailand, and Xi’an, China. During the study terms I studied things like Theology of Missions, Discovering our God, Life of Christ, TESOL, History of Missions, Principles of Teaching, Genesis, Cultural Anthropology, Christian Family, Galatians, Hebrews, and Kingdom Theology, to name all 12 classes. Plus there was a mentoring group with it’s own subject matter and assignments. Additionally, during the study terms, we went out two nights a week on local ministry tasks. No, we did not get bored.

It doesn’t look like I’m going to get bored at home either. My “little” brother Eric is leaving in 1 week for a 2 year term in Poland with AIM teaching English, and I want to be with him as much as possible before he leaves. Passion camp is this weekend, Thursday night through Sunday. Looks like it’s shaping up to be a great weekend, and if know of any more guys that might be interested, we can still sign them up. My sis and her kids are here now, which is awesome, and my bro and his family is coming down for the day tomorrow. Our youth camping trip is today and tomorrow. School is starting in 2 ½ weeks, and I am supposed to be teaching 17 of them, grades 7-12. Breath in…. breath out… Say a prayer for me, if you would. It’s good to be back.

Well, this morning I had my first cup of real coffee-maker coffee since coming to Thailand!  I’ve been surviving on instant.  That’s about all they drink over here.  This stuff they call 3 in 1 is really popular; it’s got sugar, creamer, and instant coffee all mixed together.  It’s tolerable, and not much more.  So since Mom sent this bag of really good Starbucks ground coffee over I’ve been pining to make it, but haven’t had a coffee maker to do it.  Collier brought a coffee maker from America, and this morning I went over to his house and he made me a cup of genuine brewed coffee.  It was profound.
Had a great rest of the day as well.  Our mentoring group rented motorbikes and went driving all the way around the mountain, on a 3-4 hour drive.  We saw some incredible scenery, and besides two flat tires and some serious sunburns, we had a perfectly awesome day!
Now we are just about to leave for  our 2nd ministry trip, this time to the mountains of Thailand, to visit Karen villages.  We’ll be doing lots of driving on rough mountain roads, sleeping in a different place every night, and generally living pretty primitively, the way it sounds.  We’ll probably be doing a bit of English teaching and helping with some church services.  Looks like an adventure, at any rate.  Keep us in your prayers; Kelly, Katrina, Hans, Craig, Huber, and I.  Hopefully there will be an update about that when we get back.

Here’s Val, just 15 minutes ago, talking about one of his passions–
Radiant, Alive Christianity!  Good stuff!

This morning Phil and Josh elected to do their morning guitar practice on the street, in front of our building. 

Time for a little update.

We’ve been very busy, but Friday was the last day of the first 3 week term, and things have slacked off a bit, which is nice. Today we spent time alone, as part of the mentoring program, and I had a good time beside a little lake at Chiang Mai University.

Wednesday we leave on our first mission expeditions. What all we’ll be doing I’m not totally sure, guess we’ll find out when we get there. I know we’ll be visiting some slum areas and an orphanage. If you are getting my email updates you should be hearing more about this.

It’s been a great three weeks, and I’m very glad I’m here! Definitely consider coming if you have any inclination towards missions! That would include about all of my readers, I suppose.

The last three weeks, God has been teaching me some of the most valuable things I have ever learned. In our Biblical Theology of Missions class the focus was on God’s desire to be known by all people groups in the world. There are absolutely hundreds of verses in the Bible, especially the OT, that evidence this. From the huge amount of supporting biblical data, it seems pretty obvious that God’s primary concern is that people acknowledge and glorify him for who he is. Understood correctly, the theme of scripture points to a God centered Christianity focused on worship, with missions necessarily flowing from that worship, with the aim of bringing more people into a relationship with God where they too can worship him. It’s been powerful for me to realize this–it helped correct a mission focus that was somewhat distorted.

I’ve received input on a couple other of my “burning” questions. I would tell you about them now, but then this update would be getting REALLY long.

I really appreciate the spirit of the place. I haven’t detected “Christian” arrogance or any sort of western superiority. On the contrary, we hear a lot about cultural sensitivity, and have been warned clearly about not expressing distaste for local food or customs. I didn’t realize how different Thai culture is from ours, for sure. Offending someone is the ultimate taboo, and showing proper respect to ones elders is extremely important. Because age determines how you address a person, it is proper to ask a new acquaintance how old he or she is when you meet them, if there is any doubt as to which of you is older. But since we don’t know the language, we haven’t really experienced this kind of thing yet. Feet are highly offensive. You MUST take your shoes off when entering a house, and even some workplaces. You are not supposed to “point” your feet at someone, like we do sometimes when we cross our legs. And of course the king is revered highly. Money, because it has the king’s picture on it, must be handled with greatest care. Recently there was a fiasco between the Thai gov’t and google’s youtube.com, where a video on youtube was highly offensive to the king, because it displayed a picture of the king with the soles of someone’s shoes pointed at him. The Thai gov’t promptly blocked access to youtube.com and threatened a lawsuit against google. Amazing.

In other news, what I am looking forward to most after the missions expedition is having my very own pastor and dear friend Ken Miller here! That will be nothing short of awesome! He’s going to be teaching a “History of Missions” class for 3 weeks, which I am looking forward to very much!

That’s all for now. Be sure to keep checking blogs.i-g-o.org for other more interesting news from other students. And thank you for keeping us in prayer!

K, here’s more pics. Not going to put names with pics cuz that would be making things way too obvious, so here for your consideration is a Josh, Becky, Kelly, Shelley, Beth, and Herb.