Rejecting the cult of self

Our daughter graduated from high school a few weeks ago, marching down the aisle with her classmates to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance as we parents swelled with pride.

Then we had to listen to the obligatory commencement address.

As commencement speakers go, our guy wasn’t bad. A local radio talk show host, he was humorous and engaging. He delivered a speech that was part pep talk, part political diatribe. The pep was fine, the politics unnecessary considering the occasion. To his credit, he admitted that he didn’t remember a single word uttered at his own high school graduation many years ago (I could relate to that). He assured the assembled grads they would forget his words, too.

It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was the Gettysburg Address compared to the typical commencement speech — particularly the ones heard these days at major universities. Often delivered by media types or celebrities, such speeches usually consist of clichés, platitudes and outright insults to the young minds and hearts they’re supposed to inspire.

“Worst of all, [students] are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears,” writes New York Times columnist and social critic David Brooks. “[M]any graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

“But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.”

Misleads how? For one thing, it promotes absurdly unrealistic expectations among graduates entering today’s tough job market. On a deeper level, however, it glorifies the self-worship that has come to define so much of American life. Too many boomers have yet to notice the destruction this mindset has wrought on our culture, so we pass the all-consuming idol of self on to the generation now coming into its own. We tell our children, “It’s all about you, kid. You’re the god of your little world, which you create and which exists only to make you happy. Go forth and fulfill yourself!”

This is a perversion of the American ideal of liberty, which certainly includes individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness, but not to the exclusion of shared responsibility and voluntary, possibly sacrificial service to others.

“The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and a calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy,” Brooks observes. “Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. … Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose of life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.”

Sound familiar? It should; it’s a secular echo of the words of Jesus Christ: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:24, 25, NASB).

Following Christ is the antithesis of the pagan cult of self. Indeed, He demands the ruthless, daily execution of self. The Apostle Paul describes such a life:

“Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant …” — to the point of death upon a cross (Philippians 2:3-7, NASB).

Personal fulfillment — happiness, if you will, though joy is a better word — comes in the daily act of loving and serving Jesus and others. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” as the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647 summarized it.

That once was the guiding principle of the education offered by great Western universities. Now it seems to be: “Man’s chief end is to glorify himself, and to party forever.” Nothing new in that; the prophet Isaiah heard people shouting, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we may die” seven centuries before Christ. It was an ancient philosophy even then.

But young people in search of a worthy calling want more. They’re rejecting the cult of self, even if their parents still buy into it. They want to give their lives to something greater than themselves.

There is no greater calling than the mission of God — that every people, tribe and nation will know and worship Him. See what it looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g_8lcnHdWL4

Holding their breath in Egypt

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For Sabri,* the daily lurch between excitement and fear has settled into queasy uncertainty about Egypt’s future — and what it holds for followers of Christ.

Sabri, a white-collar worker who lives with his family in Cairo, is an evangelical Christian. When massive demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and other cities sparked national demands for freedom in January, he joined many other Egyptians in hoping positive change might be coming after decades of stagnation and dictatorship.

As a member of Egypt’s embattled Christian minority, he also wondered how Islamic extremists would react to the situation.

Hope and concern, however, took a temporary back seat to terror as chaos spread. Longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak first tried to hang on to power, then lost his grip amid bloody clashes on the streets — and behind-the-scenes maneuvering among contending government factions and the military.

“There were no police on the street,” Sabri recalls of the worst moments leading up to Mubarak’s exit. “It was very scary. We had to guard our homes. We would stay up all night in the street with whatever we could carry — a bat or a piece of metal — just to defend ourselves. There were criminals and guns firing all the night. Everything was moving very fast and we didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. We didn’t know what was right or wrong [politically], so our prayer was: ‘God, whatever You think is right, we are asking for Your will to be applied.’”

Mubarak stepped down Feb. 11, unleashing a wave of euphoria among millions of young Egyptians calling for freedom. Political tensions have eased in the months since, or at least moved to other stages, as the military runs the government while the nation prepares for elections in September. World news coverage has shifted to more violent locales — such as Libya, Syria and Yemen — as movements for change continue to shake the Arab world.

Police have returned to the streets of Egypt’s cities, but crime is on the rise.

“Business is not yet back to normal,” Sabri reports. “The police are scared of taking action because they are afraid the people will attack them.”

Everyone is “holding their breath” and waiting for what happens next, adds a recent visitor, as the young reformists, the old power structure, the military, secularists and Islamists jockey for position. Despite the disillusionment of recent days, a deep sense of pride in the change that has been accomplished remains from the early, heady days of the demonstrations.

“They are proud of what they have done, and there seems to be a sense of hope about the future that we haven’t really seen in the past,” says the visitor, who lived in Egypt for many years. “There’s also a great deal of caution, like they’re trying not to get too excited. One man said, ‘It’s going to be five years before we see the results.’”

What about prospects for minority Christians, who continue to suffer attacks by Muslim extremists?

The worst such incident in recent weeks occurred May 7, when a radical Muslim group, the Salafis, assaulted a Coptic Christian area of Cairo. The attack resulted in 12 deaths, at least 200 injuries and the burning of two churches. Enraged, Copts took to the streets to fight back. The Salafi movement, Coptic leaders charge, is trying to foment sectarian civil war between the Muslim majority and Coptic Christians, who comprise about 10 percent of Egypt’s 83 million people.

The conflict illustrates divisions that could sabotage change throughout the Arab world, according to Anthony Shadid and David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times.

“The revolutions and revolts in the Arab world, playing out over just a few months across two continents, have proved so inspirational to so many because they offer a new sense of national identity built on the idea of citizenship,” they wrote in a May 21 article examining the fissures confronting reform movements.

“But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era. … [T]he question of identity may help determine whether the Arab Spring flowers or withers. Can the revolts forge alternative ways to cope with the Arab world’s variety of clans, sects, ethnicities and religions?”

The situation is “supremely complicated,” says Sabri, who urges outsiders not to jump to conclusions about where Egypt is headed. “For Mubarak to step down, that’s a miracle. For unity between average Egyptian people in the street — Christians and Muslims together — that’s a miracle that’s still happening now. There are miracles happening from a spiritual point of view.”

The many young, educated people who demonstrated for democracy in Tahrir Square support religious liberty for all Egyptians, he believes. Other forces do not — including the influential Muslim Brotherhood, banned under Mubarak but now allowed to participate in politics.

“I would be very concerned if the Muslim Brotherhood or the extremists get power over the parliament,” Sabri warns. “If they write the new constitution, it will be more tight on us as Christians. They’re not going to do it through violence. They’ll try to do it very smoothly so they don’t lose international support.”

Some Christians don’t intend to stick around to find out which scenario plays out. They’re leaving the country, or considering it. Sabri, however, isn’t going anywhere. He’s using this historic moment to share the hope of Christ with other Egyptians.

“Muslims are asking a lot of direct questions — questions we’re not used to being asked” without years of relationship building, he says. “Now you can meet somebody in the subway and he or she wants to know the truth.”
*(Name changed)

After Osama's death: violence or mercy?

Flying into Cairo on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, we heard something terrible was happening in New York and in Washington, D.C., the city we had departed approximately 15 hours earlier.

A photographer and I had come to gather material for a profile of the great Egyptian city. But as we watched the planes fly into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on our hotel-room TVs — and learned who was behind the attacks — we wondered if and when we would be able to leave the hotel, much less the country. How would a couple of nervous Americans fare on the “Arab street” in that moment?

The next morning, we decided to find out.

No sooner did we emerge from a taxi in a Cairo neighborhood than we were surrounded by a crowd of Egyptian Muslims — not to be taunted or threatened, but to be comforted. They led us by the arm to a nearby coffee shop and surrounded our table, offering the passionate expressions of friendship and condolence for which Arabs are famous.

They didn’t want to believe Muslims had participated in the airborne attacks on thousands of innocents. They begged us to convey their grief and deepest sympathies to the victims’ families and to all Americans when we went home.

“We would never do this,” one man urgently repeated, tears in his eyes, as he gripped my hand. And he meant it.

But Osama bin Laden would do it.

A veteran terrorist determined to exact revenge for his many grievances against America and the West, bin Laden was quite willing to plan the attacks, carry them out through his al-Qaida terror network — and proudly claim responsibility for them. And it was only the beginning, he promised. Many more assaults would come and many more innocent people would die until the terrorists’ aims were accomplished.

So began the attacks and counterattacks, the violence and retaliation, the skirmishes and full-scale wars that continue to this day across multiple borders. But Osama bin Laden is dead, shot down May 1 in a U.S. operation after a nearly decade-long manhunt that began in the days following 9/11. Few war-weary people — not just in the West but also in the Muslim-majority nations most affected by his bloody ideology — will mourn him.

Will he become a martyr? An enduring symbol of radical Islamic defiance of the decadent West? An inspiration to new waves of terrorist true believers? Perhaps. Even if al-Qaida has suffered a mortal blow, others will take up its radical cause. The United States and other nations will take the actions they see as necessary to defend themselves and their interests. The cycle of attack and counterattack might continue.

However, the “Arab Spring” now under way in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa suggests an alternative future. Millions of young adults are bravely — and nonviolently — pushing for change and freedom, even in the face of violent repression in some countries. Their aspirations, openly expressed on the streets and through the potent tools of social media, suggest that history might (emphasis on might) have rendered the bin Ladens of the world irrelevant.

These peaceful revolutions will be hijacked by extremists or crushed by dictators in some places, but in others they will take root.

In another generation, young Muslims might even reject radical Islamism altogether. Naïve? Who would have believed that the Soviet empire would collapse in the space of a few years? The pace of change in our era is unprecedented in human history.

Whatever happens in the political realm in the days to come, however, an unseen kingdom is silently spreading across the region: the kingdom of God. It is a kingdom of justice and mercy, and its power comes from divine love, not weapons of war. It is beholden to no earthly nation; it transcends all cultures.

Muslims, like all other people, hunger for God. Millions of Muslims are seeking Him. More and more are finding Him through His Son, Jesus Christ. Persecution of Christians and churches in the Muslim world has increased, along with the exodus of many traditional Christians targeted by extremists. Yet reports of Muslims deciding to follow Christ, regardless of the consequences, continue to emerge from across the world. They continue to tell of dreams and visions of Jesus, of their desire for a close relationship with a God of mercy, of indescribable joy when they meet Him.

As we walked the streets of Cairo that sad day after 9/11, a Muslim man approached us near Al-Azhar University, the intellectual center of Sunni Islam for more than a millennium. Every night for years, he said, when he closed his eyes to sleep, he had seen a bright cross. “What does this mean?” he asked. We told him of the Lord who extends mercy and salvation to all who seek Him.

Don’t be afraid to tell the person who may ask you. The love of Christ is a far more powerful force than hatred, fear, war or vengeance.

Living proof

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Back in the “olden days” — my son’s term for the ancient era when I was his age — a new book hit my high school campus like a meteor.

I was a brand-new Christian — and an ignorant one. Like other young believers at our school, I knew Jesus Christ had come into my heart and transformed my life. I wanted to share that exciting news with others. But I knew little about the Bible, its authenticity and authority, or the powerful historical evidence for its most revolutionary claim: the resurrection of Christ.

Evidence that Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell, one of the most dynamic Christian speakers and writers of the last generation, gave us the basic tools we needed to contend for our faith in a sometimes-hostile environment. It was a short course in Christian apologetics and we ran with it. We didn’t win every debate with skeptics and scoffers at school, but we improved our track record.

My favorite chapter in McDowell’s book is “The Resurrection — Hoax or History?” It presents in detail the case for and against Christ’s physical resurrection from biblical, historical, legal and eyewitness perspectives. The verdict: Jesus rose from the dead and is alive today.

Beyond the many biblical prophecies Christ fulfilled, the reliability of the Gospel accounts, the compelling events surrounding His death and burial and the witness of the empty tomb, there is the evidence of changed lives — from that first Easter until today — beginning with the disciples themselves.

“Perhaps the transformation of the disciples of Jesus is the greatest evidence of all for the resurrection,” John R.W. Stott observed.

McDowell quotes a portrayal of those early Christ-followers after the ignominious death of their leader at the hands of the Romans:

“On the day of the crucifixion they were filled with sadness; on the first day of the week with gladness. At the crucifixion they were hopeless; on the first day of the week their hearts glowed with certainty and hope. When the message of the resurrection first came they were incredulous and hard to be convinced, but once they became assured they never doubted again.

“What could account for the astonishing change in these men in so short a time? The mere removal of the body from the grave could never have transformed their spirits, and characters. … Think of the psychological absurdity of picturing a little band of defeated cowards cowering in an upper room one day and a few days later transformed into a company that no persecution could silence. …”

Absurd indeed, unless the living Christ appeared to them and filled them with His Spirit. They went on to turn the world upside down with their message. Most of them gladly died as martyrs. They and their successors established the Christian church, the most indestructible institution on earth. The more it is persecuted, the faster it grows.

“It was the conviction of the resurrection of Jesus which lifted His followers out of the despair into which His death had cast them and which led to the perpetuation of the movement begun by Him,” wrote Kenneth Scott Latourette, the great historian of Christianity. “But for their profound belief that the crucified had risen from the dead and that they had seen Him and talked with Him, the death of Jesus and even Jesus Himself would probably have been all but forgotten.”

Such is the power of lives changed and redeemed by the risen Christ. Your own life may be the most subjective evidence you can offer for the resurrection of Christ. But if you live in His Spirit and express His love toward others, that evidence cannot be refuted. Rejected, yes, but not refuted.

“The Lord is at work here,” a young missionary in an animist area of West Africa wrote. “He has healed many people in our village after we have prayed with them in the name of Jesus, and now our neighbors thank us for our prayers. Recently when we offered our ‘village father’ and our family chief the monthly payment for our hut in the village, our ‘father’ replied, ‘Your presence here and your prayers for the village are a gift to us.’ They would take nothing [in payment].

“Then we asked permission to celebrate Easter in the village. A large smile came upon our village father’s face as we explained that they were now our family and we wanted to celebrate this important day with them. On Easter morning when we met with the village chief and elders, we were given a goat! A feast was prepared and people from our entire village came to our compound and shared it with us. Later we worshipped under the village ‘meeting tree’ and prayed boldly in the name of Jesus for the villagers.

“Our presence and prayers are unworthy of being called a ‘gift.’ The only real gift we desire for our village is the gift that the Lord offers to them. Pray their eyes will be unveiled to the gift of life that the Lord extends to them with open arms.”

Yet the missionary’s presence is a gift, however imperfect it might be. God chooses to use it to offer His love and mercy to the village.

It is one more evidence for the resurrection — nearly 2,000 years after the event.

Japan: a fourth Gospel opening?

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Throughout their long history, the Japanese people have opened themselves to the Christian Gospel three times.

Each time they eventually rejected it or decided to hold it at arm’s length. Today, Christians comprise barely 1 percent of Japan’s population of 127 million people, despite decades of religious freedom — and powerful Christian movements in neighboring China and South Korea.

Could the national soul-searching resulting from the March earthquake/tsunami and its devastating aftermath — called Japan’s worst crisis since World War II by the nation’s leaders — become a time for the Japanese to reconsider the new life offered by Jesus Christ?

Yes, says Atsuyoshi Fujiwara, a Japanese Christian scholar who has carefully examined the history of the Gospel in his native land. But it will happen, he cautions, only if Christians work together “humbly and lovingly, nationally and internationally” to serve the Japanese during their time of suffering and recovery.

“The disaster has been terrible,” says Fujiwara, professor of theology at Japan’s Seigakuin University and founding pastor of Covenant of Grace Church in Tokyo. “We are talking about more than 25,000 people killed in Japan. Every day we are hearing new, heartbreaking stories of suffering people.

“Yet I deeply believe that God can bring good even from a painful experience like this. … I think that this post-disaster recovery has a chance to become the fourth encounter of Japan with Christianity.”

The first three “encounters,” according to Fujiwara, were the introduction of Christianity to Japan by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 1500s, the opening of Japan to Western powers in the 1850s and the nation’s defeat and rebuilding at the end of World War II. Each time, Japan faced wrenching social and political change: civil war in the 16th century, the end of the shogun era in the 19th, near destruction and despair in the 20th.

“On these three occasions, Japanese people were very open to Christianity in the beginning, yet eventually they rejected it, particularly in the first two periods,” Fujiwara notes. “Postwar Japan accepted full religious freedom and did not clearly say ‘no’ to Christianity. It appeared to be a promising solution to their problems. It also came with Western wealth and civilization, which were attractive to many people.”

As a faith personally embraced by large numbers of people, however, the Gospel of Christ has failed to spread widely in Japan, despite generations of prayers and ministry by missionaries and Japanese believers. Why? Church and mission leaders have been trying to find answers to that question for a long time.

The Japanese are religious people, Fujiwara stresses. They have a millennium-long tradition of Shintoism, Buddhism and Confucianism as their “spiritual backbone.” Christianity initially appealed to many Japanese, but they eventually decided it didn’t fit their psyche or tradition. The pattern of “initial acceptance and gradual rejection” was repeated several times.

“I think that rejection largely came as a nationalistic reaction to the West,” Fujiwara observes. “There was a slogan in the 19th century: ‘Japanese soul and Western technology.’ While accepting Western civilization, they wanted to keep the Japanese soul untouched. They certainly did not want to accept the Western soul — i.e., Christianity.”

People crowded into churches again as Japan boomed after World War II. “But they left like an ocean tide, saying, ‘We graduated Christianity,’ or ‘Christianity was good, but we are done with it,’” says Fujiwara. “They have to be touched by God. Their hearts must be penetrated by the Gospel so that they may start living as disciples.”

Christian institutions are still respected in modern Japan, particularly the many schools and colleges begun by missionaries. But the number of believers remains low as modern Japan has become increasingly secular.

“They really believe that in themselves they have what they need, which makes it very difficult to share the Gospel,” says International Mission Board missionary Gary Fujino. “What we need is for people to be shaken and realize that you need something outside of yourself — God.”

The triple trauma of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis may have accomplished that, according to Fujiwara:

“The foundation of the earth was shaken; the houses we lived in were washed out by the tsunami. The atomic power stations that we were told were safe exploded. Something we trusted was broken down. People are asking, ‘Why has this happened?’ ‘Can we still go on?’ If this could not open people’s hearts, what else could?”

Some cracks in the façade already were appearing before the quake. Japan, an aging society, has struggled for years with economic and social stagnation.

Books and periodicals about Christ have been hot sellers since last year, according to Japanese publishers. One of the top bookstores in Tokyo’s business district dedicated a special section to the topic. Two issues of a national magazine with cover stories headlined “What is Christianity?” and “What is Christianity II” sold out within weeks.

In the quake zone, meanwhile, more than 170,000 displaced people remain in shelters. Thousands more are living in their cars or in damaged homes with no electricity or water. As more of the neediest areas become accessible, Southern Baptist disaster relief teams are working with Japanese Baptist partners and IMB missionaries to provide such services as food and water distribution, blankets and warm clothing for the elderly and grief counseling.

As they join hands with other Christians to serve the hurting, Fujiwara prays their ministry will change Japan forever.

“My father, who died 20 years ago, was baptized by a Southern Baptist missionary in the postwar period,” he recalls. “I am deeply and forever grateful for that. I want you to imagine with me that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will hear stories like this: ‘The 2011 disaster was terrible, yet God brought good even through that. I remember your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents sacrificed, loved and cared for us at that time. The Gospel was brought to my family then.’”

Not later -- now

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A missionary struck up a conversation with a businessman seated next to him on a plane flying over Southeast Asia.

The plane was heading toward an area where the missionary hoped to make new contacts with a people group yet to be reached with the Gospel. He asked in a general way if the businessman knew anything about the group and how to develop relationships with them.

“No problem,” the man replied. “I could introduce you to them. We’ve already been in their villages. We know how to get to their children. I can give you prices.”

Horrified, the missionary realized his seatmate’s business was sex trafficking. The businessman assumed the curious American questioning him was either a customer or wholesaler involved in the same trade.

After all, who else would care about the remote villagers they were discussing?

That missionary is the son-in-law of Tom Elliff, newly elected International Mission Board president. Elliff tells of the encounter to make a point about the mission terms “unreached” and “unengaged” — often used to describe the thousands of people groups with little or no Gospel witness.

“We’re actually deluding ourselves to say that they are unengaged or unreached,” Elliff says. “What we should say is that they are unengaged by us and unreached by the Gospel, because other people already have engaged them.”

Those others include not only criminals but legitimate corporations, humanitarian groups, governments — anyone who is serious enough about connecting with a group of people to “pay the price to get there,” Elliff explains. Their motivation may be to help or to exploit, but seldom to share the love of Jesus Christ.

“If it’s worth the price, we must go to the uttermost now,” Elliff says. Not in the next generation. Not after Christians solve all their church problems. Not after they get local and national politics straightened out. Now.

That’s why he seized the opportunity of his acceptance speech — immediately following his March 16 election by IMB trustees — to issue a bold challenge to Southern Baptists: Engage all of the estimated 3,800 people groups worldwide that have yet to be touched by the Gospel.

“I intend to introduce at the [June] 2011 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention a very simple plan by which each one of these 3,800 unengaged people groups can be embraced by a Southern Baptist congregation,” Elliff told trustees.

“I believe we can accomplish this in one year. Just think about that for a moment. Should Jesus grant us the days, by the 2012 Southern Baptist Convention meeting, we would be able to say that, to our knowledge, every people group on this globe has some church committed to take specific steps to strategize, to pray over, to learn about and discover some way that the Gospel witness can be shared with those people.”

Can it be done?

Local churches have many God-given ministries: worship, preaching and teaching, discipleship, caring for the needs of believers, evangelizing lost people close at hand, feeding the poor, visiting the sick. These days, they’re carrying out those tasks in a tough environment of increasing secularism, rapidly changing communities and social norms, conflicting demands from members and a still-struggling economy.

Effective international mission work, meanwhile, has become an enormously complex and expensive task — often conducted in hostile conditions — requiring in-depth cultural knowledge, detailed logistics and careful cooperation with like-minded partners. It calls for well-trained workers with a high degree of commitment — good missionaries, in other words.

But missionaries can’t get the job done alone. And they aren’t sent by mission boards and agencies; they are sent by local churches.

Missionaries are “your boots on the ground,” Elliff said. But fulfilling the Great Commission is “going to require local churches … becoming burdened for the unengaged and the unreached of this world, signing on, creating vital partnerships. This is not a new way of doing missions. This is a biblical way of doing missions — and your missionaries are eager for you to step up to the plate.”

If a time ever required boldness, “it is this day,” he said. “[You] can’t simply be content to say you’re for church … and the Rotary and good government and low taxes and oh, by the way, you’re for missions. It is something that is going to have to consume us.”

For all its challenge and complexity in our day, taking the Gospel to all peoples remains primarily a matter of the will. Will we pay the price of obedience to God’s command, or not?

When 'Plan A' fails

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Tired, hot and halfway to lost, the missionary drove down a dusty dirt road into a fishing village that appeared on no map.

A mangy dog barked. A few locals eyed the stranger from their shacks. The sun sank toward a red horizon.

“This is a dead end,” the missionary told himself nervously. He was a rookie. It was one of his first trips into the Philippine countryside on his own. Anywhere else seemed more promising for ministry than this, and he intended to get there as soon as possible.

He turned his pickup truck around. Just before he mashed the gas pedal, he heard a voice: “I want you to stop right here.”

No audible voice. God’s voice? The missionary pulled over — under protest.

“I’ll walk around for five minutes,” he muttered. “Then I’m outta here.”

He saw no one outside — just more dogs that followed him, growling with a distinct lack of hospitality. He forced himself to stroll through the village, almost hoping he wouldn’t find anyone. Turning one last corner before scurrying back to the truck, he encountered a group of fishermen mending their nets. He approached them.

“I’m a missionary,” he said, struggling to make himself understood with his beginner language skills. “Could you guys tell me if there’s someplace around here where I could tell people about Jesus?”

The fishermen looked at each other. “Why not here?” one of them replied.

That village eventually became home to a church, which went on to start three more churches, which in turn started others.

Funny how God works while you’re on the way to someplace else.

That young missionary, now a grandfather, remembered his long-ago experience at a home fellowship I attend. We were talking about the time Jesus fed more than 5,000 people in the wilderness (Matthew 14). Actually, He told His disciples to feed them. They were exhausted and hungry themselves. They didn’t begin to have enough food to satisfy such a large crowd — two fish and five loaves of bread. They probably worried about starting a riot.

“Bring them here to Me,” Jesus said, calling for the fish and bread (Matthew 14:18, NASB). Something happened between the time He blessed the food and the disciples started passing it out — something only Jesus could do. But He used His doubting followers while doing it.

“He says the same to us: ‘Just bring Me what you have,’” writes Andy Stanley. “We’re discouraged about our inadequate education or experience or training or resources — but whatever we have, however small it seems, Jesus wants us simply to bring it to Him, and He’ll use it to meet the need.”

We know in our hearts that it’s true. But it seems counterintuitive to the modern mind, like much of what Jesus said and did. We believe in education, preparation, planning, measurement and accountability — and rightly so. God deserves no less than our best. If ministry is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. It’s a foolish servant who spends valuable time (and his master’s resources) on new projects without counting the cost, using proven strategies and best practices.

And yet, plans and training aren’t enough. Planning didn’t start the Great Awakening in America or the Shantung Revival in China. God’s Spirit, convicting repentant sinners, did.

“A tension seems to exist between the plans we make and the plans God chooses to bless,” writes Guy Muse, my favorite missionary blogger. “In fact, the Lord actually states it this way: ‘My thoughts and my ways are not like yours. Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, my thoughts and my ways are higher than yours’ (Isaiah 55:8-9, CEV).

“Missionaries are expected to set goals, [make] action plans and work towards fulfilling them. ... I personally don’t mind putting things down on paper. Knowing what one is trying to achieve and working towards ministry goals brings a sense of direction and satisfaction. Only one problem, though: Year after year, only a small percentage of what is put down on paper happens as it was envisioned. We plan, but He leads. As He leads, we follow. More often than not, He leads in directions we had not anticipated.”

It has always been thus in missionary work — or any other ministry. When the Apostle Paul and his companions tried to go to Bithynia on one of their carefully planned mission journeys, “… the Spirit of Jesus did not permit them.” (Acts 16:7, NASB). Later, Paul had a vision of someone standing and appealing to him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (Acts 16:9b, NASB).

“What usually happens when our plans don’t come to fruition as envisioned is we double the effort, work harder and plow forward, insisting at all costs we be permitted into Phrygia and Bithynia,” Muse observes. “After all, Asia needs the Gospel and we know that it is just Satan that is standing in our way! But Paul didn’t blame Satan for not having been allowed to go to these places and do what he had planned. He understood it was Jesus who was calling the shots.”

Planning is good. Biblical, even. Just remember who calls the shots.