It's the size of your heart, not your church

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/156/15602/15602-86086.mp3

Watch a video about Unity Baptist Church and its embrace of a people group in the Sahara:
http://www.imb.org/main/downloads/flashvideos.asp?mvid=13449&mvidext=mp4

Chris Jenkins wants fellow pastors to know something up front: It’s not easy to get your church strategically involved in global missions.

In fact, it might be the hardest thing you ever do.

“I hear the International Mission Board giving us these steps, you do this and you do that, and it sounds easy,” says Jenkins, pastor of Unity Baptist Church, a congregation of about 200 people in semi-rural Prince George, Va. Four years ago, the church called IMB’s prayer office and committed to pray for a nomadic group in the Sahara Desert with more than 300,000 people and only one known Christian.

“We wanted somebody that nobody else wanted,” Jenkins told messengers to the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting in New Orleans during IMB’s convention presentation June 19. “Of course, we just wanted to pray for them and didn’t have a clue what we were getting into.”

They were getting into something that is revolutionizing their church — and might just revolutionize the people group they began visiting in 2010. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Jenkins insists he’s like most pastors: so busy he can barely carve out enough time to handle garden-variety ministry and family life — much less a major commitment to an unknown group thousands of miles away.

“When you’re dealing with a couple hundred people in your congregation and they all have a different idea of what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s hard to put rubber to the road,” he admits. “You’re dealing with hospital visits and marriages falling apart and teenagers getting in trouble at school. You’ve got single moms trying to pay the bills and they need help with their kids. Then you’re trying to have a family of your own. [Jenkins and his wife have three foster children in addition to their own two children.]

“You want the church to be missional, but it’s overwhelming.”

Yet Jenkins and his flock couldn’t ignore God’s call to the nations. Unity has become one of hundreds of churches and entities to act on their commitment to embrace an unengaged, unreached people group.

Before, “We liked to talk like we were a church on mission, but we really knew it was just a show,” he told listeners during the IMB program. “We were more concerned with what was going on inside the four walls [of the church] instead of out.” After Unity’s first trip to the Sahara in 2010, their whole outlook began to change — beginning with Jenkins himself.

“God kind of slapped me around a little bit” on that trip, he reflects. “I was getting comfortable as a pastor. I was getting comfortable doing American ministry. … I saw people, thousands of miles away, that are going through things I could never imagine going through, and they have no one in their life sharing with them that God cares. … How in the world are they going to know it unless we’re out there with our hearts, pouring ’em out, with our hands, getting ’em dirty, and with our voices telling people about the Good News of Jesus Christ?”

That first journey — and three more since — have changed priorities at Unity. Some members are selling cars and taking second jobs, even planning for early retirement, to get involved in the Sahara mission, according to Jenkins. “And what we’ve learned on the global side certainly has helped us on the local side” — whether it’s reaching out to public schools in Prince George or other ministries.

During his time at the SBC meeting, Jenkins had the chance to share his experience with other pastors, both as a participant in the IMB presentation and in one-on-one conversations around IMB’s “prayer tent” exhibit.

“To be mobilizing others when we’re just getting mobilized, it helps you see the work that God is doing,” he says. “But I feel like a cat in water, too. I dove in and here I am trying to help other people. Sure, we’ve sent four teams, but I’m not ignorant enough to think that we’re an engaging church just because we’ve sent four teams. We’re still learning about our people, what our platform is and how we’re going to raise money for the next 10 or 20 years to do this thing.

“But I want to help churches see that this is not just for mega-churches. You don’t have to have a thousand people in your sanctuary on Sunday morning to be able to adopt an unengaged, unreached people group. If you’ve got 80 people in your church, adopt that people group, be as loud about ’em as you can, find other churches of 80 members to team up with, and you might have a thousand people reaching out to that group one day. It’s for all of us. It doesn’t matter our size; it doesn’t matter our race. … That’s who God has called — the local church.”

The first step, he adds, is to take a first step:

“Start praying for a people group. Start researching and learning about them. It’s amazing what God does in your heart as a pastor and the heart of your congregation as they start to literally embrace a people group, not just on paper. Their heart starts to get wrapped around these people and they start seeing a God-sized call and a God-sized task in reaching them. I came [to the SBC meeting] to talk to pastors and see churches get fired up.”

As IMB President Tom Elliff says, it’s not the size of a church that matters in embracing lost peoples; it’s the size of the heart of a church.

And its pastor’s heart.

Be there

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/154/15420/15420-84831.mp3


Don’t just do something; stand there.

Better yet, kneel there. Be there.

It’s easy to switch the verbs in the old, accusatory challenge to do something — anything — rather than stand around. Lots of preachers, speakers and writers invert the familiar phrase to encourage us to slow down and be still. But it’s hard for us action-oriented Americans to stop and just be. Inaction, even for a moment, seems lazy, unproductive, even weird. We should be multitasking.

Stillness? It’s a little scary.

Yet stillness is where we meet God. To be His heart, His hands and His voice — the International Mission Board’s overarching theme for 2012 — we must lay aside the sound and fury of our ceaseless activities, our personal priorities and our very selves to encounter Him. We need His heart to make a difference in the world; not our divided, selfish hearts. His hands do the healing, not our powerless hands. His voice cuts to the core of searching souls, not our meaningless chatter.

“… If anyone wants to come with Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me,” Jesus says. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of Me will find it” (Matthew 16:24, 25, HCSB).

There’s plenty of positive action cited in that statement: come, take up, follow, save. Before any of that can happen, however, first there’s a negative action, an “inaction,” so to speak: deny self.

If you’re planning to attend the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting in New Orleans June 19-20, I recommend a visit to the IMB exhibit. This year it won’t be a media extravaganza or a place to socialize and pick up lots of free stuff. It will be, in essence, a tent — a place of prayer. There, you will find four stations where you will have the opportunity to deny yourself, to take up your cross, to follow Jesus and to lose your life for Him.

When you emerge, you’ll find visual representations of the thousands of people groups throughout the world who have yet to hear the name of Jesus, much less His loving offer of salvation. They wait for someone with God’s heart, hands and voice to come to them with the joyful news. He longs to send someone. Maybe you are that someone.

But you need to spend time in the tent first — whether it be a physical place or an inner one — to become one with God.

Psalm 46:10 is my favorite mission verse: “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”

Stop. Listen. Know. Be. Only then can you act in obedience — no matter the cost. Only then will you know His power.

Shut up, they explained

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/151/15180/15180-83963.mp3

A letter recently published on my local newspaper’s editorial page helpfully summarized the view of many secular folks when it comes to religious expression in public.

We “stand for separation of church and state,” the letter writer declared. “Pick your religion, believe what you want, pursue greater knowledge toward that end. Do it for yourself — and keep it out of public discourse. That’s where the [secular] left stands.”

I appreciate his honesty, if not his all-too-common misunderstanding of church-state separation. Open hostility toward freedom of speech is better than paying lip service to it while working behind the scenes to silence it. Either approach, however, is wrong.

“Keep your views about God and His commandments to yourself,” society increasingly tells believers — particularly conservative evangelicals, traditional Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews. “Socially accepted truths and morals have progressed beyond your antiquated theologies. If you can’t embrace the new normal, just keep your mouth shut. If you don’t, we’ll shame you, shout you down, call you a bigot. We might even take you to court and charge you with ‘hate speech.’”

Such responses to religious speech undercut the spirit of the First Amendment. You have every right under the law and the Constitution to express almost any religious belief in public. If those views happen to be unpopular or minority positions, you still have the right to express them. That’s why the First Amendment exists.

Free religious expression in the United States didn’t come easily, as I wrote in a 2008 column, and it won’t endure without vigorous exercise and defense. State church tyranny was the main opponent in the nation’s infancy. Baptists, who experienced persecution by state-controlled churches in Europe and early America, played a key role in helping forge religious freedom in the new nation. Today the threats to religious speech are coming primarily from secular extremists who see biblical Christianity as “intolerant” and evangelism as “hate speech.”

By far the greatest threat to religious expression, however, is the self-censorship practiced by believers. We fear offending someone more than we care about telling him or her the truth. We don’t want to be thought intolerant. We don’t want to go against the pluralist grain.

Let’s find some inspiration — and backbone — from followers of Christ in tougher places who put everything on the line to share truth.

Recently I met several Muslim-background believers in North Africa and the Middle East. They are taking full advantage of the new freedoms they’re experiencing following the “Arab Spring” revolutions last year to spread the Gospel and make disciples. After generations of enforced silence, people in a number of Arab countries feel freer to express their opinions and seek their own answers — for now, at least.

“Sometimes I even get calls from [militant Islamists],” one believer told me. “They just want to know who is the right God. … So I think God is really working after the revolution.”

Another believer was arrested multiple times for telling people about Jesus before the revolution in his country. He just could not stay silent about the wonderful truth he had found. He’s wiser now about when to speak and when to be quiet, but he’s just as bold.

“Before, I was controlled by the government,” he explains. “I had to go and sign in every three months and tell them everything — what I did, where I moved. If I was having any guest [in my home], I had to go and ask permission. I really hated that. I feel more free now in doing God’s work.”

Even if the new freedoms disappear, however, these believers will keep telling others that Jesus is the only way to God. If they aren’t afraid to talk about the truth in places where the hammer could come down at any moment, why should we be?

Don’t squander your freedom in the land of the free. It’s not guaranteed.

Speak, memory

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/150/15063/15063-83366.mp3

Don’t look back.

That is one of the worst pieces of advice you’ll ever hear. Naturally, you hear it all the time. “Positive thinkers” and pop psychologists love it. Forget the past, they say. You can’t change it, so why dwell on it? Move on. Sunshine will follow the rain. Tomorrow will bring a new you. The next shot will fall. Insert your own cliché here.

“Waste not fresh tears over old griefs,” recommended Euripides, the great Greek dramatist, more than 2,400 years ago. Now that’s good advice. But regret is a response to memory, not memory itself. To forget our past is to forget who we are — individually and collectively.

Yes, the Apostle Paul urged believers to lay aside the past in their pursuit of knowing God: “(F)orgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13b-14, NASB). And he’s right. We should not obsess about past sins and failures, but look to God, rejoice in His patient mercy and relentlessly follow Him toward glory.

But Paul never forgot where he came from, what he had thought as a Pharisee and what he had done as a one-time enemy of the Gospel. He never forgot the long, dangerous, often discouraging road he had walked as an early apostle of Christ. And he never forgot the many ways God’s grace had pulled him from the pit to the mountaintop. Those experiences forged Paul into the man he eventually became. They stayed with him, informing his future attitudes, decisions and actions.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.”

Nor should it be. The Lord gave us memories for a reason. Even the painful ones. The Divine Physician has a way of healing us without removing our memories entirely. If we forget the pain, how can we minister to the hurting? If we forget the darkness, how can we lead others toward light?

Memories are precious things. As Saul Bellow observed, “They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.” Who are you without the memory of who you have been, what you have thought and done, the people you have known? That’s why memory-killing afflictions such as Alzheimer’s are so heartbreaking, both for the people who experience them and their loved ones. Alzheimer’s is a thief that steals whole chunks of who we are.

A recent movie you should see is a meditation on memory. “The Iron Lady,” about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, won actress Meryl Streep her third Academy Award. It might be Streep’s greatest performance in a long line of them. The film itself, however, has been criticized for focusing not on Thatcher the world-changing political leader of the 1970s and ’80s but on Thatcher the lioness in winter, elderly and infirm, confused, engaging in imaginary conversations with her late husband, Denis.

I found it deeply moving. Streep as Thatcher reflects on past events large and small: a girlhood working for her grocer father, meeting her future husband, challenging a male-dominated political world as a young member of Parliament, motherhood, triumphs and defeats, war and terrorism, national turmoil and progress, doubts, questions, resolution.

Looking back is an inward journey we all must take as our earthly lives approach the farther shore. Memory helps us along the way.

Memory is a gift from God. More than that, it is a command and a sacrament. “Do this in remembrance of Me,” Christ told His disciples as He introduced the Lord’s Supper on the last night He spent with them (Luke 22:19-20).

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of His benefits,” David sang (Psalm 103:2, NASB). Remembering who God is and the glorious things He has done is part and parcel of worshipping Him.

In his great farewell address to the children of Israel as they prepared to enter the Promised Land, Moses thundered: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9, NASB).

Why go to such lengths? To remember — from one day to the next, from parent to child, from generation to generation and age to age — who God is and what He has done. Review the tragic history of the ancient Israelites to see what happened when they forgot. Remembering God is as important as obeying Him; indeed, it is part of obedience.

Look back. Remember. Praise God for His marvelous grace and mercy. Then look ahead without fear or regret.

Uncool? Deal with it

Listen to an audio version at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/148/14842/14842-82233.mp3

I had to sympathize with rock singer Bono when he discovered he was uncool.

Uncool? The frontman for supergroup U2, one of the biggest bands in the world? The activist who travels the globe and meets with kings and presidents? The guy so hip he probably wears his trademark designer shades in the shower?

Yep. Uncool. He learned the hard truth a few years ago from his teenage daughters. First off, to teenage daughters a dad is uncool by definition, especially if he’s pushing 50 (Bono was 48 at the time). But they were particularly mortified when he droned on and on about global issues while some other celebs were visiting their home. He overheard one daughter telling the other, “He’s probably boring their [pants] off talking about Africa.” Actually, he admitted, “I probably was.”

The horror. I can relate.

In truth, I’ve been uncool so long that I no longer know (or care) what is cool. I haven’t even heard the bands that were topping the charts 10 year ago, much less the ones with the most iTunes downloads now. On the plus side, there’s liberation in being terminally uncool. You don’t have to watch trends anxiously and waste a lot of time and money trying to keep up with fads. That’s for teens. There’s something sad about a middle-aged man or woman trying to look and act like their kids — or grandkids.

Too often, however, churches try to do that.

Tullian Tchividjian, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., has a “You may be too fashionable if …” list for Christians.

You may be too fashionable, he warns, if:

-- You look around at church and notice that everybody is the same age and looks and dresses pretty much like you do.

-- You can’t stand singing a worship song that was “in” five years ago — much less singing a hymn from another century.

-- You believe social justice is more important than evangelism, or that evangelism is more important than social justice.

-- Your goal in spending time with non-Christians is to demonstrate that you’re really no different than they are. To prove this, you curse like a sailor, drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney.

-- You’ve concluded that everything new is better than anything old, or that everything old is better than anything new.

-- The church you’ve chosen is defined more by its reaction to “boring” churches than by its response to a needy world.

-- You’ve decided that everything done by the church you grew up in was way wrong and you’re now, thankfully, part of a missional “community” that does everything right.

-- The one verse you wish wasn’t in the Bible is John 14:6, where Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” That’s way too narrow!

Way back when I was cool (like, 35 years ago), I played drums in a Christian rock band. We took old-time hymns and turned them into 15-minute jams. “Jesus freaks” with long hair and tie-dyed T-shirts were coming into traditional churches in those days, and it caused a commotion. I remember when we played at our church and cranked up the amps. Our pastor’s wife, who had really big hair and played solos on a grand piano like Liberace, stood up and walked out on us. We needed a spirit of unity. We — some of us, at least — found it in the words of one of our favorite songs, “Little Country Church” by Chuck Girard:

“They’re talkin’ ’bout revival and the need for love

That little church has come alive

Workin’ with each other for the common good

Puttin’ all the past aside

Long hair, short hair, some coats and ties

People finally comin’ around

Lookin’ past the hair and straight into the eyes

People finally comin’ around. …

God’s house can accommodate many styles. He doesn’t have security at the door deciding which sinners are trendy enough to enter.

There’s nothing wrong with seeking relevance and connections to the world beyond the church. Effective missionaries are passionate and respectful students of the cultures they’re trying to reach with the Gospel. They seek to learn which aspects of culture are bridges they can use to share Truth, which aspects oppose Truth and which are neutral. As the Apostle Paul, the greatest missionary of all time, said, “I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22b, NASB).

But Paul never hesitated to deliver Truth straight up, unvarnished and in your face when the situation called for it, regardless of the consequences.

“Christians make a difference in this world by being different from this world; they don’t make a difference by being the same,” Tchividjian writes. “To be truly relevant, you have to say things that are unfashionably eternal, not trendy. It’s the timeless things that are most relevant to most people. … When the relevance of God's Word reigns supreme among God’s set-apart people, we influence the wider culture by expressing His revealed truth with both our lives and our lips.”

A global faith

Patrick Johnstone discusses evangelical Christianity’s global “awakening” (VIDEO) --
http://media1.imbresources.org/files/148/14850/14850-82285.mpg

Evangelical Christianity, once marginalized geographically and philosophically in the modern world, has become a truly global faith over the past half century — with two main competitors.

“The chief contenders for the hearts and souls of those living in the 21st century [will be] Muslims, evangelical Christians and secularists,” says renowned British mission leader Patrick Johnstone, former editor of Operation World, the bestselling guide that has helped millions of believers learn about and pray for the peoples of the world.

“Who is going to be the most successful? Islam is growing, largely by biological growth, not by conversion. Evangelicals are growing massively by conversion. Secularists are adding to their number every year, but are dying as a breed, because they are not having enough children to replace themselves — which is an interesting phenomenon.”

But you won’t hear much about that phenomenon from Western media, since they are largely controlled by secularists. Nor will you hear much from them about the staggering growth of the church in China, which is on track to have the largest evangelical Christian population in the world by 2050.

You will, however, find information about these trends — and much more — in Johnstone’s new book, The Future of the Global Church. It contains a trove of data and insights about the state of the church and the world today and in the years ahead — not to mention a fascinating summary of the past 20 centuries (find out more about the book and accompanying media resources at http://www.thefutureoftheglobalchurch.org/). Johnstone, European regional director for the WEC International mission agency, recently visited the United States to speak about his new book and meet with various mission groups, including IMB mission strategists.

What caused evangelical faith, once based largely in the United States and Europe, to spread so far beyond its traditional strongholds in the second half of the 20th century? The post-World War II missionary movement had a lot to do with it, along with the major expansion of local church involvement in missions, the spread of education and communication and, paradoxically, the end of Western colonial power in many countries.

The year 1960 marked a turning point, from Johnstone’s perspective.

“One day in eternity, I think we will look back and see God’s hand in so many things,” he says. “1960 was the great year of independence in Africa and many people thought, with the missionaries and the colonial regimes gone, Christianity would be pushed out. It did the exact opposite. It became indigenous and exploded. In many countries that are now broken politically, the churches became the source of stability and hope for the future.”

Unknown to most Western Christians at the time, the same phenomenon — the growth of truly indigenous churches, often amid persecution — was quietly unfolding in many parts of the communist world.

Johnstone also credits the “extraordinary work” of Billy Graham in encouraging a globe-spanning movement.

“The influence of Billy Graham has been quite dramatic,” he says. “Of course, he’s known for his evangelism and giving back credibility to evangelicals who preach the Gospel. The respect that he’s had around the world is amazing. But in the light of eternity, what Billy Graham did in pulling Christians together to focus on world evangelization brought evangelicals together globally for the first time ever. I think it gave a cohesion and a focus that had never been there before.”

Johnstone calls the period since 1960 the “Sixth Awakening” in church history (read the book to learn about the first five). The new, indigenous Christian movements around the world and the new focus of missionaries on reaching unreached peoples culminated in the 1990s.

“That was the decade in which more people became evangelical Christians than in any decade of history,” he observes. “I don’t believe it will happen again unless there’s a mighty work of the Spirit of God in a country like India. … I believe there are going to be breakthroughs amongst Muslims, and we are seeing some, but because of history those are going to be harder to see happen because of the long interaction between Muslims and Christians that has been very bitter and painful on both sides. Nevertheless … let’s trust God for it.”

Now that their faith has become mainstream, Johnstone warns evangelicals to avoid pride and complacency.

“Are the very successes of evangelicalism sowing the seeds of its spiritual demise by grieving the Spirit of God through pride, division, disobedience, carnality, moral laxity, theological error or prayerlessness?” he asks. “Nominalism is not the preserve of more traditional churches — it is increasingly a problem for third- and fourth-generation evangelicals.”

He also urges U.S. and other Western churches and mission agencies to pursue “multi-polar global leadership” with their Asian, African and Latin American brothers and sisters. The United States still leads the world in the sending of missionaries; it supported 127,000 of the world’s estimated 400,000 Christian missionaries in 2010, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. Are they willing to share leadership — and turn it over when the time comes?

“Wherever you look in the Christian world in the 21st century, [mission teams and strategies] that remain mono-ethnic are not going to survive,” Johnstone predicts. “I sometimes jokingly say that the perfect multicultural team would have a Brazilian evangelist, a Korean church planter, a Chinese to manage the accounts, an Australian to mend anything that’s broken and an American to handle planning and goals.”

More little Easters

Listen to an audio version at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/148/14841/14841-82226.mp3

Easter is coming. It’s the day we mark the biggest moment in history: the moment the resurrected Christ conquered sin and death.

A few years ago I shared some “little Easters,” the quiet epiphanies that continue to reveal His risen presence on the move around the world. Here are a few more.

STEPPING UP—“This is what we’ve been waiting for, praying for: Zambian people telling Zambian people about Jesus!” reports an IMB mission team in Africa. “Recently an 18-year-old, blossoming preacher-in-the-making traveled more than three hours by public transportation and his own two feet to encourage the new Litoma Baptist Church.”

The small congregation, only 6 months old, had barely begun when the missionary couple who helped them get started returned to the United States for a time. The fledgling church’s members needed support and reassurance. The young “Timothy” taught the older members, and during a revival weekend, 18 new people came Sunday morning.

“Thank you, Lord, for making this young man missions-minded for his own people!” the IMB team prays. “Thank you that he refused to let anyone look down on him because of his youth (see 1 Timothy 4:12). Continue to bless him and provide peace in his unstable home life. May Your wonderful words of life go down deep into the hearts and minds of the 18 men and women who expressed an interest in the church.”

RESISTING THE DARKNESS—“A man came last night to ask my husband to go and pray for his daughter who was sick,” another missionary in Africa writes. “When my husband arrived, there were several people waiting outside the hut — eerily silent. As he entered the hut, the girl was acting very strangely and it soon became apparent that this girl was more than likely demon-possessed. He began to pray for her, laying hands on her and calling out the demons in Jesus’ name. After some time, he walked around outside with the girl’s father, praying for protection on the whole family.”

After an hour, the girl began to act normally. She came outside to sit by the fire.

“Witchcraft is very real here,” says the missionary. “Many people can become demon-possessed. The girl’s father had asked for my husband to come and pray for his daughter [instead of seeking out a witchdoctor]. Praise the Lord for the belief of this man, a relatively new believer. Pray for renewed spiritual strength that will glorify the Lord in all things. Pray that this girl will be delivered from the powers of darkness and accept Jesus as her Savior.”

HOPING IN CHILDREN—“How do you know He likes flowers?” the child demanded, challenging the missionary who claimed God created flowers because He likes them.

“Because I know God. I talk with Him,” the missionary responded. The other little girls looked at her skeptically.

“You know God?”

“Yes. I meet with Him.”

The girls looked at each other, then began laughing and repeating, “She said she meets with God!” The missionary felt her face burn, but went on to explain how she meets with God every morning at home.

One girl rolled her eyes and said sarcastically, “Oh, you mean you pray.”

“More laughter and mockery. From 7- and 8-year-olds,” the missionary writes. “This is supposed to be the age of innocence. What happened to faith like a child? My heart aches. They’re already so hard, so cynical and skeptical, and it’s a painful reminder that things are not the way they should be. The world is bent. … When I look at the whole, I’m overwhelmed with despair. We’re hurtling further and further away from the Truth, toward the blackness of hatred, pain, evil — toward nothingness.

“But when I look at the moments, I see the hope. Sometimes only like a flash from a firefly in the dark of night, but still, it’s light. Like these small conversations. I pray they’re steps, inching these little ones closer to Love. One little flash at a time.”

WEEPING FOR JOY—A mission volunteer recently crossed a river with a ministry team, leaving behind a busy city for a rural area dotted with palm trees and bamboo houses on stilts. They walked through a village, crossed a rice field and found a one-room schoolhouse with a tin roof and chicken wire covering the windows. Inside were two rows of wooden pews on a dusty cement floor.

“From my seat at the front of the room, I looked out the windows to view lines of fat banana trees all around us,” the volunteer recalls.

“It felt almost like a dream, and I felt so thankful to be in this place with these people. The people of this village were filled with love and humor. I couldn’t get over the words from their leader declaring that they had nearly 75 believers … with many more waiting to be discipled and baptized.”

A man came forward with a guitar, strumming the tune to a song the volunteer team had never heard. But they knew what the song was about by the way the people closed their eyes and raised their hands toward heaven.

“They were singing with as much volume and passion as they could muster out of their thin bodies, and I began to cry,” the volunteer says. “I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down my cheeks, dirty from the dust of traveling there. The sight of these like-minded believers giving their whole heart in praise of Him who had saved them was more beautiful than any landscape or artist’s rendering I had ever seen. … Like dry land thirsting for rain, the people were desperate for Good Book teachings, and you could see them being watered spirit and soul.

“These people risk everything to come to this gathering. They could lose their homes, be imprisoned, possibly even killed, for standing in their newfound faith. Yet, here they were with hands raised high and smiles on their faces. Despite circumstances and hardships, sacrifices and sufferings, triumphs and blessings, life with purpose is a life worth living, and He is worth it all. That day, for that moment, they got it. They lived it, and so did I.”

Easter is coming.