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Missionary shock!

June 16, 2011 in Cultural Adaptation, Culture, Culture Shock, Ministry Tools, Training Leaders with 0 Comments

One night, I was invited over to the home of a missionary that worked in the area where the national pastor I mentioned in the previous post lived. This missionary had a very bad reputation among the nationals. (his bad reputation had to do with how he treated the nationals) This missionary had a reputation that he didn’t want to preach, and he’d come down there as a mechanic but yet he’d like to take pictures of their churches.

And I am in his home and he told me that he didn’t understand how I can fellowship with this guy and how I can preach in his church after what he had done. And as we talked, I asked him to tell me stories maybe where this national might have been offended. I was told a story of him going down to work at a camp on the beach, and when they got down to work at this camp on the beach, the pastor of the largest church in the area and although it ran about 200, that would have been a mega church for the time in the area. This pastor was working in the camp; then one day this pastor worked until 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

He just told the guys, he said, “I’m going to take a dip in the ocean and I’m going home. I’m tired.” And a bunch of his men left, and this missionary began to call his hand and to fuss at him, to let him know that he didn’t agree at all with his laziness. He was setting a bad example for the men, and he was harming the work of the camp.

I said to him, “You can’t talk like that to a pastor; you don’t have any authority over that pastor, and this pastor is the pastor of the largest church in this area. If anything you needed to have said ‘whatever the pastor says, I want to get along with.”

He said, “No way, that man was hurting the work, and he needed to be reprimanded to the face.”

Then I proceeded to ask him, “Would you have done the same with the pastor of his American church?” His pastor at that time was a very well-known pastor and famous on the west coast.

He said, “Of course I would.”

Now I said, “You and I both know your pastor pastors the church of over 2,000, and you would never reprimand him to his face and in front of everybody about that sort of thing.” He persisted that he would.

There’s no wonder that missionaries get a bad reputation. Often missionaries won’t eat with the nationals. They will even buy the food for the nationals to eat.

You know, there are good missionaries that would never do any of these things. And this is not being written to talk about those. There are missionaries who have eaten the food, slept with the people, missionaries that have paid the price. The man that mentored me when I arrived in the city where I served would have eaten anything and slept anywhere and done anything they asked him to do.

But there are some missionaries that would send the nationals to eat in one place and give them basically beans and rice and go to a restaurant and eat good American food. They would give them some form of kool aid, while they drink cold Coca-Cola in another place. It begins to cause the nationals to have a major attitude problem. That’s what you call missionary shock.

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Dealing with nationals!

June 15, 2011 in Cross-Cultural Evangelism, Cultural Adaptation, Culture, Culture Shock, Ministry Tools, Training Leaders with 0 Comments

The following will not be agreeable to many of you! I do not want to be hurtful but I do think that we need these experiences, however rare they are, to be able to avoid making some mistakes. I love missionaries. I believe in missionaries. I love nationals and I believe in them too! I know that there are two sides to every story and this is just one side but maybe we can learn from it!

When I was first planning to be a missionary and I went to my first orientation, I was in awe of all missionaries. I would have never been able to explain to you what I thought of any man who was willing to give up the comforts of an American and travel overseas. This was back in the mid-80s, and I was enthralled.

Since I was a little boy, I dreamed about being a missionary, missionaries were my heroes. We said it in our church; we said it everywhere. And it was such an exciting thing to be around missionaries and to know missionaries, but I was still very naïve. I had this idea that they were somehow super surrendered, super talented, super gifted in giving their lives to the Lord.

While we were in orientation that first week, the comment was made as we prepared for culture shock that one of the biggest shocks we would ever face will be missionary shock. They explained to us that we would soon arrive on the field and find out that missionaries were not what we thought they were. That was discouraging to me; I didn’t believe it. I was young, and I was naïve, and I’ve not been around yet. And like you, as you read this, my heart was broken, I couldn’t believe people would even think that we were talking about missionaries that way.

Then we arrived on the field; as we arrived on the field, it was not intentional that we sought it out because we didn’t. I’m not talking about little things like personal standards or convictions. I’m not talking about, many times I’m not even talking about doctrinal issues as much as I am work related, training related, ministry related issues that brought about a great deal of shock.

I was preaching at a church in one city and the pastor there was known as a “gringo” hater. Of course that was shocking to me, what did it mean that he was a “gringo” hater? So they said, word was, that he had been known “to bodily remove missionaries from his services who came and took pictures.” Again, I was pretty much in shock. The word was that missionaries would come to the churches, take pictures, go home and report that as being their work. Yet, they gave no money, attended no services, did no work in that church, but somewhere way back down the line maybe the mission board had started that church and so they wanted to claim it.

This national pastor was meeting under a tin roof on a dirt floor with very raggedy benches. He lived in a house with a dirt floor, and his life was pretty despicable, pretty hard. And so he had a very bad attitude about missionaries. So he called me and asked me to preach because word had gotten around that I liked nationals, and I wouldn’t do anything to harm him. I went in and preached for him. I preached the entire week, and I ate wherever he took me to eat, and I slept wherever he put me to sleep.

Then he called me to go preach another meeting, and when I was at that next meeting, he said to me, “Why don’t you ever bring your camera, why do you never take pictures of my church.”

And I laughed and I said, “Are you crazy? I will not have you bodily remove me. You have a reputation among all the Americans that you would bodily remove them.” And I said, “I don’t ever want that to happen to me; and so, no sir, I have no intention of ever taking pictures of your church.”

And he said, and this is shameful, but he said, “I wouldn’t mind you taking pictures because I don’t think you’d lie. I don’t think you’d claim it was our work. I’d think you said, ‘Look at this brother, see what he’s doing, and if you want to help him that would be good.’” He said, “So you can take pictures anytime you want in my church.”

Although I preached for him on numerous occasions, and actually one time when a bomb blew up a bus just across the street from his church during the days of terrorism, I never took any pictures in his church the whole time I was there.

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Get the right mentor!

June 14, 2011 in Discipleship, Family and Culture, Ministry Philosophy, Reading Notes, Training Leaders with 0 Comments

You gotta be careful to get the right mentor. In his book Cross Cultural Servanthood, Duane Elmer discusses arriving on the field and finding an older gentleman to learn Culture from. It’s not about ministry, but get a man who will be willing to teach you what it means to live in the country. By the way, never believe everything he says. Always test everything.

For example, you want to learn to ask questions. One of the smartest moves you can make when you arrive on the field is to ask questions.  Ask the same question 100 times. Ask it of 100 different people.

Keep notes of everything you ask. Take a voice recorder around with you. Record the answer later. Develop a consensus of opinion. Ask the taxi driver, ask the person at the restaurant, ask your friends at church, ask everybody so you can get an idea of what people are preaching, and saying, and teaching.

Duane Elmer talks about getting this older man to teach you. When I arrived in the country to learn the language, God blessed me by allowing me to meet a man whose house I rented. And then I was told to try to find somebody who would help me with language practice. So I went over to his place. He owned a tienda (small store) where he sold  soccer balls and soccer jerseys and uniforms, and I went there each day.

I learned how to sew up soccer balls with him. I sat behind the counter, I became almost like a free employee. I would buy cokes and candy bars, and we would sit there and eat and talk. While I did that, he taught me all sorts of things. He taught me what to do when the beggars came and how he always had a very small coin to give them. He taught me what idioms to use and not to use. He taught me what was insulting and what wasn’t. 

He told me what he didn’t like about Americans. He showed me how to eat with a tortilla, showed me how to get along with the people. He gave me a ton of information. Often in language school, I would be far ahead of the class, not because of my intelligence or ability, but because as I spent time with my friend, he would be showing me what I was to be doing. He would be teaching me new words.

We would go out together and play squash, a racquetball type sport. We would go out to a ranch each week and preach, and we would ride in the car for an hour and a half each way and all the time we would be talking in Spanish, and I would be learning about the people. He would laugh at me and make fun of my mistakes, and he would teach me with what I was supposed to do. He would have me in social settings where I would be the only american, me and my family, and we would make big cultural mistakes, and he would cover up for us and help us. But he trained us.

I suggest you get a mentor on the field. Get some young people to teach you how young people think and talk and get some old people to teach you how old people think and talk. Get a missionary that can teach you things.

Don’t learn about the nationals secondhand because when the missionaries teach you about the nationals, they’re giving you their opinion, and you’re getting all your information through a filter that makes it really difficult to know what’s going on.

So I strongly suggest that you get some people to teach you and train you. I suggest that before you ever go to the field that you learn from a mentor in America that’s training you about ministry. I challenge you to get some missionary mentors when you get to the field, I challenge you to respect the senior missionary, run every decision by him, let him help you make a decision. This doesn’t mean you have to do what he says, but he has insight you don’t have. Ask a 1,000 questions.

An older pastor, a friend of mine that’s now in heaven, used to say, “Ask questions, don’t make statements.” You’re not ready to make statements for a long time, and anytime you’re with somebody, there ought to be more questions than there are answers from you until God has so proven himself, and even then, it would be wise to ask questions. So get a mentor. Let somebody help you and train you in what to do.

Check out bcwe.org

Why some cannot disciple others?

June 13, 2011 in Discipleship, Training Leaders with 0 Comments

Something to consider for sure!

Dawson Trotman says in his article there are five reasons Christians do not reproduce:

“1. Un-confessed Sin – Impairment to some essential organ can prevent physical reproduction. In the spiritual realm sin is the disease that can keep one from winning the lost.

2. Fear of Man- “Oh, but I am afraid.” someone says.

Proverbs 29:25 –
“The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe”

3. Lack of Spiritual Purpose- Some Christians desire to be spiritual parents, but their lives run in circles. “I have to buy a house to pay rent, so I’ll have a place to rest up so I’ll be fit to work, and earn some more money.”

4. Busyness in Spiritual Activity- Satan puts all his efforts into getting the Christian busy, but not producing. I am not talking about earning money, but being busy doing Christian things. We have spiritual activity with little productivity.

5. Faithfulness in Church, but Not in Reproducing- We have a lot of pew-sitters- —people think that if they are faithful in church attendance, put good-sized gifts in the offering plate and get people to come, and serve in some way they have done their part. All this is incidental to the supreme task of winning a man or woman to Jesus Christ and then helping him or her to go on.”

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The Measure of a ministry!

June 10, 2011 in Discipleship, Training Leaders with 0 Comments

It takes more than one person to train and raise up a person to serve God. Many people will be investing in them. Don’t be jealous and don’t be selfish. It is not about you but about Him and them!

Chris Adsit in his article “The Measure of a Ministry” again in Missions Frontiers, Jan. –Feb. 2011 is trying to teach us the definition for the word disciple, and he says,

“Here is a good start. A disciple is a person in progress who is eager to learn and apply the truths Jesus Christ teaches Him, resulting in ever-deepening commitment to Christ and to a Christ-like lifestyle.”

A warning accompanies this approach, don’t subscribe to single relational discipleship. That is, don’t assume that you and your vast treasures of wisdom, knowledge and experience are the only trainer your disciple needs.

If you do, you will indeed duplicate your strengths, but you will also duplicate your weaknesses. We all tend to emphasize our assets and minimize our deficits as we minister to others. For this reason, Christ established His church to provide a wide variety of gifted men and women for the equipping of the saints.

Ephesians 4:12 “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:”

As we count on and invest in this system we’re working together to reproduce Christ not ourselves. Conduct a survey of the spiritual gifts, natural talents and acquired skills of your church. Encourage their disciples to appropriate experts as needed.

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