A massive transition

The first episode I had with today’s guest is episode #5 Twelve Years A Missionary.

The changes were making our heads spin.

We were weighing our bags to head back to the Middle East when the doctor said there was something not right with our newborn son’s head. They did an X-ray and realized that he needed to have major surgery on his skull. It was such a shock to us and was very disorienting. We didn’t know where to live. We didn’t know what treatment was going to look like.

During that time, we kept thinking about what was around us and not as much about what we were going back to.

We were in the midst of a global city, with people coming from all over the world, all the time, starting businesses and studying on college campuses. We would hear from our friends, “There are so many people here from all over the world. What do we do?”

At a prayer meeting, a guy gave a presentation and said, “Missions everywhere to everywhere.” The Holy Spirit used that in a very profound way that day. What about all your experience overseas? How could you use that right here?

Both my wife and I didn’t have a desire to go back. For me, it was conflicting, but for my wife, it was pretty straightforward.

There are people from all over the world right here. There are people from some of the hardest places in the world to send people to, and they’re sitting at my table right here.

Helping Westerners reach their Muslim neighbors

From somebody saying, What can I do, to actually doing something is huge and something that we celebrate.

She asked us what we should do to meet that Muslim lady at the park, and my wife gave a very simple answer that was more profound than she realized at the time. She just said, go and say hello to her.

We want to have conversations that go beyond asking questions about what food is like in your country. We want actually to talk about real things.

It’s not easy to be the aroma of Christ and salt and light to the world, but it’s very much worth it.

Know what you believe!

How do we get young people to engage with a very changing world around them?

We realized that when we were putting that program together, one of the first things we needed to start with was the Bible. The story of the Bible. This is our great story. This is our great God and King. And the whole scope of scripture sings this story.

The True Story of Reality

Not only do we identify the error in their story, but that gives us an opportunity to share God’s story with them.

I studied biblical theology, and I find it so wonderful to be able to bring that into evangelism.

Equipping the church is a very important feature of engaging Islam, of engaging the people around us. We have to know where we’re coming from.

Seeing immigrants as a mission field

We wrestle with the fact that the paradigm is still that the mission field is over there, not here.

We have to think of it as both, we send people far away, and we are sent people here. We are missional whether we are here or there.

The challenge is to see this not as these people taking over our neighborhoods, but as God bringing the nations to our doorstep.

Our natural reactions are fear, anger, fascination, and apathy. That’s what we tend to want to do.

We were in a park where our fishing opportunity could’ve been a little more oriented to them.

More often than not, when you do actually approach somebody with a spiritual intention, their responses are quite often warm, and they are quite often willing to engage and talk about this stuff.

We’ve had very little pushback in the way you might think we would have pushback.

I think our biggest challenge is what do we do? We want to do something. We see this happening. We hear about these things happening. What do we do?

This leader of a mosque was born and raised in America and knew almost nothing about Christianity.

How being cross-cultural helps you minister back home

It gives us so much understanding and compassion for people who have left everything and are in a totally new setting. I don’t know the language, and I’m trying so hard to learn it.

Having lived in the East, you learn to be flexible and not expect everything to go according to plan.

Helping our children see that there is great value in trying to understand other people.

God is using his people as tools in his hand to proclaim his love for all people.

The challenges of being missional

The people who were born and raised in these places where there is a massive transformation of culture find it very challenging. We have to give recognition to the fact that there is sacrifice involved in thanking missionally.

Instead of seeing these people as invaders of our communities, we have to see that God and his sovereignty have brought these people to us. This is our opportunity.

It’s not always going to be easy, and it’s gonna take a lot of time.