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Do You Really Support Our Troops!

Posted in Christian Missions, tagged , , on January 25, 2012| 4 Comments »

I watched the President’s State of the Union speech last night. Very intentionally, President Obama framed his more controversial and political proposals with non-controversial, military bookends. He started with the removal of troops from Iraq and finished with the elimination of Osama bin Laden.  At every mention of the troops with their sacrifices and victories, both sides of Congress and all visitors stood and applauded.

 If there is one thing upon which Americans generally agree, it is that the country stands behind the troops on the ground!  Even when we disagree over why they are there or how long, no one ever goes on record saying our soldiers did a terrible job!

I couldn’t help but wonder if the American church of Christ feels that same way about its boots on the ground! I’m talking about the foot soldiers we send out to combat the kingdom of darkness all over the world—aka missionaries.

Times were when these soldiers of the cross seemed to be highly respected.  Missionaries like McCaleb, Shewmaker, Benson, and later Gatewood, Hare, and Bixler were well-known names with heroic stature in our churches.  Because of the big splash the Brazil team made in the early sixties and because of their innovative approach, they too continue to enjoy notoriety, especially in older, established churches.

I wonder how many of us can name five missionaries that have entered their field in this millennium—or even the last quarter century?  Unless you are on a mission committee that sent some recent workers or a teacher of missions, or working in a missions organization, I’m afraid of the results!

Our churches are still committed to missions, and we are still sending out new missionaries, so what has changed?  Here is a short list of some of the things I fear have reduced our enthusiasm for the troops:

  • Because it is now more expensive to go abroad than to work at home, churches are choosing more domestic mission projects.
  • Also because of economics, churches are choosing to support national preachers instead of Americans. National preachers are viewed as requiring much less support, no travel funds, and no benefits!  What a deal!
  • Foreign mission work is seen more as a competitor to local work. This sometimes has economic roots and sometimes geo-political.  When the nation is tired of foreign entanglements, the church becomes tired of them as well.
  • Because of fewer services per week, i.e., many churches only meeting Sunday morning for a general assembly, with other meetings done in classes or in homes, fewer are willing to open their pulpits for missionary reporting.  The average member in the pew has very little exposure to the work and sacrifice of current missionaries.
  • Mission work is low on the ladder of ministerial respect.  Fairly or unfairly, one hears the comment that people go to the mission field who can’t make it or who don’t want to fit in at home.   Test yourself: rank in value to the kingdom the following types of ministers:  mega-church preachers, small church preachers, youth ministers, campus ministers, worship ministers, church planters, and foreign missionaries.
  • A nineteenth-century attitude toward foreign missions predominates, which says missionaries should go to third-world countries and live in poverty, working only with people who are physically needy.  Interestingly enough, as Africa has become one of the most Christian continents on the planet, it has become an even greater magnet for American mission work! If there are more Christians in Africa than in the United States, perhaps American missionaries should be choosing to go other places. (I’m not saying that we should not continue to aid African Christians in their work. American Christians still have much more wealth than African Christians.)

This list is certainly not exhaustive, but perhaps will stimulate the conversation about missions among us.

I would love to see the day return when foreign missionaries are greeted with standing ovations, when churches line up to invite them to speak of their work, when mission committees bang on the doors of Christian colleges and missions organizations, looking for good people to send to their mission points.

What can you do to raise the stature of those soldiers of the cross who serve faithfully and sacrificially in the spiritual battlefields of this world?

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Tear Down Those Walls and Put In Windows and Doors!

Posted in Christian Missions, Church Leadership, tagged , , , on January 19, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Apparently I got so excited about blowing up silos that I forgot to address adequately two of the main areas for avoiding silos, that is, transparency and distribution of information. 

Real-life silos exist because different kinds of grains need to be stored and they need to be stored separately.  So the best functioning silos offer secure and appropriate storage to conserve the grains, and they isolate their grain and protect it from contact with any other grain.

Mission committees (or any other committee or subgroup) which protect, conserve, isolate, and/or separate are dangerous to the health of the church!  I hope that message has come through loudly and clearly in all of posts.

Let me offer you some suggestions for opening up your committee or your processes to avoid dangerous isolation.

  • Diversify your committee. I’ve already mentioned the possibility of establishing a rotating pattern of leadership in committees, so that no single person sits in first chair forever. Terms for committee members is also something to think about. The reason most committees don’t like new members is that they bring in new ideas. The reason committees need to add new members is for new  ideas!
  • Include members who will sync you with the whole church. You want to make sure that the mission committee’s goals and actions are in sync with the whole church, so why not invite one of the vision casters to be a part of the group. This might be an elder, a minister, or a member of a special committee.
  • Announce both your meetings and the agenda for the meetings publicly.  I understand that occasionally some delicate matters might need to be discussed privately, but 98% of all the committee meetings I have ever been in were not those kinds of meetings.  Why should they not be open meetings?  (I would challenge elders with the same question!)
  • Provide the most public platforms possible for your missionaries when they are with you! I know there was a time when missionaries reported by showing thousands of slides—but unless you are 55+, you don’t remember those days!  Most missionaries are barely acknowledged publicly in our churches, both when they are there and when they aren’t.  Sherrylee and I were sponsored by a very good church and supported by several other good churches—but even when we were in the states, if we did not ask for a meeting with the elders, if we did not fit the regular schedule of the mission committee, or if we were only able to visit a certain church on a non-church meeting day, then we would not even get a chance to talk to those directly involved with us, much less the other members of that congregation.
  • Publish both the goals of your committee as well as how you are working to meet those goals. At least yearly, the whole church should be included in your committee’s work through published information that they can study or refer back to later.
  • Encourage members to participate in the work at your mission sites! Short-term missions give members firsthand experience with the missions of the congregation.  Especially elders and ministers need that personal experience if they are to participate at home in promoting  missions as part of the vision of the church.

Keeping the members ignorant is a way of controlling them. Silo committees are afraid of new ideas and transparency.  Your mission committee needs to be as open, as transparent, as receptive to input, and as cooperative with all areas of the church as is possible for you!

 

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Blowing Up Silos In The Church!

Posted in Christian Missions, Church Leadership, tagged , , , on January 18, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Blowing up silos is dangerous work! Relationships are threatened, church revenues may be threatened, and serious discontentment among certain subgroups of a congregation may result.  Let’s talk about ways to get rid of silos and try to avoid stepping on any landmines.

If you as a church leader see silos, if you as a member see silos, what can be done?

  • Decide if the fallout is worth it or not. I once heard about a deacon who would not give up the keys to the sound board at church—because he ran the sound board. That was his kingdom.  So is this little kingdom here worth the destruction that comes from blowing it up?  Good question! And there is no single right answer. In this particular case, the worship minister could not practice and the praise team could not rehearse unless it was convenient for this deacon with the keys to the sound board. So, very concretely, the effective worship of the entire congregation was held hostage by the sound board deacon.  The damage to the whole church was greater than the damage of losing this one family, so he was forced to give the keys up! 
  • Don’t destroy without having something better to replace it with.  I know of one congregation where one brother has been in charge of foreign missions for decades! He has done a very good job and served the church well, but his vision has not grown with the congregation, so now he is sometimes out of step with the whole church—but he doesn’t know it.  When someone has enough courage to tell him to give up control, there certainly needs to be a plan and people in place that will serve the church better than the good brother alone was doing! Blowing up silos is not the conclusion of the matter, just the means to a better end.
  • Know the difference between a battle and a war. Leading a rebellion against the elders because you can’t understand why they meet privately and you believe them to have silo mentality might succeed in forcing them out, but the damage done could destroy the whole congregation.  Breaking up the foreign mission committee because they refuse to give up their kingdom  might cost the church a family or two, but probably will not destroy the congregation—especially if there is something better to replace it with.  Destroying the congregation is losing the war; losing a couple of families is painful, but probably only losing a battle.
  • Address the challenges holistically, rather than particularly. Instead of announcing that the foreign missions committee is ruining the whole church because they dominate the church budgeting process, perhaps stepping back and looking at the whole budgeting process and addressing its inadequacies would be more productive.  Instead of painting a bull’s eye on one silo, why not look at the vision of the church as a whole and ask all subgroups to define themselves within that vision. Those that resist or have a hard time will be addressed by all those groups who define themselves or successfully re-defined themselves within the vision of the whole church. 
  • Take a long-term view.  So you think the long-term chair of the missions committee has too much control and not enough accountability. It is reasonable to think that it will not be a quick fix! You are going to have to be patient, working for peace as well as change. God is longsuffering, not willing any should perish but that all chairmen should come to repentance.  You can be longsuffering and patient as well.
  • Relieve fears. We said some people can’t give up control because they are afraid of what they will lose, for instance, like prestige, control, respect, and relationships.  Try alleviating some of those fears as part of the process. Honor people for what they have done. Assure them of relationships and respect. Celebrate the change in status, rather than the demise of the little king.
  • Act in love. If you sense hard feelings or disrespect in yourself towards that person or that subgroup, stop and examine your own heart before you do one more thing.
  • Don’t be afraid.

Christians are called to be peacemakers, so I do believe in living at peace with all people as much as it depends on me. I do know, though, that little kings and little queens of church territories are sitting on little thrones that don’t belong to them and that diminish the ability of the church to function fully and gloriously as the family of God or the body of Christ.

We must never allow other thrones inside the church than the throne of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords! 

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How To Build A Church Without Silos!

Posted in Christian Missions, Church Leadership, tagged , , , on January 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Never building silos is easier than removing silos! I have heard preachers who tell about the first two years at their new congregation, all they did was break down the doors to silos and little kingdoms that had grown up over the years in that particular congregation.  My fear is that they are only the surviving preachers, i.e., the ones who can still talk about it;  the others who are not talking were not victorious in their battles with silos.

If you are planting a church, or if you have had a catastrophic event or truly phenomenal leadership that allows your church to reorganize completely, then here are a few suggestions for you to avoid building a missions silo:

  • Work on the mission and vision for the whole church before you start parsing that vision into sub-visions.  Discovering the big picture for a church is the result of lots of people praying together, talking together, praying together, searching the word together—and praying together.  Beware at this stage of the individuals who seem to have a single agenda or a single focus with no real interest in the other areas.  Help them either come back to working as part of the whole body or ask them to wait to speak until the vision for the whole is received.
  • Use a non-corporate metaphor for building your congregation’s organization.  I myself love the family metaphor, but there are others you might choose like the physical body or the tree and branches.  Using a different metaphor opens the conversation to different possibilities.
  • Build rotation into your model.  Nobody gets to be appointed to any position or becomes a member of any committee for life! Everybody understands that they are serving a defined term as elder, chairman, ministry leader, or committee member.  The term is not based on performance. You can’t run for re-election and get another term. Everybody steps down or away for some specified period of time before they can perform those same duties again for another term.
  • Build accountability into your model.  Nobody gets to be anything without being accountable to someone!  The hardest question here is to whom the elders will be accountable, both individually and collectively.  Without too much explanation, let me suggest that individually the elders need to be accountable to one another; collectively, they should be accountable to the flock they serve. 
  • Do budgets as representatives of the whole church, not as representatives of particular subgroups!  Try to remove any sense of competition for funds.
  • Do not idolize efficiency!  God did not call us to efficiency, but to faithfulness.  He is patient and longsuffering.  He tells us to wait on Him. Those are not instructions for efficiency, but rather for following in His steps. That’s where we want to be.
  • Don’t be afraid.  It’s God’s church, not yours! He is very much in control; you are not! Trust Him!

Tomorrow, look for the last post in this series on what to do if you find silos all around you!

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Who Built That Silo In My Church?

Posted in Christian Missions, Church Leadership, tagged , , , on January 10, 2012| 2 Comments »

Last week, we asked ourselves questions to discover whether or not the mission committee at our church works in a silo—that is, works independently of the main streams of church leadership and other primary activities of the local congregation.  Here’s the link if you missed that post:  Does No One Understand the Mission Committee: There Might Be A Reason

Before we explore remedies, let’s look at possible causes of silo organization.  If we can identify causes, then, I believe, we can do more than just address symptoms! We can cure the disease, not just manage it.

  • Silo organization can result by defaulting rather than strategic thinking. Since many larger corporations are organized by departments/divisions, each with its own budget and budget manager, those brothers who organize the church leadership into separate committees are just imitating what they have done at work.  There are other models to consider, for instance, the model of the physical body or perhaps the family.
  • Silo organization becomes a greater temptation as size of the church grows! The larger the church, the more difficult it becomes to gather input from multiple sources,  or to get diverse groups together, or to include larger numbers of people in decision-making processes, so the “natural” tendency is to opt for efficiency, moving decision-making into smaller, more specialized groups—the genesis of silos for many churches!!
  • Silo organization is often the result of the worship of specialization. I’m actually all for people learning lots about missions and using that experience and information for the good of the kingdom, BUT, I have seen mission committees dominated by the ex-missionary or the missions professor or the member who attended the last missions workshop, all to the detriment of the kingdom because no one knows so much that they can’t learn from someone else! No one’s experience is universal! No one set of mission principles works in every circumstance!
  • Silo organization may occur because of the budgeting process. If your budget is broken down into categories like local ministry, adult education, foreign missions, benevolence, building and grounds, then it is very easy to make two mistakes:  organizing your committees according to budget categories and assigning full responsibility for that portion of the budget to that one committee. 
  • Silo organization can happen with power players who want control of a fiefdom! If one person has to approve all the decisions; if only one person can sign the checks; if the meetings are just rubber stamping what one person wants to do; if one person sets the agenda for every meeting; if even one or two of these things are true, you are probably a member of a little kingdom within the church, no matter how benevolent the dictator is.
  • Silo organization often exists because of fear! While fear apparently is very real in industry because of job security issues, I tend to think that at church fear may be over loss of influence or loss of a sense of purpose, maybe even loss of relationships with certain missionaries. 
  • Silo organization can simply be a church tradition. Oops—the way we have always done it . . . . Surely I don’t even need to comment on that.

All of these First Causes are so common that I’m pretty sure many of you are saying, “Of course we do that. How else could it be done?” 

If you are a church leader and feel like there is always a little tension with the mission committee,

or if you are a mission committee member and feel like church leaders are always sticking their fingers into your business, or that they don’t understand how important this committee is;

If you are a minister and are frustrated by the lack of synergy and/or cohesiveness between the working leadership groups in your congregation, or

If you sense an allegiance anywhere in your congregation to a sub-group over the good of the whole,

look for silos, look for those who love silos—and I’ll finish this thought next time with some suggestions for actions to take to both avoid and remove silos.

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Does No One Understand the Mission Committee? There Might Be A Reason!

Posted in Christian Missions, Church Leadership, tagged , , , on January 5, 2012| 1 Comment »

The term silo effect is pretty popular in business and organizational circles.  You also hear about silo vision and silo thinking.  All of these phrases derive from agricultural storage silos, typically with each individual silo housing a particular kind of grain.

The assumption in anything silo is that each unit is segmented in such a way that there is little to no communication or exchange between the two silos.  When this happens in an organization you might see two departments which are, in fact, interdependent, but which have separate goals and are working in a counterproductive way—but they don’t know it, because they don’t talk to each other.

Your church may be a collection of silos!  Many are!  The elders are one silo, the minister and his staff are another, the benevolence group are another—and the mission committee is almost always its own silo!

Let’s just talk about mission committees.  Let me ask a few leading questions, and you be the judge as to whether your mission committee works in a silo:

  1. Does your committee include and people from other important church areas: elders, ministers, youth, adult education, women’s ministry?
  2. Does your committee make foreign mission decisions as part of the process of making local mission decisions? Local benevolence decisions?  Local youth decisions?
  3. Is your committee invited to participate in the vision-setting meetings of the church leaders? (Budget meetings don’t count! Planning a budget is not the same as setting the vision.)
  4. How many of your missionaries or mission points can the average member of your church name?
  5. How many weeks per year is your mission work mentioned from the pulpit?

So what happens when several different committees of the church work independently of each other? I mean they may have different goals, different processes, different timetables, and different organizational styles!  Is this the picture of a body working in harmony?

Read I Corinthians 12 from The Message and tell me if silos are good for the body of Christ?

 12-13You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything.

 14-18I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.

 25-26The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.

 27-31You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your “part” mean anything.

Next I’ll offer you some suggestions for remedying the problem of a silo mission committee.  In the meantime, start making your own list!

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The Last Days and Thanksgiving!

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , on November 22, 2011| 4 Comments »

My computer is having trouble, which has meant that I did not have good internet access, so I’m going to finish this series of traveling thoughts today even though we don’t actually leave Europe until Thursday.

Our granddaughter Cassidy flew by herself (again) from Dallas to Frankfurt, where we picked her up last Friday.  Since she was three or four years old, Mimi (Sherrylee) has been reading her the Madelein books about the little group of orphan girls who live in Paris and always walk in two straight lines!  We’ve told Cassie many times that someday we would take her to Paris, so this year we did.

Cassie slept in the backseat while we drove from Frankfurt to Paris.  Although she slept through most of the countryside, when she woke up told her all about World War I which had been fought in much of that region. The French have many new signs commemorating different nations who fought in France, probably as preparation for remembering the centennial of the beginning of the “war to end all wars” in 2014.

We had a dream Saturday in Paris: petit d’ jeuner, Notre Dame, Sant Chapelle, Musee D’Orsay, and the Louvre—being typical Americans and seeing lots instead of looking closely, but somehow it seemed to work better with a 12-year-old granddaughter, and this was all about her!

We finished the day with a trip to the summit of the Eiffel Tower on a perfectly clear night. I have to admit having been in Paris three or four times before and never really enjoying it that much. Somehow seeing it all through Cassie’s eyes on a beautiful sunny day has totally convinced me what an awesome city Paris is!  (See, I can even talk “teenager”!)

Our last three days in Europe have been at the Euro-American Retreat, held each year in Rothenburg ob der Taube.  About 140 Europeans and Americans, most of whom live in Europe, come together to be refreshed by worship and fellowship.  We try to come whenever we are in Europe in November.

Yesterday was a typical afternoon, where after the morning sessions, we had lunch with John and Beth Reese, who direct World Bible School. Then we took Tony and Leslie Coffey from Dublin, Ireland, as well as Paul, Carol, and Jesse Brazle (Antwerp) to Dinkelsbuehl, another walled city not far from Rothenburg that Sherrylee and I knew about.

We talked and talked, walked and talked, stopped for coffee and Kuchen (Black Forest cake), and even shopped a bit before heading back for the evening sessions.

Tonight is first the teen banquet and then the children’s singing program. Cassie honored us with an invitation to go with her to the banquet!  Tomorrow we pack up and start getting ready to go.

The small German towns of Reichenbach and Linden Fels will be our last stops on the way to Frankfurt, so that we can show Cassie where her great-great-great grandfather was born and where his family left to come to the United States in 1848.  Some things are better shown than told about—ancestors definitely belong in that category!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!  God is so good. Seeing so much of the world just makes me ever so much more grateful to Him for the richness of His blessings. He didn’t have to make anything beautiful or loving or fun—and, in fact, He made so MUCH that is beautiful and loving and fun!

Thank you, Lord!

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Days 18-20: Conversations!

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , on November 19, 2011| 3 Comments »

Aegidien Church in Hanover, Germany

You aren’t surprised, are you, that the people who start something called “Let’s Start Talking” find themselves in conversations with lots of people all the time about lots of different things.  Would you like a quick look at our conversation itinerary?

Hannover, Germany was our home for six years and where all three of our children were born. Along with two other couples, we moved here in 1973 to begin a new church plant.  That church grew and thrived for 20 years, long after all of us Americans had left. The Hannover church even helped in planting two other churches in Peine and Hildesheim, both cities about 30-45 minutes by autobahn from Hannover.

In the mid to late 90s, the devil got into the Hannover church through divorce, immorality, petty jealousies and blew it completely apart.  Many of the members have remained faithful and belong either to one of the offspring in Hildesheim and Peine, or they attend another church. Some seem to have completely abandoned their faith.  Those who really suffered, however, were the children of the members.

Even if we just have one day, Sherrylee and I have always made a point to keep the love and the conversations alive that we share with our brothers and sisters in this region.  But, as you will see, the conversations can be gut-wrenching.

  •  “How are your kids?”  The Hannover church was mostly young families, so there were lots of children. Today most of them are in their early 20s, marrying, finishing educational goals—and only a few of them are active believers! Most of those children do not attend church and do not appear to be living in any kind of faith.  The ones who have chosen faith are spoken of almost as miracles—like God has been especially gracious to them.  The others are all still held up to God in prayer by loving parents—at least by the parents who are themselves still believers.
  • “What do you hear about _________?” Surprisingly, many from the disintegrated Hannover church still keep up with each other. Some have moved away, a few of the older members have died, and only a handful want nothing to do with those friends from the past.  I believe that even these occasional relationships are remnants of the strong love that existed in the Hannover Gemeinde.

Those conversations were only the front door then to these conversations which were much more difficult and sometimes painful:

  • “I  feel betrayed by the people who abandoned their faith?”  Those who so casually leave a church family probably have no idea that they cause real pain,–but they do, and it is a pain that can endure for years!
  • “Why don’t those other people love me anymore just because I don’t worship with them?  This conversation usually grows out of a longing for the intimacy that has been lost.  Sometimes even those who have abandoned the community suffer from this loss of intimacy. It’s not unusual for them to blame those that they themselves rejected!
  • How can I have a relationship with her when she is still living in sin?  The broken mess that sin creates can be forgiven, but the consequences  for relationships are very difficult to heal. The people can be redeemed, but the mess is often permanent—at least until Jesus comes and makes all things whole!  We had several conversations this time about how Christians should respond to the enduring brokenness that sin leaves behind.

Happily, we were able to have breakfast with Don and Cindy Roehrkasse and Kyle and Susan Bratcher who lead the church in Hildesheim. Randy and Katie Smelser and Amanda Knapp, the American workers in Peine, joined us around a true love feast!

Amanda and her husband David are fairly new, but the other three couples have worked with these churches from their beginnings!  Our conversations with them were not about the past, but about the future

  • people they were studying with,
  •  plans for developing native leadership in the church,
  •  the possibility of a new church plant in Celle

And, of course, we talked about Let’s Start Talking!

So Thursday from dawn until well after dusk, we talked.  We talked and prayed and cried and laughed and dreamed and wondered—because that’s just what Christians do with each other.

“We believe, therefore we speak!”

 

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Days 12-15: Does Belgium Have A Government Yet?

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , on November 14, 2011| 1 Comment »

I think Belgium has a government, but I’m not sure.

This small divided country went at least 482 days without a government because the French-speaking parties and the Flemish-speaking parties could not—would not agree on how to go forward. Belgium is a parliamentary democracy, but without any single party having a super majority and governing independently, the only way to form a government is by coalition, that is, several parties joining together and agreeing to share power.

A country with no government because of radically self-interested political parties—now there is a lesson to be learned here, for us Americans and for us Christians.

Sherrylee and I have spent the last four days in Belgium and the Netherlands, visiting our good friends Paul and Carol Brazle in Antwerp and Hans and Ans van Erp in the Eindhoven church.  The times are interesting in both of these established works.

Maturing church works have different problems than church plants. Although both of these works are approximately twenty-five years old, they are reaching critical stages in their existence.

All of Western Europe should probably be classified as post-Christian, meaning that the forms of Christianity still permeate society, but personal faith and relationship to God through Christ is relatively uncommon.  Christianity is generally viewed as an old superstition that a more enlightened society has moved beyond.

Bringing the Good News of Jesus to Europeans requires patience. Those missionaries who choose to serve here are often choosing to leave home and stay for decades, not years!

Paul and Carol Brazle have been in Belgium since 1986, faithfully representing Jesus among the Flemish-speaking people.  The church they serve in Antwerp has been evangelistic and has fluctuated between 20-50 members over the years, depending on the Christians who move away and/or move back.

Currently they are ministering to a much larger group of people because of the influx of Africans into Europe. A group of Christians from Ghana began collecting, then growing, until they far outnumbered the other nationalities in the Antwerp church.  Along with the blessing of new members came the struggles of trying to be one church and blend Euro-American church culture with Afro-Ghanaian church culture.

You’d be surprised at how strongly everyone feels about how church is conducted—or maybe you wouldn’t!  I’m talking about totally innocuous questions like how you start songs, what melodies to use with a set of words, what to do with the children during worship times, what time will the service really start on Sunday—all mostly cultural issues, but ones that can create tension, especially if anyone insists on their own answer to the question!

And I have not yet mentioned any issues!  The church in Antwerp—all parties—are doing their best to be one church and not take the easy way of just splitting into two groups who do whatever they each are most comfortable doing.

The Dutch church of Christ in Eindhoven was begun about 1987, when Hans and Ans invited us to bring an LST group there. They have grown in the ensuing years to be a model church in Europe in many ways. Eindhoven has always been an indigenous church, self-supporting, self-ministering, and quite international as well.

At yesterday’s service, we had Belgians, Chinese, Africans, Americans—and Dutch people, singing, praying, and breaking bread together.  Their challenge now stems from their success as a church.

This wonderful church family may be reaching that time in a church’s life when they are so busy taking care of their own needs that they quit reaching out to others.  I’ve seen this happen many times in European churches. Usually the church plant is very evangelistic, fresh and enthusiastic until they reach30-50 people coming regularly.  Then church life begins to take all of their energy just to care for one another. Besides,  there is much less threat of painful rejection when only working among yourselves—so they quit reaching out!

Typically, this church will continue to feel good about itself for a while longer, maybe even grow more because of its good reputation, but then it begins to decline and no one understands why!  Decline, however, is inevitable when the community of believers is no longer consciously and intentionally shining the light into the darkness.

Some think this pattern is absolutely determined and unavoidable, but I do not. These two good churches have good leaders, people of great faith, and my prayer is that they will continue to depend on His power and Spirit for guiding the flocks which they oversee.

3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. Philippians 2:3-4

Would it make a difference in the Belgian government, would it make a difference in our churches, if we really believed and practiced what Paul taught the early church in Greece?

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Day 11 – You May Have To Pull The Pin!

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , on November 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »

If you fly into a new country, but only stay in the airport, you can’t put a pin in your map for having been in that country!  International airports are notoriously void of anything representative of local cultures.

You deplane (I really don’t like all these nouns turned into verbs!), stand in windowless rooms with only legal posters on the walls as you wait to have a completely silent passport officer check your passport. If they talk to you at all, they only want to know where you come from, where you are going, and how long you are going to be in their country.  Only in Israel did they actually ask the names of the people we would be visiting.

The passport officer then stamps your passport, waves you through so that you can go get your luggage in the prayer room—I mean, the baggage claim area!

In most countries you have two or three choices of exit doors from baggage claim. One says “Nothing To Declare;” another says “Something To Declare”—I’ve never seen anybody go straight to that line—and then in some countries you have special lines for special citizens. In Europe, both in the passport lines and customs, if you are a citizen of a European Union country, you bypass the more stringent controls for those of us who are “Other passports”. It’s a good lesson in humility for us Americans.

Of course, we do the same thing –maybe worse as non-citizens come to the U.S.  I find our passport and customs controls among the most rigorous.

Now to make choosing the correct line even more interesting, there are some countries who introduce a random search element to the process.  One country we have visited has each person hit a big button which lights up the green Go or red Stop light. Randomly, I suppose, you get the red light and must open all your suitcases.

I’m pretty sure most customs officials work off of profiling passengers. You can bet on some scruffy student being stopped.  Yesterday, upon arriving in Frankfurt from Turkey, we faced immediate passport control by the police before getting ten feet into the airport, then again at the normal passport control. For the first time in thirty years as well, there were German customs officials actually stopping people and looking in their luggage.  I’m pretty sure it was because we were flying in from Istanbul.

If you haven’t seen The Terminal (2004) with Tom Hanks, you should rent it today!  Everything that has to do with the official side of entering a foreign country is perfectly believable!

Today, Sherrylee and I start the last two weeks of this trip. Today we drive to Antwerp, then to the Netherlands, then to Germany for about 10 days, finishing our trip with the American-European Retreat in Rothenburg.

Now, instead of talking with potential LST sites, we are visiting workers and sites that we have worked with for many years with one exception.  But relationships are everything, so we look forward to visiting to encourage them and to find out how we can serve them better.

I apologize if you need now to pull those pins out of the map for places you just flew through the airport! No cheating! You can’t count that country unless you have really had a conversation with someone other than the passport officer!

And if you need help finding that conversation partner, we at Let’s Start Talking would love to help you!

What are your experiences in international airports?

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