Five months have passed since we moved to Chiang Mai to begin our missionary journey here. We’ve spent most of our time during this period getting settled on both the home and work fronts.
Through this process, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the nature of missionary work. During a recent conference where all the Methodist pastors and missionaries across Thailand gathered together, we also had the opportunity to get an insight into what ministry looks like in other parts of the country.
A comment made by one of the pastors during a conversation really struck me. We were sharing the story of why and how we ended up coming to Chiang Mai and serving in the local church as missionaries. Her response caught me off-guard: “Oh, your church is so blessed to have missionaries like you!” Following that, she asked us to recommend any potential missionaries we might know to her church.
Her comment surprised because, to me, it seemed like a lot of the work that we have been doing in the church were quite… ordinary.
In fact, missionaries spend a lot of time on things that Christians in developed countries take for granted.
They look like:
Setting up the sound system in the church sanctuary. Developing and implementing structure and processes for the worship team. Discipling church members to serve faithfully. Training and encouraging youths to step up and join a ministry.
Why does missionary work look so much like doing regular, ordinary ministry? Do we really need to go through the trouble of living in a foreign land just to do what we might be doing usually in our home countries?
The answer is yes.
In Thailand, where less than 1% of the population are Christians, the pool from which to find (and retain) faithful Christians to attend church is tiny. Most are barely able to make ends meet, and so asking them to spend time in church turns into a very real struggle against the opportunity cost of earning potential income. As a result, pastors bear the bulk of the workload of running the church – leading, planning for, and running almost every ministry and event.
Because churches and their pastors have few resources to tap on, growth is very slow (sometimes even non-existent). The resources we have in abundance in our developed countries are in dire need here. And so it falls on missionaries to leverage the knowledge and experience they have from their respective ministries and apply them locally.
It certainly isn’t as “glamorous” as, say, holding a mass rally and seeing a thousand raised hands. It isn’t as “dramatic” as praying for a blind person and having them see for the first time. To be sure, such things do happen in missionary work, and praise God for them! However, these tend to be the exception rather than the norm.
We currently serve in a small church of 30+ members. That might seem rather ineffective to the world. But I am reminded of the single lost sheep that the Good Shepherd left 99 others to go and find. To Jesus, each and every soul is precious.
How about us?
Our regular, ordinary ministry here might just be the difference between eternal life or death for one or two people.
Is that enough for us?
…
I’ve always wondered why God had to (and continues to) take such a roundabout way to save humanity. Surely He can simply think a perfect world and human race into existence.
Why would He painstakingly go through the arduous and frustrating process of reaching out to us, revealing His will to us, and then working with us in all our imperfections to carry it out? Why would He make us wait for weeks, months, years, and even decades (as was the case for many characters in the Bible) for things to happen?
I think that this process – this life – is our furnace of transformation.
God can certainly use miracles and extraordinary events to inspire us to change, as He has done with our forefathers like Moses (the burning bush) and Abraham (the promise of being the father of nations). Yet even through these miraculous events, we still need to make the decision to follow Him.
Moses ended up arguing with God in front of the burning bush (imagine that!). Abraham had to wait for 25 years before his son, Isaac, was born. But both ran the race well and became the heroes of faith that they are known to be today.
Extraordinary, mountaintop events might happen to us once or twice. But for the rest of our lives, the choice is ours as to what we do in our day-to-day, ordinary existence. Through every seemingly ordinary and unimportant choice that we make, we are either paving a path towards God or away from Him.
Is that enough for us?
…
Have you ever met someone who you’ve looked up to your whole life, only to be utterly disappointed by the reality of how they actually were like?
I love how God refused to omit mention of how messy and imperfect the lives of these heroes of faith were in the Bible. They were ordinary people like us, but called to do extraordinary things. They stumbled around like us, but eventually found their way.
It gives me hope that, as long as I pursue God with my heart, soul, mind, and strength, my ordinary existence might one day produce extraordinary things in and around me.
Is that enough for me?
I pray it will be.
