“Blood does not get erased”

These phrases are prominently scrawled in red graffiti right now on the central square of our state’s capital.  Slogans such as these regularly pop up in our region, visible signs of the anger some have towards the government.  Graffiti-marred buildings receive fresh coats of paint, only to be vandalized again within weeks.  On and on the cycle goes, with slighted people insisting they will never let the government off the hook.

Unforgiveness is a significant spiritual stronghold in our region. Feuds dating back over a hundred years between villages flare up with regularity, leaving new blood spilled each time.  Family members refuse to speak to one another for years over wrongs committed long ago.  Villagers still carry noticeable bitterness over the Spanish conquest of the 1500s.

Wrongs are exactly that–wrong.  No excuse exists ever for hatred, injustice, and oppression of one person or group towards another. But until the cycle of unforgiveness is broken, a people always live in bondage.  Every person who walks this planet has wronged another and been wronged by another.  Only the forgiveness made available through Jesus Christ breaks this cycle and brings freedom.

Once I heard a Mixed-language Bible translator in our region relate a legend told in the villages where she was working.  I don’t remember the whole story, but the gist of it was something like this: A boy is wronged by people close to him. Later, through an encounter with an animal in the mountains, he gains power and wealth.  His mom then comes to him and asks his forgiveness.  His short, blunt answer to her is, “No.”  End of story.

Jesus told a story of his own about forgiveness, recorded in Matthew 18:23-35:

“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.  As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents [this is, millions of dollars] was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

The servant fell on his knees before him.  ’Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’  The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii [that is, a few dollars]. He grabbed him and began to choke him.  ’Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.

His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’

But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.

Then the master called the servant in.  ’You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.  Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”

The Mixed people of southern Mexico aren’t the only ones who struggle with unforgiveness.  Maybe some of us also need to forgive someone so that our heavenly Father can forgive us as well.

Please join us in praying the spirit of unforgiveness in our region will be broken.  Pray that people here come to know the loving forgiveness of Jesus Christ and begin to forgive one another from the heart.

• Pray for favor with the customs officials we’ll be working with to legalize the car. Pray they charge reasonable tax rates and the legalization process goes quickly and smoothly.
• Pray for divine protection as we drive home, especially in passing through the border states that have had lots of drug violence. The cartels like strong trucks (like ours) and have been known to hijack them. Pray we would pass through without any attention from them and that the truck would run well all the way back home to southern Mexico.

Thanks so much for your prayers! We appreciate your partnership in the things God is doing among the indigenous of Mexico.

• In 2007 and 2008, Global Frontier Missions raised the funds for buying a well drilling rig. While we were raising funds, the rig we were originally looking at almost doubled in price. So in 2008 Dave decided to build the rig himself and save us about $15,000 USD. He had to wait to start construction until finishing Mission Training School and spending a few months concentrating on language learning.
• Late in 2008 and early in 2009 Dave bought most of the parts and materials for the well drilling rig and began construction on it.
• After being at home for three months in the spring of 2009 for his daughter's wedding, Dave spent countless hours in the summer and fall building the well drilling rig. Throughout that process and in the time since we have had people visiting us wanting to know if we can drill them a well.
• In December of 2009 Dave was able to fire up the rig for the first time and test it out. It worked well, but Dave realized we needed to order some more parts and make a few changes.
• In January and February of this year, Dave made the necessary adjustments to the machine.
• In February we started drilling our first well, this one at the GFM base. We used all our pipe going 43 meters deep, then decided we needed to go deeper. Dave also realized we needed to order a safety valve that would keep the drilling assistant (which has been me up to this point) from losing a finger. I thought that was a great idea.
• The part got here in March, and we immediately found out we would need another part to make that one work properly.
• The second part took a few more weeks to arrive, getting here in April.
• In late April, we were able to start working on the base well again. The machine is now working very well, but we found out we needed a different type of bit to complete the job. (Anyone see why it's been hard for us not to get impatient during this process? The learning curve has been steep, but very valuable.)
• Dave has to go to the U.S. for a couple of weeks right now, so he will bring down the new bit we need when he returns. We hope to finish the well at the base the last week of May. Then we hope to do a free well we owe someone and two wells that we get payed for during the month of June. It can take us a week or more to drill a well at this point, so if we're able to pull that off in June we'll feel really good about it.
• My family and Dave and Rhonda plan to be in the United states for a lot of July and August. So when we get rolling again in late August into September, we hope to start drilling regularly and work on bringing one or two employees on board.

And now you know where we've been and where we're headed with well drilling!

A bi-vocational Christian leader is someone who leads in a church, but supports his family financially by working another job.

Biblically, I see no problem with Christian leaders earning their income through the church. Practically, that hasn’t worked very well in this region. Churches are small and money is often very tight, so even churches that are good at giving often don’t contribute enough to support their leaders. This has too often resulted in key leaders moving away to another state or country to try and earn enough money to support their families. In churches that are very dependent on their leaders (pretty much all the ones I know around here), this leads to great struggle or even the church completely falling apart.

Tony was one of two key leaders in a good village church in our area. He survived an intense season of persecution in his village during the 1980s. I believe his brother was martyred during that time if I remember correctly. Tony faced attacks and serious death threats. He and a few other believers came through that time well, though. In recent years, the church was pretty strong and growing. Tony, however, struggling to support his family, moved away for a year to work. After returning to the village for a short time, he moved his family to another state for good. They have no plans to return, and their church has lost an important leader.

I’m talking to more and more pastors, missionaries, and church leaders around here who are thinking about if not already trying to start businesses to support themselves.

• Henry is a Mexican missionary pastoring a church plant who has thought about starting a photo shop. He feels that working a business would help remove a significant barrier between pastors and not-yet-believers.
• Hugh is a Mexican church planter and Bible translator who has started a well drilling business.
• Fred is an indigenous church planter who has started a construction business to support himself and eventually some of his disciples.
• Gary is a Mexican missionary who has supported himself for 16 years by raising rabbits, chickens, turkeys, sheep, and growing tomatoes. He has trained hundreds of other people to support themselves the same ways. He told me that one of the best ways he’s found to disciple people is doing it as they work alongside him.

Bi-vocational leadership came up again today as I had a drop-in visit from a Christian leader and his wife from a nearby village. It turns out Bernie has been thinking along the same lines, also. His idea would be to start a tortilla shop and use that as a way to work with people and disciple them.

Everywhere I turn around here, I hear people with the same thing on their hearts. I have to believe it’s something God is doing. I’m getting excited.

Josh has a wife and two young boys. When his youngest was a year old, he left them for several years to work in the United States. He returned with a bit of money in his pocket, but his family is still fairly strapped financially. He doesn’t want to go to the U.S. again and leave his family. If he can’t find a way to make a better living, though, he’s afraid he’ll have to go.

His village has a lot of underground water, but very little on the surface. A spring used to feed the water lines running to the houses in the village, but it is now virtually dry. During the six months of the year that it doesn’t rain, his family has to walk a kilometer away to bring water. While I was there, his aging father returned to the house with five gallons of water on his back, hung by a strap on his forehead.

Josh wants to help himself and his parents. He thinks if they could just have a good water source, he could work the fields and produce enough to support the family. Then he would not have to go to the United States again. I told him I thought this was a great idea. Imagine his boys spending the most formative years of their lives without a father and his wife struggling to make ends meet in difficult circumstances.

Josh and I had a nice talk on the ride back to our town. He thinks about ways to help people around here. He feels like people could better provide for themselves if they just had a little startup capital to get small businesses going. He had even thought about trying to earn enough money in the United States to give small, low-interest loans to people like himself for starting businesses.

The conversation stirred me, because we share the same burden. We are trying to establish the well drilling business to employ local men and raise startup funds for more businesses. I can definitely see us establishing a microloan bank at some point to help local entrepreneurs get up on their feet. I don’t want to keep seeing families destroyed and churches struggling because of men leaving for years at a time to work.

Will you pray about how God would use us in the transformation of these circumstances?

This photo isn’t great because I just snapped it for reference, but this is Josh’s parents’ house where we would drill the well.

I have a hunch that one day when we know how God sees things, we’ll be surprised. I think we’ll find He never saw a team when He looked at the group of us in Mexico, He only saw a church. I bet we’ll find He never saw Young Life or Campus Crusade or Jews for Jesus, either. He only saw churches.

I can’t think of who to credit (can anyone help me?), but I know I’m not the first to say this: One day, the current church/parachurch distinction we have today will be viewed as an anomaly in church history.

Going a step further, when God looks at our family, does He see a church? What changes if I think of my family as my first and most important church body?

I’m enjoying looking at everything through the lense of church. I’m not talking about the big institution, I’m talking about two or more gathered with Christ as the head and roles and gifts of the Spirit distributed according to the Father’s will.

How about you? What groups could you consider churches? What changes if you see them that way?

We caught up on things that are going on in each of our lives.

We examined passages of Scripture together.

We were greatly encouraged as we shared different visions and prophecies that God has been giving.

We prayed together.

We took communion together.

We encouraged, prayed for, and prophesied over a team member who was trying to discern God’s will in difficult personal circumstances.  God gave her direction and she has since acted according to it.

Our time together didn’t incorporate every possible expression of church life, and it’s not nearly the only model for church.  It is church, though.  Church is not a building, and it’s not a meeting – it’s who we are.  I love the edification that takes place when we meet together with our church family.

• The Bible talks more about money than any other subject except love.  It talks more about money than about heaven and hell combined.
• The indigenous people here are in bondage to a spirit of poverty.  That doesn’t just mean they’re poor.  It means they stay poor because they have very little belief they’re capable of helping themselves.  Five hundred years after the Spanish conquest, they’re still a conquered people.  They largely have a mentality that other people owe them something.  Instead of taking initiative to improve their situation, they wait for handouts from the government and from charitable groups.  It’s a spiritual bondage.
• In many villages, 50% (or more) of working age men are in the U.S. because the villages have no economy and most jobs in towns like ours don’t pay enough.  The men stay gone for years at a time.  This is having a devastating impact on the region.  Wives are trying to support and raise families as single parents, and thousands of kids are growing up without fathers.  Very young kids are being left at home alone for hours at a time while Mom works.  In many cases, a husband starts a new family in the U.S. and never returns.
• This area has a wealthy class of small business owners who are doing quite well, but they don’t pay their employees enough to live on.  This is a spiritual problem (James 5:1-4).
• What economy this region does have (because it’s not in abject poverty) is a house of cards.  It is entirely dependent on outside sources, those being government handouts and money earned in the U.S., Canada, or other parts of Mexico.  When the world economy collapses, our region will take it on the chin unless it begins to utilize its own natural resources more effectively.  (This is difficult, because the government owns rights to most of the natural resources.)
• The villages are built on agriculture, but the agriculture is not doing well.  Corn is the king crop, yet villages are buying corn grown in other places from the government at subsidized prices.  The agriculture must improve.
• Most churches in the region gravitate strongly to a model of having paid clergy (which is perfectly biblical).  The trouble is pastors aren’t getting paid nearly enough to support a family, so they’re leaving their churches to work in the U.S. and the churches are then falling apart.  One issue here is the churches believe they can’t be obedient in giving due to their poverty – another spiritual problem.  See the example of the Macedonian churches, whose “extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity” (2 Corinthians 8:1-4).
• The other issue is the churches thinking their pastors should do all the work of the ministry since they’re being paid.  This is NOT biblical (Ephesians 4:11-13).  While churches are growing in obedience in giving, pastors could get more people involved in ministry and remove a huge stumbling block for the people by supporting themselves – IF they had good jobs with which to support themselves.

Those are some scattered thoughts; things that burden me as I look at our region and things that are affecting what we do.  If you’ve wondered where projects like a well drilling business fit into our church planting ministry, the above points are some of the pieces to the puzzle.

• A Vision of the Possible by Daniel Sinclair – This is a good book for a team to read before going on the field as it gives a great overall roadmap for cross-cultural church planting.  It’s very practical, dealing with such issues as team formation and leadership, preparation, entrance and residency, language learning, spreading the gospel, discipleship, raising leaders, and church multiplication.
• Bonding and the Missionary Task by Thomas and Elizabeth Brewster – This one should also be read before arriving on the field.  If there is any book I want a new missionary joining us to read, it’s this one.  This short booklet gets straight to the heart of one of the biggest mistakes missionaries make – not bonding with the local people and culture – and gives practical direction on how to bond effectively.
• Language Learning IS Communication IS Ministry by Thomas and Elizabeth Brewster – The companion to the Bonding booklet, this one presents language learning as the first important ministry the missionary should have in the host country.  We don’t learn language so that we can minister; rather, our language learning communicates powerfully to the locals and is itself an important ministry.
• Christianity Rediscovered by Vincent Donovan – This excellent books deals with what the job of a cross-cultural church planter is and isn’t.  Through Donovan’s personal experiences as a Catholic missionary to the Masai of Tanzania, he casts a wonderful vision for mission work.  The vision is that missionaries should carry out the simple task of delivering the gospel message, trust the Holy Spirit to reveal the gospel’s application, make disciples, and then do one of the most important things they’ll ever do – leave.
• Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? by Roland Allen (available free online from Google books) – This book, overlooked for decades, has gained popularity in recent times.  Vincent Donovan was heavily influenced by it, so it’s a great read after Christianity Rediscovered.  Christianity Rediscovered casts the vision, and Allen’s work lays out the framework of thinking behind that vision – getting rid of extra baggage and simplifying our work to the type of ministry that allowed Paul to establish churches all over Asia Minor in just a few years.
• Organic Church by Neil Cole – Organic Church gets at the heart of what the Church is in its simplest form and how God intended it to reproduce organically.  I like our new missionaries to read it to give them a clear and simple vision of Church, because complexity kills.
• Church Planting Movements by David Garrison (either the full-length book or the concise booklet available free from the IMB) – Based on research of movements on several continents, Garrison’s work lays out characteristics common to every movement of rapidly multiplying churches as well as discussing factors that hinder them.  It hits on important topics such as the importance of prayer, broad sowing of the Word, lay leadership, and avoiding restrictive, authoritarian structures.
• Two Ears of Corn: A Guide to People-Centered Agricultural Improvement by Roland Bunch – I recommend this book not because I think missionaries have to do agricultural development, but because its principles carry over very well to church planting work.  Two Ears of Corn deals with important issues like dependency, reproducibility, and simplicity.

What do you think?  If you were making your own list, is there anything you would add or subtract?  Those of you helping new missionaries entering the field, what are you recommending to them?

• The tribal people of this region are oral learners.  They best assimilate information by hearing it, not by reading it. This is a very important point.
• Those among the tribal people who are educated have learned Spanish as their second language.  Scripture is much easier for them to understand in their first (heart) language, though.  If you’ve ever somewhat mastered a second language, which language is easier for you when talking about deep things and matters of the heart?
• In light of this, any effort to get Scripture into the first language of tribal people is a worthy undertaking.  Wycliffe has been diligently working for decades in our region to get written Bibles translated into the tribal languages of our region.
• The limitation with written Bibles is that most tribal people learn things much more effectively by hearing them rather than reading them.  Indigenous people here who read tell me they have a much easier time reading Spanish (their second language) than reading their tribal languages.
• An example of the difficulty oral learners experience with written texts was given me by an indigenous pastor in the area who is helping with a Bible translation.  This man is quite educated.  Mixed People language is his first, but he’s also fluent in Spanish.  He spent several years in a Spanish-speaking Bible school and reads well.  He told me that when he’s helping translate into his (first) Mixed People language, he can’t tell if something is correct until he hears the entire passage read back out loud.
• As best I understand, then, these are the main ways tribal people in our region can learn the Word of God, in order of effectiveness:
  1. hearing their tribal language spoken
  2. hearing Spanish spoken
  3. reading Spanish
  4. reading their tribal language (for the very few who become proficient in reading their tribal languages, this probably jumps up to second or third)
• The Wycliffe folks are doing a nice job making audio recordings of their translations, but much of their work remains unrecorded.  Some dialects in our region have not had any translation work done in them yet.  The problem of Scripture access is two-pronged: 1) languages not being translated, and 2) Bibles that have been translated sitting in warehouses because those who don’t read their indigenous language (almost everyone) can’t use them.
• The strength of oral learners is not reading a passage of the Bible and analyzing it, but they are great at remembering stories they have heard.  Playing to this strength is the idea behind the OneStory Partnership.  Their vision is to help people produce sets of 40-60 Bible stories that can be transmitted orally in their languages.
• Faith Comes By Hearing has produced a really nice piece of technology, the Proclaimer.  The Proclaimer is a device for playing audio recordings of the New Testament.  It can be charged by A/C adaptor, solar power, or hand crank, making it very useful for people in underdeveloped areas.
• A long-time national missionary in the area and our team were discussing the need for more recordings.  Our thought was that a trained person could rotate living in different villages two or three weeks at a time, helping produce a couple of recorded stories each time.  While those newly recorded stories are propagated through the language group of one village, this recording facilitator can move on to other language groups to do the same.  Every few months, new stories could be produced in each language group being targeted until an adequate set has been produced.
• Many Christians are very set on our Western ideal of each person having a full printed Bible in hand in their own language.  While this isn’t a bad goal, being on the mission field with illiterate people who don’t have Bibles in their heart languages tends to make you more pragmatic.  The Church was able to expand greatly across several continents for many centuries without people having written Bibles in their hands.  The current (largely) underground church movement in China is said to be the greatest in history, outpacing the growth of the early church in the book of Acts.  In this movement, many examples exist of churches feeling blessed to have one written Bible or of individual Christians owning only one page of Scripture which they periodically trade with other believers.  Obviously, it’s possible for people who can’t read to know the Word of God and for believers to grow mature even without a written Bible.

Please join us in praying that God will make His Word easily propagated in the heart languages of all Mixed People and Tree People in our region.  We believe recordings are a key to this, but God may have other means of which we haven’t thought.