A Tribute to the Gospel Pilgrims

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In just a few weeks we will see the end of a four year project called “Gospel Pilgrims”. The emotion of gratefulness is mingled with sadness in my soul. The four men who have served in this role have been miraculously exemplary. Why? Only God could transform men to serve as these four have. They are living, walking proof of the transforming grace of God through Christ.

God planted the seed of this idea in 2006 just a few months before I moved my family here to North Africa. He used a conversation I had at a conference with a young American college grad (can’t remember his name) who had just returned from a year of backpacking through North Africa with Operation Mobilization. This adventurous trekker told me of the need of the mountain and desert villages of Morocco for the Gospel. He told me that this people didn’t live near any believers or churches or gospel witness.

Fast forward to 2011. After four years of ministry in the major coastal cities we faced a problem: we were receiving thousands of requests for New Testaments in these rural regions far from the reach of a local church. New Testaments are often “lost in the mail” (confiscated before they reach their destination) as they are illegal to distribute. Our need was the oldest gospel need that Jesus told us to pray for: laborers. But not just any laborers. We needed laborers willing to travel for weeks at a time into remote situations looking for one lost sheep among a thousand wolves. We needed laborers willing to get on hot buses and crowded taxis and sleep through cold nights. We needed laborers willing to put their lives on hold for the sake of others; denying mother, father, brother, sister, wives, and gain. These needed to be single men in the fashion of the circuit riding Methodist preachers who rode tirelessly to evangelize the American frontier.

I contacted Pastor Miguel Murillo, the director of the Peru Bible College and pitched him an idea: two men who could study Arabic for six months and then travel for a year and a half stopping only to refuel with New Testaments and for some weekend fellowship. His response was typical for his exuberant attitude toward life and ministry: “Perfecto!” Miguel talked to a couple of the graduating seniors and their pastors and came back to me with two names: Cesar and Joel.

The first pilgrims arrived with funding from Mission Joint Venture International on June 19th, 2013. Cesar was loud and sometimes obnoxious while Joel was quite and studious. I myself witnessed Cesar faking a dramatic limp crossing a busy street to draw the sympathy of the rushing traffic while Joel laughed in embarrassment. They were an exact contrast; a good team.

They set about learning the language for six months and then in January they were ready for their maiden voyage. Pastor Said had prepared 20 meetings for them in the cities of Beni Mellal, Essaouira, and Asfi. I remember praying over them at the bus station in Spanish, English, and Arabic. I remember my nervousness and excitement to see what God would do. I had no idea.

Within 48 hours of their first trip the police were already involved. They had been been sharing Christ in a village of just a few hundred people at the end of a dirt road. They had met Mohammed, a Bible requestor, spent the day at his home, and begun to share Christ openly with his family and friends who had come over to see the spectacle. By the time they were in a taxi back to the larger city they were hearing rumors on the radio of local authorities looking for two Latin American men who had been “proselytizing”. They called me to report on these events and I remember rejoicing that on their first journey they were already turning the world upside down.

Less than a week later I received a second phone call from them. This time they had been arrested about 4 hours from their previous location. They had met a man at a cafe and given him a New Testament. They stayed after he had left to check their emails and messages from their girlfriends and families back in Peru (a mistake no Gospel Pilgrim would make again). This contact returned with the police. They were loaded into the police van and taken to the station.

They were questioned for hours by the investigators. The detectives asked them, “Who sent you? Who gave you the authority to teach this? Who pays your bills?” Their answers were so pure and true that they no doubt seemed unbelievable to this corrupt group of men: “Believers in our Savior pay for this trip. Jesus has sent us. Check out Matthew 28:19-20”. The police report would eventually contain these verses banged out on an old typewriter from a cement interrogation room the day before. Heavenly answers have always confounded earthly men.

The police were kind to these two simple servants. They were taken to a hotel to wait until their hearing on Monday. It was from the hotel that they called me. They felt bad to have been arrested on their first trip since they had hoped for 18 more months of travels. I assured them that they had done just what Christ had commanded them to do so they could sleep well. They did. And they witnessed of Christ that Monday to the judge as well.

The Lord graciously allowed these two men another six months of travel before they were stopped from reentering the country during a visa run to Mauritania. During those six months they travelled all over the country distributing hundreds of Bibles, spending the night in homes and even mosques, traveling by bus, taxi, and foot. Cesar and Joel are now both married and pastoring church plants in Peru.

In October 2014 their replacements arrived: Andres and Denis. They have taken 17 trips through the mountains and deserts. They have, like their counterparts before them, passed out hundreds of New Testaments to seekers in some corners of the world that are most isolated from the glorious gospel. They have shared countless cups of tea and crammed in a countless number of old Mercedes taxis on their way to their destination: another soul who has never met a real Christian and has never held the Word of God in his hands.

The church in North Africa is made up mostly of single men in their 20’s. These four pilgrims have been a great example of selfless service, sincere love for Christ, and tenacious evangelism to this men who have little exposure to Christianity outside of their small circle of believers. They have taken special delight in visiting believers like Nabil, a university student who lives 4 hours from the closest house church. They were the first Christians that Nabil met.

Last night Andres preached to a small group Bible study of North Africans. His text was 2 Tim. 1:8, “Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God.” His life was the best illustration.

We all, including you our supporters in prayer and giving, have had a part in something truly significant, something purely eternal. As the project comes to an end we are thankful to God and to you our co-laborers in the gospel. There is so much more to be done before our Lord returns.

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Albania: Land of the Black Eagle

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Albania

The importance of reaching the Albanian people with the Gospel is hard to overstate. Samuel Zwemer said reaching them would be the key to reaching the Muslim world.

The people:
Albania (Shqiperia) is a country comprised of more than 6 million ethnic Albanian people, called Shqiptar (pr. Sh-chip-tar) in their native tongue. In the ancient world the Albanian people were known as the Illyrians living in Illyricum. These were some of the earliest Greek converts to Christianity under the ministry of Paul (Romans 15:9).

Their native land is made of dramatic mountains called the Balkans rising from the Adriatic Sea to the east of Italy, north of Greece, south of Montenegro, and west of Serbia. Their country reminds the American visitor of the Appalachia both in beauty and culture. Blood feuds like the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s are still going on today. (I heard of one believer who has fled to Italy to escape the family responsibility of revenge after his brother was killed by a rival family.)

There are two main tribes of Albanians: the northern tribe called the Gheg and the southern tribe called the Tosk. Each tribe has their own distinct dialect spoken at home while the Tosk dialect has been standardized for teaching in the schools throughout all of the region.

The Land:
The history of the Albanians is like that of the Kurds in more than one way. The actual borders of Albania were drawn by Russia and the Western powers when the Ottoman Empire fell after WWI. The lines they drew left out almost half of their population and half of their native land. These pieces of traditional Albania to the north, east, and south now belong to Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro (all where the Albanian people make up the minority), and Kosovo (where the Albanians make up a majority). The Albanian people have thus suffered much at the hands of foreign governments who have marginalized them and sometimes murdered them in mass.

A brief history:
Albania was the fault line of the schism between the Western Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox church. It was along this fault line that the Turks drove a spear through the heart of the Balkans all the way to the Adriatic from Istanbul threatening Catholic Italy itself. Though the majority of Albanians are Muslim, their ethnic hero is a Christian military leader named Skanderbeg who fended off the Turks who were being led toward Europe by Mehmet the Conquerer in the 1466. Skanderbeg made his last stand in the ancient castle of Shkodra (located in the north of present day Albania).  The eventual victory by the Turks meant a gradual rewriting of Albanian history (most think Skanderbeg must have been Muslim since he was Albanian) and the forced conversion of all but the most stubborn of Albanians (more than 80% today consider themselves Muslim).

The history of the Albanians has been fractured since they were divided along national lines after WWI. So to speak of their history we must follow three separate streams.

First, the Albanian people living in Albania proper (the country) suffered for 50 years under the strictest application of communism that the world has ever seen from 1941 to 1991. Dictator Enver Hoxha destroyed all but a handful of ancient churches and mosques and declared Albania to be the world’s first “atheist state”. “Do not look to the church or the mosque for hope,” Hoxha said. The national religion of Albania would be their Albanian-ness. By 1991 after 5 decades of militant athiesm Albania was the only country in the communist block with no known Christians. I listened to the older believers tell me of how they knew no one who believed in God before the fall of communism. Nowhere had Marx done such a thorough job of eradicating “the opium of the people” as he had in Albania through the work of Hoxha.

Second, the Albanians of Kosovo and Montenegro suffered, though admittedly less than their counterparts in Albania, as a region of communist Yugoslavia under Tito during the same period. Their suffering would dramatically increase with the rise to power of Slobodan Milosevic in 1998. He started a campaign of genocide in the region of Kosovo that created a humanitarian crisis as refugees fled over the mountains to Montenegro, Albania, and Macedonia. Milosevic employed criminals and thugs to do the dirty work of murdering 70,000 Kosavar Albanians within a matter of weeks. Their aim was to empty Kosovo of Albanians so that their region would belong completely to the Serbs. Thanks to Bill Clinton and NATO they were unsuccessful. After 73 days of bombing from the NATO planes and murder on the ground Milosevic retreated and Kosovo became an independent country for the first time; a country of widows and orphans.

Third, the Albanians of Macedonia escaped the tyranny of communism but not the tyranny of false religion. The orthodox church of Macedonia has marginalized the Albanian minority in every way. As a result the Albanians have clung tighter to their language and religion (Islam) that separate them from the Macedonians.

The Mission: 

The protestant missionaries were the first religious group to respect the ethnicity, culture, and language of the Albanian people. The Catholic church had operated in Latin and later the Muslims in Arabic. The British Bible Society commissioned missionaries to reach the Albanians in the early 1800’s, a full 500 years after Islam invaded. Their first job was to develop an alphabet and grammar book for the unwritten Albanian language so that they could translate the Bible into the heart language of the people. Their second job was to teach the Albanians to read their own language! The early evangelical missionaries to the Albanians thus became heroes of the nation and people. The missionaries entered with God’s Word and singing. The Muslims had entered with the sword.

After all of this effort by these early missionaries produced little fruit. Communism stamped out whatever fruit remained. Hoxha wiped the minds of the people of any trace of religion but he could not wipe their consciences clean. This was evident in the testimonies that I heard from the oldest believers, now in their 40’s.

Albania:
Within weeks of the fall of communism in 1991 missionaries and other non-profit organizations from the West started to trickle into Albania’s capital, Tirana. It took a few years for that trickle to become a flood. Those first responders who stayed were usually single, mobil, and trained in the basics. They found a country that had been absolutely destroyed by isolationism. No one had cars; but what would they do with them if they had? The roads were impassable. They found that food was scarce and electricity was sporadic. They also found a generation of bright university students ready to listen to the Gospel for the first time in the history of this great people. They were eager to listen to whatever Americans had to say about what made America great. These eager college students became the first believers in one of the most amazing and dramatic missionary stories in these modern times.

At the airport when we landed in Tirana we met one of these missionaries and one of these first believers: Missionary David H and Pastor Taulant. (David provided me with most of the information about the history of missions in Albania.) David and Jeff Bartell, both young single men at the time, were part of that first, small wave of missionaries. They both came for a two week missions trip. They ending up giving more than their vacation time. They gave their lives. David would end up spending the next two decades in the northern city of Shkodra while Jeff stayed in the capital, Tirana. They were the type who stayed and made disciples. They had to sift through the first “believers” to find true believers and then teach them the Word. They were holding on for a wild ride of faith that would pay off big time.

Pastor Taulant is a tall, gentle giant with a big smile and spirit that exudes humility. He is educated with an engineer’s degree but has left secular employment ten years ago to pastor the first Baptist church in Tirana where he himself was saved during his college years. He was a strange creature indeed back then: an Albanian born-again evangelical Christian circa 1992. During the rest of my trip I would have the privilege to meet the other men and women of his generation who are filling Albania with their doctrine: Erion, Berty, Freddy, Benny, Sazan, and more.

We entered Bible Baptist Church in Tirana on Thursday night for the start of the four day Bible conference. The oldest believers in the church were a handful of men and women like Pastor Taulant and his wife who trace their spiritual birth back 24 years to that first year missionaries arrived. That generation have married and are raising the first generation of children in Christian homes. Some of them have seen their parents come to faith so there are some older people in attendance. Mostly, though, the church is packed from wall to wall with a very young crowd who are following and learning from these “older” believers. The congregation is made up of believers from both Muslim and Orthodox Albanian families. The newer believers are coming from increasingly religious homes.

These Albanian brothers and sisters have entirely replaced Jeff and David. They are paying their pastors. They are evangelizing, preaching, and discipling. They are organizing beautiful, skillful worship. They are meeting for Bible studies in homes all around the city. They are sending missionaries to every corner of their country and have even sent a missionary from their congregation to Turkey. (He wrote Taulant the day I arrived with the good news of the first Turkish convert.) Over breakfast my last morning in the country Pastor Taulant shared their plan and passion to send more of their congregation to reach the Albanians in neighboring Macedonia. To this day they do not know of a single Albanian believer among this group of dedicated Muslims in Macedonia.

The void left by athiesm in Albania has all been filled now with materialism and Islam. There is a new modern mall and many opportunities to work in the US and Eastern Europe. The Turks and the Arabs are rushing into the country to teach the Muslims about what it means to be Muslim. A huge mosque is being built in Tirana. Turkish schools are recruiting heavily among the young people, especially the orphans. A love and gratefulness for America persists but the break-neck pace of Gospel growth has slowed.
I don’t know if I have ever observed a healthier fellowship of churches. They are really the picture of what indigenous missions should look like after 25 years.

Kosovo:
The work among the Albanians of Kosovo has been much different than in Albania. The communism of Yugoslavia was not as sever allowing the people to retain much of their Islamic roots. The massacre of 1999 at the hand of the “Christian” Serbs further poisoned the water hole. The Serb minority took out decades of frustration and hatred on their Muslim neighbors over the course of a few short weeks. After looting the homes and businesses of the Muslim Albanians and killing the men execution style they spray painted the cross on their doors. Their cross was not the cross of Christ, it was a symbol of nationalism.

The initial effort to evangelize the Kosovaars after the fall of Melosevic and his Yugoslavia in 1999 needed to be largely humanitarian. Families were returning to burned homes and destroyed lives. Their government was brand new and the mafia controlled the foreign aide. Missionaries like Nadine H. were there with the House of Laughter.

The numbers of Kosovar believers numbers in the hundreds compared to the numbers in Albania in the thousands. There are still cities like Prizren and Mitrovitz without any local body of believers. New disciple making missionaries are needed there. The churches in neighboring Albania could still use the help to accomplish the task of saturation evangelism and church planting with  greatest speed.

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The Church or Good Works?

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Should we support church planters or mercy ministries?

      In his book “Reaching and Teaching” David Sills cites a stat that in the last decade mercy ministries (non-profit organizations aiming at supplying some physical need) rose 75% while church planting rose only 13%. This, he said, was an alarming statistic. Not because we shouldn’t do good works but that it indicates that less resources are going into churches being planted. The churches that support us, for their part, have continued to focus on church planting.
      So what part, then, should churches have in doing good works to the community? Feeding the hungry? Providing relief for the persecuted brothers in prison? Rescuing orphans? Comforting widows in their affliction? Counseling and aiding single women in a crisis pregnancy? Dressing the naked with clothes and coats in the winter? Should we stop doing this and focus only on church planting?
      The above question is flawed, I think, biblically. Here are some principles to understand the issue:
       Principle #1- The work of the Great Commission is evangelism is disciple making is church planting. Each one of these activities is found clearly in Matthew 28:19-20. This is the primary work of the missionary and should be the primary activity supported by missions giving in churches.Principle #2- The result of church planting is good works that glorify our Father in heaven. Paul wrote that we were created in Christ Jesus unto good works (Eph. 2:10). This means that new believers have flowing from them a desire to do good to others. This is the natural result of the gospel and the natural result of church planting.Principle #3- God has equipped certain members of every church with gifts that are not teaching and preaching gifts. These include compassion, giving, organization, and service. These gifts are meant by God’s Holy Spirit to be used to show Christ’s love to those inside and outside the church. As local believers gather and form a church, these people with these gifts will be more and more active in serving social needs to the glory of God.

Good works in the church of the New Testament include the healing of the lame man (Acts 4), service to widows by the deacons (Acts 7), the ministry of clothes making by Dorcas (Acts 9), the giving of the churches of Macedonia to physical needs in Jerusalem (2 Cor. 9), and more. An overflow of good works has long been the result of church planting and the proof of the gospel to the world. We aren’t to just tell people, “Be warmed and filled”, James said. We are to actually give them bread (James 2:16).
      Rodney Stark in his book “The Rise of Christianity” points to the compassion of Christians as one of the main contributing factors to the the massive growth of the Jesus movement in the Roman Empire. During the plague that wiped out 1/3rd of the empire the pagans fled and abandoned any homes touched by this sickness. The Christians, however, rushed in. They acted as nurses and often died as a result. They often, however, lived and helped the affected to survive the fever caused by the plague. The pagans saw them as super human or angels. In a way they were right! An untold number came to Christ during these times because the church was doing what the church does: good works.
So the question in the title is a false dichotomy. Church planting gives birth to compassionate and merciful social ministries of all types to the poor and hurting. The problem lies in seeking mercy ministries as a priority in a region. While serving the poor and needy is necessary it needs to be preceded by preaching the Gospel. We should seek healthy church planting and then come along side these brothers to help them live out all that God has called them to do: the good works of preaching and loving the poor, orphaned, widowed, etc.
       Paul and Peter did not go into a place launching mercy ministries. They launched churches and the local believers did the kind of good works that non-profit organizations do today. They preached the gospel and a tangible love for others sprang from the trees that grew from that seed. Non-profit organizations ought to give us an opportunity to join with local believers in showing the gospel that they are already preaching. Good works are not in competition with the gospel ministry, they are the results of gospel ministry.
      We should help churches we have planted in other cultures to do the same types of ministries of love our churches are doing at home mingled with local and international resources. Our church in Middletown, OH feeds the hungry, provides after school mentoring, gives away gifts to underprivileged children at Christmas, participated in our local crisis pregnancy center in giving options for girls considering abortions, and more. One wonderful church I know of in our same town started a ministry called “Hands and Feet”. They restore a home of a needy family, typically a single mother, once per year. They put to use the skills of a lot of people in their churches for the glory of Christ and the joy of everyone.
      We can support these same works by coming alongside our new brothers and sisters in cultures that hate Christianity to help them see how to love the lost. We can support them by sending the deacons and others in our churches who are gifted in this area. We can support them by helping with our gifts. We can support them with encouragement and stories of how God has used good works to bring people to Christ in the West. In short: we can support them.
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