Hello and welcome to our next episode in leadership training. In this session, I want to challenge you to begin thinking like a missionary. 

Let me explain what I mean. The most important job of a missionary is to identify and attempt to understand as much as possible about the people they're attempting to reach. It goes way beyond learning the local language or dialect. In fact, it requires the missionary to become as fluent in a cultural, social, linguistic, and cultural reality as possible.  It means we learn to express a group's hopes, objections, fears, and beliefs so well that they feel as though they couldn't express it any better themselves. It means that we actively listen to the questions that are being asked and give an adequate answer in return. 

Let me give you an example. Let's say that you move to Oberlin, Kansas, the town where I grew up. You're sitting around the table having coffee with a group of businessmen, and they say, we need rain. You nod and agree. “Yeah, I noticed I have to water my grass two times a week.”  Well, I'm sorry to say you've completely missed the point. In Kansas, rain is everything. An extended period without rain could mean crop failure. And if crops fail, the annual income drops significantly. And if the primary source of income for the entire population of a small farm town goes down, business gets bad quickly.  For a Kansas farmer, rain is everything. So, if you're a pastor in Oberlin, Kansas, during a dry spell, you ought to pray for rain from time to time. 

Paul was a master at this. If you read the book of Acts, you'll see that he was kind of the master chameleon. When he was in Greece, he used the language and mental images that Greeks could identify with, and when he was hanging around his Jewish friends, he adapted as well. And then, when he was with his Hellenistic Christian friends, again, he changed his whole approach to ministry; his language and his culture completely changed so he could relate to that community. 

So, when we think like a missionary, we really have to shed some of our own personal preferences and be determined to live with a bit of discomfort. Sometimes, we leave behind or have to leave behind some of those things that we hold dear just so that we can reach a community or a group of people with whom we are learning to become familiar. We bring with us our own culture, our own worldview, and our own set of beliefs, and we'll bring our own set of preferences.  We have our own memories of what we would call the good old days, and so on and so on. 

So, as you think about your own ideas, consider what the non-negotiables are. What is it that you like that you simply could not part with? Now think of the things that you would be willing to change in order to reach someone else who may not be quite the same, who's very different than you. Now here's a third question. What are some preferences that are universally accepted? In other words, what can we bring to the table that we're fairly certain almost everyone would agree is important and invaluable? What does this mean to you when you consider thinking like a missionary?