The Thai language has an endless number of words related to emotions that use the word jai, or “heart.” And since most Thai are concerned about saving face (and losing face!), one of the common “heart” words is noi joi, which roughly translates as feeling slighted, hurt, or overlooked.

Have you ever felt slighted? At one time or another, all of us have felt unhappy and hurt because someone overlooked us or did not give us credit.  Even though we have knowledge, position, and dignity, someone fails to give us the honor that we are due. We are someone that others should respect and honor, but instead they dishonor and disrespect us.  Don't they know who I am?!

Image by rafiq23 from Pixabay

Returning to Thailand after a long time away, my family and I have had a lot more government related paperwork and encounters with government offices and officials than we have had in a long time. This has especially been true for visa applications and immigration related tasks as we’ve left the U.S. and come in and out of Thailand and Malaysia before finally coming into Thailand with the right kind of visas. We’re not done yet though, because even though we are back in Thailand on the right visas, a work permit needs to be applied for and additional paperwork and address verifications need to be accomplished certain tasks, such as buying a vehicle.

Royal Thai Consulate General, Penang, Malaysia

In 1910, representatives from mission organizations working across the world met together in Edinburgh, Scotland for a World Missionary Conference that promised to be “a Grand Council for the Advancement of Missionary Science.” The vast majority of delegates were European or North American and those present discussed the missionary task in terms of “the Christian world” and “the non-Christian world.” In 1910, this division of the world made sense because the vast majority of those who identified as Christian lived in Europe in North America.

The 1910 World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland

However, if we fast forward 100+ years, it seems both ridiculous and ethnocentric to talk about “the Christian world” and “the non-Christian world.” Europe today is quite secular and North America’s Christian heritage is fading quickly. Two-thirds of those who profess the Christian faith live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The world is changed. No longer is the missionary task of the church a question of “the West to the rest.” Rather, as Allen Yeh has put it, twenty-first century mission is from everyone to everywhere. Around the world, there are vibrant churches on every inhabited continent and the number of truly unreached peoples is rapidly diminishing.

Westerner believers can no longer assume that they are “the missionaries” whose job is to bring the Gospel to the rest of the world. They can no longer assume that if they are not working among a particular country or people group, then nothing is happening. Western missionaries today would be short-sighted to go into a country and get to work “reaching the lost” without touching base and coordinating with local churches and believers to find out what they are already doing and how foreign missionaries can fit in to what is already happening. Today is an era of partnership.

So, is the era of pioneer missions over? Is there no place in the world today for foreign missionaries, especially Westerners, to do pioneer cross-cultural evangelism among unreached people groups? Should foreign missionaries primarily focus on supporting roles, partnering with indigenous Christians who are now at the forefront of pioneering among their own people?

When I pray for evangelism, I don’t pray that as many people as possible make a profession of faith at the end of an evangelistic event. That may seem weird, because the success of evangelism is often measured according to the number of people who pray to accept Christ.

However, the reality is most people who pray to receive Christ in an evangelistic meeting never join a church, don’t grow in the Lord, and perhaps were never converted to begin with. That’s not always true, but statistically, it’s a high percentage.

Christmas is a beloved holiday around the world and every December, Christians turn their attention to celebrating the miracle of the incarnation, namely that God chose to condescend into our world and be born as a human baby. It is truly a wondrous thing that the sovereign Lord of the universe would abase himself in this way for us and our salvation.

But in the early centuries of the church, this truth came was aggressively attacked. In the year 318, an elder in the church at Alexandria by the name of Arius popularized the idea that Jesus Christ was a created being inferior to God the Father. Arius maintained that Jesus, the Son of God, existed before all things and had a hand in the creation of the world together with God the Father. According to Arius, Jesus was a created being.  Jesus had a beginning and thus was not eternal. 

Though Arius readily affirmed that Jesus was truly human, he denied that God the Father and God the Son, namely Jesus Christ, were equal or were of the same substance. In other words, they were different beings. This heretical teaching spread through the Roman Empire and there were many who held to Arius’ false teaching on the nature of Jesus Christ, including the son of the Roman emperor Constantine.

As this teaching spread, Emperor Constantine became concerned about swelling conflict in the church and called a grand council of bishops to respond to Arius’ teaching. Were Jesus and the Father the same God or weren’t they? Because resolving conflict was a prime concern for Constantine, one option for the council at Nicea would have been to issue a statement that used broad, vague language which no one on either side of the issue could find objectionable. If they had chosen this route, all sides would have been able to save face and the substantial difference between the teaching of Arius and those who opposed him would have been covered over. Superficial peace and institutional harmony might have prevailed.

Late medieval Greek Orthodox icon showing Saint Nicholas of Myra slapping Arius at the First Council of Nicaea.