AALC Transcript: The Asian American Church and the Call to Global Missions

So my adult children recently asked me what I wanted for my birthday on a family group text. And so I thought, you know, they asked me every year. So I thought, what do I really want? And so I texted back, I want world peace. I want more missionaries. I want grandchildren. And then my adult, married daughter texted back no to the grandchildren, but my single, unmarried son wrote I got it.

And then I realize you have to be careful what you ask for. And yet, I’m going to ask you, with all caution, to take this last session to consider becoming a long term global missionary. What is the next chapter in the Asian American church? My hope is that it would be a church with deep, a deep passion for seeing the glory of God and the dominion and rule of our King Jesus fill the earth. My prayer is for the Asian American church to raise up disciple and send its people, its beloved children all over the world, in obedience to the Great Commission. Now there’s a lot of reasons why the Asian American church should engage in mission, but quite honestly, there’s a lot of barriers. We’ve heard them as we’ve talked to young people all across North America. So what I’d like to do is to take some time and make a case, make an argument for pursuing long term global missions and addressing those common barriers, those common things that we struggle with as we think about engaging in missions, but before we Jump into talking about all those things that people struggle with when they want to pursue missions. 

Let me say a word about grace. Grace is not something that we just preach. It’s actually one of the values that we have at our mission, mission to the world. Now, why is grace so important for missions. Can you think of another profession that is not more naturally geared towards works righteousness than being a missionary? Think about it. What do missionaries do? They come to your churches and they ask for what? They ask for support. They’re trying to prove their worth to you, why they’re worthy of being sent as an ambassador of Jesus, and there’s metrics involved. Missionaries ask each other, what percentage are you in raising your support, even when they get to the field, the metrics don’t stop. Have you learned the language? How many people are getting baptized? How many churches are are being planted? Even when missionaries meet other missionaries, one of the first questions they ask is, how long have you served here? And so with all these metrics, it is so easy for missionaries to essentially live a works righteousness based religion. So this is why we talk about grace. 

This is why we need to remind ourselves of God’s grace for us, because if we don’t, then we’re going to burn out, we’re going to get discouraged and we’re going to quit. And so we remind ourselves, as this conference is done so beautifully, that we are loved, we are accepted in Jesus, regardless of how well we do or how poorly we do, that our value and significance is tied to the fact that Jesus loves us and has given us His very life. Here’s the thing, when we are secure in God’s grace, for us really believe it, then we experience incredible freedom, freedom to risk, freedom to freedom to fail, because we know that our significance and value is not tied to these things. And so let me begin here with this idea that pursuing missions. It’s not for Super Christians, it’s not for those who have everything put together, but it’s for sinners, for people who understand the gospel and drink deeply that fountain of grace, and then want to respond to that grace and obedience to the King who has given us life. So let’s jump into those hindrances. Let’s talk about to those things, those things that people struggle with when they think about missions. I. I have seven, I’m going to go through them fairly quickly. So don’t worry. The first local missions versus global missions. 

One of the most frequent things that we hear people say is, aren’t we all missionaries? Why should I go overseas when I can be fruitful doing ministry here in my own hometown. Have you ever seen those churches that on their exit is a sign that says you are now entering your mission field? Beautiful, wonderful. We praise God for this idea that we are to be witnesses wherever we wherever we are, in some context, it is a great corrective to simply doing things overseas, but not reaching out to our neighbors locally. We love it. And so maybe you’re saying, yeah, why should I then pursue global missions when I’m being fruitful here in my own hometown? 

First response to that, I would say, is because of the overwhelming disparity and resources that we have here versus those places that are unreached and unengaged, places where there’s less than 2% evangelical Christians. These statistics come from the traveling team.org 55 million full time Christian workers in the world. 75 75.9% work in a context where there is a majority of Christian population, or a large percentage of believers. 23% work in a context where there’s more than 2% but still many unsaved. That only leaves less than 1% point three, 7% of all these 5.5 million Christian workers reaching those places where there’s less than 2% evangelical Christians. Let that sink in. We need our best evangelists and disciple makers to go to these places where there is no witness of Jesus. It’s not the same when people come here from unreached people groups. Because, guess what? When people from unreached people groups come here, they have access to what to you, to the church, to resources, to disciple makers. But but people in unreached, unengaged places are born, live their whole life and die without ever meeting a Christian. 

Secondly, we go because we belong to a global family, and our brothers and sisters across the world are asking us to come and to help. And so we need to ask ourselves, do we really believe in a holy Catholic Church? Do we really believe as we profess these things in the communion of saints? What are we saying when we make these professions? We are saying that we are so intimately connected with our brothers and sisters in Iran, in Syria, in Lebanon in China, we belong to a global family, and they are asking us to help. And so if we believe these things, that we will come alongside our brothers and sisters in their desire, along with ours, to see the glory of God fill his creation. Finally, we go, because, quite honestly, Jesus commands us. Matthew, chapter 2818, to 20. What does he say? Our king, All authority has been given in heaven on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make what disciples of all nations, baptizing the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And behold I am what I’m with you, even to the end of the age. There are 6741 unreached people groups in the world. These 6000 unreached people groups make up 42.2% of the global population, 3.1 4 billion people. There’s this famous Canadian mobilizer named Oswald J Smith. He’s quoted as saying, we talk to the second coming half of the world hasn’t heard of the first. That was the first. The second hindrance that we hear when we engage with people about missions, and I think it’s particularly strong in the Asian community, is raising support. I know a lot of people have difficulty even thinking about pursuing global missions, because they know that part of it is what That’s right, fundraising, raising support, and so they might shy away, let’s be honest, from wanting to pursue this call because they don’t want to be a burden, they’re failing. Family, to their friends, to their community. And I’m I’ll say this, we were missionaries for I totally understand this. This is a real barrier. I remember this new awkwardness when we started raising support with our friends and family. I would I would call somebody, I’d say, Yeah, this is Lloyd and and quickly have to say, no, I’m sorry. No, no, we’re not raising support. I just wanted to say, Happy Birthday. I love you, mom.

So I get it. It’s hard, but I also remember the incredible affirmation we received people that some of them we didn’t even know, gave sacrificially, gave lavishly to support us. You know how that

increases your faith when others are affirming your call by by giving to your needs? And I remember the intimacy of our relationship that we had with these supporters who were Kingdom minded, who believed in what we are called to do. I remember the incredible growth of my own faith as I had to trust God for our family’s needs, living every day, praying that prayer Give us this day our daily bread. There’s something completely liberating and freeing when we live by faith, trusting God for His provision. You know, I thought about it a lot, and I think our reluctance to raising support is is because we’re actually seeing it through the eyes of the world. How does the world see missionaries maybe as sales people trying to sell them something, maybe as beggars looking for a handout. Sometimes, I think the church even sees missionaries in this way, and I remember quite honestly that when we were asking people for support, I felt shame. I felt this, this derision, asking for people to help us, help our family. And I remember asking myself, am I willing to endure even this for the sake of the gospel? Am I willing to endure shame for a redemptive purpose, to be seen as a beggar by the world. I think, quite honestly, the biggest barriers are pride to engaging in missions. 

But how does God see missionaries? Missionaries are His ambassadors. Missionaries are the representatives of his kingdom. Missionaries are the ones that he sends with his with his authority. Missionaries are ones he fills with His Spirit. Missionaries are ones that he calls to bring the good news of the kingdom to the nations. Do we see missionaries as God sees missionaries? So our encouragement, our simple encouragement, is to say missionaries are not salesmen or women. They’re not beggars asking for a handout, but but they’re ambassadors of the kingdom of God. And not only do they represent the King, who else do they represent? They represent the church. They represent you. And so when when missionaries come to to ask you to participate, what they’re inviting you to do is to participate in the work of the Kingdom of God, the work that the king has called us to engage in. They’re inviting you to participate in faith, in building the King, the kingdom of our King. Another fact that’s very helpful is to point out that, relatively speaking, very little money actually goes to unreached, unengaged peoples. These statistics also come from the traveling team Christian giving. 96.8% goes to where can you guess? Local Church, praise God, not that’s that’s not a bad thing. 2.9% goes to home missions. That leaves only point 3% of all of Christian giving going to reaching the unengaged, unevangelized, non Christians Of The World. So let me ask you, should we feel bad asking the church to engage financially in supporting the work of the Kingdom. Okay, that was two number three, parents, grandparents. 

Third barrier to serving as missionaries are our parents, especially if we are immigrants or. Children of immigrants. So how do we respond to parents who tell us we have sacrificed and suffered so much for you to have the opportunities here in North America that we’ve never had? Why would you want to go to places that are worse than the places that we left to come here? You would think that this would be the natural response of many non Christian parents. Sadly, I think it’s also the response of many Christian parents. In all fairness, I can understand why even Christian parents would struggle if their kids became long term missionaries. I want to minimize the sacrifice. I understand it. I get it as a parent, but what an opportunity to allow our parents and grandparents to grow in their faith and believe in the gospel promises. Could we humbly challenge our parents with the idea that maybe God has brought us here to North America and blessed us for a greater purpose. Maybe our parents, suffering and sacrifice, were for something greater than our own comfort and worldly success. Maybe God brought us here and blessed us so that we can be a blessing to the nations, to be His ambassadors, to carry out his redemptive purposes for the world. 

When we were getting ready to go to our first field, which was the Philippines, some of my wife’s relatives came up to us and said, Why are you going over there when your own family’s not Christian? Your own mother doesn’t believe you should stay here and wait until all of your family become Christian before you go overseas. It’s pretty hard for us to hear these comments, but we entrusted our non believing family members to Jesus, and we stepped out in faith. And when we were going our our senior pastor said, Don’t worry about your mother in law. We’ll, we’ll take care of her. And they did. They pursued her. They reached out to her. They loved her. They loved her so much. She started coming out to church every Sunday. And about a year and a half after we arrived with our field we got a call from our our home church, and they said, your mother in law is getting baptized. As hard as it is to pursue global missions, it may be the best thing you can do for your parents, because it will force them to think about the reality of the Kingdom of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That was three. We’re moving on to number four, fear, another common hindrance that we hear people are quite honest these days. I’m afraid. I’m anxious. Fear of the unknown, fear for personal safety, fear of loss of career, loss of opportunities, loss of relationships, not only fear of these things for self, but fear for who

your children. You have children. It’s really easy to give in to this fear and anxiety. I don’t want to make light of these fears. Do we believe that God is in control of all the affairs of our life, and do we believe that as we go on his mission, that he is what with us, even to the end of the age, Beloved, if he’s with us, who can stand against us. It was 2006 where our family first visited Cambodia, our second mission field, and it was my opportunity to convince them that God was calling us to serve in Cambodia. The first night we were there, we were staying at another missionary’s house. It was hot, it was humid, it was miserable. Quite honestly, we were on the third floor of a long house, and it was so hot we left the balcony doors open just to get a breeze in. As we were sleeping the the we had our two young kids at the time sleeping on a sleeping bag. We had a baby, one and a half, in a crib. My wife and I were on the bed, and the baby was crying all night. It was really miserable. She She screamed and yelled and cried once. And I woke up, and then I saw another man in our room, and I got up to go towards him, and then he ran out of our room, ran off the balcony, the neighbor’s balcony, the roof, went down onto the street, walked off, turned around and looked at me. My heart was beating, racing with fear. Of course, my wife was awake at the time, so I locked the doors. I said, Honey, honey. It’s okay. Trying to like, you know, be the man, be calm and honey. It’s okay. It was. He’s gone, we’re safe. She goes, check the house, check the house. It was safe, honey. Let’s just go to sleep. She said, Where’s your wallet? Where’s your watch, where’s your he stole all these things. You know, where they were. They were on the headboard, right above my wife’s head. 

The next morning, the neighbor came by and said someone broke into your house. And we said, Yeah, how did you know? He said, Well, we heard him. And we said, You heard him. Why didn’t you yell or scream or like, warn us? He goes, Oh, we don’t do that here. We said, what? He goes, Yeah, if we say anything, then he’ll come after us. We said, Well, why didn’t you call the police? Why didn’t you call some authority? He goes, Oh, we don’t do that here either, because they won’t help and sometimes they’re behind it. We thought, What kind of place is this where neighbors don’t help neighbors, and you can’t even trust the police to help you? Few days later, we visited the Tulsa Genocide Museum, and we learned of the tragic history of Cambodia under Pol Pot in the Khmer Rouge, we learned of the killing fields where neighbors betrayed neighbors, family betrayed family, and then we understood, and it was there in that interrogation center Elementary School turned to interrogation center where my wife turned to me and she said, This is why we need to come to Cambodia. These people need the gospel.

Fear and anxiety are real barriers to pursuing missions, yet God says there is no fear and love, but perfect love casts out fear, and Jesus’s love for us gives us victory over soul crushing fear, and it’s the same love that empowers us to love others in faith. That was four. Here’s number five. How many have thought, well, I am doing missions. I’m going on several short term mission trips. Um, uh, praise God. Short term mission trips are wonderful, are great, but there are limitations. If you’ve ever been involved at all in any cross cultural ministry, you know it takes time. Why? Because any discipleship relationship is a relationship, and relationships require eating together, laughing together, crying together, doing life together, and you simply cannot do that simply by doing short it requires a long term commitment, even to be positioned to be in a place, to enter into a discipleship relationship. But short term missions are great. Why? Number one, to confirm a Long Term Missionary call, it’s a great reason to go on a short term trip. To ask yourself, God, are you calling me and my family calling me to engage in your mission? Second, to do something to help the long term missionaries and national partners who are there? Medical, theological, education, other things. Finally, it is helpful also to go and to learn and to see what God is doing, so that you can come back and better support and pray and engage in this mission. There was a younger, single, single woman missionary named Becca who came for a short term trip to Cambodia in the summer. She went out to the villages and was ministering to the children. They fell in love with her. She finished her time as a short term missionary, went back home, and then a young single man came named Brennan, and he ministered to those same young village kids. And after he came back, the kids hatched a plan. They thought, well, of course, the only two single Americans they knew would make a perfect couple, right? So they tried to introduce them to each other online and through social media. What are the chances? Two years later, they got married, and they are now serving as long term missionaries back in Cambodia. Short term missions has its benefits. 

Among those is confirming a longer term call six bi vocational missions. We’ve heard a lot of folks say, Well, what if I just get a job in another country and do missions that way, bi vocationally? Certainly you can do this, especially in those places that are creative access, that are hard to go as a traditional missionary. But there’s disadvantages, disadvantages to simply finding a job or moving with a company overseas, and not involving a mission agency or your local church. So what do you lose? What do you lose if you simply go overseas with a company or try to find the job, you lose first an army of people who are praying for you, who are supporting you, who are encouraging you. The truth is that those who give to you financially are much more aware that. What you’re doing. They will read your updates. They will pray for you. They will encourage you. And wherever you go, you’re going to encounter spiritual attack. We need intercessory prayer warriors to come with us through their prayers. Second, if you’re working 40 to 50 hours, guess what? You’re not going to have a lot of time to do the work in ministry that you may be eager to do. Third, you might have a boss that’s not sympathetic to what you really want to do. If you lose your job, you lose your ministry. Finally, you lose all the experience the community, the vetting, the training, the care and support for you and your family that a mission would provide. So even though it might seem like going overseas with a job is the fastest, most economical way, there are some challenges to this approach as well. Number Seven calling one of the final objections that we’ve heard is, I’m not called to global missions. I always want to ask, How do you know you’re not called? You know, when you think about calling, there’s an external call and there’s an internal call. What’s the external call? External call is somebody calling you, telling you to go and make disciples of all nations. That’s an external call. It’s coming from that. I think somebody has actually given us that call. His name’s Jesus. Part of this external call is also having the church and a mission, confirm your gifts, confirm your readiness to engage. Not perfect, but it is a mechanism. So I can say, I think you can say that you’re not called to pursue global missions. 

If you’ve actually engaged with your church, engaged with the mission, and they’ve said, we don’t think you’re ready, then I can then I think you can say, with a clear conscience, I don’t think I’m called, but if you’ve never pursued this external call, how can you say you’re not called? Okay, maybe you say, I don’t have an internal call. What’s an internal call? It’s this persistent desire to pursue long term global missions. And so some of you might be saying, Yeah, I could care less if people across the world come to faith in Jesus, and if that’s how you think you have bigger problems, then whether you’re called to be a missionary or not, right? Let’s think about it. All of the disciples of Jesus should care that the nations come to bow their knee to King Jesus. All of us should seek and desire that God’s glory fill his Earth. The question is whether we should participate in this great commission as those who remain here support and send or as those who go to the front line and serve. And so we should be asking, what stage of life, what what freedoms? What opportunities do I have that would allow me to serve overseas? In other words, how best can I could I be used to advance God’s mission? Sending or going? So I think it is legitimate to say that you don’t have an internal call to go if you have a strong internal call to mobilize, to raise up support and send workers for his field. If this is the case, can I challenge you given sacrifice as much as those who are called to go, Let’s fulfill our call. It might be hard to believe, but we can actually make a career out of missions, a real career with benefits, health insurance, retirement, all those things. 

Missions is not something you do before you get your real job. Missions is not something you check off your bucket list. Missions is not only a calling, but it can be a career, something you do for your life. And I’m going to argue to say that it is the best job that a Christian can have. You wake up in the morning. What’s your job tell other people about Jesus. You wake up in the morning to drink deeply of this grace of the gospel and then share it with what are the benefits you have an army of people praying for you, praying for your family, praying for your marriage, praying for your kids, praying for your soul, you experienced incredible sense of purpose in life and privilege. This is why, even after years of serving, of coming back from the field, when missionaries hear a sound, smell something that reminds them of their field, they break down and weep and grieve their time on that there’s something that you can never experience or explain, the bond that you have with the people that you’ve served. And so my argument is but. Pursuing global missions is really the best job in the world for a follower of Jesus. This is my case for pursuing long term global My hope is that the next chapter of the Asian American church would be one where the church has a deep passion for seeing God’s glory fill the earth and being obedient to His Great Commission. Would you pray with me that the Lord would raise up and send many from the Asian American church to his harvest field? But as you pray, be careful what you ask for. 

Let’s pray, Father, thank You for these words that you give us of your great commission and the promise that we have of your presence there are people here, Lord, I pray that you are calling internally and externally. Would you give them the courage to step forward in faith, to affect not only the people that they will serve, but the whole community here, the church, in believing in the promises of the gospel and delighting in the grace you’ve given us to your son in whose name we pray amen.