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The Missionary Roles People Don’t Talk About · The Ethnos360 Podcast

• speaker-0: We're dating, and she said real early on, if you're not all in on reaching the unreached, we need to break up now. People groups are being reached, Bibles are being translated. There's all of these high watermark moments happening. We have to connect the greater church with what God's doing. Do you think money is gonna stop him? Do you think the need to support Rays is gonna get in the way of that happening? speaker-1: Joel used to be my boss and now he's my boss again. I interned at headquarters in twenty seventeen and you're still there? Doing great work ⁓ as a support missionary. Why don't you just tell your story of how you became a support missionary? Because like most support missionaries, that's not what you're planning to do, right? speaker-0: That's right. That's not what comes to mind when you think about missionary work. And I'll just say this too at the beginning. You were the first intern that I had and it went so well. And it's cool to see now because we have four or five interns working in like advancement, communications, media, marketing. ⁓ and you helped pave the way for that. So also taught us a little bit of what not to do as bosses of interns. speaker-1: Just talk for three hours at a time. speaker-0: We were both fond of talking. Yeah. So my parents were missionaries, but they didn't decide to do that until midway through their adult lives. It was like a second career for my mom and dad. So I am an MK who didn't grow up on the mission field. But I had enough time during my last years of high school in a little country in South America called Guyana. And it was a really formative time of my life to be there. You know, the last two years of high school you're thinking through life decisions, what comes next, and that was a great time for me to be exposed to another culture, other people groups. Guyana was a really interesting country, is a Caribbean country, but re from a religion standpoint it's Hindu and Muslim. So unlike any other country in South America, ⁓ and the world view is yeah, also very unique, not at all like Spanish speaking Catholicism. Do they speaker-1: Speak Spanish? speaker-0: They speak English. Guyana was a British colony until the 1950s. Okay. And that's also why my parents went there, because at middle age, neither one of them were down for learning another language to that degree of fluency. So that was that worked out. It was during that time that the idea of full-time ministry and maybe missions set in place as I think I'm probably gonna be involved in this. I don't know what. And I followed a pretty normal trajectory after that. I went to a community college. I did five semesters and got a lot of my general general ed credits out of the way. But then I just started like, okay, I think I'm done for now because I don't want to take more if I don't know what I'm going to plug them into degree wise. And I'm just having such a good time doing this internship in a student ministry working with students. But that wasn't really setting myself up for the next step. And it was the youth pastor who had invested a ton into me. He could see it. He could sense that drift happening. And he just like laid down the hammer one day and he said, You've been talking about a lot of different things, a lot of different possibilities and ideas, but you're not acting on any of them. So if you want to stay in this internship and if you want to keep working with ⁓ the with this youth group, this student ministry, you need to have started three college applications before the end of today. This was You know, before you could fill out an application online ⁓ for a college. So I had to go home and log on, print a bunch of you know, paper applications and start that process. And I didn't end up going to any of those schools, but it did light a fire and that fire burned for the next year. And what I knew I needed to do was I need more understanding of God's word. I don't trust myself to make a good decision about the rest of my life. ⁓ because I just don't have enough of God's word to make a wise decision. So that set me on a path looking for some kind of a Bible school, Bible college, where I could just do that. And I don't have to specialize into a bachelor's degree with a bunch of stuff that I'm not interested in yet. And that path led me to discover at the time it was called New Tribes Bible Institute. It's now Ethnos 360 Bible Institute. And I knew, hey, I can just go there for two years and study the Bible. I know it's a part of a training program for missionaries who want to serve overseas people groups, but it's also available to anybody who just wants to go and invest two years in God's word. And that's like that's right where I was at. I want to do that. And it was during that time that the ⁓ the inevitable happened. And for me, I I think the pump was already primed because of my two years with my parents. But Missions was presented in a an even more focused way there. I didn't get a calling while I was there. I became accountable to something while I was there. And I was accountable to this knowledge that I had that there are vast numbers of people groups who know missionary work is being done, let alone missionary work in their language, in their heart language. They don't have access to God's word. And unless more people do something about that, that's not going to change. Up to that point, you know, while I was doing that internship, I was interested in ministry. And I kind of thought, I'll maybe be a a worship pastor. Maybe I'll follow in, you know, my mentors' footsteps and get into student ministry, college ministry. And I started as I was thinking through that and having my my mindset influenced by all of this information about missions and unriched people groups. There's like a scale in my in my thinking. And all of the weight on the one side for like ministry in the US, it that's a good thing. Serving the church, good thing. But all of a sudden, all of this weight got put on the other end of the scale of boom, unreached people groups, and there's very few people going and doing anything with that. I just felt like, how can I get in line to compete with hundreds, if not thousands of other candidates for pastoral roles, for worship leader roles, when there's another set of doors over here leading to missions work with unreachable groups. And there's like nobody standing in that line. Most Christians don't even know that that's a door. And I just felt accountable to it. And that's how I made my decision. ⁓ I couldn't ignore it. I had to be involved in some way. But what do I do? I I wasn't Like particularly like analytical, interested in in languages. I love studying God's word and I like teaching it, but I don't think that the people in my life would have said, Man, you are a gifted communicator, a gifted teacher, that you should be doing something with that. I was kind of like, I'm all in on missions to the unreached, but I don't know what I'm gonna do yet. It was in my second year as a student at the Bible Institute that I met my now wife, and she was a young lady who I think had a different trajectory into it and was so, so convinced from the beginning, I have to be a part of this. This is the kind of mission work I've been looking for my entire life. And I just remember we're dating and she said real early on, if you're not all in on tribal missions, which is that was how we referred to it at that time. ⁓ if you're not all in on reaching the unreach, we need to break up now. Cause I'm I'm going. I'm staying a part of this. There's no other cur career trajectory. It worked out, because I was all in too. But ⁓ close call. As our relationship proceeded and we got to know each other and we began to think through well, what does service look like for us as a couple? Because she had been serving on staff at that Bible institute. And I was interested in maybe doing something like that. But we were thinking, man, it would be great if we could get a little bit of insight and perspective. Of what it looks like to serve in one of the overseas positions. Let's let's go to a country, let's get firsthand experience. ⁓ let's get to know missionaries who are working with these people groups. And let's bring that perspective into whatever else we do for the rest of our career. And we communicated with a lot of different, we called them fields of service, different countries around the world where New Tribes Mission was working. We settled on on a part of the world, and we refer to it now. By a regional name rather than a specific name, but we just called it Asia Pacific. ⁓ when they found out about our willingness to be involved wherever we could be involved, they jumped on that and they said, Hey, we have ⁓ a guest house, vacancy. A guest house is basically a large house where missionaries who are traveling in and out of the country or in and out of the region, in and out of the tribal village where they live for, you know, six to eight weeks at a time. They come out and they stay. It's oftentimes one of the first places that new missionaries arrive. It's one of the last places that missionaries who are leaving stay. ⁓ guest house hosts play a huge role in the lives and in the overall health of of the missions community because they're they're impromptu mentors and counselors. They're helping them process things. They're celebrating milestones with them. The field leadership presented this opportunity to us and our hearts just lit up. We love being with people. We love hosting. We love doing the little things that make make people feel seen. And so we we jumped at it. And we're like, we're, we're all in on this. So we went to this country to host a guest house, to buy ⁓ supplies for those missionaries living in those interior locations. Just whatever we could do to make their ministry more doable, more sustainable. And the way that things went was different than what we thought initially. We ended up coming home from that country after about two years because of some big health things on the part of my oldest son at the time and my wife. But we we were not done with this work and all the more convinced of how all of these different roles were required to support those those missionaries working on that that outer edge. And Lord allowed us to move back to the very Bible institute that we met at. ⁓ and we joined their staff team. And ironically enough, in the beginning, that's kind of where we wanted to end up. And you might remember I said we decided let's go overseas and get some overseas experience and bring that back into our ministry in the future and training. And so the Lord just led us back there a lot sooner than we thought. True. But we're we're loving our ministry, we're Meeting with young students who were in the same place that we were in ten years before that, and just challenging them to consider all the different ways that they can be involved. And imagine a a bicycle wheel, imagine a wagon wheel, and you've got that central hub in the middle, and you've got spokes, and then you've got that rim and that tire. And in order for that wheel to function like a wheel and roll forward, you know, you have that that central hub. Where like the axle goes through and it supports it, and then those spokes support that outer wheel. A wheel with no spokes is not a wheel. A wheel with like three spokes is a really unstable wheel. So we see all of those spokes as these support mission roles. It's the guest house host, like what we wanted to do. It's the missionary pilots who serve in aviation and fly missionaries in and out of locations. It's team doctors and nurses. It's Bible school instructors. It's Bible school videographers who are creating course content online, who are creating videos to draw in more people. It's it's all of these roles. I've heard it said that it takes at least fifteen specific ministry roles to support ministry in an isolated indigenous location. And those are just like those are the bare minimum ones, not everything else that we can do. To sustain them in ⁓ healthy long-term service. And we just continue to use this illustration to explain to students, to explain to believers in churches all over the US, and to just talk about how vital being a spoke in that wheel is. Because when you don't have a lot of spokes, the few spokes that are there have to do multiple roles. And we know that when a person does more. More than what they're capable of sustaining for longer than they're capable of sustaining it, burnout results in that. ⁓ bitterness sets in. Just a classic recipe for ⁓ for for failure, for struggle, for ⁓ unfulfilling service. And our heart is to just continue to put the importance of this kind of ministry in front of people because there's s so many roles needed. I work now in the home office for ethnos three sixty in Florida. in communications and marketing. And for example, for the last and I'm just gonna own it, but for the last 10 years, maybe 15 years, our team has has missed out on the chance to tell lots and lots of stories about tribal events, tribal church events like Bible dedications, like outreach from established indigenous church to another people group or another region, literacy programs being developed. My team's responsibility is to capture those and to create video content that just highlights that and inspires more believers. But for the last 15 years, we've not had a single full-time videographer at our home office. Also, even these creative disciplines, videography, photography, graphic design, illustration, all of those things have an outlet in reaching the unreached. All of them, I would say are I mean, I don't wanna Maybe it's ⁓ a hot take to say they're essential, like as an illustrator, really essential to reaching the unreached. I mean probably maybe not. But the more spokes that we have, the better. The better supported the wheel are. speaker-1: I think of like some churches that have an international ministry, they have bigger videography teams than we do. Mm-hmm. Even now. And they're just one church. Right. And we have over two thousand mission. speaker-0: Yeah. Nice. Exactly. That reminds me too of how important it is to get this idea into our students' minds as soon as they begin training. I recently had the chance to sit down with a young couple. They just finished up their training here in the US. And while they were in training, and in in the wife's case, before she was in training, she had a successful wedding photography business. And as she met her husband, He, out of a desire to just spend more time with her as they were getting to know each other, started helping out in her business. And eventually he branched into shooting videos, shooting films for their clients. And they, man, it's just evident if you look at their Instagram, they're gifted at visual storytelling. They come into Ethnos 360 for training. They are struck with that same need to be involved in reaching the unreached. And they're thinking, I don't really know that our business background, our creative skills and abilities are what we're going to be using as missionaries. So we're we're prepared to let that go. And while they were near the end of their training, they had the chance to meet with one of our ⁓ executive leadership team members. And he knew that they had this background and he just really challenged them and just said, Guys, I don't know if you know this, but our communications team. Florida has been without the capability of making ⁓ videos and doing visual storytelling for the last 10 years. Like, would you guys consider using what God's given you in your role as a missionary? Would you be a missionary to the unreached, but by using your videography background, your photography, your storytelling background? And they they would they will admit it hadn't even occurred to them that they could. So It's definitely a burden of mine. It's a burden of my wife's to present these opportunities, especially to our students as they are coming in and just considering where would the Lord have me ⁓ serve? And it's not just the one there's not just one way to be a missionary. There's so many ways to be a missionary. I I guess to your point, you brought up the example of of large churches having the ability to to do that. They've God has gifted ⁓ these bodies of believers with people from all these different backgrounds with experience and skill sets. And we see so many awesome examples of churches able to leverage that. I think it's my heart that we as an organization leverage that diversity that God has blessed us with as well. ⁓ and hey, that's kind of what was going on, you know, eight years ago when, you know, a young man who grew up as an MK was just like. Exploring media. And I remember having conversations with you about it. And my hope as you interned with me those years ago was that we'd be in this spot where we are at right now at some point. And a couple of years in there, I was like, I don't know if it's gonna happen. I think you were probably thinking, I don't know if it's gonna happen. ⁓ but it's so encouraging to have seen you take that that interest, like God uniquely gave you. your personality and your background and let you be interested in what you're interested in, that being visual storytelling, creating with photography, creating with video, and its best possible use is in his service. speaker-1: That makes me think of why what was like maybe the biggest thing that kept me from joining w right away. And I think it it's the fact that I had to support race and that's very daunting. But long story short, you I just so cool to see God provide and realizing how much money there is out there and how little of it is being used towards missions. And it's not like God ha is is low on money. Yep. Overcoming that mental spirit maybe spiritual barrier. But after that, like speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. speaker-1: I'm super happy to be serving full time as a videographer. Yeah. being a small part in reaching the unreach. So what what's kind of like your role ⁓ now? Yeah. speaker-0: Right now I am the media manager for the Ethno Straight Sixty Home Office. We have a great relationship at the home office with the team here at EBI. But your leadership team is making you available to collaborate with us on projects. ⁓ and so one of my roles is really just to collaborate is to kind of lead that collaboration well, manage our human resources that we have available, manage our physical resources, our gear, our budget, that kind of stuff. Turning turning this this media ministry back on after like ten, fifteen years of being dormant, God is at work. ⁓ people groups are being reached, Bibles are being translated. There's all of these high watermark moments happening, and we have to connect the greater church with what God is doing. ⁓ because when when they connect with that, when they see the results of long, painstaking effort being made to learn a language and and culture and develop relationships results in a new church being born, they have to be involved as well. In the same way that like I, when I had that sense of accountability, we want to help Christians have that same moment, that sense of accountability, not from a guilty standpoint, but from a ⁓ my gosh, look at what God is doing in Places that I honestly didn't even know existed, with people groups who are so far off the grid or whose language is so complex that I would have never imagined that possible. speaker-1: What would you say are some support roles that are needed right now? speaker-0: Man, well, we're sitting here in Wisconsin at the Ethnos Three Sixty Bible Institute and super practical. The team here is in need of of a chef, essentially, of of cooks keeping two hundred plus students nutritionally fed and thriving takes food. That's one. I I'm just thinking about ⁓ our team at the home office in Florida. ⁓ and like I talked about. Turning this machine back on. ⁓ you know, the young couple that are on their way to join our team, that's not going to be enough to do all that we can to take advantage of all the story opportunities that are there. So, ⁓ videographers, photographers, people with a background or an inclination ⁓ in marketing. We need people who are gifted communicators to be able to inspire more people to be involved. We call them representatives or reps. At our home office and here at the Bible Institute, you have a whole office full of finance managers, curriculum developers, Bible teachers at the home office. We've got ⁓ a legal department, an HR department. And those all sound like well, those are career jobs. So people are getting paid to do this, right? Like the missionaries are the church planters and the Bible translators. That's that's not accurate in our case. You know this, but our audience might not know that every role that I just listed, that's a missionary role. It takes that role to s to sustainably ⁓ make God's word known in unreachable groups. And all of those roles, ⁓ they're all s faith supported. So in the same way that you talked about like kind of being daunted for part of the time at raising your financial support to come and do this, like you loved what you were coming to do, but Yeah, I have to raise support to do that. That sounds tough. And there are moments when it's tough. But when we remember, God wants people reached. God wants people from all nations to be able to worship him because they know him and they know that he speaks their language, that his word was for them. Do you think money is gonna stop him? And do you think The need to support raise is going to get in the way of that happening. And I'm saying that to myself because I easily get distracted by, ⁓ man, our our monthly support was low this month, or we lost these financial supporters. I just don't know if we're gonna be to continue on. I have moments where I lapse into thinking like that, and then God just breaks through and reminds me, this is my work. I'm sovereign. I'm not short on money. Money means nothing to me and I can provide for you. I just want you to keep being obedient and exercising faith that I'm with you in this. This is my work, but I love you and I love your obedience. And when I remember that and when that's the voice that I hear God talking to me in, the financial aspect really gets a lot smaller. speaker-1: One point that helped me a lot too was it's a way to get people who aren't involved involved. Yes and and they get to be involved with ⁓ your ministry and support people they love and know and trust. Yeah. Rather than some organization out there. speaker-0: Exactly. Yeah. That's a great point. ⁓ that it they're investing. We're inviting them to partner with us. And it's sometimes it's money, sometimes it feels like I wish I could I I could ask you for anything but money, right? But again, I have we ha I have to constantly set aside some of those like stigmas that that I have about things and just remember I'm a believer, you're a believer. Do you want to get involved in this thing that God's called you and I both to be involved in? Here's here's a here's a very easy step. We see people who their start in missions is supporting another missionary financially. That demonstration of faithfulness to the Great Commission and their giving gets multiplied in their own life, and they become accountable just like I felt that sense of accountability to maybe I need to do more than just support. speaker-1: Not that one is more important. speaker-0: Man, we think about Paul's words in Corinthians when he talks about the composition of the body. I don't know. This is probably a tired trope, but if you want to say missionaries are the mouth, they're the ones speaking the word of God, speaking the gospel. Okay, well, just indulge it for a minute. ⁓ if every part of the body is a mouth, well, number one, the world would get so tired of it because constantly talking, talking, talking. Yes, it's truth, but God's given ⁓ diversity in the body of Christ, like he's given diversity to our physical bodies. We're not all mouths. We have one mouth, we've got two eyes, we've got two ears. And they're all essential in communication. And when one of those is missing, extra work has to be done. So we need it all. We need all of what the body provides. And in the body of Christ, we need goers, we need senders. It's important that we are one of the other. And I think if a If a believer is sitting here hearing this conversation and they're taking honest stock of their life and they can't identify that they're either one of those, I think that there's a step of obedience that person needs to consider taking. speaker-1: Some people don't view support roles as important until they go actually into a remote or really hard location and they realize, wow, there's no infrastructure around us. speaker-0: Yeah, or Man, wouldn't it be awesome if a church could fully own the process of reaching the unreached? Right. But what would it take for that church to do that? Churches are oftentimes great at sending missionaries. They're great at creating an environment where God's word is taught constantly with a healthy focus on the Great Commission, on making disciples of all nations. And we see churches where people are coming under that conviction and making the choice to use the prime of their life ⁓ to be about the Great Commission, to become career missionaries. We see that. But why can't churches do more? Why can't they train them? Why can't they send them? Why can't they support them in long term service? It takes so many roles to do that. Sometimes there are critiques leveled at missions organizations. maybe questioning why d why do they exist? Well, shouldn't the church just be able to do more? I helped lead a short-term trip of students to the Philippines this past summer. And we were in a part of the Philippines that's fairly well developed. We were able to actually drive in a car to a trailhead and then hike not even a mile down a hill. And we're in this little village where this indigenous people group ⁓ lived. And had had outside missionary presence from expats as well as national Filipino missionaries who lived in there. And it'd be easy to kind of look at that and just say, like, wow, like here's a great example of how easy it would be to just reach unreached people groups without all of that other stuff. And yet, all through our time there with the students, ⁓ those like 36 hours that we spent in that village, so many different examples of how that ministry was better. more self sustaining, more safe for everybody involved because of the presence of at the time they're invisible, ⁓ like the pilot who could come in at a minute's notice and had to come in at a minute's notice a couple weeks after we left when one of the one of the guys in that village was bitten by a a really dangerous venomous snake. Yep, he could hike a a mile up up the hill and then get into a bus and and go two hours, but he might die before But the missions aviation team there in the Philippines was able to fly in their helicopter right onto the landing pad and Medevac that guy quickly to health or not to health but to a hospital to get the anti-Ven and to save his save his life. ⁓ and that was just one example of many, maybe even an extreme example, but ⁓ it's not so much a question of is it possible to reach the unreached without all of these other roles versus should we try to without all of these other roles? If our goal is to have believers in long term sustainable ministry, God doesn't want us to burn the candle at both ends, right? He doesn't want us to to give, give, give until we are literally a a shell, a husk of ourselves. He wants us to serve from a place of abiding. He wants us to depend on the body of Christ. And the way that we do that, I think in missions work in particular is with a team, a team based approach. relying on the diverse gifts that God's given to our coworkers, letting them serve us, letting them serve the ministry itself, play their role. And the result is missionaries who can thrive in these roles. This is an extreme example, but I know a couple. They worked in a people group in Papua New Guinea, long term learned their language and culture, helped to translate the Bible in into their language, saw a church born and Grow into maturity. And then they said, Well, we did it here. Let's see if there's another place we can do it. So they moved to another people group in Papua New Guinea, learned the tribal language again, helped be a part of that church development process, and came to a similar point of, okay, it's time to move on. They then moved to Thailand, learned Thai. And began to take the experience of working in two other people groups and bring that to bear and giving leadership and guidance to new missionaries allocating to Thailand in this ministry. There's no way that they would have been able to to serve in those varied contexts if they were doing everything that it took to be in those places. They were able to do that because of the team that enabled them to do that, that supported them, that provided those specialized gifts that They themselves didn't possess. Especially for workers who are in those hard to get to locations. Yes. What it takes to l just do daily life is so much more than what we think about. Exactly. You don't have stores. When you have to plan out groceries for six to eight weeks at a time, including your fresh groceries, your perishable items. speaker-1: Running water, electricity. Can't just order something from Amazon. speaker-0: No, Amazon Prime has its limits. You are literally in the Amazon.