Latest / The Ethnos360 Podcast / How to Plant a Church Among an Unreached People Group
Transcript
- Ethnos360: Had my ha hand on the mouse, ready to click return tickets from Australia without ever having been to New Guinea in the first place. We were never called to make converts. We were called to make disciples. You guys have done so much, you may as well come home. My response is always the same. I'm glad I didn't do that with my two children. And all of a sudden, you're in the water, a crocodile-infested water, dunking people. So that they can tell the friends and family that they have now associated and identified themselves with the creator and owner. We have Justin Reese, who's a missionary among the Pay People Group in Papua New Guinea. And now you're serving in Dallas as an alumni coach and also ⁓ with advancement. So yeah, thanks for coming on. Man, super appreciate you having me. It's exciting to be here. You just spoke in chapel, ⁓ here at EBI. You mentioned you didn't want to be a missionary. You described yourself as an avid endorsman. I definitely borrowed that avid endorsement ⁓ from ⁓ somebody, an author we love to read in our house. But yeah, b b born and raised in Southern California, Los Angeles County, I was one of seven children. I met my wife in high school. ⁓ we were good friends. ⁓ we hung out and from there we had an incredible opportunity to be part of a church that had a high view of missions. They had a high view of of God's word and they had a high view of ⁓ of the church. There was a pastor there, a local pastor, his name was Francis Chan. He ⁓ spent a lot of a lot of years discipling and sharing with people the need ⁓ of those that were overseas and week after week I would go in on Sunday and go out the doors on Sunday and I believed what he was saying, but it it it didn't impact me at all. But over the course of time, I recognized that Jesus was in fact ⁓ my king and he had the right to tell me what I ought to do with my life. And while I thung I I I was clinging to things like ⁓ my role as a as a banker or my role as a as a ⁓ loan processing rep or whatever the job might have been at the time, ⁓ in in desiring to stay in those industries or whatever it was, over time I I recognized that yeah, in fact the Lord could tell me what I ought to do. And ⁓ just so happened that my wife was going through ⁓ a similar thing. She was a hairdresser ⁓ in Calabasas, California. She she had done hair for MacGyver, ⁓ the old TV show MacGyver. She would cut his hair in a modern mullet. And ⁓ you know, she was living her dream. And together at the same time we we just kept asking the the question what was holding us there in California? And week after week we would see the same folks walk in, sit in their same seats, you know, Sunday morning save seats, and we recognized that no one else was going. And so we just thought, well, if this is all true, if what our pastor is teaching from the front is true, and this is the greatest message, and there's still a groups of people in this world who don't have a single verse of the Bible in their language, well maybe we could volunteer to go. I don't I don't want it to sound like this transition was like not stark or or not a big deal, but it wasn't a burning bush. There was no neon light. There was no angel speaking from heaven telling us where we should go. Only that if we were willing, we could figure out what it meant to be trained and equipped to go. And so we did. And in two thousand seven we stepped into training with Ethnos three sixty through a Bible college two year program. And from there we went on to the missionary training center in in ETC in Missouri. And letting go of the California dream and the California experience was tough. ⁓ it impacted the way our family and friends viewed us. Sure. You know? Hard decisions had to be made. But yeah, just recognizing that Jesus had that right and authority to tell us what to do, we were willing to make that change. So how valuable do you find that training? is to reaching unreached people group. Because some people they have the zeal and passion and they just wanna go. Why would you recommend to slow down a little bit and just get that training? Great question. I I I think I've processed this ⁓ as much as anybody else. I think I've told people to get trained as much as anybody else because I thoroughly believe in it. I think it's incredibly important. Sometimes I guess the perspective could be that zeal will will carry you on through. I I'm reminded of Jesus and and his zeal in the temple and his disciples stop and they look and they think to themselves, Wow, zeal for the house of God consumes him. And that's Jesus, right? So zeal is a great thing. Like I'm I'm all about it. But if we neglect to realize that Jesus lived in a particular context with a particular language for over thirty years before he even began his ministry that the folks could see his zeal, ⁓ we'd be neglecting a huge part of the story. He became something. He he trained in something. He was discipled. He was a baby and grew up in this culture and language. The question becomes like, what does that mean for us? How do we grow in our own language and culture? Well, if we desire or endeavor to translate the Bible and teach the Bible and see a mature church at some point among an unreached people group, for instance, like we better be able to handle the word of God. And so stepping into a place like the Bible Institute with Ethnos 360 and the BI there is just incredible because I don't ha I I can be able to be familiar with scripture and be able to handle it well. Number one, I don't need to spend seven years getting a couple of ⁓ initials behind my name and and going into debt. Like I can I can do this in a in a relevant way and I can do it with men and women, ⁓ teachers, ⁓ staff, administration. The president's door is open during the day. I can do it with people that want to be accessible. It just seems like ⁓ if somebody wants to reach cross-culturally, they ought to be able to handle the Bible in their own language first. But then there's the second critical piece. Yeah, Jesus trained for 30 years. Why would not get trained for 30 years? Why not become a master of this thing? Well, Jesus was doing this incredible thing where he was going to grow up as a, you know, be born as a baby, grow up as a an infant, a toddler, an adolescent, and go on into his adulthood and then he was gonna work just three years with some men from his own language, his own culture. Well, for us, we take a little bit different approach. We train for three or four years to go spend maybe twenty, twenty five, maybe thirty, who knows? We do it in this inverse proportion for a couple of reasons. One, it takes a long time. To learn a different language and culture. So part of the two to three to four years of training is learning how to learn that cult that language and culture. ⁓ and by the way, we're learning from men and women who've already done it before. There are these missionaries that have gone and done this spectacular thing and then come back to the training center to impart this wisdom and these methods and and and and these steps so that we can benefit from them. It's incredible. And if you want to planned a church among an unreached people group, what better person to have in your corner calling your fight than the person that's already done it? Yeah, I'm sold on training. I think training is the most incredible thing. I think there's also a a real impact of allowing those folks that have done it, the ones who've become trainers, to be able to pour back into the system. And that's what my wife and I are attempting to do in these years that we're home in America right now. We want to be able to encourage and spur on to good works those that are behind us. Could you walk us through the ethno three sixty church planting methodology? Specifically ⁓ in reaching the pay people group? Yeah. So to begin with, ethno three three three sixty endeavors to reach the unreached with ⁓ a gospel of Jesus Christ so that we could see those people groups go on and thrive. In a mature way, in a in in a mature church. And so what's really neat about Ethnos 360 and their approach to church planting is that their desire for the church the cross cultural church planter to become as close as they can in in language and in culture. That which would be able to reach the people group that they're going to. They've provided a an awesome methodology that's largely rooted in God's word, and it's the thing that we anchor ourselves to. It's the thing that we cling to. And what they've done is they've given us the opportunity to become equipped at several different fra phases. We talked about the Bible college, we talked about the the Ethnos Training Center where we learn how to learn unwritten languages and learn how to develop alphabets. We talked about that stuff. ⁓ and that would be great. Part of the first phase of equipping. Equipping one. The second phase of equipping is equipping two. This is when after you've partnered with your home churches, the local churches, after you've done the training, after you've re ⁓ raised your after you've waited raised your partnership teams, you arrive on the field and now you're in this new place with new smells and new sights and new sounds. You don't know how to travel or go to the bathroom or where to do any of this stuff. And ⁓ your whole goal at this point. Is to become something new, become part of this new culture and new language. And this is on the national level. And so ⁓ you you may be learning ⁓ the language of the host country. For our particular context, we learned the language of talk pigeon. And ⁓ we enculturated. And the methodology was rooted in us being able to hear the language, recognize that it's not English, eventually. Be able to say the language, be able to take all those little bits and pieces, whether they were the sounds and join them till they become words, and then those words and join them till they become sentences and sentences to paragraphs and paragraphs to ⁓ stories. And the whole goal ⁓ is to make these things understandable to the target culture. And that's just the first phase. That's just the national language in the national country. Well, there may be an unreached people group that's by proxy or by by proximity just a little bit further away. ⁓ that was the case in in in pay. We were about a hundred kilometers as the crow flies away from a town, ⁓ on an airplane. Took us about an hour to get there, and then we would have to jump off of that airplane on a remote airstrip, we'd land and then we'd get on a dugout canoe that had an outboard motor pinned to the back and we'd travel another two and a half hours. To the middle of the swamp in the country of Papua New Guinea, where there was another language, and we'd have to do it all over again. We'd have to point at the stone and hear them say stone and point at the stick and hear them say stick and point at the cup and hear them say cup and point at the house post and hear them say house post and point at the machete and hear them say machete. And once we did that enough and we could recognize those words, then they would ask us to point. You point at the machete, ⁓ you point at the house post, you point out the stone, and eventually all of these words, all of these phrases you point at, show me, all those things started to ⁓ be understood. And eventually we started to say, point at the stick, point at the stone. In the vernacular, and ⁓ the process of becoming a pay speaker ⁓ is long, it's hard. ⁓ it's fun. It's so joyful to realize that our creative, the creative aspects of God, as he allowed languages to be developed, as as he allowed languages to be a art and a science simultaneously, it's so fun. ⁓ but it's hard work and super hard work. The process of of language and and culture development and and learning and acquisition. ⁓ is basically the baseline of our methodology. ⁓ we become as close as we can to the pay language and culture so that when we bring this message of great joy, great hope, that we would be able to speak it exactly like a pay adult or as close as we could as a pay adult would, so that this most important message could be understood in the most relevant context. That would be one of the targets we have as we're aiming. The second would be that after we speak the language and culture, we spend time taking that culture, thinking through the message of the Bible and how it would enter into the the worldview of the pay people. So we contextualize the message through these lessons. And we develop our lessons based on a foundational Bible teaching method starting in the Eternity past, Genesis 1-1, from the beginning, and go all the way to eternity future in the book of Revelation. And we systematically and thematically ⁓ teach through who God is by his own revelation, starting where he did, at the beginning. So that when we say God, they're recognizing he is the creator, the owner, the gracious one who didn't need to create any of this world for us, but he did it because he loves us and he cares for us. Systematically teaching through, foundationally teaching through, we're able to see what sin actually did to the relationship. It destroyed it. It destroyed it so much so that God had to promise that there would be one who would come to redeem it. And every story we tell in the biblical narrative moving through is a perfect chance for your people group or for our people group in pay to ask: Is this the promised one? And the first guy is Cain and Abel. Is it Is it Abel? Is he the one? Well, spoiler, it's not Abel. And it's certainly not Cain. But all the way through looking, is it Seth? Is it is it Noah? Is it like who's it gonna be? And then before you know it, we're on the scene with Jesus. And that would be the very first stages of the methodology of Ethnos 360. Because after that, they hear the message that Jesus is the promised one. They believe that he is the one who justifies them through their faith in him. And then the real work begins. Now you have a baby church. Now what? Some people would think, okay, you evangelize them with the gospel, you've given them parts of God's word. They should be good to go. What would be your response to that? Yeah, over the years, ⁓ I've heard exactly that. Like you guys have done so much, you may as well come home. Sometimes it comes from family, sometimes it comes from friends. My response is always the same. I'm glad I didn't do that with my two children. My two babies, when they were born, I'm glad my wife Lauren and I didn't look at them and say, Wow, look at all this hard work we've done. And just left them to their own devices on the on their birthdays, right? They were too young. They weren't mature. And these little babies that even though they have so much potential, the human body is so complex. Look at these little baby eyes and eyelids and their fingernails and look at how they can make noises with their mouth and look at look at how they could eat and and consume. Like they're still immature. And we would never consider living our own leaving our own children in that state. Why in the world would we consider leaving the church ⁓ as an infant, as a newborn church in that state? You see. We were never called to make converts. We were never called to come and do this work of child development and then just leave them on their own. No, we were called to make disciples. We primarily go and proclaim. And then we stay, we remain, and we teach. And the reason it is because maturity is the end goal. A mature church is what we endeavor to plant. A a a church that would thrive in every ethnos, every ethnic group. I don't even know what the tagline for ethnos three sixty is. I'm trying to think of it. A thriving church for thriving church for every people. Okay. You can tell I've been on the field a while. ⁓ you can ⁓ our goal would be that we would be able to plant a church, a thriving church for every people. And we certainly can't do that by leaving them on their own in infancy. It's not possible. The movement toward maturity ⁓ has always got to be there. So ⁓ on this ⁓ on this this journey from infant to mature church, there's this phase called a maturing church. Right? This is where ⁓ growth is happening in it's following the same ⁓ pattern of development that that that say our own children would. They are standing on their own, but they're also falling. They're ⁓ cruising around and toddling, but slipping and and and taking a digger. They they are ⁓ having success in one arena and having failure in another. And no matter whether it's success or failure, growth is still happening. And so during this time of this maturing church, some incredible things are happening. Them realizing their place in the church, them realizing who they are, them realizing Jesus Himself has called them to make public declarations of the fact that they are a part of his family and It's quite possible that just like happened in Pay, that the maturing church actually gets together, hears this word baptism, and comes to you as a missionary and says, Hey, why haven't we done baptism yet? All of a sudden, in this maturing church, you're talking about the fact that there's this thing called spirit baptism and water baptism. And now all of a sudden they're realizing who they are and that they have been spirit baptized because they have trusted. Jesus as their substitutionary atonement. ⁓ They've accepted Jesus' work on the cross, his death to defeat it, and his resurrection to be completely approved by the Father. They recognize that and they say, Yeah, the Spirit is in me. Now, how can I publicly tell people? And all of a sudden you're in the water, a crocodile-infested water, dunking people. So that they can tell the friends and family that they have in their own people group that they have now associated and identified themselves with the creator and owner. And instead of talking bad about each other behind their backs, they're praying for each other. They're lifting each other up. There's gonna be an opportunity, possibly like we saw in Pay, where young people are seeing that they have a responsibility to the boys and girls of the village, and they take ownership and They begin to read scripture publicly to them. They begin to teach them through the teaching lessons that have already been provided for them. And this maturing church is ⁓ w essentially the place that we see how God's word enters into the language and culture, how his spirit enters into the language and culture, and then we're able to see what the people do with it. And when you go from infant church to maturing church, the natural progression is that you would see a mature church. This is when. The men get together and they start to work the missionary out of a job. The missionary goes from being up front teaching and preaching to now sitting at the back of the teaching house, the thatched roof, the tree bark walls, and the people from the people group are now standing at the front reading their lessons. They're the ones who are exhorting one another in scripture, systematically teaching through ⁓ epistles. These are the ones who are developing lessons during the week. So that would be primary is that there's a group of people in a mature church who are elders leading, teaching, and preaching. The second part of maturity is that they would themselves reach out to the people around them. Just in the same way that we left our language and culture, it might be required of the mature church to be sending others to reduplicate. themselves ⁓ to those around them. So the process from infant church to maturing church to mature church ultimately is going to take time. It's going to take time. And in the 14 years that we ⁓ spent associated with the pay people group, that's exactly ⁓ what was required of us was all that time. Go and proclaim the truth of Christ. Remain and teach them. Everything that he commanded and recognizing that Christ would be with us in the hard, in the easy, in the joyful, in the not so joyful, ⁓ he would be with us the whole time. This promise that his divine, unending, unwavering spirit would be right there with us. So So you've been over working with the pay people for over a decade. What would be some of your your favorite stories of maybe some of that life change that you got to witness firsthand seeing how they went from from darkness to light. If we took ⁓ anybody into a isolated community, like the pay were, you know, hundreds of miles away from anything resembling civilization, and they were to stay there a week, especially looking like I did, if you stayed there a week, you probably would leave and say, These guys are peaceful. They just need us You know, a camera recording crew would record it all and it would just be great. But after a week, a week is about all you get. At day eight, things are changing. The real people are coming out. It's not unlike we do for family holidays and things like that either, right? And ⁓ but at day eight, you will quickly see that the pay, because of their worldview, because of the fact that their worldview has them so locked in this language and culture. That is dominated by fear and the spirits of darkness, that they are animists at heart, where they attribute spiritual life to inanimate objects. So the spirit of the tree, the rainforest, the spirit of the river and the waterfall and the stone and the log, those are the things that are dominating them. And you see, they don't have benevolent spirits, rather, they have malevolent spirits. These are the spirits that only want to do that which is ill toward them. So they spend their lives trying to figure out what is the custom that will ⁓ avoid the malevolence of this spirit. That worldview is dominated by fear, dominated. So someone who doesn't speak the language and culture, they will absolutely think these people are peaceful because they don't understand what's going on. As you get to peel back the layers of the onion, as you get to the core of the onion, what the worldview is, you recognize that their outward behavior Is motivated by their lens, but that by which they look at this world. And one of the most incredible stories that I've had is because of the methodology of teaching from the us the creation of the world and the promise of the Redeemer in Genesis 3 15. By the time you get to the story of Jesus, and this is ⁓ this this happened with a friend of mine named Benny, he was one of the first believers in pay. He would help me write the lessons ahead of the teaching schedule. And so we are talking, we're hashing out lessons, we're trying to make them sound more natural in the language. We're working together on this. Remember, unbelieving man, but he's still working because he wants to hear this message. And I remember I took a picture of him. He's got his for his hand on his forehead, just deeply thinking about a lesson he was reading. And I happen to snap a picture of it on my iPhone and and he looks over at me and he says, Hey. ⁓ Jesus is gonna die, isn't he? Recognizing what lesson he was on, I smiled and I said, Why are you asking me that? And he said, His cousin John just told him and the crowd that was watching, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And I said, Why would that be important? Why would that f saying be important? And he said, Because I know what a lamb is. I know what a lamb is for, I know what it does. I know what it did in the context of the clothing that Adam and Eve put on. I know what it did when it took Isaac's place. I know what it did at Passover when its blood was spread on the doorpost and the lentil, signifying to death the angel of death that that was coming in. You cannot come here. The blood is here. Death has already been in here. It was one of the first times that I recognized. This is exactly the methodology that was appropriate for an indigenous. man in the jungles of Papua New Guinea like Benny. It was perfect. And he connected those dots through reading God's word in his own language. Another favorite part of mine is to see what happens post faith in Christ. And it's incredibly shameful to ever go to the jungle by yourself. If you go into the bush by yourself, it could only be for never nefarious purposes. It could only be for maybe sorcery or or or black magic, it could only be to to to do unsavory things, right? But it also could be a ⁓ indicator that you're that you're hopeless and you're just resigned to give yourself up to the spirits of the of the jungle. And so you will never see you will rarely see people traveling to the jungle by themselves. And in particular, you will never see women traveling Traveling through the jungles by themselves. They're always in a group. And there was one day where this lady was rowing downriver in her dugout canoe, a giant, you know, 10, 12-foot tree that's been carved out of the middle and it forms a little canoe, and she's at the back of it at the stern, and she's navigating the rudder as she's flowing with the river. And from the bank, I hear somebody yell, Hey, don't go to the jungle by yourself. Because the spirit who eats you from the inside out, he's gonna get you if you're alone. And understanding who she was as a redeemed one of the king indwelt with the Spirit of God, he was in her and she was in Christ. She said, as she's rowing, cigarette stogie, jups big old thing of, you know, homegrown tobacco leaf in her mouth, she yelled back, I'm not alone anymore. And it took one of the most marginalized people in our culture in pay, the widow. The single woman, no sons, no brothers, the one that would have to be at the mercy of anybody else to go to the jungle with her and collect firewood with her, gave her the confidence, the worldview shift, the change in her thinking that it could allow her the freedom to go collect the wood that she would need for that day and the following day to warm her house, cook her food. How have you seen him ⁓ provide and help you through? Some really hard situations. Being overseas, some people might think I could never do that. Up until the point that we left for Papua New Guinea, I had been overseas exactly zero times. And so I had been out of the country one time, ⁓ just south of California to Mexico for about three days. And ⁓ it while that was eye-opening and it was ⁓ beneficial to me personally, I had been ⁓ insulated and very guarded from the language and culture itself and not really doing anything but following someone else's lead. But this, to go to Papua New Guinea for the first time ever, after the 17 hour air travel, only to connect in ⁓ the South Pacific to finally get up there, into Papua New Guinea, I had this moment of Being at an air t airport lounge experiencing culture shock in a way that I never had. And I had my ha hand on the mouse, ready to click return tickets from Australia back to New Guinea without have ever having been to New Guinea in the first place. And this was day one, as it were, of this trip, right? My wife looked at me and ⁓ with a confidence and a peace that ⁓ I did not have. She said, maybe we should at least try to get to New Guinea first before we turn around. That would be indicative of the the rest of my years in PG. When I thought, with all the transition and the culture shift and and the change, even as as as minimal as it was from America to Australia, ⁓ the air the international airport at LAX and the International Airport ⁓ in in Brisbane. Even as small a difference as those were, it was enough to knock me so far off balance. But the Lord was faithful, number one, to use the people around me to help me focus on truth, to put my faith in the facts that he's good and he's careful and he's loving, right? Instead of my feelings that were off balance and awkward and and that that were that just had me in all sorts of different feelings, right? His spirit came alongside and said, Hey, I'm good. We're good. You're good. You're seen, you're loved, you're cared for. And remembering the fact that he's promised in his word, no matter where we go, doing this thing, he is with us. So from day one, at the word jump, I was ready to. Take all the years of training, take all the years of investment, take all the team ⁓ support we had behind us, and I was ready to turn back around and and head home. That's a silly one. But it was real. And it was something that I looked back to during one of our more dark days, where one of our close friends, who was an incr incredible reader, ⁓ he spent so much time. with me personally, teaching me his language, ⁓ investing time, taking me into the jungle, allowing me to, you know, step on the leaves and the branches and make them break and his food that we were hunting run off and you know, hit him take me into the garden and allow me to to pull the saplings of the food or the trees that he had just planted and cause I have no idea what any of this is. And he would just have so much grace with me. He was one of our first believers. He developed this j degenerative disease that we still don't even know what it is. ⁓ you know, ⁓ the medical world out there is so hard to access, and all we could do was, you know, send videos and photos back to folks that we knew in the States who were better equipped equipped to answer this. But eventually this young man lost the ability to speak. He lost the ability to walk. His body began to break down and deteriorate from just ⁓ not being active, from not being able to go ⁓ do anything. Even though he was there in his mind and in his head over the years he he lost the ability ⁓ to swallow and just within a few days of not being able to swallow water or food, the stopwatch, as it were, on his life began to tick. We'd have to help clean him up when he had ⁓ messed himself, and we'd have to bathe him and wash him, and we'd have to change him and we'd have to care as best as we could for him. We would come and pray for him and with him and over him. And it was a dark, dark, dark time. But in the same way, when we left for overseas and I was ready to buy my tickets and go back, the new believers in this pay church were encouraging us. They were pointing us toward truth. Justin, don't be afraid. Edgo is going to be with God. God himself, through his spirit, was speaking to my own heart saying, hey, His life is not gonna be prolonged by the amount of food that you're trying to f feed him or the amount of times you clean him up. Like what he needs is he needs you here with him, investing in him, caring for him, loving him, speaking to him, like he's human and alive and in there still. After using his people and his spirit, again, here comes his word. Justin, these are hard days, not for you. These are hard days for Echo. Echo is going through it. And not only am I with you, Justin, but I'm also with him. Yes, they don't look like me. We both have different skin colors. We both have different languages. We both have different worldviews. But ⁓ as we work together, these things come closely together and we become brothers and just in these dark, hard moments where I thought, dude, this is this is the maximum, you know, just being reminded by new believers, ⁓ young believers as it were. That Etgo is gonna be the first person in glory from the pay tribe ever with his creator and owner. And ⁓ and although it was hard, although our life in the jungle was difficult, blood, sweat, and tears, I do it all over. I do it all over.