The book Pioneer Missions kind of just happened. Our family had relocated to Samraong, the small rural district capital of Oddar Meanchey Province. This province was home to many former Khmer Rouge Communist soldiers, a desperately unreached area on Cambodia’s northwest border with Thailand. Our burden was to continue our ministry of church planting in this needy area.
Our first church planting endeavors had been in Pursat province in western Cambodia. The Lord gave us the joy of planting a church there in the provincial capital. The Lord taught our missionary team much as we strove to seek how to best fulfill our ministry before Him. We wanted to be faithful to New Testament teaching and principles for church planting, doing so in a way that was appropriate to the context we were given. This exercise of heart and the experiences gained developed in us deep convictions about ministry philosophy.
With a national pastor now leading that ministry and other missionaries on hand to help for a time, we felt at liberty to preach Christ in a new area. We prayed about another unreached area of Cambodia to serve in and He led us to Oddar Meanchey.
An Unlooked For Opportunity Graciously Given
We were only in Samraong for two years. Suffering from an auto-immune disease had brought me quite low and I found myself often barely functioning. When I had strength, we taught professed believers there that were very weak in faith and confused. We had the joy of grounding a few in the Gospel, but this was not why we had moved there. I wanted to give my time and energy to widespread effort in evangelism!
When I was at my worst physically, one thing I could do was sit at my computer and write. I was so burdened for Cambodia, for church planting, and for missions around the world. And here I was largely restricted to my bed or desk. My heart was full—I felt like I just had to communicate my burdens for missionaries going out for Christ!
It was an extremely disappointing time of life and ministry, as you can imagine, a real trial for my soul. Yet God graciously allowed me to write and self-publish Pioneer Missions: Meet the Challenges, Share the Blessings while in such a state. In the next several years, we were blessed to hear of people reading the book, engaging with its ideas, and positive about how it had helped them.
Encouragement toward greater discernment
Writing this book was a wonderful encouragement to me personally. One major help it gave was to clarify my thoughts and enable me to communicate them better to others. It increased my understanding to be forced to express these thoughts carefully, weighing them against the Scriptures.
I wrote with various audiences in mind. One of these was leaders in local churches back home. We came to realize through our ministry that many pastors, deacons, and missions committee members in local churches have never had the opportunity to think through the nuts and bolts of missions beyond the need to go and give and pray. I hoped to encourage these to think through missions methodology. I wanted to help them towards greater discernment in the use of resources as they seek to assist missionary endeavors.
Another audience I sought to encourage was fellow missionaries, particularly those preparing to serve or just getting started. During our ministry we have met many missionaries who have received little or no missionary training before leaving for the field. Some have confessed with some sorrow that they had to learn as they went. These had suffered the consequences of many unnecessary mistakes early on in their ministries. I wanted to help our co-workers in the Gospel think through missions philosophy and its practical implications for daily ministry on the field, especially those who serve in Majority World/Third World settings.
A grid for thinking through missions
The process of preparing these those for a wide audience forced me to be much more careful in my statements than I naturally would have been. Meditation on the many passages of Scripture and their implications and applications helped my as a Christian first, then also as a laborer for the Gospel and cross-cultural servant.
My goal was not to attempt a how-to guide for missions–as though I had all the answers! Instead, my purpose was to help get people thinking about the right categories. There are fundamental issues that needed to be tackled so that missionaries could form their ministry practices around God’s Word and practical realities. I wanted to get those ideas out there, leading people to consider the principles involved so they could apply them to their own situations.
Privileges, priorities, and problems in pioneer missions
The book focuses on eight factors that contribute to the privileges, priorities, and problems faced by pioneer missionaries. These factors provide the main chapters for the book. Much of this book applies to every setting a church planter or cross-cultural gospel servant may be in. However, the illustrations come from our experiences in Folk Buddhist Southeast Asia, Cambodia, in particular.
Factor 1: Preparatory Work is Foundational for Evangelism
Factor 2: Guarding the Gospel is Crucial
Factor 3: Intense Discipleship Requires Dealing with Sin
Factor 4: Believers Face Profound Isolation and Persecution
Factor 5: Maintaining NT Simplicity is Crucial for Church Life
Factor 6: Misapplications of Bible Truth Regarding Poverty Abound
Factor 7: A Consistently Spiritual Focus of Ministry can be Difficult to Maintain
Factor 8: Changing Times can Obscure Unchanging Needs
Conclusion: Greater Freedom, Greater Effectiveness
Appendix: Run or Fight?
Positive feedback
As Pioneer Missions started getting around, I found that God was using it. Missionaries began to express how challenged they were by its contents. Pastors in well-established churches back home wrote of how the book helped reorient their thinking about their own ministries. Talk of translation of the book into other languages began. Opportunities to teach its contents in various settings came about. I was encouraged to write more, including for this blog.
Set on a new path
When the book was published, I began to have lots of discussions with God’s people from varied Christian mission backgrounds all seeking to better serve the Lord. As conversations multiplied, God used them to greatly increase my own burden to encourage and strengthen co-laborers in the Gospel. A few years later, Gospel Fellowship Association, the missions agency through whom we have served in Cambodia, asked me to become the Asia/Australia/Oceania regional director to do this very thing. The writing of Pioneer Missions has helped my own soul. God also used it to shape the direction of my present ministry.
I am grateful the Lord allowed me to write, a means of fruitfulness during a very difficult time for us. I am thankful for this set of principles that He has allowed me to meditate long upon. I am blessed to be a voice of encouragement to other believers about some important aspects of His truth.