A must read.

This book, written by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay who lead CRM’s Missio team in Denver, (published by Josey-Bass and available on amazon.com), is a challenge to the Christian movement to live out its missional, incarnational calling. It is illustrated with loads of personal experiences from Hugh and Matt’s own journeys as practitioners.

Tangible Kingdom captures the reality of missionality in a moving, practical way.

While the outside of the building was massive and imposing, it gave little hint to the spectacular interior. Stain glass, a huge valeted ceiling, and stone and woodwork that were remarkable in their artistic genius.

I’ve passed this church building numerous occasions during our stays in London. So yesterday to get out of my hotel and get a break from the computer, I hiked the neighborhood and decided to explore this edifice. I found an open door and went in. It was just me and a lady doing some cleaning.

I discovered there are about 130 active members of this congregation in a building that could easily accommodate a thousand. The parish newsletter was even sadder …a ministry that sacramentalizes a dwindling and dying population. Incredibly depressing.

As I marveled at this architectural relic, the words that came were almost audible: “Jesus has left the building!”

From there, I wandered across the street and came across a totally different scene. It was a Saturday morning, open air swap meet swarming with hundreds of people from every imaginable ethnic background. The smells, textures, colors, languages, all made for an incredibly diverse and vibrant setting. The contrast could not have been more stark.

I am on trip that will take me to the UK, the Middle East, and South Africa.

As Patty and I were praying before I left, she prayed specifically for divine contacts. As I settled into my seat on British Airways, I discovered that the distinguished African gentleman next to me was exactly that. He was an Anglican bishop from Uganda, on his way home after speaking at a conference in the states. A few notable highlights of the conversation were:

He believes the greatest challenge to the church in East Africa is that it “does church” meaning it is captive to the traditional and institutional and has lost its sense of missionality.

The greatest need in East Africa is leaders for the Christian movement and a means of developing them that is transformational and not just the impartation of information.

He is part of a think tank in Africa that wrestles with issues relating to the sending of Africans as missionaries but for the most part, he feels the African church, with a few exceptions, is not at this juncture. Existing models don’t work, particularly regarding the marshaling the resources necessary to accomplish the sending task.

When I asked if he was part of the Ugandan Anglican body that was accepting parishes of the American Episcopal Church which were leaving the denomination, he responded “yes,” but then politely corrected me. “These individual churches in the U.S. are not leaving the Anglican communion. It is the American Episcopal Church that has left us.”

In the course of our travel, the conversation covered a spectrum of topics, everything from Obama to the shabbiness of LAX. It was a pleasure to encounter and enjoy this godly saint at 35,000 feet.

I talked today with the folks serving with CRM in Nairobi, Kenya.

This couple, who are actually Nigerian, have lived and ministered in this East Africa nation for the past 20 years. I asked about their impressions of the violence and upheaval that has roiled Kenya after the conflicted presidential election held in December, 2007. One observation they shared was sad.

“In the midst of the social turmoil, the church has been strangely silent. And unfortunately, tribal loyalties have too often trumped kingdom loyalties. The situation is another example of the crises of leadership that grips the African church.”

In a land where the Christian veneer appears as a pervasive covering over all of society, to hear of another situation where ethnic bloodletting is tolerated or even encouraged by those who claim to be followers of Jesus is disheartening. It has the all too familiar ring of earlier events in Rwanda and Uganda. It is another example of the transformational presence and power of Jesus being compromised and being rendered impotent because cultural captivity.

Do you jump ship on a sinking vessel or hang in there and try to save it?

That’s a perennial dilemma that many people face in denominations and churches that are on the downside of their life-cycle.

There is a part of me that genuinely longs to see a whole new wave of spiritual vitality and renewal sweep through the Anglican churches of Great Britain. I appreciate the incredible legacy of the institution and the way God has worked through it throughout history. And today there are some bright spots in the Church of England which include some gifted, godly people who feel God has led them to remain committed to what appears to be an ecclesiastical Titanic.

However, I have my doubts that this moribund institution will ever see again the type of movement of the Spirit of God that occurred during the four great awakenings and revivals that swept the Western world in the past 300 years and had profound effects at every level of British society. The ingredients, both internally and externally that would provide fertile ground for such a movement are simply not there.

What is encouraging is that God is not bound by such human limitations. His long-suffering and ongoing compassion toward a society such as contemporary England will not be thwarted by churchly forms that have lost their potency.

My guess is that the best hope for the UK is for to God multiply a new generation of Charles Simeons, inside or outside Anglican structures, through whom the transformational power of the Spirit will flow. They are the types of men and women I want to look for.

Deo planto is sic!

Perhaps one of the advantages of being cultural outsiders here in the UK is that we may have a little more objectivity than those immersed in their own culture. I know this happens in the States when those from outside American culture see what we don’t see because we are captives of our own surroundings.

The past couple of months, I have been overwhelmed, and sobered, by the presence and the state of the Anglican Church in Great Britain. There is virtually no place one can stand and not be in visual sight of an Anglican church building. The legacy of this institutional bastion of Christendom is astounding.

What is sobering, however, is how completely out of touch and irrelevant the overwhelming majority of the Anglican Communion seems to be to present day Britain. With less than 1-2% of the population ever attending a service in one of these historic relics called churches, you’d think the Anglican leadership would realize that what they are selling, no one is buying. If the Church of England was a business, the whole outfit would have been in bankruptcy a long time ago. (And from what I have begun to discover, it’s probably headed that way regardless. Apparently the only thing that keeps the institution afloat is selling off their properties and “redundant” churches).

It appears that the Church of England and its leaders are simply in a different universe than the culture around them. The communicative disconnect is jarring in a country where more than 1/3 of the people are admitted atheists or agnostics and more people in the UK attend mosques on Sunday than darken the door of an Anglican church.

On one hand, there is so much to admire about the Anglican heritage. The depth of the theological and liturgical tradition, and a remarkable legacy are attractive to anyone desiring a sense of rootedness and historicity. As with Orthodoxy and Catholicism, there will always be people drawn to the richness of a tradition that has evolved through the ages. Yet Anglicans hold fast to an attractionistic model of ministry that expects the secularized and increasingly postmodern populace to come to them, which simply will not happen.

What is also heartbreaking is to see the wasted resources. It’s staggering. If even a slight percentage of the buildings, parsonages, and properties that are owned by the Church of England were made available to people with spiritual passion and biblical vision—particularly in the emerging generation—the impact on this society could be profound.

An article in the magazine of the National Trust describes the future of the largest landholder in England. It laments that “…congregations and parish incomes are in a free fall” and over the next decade, “…the trickle of churches becoming redundant is predicted to become a torrent.”

It appears that theological and missiological realities have not been adequate motivational forces to generate the necessary renewal within the Church of England that could stem its slide into oblivion. Perhaps the immense practical pressure that money and property problems exert will force the desperately needed institutional change.

Regardless, God is not limited by such human institutions and will eventually bypass such forms to create new, vibrant expressions of his Kingdom presence. Such processes have happened over and over again throughout history and it’s no different today in contemporary Britain.

It’s about 3:30 on a gray, cold, overcast London afternoon. I’m sitting in a very uncomfortable, rickety wooden pew at the back of the church of St. Mary Woolnoth.

I’m the only one in the building. Only a few lights are on in a magnificent bronze chandelier that occupies the center of the room. It’s musty, dank and has that old building smell. It’s actually a little spooky

However, St. Mary Wolnoth occupies one of the most prominent sites of any church in London. It stands at the junction of Lombard and King William streets, under the shadow of the Bank of England and a stone’s throw away from the historic site of the London Exchange.

A church building has been on this site since 1191 and the structure in which I am sitting is the fourth iteration. The second was built in 1438, the third by the famous Christopher Wren (architect of St. Paul’s cathedral) in 1674, and the last by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1727. It’s a majestic example of English baroque architecture.

But what is most gripping is to imagine what happened here in centuries past. From 1779-1807, the rector was John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace. From the pulpit that rises above me, he preached vehemently against the evils of the slave trade and encouraged others such as William Wilberforce who led the battle for the abolition of slavery in the British empire. Also, Claudius Buchanan, who launched significant missionary efforts to India was inspired by Newton in this place as was Hannah Moore, the writer, social reformer and philanthropist, and others.

Newton was buried here in 1807. On my left is a marble plaque that carries the following epitaph which Newton himself wrote:

JOHN NEWTON
Once an infidel and libertine
A servant of slaves in Africa,
Was, by the rich mercy
of our Lord and Savour
JESUS CHRIST
restored, pardoned, and
appointed to preach
the Gospel which he had
long laboured to destroy.

And now this building is a musty relic. Pretty much forgotten. Thousands of people pass by its doors every day here in the heart of London’s financial district, oblivious to what momentous, world transforming convictions had their genesis within these walls.

If only stones could talk.

John Newton and his memorial plaque at St. Mary’s

Begun 15 years ago by a restless entrepreneur and his family, the Little Texas complex in Iasi, Romania is an amazing example of what business for ministry is all about.

Now a 125 seat Tex-Mex restaurant with accompanying four star hotel and business center, in 2007 this thriving complex will provide several hundred thousand dollars from its profits for ministry throughout Romania. Funds from Little Texas go toward support of Romanian families serving as missionaries, church plants, and a nascent church planting training center in Moldova. In Romania, it provides local, indigenously generated funding for a church planting movement, sports ministry, theological education by extension, work among teen-age orphans, a medical clinic, a dental clinic, several effective ministries among the abject poor, one of the largest and most respected Christian 1-12 schools in the nation, and an array of evangelistic and discipleship initiatives led by Romanian nationals.

The array and diversity of creative, effective ministry that swirls around Little Texas is dizzying and a little hard to get one’s arms around. Besides the direct support for this broad array of kingdom work, the presence of such a business enterprise that is done with excellence and without corruption produces huge amounts of social equity and helps redefine what it means to be authentically “Christian” in this setting.

What God has led Jeri and Gloria Little to accomplish through Little Texas is nothing short of remarkable. Hopefully, the full story will be available in book form this coming year.

We’re under no illusion that Garth Brooks on the CD and the life-size poster of John Wayne that adorns the wall are not necessarily replicable around the world. But the function that Little Texas represents has profound implications for missions and how such ministry efforts are supported in the decades ahead.

The focus of CRM’s InnerCHANGE team in Romania is Steps of Hope, a well-designed and led ministry to the younger generation which is making a substantive difference in breaking the crippling cycle of poverty among the poor.

Diane Moss leads this team and brings some great experience to bear after her eight years of work in Cambodia.

I’ve traveled throughout Romania since 1984 and have seen great changes throughout this land during these years. But despite now being part of the EU and other cosmetic advances, the vast majority of the population remains locked in the grip of poverty and hopelessness. These InnerCHANGE staff sow seeds that in years to come have the potential to be like the mustard seeds in the parables of Jesus. While almost unrecognizable to begin with, these seeds can eventually grow into something that will bring radical kingdom transformation to those at the bottom of a society in great need.

Now the poorest nation in Europe, Moldova is struggling to overcome its communist past. However, the degree of social pathology and brokenness that exists in this nation can be overwhelming.

Dan Onu, pictured here, leads a team of Romanian missionaries who are generating a movement of new churches in Moldova. He and his apostolic band of pioneers have already planted three new churches and are putting in place an innovative “school for church planters” that will work with a dozen leaders at a time who can give birth to new groups of believers throughout the country. I had a chance to see it firsthand in early November.

CRM has been honored to work alongside Dan for many years. Also, CRM’s Enterprise International businesses in Romania have been a source of local funding to support these efforts. It’s been a powerful model.

I just returned from Norway.

90% of Norway’s 4.6 million people are registered as members of the Church of Norway (the Lutheran Church). But beyond being sacramentalized (baptized, married and buried), only around 6% actively attend the services of this “state” church.

While all the signs are there—and increasing—that the age of Christendom is over in Norway, this particular institution is proving to be quite resilient. What sets it apart from other state churches, such as the Anglicans in England, are probably two factors. First, is the small size of the country and secondly the relative homogeneous make up of the population.

Power, privilege and position are rarely relinquished without a struggle and some considerable pain. This is beginning to happen in Norway as finances and steadily declining numbers are beginning to get the attention of the ecclesiastical powers to be. Whether they can respond in time in any way that can alter what seems like the inevitable trend in Western Europe, is a long shot.

But from my superficial observation, I think there may be hope, albeit slight, that the Church of Norway, or portions of it, could be given a new lease on life and that the winds of spiritual renewal and missionality could quite possibly blow again in this body. I suspect so for two reasons:

1. At its center, there remains a core of Lutherans deeply committed to the historic confessions of the church and its mission. There appear to be some godly, thoughtful people who make up a sizeable percentage in this body. Some of the younger leadership is particularly impressive although it includes many who are justifiably skeptic that anything can be done to save this sinking ecclesiological ship. There may be some Charles Simeon’s lurking in the shadows.

2. With its posture in Norwegian society, this church may have a unique opportunity to stem its decline and missionally reinvent itself. If the will is there, the resources may still exist to pull it off. My take is they are on the precipice of the cliff and about to fall off. Whether the leadership has the guts to make such wrenching changes is up for grabs. The historic vote this week by the Church of Norway to ordain openly practicing homosexuals is not an encouraging sign.

There is a lot to admire in Lutheran theology. But there are also aspects, particularly in its polity, that are contributing to the free fall that is occurring in Norway.

What is encouraging is that God and his kingdom purposes are not bound by such institutional limitations. As he has done repeatedly throughout redemptive history, God may work through and/or bypass such moribund structures and bring new life and fresh expressions of his presence to a people in need. May it be so in the land of fjords, brown cheese, and Pinnekjøtt.

These are scenes from this year’s CoNext meetings held this past week in Kovagoors, Hungary, south of Budapest. Attending were seven nations where nationals lead CRM ministries: Australia, Venezuela, Hungary, Africa, the UK, the Middle East, and the US.

Keith Uebele, senior strategist with Intel and a member of the CRM-US board of directors did an excellent presentation on distributive organizations. Sessions were also spent delving together into topics such as recruiting and funding in our respective nations.

Most impressive was the depth of camaraderie around a sense of common calling and vision that superceded significant cultural and geographical differences. These are the men and women who are making it happen all over the globe …empowering leaders for the Church and multiplying the structures that can replicate an apostolic movement among the nations. It’s a privilege to be part of such a company of the committed.

As I write, it is early morning and I am looking out of the window of my room as a light snow begins to dust the ground here in Iasi, Romania.

Up in the Northeast corner of the country about 25 kilometers from the border of the former Soviet Union, Iasi has been one of the primary sites of CRM’s ministry in this country since the late 80s. Our focus here has been threefold over the years: a strong, individual discipling and mentoring work among younger leaders, business for mission, and an InnerCHANGE team.

The results of this patient, steady ministry these past two decades is nothing short of remarkable. It is a testimony to the power of presence. Some heroic people have given their all to help make it happen here on the ground, and others have faithfully partnered with us behind the scenes in prayer and through giving.

The results are transformational and are already altering the fabric of this society. It is a wonderful case study of the power of Jesus kingdom and how, despite human frailty, discouragement and sometime fierce opposition, the Spirit of God can bring new life in the midst of utter hopelessness.

Deo Gloria!

I recently spent several days with these skuzzy characters in Germany to get acquainted with a missional community south of Heidelberg.

What we saw and experienced is a fascinating case study of an emerging church uniquely crafted for Europe. It is led and populated by young, urban, cultural creatives.

Every generation has had men and women like this, but as Western culture staggers into the 21st century, the magnitude of this demographic is significant and growing. The future of the Christian movement in a setting such as Europe depends largely on how historic faith leans into, and is absorbed, by this cultural milieu.

• It is all about the creative arts …music, design, graphics, film, art, dance …


• Music particularly is the lingua franca. It is the poetry and vehicle of emotional expression that crosses culture and speaks to the heart. Luther may have changed the world because of the printing press. In our day, it’s the iPod.


• Media reigns. Film and video are no longer elitist but accessible to all in a flat, virtual democracy which provides unbounded outlets to creativity


• It’s a profoundly urban phenomena influenced by all the swirling complexities of “the city” in which the majority of the population in the West now live.

No generation in human history has had the leisure time or the affluence that allows for young, urban, cultural creatives to become such a sociologically dominating class. Even when such individuals were elitist and in the past lived on the margins of Western society, the effect on the culture was powerful. How much more so today when the margin is now the center and by sheer numbers dictates the direction of popular culture?

For serious followers of Jesus, the real issue has become how expressions of the imago Dei are fully integrated into the missio Dei. The future of the West hangs in the balance.

Soshanguve is a massive township north of Pretoria, South Africa. It’s hard to get an accurate count of how many people live there. Some say a million. Some say more. The name itself speaks volumes ..it’s a combination of the Sotho, Shangaan, Nguni and Venda peoples who were forcibly resettled in this area of Gauteng.

The group of men I’m with above come from all these different tribes, but they represent the hope and future of what God is doing in this place. They’re in their second year of meeting together and have been coached and mentored by CRM NieuCommunities staff.

I was impressed with the maturity and the depth that I saw when I was with these younger leaders. Most of all, they have the potential for being catalysts around which fresh movements of new churches could emerge in this township and beyond. Men like this are the hope of Africa.

“If you really want to keep your kids safe, middle-class, responsible people, keep them away from the gospels which will radicalize them. Don’t expose them to Jesus unless you want them to be martyrs.” —Alan Hirsch to CRM staff, August, 2007

I see all too often: parents who want their children to have enough Christianity to be respectable but don’t want their offspring to go overboard and become too committed.

Where this “enough but not too much” attitude may show up blatantly is when the son or daughter makes the jump into vocational ministry, particularly a missionary calling, and they have to raise financial support. Then the fat can hit the proverbial fan!

“I don’t want you begging for money!”
“Don’t ask our friends to support you”
“What are you going to do about retirement?”
“Can you really live off of that?”
“Do you really think this is a good way to use all that education we paid for?”
“You mean you may move overseas? When will we ever see the grandkids?”

Somehow the real Jesus who makes statements like Luke 9:23 gets lost in the well-meaning but mis-directed scramble to protect and preserve those whom we love from a God we do not really trust:

“If any person would come after me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.”

As much as we may want to sanitize it, the cross is still a cross.

The demonic is real.

Some people have gifts in discerning such spiritual realities. I’m not one of them. Nevertheless, I have no doubt as to the existence, the influence, or the power of such beings and have had numerous experiences over the years where the demonic has manifested itself.

One such manifestation that we see in scripture and in reality is that demons can be attached to people, objects and places. Recently, I have been in situations where we took seriously the issue of “place.”

John and Deanna Hayes who lead InnerCHANGE, the order among the poor within CRM, have moved with their two girls to Tower Hamlets, a borough in the east end of London. The flat they are renting is part of “estate housing”—the British term for tenements—that house an amazing and wonderful cultural menagerie. Their immediate neighborhood is predominantly Bengali Muslim.

Along with John, Deanna, and the girls, Patty and I spent time praying through, and cleansing, their new digs. We went room by room, anointing each doorway with oil, commanding, in the name of Jesus, any residual spirits to be gone, and then asking the Spirit of God to fill each room with his presence, making it holy ground. We also prayed for the function of each room to be sanctified and empowered by the Spirit in every respect.

I would do this as a matter of course for any new home or lodging. I frequently do the same thing when I enter a hotel room for a night. Who knows what’s gone on in such a public place!? At least while I’m there, I would like it to be filled with the presence of God and be a safe island of rest.

While I may not necessarily see the overt results of such prayer, others may. A few years back, we were traveling and another couple stayed in our home. The wife has definite gifts of spiritual discernment but the husband doesn’t—he’s kind of thick like me. Nevertheless, both of them, apart from one another, had visions in the middle of the night of demons trying to scale the walls and parameters of the property but with no success. It was “protected” and holy ground.

I’ve also seen what happens when these realities are not taken seriously. For example, when CRM first sent people to serve and minister in Russia after the fall of communism in the early 90s, they stepped unprepared into a spiritually dark and profoundly oppressive setting. When demonic appertains began appearing overtly in their apartment, they thought they were loosing their minds.

While our rationalistic western world-view makes it hard to buy into such supernatural goings on, it’s very real. It’s unfortunate that sometimes this whole thing gets sensationalized and consequently dismissed. But we do so to our peril.

This was the scene today in Vancouver, B.C. where 20 CRM staff from around the world gathered for a four day Theological Conversation on Biblical Holism and the Recovery of the Gospel.

That’s a mouthful. But what we are focusing on is simply the totality of the good news in the bible and how our own cultures can act as unintended filters to keep us from seeing what these implications are both personally and corporately. We are also considering how this applies to CRM as a whole around the world regarding the types of leaders we mentor, coach and train and the types of churches that we want to see evolve and emerge from our work.

In the photo, we’re wrapping up an afternoon of labor in a community garden that our NieuCommunities staff are cultivating in an urban neighborhood which is having multiple layers of impact on those who live around them.

One of the best parts of this conversation was the variety of perspectives in the dialogue from folks living and ministering is places as diverse as South Africa, Cambodia, Australia, Hungary, and various locales throughout North America

I just spent an intense week in Spain surveying it out as a potential site for a future CRM team.

Along with Alex Galloway (who leads CRM’s Staff Development and Care Team) and Danny Aanderud (Spanish prof at BIOLA who is checking out potential CRM ministry opportunities in Europe among other things), we spent time in Madrid and then on the southern coast near Malaga.

We had a steady stream of appointments with church and mission leaders across a broad spectrum. While our learning curve is steep and we’re just scratching the surface in getting our arms around what God is doing in the Spanish context, there were a variety of commonalities expressed throughout the conversations. Some of our initial observations include:

• Spain is a nation rushing headlong into post-modernity and secularization.
• This rush toward the future is a reaction, in part, to the social, political and cultural stranglehold of the Franco years and the tragedies of the 20th century such as the Spanish civil war.
• The aversion to Catholicism is extraordinary to the extent that the Catholic Church has become irrelevant for the overwhelming majority of Spaniards.
• Most evangelical church expressions are small, anemic, and culturally marginalized. Few would have any appeal to Spaniards under 30 years old nor do they know what to do with the emerging generation.
• There is spiritual receptivity and vitality among the immigrant segments of the population.
• Latin Americans are at the forefront of the most vibrant ministry initiatives in the country but are neither well-received or respected by most Spaniards.
• Spain, but almost any criteria, could be characterized as “resistant” ground to historic, biblical Christianity. Most mission efforts either take a long time to bear any fruit or are ineffective on their face.

It’s called the Beqaa. The massive rift valley in the center of Lebanon separated from the coast by the Mount Lebanon range to the west and from Syria on the East by the Anti-Lebanon mountains. In this picture, Syria is straight ahead over the mountains in the background. The Beqaa forms the northeastern-most extension of the Great Rift Valley, which extends down the spine of East Africa.

While historically the bread-basket of the region, today it is a harbor and a crossroads for the drug trade, money laundering, and terrorists of many stripes …Hezbollah, Iranian jihadists, and Syrian infiltrators into Lebanon to name the more well-known. It figured prominently in one of the first Tom Clancy novels I ever read years ago as a hotbed of intrigue and espionage.

As I was driving through it with one of the Lebanese who serves and ministers with us in Beirut, he mentioned that he used to be in the Beqaa several times a week and he pointed out the places where groups of believers in Jesus met.

I continued to be amazed at how God establishes his presence and signs of his Kingdom’s reality even in the most inhospitable places on the planet.

Lebanon continues to teeter on the verge of war and chaos. One of the major destabilizing factors contributing to the present situation was the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri in February of 2005. His death further catalyzed the “cedar revolution” which resulted in the end of Syria’s overt influence in Lebanon.

We passed over the place where a bomb blew up Hariri’s car on a Beirut thoroughfare. The blast, equivalent to 1000 kgs of TNT, gouged a 30 foot hole in the pavement and the evidence of the magnitude can still be seen from the destruction of the surrounding buildings in the photos above.

While the UN investigates and the labyrinth that is Lebanese politics continues to swirl with intrigue, life in Beirut is characterized by fear and uncertainty. Such instability can make life hard, but it also means people grapple with the significant and the deeply personal much more readily than those whose lives are immune to such trauma.

Beirut is a contemporary example of what historians and missiologists have always known; that spiritual receptivity can be the silver lining of social/political upheaval. The search for God and ultimate meaning takes on a new urgency when all hell is breaking loose around us. What I have seen firsthand in places like this is that the good news of Jesus is profoundly transforming when communicated humbly and lived out authentically. Such sovereign intervention by God, mediated by those on the ground determined to follow Jesus, is the only hope for Lebanon.

This is one of the few remaining groves of the famous cedars of Lebanon. I had a unique chance to wander in this remote grove up in the mountains recently during time in the Middle East. These trees are remarkable …huge umbrellas with massive trunks, some which were alive during the time of Jesus.

Wood from these trees were used in ancient times by the Phoenicians to build their trade and military ships, as well as their houses and temples. The Egyptians used its resin for mummification, and its sawdust was found in the pharaoh’s tombs. Jewish priests were ordered by Moses to use the bark of the Lebanon Cedar in circumcision and treatment of leprosy. Kings of neighboring and distant countries asked for this wood to build their religious and civil constructs, the most famous of which are King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and David’s and Solomon’s Palaces. In addition it was used by the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians.

One gets a very different picture of the realities of life and ministry in the Middle East when on the ground in the region. Particularly stunning is the perspective on the state of Israel shared by many of those who are followers of Jesus and who live in the region. What I found is dismay at the uncritical, and what they perceive as naive, posture held by many North American Christians in their unequivocal support of the secular Jewish state.

The facts are that that almost all of those who name the name of Christ in the Middle East are also Arabs. The cannot understand the theological and/or geo-political justifications that American Christians—particularly some evangelicals—give to political Israel and Zionism. It makes no sense to them biblically, historically, or politically.

What is happening in this region is incredibly complex. And the only long-term solution is the present and future rule of the Prince of Peace and his Kingdom, which has no bias regarding family of birth, ethnic group, or possession of land.

(The pic above is of a major bridge destroyed by the Israelis in northern Lebanon during last summer’s war. I had the chance to see it up close and personal. Bombing it severed a major artery between Beirut and the western part of the country and inflicted great suffering on innocent segments of the population. Its destruction had little strategic or military value).

We have people serving and ministering in Beirut who, with their families, lived through the trauma of the war last year.

When visiting with them, all things trite and insignificant pale in light of their circumstances and gravity of the Middle East context. They minister in a crucible where there is indescribable pressure from every side: radical Sunni Muslims, militant Palestinians, Hezbollah and radical Shiites, Syria, “Christian” militias, pressure from the majority Marionite Catholics, and the ever present threat of Israeli incursions, bombings and retaliations in which innocent people are invariably hurt.

In this unbelievable cauldron of political, religious and social turmoil, they are following Jesus with perseverance and integrity. Their quiet, steady ministry in Lebanon and throughout the region is making a profound contribution to the Christian movement on the soil of the lands where it first originated. The honor is all mine to serve alongside them.