Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.
I had a chance to meet with Nabil Costa today in Birmingham. As one might expect with a Lebanese family, there were cousins running everywhere. That's much the same way we do things here in Alabama. One of them was Dr. John Constantine, who is the Pastor of the Arabic Mission at Dawson Memorial Baptist Church in Birmingham.
They were able to answer a lot of my questions about what God is doing in Lebanon, and about how we might fit into that. Nabil confirmed my estimates about our funding needs, and the amount of time I'd probably need to be functional in conversational Lebanese. The Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian dialect that I speak now will get me by for a while, but I really need to sound more local in order to fit into the culture.
He suggested some ideas about how to acclimate into the culture, including working as a Chaplain at the Beirut Baptist School, which is in a Muslim neighborhood. It would offer a great opportunity to learn the culture, as well as an opportunity to share the Gospel with Muslim children on a daily basis. If we go this route it will require us to rethink how we structure our support.
I hope that I was able to communicate to him our sincere desire to work with, and in submission to, the Churches in Lebanon. The United States will not save the world, nor do we have a lock on God's will. When God reveals his plan for Lebanon, there's no reason to believe that he'll leave the believers of Lebanon in the dark, and instead reveal it to chicken farmers in Alabama. Aliens, on the other hand, always seem to pick us out for UFO encounters.
For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.
Kim and I won't be the arrogant Americans who go there with our preset ideas of how we should share the Gospel. God doesn't have five visions or twenty for Lebanon. He has one body of Christ and one vision, and we need to find that, not assume that we bring it with us. There's a right way to share the Gospel in Lebanon, and there's a wrong way to share it. I want to learn that rather than assume I already know it.
Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
In the US we value our freedom. We're quite proud of it, and not without reason. Yet as believers, we don't get to wear that as a badge of privilege. Christians from the US are not somehow better or more enlightened than our brothers and sisters from less economically developed nations.
If there was ever a missionary who had the right to say "My way is the correct one" it is the Apostle Paul. Yet here we see him explaining clearly that the message of Jesus is meant to be presented to every culture in their own way. So pray that God will continue to teach us to be Lebanese to the Lebanese.
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