Last year week.

Seriously.

Check it:

ServeRDU from The Summit Church on Vimeo.

(Have I ever mentioned that I LOVE our church?)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuohmD4Ajk8

Three weeks ago, Osh, Kyrgyzstan was a very large city with a very large population of Uzbeks, a people group very dear to my heart.

Today, a significant portion of the city lies in ruins. Hundreds are dead, and tens of thousands have fled the city.

Many Uzbeks have gone back to Uzbekistan, where it is much more difficult to reach them with the message of the Gospel.

My dear friends and former teammates were living in Osh. They are safely back in the states, but very uncertain of their future. It is possible that their whole neighborhood has been burnt to the ground.

Please pray with me that God will use this to advance the cause of the Gospel in Central Asia.

There was a time in my life when Campus Crusade For Christ was an important tool that God used to shape and mature me.

I have met hundreds of Campus Crusade staff over the years, and every one of them impresses me with their passion, vision, and persistence in their desire to reach college students with the Message of the Gospel.

One of the hardest things about working on staff with CCC is that each staff person has to raise their own financial support before they can ‘go to work’ on the campus. Unlike a typical local church – where the staff is usually funded by the church community - CCC folks are usually working with broke, slow-to-commit college students. For the typical American staff family, this means finding a team of people who will collectively commit to giving thousands of dollars per month, making it possible for one person or family to focus full-time on ministry at a particular college campus.

I learned about this first-hand when I went to Central Asia right after graduating from college. I had to put together a team that would keep me funded for at least a year while I focused on digging into the culture and building relationships with college students in a DRAMATICALLY un-reached part of the world. Factoring in insurance, travel costs, training costs, ministry tools, and daily living costs, this meant that I needed a team of partners to commit to giving almost $2,000 per month to keep me working.

God was very gracious to me and allowed me to pull it off in time to get on the plane, but with each month, partners who had made a one-year commitment stopped giving. Some would email me and tell me why; others just quit sending checks.

The month I came home, I think less than $1,400 came in.

But even when your financial partners forget (or choose not) to send a check, the bill collectors don’t forget to send a bill. Plane tickets, medicine, rent and medical insurance premiums don’t have compassion on your month-to-month budget.

So where does the balance come from?

For me, it was savings.

I had a few thousands dollars of credit card debt that I carried into my marriage, and it was mostly a product of paying the support short-fall that I experienced in my 11-month stint overseas.

At this point, I’ll bet you’re starting to squirm a little bit about the topic and the level of detail here, so let me try and get to the point before you bail on me: Raising your own support is HARD work.

It requires faith with legs and walking on them every single day.

And that’s why I want you to know about my new friend Ben Meredith.

Ben and his family have been on staff with CCC for several years, and they just moved to this part of NC a couple of weeks back.

A mutual friend introduced us as two guys with LOTS in common – go read his blog and you’ll see what I’m talking about — from raising a toddler to being married to a pregnant woman to being really passionate about Jesus and His Kingdom: we live very similar lives. Ben is even an aspiring geek (like me), and his new job with CCC will be helping the regional office identify and make use of new technologies to help the ministry throughout this area increase their effectiveness.

But before they can fully launch into this new season, Ben and Jacq need to tighten up their support base, and that’s why I’m telling you about them.

Ben recently wrote about how support-raising isn’t about going around and asking people for money. It’s about putting in the work to identify those people who God has raised up to be partners in ministry.

And I believe that some of the folks who will read this might be in that group of people.

I know that money is hot topic, and nobody likes to talk about it. And the call to generosity is generally considered to be offensive. But if you read your Bible, you’ll see that about 25% of everything Jesus said had to do with generosity. And if we are His followers, then we should be talking about it a WHOLE lot more. (Check out my pastor’s recent blog post on The Generosity Matrix for more on that…)

Some of you have recently grown in your understanding of God’s call to generosity, and you’ve been looking for good opportunities to contribute meaningfully.

Others of you recently stopped going to a traditional church, and don’t really have a good place to tithe to Kingdom work.

Heck, some of you might not have ever considered supporting a college ministry, but now that you think about it, it makes perfect sense!

Whatever boat you’re in, would you consider doing two things?

1) Pray about whether God would have you partner with the Merediths in their ministry.

and

2) Go have a look around their website, and if what they’re doing looks like something that you would like to be a part of, get in touch with them (or have me do it for you). I know they’re chomping at the bit to sit down with you and share exactly what they’re doing and how you can join them.

Even if you’re not a position to support them financially, I know they’d love to send you regular updates about how you can be praying for them!

The article I just stumbled over begins:

WHEN her baby died soon after delivery, Gulbahor Zavidova, 28, a poor farmer’s wife, longed to be pregnant again. After months of trying she and her husband visited a doctor who told her she could never have another child because she had been sterilised.

The procedure had been performed immediately after she gave birth, by doctors who did not ask her consent. On learning she could not bear children, her husband left her.

“Not a day passes without me crying,” she said. “I was outraged when I found out what they had done. How could they do such a horrible thing without asking me?”

According to human rights groups, tens of thousands of young women like Zavidova have been sterilised without their consent in the authoritarian former Soviet state of Uzbekistan.

Uzbek sources say the measure was ordered by Islam Karimov, the president, who has ruled with an iron fist for 20 years. The policy is aimed at keeping down the country’s poor population — with 28m people, it is Central Asia’s most densely populated state.

I think something about our demoralized American sense of reality will tempt us to assume this is some kind of over-dramatization or over-simplification. But it isn’t. I saw the corruption of the Uzbek government for just shy of a year while I lived there, and I have no problem believing this.

It’s a dark, hopeless place with a dark, murderous, and thoroughly corrupt government.

Please pray for them with me.

The Summit Church has a vision to plant 1,000 churches in the next 40 years — most of them in un-reached countries around the world.

That’s right: one thousand churches

One vehicle for this effort is called SendRDU, which exists to help equip and connect people and families who are interested in investing their lives for the sake of the Gospel.

Last week, there was a SendRDU gathering where pastor JD attacked a great question: “What Does It Mean To Be Called?”

This is a rich question that I think all of us struggle with in different ways and at different seasons.

I think pastor J.D. did a fantastic job handling the question. Stephanie and I couldn’t make it to the event (no babysitter), but we downloaded the message and listened to it together this weekend. It was awesome to dream together and remember what God created us for.

I’m so excited to see what God is doing!

You can read his blog post on the topic here, and listen to the teaching here.

I’m curious: what does it mean, in your opinion, to be “called”?

]]> http://www.therieslands.com/2009/09/22/what-does-it-mean-to-be-called/feed/ 3 http://www.therieslands.com/2009/08/11/ever-heard-of-the-tatars/ http://www.therieslands.com/2009/08/11/ever-heard-of-the-tatars/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:04:56 +0000 Zack http://www.therieslands.com/?p=3827 You may have never noticed it before, but on the right sidebar of this blog, there’s an “Un-reached People Group Of The Day” banner…

This functionality is provided by the fine folks at the Joshua Project. The Joshua Project is dedicated to finding all the people groups in the world, and getting a handle on their status in terms of how they have been influenced by the Gospel. In so doing, they help determine exactly how much work is left to be done in order to complete the Great Commission.

Today’s Un-reached People of the Day are the Tatars of Ukraine.

Based on the best info available, which is from 2002, about 0.01% of the Tatars are Christians. That means that if you woke up as a Tatar this morning — living in a Tatar community and engrossed in the Tatar culture — you would have to know 10,000 other Tatars in order to know one who is a follower of Jesus who could tell you about Him.

“But can’t they just turn on the TV to hear about Jesus?”

-What TV?

“But can’t they just go to the library and read a book about Jesus?”

-Seriously? If someone were literate and if there was a library anywhere near their home and if that library had Bibles translated into the local language and if there was a way to read one of those Bibles without totally freaking everybody out, then maybe…

The Tatar people are dear to my heart because I had the great privilege of spending a lot of time with a couple of them when I lived in Central Asia. I spent hours talking about Jesus and His great love and sacrifice, and I realized that sharing Christ with a cultural Muslim is a lot like trying to tear down a brick wall with a carpenter’s hammer… slow and painful work.

In the end, I had two friends who chose to follow Christ. I enjoyed their hunger to learn all they could about Jesus, while it lasted. My team had to leave abruptly and I wasn’t able to keep contact with them in all the craziness. It’s very possible that they spent some time being detained for even knowing me and my teammates.

I wonder if they think we abandoned them.

I pray for them whenever I think of them. I ask God that they would remain faithful, even in such a dead and hopeless place. I pray that their experience with Him was deeper than the connection it gave them to some Americans. I pray that we will have some great conversations in heaven. Some day.

Please pray with me for the Tatar people. I pray for the followers of Jesus among them to remain faithful and multiply. I pray for those who are lost among them to grow weary of the hopelessness of cultural Islam, and that God would open their eyes to see the beauty of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

And I pray that God would send people to bring the message of the Gospel to them.

Do you believe God has specifically called you to stay in America and live a typical American life?

If not, what are you doing about it?

And with all that in mind, I’m curious about your thoughts and experiences.

Whether you go to church or not, whether you’re a christian or not, I’d love to have your thoughts!

(I’m playing with Google forms, so I’ll see what kind of cool ways it gives me to share the results w/ everyone!)

If the embedded form doesn’t appear below (after the break), then please use this link

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_uwWPE6lQ

I heart Francis Chan.

Take 3 minutes and watch this.

(Courtesy of Mr. Vitamin Z)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v32UvLWH1pg

Next weekend, I’ll be in Durham with some of my favorite Bible teachers in the world.

I can’t wait!

There’s still room to sign up if you want to join me: www.Advance09.com

Moves like this are common in Uzbekistan, as the government, composed of murderers and thieves moves closer and closer to the soviet dictatorship that supposedly fell apart after the Cold War.

Here’s the abstract:

In a move that appears designed to give the Uzbek government total control over the legal system, officials in Tashkent are requiring all defense lawyers in Uzbekistan to reapply for licenses to practice law.

Many defense lawyers believe that those who refuse to do the government’s bidding will end up having the license renewal applications rejected. Uzbek judges and prosecutors are already appointed by the executive branch.

Pray for Uzbekistan.

Pray for God to open the eyes of those who are lost.

Pray for God to tear down or reform the corrupt, broken leaderhship.

Pray for God to have mercy.

And thank Him that He allowed you to be born in a better place…

…very interesting thoughts from someone I admire very much, but who doesn’t often say much on the topic.

Here’s a particularly interesting and insightful snippet:

Lastly, the fact that Jesus remains to this day an active evangelist is of great encouragement to me personally. It means that children who are aborted in the womb, those mentally incapable of understanding the gospel, and those people who have lived in times and places that missionaries did not visit are not necessarily beyond the hope of salvation. Indeed, Jesus could visit and save anyone anywhere because He remains The Evangelist.

You can read the whole thing here.

Any thoughts?

My good friend Tricia and her husband just moved to Thailand with hopes of seeing children come to know Christ.

It’s especially interesting for me to read about their adventures because a couple of years ago I was with Tricia in Central Asia for a year and we learned a lot from each other as we adapted to life in a new culture.

If you haven’t made it over there yet, you should visit their blog and tell them you’re praying!

A few days ago, she had an especially thoughtful post.

Here’s a excerpt:

I also find myself a little bit resentful that I can just go down the street to the ‘mall’ to go to Starbucks or McDonalds, KFC or Burger King. Then, I find myself pretty thankful for the convenience of being able to buy the same toiletries and groceries here, more or less. One of the reasons that I wanted to come here was to live life more ’simply’. I found myself so much closer to the Lord in Uzbekistan, when I wasn’t surrounded by all the ’stuff’ that America has to offer. I really hope to find that here, even though it is not as simplistic here as Uz. Probably, this is more of a heart issue than anything else anyway.

We also went to a church here last night, and I found myself very critical of how they did things in a ‘third-culture’ environment. I kept thinking, “This is not how we did things in Crusade… Is this really being sensitive to the Thai culture?… This seems like an American church transplanted to Bangkok…” Whoa, Tricia… “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

Here’s an excerpt:

The case against Turgunov sends a chilling message to other activists that working for justice is a dangerous business in Uzbekistan. Despite the recent release of several other activists, new cases like this one show that any government critic will be dealt with harshly.

He got prideful about his success.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPo4vKoPd8Y

Does anybody else notice a spiritual lesson in this? (video embedded)

Most of my friends know that I spent a year in Uzbekistan, and that I would give a lot to go back.

I posted a bazillion pics from my trip when I first came home, but the server I used for those has become bogged down with spam, and most of the folks who read this blog now didn’t way back when those photos were new to me.

So, I’m slowly porting some of them over to Flickr, complete with explanations and everything.

Not only that, but if you spot a photo you particularly like, I’d love to sell you the full-size version for any price, and I’ll give the proceeds to support many close friends who are working to spread the Kingdom of Jesus in Central Asia.

(For a point of reference, $20 is enough to support one full-time native believer within the country for one month)

Click here to view the photos, and check back for new picks throughout the next several weeks!