By Jingwen Zhong
The summer of 2019 has been a busy one. I started to look for jobs and send out applications since May, and in late June, I joined a short-term mission trip organised by OM in a little-known country called Moldova. After coming back from Moldova, I went straight into writing up my dissertation and doing a summer internship. I then realised the consequence of being lazy to keep records of my daily trip in Moldova and use my phone to upload traveling pictures—I now have loads of thoughts and memories buried under my daily schedule and some 500 pictures in my camera!! But one prevalent advantage of reflecting on the mission trip a while after it ended, instead of writing down some prompting thoughts right after the daily travelling and the whole trip is, I can see things more clearly and objectively than when I was intensively engaged in it.
The mission team in Moldova was made up with people from different cultural backgrounds but with one thing in common: though Christians, we are all sinners in nature. That is why it was interesting to observe dynamics of the team and relationships between distinct individuals—we all had our own aims, goals, ambitions, desires, plans, lusts, fears, emotions and selfish thoughts. The people whom we assume are waiting to be reached out are actually sharing the same nature with us, and then here comes the question: what can we bring to them if we are all sinners? Financially, we may be in a more advantageous position, but there will always be problems that cannot be completely solved by pure monetary aids; otherwise, the world should have long been a better place. Or, we should ask: who will be essentially benefited through the mission trip, them or us? Terms I am using here (“them”, “us”) would be regarded as controversial to social anthropologists, as they seem to draw a clear line between the “developer” and people who are presumably “being developed”. After all, as I mentioned earlier, we are altogether sinners, so it is in fact hard to judge who are more developed than the other. But if then, what is the point of doing programmes like a mission trip to Moldova? What can sinners offer sinners?
[For the sake of simplicity, I will continue to address people who were in the mission team as “us”, and local people we attended in Moldova as “them” with no offense.]
Before I set out, a few good friends from my home church in Edinburgh approached me and kindly “warned” me not to romanticise the mission trip. “It would not be like that you are going to save the world,” they said, “You can only do as much as you can. Plus, you may find out that you get much more from the locals than you have brought to them.”
It turned out that they were absolutely right. We did not save the world. Instead, we travelled, planned summer camps, did family visits, talked to the Moldovans, read the Scriptures, shared stories and thoughts, made friends and sometimes enjoyed ourselves by being tourists in some places. Despite the team leaders repetitively stressed that what we did in the villages were highly valued by the villagers, I reckon what I did as trivial. However, have I not gone to the mission trip, I would never experience, realise, notice and contemplate many things that I never experienced, realised, noticed and contemplated before. As for a mission trip itself, it has helped me give up some naïve thoughts based on what I experienced in Moldova. But regarding the question I raised up previously, “What can sinners offers sinners?” I now have a clearer answer.
I can offer nothing, but the Gospel and my testimonies of what God has done on me and the people around me to show His love, mercy and glory.
The Gospel seems like a myth to people who do not have faith in Christianity. It is too incredible to believe and so in the end, many parts become questionable. For people who do believe, the significance of the Gospel has been emphasised by the apostles in the Bible, pastors, elders, parents, church families and even us to the others. But personally speaking, sharing the Gospel was more like a “burden”, something that I was not confident with, or even scared to tackle with. I considered it easy to talk about what Jesus had done and what it “in theory” meant to every individual on the earth. But once you started to explain the importance of Jesus’ death and resurrection in detail, you had to go back to the Old Testament history and bring up “jargons” that might only be comprehended by Christians. According to my own poor experience, many articles I read and many testimonies I watched and heard, I knew the whole process was a tough one. It was highly likely that you would have an intense debate or even an argument with people you initially wanted to share the Gospel with, and they ended up still not believing. I disliked (and still dislike) intense debates and arguments, and my intelligence was (and still is) definitely insufficient to win them over. For me, the Gospel was too wonderful but at the same time too complicated to be clearly explained. There were things that I could only feel in my heart but could not be able to express by words. I did not think that my gift given by the Lord was to share the Gospel and defend the truth of it by debates. I preferred (and still prefer) play the role of Martha, living my faith out by quietly serving and leaving all the tough and demanding work to those who were gifted at them.
John 3: 36 “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.”
Romans 3: 22- 26 “This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
As a mission trip, sharing the Gospel was a pivotal part. People in our team (including myself in fact) talked about Jesus’ death and what it meant to humans in various of settings—on the train, on the street, in rural households, and to different audience— acquaintances, strangers, the old, the young, the healthy, the sick, men, women, the Moldovans and each other. Sometimes people would stop and listen, sometimes people would walk away. Some of them would try to be polite, others would show annoyance to our face. Some shook their heads, some bowed their heads in silence, some smiled, some asked us to pray for them, and some listened and accepted with joy. Now when I reflect on these different reactions from people, I can literally see pictures that the Bible have shown us, things happened when Jesus and his disciples preached the Gospel thousands of years ago in Israel. Thousands of years later, the reactions of people when facing the Gospel do not change much.
The length of this mission trip (10 days) had decided that each conversation we had with the Gospel recipients was brief. Previously, I thought preparing to share the Gospel needed to take days, if not months or years in order to grasp every detail to “win the debate”. But in Moldova, every time before we set off for a new trip or family visits, we only had a few minutes to pray together. We prayed that God’s words would be in our mouths, and we prayed that the Lord would prepare hearts of those who spoke and those who listened. When we travelled by train, when we did family visits, when we tried to sing worship songs and share the Gospel on the street—all our encounters with people were brief, and people reacted in different ways. However, through all these experiences of trying to share the Gospel to people I barely knew and going beyond my comfort zone, my faith was strengthened, but also challenged in the sense that I started to ask myself, “Do I actually know the Gospel? Do I believe that it is God who put words in our mouths and prompts us to speak the truth? Do I believe that we sow the seeds and it is God who let them grow?”
In one of the families, we visited a man living with his elder father, who suffered from sequela of strokes. The man was a carpenter, but he was put into prison for many years after the Soviet Union collapsed. His father was already sick at that time, being left alone at home led to the happenings of strokes. When the man was released, he spent most of the time taking care of his father and much of his income on his father’s medicines. You can imagine a scene like this: in a small dark room, a few delicate handmade wood carvings of Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus hanging on the wall, small bottles of different medicines standing on the table; the old father was lying in bed, occasionally giving low moans of pain, while the son was telling us his past stories with a slow and calm voice; the whole house was soaked in sadness and resignation, and people who listened remained silent. However, among the shadows and darkness, some of us were stirred up by the Spirit to share with the man and his father about Jesus, his descent, his ministry, his death and his resurrection. The man explained that he knew Jesus and he had gone to church, but his poor father had never had the chance to hear about Jesus.
Silence was in the room again; no one responded, everyone was moaning silently. We did not know how to console this man and his father, regarding their desperate situation now and unfair treatment they had in the past. Sheer words from human were insufficient in this circumstance. We did share the Gospel, but we left the house with a heavy heart. Joy had not returned to this household, yet.
On the same day, there was an evening service in the church where we temporarily stayed with. When we dressed up like the local people and welcomed men and women and children in, I noticed in surprise that the man we visited before was among them! After the sermon, I saw the man shaking hands with and talking to other people, and smiles had returned back to his face. I had no idea what had happened after we left the house, but for me, seeing him coming to church showed faith and hope were growing in his heart.
Paul claimed in 1 Corinthians 3: 6-7 “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” Compared with “growing”, the processes of “planting the seed” and “watering” are far more visible, and therefore, they may be quickly judged as “effective” or “ineffective”. “Growing” is a subtler process that happens inside and is not easy to be observed, however, it is this very part that has transformed so many people’s lives. Also, “growing” can take as short as days and as long as years or decades, but as the verses above point out, it is only God who has been making seeds grow. He is in full control all the time, and he says, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens (Ecclesiastes 3: 1)”. I was so wrong to think that people who sowed the seed had to prepare in full, which is synonymous with saying it is men who can take control of faith—if we prepare and speak well, people will believe the Gospel; otherwise they will not. And the truth is, “neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow”. The Lord who has ultimate sovereignty takes initiatives.
Believing words of men would lead people to believe or reject the Gospel is also suggesting that there are things that the Lord is not able to control. But what does the Bible say? “For nothing will be impossible with God (Luke 1: 37)”! On another day, we decided to be “street pastors” in a public square. In order to approach people more easily and naturally, we bought many fizzy drinks in the supermarket nearby. We offered drinks freely to people who were passing by to start a conversation about faith. I was not convinced that it was a good strategy, so I stayed behind with a few others and we sang worship songs together. I saw our teammates who were in the front line attempting to engage with people but for many times failed.
After about 20 minutes, some of them came back and they just could not hide them joy and excitement. In fact, while they were offering people drinks and find opportunities to talk with them, a young girl quietly followed them but dared not to get a bit closer. They finally found the girl and started to chat with her. At first, they thought she was attracted by the free drink, but later on they realised that she was in fact more interested in hearing what they shared to people. My teammates got much amazed and they explained the Gospel to her. The girl listened with great attention and almost immediately accepted Jesus as her Saviour and Lord afterwards.
“Praise the Lord!!” Everyone exclaimed.
The Lord pleased her to believe, and He made it happen. I was wrong again—theological knowledge might be difficult to fathom, but the Gospel is not! Essentially, the Gospel is to tell people that God’s only Son Jesus died out of love and resurrected to bring life to many—so that “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10: 9), and so that one day “all the world may be saved” (Acts 13: 47b).
“Whoever has ears, let them hear.” (Matthew 11: 15)
Another unavoidable part of the mission trip was to give testimonies. By using the word “unavoidable”, I do not mean that I dislike testimonies, but I did try to avoid making testimonies as much as I could. My humble experience about giving testimonies for the past five years had indeed given me some other perspectives about verbal testimonies, apart from their initial aim to “bear witness” of God’s work on us (John 15: 27). Since I came to faith in 2014, I had been asked several times to give testimonies in front of people about how I believed in God. To be honest, I did not enjoy it. Because I realised that once I was speaking in front of a large group, I started to gloss over my testimonies. In other words, I spoke what I knew people would like to listen and left the other part untouched. Before I was on the stage, I also could not stop but worry about things such as what I should wear and how I should do my hair, all for this “special occasion”. Other times when listened to people’s testimonies, some were genuine, encouraging and thought-provoking, others were similar to mine—they were more like performance to please the audience and less “bearing witness” of God.
I then started to be very reluctant to give public testimonies, all based on my own experience and judgements. But during this mission trip in Moldova, the testimonies I heard from my teammates and the local people began to restore my confidence in testimonies. They were genuine and of no performance, they did not over-emphasise the happy ending, but showed how great and sure that God’s mercy had led them through when life became unbearable and confusing. Yet at the same time, these testimonies have pointed out to me that how quick I was prone to judge and trust my own feelings, and how much I believed in the power of human words but little in abilities of the eternal God to touch people’s heart and do marvellous things in sinner’s lives.
Mark 5: 19 “And he did not permit him but said to him, ‘God home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.’”
Humans give testimonies out of plenty of aims, but is God not in control behind all of these that he can “take the curse into blessing” (Deuteronomy 23: 5), take the dirty into cleansed, take the sinners into the righteousness and take away the heart of stone and put us a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36: 26)?
This mission trip has given me an answer.
Intriguingly, when I was dedicated my time to this whole new experience in Moldova, working hard with my teammates on the road, in the village and among the local people, once we have a break from our work, I always thought of people living in the city of Edinburgh. Before setting off for this trip, often I tended to think that mission work had to be done in foreign countries and missionaries had to go into impoverished, remote places. My reason was, people in less advanced places had less resources available and therefore had less opportunities to hear the Gospel. I assumed that people in cities were more likely to hear the Gospel considering how many resources they owned—but were they?
Every day I walk to university, and I can pass at least three people who beg for money and food. Do I often stop? Not really. In each lecture hall, there is full of brilliant brains— intelligent students and academics who enthusiastically express their own opinions and spread their great knowledge. Do they all know and believe in the Gospel? Certainly not. Even in church, when some of our friends have kept attending church for years but still do not believe, do they not need the Gospel to be repetitively explained to them? Surely, they need it! This trip to Moldova has enabled me to see the needs for faith are not only desperate in poorer places, but also in wealthy cities. Jesus told his disciples that “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few” (Matthew 9: 37). Likewise, the mission fields are many but the ones who have realised that are probably few.
I suppose no mission trip is easy, and this one is of no exception. There were many fun parts—cycling 23km in the summer midday, making cement together, building indoor bathroom and toilet for a church, playing dramas for kids, playing games together (Ninja and “Killing” game), singing thanksgiving song before every meal. They were many emotional parts—sharing in the daily devotional time in the morning and debriefing time in the evening, praying together when we were weak or perplexed, blessing each other with encouraging words, washing each other’s feet in church and listening to people’s testimonies. But I definitely had some really hard moments—when I was scared by the physical demands of some tasks, when I found wasps in the toilet, when I was mentally challenged by people’s situation in Moldova, when I got hurt on the road, when I felt dry from inside and so on. But I give thanks to all the difficulties because they made me realise that how I can and how much I need to pray for brothers and sisters cross the world who have decided to devote themselves to the Lord. I especially kept friends who had done mission trips in the past, doing their mission trips at the moment and were going to do mission trips in the near future in my prayers. No matter where they are, no matter what types of mission they work on, they very much need our prayers.
Coming back from Moldova, I immediately went back to my normal life in Edinburgh, university studies, summer internship, church life, worship team, etc. And I suddenly realised that in fact, the life of a Christian on earth is like a long-term mission trip! Morning by morning, we experience new things and learn new lessons, and morning by morning, we see new mercies from the Lord. As a Christian, each day we are called to share the Gospel and give testimonies to bear witness of God, no matter where we live, work, study and travel to. Our earthly life is comprised of different parts, some are exciting, some are scary, some are emotional and some are miserable. Just as our team did in the Moldova mission trip—we prayed and cried for God’s mercies and guidance in times of trouble, we were joyful and gave thanks to the Lord when our prayers were answered and things went smoothly, and we persevered when sufferings lasted for a bit longer but continued to look up to God—we need to do exactly the same thing to deal with our everyday life as a Christian. Of course, in the field none of us was alone, we were always beside each other to give supports, comfort, encouragement, and gentle rebuke with love. Elsewhere, Christians cannot live by themselves, either. The Scriptures urge us to “consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the mores as you see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10: 24-25)”. Through Christ-centred and loving congregational meetings, fellowship groups and households, we are able to always be connected with the Father and His Son Christ Jesus as well as walking the heavenward road with each other.
OWLS 