Our family returned to Pennsylvania on furlough earlier this year. We have come to anticipate these times of connection with our families, friends, and home church. As we reconnect, I realize the uniqueness of living in two houses, in two geographical locations, spanning two drastically different cultures. We participate in two churches, but yet we are one family unit!
When we are on the mission field, we connect with a small church plant. We attend church regularly, assist in teaching the Word as needed, and encourage local men to take active roles in the church. We visit families and individuals who are members of this local body of Christ. We invite townspeople to come to church services and Bible studies and we point seekers to the truth. After others have spent years planting this church, we are enjoying interacting with a church of first-generation Christians that are walking with the Lord.
Our interactions often seem surface level on the mission field at this point. We try our best to communicate, but we stumble and come up short of the proper words. We try to encourage, but find that we really need to focus more on learning the local language and culture. We want to become “all things” to the Tarahumara people, but find that we are still building a communication bridge to them.
Now as we attend our home church in Pennsylvania for a few months, we go to church and sit amidst three hundred other people. Most of us can’t count how many generations our ancestors have attended a scriptural church. We talk, and we are understood. We rarely misunderstand each other! We receive teaching without being the teacher. We receive encouragement without being the encourager.
Today, I stop and reflect on these vastly different churches that my family worships with. I need my home church. This church is filled with fathers who work hard building structures, manufacturing widgets, and fixing gizmos, so that they can support their families as well as mine. Mothers keep house, teachers teach school, and children grow up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The lives and testimonies of these dear brothers and sisters encourage me. The power of the Holy Spirit is at work among this church.
I also feel a strong connection to the church in Mexico. God has called me and my family to serve. If I stop serving, I would be like Jonah who went in the other direction. For this church of only a few members, my tears fall. For this church, my prayers ascend. When Jesus said that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, it included this little congregation. It’s small, it’s unstable, but the power of the Holy Spirit is working within it.
It’s as though I have a foot in each church congregation, straddling cultures, traditions, and practices. But there is one Lord. There is one body united as the body of Christ. I’m convinced that God has called my family to serve in this capacity. Difficult? Yes! Sometimes we feel stretched between the two worlds. Blessed? Yes! We feel the support of hundreds of Christians who also want to see a growing and maturing church among the Tarahumara. Together we see the body of Christ benefiting and growing.
Maybe you should consider joining the efforts of sending and serving. It is a process of stretching and being stretched. But we do it with joy, because we do it so that one more people group can be around the throne praising God.
– DS, Tarahumara Project