Missionary Profile: Preaching Christ Among Unreached Tribes in Southeast Asia

Posted by deangonzales on March 11, 2010
Be the First to Comment

I am Trevor Johnson, a sinner saved by grace and for the service of the Lamb. I am a missionary  sent by my home church of Bible Baptist Church of Maplewood Saint Louis (www.oldgospel.org), through the help of World Team Mission (www.worldteam.org). I was saved at age 18 after doubting even the existence of God. I believed myself to be a product of the primordial ooze, and I acted consistently with this belief for a time.

My wife, Teresa, a patient and durable woman, has blessed me in marriage now for 10 years and we have two children, Noah (5) and Alethea (2), who own the nicknames of “The Peanut” and “The Turkey” respectively. We want more children. At least 15 more.

I served 5 years as an active duty army officer and am also a pilot. I loved the army, was honored to serve, volunteered an extra year after 9/11, but I am also glad that I am out and that I am now free to serve a greater Commander. After military service, I finished a Masters through Reformed Theological Seminary, but don’t worry, I am still a Baptist (if Sinclair Ferguson can’t put together a convincing argument for the pedobaptist position, then nobody can). Teresa and I gained linguistic training through SIL and then we embarked for language school in Indonesia. Despite linguistic training, we still made many language gaffes, such as calling the “village head” the “village coconut.” Being a missionary means learning how to be humble.

Teresa and I are both registered nurses, but Teresa is my superior in this field and I bow to her medical decisions. She beats on a skillet every day at 4pm in the village to summon the sick and treat them from our front porch. Many people complain of evil spirits, but we tell them there is no medicine for that except for prayer. Malaria, fevers, malnutrition, infected wounds and even worms are common-place.

I sweat and labor among a remote tribal group tucked away into a dark interior corner of SE Asia. This tribal group inhabits fetid jungle, largely swamp, and exists in constant fear due to animistic superstitions, still offering pig fat to appease local spirits. Still being wholly ignorant of the germ theory of disease, these tribal peoples believe that diseases are caused by witchcraft, a belief leading to the murder of the accused witch. Most importantly, these unreached clans still do not know their Creator God or His Son Jesus Christ.

My area of ministry is 22 hours hike upriver from the nearest bush airstrip, so we have opened up a water strip nearer to us, wading the river and heaving logs from the bottom to clear a straight section of water so that a floatplane can safely land. The tribal clans lack nourishment, so we have experimented with fruits and vegetables. Tomatoes and watermelon all failed, but we are able to grow abundant corn and roast our own peanuts, in addition to long beans and kangkung (swamp grass). The people are wholly illiterate, so we are sending in teachers to assemble and teach the tribal children. In classrooms lacking a single nail, fashioned together totally by vines, this tribal group is struggling forward in its first steps towards reading the Word of God for themselves. I am struck that in Matthew 9, Jesus went teaching and healing the people in all the villages. I cannot separate my preaching from humanitarian works. Our Gospel results in aggressive social action and mercy ministries. I see no dichotomy between good words and good works and I have never been able to “just preach the Gospel” in this context. I believe all of us should be zealously seeking to bless this lost and dying world, by whatever means possible.

I try not to be a Lone Ranger in ministry. In the book of Acts, the Apostle Paul was not a loner either. He travelled with co-workers and ministered in the context of an apostolic team. I am taking highland tribal Christians, from regions where the Gospel has, in fact, penetrated, and I am equipping, mentoring, and melding these highland evangelists into an indigenous evangelistic church-planting team in order to reach the lowland unreached tribals with the Gospel. Through this evangelistic task force, we want to occupy and saturate these lowland swamp areas with a Gospel witness. Together we form a church-planting team of about 20 evangelists and teachers. Instead of pastoring an individual church, I split my time between evangelizing this unreached tribe, and in circulating and teaching this network of highland Christian evangelists. As I bless these evangelists and teach then, they bless and teach these unreached clans. That way the work becomes gradually less dependent upon me. If the Lord should take my life or my health, by this strategy the Gospel can continue to march forward without me.

If I ever became a pastor, I would be failing in my job. I invest myself in indigenous leaders who can minister and pastor on their own. Yes, I do directly evangelize my tribe, but I primarily pour my life into these national Christians so that the Gospel may become multiplicational and replicational, so that the truth may reproduce and spread long after I am gone.  II Timothy 2:2 is my missions motto; “And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.” The discipleship model of Jesus towards His disciples is my methodological ideal, and I strive not merely to share academic lessons, but also my meals, my travels, my very life, with these indigenous evangelists so that I may strengthen them and become a “force-multiplier” for the Gospel in a dark land.

Finally, I am convinced that missionaries are not merely to focus on peoples “over there.” If God has called me as a missionary, I must also bless my partnering churches here in the West by stirring them up to greater missionary zeal and in making missions practicable and real to people, clearing the road so that others, too, may come and share in the joys and the trials that I have experienced. I am mindful that in the history of missions, God has raised up missionaries by the means of other missionaries. As fallible and average as I am, the Lord has used me. He has granted me ministry fruit. And if the Lord can use me, then I am proof that He can use many of you. We are ordinary people who serve an extraordinary God, who delights to use weak vessels to spread His glory to the uttermost ends of the earth. I am living proof of the mercy of God, and the Lord has been pleased to use me. He will be pleased to use you as well.

My final plea to you regarding missions is this:

If you can go, do not be content merely to support. If you can support missions, do not be content merely to pray for missions. If you can pray, do not be content merely to sit idly by and watch. Be as involved as you can be. Seek to place yourself the closest to the frontlines as possible. The Lord may eventually afflict me and break my health, and yet “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” While I am young and healthy, I am determined to serve in the hardest place that I can find, out of joy and utter thanksgiving for Him who Has given me so much. I am mindful that we are as a mist and a vapor on the earth and that we must work while it is day, for the night comes when no man can work. We must redeem the time because the days are evil. We must use our short and limited lives while we have them.

Let me also say a word about the missionary call. If you want to serve in missions, don’t wait for the audible voice of God or a dramatic emotional experience. If your desire to go to the nations is seconded by Scripture and the larger Body of Christ, starting with your local church, then seek to go. Let’s de-mystify the missionary call. Let’s create a climate of sending. In Acts 13 we see the deliberate strivings of a church seeking to please God, and I would plead to pastors and leaders to lead from the front. We who believe in the sovereignty of God know that victory is assured. Our cause cannot fail. We could be sending out 10 times our present numbers!

Email me at: oct31st1517@hotmail.com. I desire to bless and serve you and be a resource for anyone wanting to go into missions. You can also keep up with our missionary efforts by following our entries on our family blog.

“Uncool People Need Jesus Too”: An Acts 29 Network Pastor Offers a Caution to His Colleagues and Provides an Example of a Healthy and Humble Self-Critical Posture

Posted by deangonzales on March 6, 2010
3 Comments

According to the Westminster Confession of Faith 25.5 (see also LBCF 26.3), “The purest Churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error.” There are at least two ramifications that flow from this doctrinal assertion. First, no church or ecclesiastical organization should assume the posture of having arrived at complete doctrinal and spiritual maturity–including Reformed churches and organizations! Hence, when we take too much pride in being “ReformED,” we run the risk of losing sight of the Reformation principle of semper reformanda (”always reforming”) and of assuming the rather haughty posture that we’ve got a “corner on the truth.” As a result, we can tend to spend too much time criticizing others and develop an unhealthy resistance to receiving criticism (whether from outside or inside our circles). Second, since we’re not immune to errors and imbalances and weaknesses, we should be just as ready to learn from others outside our ecclesiastical circles as we are eager to help them see their faults. In other words, we shouldn’t assume that we’re the only ones who have something profitable to bring to the table, that everyone else needs to keep quiet and learn from us. Rather, while we may have some insights and wisdom to offer our evangelical brothers, we can expect they probably have some things to teach us as well.

With the preceding remarks in view, I’d like to commend to you two recent blog entries by one of our seminary students, Bill Streger, Pastor of Kaleo Church in Houston, which is part of the Acts 29 Network, an association of pastors and churches focused on reaching the unchurched and planting churches. In the first entry, entitled, “Uncool People Need Jesus Too” (see link below), Bill directs a caution to pastors within his own ecclesiastical circles. Basically, he warns them against allowing a good thing (i.e., a burden and effort to reach the younger “hip” generation) to develop into an imbalance (i.e., a failure to be burdened for and reach people who may not be young and “hip”). In the second entry, entitled, “What I Actually Meant” (see link below), Bill provides some qualifying remarks to clarify the intent of his original post. He assures his colleagues (some of whom took offense at his first post) that he was offering the admonition not as a broad-brush critique of the whole movement but as a general caution regarding a potential pitfall into which some may unwittingly fall.

Personally, I didn’t need Bill’s qualification. I understood that his remarks were simply a generalization and that he wasn’t impugning the motives of those whom he was warning. Moreover, I understood the cautions as coming from one who was overall appreciative of the good in his ecclesiastical circles but who simply wanted to encourage biblical balance and maturity. Nevertheless, as one who has sometimes offered self-criticisms of my own “movement,”¹ I know what it’s like to be misunderstood. Of course, this is not to say that I’m always above reproach in the way I communicate criticisms. Sometimes I fail to make necessary qualifications. This is why I appreciated Bill’s humble willingness to post a second entry in order to clarify his intentions and even concede that he could have said it better the first time. In the end, though, I think every church, denomination, or ecclesiastical “movement” ought to remain self-critical in the spirit of semper reformanda. If you read both of Bill’s posts, you’ll see that he highly esteems the Acts 29 Network, its leaders, and the brothers who are part of it. But he also recognizes the truth expressed in the Puritan confessions, namely, that no church or body of churches has “fully arrived.” Consequently, he’s willing to be self-critical in the interests of helping his church and his sister churches to become aware of pitfalls and to grow in “the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13, ESV).

I believe that we, as Reformed Baptists, can profit from Bill’s caution against the tendency to be trendy and to mimic other ministries in ways that are unwarranted or imbalanced. Perhaps more importantly, we can profit from Bill’s willingness to be self-critical. There’s always a danger of becoming so enamored with our strengths that we become blind to our weaknesses. May the Lord help us!

“Uncool People Need Jesus Too” by Pastor Bill Streger

“What I Actually Meant” by Pastor Bill Streger

Your servant,
Bob Gonzales, Dean
Reformed Baptist Seminary

1. For example, see my “The Danger of Reformed Traditionalism, Part 1, and Part 2. [↩]

Does God Really Want All Sinners to be Saved? R. C. Sproul’s Answer to the Question

Posted by deangonzales on December 13, 2009
12 Comments

Does God really want all sinners to be saved? Even those whom he has not decreed to save but to punish? This question has been oft debated by Calvinist theologians. In this video, Pastor Mark Driscoll asks Dr. R.C. Sproul the question in response to an inquiry from Facebook. This question is foundational for the Free Offer of the Gospel. Listen to Dr. Sproul’s response.

Your servant,
Bob Gonzales