Anon.
Our new worker was frustrated. He couldn’t see the "new thrust" into an unreached ethnic group. He complained, "There just isn’t anything there." To him, it looked like the team was just a group that met and prayed regularly.
And he was right. Pioneering is starting with nothing. We were all working for what would be there—an indigenous fellowship of faith in Christ. Just at this stage, we weren’t there yet. We had no visible institution, not even a weekly meeting of people from the ethnic group studying God’s word.
But what we had around the city was a network of friends and contacts. Our team members spent their time with them in personal conversations in homes and workplaces. Making friends and building trust was slow. In fact, one of our early lessons was that we needed to take our time. Rushing to the message of the Messiah just made enemies of people who could have been friends. It was deliberately not very visible or structured, and that made it much more effective and far more culturally acceptable.
The best times were the sharing times when workers would tell:
"I met a young woman down at the market. She was very pleasant and we talked for a hour or so. I met her again the other day and she invited me to her house. I went and met the whole family, and now the whole neighbourhood knows me. I started sharing, and I think she’s quite open."
"I met a family not far from where I live. We talked a long while and they seem very open. They asked me for teaching about how to know God. We agreed to meet once a week for discussion."
Many things were far from ideal. New believers were sometimes quite fickle. They were still struggling with their old lives and how to follow the Messiah. They still had a lot to learn, and in a highly communal culture, sometimes had little control over their own lives.
Plans were all tentative; we had to learn as we went. Even though most of us were experienced workers, the people in this ethnic group were culturally very different. As nobody else knew how to reach them, nobody who could teach us how.
In fact, we spent extra time in planning and strategy, deciding exactly what we should do and how. People needed training, which mostly comprised of sharing what we’d learnt and evaluating approaches used elsewhere. It took time for everybody to identify gifts that would be useful with this ethnic group. Some didn’t find their roles straight away. Without a clear ministry institution like a school or a church, team members sometimes felt as if they’d been cut adrift.
And then there was Christianity. We had to think about how it could be presented in ways that would be understood and accepted. People seemed very open to the Good News of Jesus the Messiah but found traditional institutional Christianity quite repulsive.
The team itself actually took up time, because people in pioneer evangelism needed more pastoral care and encouragement. Spiritual warfare was a higher priority issue. Team members could be tempted in many different ways—one wanted the regular income of a pastorate. Another had family problems. Several had moral failures. Some didn’t like the idea that people could become Christians without becoming like their culture-specific version of "Christian". And some just went emotionally flat sometimes.
So here’s the point. Develop realistic expectations. Everything we do is an attempt to advance the Kingdom. It is all progress in some way, even if it’s only learning from mistakes. You are achieving more than a large church that works hard just to stay exactly the same.
The pioneer path amongst and unreached people might not be clear and perhaps you can’t start with a neatly defined role. But keep the vision burning, not only of an eventual community of faith, but of evangelism itself. We are not selling shares in a church company; we are bringing people to know God personally.