Friends of the neglected
Photo credit: © Blake & Tracy Staton. All Rights Reserved.
"The missionary movement has been preserved in the margins."
-- Andrew Walls, Christian Historian, Author
Becoming friends with the lost was something I learned from All Nations Founder Floyd McClung. I remember how he described his friendship with the lost in the red-light district of Amsterdam. It was on a tape when he spoke at Christ for the Nations back in the early 1980s. We carried his idea of relating as friends with the lost to the mission field. When you care enough to listen to their stories, they open their hearts to you, he said.
After nearly seven years and language fluency with the Akha Hilltribe of Northern Thailand, we sensed a change was coming in our mission work. We were attending a village pig roast in honor of Bu-Sheu and her graduation from the Akha Bible School. Her brother, A do, asked if we’d like to visit his distant cousins, the Akeu, who lived just down the road. We’d never heard of the Akeu and were especially surprised when he told us we could speak Akha with them and that they’d not yet accepted the Good News of Jesus.
Within hours we were eating sunflower seeds and sipping tea on the porch with the Akeu village chief and elders. Our son’s Akha-given name, Ga-lo, caused an outburst of laughter among them. They corrected us, saying Ga-lo was truly Akeu and one of the most common male names in their tribe!
A few weeks later, word from those elders reached us: "Please tell that white family whose son has an Akeu name to come back again. We are concerned that we are becoming a forgotten tribe. That as our generation dies out, our culture will pass away and our children and the world will not even know we’ve existed.”
I couldn’t shake that voice. It was the heart-cry of the neglected.
Around that same time, we were invited to a gathering where someone shared the story of the lost sheep from Luke 15:1-7. The shepherd, as the Father God, leaves the ninety-nine to find the one sheep. Later, in Matt. 25:31-47, Jesus gives us a picture of judgment among the nations with this idea of the least. The people, neither the sheep nor the goats, were able to recognize Jesus among the least.
What if Jesus was hiding among the Akeu and asking us to join Him there?
We accepted His – their – invitation, and so began our pursuit through ethnography to help keep their tribe from becoming “forgotten” -- and through it all, for us to become friends.
Limitless in His creativity, God will go to great links to help us join Him in reaching the neglected – even if that means going outside of our calling, as Jesus did. He went beyond the Jews to reach those in the margins, like the Samaritan and Syrophoenician women and the Gadarene demoniac.
Friends are ready to be made there.
Will you join Him among the Least, the Last, and the Lost?
Recommended books:
The Missionary Movement in Christian History by Andrew Walls
Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity by Lamin Sanneh
Diaspora Missiology: Methodology, Theory and Practice by Enoch Wan
About the author: Blake Staton serves as Missiologist and Cultural Consultant for All Nations International. He and his family served as long-term All Nations missionaries in Northern Thailand from 1999-2017 and now reside in North Carolina, USA.
[reposted from July 10, 2020]
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