Last week, I introduced Google Maps as a tool for discovering the unreached people living in your city or region. However, finding the unreached around you is just the first step. We need to find ways to engage these communities with love and gospel witness. Today, I’d like to introduce four principles that will lead to loving engagement as you go out into the harvest—the places you’ve discovered using Google Maps.

Four Principles for Gospel Engagement:

1. Enter every situation with a posture of learning.
2. Approach every interaction with an attitude of love.
3. Default to listening first.
4. Engage with the gospel through discernment.

Learning
As you go out into the community, be intentional about adopting a posture of learning. One of the greatest kindnesses we can show to new Americans—whether refugees, immigrants, or international students—is to take a genuine interest in their lives and cultures. To do this, you’ll need to reflect on your own preconceived stereotypes and be careful not to make assumptions about the people you meet.

In Acts 17, the Apostle Paul spent time exploring Athens, learning about its people and beliefs. He discovered an altar to the “unknown god” and used that cultural reference as a bridge to share the gospel in a way the Athenians would understand. In the same way, we should become cultural detectives, searching for the fingerprints of God in different cultures to understand the deep beliefs, desires, and needs of those we encounter.

Action Steps for Learning:

• Visit cultural markets, restaurants, and events to build familiarity.
• Learn a few phrases in their language.
• Read books or watch documentaries about their home country and culture.
• Connect with those experienced in cross-cultural engagement.

Love
As you enter the community, approach every interaction with an attitude of love. Everyone you meet is an image bearer, known by God before they were born. Their differences do not change this truth.

One of the top reasons former Muslims cite for leaving Islam and following Christ is the tangible love of a Christian in their lives. If you are wondering how to love well in cross-cultural relationships, consider 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

This passage serves as a rubric for love. When unsure how to act or think in a relationship, return to this list and ask the Lord to help you embody these attitudes and actions.
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Action Steps for Loving:

• Regularly support their businesses.
• Offer practical help (transportation, tutoring, navigating life in a new country).
• Celebrate their cultural festivals and important traditions.​

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Samaritan’s Purse

• Food for Sudan
• Emergency Field Hospital Sudan
• Food for South Sudan
• Women’s Health in Sudan
• Relief for Ukraine

Compassion International

• Sponsor a child in Guatemala 
• Sponsor a child in El Salvador 

​Blood:Water Mission

• Clean Water in Africa

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Further Reading

• The Treasure Principle by Randy Alcorn
• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

One of the biggest reasons Christians hesitate to share their faith—with friends, co-workers, neighbors, or even strangers—is a deep sense of insecurity. Maybe you’ve felt it too. The fear of being unprepared, facing tough questions, or things not going as planned can be paralyzing.

Perhaps you feel unqualified.

But Jesus directly addresses this fear in the Gospels. In Mark 5, He crosses the Sea of Galilee into the Decapolis, where He encounters a demon-possessed man. It’s a dramatic moment—the demons, calling themselves Legion, are cast into a herd of pigs, which rush into the sea and drown. Overwhelmed, the people beg Jesus to leave. And so He does.

But…

What does Jesus require for someone to share the good news?

Simply this: that God has done something for you.

The man in this story had no formal training—no seminary degree, no deep theological knowledge, no long-developed prayer life. For much of his existence, he was the outcast, the "crazy demon-possessed guy." But then he met Jesus. And Jesus changed everything.

As a follower of Christ, Jesus has changed everything for you too!

Of course, growing in biblical knowledge and prayer is important, but notice—Jesus didn’t require it before sending this man out. In fact, when the man begs to go with Him, eager to learn more, Jesus says no. Instead, He gives him a mission:

"Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how He has had mercy on you."

And the man doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t make excuses about his lack of training or experience. He simply obeys. He goes and shares his story—and the people are amazed!
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The next time you feel unqualified or uncertain about what to say, remember this: You have more knowledge, more experience, and more access to Scripture than this man ever did. If God could use someone with his past, He can surely use you.

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When I think about the types of verses that I’ve been encouraged to memorize throughout my life, they have tended to be verses that record the teaching or commands of Jesus or Peter or Paul. Perhaps that has been your experience as well, but what I have not spent a lot of time memorizing are the narrative stories of the gospels or the book of Acts; the story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, the healing of blind Bartimaeus, the story of Paul’s time in Philipi or Thessalonica or Ephesus. One type of passage focuses on the teaching and commands while the latter is simply telling the story, narrating what certain people empowered by the Holy Spirit actually did.

This, I have come to learn, is the difference between those passages that are prescriptive and those that are descriptive. There is an important distinction here and I’m increasingly convinced that, as disciples of Jesus, we should sharpen our skills at noticing the descriptive passages to help us better understand how to live out and obey the prescriptive ones.

An example of a prescriptive passage is the great commission, “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:18-20). In this passage, Jesus is prescribing a way of living. He’s asking us to obey him and do the things he commands in this passage. It’s a clear call to make disciples - Jesus is telling us to do this thing. It is a prescriptive passage.

But, what does it mean to make disciples? And how do we go about baptizing them? And teaching new disciples to obey everything Jesus commanded - what does that mean and how do we do it? While His command is clear, when it comes to what we do on Monday morning to obey it, most in the church today have little idea. We tend to fall back on the one action we know to take - invite them to church. That is a good idea but, is that what Jesus meant when he told all disciples to make disciples? Invite them to church and hope that a thirty minute sermon will be adequate to invite them into a life of apprenticeship to Jesus? I think He might have had more in mind.

This is where the descriptive passages in scripture are helpful. In answering the questions above, the book of Acts gives us a front row seat to watch the first Christians make disciples. The twelve, the seventy two and many more had spent three years apprenticing to Jesus as he taught and ministered in front of them and with them and we can watch how they make disciples throughout the pages of Acts. They not only heard the great commission but they had also watched Jesus do it. Because of this I think we can assume that they had a fairly clear idea of what Jesus was expecting of them and so as we watch their lives, we’ll see real time examples of what Jesus meant when he gave the great commission. The description of their lives and actions fill in the blanks of our understanding.

Do descriptive passages hold the same weight as the prescriptive ones?  No. Prescriptive passages tell us truth about God and share the commands of Scripture. The Bible is clear that Jesus expects us to obey his commands. With descriptive passages however, we simply get a front row seat to watching the first disciples live out those truths and obey the commands in their particular time and context. It is important to understand that their time and context was different than ours.

Jesus healed in all kinds of interesting ways. In the gospels we can see examples of him healing others - with a word, with a touch or embrace, by spitting and making mud or sticking his fingers in a person’s ears. These are descriptive passages but I don’t think anyone would say that in order to heal a person we need to spit and make mud. If the Holy Spirit leads us to do such a thing, we sure should but while the Bible does call us to pray for healing, how we do that might not matter so much. There are many examples from the church in Acts that don’t make a lot of sense for Christians living in the modern world and many more that aren’t the only way to do a thing.
 
While the examples in scripture don’t hold the same weight as the clear teachings of scripture, it is vitally important that we regularly hold our methods and ideas up the mirror of scripture and think reflectively why we do one thing when the Apostles and first Chrsitians did things so differently.

As an example, Jesus’ command his disciples (that includes us) to baptize new believers. The example in the book of Acts is of immediate baptism. The longest time between conversion and baptism that I can find is the Apostle Paul who waited in blind darkness for three days before Ananias arrived. In my modern day church experiences, baptism is often put off for months and even years as we wait for the new believer to go through some sort of class so that we, the older more mature Christians, can make sure they are ready. Is it wrong to baptize in our way? I don’t think so but this is why the descriptive passages can be so helpful. They cause us to look at our traditions, the way we do things, and compare them to what those closest to Jesus did. And in this case, it causes me to question why we deviated from the pattern of the Apostles. Are we somehow smarter than Paul and Peter? Do we have some insight that they did not? The fruit of mature disciples seems more abundant in their time than it does in our modern western churches. Food for thought I guess.

Another example is how churches come into being in the book of Acts. I hesitate to use the word “planted” because I’m not sure we can find enough evidence that Paul’s goal was to plant churches and his methods are so apples to oranges different than our modern approach, that the phrase “church planting” ends up being a distraction. To be sure, Jesus intends the church - the gathered body of believers in any one location - to be his outpost in a broken world. He will build his church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. But as we follow Paul, in particular, through the second half of Acts, his method seems to be focused on making disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey the commands of Jesus and then, the church always emerges. But in another mind blowing observation, these churches are immediately led by the brand new believers in each city. Nobody plants churches like this in North America. We generally tend to transplant a group of mature believers with a sizable budget into a new location where the outsiders will lead for the foreseeable future. Is this wrong? Again, I don’t thinks so. It’s just another way to do it. But it is not the example of Paul which should cause us again to wrestle with our assumptions and beliefs about church planting. We often talk about Paul being the most prolific missionary and church planter in history so it is curious why we’ve so readily disregarded his example?

So while the descriptive passages help us understand and apply the prescriptive ones, they also have a way of causing us to reflect on our own assumptions about ministry. But we cannot give them the same weight of authority. To do that would require us to walk everywhere we go and to write letters to communicate with other believers because that is how Jesus and Paul did it. That would be legalistic folly.

It could however be a good idea to add a new bracelet next to our W.W.J.D bracelets, W.D.J.D - What DID Jesus do? Going back to Paul’s church planting method, he seems to have adopted the W.D.J.D model, looking at the example of how Jesus did ministry and then copying it almost to a T.  In Luke 10, Jesus sends out the 72 into new regions which he had not yet entered. They were to enter the city or town, proclaim the kingdom and then, if a person invited them into their home, they were to stay with that person. This is exactly what we see Paul doing in Philippi - proclaim the kingdom down by the river, stay with Lydia - and in Thessalonica - enter the city (the synagogue), stay with Jason. If you study Luke 10 and then follow Paul’s missionary journeys, you’ll see that he is following the example of Jesus. For Paul it seems, if it was the way Jesus did it, he would do it too.

I hope that as you immerse yourselves in scripture you will become more aware of how the descriptive examples of Jesus and the first church help fill in the gaps of the more prescriptive passages. It has certainly challenged me to grow in my ability to recognize what it is that I do that is built more on modern ideas from business or psychology or pop culture. It’s a hard challenge but a good one and leads me to prayerfully begin realigning my beliefs and behaviors with the teaching and example of scripture.​

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I long ago noticed that Bezalel and Oholiab are, as artisan creatives, the first people in the Bible to be ‘filled with the Spirit of God’ (Exodus 31:3) but I recently found, three chapters later, that they were also given the ability to teach others. The work seems to have been too big for them to accomplish alone - they are going to need to train others, to bring on apprentices who can join them at the craftsman’s table. The creation of the tabernacle and all of its components was God sized work and thus required a God sized workforce. This would only come about through the multiplication of workers and so God saw fit to give Bezalel and Oholiab the ability to teach and train others.

I wonder how Adam and Eve felt when God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28). I’ve read that passage most of my life without really feeling the gravity of the God sized job that had been given to the first couple. I can wrap my mind around being fruitful and increasing in number, but fill the earth? Subdue it? I struggle to keep my lawn mowed but the whole earth? This is a God sized job! It could only be accomplished if the workers are multiplied and trained. And God seems focused on multiplication in Genesis 1:

• Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” (Day 3)
• God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” (Day 5)

Fruit seed is exponentially powerful. It is by nature multiplicative. An entire apple orchard lies hidden in the flesh of a single apple. Wheat to feed the nations is contained in a single wheat kernel. Multiplication is built into the very fabric of the cosmos - it is the way God created things. It is the pattern in nature and an intended pattern in the church as well.
 
Creatives like Bezalel and Oholiab were given the ability to teach others and to multiply their gifts. Jesus told his disciples to go and make disciples, to teach them to obey his teachings. He chose 12 good seeds knowing that as they do what he did, they will multiply (Matthew 28:18-20). Paul tells Timothy to take the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others (2 Timothy 2:2). And Christ gives the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers and pastors to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:11-13).

Jesus tells us that He will build his church (Matthew 16:18) but we are to make disciples: to teach, to equip, to train, to entrust, to build up, to mentor, – to multiply. Disciple making at every level of the church would seem to be the Jesus method. Are you the pastor?  Who are you training and teaching to do your job? Are you a Sunday school teacher? Who are you inviting in alongside you to equip and prepare?  Are you a brand new believer? Who are you entrusting with the things you are learning? You don’t need to be a theologian, just obedient to teach someone the last new thing you learned about following the Lord.

God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and increase in number, to fill the earth and subdue it. Think about your town or city, your neighborhood or country - think about the unreached world, over 3 billion people who have no real access to the gospel. There are all kinds of good things we can do as Christians but making disciples is perhaps the most clear command we’ve received from Jesus and it is a principle found in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. If God called two artists to teach others to do the thing He had called them to do, He’s calling you as well.

Let’s multiply.

Let’s make disciples.

Not just the professionals but all of us.

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A person born in 1900 came of age as World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic ravaged the world. They started their family in the affluence of the 20’s, raised that family through the dire poverty of the Great Depression and then, despite the promise that the war they fought would end all wars, sent their sons off to fight - and for many, to die in the Second World War. This jumble of life experience formed that generation. The context and circumstances of the decades we live through always form who we are and who we become. This was true for their generation, it’s true for ours and it will be true for our children's as well.

Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012 and currently ages twelve to twenty seven, are no different. The context and circumstances of their lives are forming them in the same sorts of ways previous generations were formed. Like those who came before them, this formation has caused them to have certain characteristics and values that make them different from previous generations in both positive and negative ways.

Gen Z however, is one of those unique generations living through a great turning point in history. The industrial economy is quickly giving away to the information economy. While past turning points, like the industrial revolution, were decades long and gave people the opportunity to plan and reflect and adapt, this cohort is living through a change that, in comparison, is happening overnight. The home computer showed up in the early 80s and became fairly common within a decade. The Internet - and this is where the turning point really takes shape - was accessible by 16 million people worldwide in 1995, had skyrocketed to 1 billion by 2005, 3.2 billion by 2015 and 5.4 billion today. The iPhone came out in 2007, social media in 2012 and the world has never been the same. One day we had computers and the Internet on our desk, the next day, they were in our pockets. The smartphone life is all Gen Z has ever known. For the rest of us, born prior to 1997, we had a different life and upbringing. Gen Z is the first generation to be formed by more than their immediate context and circumstances. Spending an average of 7 hours a day on their phones, the digital world they inhabit is undoubtedly forming who they are and who they will become as much, if not more, than their immediate context of the embodied world around them; their family, friends, neighborhood and religious communities.


[Read: The Missions Movement Needs Gen Z]


The Lausanne Movement recently released a report, “The State of the Great Commission”. In their online launch of the report, I jumped into the “What is Digital Life?” breakout session to walk through the findings. It was there that our host used the term, “Augmented Digital Identity” (ADI).  ADI is most often used in discussions of online security and blockchain and other things that I’ve not yet fully wrapped my mind around, but in this context, ADI was crystal clear. 

My identity growing up through my teen years was largely shaped by my available circumstances and context. My parents, teachers, youth pastor and friends were my main influence. Television was still coming through our antenna and the handful of channels didn’t offer much in the way of diverse thought. Our public and school libraries were treasure troves of information but were limited to the space available on the shelves. Reading Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Mitchner’s 800 page tome, The Drifters gave me a romantic inclination toward a hippy lifestyle but it never got much more developed than trying to grow my hair out for a few months. There was just not enough input of these types of ideas to shape my identity in any lasting way. I still love the music of the late 60’s and early 70’s but beyond that I’m pretty plain Jane. 

Members of Gen Z however are being shaped by an onslaught of input from every corner of the world through their smartphones. I’ve not seen any comparative studies but I’d guess that Gen Z sees, reads, or watches more messages in a week than I came across in a year, maybe more.

As a rather disturbing example, in a recent study I came across in Jon Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation and reported on in The New York Times, Tik Tok began pushing videos about eating disorders and self harm to 13 year old girls within 30 minutes of their joining the platform. A steady stream of any issue will begin to shape the identities of anyone and social media is created to do just that. The identities of Gen Z, like every generation, are being shaped by the circumstances and the context of their lives. It just so happens that theirs is the first generation to be shaped by a digital space rather than the real, flesh and blood spaces of their homes, neighborhood and schools. This is the augmented digital identity.

There is much that is problematic about the phone based life of many in Gen Z. Haidt’s book or his Substack After Babel would be excellent places to learn more. The augmented digital identity does however prepare Gen Z in unique ways to interact with an increasingly globalized world. They - and when I say “they” I mean Gen Z in every country on earth - have more in common with one another than any generation prior. Sixteen year olds in China and Mozambique, Canada and Mexico, the U.S. and Vietnam are all watching the same TikToks, seeing the same Instagram influencers and are all learning how to fix their iPhone from the same Youtube videos. They share gaming advice with one another on Discord and they openly mock those of us who still use Facebook. They are poised to work together in business and service better than any generation in history. Their embodied identities are still culturally defined by their local community but the augmented digital identity is flattening this out as it moves toward the center where they are interacting with people and content online from all over the world.

They are the most interculturally connected generation to ever walk the earth making them a generation poised and prepared to do great things in new ways. I for one want to learn how to support and encourage them in doing just that.

Also Read: Gen Z, Epic Learning and the Future of the Church