Thirty Conversations with a Missionary: Helping Churches Operate Like One

By JJ Farmer

J. J. Farmer has enabled everyone to be a fly on the wall during pivotal conversations that shaped the lives of his family and local partners as they worked among East Asians so that millions of more people would have access to the Gospel. Against all odds and struggling through significant pain, setbacks, and successes while on the field, he was able to see tens of thousands of people become disciples of Jesus and watch the burgeoning local churches grow until they could not only stand on their own but send their own missionaries into the harvest as well! Find out more about how to engage the world around you as a missionary through Thirty Conversations with a Missionary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512790955

JJ Farmer

My name is JJ Farmer* and I grew up as the son of a Baptist missions minister. The investment of my parents and many others from my church have helped form me into someone who was willing to give up a very promising career as an Architect in order to become one of those “weirdo missionaries” in obedience to the calling of our Lord Jesus. For 12 years now, my wife and I have served with the International Mission Board, SBC. We arrived in East Asia with little more than zealous ignorance and a firm faith that God would save the millions of people for whom we went to minister. Upon arrival, we found that 8 out of 10 people had never heard the gospel before, and in our isolation and state of desperate dependence on God and His ways, He taught us many lessons that proved to be invaluable in our service to the King of all kings. We eventually learned the language and culture while working to plant local churches and we did so all while developing resources to help local brothers and sisters not only grow in their faith, but quickly be able to effectively disciple and train others to do the same! God moved in mighty ways and during our service in East Asia He transformed both of us into entirely different creatures in Him. God also worked through us and our national brothers and sisters to help millions hear the gospel, see over 45,000 people come to faith, plant nearly 700 new churches and see over 2,000 new leaders raised up in service to our Lord!!! In the beginning we were just two people, working in the power of the Holy Spirit, who were attempting to give a two-million-person target population a chance to become disciples of Jesus. Over time we became a small team of people targeting nearly thirty-five million!!! As time went on, we better learned how to partner with local churches and work to empower them as they partnered with us, teaching us vital lessons on everything from bold evangelism to reproducible discipleship to effective leadership development to mass church planting and ultimately to sustainable cross-cultural missions. During the majority of our time in Asia, I have also worked toward earning my Masters of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to being able to see first hand how my formal theological education was able to impact my day-to-day ministry, I was also able to see God at work first hand in East Asia. In addition to all of this, after a decade of infertility, God also blessed me and my wife with “3 sprouts” while in Asia and have had the honor of seeing Him at work in their lives as well as in my marriage. My kiddos have been blessed to spend the majority of their lives in Asia as a part of my family’s ministry and they have become an integral part of His mighty work in which He has called us. *Name changed for security reasons.

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Conversation 1

How Can I Help You?

I love training, and I learned early on that asking good, open-ended questions is a superior way to teach a lesson. Jesus is one primary example of that. As a result, a variation of this question is usually one of the first things I ask when I sit across from a church leader who is a potential partner in the work God has given us.

I looked into the eyes of a local brother who was sitting on our couch. What is your greatest need? I asked as I hid my nervousness.

The snow was gently falling outside of our flat, and the ambient glow of a cloudy day filled the room.

My new friend set his cup of hot tea on the small, white end table and asked me a question instead of answering mine. The conversation, which occurred in one of the most difficult languages in the world, went something like this:

Him: When you say what my need is, do you mean in ministry or personally?

Me: It doesn’t matter. What do you think is your greatest need?

Him: My greatest need in ministry is huge, and so is my personal need. Where would you like me to start?

Me: With whatever you think is your greatest need.

Him: Okay, nobody has ever asked me that before. Are you sure you want me to share whatever I think my greatest need really is?

Me: Yes!

I gained some confidence, but I wondered if I’d stepped on a cultural land mine.

Him: Our needs are so great! I will start with ministry needs. The leaders of our churches need a great deal of equipping. We love God’s Word, but we don’t know how to apply or preach it. The churches are spiritually immature, and I am afraid that they are losing their zeal to share the gospel. We struggle with church splits and raising up more coworkers. We also struggle with how to make disciples of those who believe. We win many to the Lord, but we also lose many. Our marriages are in bad shape and are not much better than those who are lost. We have no money or resources or training.

I thought, What did he just say? What does blroaudzzzgrblldainonwenr mean? Oh my goodness, I’m missing half of what he’s saying! Don’t panic!

Me: Can you slow down? Let’s go point by point so I can write them down.

I didn’t want him to know that I only understood half of what he said since I was panicking! As he repeated each item, I wrote them down.

Me: Wow. That really is a lot. We can’t do everything at once, but let’s try to prioritize your needs and see if we can do something about them.

Him: Okay, but …

Me: But what?

Him: Can I tell you my personal needs first?

Me: Sure!

Him: My wife’s lips are so chapped and cracked that it is painful for her to talk. The medicine we have here isn’t helping. Do you know of something that can help?

Me: Sure! Just a moment. I’ll be right back.

I ran to my bedroom and pulled out two of the thirty sticks of Carmex I’d brought for fear of my Texan lips cracking in the severe cold. When I showed my new friend how to use it, he was beside himself with excitement.

Him: This is fantastic! Now that we’ve dealt with my personal need, let’s talk more about the ministry’s needs. I think that evangelism and discipleship are our greatest needs at the moment. Next on the list would be marriage and family training and pastoral development. Do you have anything that could help with that?

Me: I do!

He showed a look of surprise. My new friend was responsible for many churches and had much more ministerial experience than I had, but then he said something I thought no church leader would ever say.

Him: Will you help us?

Me: Yes, I will.

We came up with a plan for regular training times for his church leaders in order to do copious and effective evangelism that resulted in mature disciples. We planned to involve the entire church in relational evangelism. We called it the Andrew Project¹, and it lasts from four to nine months (based on the needs of the church).

We were doing lots of evangelism training at the time. I surveyed many church leaders with different church backgrounds. I discovered thirty-two main obstacles that were preventing people from sharing the gospel on a regular basis. We scheduled biweekly sessions in my home with church leaders to train the small groups. We wrote lessons to address the thirty-two issues and to ensure that they were being obedient and faithful to the process. As our relationship grew, so did our training regimen and strategies.

Their churches grew by leaps and bounds, and we got to fourth-generation believers and third-generation churches during that nine-month training time.

Conversation 2

Lots of Converts and Few Disciples

The ambient noise outside our flat contrasted with the poignant atmosphere inside. My worn-down dinner table also contrasted with the vigor and adrenaline running through my veins as I talked with the pastor and his wife seated opposite me. They were engaged in what we were discussing, and I couldn’t believe that we were finally able to have this conversation. For six months, we’d merely talked about God’s vision and the Great Commission, but we were finally getting to the heart of things.

Me: Around the world, I’ve noticed that there are many converts in the church and very few disciples. Would you agree?

Them: Absolutely.

Me: Is this how it should be?

Them: Of course not, but what can be done about it?

Me: We have to be intentional to grow healthy disciples who can grow healthy disciples who can grow healthy disciples. Do you have an intentional discipleship plan?

Them: No.

Me: When people come to faith in this part of the world, what is usually the first step of discipleship that you take with them?

Them: We get their phone numbers and ask them to come to church. Eventually we want them to be baptized.

Me: What if I were to tell you that we have a plan and a flexible process for how to intentionally grow disciples and new leaders so that we can start more small groups and churches who can grow more disciples and new leaders? Would that interest you?

Them: Very much. What will it take to achieve making disciples of all nations?

Me: The heart of the Great Commission is the phrase make disciples of all nations. This can be broken down into two aspects² that must be kept in balance in order to attain the goal of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord filling the earth as the water fills the seas as described in Habakkuk 2:14.

Them: What are those two aspects?

Me: Quality and quantity. Make disciples equal quality. Disciples are not grown overnight. It takes blood, sweat, and tears to grow them. At the same time, we are commanded to not just make a few disciples—but disciples of all nations. That represents quantity. We must make disciples of all nations, not converts of all nations and not disciples of just a few. Quality and quantity must be kept in balance in our ministries if we are to attain the goal that Christ has set for us. What is a disciple?

Them: Go into more detail about what you mean by quantity.

Me: I have seen many who have shared the gospel abundantly. They reach many people, but they have no intentional discipleship plan for how to grow them into disciples. At the same time, I have watched many who do their ministries in such ways that only a few people will come to faith. Reproducibility is the answer to our quantity aspect. When we analyze how Paul did his ministry, we see the pattern was one of reproducibility. This naturally makes sense when we understand that God blesses us so that we bless others. In like fashion, we are to take whatever we have and entrust it to others so that they can turn around and do the same thing. We call this the Triple Two principle as found in 2 Timothy 2:2. Everything we do must be done in such a way that those we train can do the same thing. If they can’t do it, then what we’re doing is not reproducible. However, to only do things in such a way that they can be reproduced is not the only criterion for our work and ministry. We must also have something worth reproducing. We must have quality in the process.

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Them: Okay. Now tell us more about quality.

Me: We have to grow healthy disciples, and in order to do that, we need healthy leaders who will influence others as they become healthy churches. Healthy things grow, so we must strive to grow healthy disciples and churches. We have developed this five-phase diagnostic chart to help us understand what is needed at each critical discipleship stage. The second phase shows baby believers and what they need. Phase 3 shows mature disciples and what they need. We need to put a process in place that strategically places appropriate scripture in front of converts and disciples at just the right time in the development process. We also need to get new believers involved in the ministry as quickly as possible so that they can begin to flex their spiritual muscles. We don’t want babies to stay babies. They must grow!

Them: This seems overwhelming, but we agree. How do we go about placing appropriate scripture in front of them at the right stage of development?

Me: The good news is that in order to do that we’ve developed materials that are based on plain things are the main things mentality when it comes to interpreting and applying scripture. The idea here is that in two thousand years of church history, even though obedience is a basic requirement of the Great Commission as stated in Matthew 28:20, we’ve failed at obeying all the commands that Christ has commanded us. In Deuteronomy 29:29, it is explained that the mysteries or secret things belong to God, but the things revealed to us belong to us and our children forever so that we will obey all of the words found in the law. This is echoed in 1 Corinthians 4:6 where we are commanded to not go beyond what was written so that we will not be puffed up one against another. We want to focus on what God’s word most clearly says, and obey it. Once we master the basics of all of Christ’s commands, we can then move on to the deeper things. The training modules that have been developed were designed to address all six critical path areas for each phase. They are also very life-application oriented and simple to grasp. We’ve also designed them with reproducibility in mind. We want to grow new leaders as fast as the Holy Spirit will allow. We’ve designed tools that will allow them to be able to teach as