Lift Up Your Eyes

January has been a bit of a blur and a lot of travel. We’re still in Canada, but been traveling down to Pennsylvania several times with a family health situation with one of our adult children. We have sensed the peace of God, and are learning how to wait it seems in every area of life from vocational seasons, to shifting family priorities. Through it all, we are acutely aware of the mercy of Jesus, the love of the Father, and the invitation of the Spirit.

Last night Deb and I shared to 160 folks at a supporting church in Canada, Emmanuel Baptist. We were able to highlight Ukraine, and share a fresh video from the front lines and our good friend Dima. People still care about what is taking place in Ukraine, but a very real challenge is knowing what to believe these days. Adding the human element to the vaguery of war is important; we’re wired for emotional connections, and simple facts don’t seem to move the human heart by themselves.

This week, Deb’s parents will be moving into our house in PA. They’ve retired, once again (they will never retire), and after many years in France pastoring, they are transitioning back to North America. This will add some family for Noah who is living, working and going to school there now, as well as Brent whose next few steps will be important as he continues to transition and Lord willing find a more flourishing path.

We will be traveling to East Texas this March for two weeks, visiting friends, church partners and our family there. Broderic and Kristin moved there a few weeks ago, along with our 3 grandchildren. Clark and Annabelle also live there. Who knew our kids would navigate back to where they came! It makes sense, as our home base for 15 years was Ukraine, and moving to Romania, then to Canada last year didn’t really provide an anchor for our wandering crew. Tucker, for example, is in London, England for the next 3 months, then plans to fly to China to meet his girlfriend’s family! Bronwyn and Logan are doing well in Upstate New York, with their baby Sloane who makes us laugh and just turned one. Our girls Abbey and Claire are doing well here in Canada, although Abbey’s intense volleyball schedule is making me second-guess the meaning of life.

2025 was a pause, a year to regroup, reset, and by God’s grace renew our souls. We came to Canada to come alongside my mom who has cancer (who is doing surprisingly well despite it being stage 4 all this time). We have realized over time that it was us who needed love, some stability, and space to process the whirlwind of what was the past 4 years of war, relocation, and managed chaos. We are processing deep things, talking a lot, working through some dreams and hopes. We haven’t felt peace about settling in here, or with a community of believers. We have been meeting on some Monday nights with a friend who is journeying through similar age related life-leadership transitions and it’s been a blessing to hold that space. We used to clamor for larger groups and motion, activity, noise, now less is more, deeper with fewer, quieter.

Things we are aiming towards in this next stage:

• Genuine
• Adventure
• Joy
• Soulcare and Formation
• Global (intercultural)

We are most effective in this life when we are filled, embodying the faith we espouse. We’re continuing to steward the things God has given us, from Mir Ministries as a conduit of mercy to widows, and Lighthouse as platform for shining Jesus among international students in Romania. I’m also serving another charity with some marketing and tech guidance, on a retainer. In March I will begin the final stages of my doctoral dissertation and preparation for the defense this summer. I’ve applied to a few roles this past year, and come close to selection. This has helped process the deeper values and desires for this next season of convergence; where we pray our +20 years of intercultural experience synthesizes into something fresh, enjoyable and fruitful for the kingdom. It’s interesting, the positions that I didn’t get, I’ve become exceedingly grateful that I didn’t get them. Sometimes, I think, the Spirit is at work in my life keeping me from myself as much as opening the right paths. I’m learning, I think.

The world is changing. Gone are the days when denominational and parachurch organizations represented the bulk of Western missional activity. Now, a growing number of individuals, couples, and families are being sent from independent churches or simply sending themselves into a variety of bi-vocational situations.

As the world continues to reshape, so is the world of global missionary activity. With the click of a button and a credit card, you can get visas, passports, plane tickets, housing, and a ride from the airport. Those were once things you needed a skilled professional to coordinate. This autonomy and ability to move around the world at a moment’s notice has become a mixed bag, depending on who you ask.

The good. Mission organizations are a beast to maintain. They cost money to staff and usually require buildings to own or rent. Where does that money come from? Usually, a mixture of church partners and the missionaries themselves. For the missionary, agencies can take anywhere from 5–20 percent off the top, directly from their support base. As a mediator between the donor and the missionary, the agency handles admin, banking transfers, and donation receipts. By handling this on their own or leveraging help from a sending church, the missionary cuts out the middleman and keeps more donor funds. Win.

Well, maybe.

The bad. The agility and autonomy come at a price. The missionary who goes it alone without an agency of any kind is essentially a lone ranger in the world of missions, at least at the beginning. Often, they end up taxing other missionaries and needing a lot of help to survive the first few months. Many agencies provide training in areas like cross-cultural realities, language learning, and budgeting. Without these benefits, missionaries fling themselves directly into complex sociological realities, and it’s sink or swim. Attrition is high, and going it alone without a back office of support can be a very lonely experience.

The Lausanne Movement notes that the “center of gravity of global mission has shifted from the West to the Majority World.” Latin America, Africa, and Asia are now leading in missionary sending. David Platt, for example, describes this shift as “a massive rebalancing of global mission energy toward the global south and east.”

It’s a cultural reflection. The Western individual: strong, independent, in need of nobody but the Holy Spirit and a wad of Baht (Bankok currency!).

The ugly? Whether this shift is positive or negative is interesting to consider.

What I’m most interested in is another caveat that may be going unnoticed by most Christians in the West. Local, indigenous believers are increasingly sensing the call of God to their own people, in their own country of origin.

For Westerners, this concept is foreign. If a friend said they became a missionary, we’d automatically ask:

“To where?”

Don’t we have to go somewhere worse than where we live now to get the badge of being a missionary?

Over the past few decades, Western missionaries have indeed been sent into many difficult (for us) places. The local church has taken root, matured, and missional efforts have begun to bear fruit. Missio Dei Journal writes that Western agencies must “shift from owning the mission to partnering in mission,” because they no longer hold the primary leadership role.

Some of that fruit looks like new believers who carry the same burden, gifting, and inspiration to live for the Kingdom among their people. In many of these cultures, the cost of living is low, and salaries are equally challenging. Sometime,s a side-hustle job is enough to live, move, and have their being while dedicating most of the day to Spirit-led activities.

I’ve met and am friends with several local missionaries who don’t fit modernity’s mold. Let’s call them Post-modern missionaries. Romanians who are both qualified and effective missional agents in their home country. Ukrainians who served Jesus before the war, while holding stable jobs, are now full-time in-country missionaries. Russians — yes, even Russians — who have left their country and are now Post-modern missionaries in other Russian-speaking nations. Many have part-time jobs. Many simply live by faith — Acts-type faith that would challenge a Western believer to the core.

This brings me joy and concern.

Joy because God is at work, inviting and sending His Church into the world He loves. Joy because supporting a local missionary can cost one-tenth of sending a Western missionary family (Lausanne). Joy because this is what we should anticipate and hope for. Concern because the Western church, for the most part, is business as usual. 

OMF International warns:

“Mission agencies must radically alter their operating models or face obsolescence.”

Too often, we Westerners want to be the ones doing the ministry. We’d rather travel two thousand miles to swing a hammer on a nail than send the cost of the ticket to empower someone local to do it quicker, 10x less the cost, and with potentially greater community impact. Our identity as missional saviors to the world often gets wrapped up in being the ones with the answers, the money, the Gospel. 

What if the greatest impact of our resources isn’t when we use them ourselves, but when we reposition them to empower indigenous missionaries and unleash a global ripple effect far beyond anything we could imagine?

We are living at a crossroads in history — including church history.

We can come alongside what the Spirit is doing and support these hybrid, Post-modern missionaries. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ. They are gifted, willing, and sacrificing their lives for the advancement of love.

To support non-Western missionaries, contact me or donate via our registered charity here.

Bruce Crowe

The earliest documented source for this quote is Marco Antonio de Domini, who used it in his written work in the year 1617. It was since adopted, and used in a variety of settings, and has been thought to have originated by a number of other people like Rupertus Meldenius, Martin Luther, the Moravian Church, John Wesley, and many more.

I remember reading it for the first time in the early 90s while at Christ for the Nations in Dallas as an “RA” (Resident Assistant), a role for which I was exceedingly unqualified for. The quote was framed just left to my desk. This 19-year-old self would sit in an office twice weekly for a few hours and receive students who had been given citations for a variety of infractions, ranging from walking on the grass to being caught breaking curfew. RAs were endowed with the power to determine what consequences fellow classmates were to receive. Punishments ranged from peeling potatoes in the school cafeteria to having to clean student dorms.

I didn’t think much of the quote at the time. I was too busy rendering justice to think about its theological and philosophical depths. Over the years, however, I’ve come to acknowledge just how important it is in the life of the Christian, and how difficult it is to practice.

Everyone agrees that unity is important, and if everyone just got along, life would be sort of perfect, right? The issue, as I’ve discovered, is determining what exactly should be considered essential. If we’ve lived long enough, we’ll all have the battle scars. For the longest time, through most of my young adult life, actually, I pretty much packed everything I believed into the essentials category. This left me in fellowship with fewer and fewer people. Finding people who believe exactly the way you do is tricky business. If you’re unfortunate enough to find and journey with them for a season, you’ll find the world becomes a much smaller place as you identify with, know, and trust only those who drink from your particular stream. My mission, it seemed, was to convince a lost world and church to let go of their liberties and adopt my essentials as their own, drink from my stream. Then, and only then, might we enjoy true peace and friendship.

Eventually, slowly, and not without pain, I began to recognize my category of essentials was bloated and full of human-conjured, imperfect, or at least incomplete ideas. Living in another culture, among a diverse and disagreeing community of believers, has a way of shaking one’s Jenga pieces loose. Doctrines that shaped my understanding of God and my neighbor became less certain. As I began to see the perspective of another, listen not to formulate a response but to understand and learn, something radical began to take place… I was growing in liberty! As my essential category was more clearly refined and reduced, my capacity to hold space for the voice and opinions of another grew. When this took place, my world began to grow, friendship circles expanded, and hope emerged. It is a lonely place when your essentials for walking in unity require a certain uniformity. It’s how cults are formed, how communism eradicates the individual, and how human flourishing ceases.

In essentials, unity. What then are my essentials? I’m not sure what yours are, but my journey of faith has led me to embrace Jesus Christ as my ultimate and exclusive essential for deep, Christian community. Jesus’ life, his ministry, his teachings are what hold us together in unity. It’s a unity that pre-existed the church, a unity that is already in the Father, Son and Spirit. We are invited into this perfect union, a union that celebrates our unique distinctions from all nations, all languages and cultures, all political and ideological frames. We don’t need to agree, I believe, on points of doctrine to experience the unity that is in Jesus Christ. In fact, it’s in our liberty in the non-essentials outside of Jesus that demonstrate authentic Christian witness. We don’t need to be the same in order to be united; we are united by something far more meaningful than ideas. We are united in our humanity, are imago Dei, and faith in the God who sent the Son.

Lastly, even if we’re united in a belief in Jesus and possess somehow liberty in the non-essentials, without charity (love), we’ve missed the point entirely. When I look back at my RA days, confidently and sometimes mercilessly handing out punishments, I now understand why someone purchased and hung the framed quote on the wall. Without love, we can have all of the right answers, and yet miss the point of God’s coming in the first place. Undergirding all of our efforts towards a sense of Christian unity and diversity is the prime characteristic of love. When the lawyer came to test Jesus, he asked which was the greatest commandment. Jesus went for the heart, the inner life, and skipped the things we can do on our own. To love like God loves is to first experience it ourselves. As I read through history, I’m amazed at the harsh and even brutal ways so-called believers treated their fellow human beings. From many Dutch Calvinists during the slave trade in the West Indies, to the colonial evangelists toward the native American indians. The church, God’s people globally, are recognized by their capacity to centralize the Person of Jesus, experience His love personally, and give a broad and open arm of friendship to everyone, even their enemies.

In this way, through charity (where we get our english word for grace), we are lights in this world of division. We rise above arguments and place them in their proper non-essential categories. We ground ourselves in the love of God, experiencing it, then giving it away freely.

Is this not what we need today?

I’m in PA this week with Noah. He has his DL test coming up and is also enrolled in a GED program starting next week with Luzerne Community College tutoring program. He will live with his brothers for the time being as we discern next steps. We were able to secure a nice little car for him, and he’s been giving me heart attacks as he learns the roads and drives on snow for the first time.

Noah’s life is changing a lot this week. We also got his work permit and applied for her first job in the U.S… Burger King! It’s been funny helping him with his resume. Everything is new for him, he’s lived his entire life in Ukraine and the past few years in Romania.

It’s been nice to see Tucker and Brent as we try to come alongside them in support more on this side of the Atlantic. Tucker is en route to enlisting with the Air Force, more on that soon!

Deb is still up in Canada with the girls. Our house in PA is quite full at the moment with Broderic and his family in the basement apartment, and Brent, Tucker and now Noah upstairs. We are hopeful that in the coming days, the Lord will reveal for us the next steps, and that sock drawer!

Grateful for the blessings of the Lord, and the chance to hold sweet grandkids – poor Deb is a little jealous, but she’s grateful for the stability and space to keep pace with her school and not be traveling. The snow is legit – I feel like this winter has lasted forever!

Cool to hear about Lighthouse Cluj events taking place this past week, including the first open mic event – The videos looked very cool, and interactive.