To download the issue in PDF format, click the "Download PDF" button to the right/below.
When I was young and brash, insecure and eager to prove I had faith, I looked at risky mission situations as invitations. People asked us about going to the dangerous Muslim world, and I laughed with naïve ignorance. It wasn’t that I was faithless but rather that I was immature and arrogant.
Then, one Sunday morning in Kazakhstan...
It was my privilege to be there in the early days of the founding of the US Center for World Mission—now known as Frontier Ventures.
These are the hardest places—contexts of severe political oppression, active conflict, extreme poverty, and systematic hostility toward the Christian faith. Yet many mission organizations and churches in the West remain functionally risk-averse, sending workers primarily to relatively safe locations while the unreached remain unreached.
Does preparing for risk reflect faith in God, or a lack of it?
Pete—whose name has been changed to protect his ongoing ministry—was fascinated by the simplicity with which Jesus had sent the disciples out on one of their first missions. In Luke 10, Jesus instructed them to set out without any spare cash or equipment (Luke 10:4).
Risks always have a decision-making factor built in, and decision making always includes risk. Risks worth taking are complex. Your circumstances change constantly, and unknown factors loom in the dark.
I grew up as a devout Muslim in Sudan. Today, I serve as a bishop among believers from Muslim back-grounds across different parts of the Muslim world. Between these two realities lies a journey marked by prayer, persecution, imprisonment, loss, and unexpected encounters with the faithfulness of God.
Missionaries encounter many forms of risk. Some are spiritual. Others involve illness, crime, political instability, terrorism, governmental hostility, isolation, trauma, or the strain of living as cultural outsiders.
Journeying with God and sharing his gospel among unreached peoples continues to be a privileged adventure I treasure. Witnessing God transform the lives of the lost and lead them to his salvation has brought me great joy. Yet where there are highs, lows also exist. Separation from family, spiritual warfare, and the persecution of disciples and disciple-makers rank as some of the lowest points.
Serving the Lord is risky.
That statement should not surprise anyone familiar with Scripture or the history of the Great Commission. Nowhere in the New Testament did Jesus promise his followers their lives would be free from danger, hardship, persecution, suffering, or loss. In fact, Jesus shows us that sharing the gospel with a lost world is a higher priority than our own safety, comfort, or justice. Every Christian must eventually wrestle with whether serving the Lord and obeying Jesus’s commands is a risk worth taking.
One of the most personally influential books that I have read of late is titled Applying Wisdom to Contemporary World Problems.1 The authors address a variety of human-generated problems, such as eroding democracies, exploding hostilities, and escalating inequalities, but they do not address the pervasive problem of religious persecution. They argue that the answer to the problems that they identify is neither more information nor new innovations but rather phronesis, or practical wisdom. Phronesis is used in tandem with sophia where we read, “God gave Solomon wisdom (phronesis) and very great insight (sophia), and a breadth of understanding as measureless as the sand on the seashore” (1 Kings 4:29). I found myself readily agreeing with the editors’ argument, and yet I was left with a question that stuck in my mind like a burr on my pantleg: Why not apply wisdom to the problem of religious persecution?
As the global body of Christ takes the gospel into security-challenged environments, its members face significant risks. In response, some elevate risk as a spiritual value, flirting with recklessness; others shun risk, drifting towards a fear-driven paralysis.
Risk is part of life. Risk is part of faith and ministry.
The people in the Bible were risk-takers.
While Denny Spitters and Matthew Ellision’s 2025 book, The Sending Shepherd: Leading Churches to Disciple All Nations does not specifically address the topic of risk per se, it does speak to the problem of missions mobilization in American churches. The authors’ heart is to see the churches in the United States once again take seriously the Great Commission call to send people to the “gospel Sahara zones” where there is no active Christian witness.2 They see this as the rightful response of all faithful churches.
While serving in Southeast Asia, I saw, and experienced, multiple conflicts among missionaries. The most intense conflict our large team ever had was over whether to celebrate Thanksgiving together in a restaurant or home. Stress was high and triggers abounded. Thankfully, we navigated it well, and our unity survived.
We tend to be impressed by big things. We feel affirmed when a brand we like is liked by others. We want our investments to grow. More importantly, we want everyone to follow Jesus and see our churches grow in him. Usually, we don’t fully understand the perceptions behind what we think we want and why.
As I’m writing this, my family and I are seven weeks into a nine-week furlough in the US For the last eight years, our family has returned “home” to the US every other summer from our other “home” in North Africa.
I have spent most of my life somewhere between cultures. I grew up as a Third Culture Kid (TCK), spending much of my childhood overseas before eventually moving to the United States. Now I live in the UK, where I work with TCKs, young adults, and people serving in missions.
Print this coloring page out and enjoy being a kid again or share it with a kid.
As faithful risk-takers, those who know the lamb look forward to a future where every tear will be wiped away, and we will experience the fulfillment of all nations being healed and worshiping!