1st Corinthians 13:1–3 Paraphrase:

1 If I speak in the tongues of unreached people groups, but do not have love, I’m just making noise.

2 If I have the gift of evangelism and know the best ministry strategies, even if I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, the fruit of my efforts will wither.

3 If I give all I have for frontier people groups, even surrender my body to martyrdom, but have not love, I gain nothing eternal, and neither do they.

1 Timothy 1:5 The goal of our training is love…

Getting to the Right Question

When we landed in Kosova in 1985, we only knew of two Albanian Evangelicals living there. We were full of faith as we moved forward in establishing a multiplying Jesus movement. This was because our pre-field training had furnished us with many fruitful models. We arrived loaded with the right answers. Unfortunately, we hadn’t learned the right questions. One of those answers was that “everything must be done in love.” Of course. But the daunting question isn’t whether we need to activate God’s love among a frontier people group, it’s how.

Uncle Ali

Uncle Ali was born Muslim. He met Jesus in his 50’s and was captivated by our Father’s heart to start fellowships in unchurched villages. He’s done that now for 30 years. To start with, Uncle Ali and his ministry partners went prayer walking in villages, pleading for God’s blessing. After Uncle Ali and his wife, Aunt Ismete, had called down heaven’s faith, hope, and love for a particular village, they moved there.

One of those early villages was Vashtëmi. Aunt Ismete eventually started a women’s coffee group. After those women persuaded some of their husbands to join, they began to meet in a coffee shop to discuss the great good news. One day, the village imam stirred up a rock-throwing mob to get rid of them. Windows were smashed, so Uncle Ali walked out into the cursing crowd to spare the others. Armed with hatred and rocks, the mob demanded that Uncle Ali and Aunt Ismete leave Vashtëmi. “Your name is Ali!” they said. “Why are you betraying your faith?” To avoid further violence, Uncle Ali and Aunt Ismete retreated. A season of despair ensued. Why not give up?

Nevertheless, Uncle Ali and Aunt Ismete still felt they had heard from Jesus about Vashtëmi. So, they started walking up to a cemetery on a hill above the village. For weeks they wept and prayed over their chosen neighbors. Eventually they met villagers on the way, and opportunities emerged to show forgiveness and to pray for sick family members, including those from the mob. Today, some of the original rock-throwers are leaders of the Jesus fellowship in Vashtëmi. How did our Albanian Uncle and Aunt find enough love to catalyze this transformation?

The Overlooked Priority

A lack of focused “training in love” may be the elephant in the room of cross-cultural ministry. Our original plan rarely works out when we move in with a frontier people. What happened to Peter and Barnabas (Gal 2:11–13) that caused them to start avoiding Gentiles? We can read their story and still miss the elephant. Our loving focus on implementing the best movement models and strategic ministry can sometimes cause this blindness because, once we’ve found the right answers, we might quit asking the right questions. A good answer is: Don’t stop eating with Gentiles. But a good question is: Why might we stop eating with Gentiles?

Again, this mistaken tendency to copy others’ fruitful practices described one of our primary weaknesses with Albanians. We held on to our methodologies like a dog with a bone. After all, those practices had worked well in other places. But Jesus isn’t prioritizing great methods. He’s prioritizing great relationships. True love requires far more effort and dependence on our Father’s guidance than implementing what we learned from someone else’s guidance.

We agree that Jesus’ command to “go and make disciples of all nations” must always build upon his overarching commands to love God and to love others. Again, the ringing question isn’t what we need to do. It’s how to keep on doing it for decades. We sometimes overlook the huge barrier between what we preach and what we do because it isn’t so hard for a few weeks or months. Simply telling workers they need to be loving (and equipping them with a few examples of how to love) could be compared to filling our tank and setting out on a 10,000-kilometer drive with no petrol stations in-between. The challenge isn’t knowing that we should treat others according to their God-given value instead of their actions. The challenge is finding ways to maintain a daily download of heaven’s energy to live out Jesus’ love, since one of his promises is that “apart from me you can do nothing.” There are a host of “keys to the kingdom” for connecting with Jesus, but we can sum up our ongoing challenge with this statement: “Pride thrives when worship doesn’t.” Self-discipline is a fruit, but it’s not the Vine. Perhaps our primary need isn’t learning how to love others more, but how to worship more.

Incarnating God’s Love

After years where failures outnumbered fruits, we got to be part of a small gospel movement that began sending out Albanian church planters in the early 1990s. Soon, our teams ran into barriers. Initial solutions yielded limited fruit—until our co-workers began sacrificing time alongside “strategic” ministry to care for their neighbors. That pattern emerged multiple times. For example, in one city, our team was into bold evangelism. But the nascent fellowship wasn’t thriving. But an Albanian grandma (Roza) on the team had been praying with a couple other women for neighborhood children, so they started a fun Saturday gathering. Those children didn’t fit our description of an influential “person of peace.” Yet Roza and her friends’ simple act of love uncovered their deep spiritual hunger. A children’s prayer meeting emerged, infused with God’s presence. Adults began attending the children’s prayer meeting to experience the miracles flowing through those children’s prayers. After a few misfires, a simple rule emerged: No adults were allowed to pray. A growing stream of non-believers started coming. Many new disciples arose, especially parents. The catalyst was simply loving kids with nothing to do. The “secret sauce” wasn’t a method, it was incarnational love, a fruit of Roza’s relationship with Jesus.

This story exemplifies the challenge. We are all desperate for gospel breakthroughs. So, we might share the story of this children’s prayer meeting, and God’s workers elsewhere could launch outreaches to children and gather them into prayer meetings. We could even write a book about how children’s prayer meetings can transform society. That might prompt costly consequences if, instead of an over-arching dependence on Jesus, we’ve fast-forwarded to a great strategy. How many times have we or others wasted years finding out someone else’s fruitful practices weren’t fruitful for us? Of course, we can still learn from quality ministries. The principle: “Read everyone’s recipes—but do your own cooking with Jesus.” Our Father is inviting us to a relationship, not a formula. The multi-faceted challenge to deny ourselves and follow Jesus never ends, like cultivating a fruitful marriage or operating a farm.

Najua

Najua’s story illustrates one kingdom key for developing the principle of love into daily application. Najua was a single Brazilian gal Jesus had called to love Albanians. Najua believed Jesus’ promise that “apart from me you can do nothing.” So, she started each day obeying the command to “repent and believe the Gospel,” “abiding in the vine” by acknowledging her weaknesses and sins so that she could download true love. I don’t know how many times I heard Najua weeping in prayer: “Jesus, I don’t love these people. Please forgive me and help me to love them like you do.” Then she would turn to worship and thanksgiving, like Paul did in 1 Timothy 1:15–17. That’s not a strategy; the command to “abide in the vine” is an unending principle. Najua made it a habit. In doing so, she was the most effective evangelist I’ve known personally, even though neither her language learning nor her cultural awareness were good. She arrived in 1987 and spent the rest of her life living with Albanians. Tragically, she died from COVID in 2022. Today, she is worshiping at the throne of grace alongside the multitude of brothers and sisters she helped get there.

Najua’s story takes us back to developing practices to love our own families and pour that same heart into the first generation of pre-believers and disciples within a frontier people. Like running a marathon in a swamp, love is hard! Najua ran that race with endurance by beginning her days with worship and repentance, enabling her heart to sluff off looming judgment and download amazing grace for people. Like all of us, Najua had her share of weaknesses, so she’d often turn back to her Father during the day. That’s how she refueled in order to treat people according to their value, instead of their actions. Jesus modeled this in Gethsemane by starting his agonized prayer with “Abba, Father.” We can also breathe in the power to truly love God and our neighbors through worship, repentance, thanksgiving, and prayer. Yet that won’t suffice if it doesn’t lead us into measurable action. May our Father grant that action first and foremost in our families, especially because it’s not what we teach that multiplies. It’s who we are. Our home is a wonderful place to discern that.

Paul emphasizes family health more than any other requirement for church leadership. (Titus 1, 1 Tim 3) There are a multitude of Bible verses indicating that the family is a primary training venue for disciples. What should that mean for us and new believers in a frontier people? It is beyond the scope of this article to describe practical applications to prioritize love training in families. Perhaps we wouldn’t have to fight the problem of “extraction evangelism” if we automatically challenged ourselves alongside new believers (and pre-believers), to respond to the good news by first loving our family members like Jesus does (e.g. Eph 5:25). After all, God chose a family (Gen 12) to bless all the families of the earth. So, shouldn't we do everything we can to cultivate sacrificial love in our homes and the families nearby?

Love is the Primary Goal of Training

God is love, and the embodiment of love is Jesus. When he invites us to take up his yoke in a broken world, we’re tempted to judge first and love later. But love is the universal command, and we will fail to obey it without an adaptive plan. The cross exemplifies how love is the hardest thing we’ll ever do. So, let us re-center our training, our methods, and our lives around love, received daily (1 John 4:19) from our God through his Word, worship, actions, and prayer. Otherwise, the fruit of our lives will wither (John 15:4–5). Like a garden, if we quit planting, watering, and weeding the multi-faceted seeds of grace-filled relationships, the weeds win. Through multiple forms of daily worship, we reflect the heart of Jesus in our homes, then into the homes of our neighbors and the families of frontier peoples. How do you plan to keep on training yourself and emerging leaders around you in love?