Many people assume a missionary’s primary role is to go and convert others. In my experience, being a disciple maker has looked more like walking alongside people as God draws them to himself. Perhaps that is why I have adopted the term “Alongsider” rather than “missionary.”

It took me years to understand this. Missiological anthropologist Dr. Darrell Whiteman describes the process as a missionary’s “second conversion.” The first conversion is when someone places their faith in Jesus and is cleansed from sin. The second occurs when a disciple of Jesus experiences a “cleansing of unnecessary assumptions about the gospel and the way that it is to be communicated.” Whiteman points to Peter’s experience in Acts 10, where God confronts his cultural assumptions about Gentiles and expands his understanding of the gospel’s reach. Looking back, I can see how God was preparing me for that second conversion long before I knew what to call it. That second conversion was not a change in the gospel I believed, but a change in how I understood my relationship to the people with whom I hoped to share the gospel. Through Philippians 2, God gradually taught me that cross-cultural ministry begins not with expertise, but with the humility of Christ.

My story begins in elementary school at Vacation Bible School. Missionaries serving in a country marked by gang violence came to speak about the work God was doing there. Something stirred deeply in my heart. I began writing in school assignments that I wanted to become a missionary when I grew up, though I had little understanding of what that actually meant.

In fourth grade, my pastors announced that a woman our church had sent overseas to the Middle East had been martyred for her faith in Jesus. I still remember the weight of that moment. Even as a child, I knew the gospel was worth giving up everything, even though I did not yet understand what it truly meant to embody that kind of love or sacrifice.

After college, I was sitting at a coffee shop talking to my Christian friends about God. I loved Jesus deeply and wanted others to know him, too. Our waitress overheard our conversation and began to engage with us. I saw it as the perfect opportunity to share the gospel, but at the time the only way I really knew how to do that was by inviting her to church.

She accepted my invitation and came the following Sunday. After the service, she gently revealed that she had spent much of her life in North Africa sharing the gospel and was just visiting the United States during a season of transition. Some people would have called her a missionary, though that was not how she primarily described herself. That conversation quietly dismantled some of my assumptions about ministry. Until then, I had largely imagined missionaries or pastors as people who possessed answers and delivered them to others. She modeled something different.

She told me she came to church with me because she saw potential and wanted to help me learn how to share my faith in Jesus with others more naturally. Looking back, she was one of the first people to embody 1 Thessalonians 2:8 for me, “We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us.”

In 2016, she went back overseas, and I found myself sitting in Dr. Whiteman’s seminary classroom as he taught about the conversion of a missionary and Philippians 2. As he spoke, I sensed the Holy Spirit moving in me. At the time, I assumed God was preparing me to go somewhere. I did not yet realize he was first preparing to change the way I saw people.

I began to meditate on Philippians 2:1–11 and pray God would help me develop friendships with people of other nations. Over time, I realized the passage was teaching me more than just doctrine about Jesus. It was inviting me to approach people with the same humility, nearness, and self-emptying love that Jesus showed toward humanity.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians emphasizes unity amid differences. Living in a Roman colony shaped by status, honor, and social hierarchy, the Philippian believers faced many of the same temptations we face today: rivalry, self-promotion, and division. Into that context, Paul calls them to embody the humble mindset of Christ.

Philippians 2:1-4 begins with an exhortation to be of the same mind, have the same love, do nothing out of selfish ambition, and to count others as more significant than ourselves. To me, this echoes Jesus’ final prayer in John 17 before his crucifixion: “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

The gospel itself does not change across cultures, but Scripture gives remarkable flexibility in how the gospel is embodied and communicated. Love, humility, and unity within the body of Christ remain nonnegotiable. Missionaries and ministry leaders can sometimes become so focused on effectiveness, strategies, programs, budgets, education, experience, and authority that it begins to overshadow love. I have seen disagreements over methods create tension and division among believers.

On one occasion, a missionary told me, out of deep passion for evangelism, that if I did not see a Hindu come to faith within one year, I was “calling Jesus a liar” with my life. At first, this accusation caused me to put a lot of pressure on myself to produce “fruit” as I understood it at the time, which was visible conversions. However, this thinking risks reducing God’s work to things I can easily measure. Jesus’ incarnation looked like weakness before exaltation and the cross looked like failure before victory. Instead, Philippians 2 has challenged me to ask a deeper question: What kind of fruit is God producing in me as I walk with others?

Regardless of our opinions, Jesus makes it clear that the world will recognize him, in part, through the unity and love of his followers. This conviction has caused me to take unity among believers very seriously, especially because I have made my own share of mistakes along the way. These days, it is rare for me to talk about walking alongside Hindus without also discussing the importance of unity within the global church.

Paul uses the Greek word phroneo for “mind,” referring not simply to intellectual agreement, but to one’s mindset, orientation, and posture toward others. Unity is more than shared beliefs; it is an embodied posture of humility and love shaped by Christ himself. At the same time, I have learned how complicated unity can feel. I walk alongside forward caste Hindus in America while remaining connected to both local American and Indian churches. I desire to create spaces where Hindus do not feel they must abandon every aspect of their culture in order to follow Jesus. Yet churches, mission organizations, and believers often hold very different perspectives on how Christ should be communicated.

Adding to this complexity is the painful reality that many Hindus carry wounds caused by Christians and Christian institutions. As I learned more about India’s history, I became aware that many Hindus associate Christianity with painful experiences connected to colonialism, cultural disruption, or negative encounters with Christians and Christian institutions. Whether those perceptions are fully accurate or not, they shape the way many Hindus hear the message of Jesus today.

Jesus does not call his followers to tolerate abuse or hypocrisy in the name of unity. We see this clearly when he cleanses the temple during the final week of his life. Even while confronting sin, Jesus continued loving his people with both grace and truth. God has always worked through imperfect people to accomplish his purposes in the world. Therefore, even in the midst of pain and disagreement, I try to “make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3).

Philippians 2:5–11, often called the Christ Hymn, moves downward into humility before rising upward into exaltation. Verses 6–8 describe Christ’s descent into humility while verses 9–11 reveal his exaltation. Though Jesus was divine, Paul says he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. The Greek word harpagmos carries the idea of clinging to privilege or using status for one’s own advantage. Jesus had every right to exercise divine authority and power, yet instead he “emptied himself” by taking the form of a servant. This does not mean Jesus ceased being God. Rather, he willingly embraced human limitation, vulnerability, and suffering.

This passage slowly transformed the way I approached both Scripture and culture. C.S. Lewis warned against what he called “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that modern people are inherently more enlightened than those who came before them. I have realized how easy it is for Western Christians to approach both the Bible and other cultures with the same posture of superiority. Bible scholar Tim Mackie describes reading scripture as an act of loving an ancient neighbor by learning to understand their worldview before forcing our own assumptions onto the text. The more I learned to approach Scripture with humility and curiosity, the more I began approaching people the same way. I also discovered that humility and love require learning because different cultures often express and receive love differently. Over time, I began seeing both Bible reading and cross-cultural friendships as opportunities for humble listening and learning. Rather than trying to quickly master what I did not understand, I began learning to slow down, ask questions, and just enjoy being with God and others.

That posture slowly reshaped my own life after this “second conversion.” About a year after I began praying in Dr. Whiteman’s class, God brought my first Hindu friend into my life. I knew absolutely nothing about India or Hinduism. I had recently completed a Master of Arts in Christian Education, but I quickly realized approaching this new friendship as a “master” of anything would not serve either of us well.

Instead, I entered into the friendship as a humble learner. The night before we met for our first lunch together, I went to an Indian buffet and ate one of everything on the menu simply so I could begin understanding a small part of her world. Looking back, it seems humorous now, but at the time it was my sincere attempt to move toward someone else’s culture with curiosity and humility.

When we met, I asked her simple questions about her life, family, and faith. Over time, those conversations blossomed into a decade-long friendship that eventually led me to visit her hometown in India, learn Hindi in order to communicate with her family, and continue growing not only as an Alongsider, but as a disciple of Jesus.

Nearly a decade later, I still do not consider myself an expert on Hindu people or culture. If anything, walking alongside Hindus has made me increasingly aware of how much I still must learn. Yet perhaps that is part of the invitation of Philippians 2 and the ongoing conversion that started this whole journey. Jesus did not move toward humanity as a distant expert, but in humility, proximity, and love. He relinquished privilege, entered human experience, and walked among people as a servant. Alongsiding, then, is participation in the posture of Christ. The longer I walk with Hindus, the more convinced I become that the greatest barrier to cross-cultural ministry is often not cultural difference, but our unwillingness to lay down our own assumptions, status, and certainty to love as Jesus loved.

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