I sat down to coffee with a 45-year-old married Ethiopian woman at a Starbucks in the Middle East. At the time, I was an American 23-year-old single man. I was struck by the fact that we had nothing in common except what brought us together: mutual faith in Jesus.
During the summer of 2017 and 2018, I spent about three months as a short-term missionary in Dubai, a booming intercultural city in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is one of the world’s richest, most dynamic, and most rapidly growing cities with as much as 80 percent of the population being non-native ex-pats: Filipinos, Egyptians, Brits, and more. Surprisingly, it also houses a quietly growing Christian population. Though Dubai is a Muslim nation that requires the Muslim faith of its citizens, they permit a degree of religious freedom for the non-Emirati ex-pats including the 4,000-person nondenominational church where my seminary friends and I were involved. Our role was to teach small Bible study groups and meet individually with the members of these groups to train them to lead their own groups in the future.
Initially, I was confident that I, the American seminary student, had much to offer. After all, 60 percent of the congregants had never been to a church before. They hadn’t heard the gospel until they arrived in Dubai. With a year of seminary education, I felt confident I could disciple these new believers effectively.
Before long, I felt inferior. I listened quietly as a Nigerian woman shared about leaving her Muslim family behind when she embraced Jesus. I felt embarrassed as I sat next to a Filipino man who had just dropped a smattering of coins into an offering plate. I had just learned that he’d left his wife and family in the Philippines and sent every spare cent he earned back home to give them a better life. I had skimped on my offering to make sure I had spending money for souvenirs. For everything I had to offer in biblical content and Greek verbs, I had much more to learn regarding the generosity, courage, and faithfulness of the people around me.
Eventually, as I sat across from a 40-something Nigerian father of two talking about Romans 8, it struck me that the truth is somewhere in between. We both have something to offer. For a long time, I had assumed that being a leader, a strong Christian, and a pastor meant becoming smarter, better, and holier than others. I had to be “good enough” to pass down what I had to offer. There was one right way of doing things (in my mind, the American, Presbyterian, Steve Clark way), and I had to become an expert to offer it to others.
Living in Dubai changed that for me. Being surrounded by faithful Christians of different races, backgrounds, personalities, ages, and stages of life helped me realize that discipleship is as much about learning as it is about leading. As a Western Christian, I had no idea what it was like to leave a (Muslim) family behind. I learned so much about bravery from my African brothers and sisters. As someone who had followed Jesus most of my life, I was stunned to realize I lacked the boldness in sharing my faith that a brand-new believer from Egypt had. As an American, I was so preoccupied with savings goals and financial status that I could not imagine the level of generosity of the Filipinos—the happiest people I’ve ever met. I realized that a 23-year-old, 45-year-old, or 69-year-old, American or African, new believer or lifelong follower of Jesus each had something to learn and offer to the other. To the degree that we lack friends who are different from us—whether by race, personality, political belief, or stage of life—it’s to that degree we lack a greater perspective of God.
One of the gifts of faith-based travel is that we learn more about God when we learn about his people. Everyone wins when we embrace a posture of learning, assuming we don’t have the full picture yet and that we might just have something to learn from someone younger than us, newer to faith than us, or just plain different from us. Just as Peter did with Cornelius in Acts 10-11, sometimes unexpected interactions with unexpected people help us learn more about who our God truly is.
I was a 23-year-old American and she was a 45-year-old Ethiopian. I didn’t have much marriage advice and she knew little about being a seminary student. But we were both learning what it’s like to follow Jesus. By hearing each other’s wildly different stories, we discovered a bit more about our Savior.
by Pastor Steve Clark
