Canned Salmon and the Gospel

“What does it take to e m b e d among secular people? Well, whatever it takes. Some days that means having a phone conversation about canned salmon with someone in Poland, because that’s the lived experience of the lost person in front of me.”

Andrew and Jess Foster have served together in Granada, Spain, since 2017. Over the past four years, they have built relationships allowing them to know and be known, demonstrate and receive love and hospitality, and walk with people in their journeys of faith.

Their ministry to secular Spanish people is rooted in the example of Jesus, who modeled what it means to embed among people. Jesus took on a specific culture and language, was deeply involved in the community, and proclaimed and embodied the gospel in a contextualized way people could understand. For this reason, the Fosters strongly believe the most basic step in missions is literally to move into the neighborhood.

Andrew explains, “The gospel message, carried by the missionary or the national pastor or believer, must be embedded among people like the seed is embedded in soil in Matthew 13. And as we do the work of embedding the gospel seed, we trust the Holy Spirit to do the work of transforming the soil and bearing fruit.”

This life embedded among secular people is costly, and not just for missionaries themselves. Jess is 32 weeks pregnant with their first baby, and not only have she and Andrew had to process the cost of raising their family overseas, but their families have as well. They know they’re signing up for a lifetime of hard goodbyes, FaceTime holidays, and life milestones celebrated thousands of miles apart.

“We feel for them,” says Andrew. “And if we weren’t totally, deeply convinced that this is what the Lord has for us—if we really didn’t believe that the Lord is in this—then we wouldn’t do it, because that cost is so great for us.”

For the Fosters, they are convinced, and the cost is worth it because 99 percent of Spaniards do not know Jesus and most will never meet someone who can tell them about Him. Rather than believing, Jesus needs the two of them and their family specifically, Andrew and Jess know they have been invited, and they feel urgency in the invitation.

“In our view,” explains Andrew, “access to the gospel is the core issue concerning missions among secular Europeans, because is it not simply that people are lost; it is that there are so few access points where a lost person could even have the chance to hear the gospel.”

Sometimes access to the gospel comes in unexpected ways, such as that conversation about canned salmon. One of Andrew’s friends was trying to start a food business, and Andrew interpreted from English to Spanish (and back) as he spoke with a man in Poland about salmon from Norway being canned in Germany shipped to Spain.

This is certainly not the type of thing you read about in brochures about global missions, but as Andrew says, “The experience of doing something as part of my ‘ministry’ that feels odd or unexpected happens all the time, because oftentimes that’s what embedding among lost people requires.”

By partnering with national churches to plant communities of faith among secular Europeans, Andrew and Jess are creating opportunities for their neighbors to find faith in Christ, be discipled, and proclaim the gospel to their own secular family, neighbors, and culture.

Impossible

“Impossible.” This one word was Mike Clark’s answer to whether his family’s mission could be casually accomplished without being embedded among the people they serve. Mike, his wife Laura, and their young daughter Ella make their home in the so-called “four-country corner,” where Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland meet. Their goal is to plant the church in German-speaking Europe, and for them, the only option is to live among the people.

This may not seem like a revolutionary idea since missionaries have always left their homelands and traveled to faraway lands to preach the gospel. The first step is going, but subsequent steps involve losing one’s identity as an American and fully integrating in a new context. This isn’t just a ministry strategy for the Clark family; it is a way of life. For Ella, central Europe is home, and the United States is a place they visit once in a while.

The Clarks have prolific experience in disaster response and international diplomacy and have even negotiated and the release of hostages, aid workers, and humanitarian cargo. For people with that kind of experience, it would be easy to approach church planting like they do disaster relief, flying in to accomplish a specific task. But as Clark explains, “Church planting is not something one does remotely. Our God—who modeled incarnation—expects us to live amongst the people we minister to.”

Using this model, they have been able to present the gospel to individuals within universities, governments, and royal households. Mike also works with the International Christian Police Fellowship in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. This connection has allowed him to advocate for pastors becoming voluntary chaplains in the Austrian police force.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mike planted a new church in an alpine village that now has 25 attending, and has raised up and installed local leadership as well.

Being culturally savvy and not relying on their American world view opened many doors for the Clarks. Mike recommends a radical approach: investing a decade primarily on learning language and minimizing social contact with English-speakers. The uncomfortable reality is that it takes intense focus and discipline to dismantle one’s life-long world view, presuppositions, and hero mentality of missions. Losing oneself for the sake of Jesus and the gospel is worth it.

Living among the people they serve is one of the keys to the Clark’s success. Instead of viewing people as targets of proselytization or subjects of their latest newsletter, Mike says, “These are my people. And in my more than 25 years living here, I am [now] seeing the greatest openness toward the gospel.”

Push The Button - Valerie Graves

Many people may wonder how I ended up going on the mission field at this point in my life. I had been on short-term mission trips and had a heart for missions, but I always felt that I wanted to do something for a longer period of time. However, I didn’t feel like there was anything that I could do on the field because I didn’t teach or preach like my husband did.

After suddenly losing my husband in July, 2018, I found myself in a new season of life. Several months later I was returning from vacation and I asked God, “What am I going back to? Is my life going to be the same, or do you have something different for me?” Little did I know that a month later God would put in front of me the opportunity to become a Missionary Associate – something that I never would have imagined for myself - and it all started with pushing a button.  

My work experience is as an office admin. I was working at my church as the Office Manager and had to go onto the AGWM website for some reason. I saw a statement that said “Become a Missionary” and it had a button below it. I thought, “Wow, people can just click this and find out how to become a missionary?” Intrigued, I clicked the button. I started looking through the search, narrowing it down to Western Europe and then found I could search for admin positions. When openings came up, I began to cry and said to myself, “There IS something I can do on the field.”  

After much prayer, I submitted my application to become a Missionary Associate, praying that if this was God’s will that every door would open. Needless to say, every door did open and, in spite of Covid and visa issues that have delayed my departure for a year, I am headed to the country of my calling at the end of August where I will be working as an admin at Continental Theological Seminary outside of Brussels, Belgium.

God has called all of us to ministry of some sort, whether it be over the back fence, at work, or on the mission field. I encourage you to forget our self-imposed limitations, ask God what He has in store for you, take a step and “push the button.”

Losing Yourself

Jesus clearly taught in Mark 8:35 that whoever loses his or her life for Him and the gospel will save it. Mark uniquely recounts this moment by noting Jesus’ call for believers to lay down their lives for His sake and for the sake of others. The gospel brings salvation to anyone who believes but—how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard?

This is what drives us. This is why we do what we do.

It’s not secret that the calling to serve Christ is costly. At his conversion, Paul was told he would suffer for the name of Jesus, and he later proclaimed—from prison—that compared to knowing Christ, everything else was garbage.

Thousands of years later, our mission is the same as Paul’s: to plant the Church. In Europe, we are taking this moment to embrace the clarity of Jesus’ words and lose ourselves as we plant churches that are gospel-driven, culturally savvy, and prophetically engaged.

Gospel-Driven

The gospel of Jesus is the foundation of all we do. It is the power of God, bringing salvation to all who believe. This must remain our focus. With the Bible as our driving force, we are called to make disciples of all nations, and we take this apostolic calling seriously. We strive to employ solid church-planting methodology, but as soon as we put methods over the mission, the gospel is no longer what drives us. In order for us to love ourselves, we must stop connecting our identity to how we minister and cling to our identity in Church instead.

Culturally Savvy

Missionaries can’t casually adopt a host culture. Learning a culture takes more than cracking a set of coded societal norms. It involves years of sharing experiences with new friends, discovering what is important to other people, and slowing down to listen and learn. Many missionaries earn trust through the process of becoming an insider as they lose their outsider identities and even sacrifice their vision of what the Church can and should look like. To be culturally savvy, we must lose our way of seeing the world and embrace others’ radically different perspectives.

Prophetically Engaged

When we contextualize the power of the gospel for a specific culture, we can customize it for a particular place with a particular people. We strongly believe the Holy Spirit is leading us to engage with peoples throughout Europe where we can strategically embed personnel and see God do what only He can do. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit can we build something that will endure beyond any individual missionary or missionary team.

We continue the costly journey of planting the church among the secularized people of Europe. If the mission is to plant the church, and we’re planting it among people for whom self is the center, then we’re calling people to lose themselves—to die to themselves—for the sake of Christ and His church.