These are the words that Jesus prays for his bride in John 17. Unity in the church, just as the three members of the Trinity are perfectly united. One Lord, Jesus Christ, head of one body, the Church, chosen to be his hands and feet in this world. It’s beautiful.

But take a look around at the bride of Christ today. Do we seem unified? I’m not talking about denominations, minor theological differences, or the way you practice the sacraments. Like it or not, as long as you believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and that he is the only one who was able to tear the veil between the Holy and the common, you’re a Christian (and so are the people at that weird church down the street where they speak in tongues and believe that the communion wine actually becomes Jesus’ blood).

No, it doesn’t matter if you practice baptism by immersion or sprinkling, if you think that communion is an act of remembrance or cannibalism, or if you believe in a literal or figurative 7-day creation. Those things may be a by-product of disunity among believers, but I don’t think that’s what Jesus was talking about when he prayed for each of us in the upper room. I think he was talking about how we treat each other in the body.

Brothers and sisters, I don’t know about you, but I see a lot of fighting over ridiculous things between Christians these days. Conservative believers argue against liberal believers all over the place (especially on social media), bickering about things like ISIS, Trump and Clinton, Planned Parenthood, homosexuality, etc. Each of us fights from our corner of the ring because we lament the way the world is and long for something better, but all the while we fail to realize that our political in-fighting isn’t solving anything, nor is it in obedience to what our Lord has asked of us.

1 John 3:23 says, “And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us,” and then later in 4:20-21, “he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

Love doesn’t mean always agreeing with each other, but it does mean bearing with each other in spite of our differences, for “love is patient and kind…it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” (1 Cor. 13:4-5, ESV & NIV). How are you doing on that front?

Brothers and sisters, keep your political views, keep the things that make your hearts beat and cry for justice, but please, please, please, I urge you – don’t attack each other when you disagree! We, liberal, conservative, Bengali, American, or whatever else, are the Church, the body and bride of Christ. We represent our Lord to the entire world, and the entire world is watching. As they watch, will they see Christ’s love, or Satan’s hatred? That, as his Church, is up to us.

We were commanded to love our neighbors. How much more each other? Please, no matter who you are or what camp you sit in, as long as you’re claiming Jesus as Lord and Savior, let your words and actions be born out of love, even toward those you disagree with. He expects nothing less from his bride.

Heather,

Administration & Outreach

Dear Bengali Christian friend,

You have been watching our fundraiser on Facebook and the special website for the last month or so.  You have been praying for our success and I thank you for that.  I asked for that because I know that you pray very well.  God hears and answers your prayers.  Your prayers are sincere and fervent  and unrelenting.  They are very precious to me.  One of the things I hope you can teach us Americans is how to pray more fervently.

Now I will tell you what I hope and pray for you.  “Excel in the grace of giving,” II Corinthians 8:7.  This is a command from Jesus to every Christian, not just the rich ones.  If you are poor, or feel yourself to be poor, then you have a special challenge.   You must believe that your giving matters.  It matters to God.  It matters to your neighbor.  It matters to yourself.

One of the most destructive things to the human spirit is comparing myself to my neighbor.  Paul said in II Corinthians 10:12 “When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.”  God does not compare you to your neighbor.  When He says, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:23), it is because of fulfilling one’s calling, using one’s gifts, and living up to one’s potential, all of which are unique to each person.  It is not because my outcomes (the number of dollars I give) compare well with my neighbor’s.

One destructive thing is discouragement.  It would be natural for someone to look at the $63,000 that we just raised for BMW and say, “I can’t raise nearly that amount.  My efforts are worthless.”  Another destructive thing is to get greedy and turn oneself into a taker instead of a giver, thinking, “I need to become a recipient of that money.   There should be plenty for me to have some.”  Then comes envy if someone else does receive some.  Then comes jealousy if I receive some.  Then comes unhealthy dependency on other humans instead of dependency on the Lord.

I truly hope that our fundraising efforts here in America will encourage my Bengali brothers and sisters in Christ to “excel in the grace of giving.”  I am proud to point to American Christians and say that we have a general attitude that we ought to give of our own money for good causes.  In our recent fundraiser, most of our participants gave a full day’s wage before they asked anyone else to give.  Many gave much more.  About one out of every four people in our churches gives 10% or more of his income to charity or church all the time.  The rest give less than 2%.  I have no doubt that most American Christians will be judged by God for our poor stewardship of all the money running through our hands.  But the fact is that almost all of them believe they should give more and are willing to be challenged to give more.  They do not wait for some government or NGO or rich person to do something.  They take it as a personal duty to make a difference.  This is the mentality that must be developed among the Bengalis.

This spirit of volunteerism and of giving is badly needed in Bengali culture, especially in the Church.  It is a complete travesty that almost no Bengali pastor is supported full-time by the members of his church.  Either he expects to live much higher than his people or his people do not take the responsibility to pay him as the Bible teaches.  Many are paid from foreign funds.  This must change.

Bengalis have a great capacity to give.  When it is for a family member, they can give huge amounts.  They do much better than Americans when helping family members.  There needs to be a similar readiness to give to churches and to ministries and to servants of God out of a desire to partner with God and His servants.

At BMW we teach that dependency on foreign funds is part of “NGO disease.”  We are fighting that disease because it is crippling the kingdom of God in Bangladesh.  We encourage collections for the poor even among our poorest students.  We do not pay pastors or build their church buildings.  Our staff members give more than a tithe.  Half of our work is done by volunteers.

It is still not good enough.  We are determined that the new generation God is giving us will be champion givers!  I believe that in a short amount of time a group of Bengalis (like the Thessalonians of II Cor. 8) could set an example of giving that would be a challenge and an inspiration for their American brothers and sisters!

I challenge you to grow in your giving!  It matters to God.  He knows how much you can give and He expects you to give it.  According to God, the widow who gave God two mites gave more than all the rich people Luke 21:1-4).  You cannot grow in your faith if you don’t give.  You cannot open your heart to God and keep your wallet closed at the same time.

I challenge you to grow in your giving!  It matters to your neighbor who will not see your love until you spend your own resources to help them.  If we wait for a foreign aid organization to help our hurting neighbor, then he will know there is no love in our hearts (I John 3:16-17).

I challenge you to grow in your giving!  It matters to yourself.  Your heart knows when you do not “honor the LORD with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops” (Proverbs 3:9).  We cannot have any self-respect when we know we are not doing our part, when we are not setting an example that others can follow, when we are giving as little as we can instead of as much as we can.

I praise the Lord for His answers to our prayers in our recent fundraiser!  I look forward to praising the Lord for His answers to our prayers in YOUR next fundraiser!

By the grace of Christ, Dave DeCook

I’ll admit it outright. Most of the time, my job with Bangla Ministries Worldwide is not exciting. Much of my day involves sitting at a computer. However, occasionally they let me out of the office, and when that happens, things get interesting.

It’s a Thursday morning and a tangerine sunrise is starting its climb over the horizon as four of us – Dave, David, Manik, and myself – hurdle down the freeway toward Michigan’s largest city (that’s Detroit, for anyone not from these parts). Specifically, we’re headed for Hamtramck, a sort of suburb of the Detroit area. You may have heard recently that Hamtramck has just become America’s first majority Muslim city. It boasts a large population of Arabs, Yemenis, Pakistanis, and, you guessed it – Bengalis. They are the purpose of our trip today.

Door-to-door evangelism has never been my ‘thing’. I don’t necessarily agree with it as a method of sharing the gospel, and more importantly it’s WAY out of my comfort zone! Unfortunately for me, going door-to-door is the very reason that I’ve been unleashed from the office computer today, and so I shouldn’t complain about it. Still, as we head out into a Hamtramck neighborhood, armed with copies of the JESUS film in 10 languages and several Bengali tracts, my stomach is already beginning to twist itself into knots. Everyone else seems calm. This’ll be interesting.

The first couple houses are awkward. These people don’t know us, and we don’t know them, and we’re carrying a message that saves and changes lives, but shouldn’t it be delivered in the context of a personal relationship between the messenger and the hearer? The American culture that I grew up in stares defiantly in my face and screams that I’d better not even think about telling someone that Jesus loves them if they don’t believe that I do first. But how do you show someone you just met that you care? Like I said, I don’t know these people as they open their doors to our knocking fists. Can I still love them?

As we leave one house and head to the next, I wrestle hard with these things. But then something starts to change.

An African-American man answers the door (yes, someone who speaks my language!), and a smiling toddler peers out from behind his knees (yes times 2, a kid!). We have a good conversation with the man, who introduces himself as Daniel, and as we get ready to head to the next house, the missionary living in the neighborhood (this whole door-to-door thing is his prerogative), leaves him a DVD and promises to return to talk about the story of Jesus. Hmmm. So that’s how relationships are born in this kind of evangelism.

House after house, I start to see things differently. An Arab woman, unable to speak English, who smiles as she takes a copy of the JESUS film and seems confused but grateful that we showed up on her doorstep. A jovial Muslim man who gleefully accepts our FREE DVD through a hole in his window screen where he is perched inside on a bench, watching the world pass by. A less-than-friendly Albanian “Christian” who seems to look down on us as he peers through his storm door, choosing not to open it. And of course, there are many others. Some are friendly. Some are not. Some show true interest in us. Some just want us to get off their front porch.

Some are Bengali, some are not. But each is a person, made in the image of God regardless of how marred that image may be. And that’s the truth that hits me as we wrap up our afternoon on the streets of Hamtramck. These are people, and they matter to God. Looking back on the afternoon now, I find two thoughts lingering in my mind:
1. I have a lot of fear and hesitation in sharing the gospel, but that’s another story for another time.
2. If those who bear his image matter to God enough that he died for them, shouldn’t they matter enough to me to step out of my comfort zone and past my fears? Whether it’s going door to door around a city block or simply going next door to talk to a neighbor you already know, shouldn’t we share the gospel? We certainly weren’t put here to keep this truth to ourselves, and it is to our shame that we do so.

I still believe that sharing the gospel requires a relationship, but maybe it’s ok if that relationship begins with a knock on the door and a free DVD? It’s better than doing nothing, and as I turn the afternoon over in my mind, I think that maybe, just maybe, God was at work.

Heather,
Administration & Outreach