Guest Contributor: John C.*

In this post, one of our friends and co-workers will answer the question – ‘Why Be Barnabas?’ through Barnabas’ example in Scripture and his personal experience.

We are defining ‘Be Barnabas’ as the role of the outsider in finding, equipping, and empowering a national apostolic visionary (NAV) who is a cultural insider to catalyze movements. Additionally, the vast majority of movements have been started by these near culture or cultural insider NAVs that receive coaching and training from outsiders.

John C. is a team leader in Southeast Asia pursuing movements among the unreached and is passionate about his team’s role of Being Barnabas to national partners in their ministry to multiply.

*name changed for security reasons

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As goers pursuing movements, we often look at Acts 13, with Antioch as Paul’s sending base, and the point in the Acts narrative where the Gospel begins to explode across Asia and Europe.

We want to see something similar in this generation and it’s helpful to not just see what happened, but where it came from. So to that end, let’s look together at the community in Antioch before Acts 13, and see what we can learn from one person in particular, Barnabas.

So we’re going to focus on just a few observations, and ask: What can we learn from Barnabas and his community about helping others reach the unreached around them?

Let’s look at Acts 11:22-26.

The report of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord. So Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people. And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.

Acts 11:22-26

Sent from the Church to the Church

The first thing we see in verse 22: Barnabas was sent. Just like many of those reading, Barnabas was a missionary. But there are so many different roles and we need to ask ourselves, what’s our specific role? What is God’s calling for me in his work?

Barnabas was sent, from the church, to the church! Barnabas didn’t find out about the work by himself, but the news was delivered to the church in Jerusalem, who decided for Barnabas to go to do something for the believers in Antioch. What was his purpose?

Rejoice to Witness the Grace of God

What was Barnabas’ purpose in being sent to Antioch? In verse 23, ‘when he arrived and witnessed the grace of God, he rejoiced and began to encourage them all with resolute heart to remain true to the Lord.’

When my wife and I finished multiple years of language school, we were feeling great: we could now speak the local language like a 6-year old, and so it was decided we should start taking on more ministry responsibility. One of the first things we did was join a small group at our partner church. It was mostly college students, and the leader of the small group had a previous relationship with some of our teammates. Our task was to help her to help the small group make disciples. Easy peasy!

Our first week at the small group went like this: first, we try for 10 minutes to get a taxi during rush hour traffic. I have to fumble through the name of the college where the small group meets and anxiously hope the driver knows where that is. We sit in traffic for an hour to go 3 miles. We are off to a GREAT start. But we finally make it! And on time! 

Buuuuuut, everyone is 20–30 minutes late. We sit waiting in a badminton court for someone to arrive and open the shipping container where the group meets. Finally, people start trickling in and we have to do the whole small talk thing, but again, language:

“My name is John.”

“Do you like food?”

That’s about all I can say at that point – we’re totally winning people over left and right. Then, and this next part is kind of a blur, we played icebreaker games for an hour, sang worship songs for an hour, prayed in tongues for a few minutes, and someone read a short Bible devotional out loud. Then we all hung out eating snacks for another half hour. I was livid. What the heck were we even DOING?! I thought, NONE of this would lead to movement.

When Barnabas arrives in Antioch, he sees the grace of God and what does he do? He REJOICES. Antioch wasn’t perfect. Later on, we read about controversy between the Jewish-Background Believers and the Gentiles that require the apostles’ attention to resolve. They for sure had issues. Yet, Barnabas rejoices. He recognizes the church for what it is: the grace of God.

Where our team lives, there are only 800 believers for a population of 2.5 million Muslims. You’d have to talk to 3,125 people before meeting someone who could tell you about Jesus.

And there I was, sitting with a dozen college students who know Jesus, know the culture, know the language, have the Spirit, have the Scriptures, are loving each other, and I’m angry. Because it’s not done the way I think it should be done. Because it’s not “reproducible”, “missional”, or whatever.

If you’ve read all the CPM/DMM books, or have a seminary degree, or whatever else – none of that matters if you are unable to rejoice at the sight of the church, even if it doesn’t look the way you think it should.

Yes, in all churches, there are valid criticisms and things to grieve that are not right, but the repentance we move towards comes from a salvation that erupts into JOY. So, if our interactions with the church, wherever your local context is, are marked more by criticism than by joy, then we have to ask ourselves whether we desire to see the grace of God, or the law of missions methodology.

Our goal is to empower believers in the local church to catalyze movements, but perhaps the first thing that gets in the way of us even entering into relationships with local believers is our attitude about them and our opinions about what the local church should or should not be doing.

You are definitely going to run into situations that don’t line up with what your tradition or training holds as obedience to the Scriptures, and you’ll have to wrestle with that. I have no solutions for you, only an exhortation to be like Barnabas and rejoice at the sight of God’s grace.

The Most Effective Disciple-Makers Among the Unreached

If you look at the largest unengaged, unreached people groups on Joshua Project, there are 33 UUPGs with more than 10 million people. Of the 33 largest UUPGs, all but 2 have a numerous, local church in the same country. That means for the largest UUPGs, almost all of them have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of believers right next door. With the growth of the Church in the global South, and with globalization bringing people from everywhere to everywhere, chances are that there are national or near culture believers somewhere in proximity of the unreached that we’re trying to see reached with the gospel.

Using my country as an example, a worker did a huge study in 2008 looking at how churches grew in our country. Working through loads of statistical and survey data gathered by in-person visits to 80% of the churches in the country, he uncovered some interesting observations:

• Statistically, no group is more receptive to the gospel than others.
• A local person is 700 times more likely to follow Jesus if they have a Christian relative.
• And someone living in a village with a church is 100 times more likely to become a Christian.

Furthermore, 70% of all believers said that the main influence in their turning to Jesus was not a missionary or even a church leader, but a lay person – another local believer.

Let’s consider ourselves as outsiders. We are not related to anybody in our overseas contexts. We are not the local church – we speak a different language, have a different background, have different ways of doing things.

Compare that to the typical local believer. They have relatives and relationships in that country. They are part of the local church. And they don’t carry the associations people have with “missionaries”. They are an order of magnitude more likely to lead someone to Jesus, not to mention the quality of the discipleship after conversion.

For me, the key takeaway is that the most effective disciple-makers among the unreached are local believers!

Bringing Movement through the Local Church and Local Believers

We are well-served to take a humble, yet critical eye to findings like this, but the sheer volume of the data in this study does force us to consider: the local church might be the very vehicle that God wants to use to bring a movement of multiplying churches through the proclamation of the Gospel, and not us directly.

I was talking with my teammates last week, and one of them said, “Any time I go out sharing it is hard to know if the person is just interested in my white skin or actually interested in what I am talking about. My skin color can often be a barrier to deeper heart conversations with non-believers.”

That’s a hard pill to swallow for our Western sensibilities, that what we look like and where we come from could be an obstacle to spiritual conversations across the world. Then, what can we do?

Barnabas Encouraged The Church

Let’s look at what Barnabas does next: ‘[he] began to encourage them all with resolute heart to remain true to the Lord.’ Let’s note 1) who he encourages and 2) what he encourages them towards.

First, Barnabas encourages them ALL. He doesn’t just encourage some select few, isolated from the community as a whole. He doesn’t just focus on whomever meets some arbitrary list of man-made criteria, subject to cultural norms or internal biases. He doesn’t just focus on those who have “already started a movement”. He encourages the whole church, and everyone in it, with all their beautifully unique wirings, giftings, diversity, whether from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria or any other part of the world.

Barnabas doesn’t limit himself when it comes to those that God can use.

Steven likes to quote Ratatouille here: Anton Ego at the end of the movie writes, ”In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” In the same way, we encourage the whole church, because we don’t know who God is planning to use to start a movement. Not everyone will be a movement leader and that’s OK, but a movement leader can come from anywhere in the body of Christ.

The Lord can use anyone to do his work. After all, he has chosen to use you and me!

Encouraged to Abide

What does Barnabas encourage them all towards? ‘With resolute heart to remain true to the Lord’. In Barnabas’ encouragement, he doesn’t point them to fruit they’re seeing. He’s not bringing some new, crazy effective discipleship tool. He doesn’t even have a super cool vision statement, or three-point, alliterated presentation on church-planting strategy.

He points them to Jesus.

I like the way Darrell Bock translates this: “abide in the Lord with a devoted heart.” Barnabas encourages the believers in Antioch to abide in Jesus. Why does he do this? Because he was a good man and full of the Holy Spirit and faith.

Many of us have heard, ‘character precedes calling.’ Your character matters, your maturity matters, your dependence on the Spirit and understanding of who God is – not just knowledge about who he is – but your relationship and believing in him. All these things are fundamental to you being one sent to help spark movements of the church around the world. In Being Barnabas, one of our primary roles is to encourage the disciple-makers among the unreached to abide in Jesus.

What happens as a result? Considerable numbers were added to the Lord. Barnabas is a pretty great guy: we just read that he was ‘good’, which is the ONLY time in Acts someone is called good. None of the apostles get that kind of description. He was FULL of the Holy Spirit. He was FULL of faith.

Of course big things are going to happen now that this guy shows up, right? Well, they do and they don’t: instead of going to Antioch and doing everything himself, Barnabas set it upon himself to go to the local believers, rejoice with them and encourage them to abide in Jesus. And then, the Lord continued to build his church.

My invitation to you is this: embrace your role as an outsider, and encourage, equip, and empower the local church to reach the unreached around them.

Barnabas and Saul

How do we do that? Let’s finish this last part of Acts 11.

To recap: Christians on the run from persecution make their way to Antioch, and some of them, Cypriots and Cyreneans start to share the Gospel with Greeks, Gentiles. The Lord brings many to faith, and the church in Jerusalem sends Barnabas, also from Cyprus, to check it out. He’s ecstatic at what’s going on and encourages the believers to abide in the Lord, and things continue to blow up.

What does Barnabas do next after visiting Antioch? He goes and gets the guy who was there when Stephen was stoned 3 chapters ago, sparking the persecution that forced the believers to flee in the first place: Barnabas goes to Tarsus to get Paul (v. 25). Why does Barnabas get Paul?

Let’s remember Paul’s story: after Paul’s conversion, he goes to Damascus and proclaims Jesus. He has to run from the Jews, so he makes his way to Jerusalem, where he tries to get in with the disciples, but they’re all still petrified of him. Who should advocate for him, but our dear friend, Barnabas? He ‘takes hold’ of Paul, believes him, and Barnabas brings him before the apostles and backs him up and shares his story, that Jesus called him ‘to bear My name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel’.

What does Paul do in Jerusalem? He continues to speak boldly, this time reaching out to Jews with a Greek background, the Hellenistic Jews. This gets him in trouble again, which leads to him being sent to Tarsus. Then, after some time, Barnabas shows up to bring him to Antioch.

Barnabas Listened and Connected

But of all the people to get, why Paul? Because Barnabas listened.

Barnabas listened to what Paul said about his calling to the Gentiles.
Barnabas listened to what Paul was doing in Damascus and Jerusalem.
Barnabas listened to what God was wanting to do in Antioch.

And Barnabas connected all of that together, that Paul was called to the Gentiles, and that the Spirit was now at work grafting them in, first through Philip, then through Peter, and now in Antioch. That’s why he went to get Paul.

Barnabas connected the need of the church with the calling of those around him. The need among the unreached is national apostolic visionaries who will catalyze movements – as Barnabas, we can connect local believers called and gifted in this way to principles and opportunities that can help them fulfill their calling.

Barnabas Spent Time with Paul

Back to Barnabas and Paul. Is it that simple? Just moving the right people to the right places? We read in verse 26, ‘for an entire year they met with the church and taught considerable numbers of people.’

Barnabas spent time. He didn’t just bring Paul and dump him in Antioch; for an entire year, they served together, spent time together, did ministry and lived life together. Mobilization is so much more than a class, or a conference, a video, or a training. It’s good to have all those things and they all have their place and purpose, but the kind of encouragement, equipping, and empowering that is required to see movements? That takes time. And being with each other.

In fact, after that year, Barnabas and Saul go on a short-term trip to deliver relief to the churches in Judea suffering from a famine. They come back and we don’t see them until another chapter, Acts 13, where they are sent out on the first missionary journey. Then after that journey, we read in Acts 14:28 that they spent ‘no little time with the disciples.’ Commentaries differ on how long Saul was in Tarsus vs Antioch, but adding his time in the 2 cities together, it was at least a decade between his conversion and his being sent out, and Barnabas was a part of his life the entire time.

Helping the local church pursue movement among the unreached isn’t fast – but I’m convinced that it is better.

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Conclusion

Acts 11 gives us a very clear outline of what Barnabas did which leads us to understand why we should follow Barnabas’ example today.

Why Be Barnabas? 

Because Barnabas was sent from the church to the church. To encourage the church towards abiding. To rejoice in the grace of God.

Because Barnabas found Paul, by listening, connecting, and spending time with Paul to empower him to catalyze multiplication in the first century.

Because the most effective disciple makers among the unreached are local or near culture believers. 

Because the vast majority of movements are started from near culture or cultural insider NAVs (Paul) with coaching and training from outsiders (Barnabas). To see movements started among the unreached, our role as outsiders is to Be Barnabas.

Questions for Reflection

• From Barnabas’ example, what aspects of his ministry and character would you want to model your approach after?
• Would you consider shifting your role to support and empower national believers? Why or why not?
• Are there local or near-culture believers in proximity to where you are among the unreached? Could you consider partnering with them? Why or why not? What obstacles might exist?
• What’s your perspective or attitude about the local church in your area? Is it primarily critical or rejoicing like Barnabas? Why?

Up to this point, this blog has largely covered some tools and paradigms around team leadership on the field. Our next series of posts will switch gears a bit to focus more on a strategic component of pursuing movements that we think is critically important.

We’re excited to start the ‘Be Barnabas’ series. Along with union with Christ, it’s one of the key ‘pillars’ that has shaped our ministry and leadership philosophy, and one of the reasons we started this blog.

‘Be Barnabas’ is what we call the role of the outsider in finding, equipping, and empowering a national apostolic visionary who is a cultural insider to catalyze movements. It’s a pattern modeled after Barnabas, who found, vouched for, teamed with, empowered, and encouraged Paul – the apostle who catalyzed much of the movement of the early church in Acts.

Why is Be Barnabas important? There’s a lot that can be said around missiology and missions history for the changing role of the outsider or Westerner in pursuing the Great Commission among the unreached. But for us, there’s two main reasons:

1. The vast majority of movements around the world are not started by a cultural outsider directly multiplying among the unreached, but through helping a national apostolic visionary (NAV) leader to catalyze a movement.
2. The biggest untapped potential missions force in the world is the church in the Global South, where two-thirds of the world’s Christians now reside. Those that are cultural insiders or proximate to the unreached will have much fewer barriers to multiplying churches than cultural outsiders will have.

In this series, we plan to tell some stories of what Be Barnabas looks like, give some of the Scriptural and movement principles behind Being Barnabas, and lay out a clear pathway for what it looks like to find, equip, and empower a NAV once you’ve reached the field.

For this post, we wanted to introduce Mint’s story. Mint is our first national partner that we’ve been walking with now for 5 years. The following story is what I wrote for our church’s missions newsletter about 2 years back in 2021. We hope this story is encouraging and gets you excited to learn more about Being Barnabas!

“What is your vision, Mint?”

She whispered back to us, almost embarrassed at the audacity of such a goal: “I think God is saying that we need to pursue planting 100 multiplying churches.”

“I never thought that God could use me for something like this—I used to be the church secretary! I am just a little seed in God’s plans.”

My wife and I have been goers in Southeast Asia for the past seven years; Mint is one of our main national partners that we coach, serve, and encourage in the work of church planting multiplication. Through serving and empowering our national brothers and sisters in Great Commission work, we have had the privilege of seeing God moving in mighty ways among some of the spiritually darkest contexts in the world.

Before we launched, we had the traditional missions mindset: move overseas, learn the language, share the gospel, gather some believers, plant a church, and hand it off to the local believers. But on our vision trip to this country, we heard a shocking statistic: it takes two full-time goers evangelizing for one year to lead one person to Christ in our country, because of the language, cultural, and identity barriers of foreign messengers bringing a foreign message.

Of the 70 million people in our country, only 0.7% are Christian. If we wanted to see this country “filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14), the traditional missions approach would be like trying to transform the Sahara desert into a body of water, one drop at a time. Meanwhile,1,500 people a day are dying in our country and entering into an eternity separated from Christ without even a chance to hear of the hope of the gospel.

These realities drove our team to two questions:

1. How many people would have a chance to hear the gospel?
2. What is our role in seeing as many people hear the gospel as possible?

In our prayer and seeking, we learned about Church Planting Movements. These movements of God were happening throughout the unreached world, where simple churches and obedient disciples were multiplying exponentially. We learned that of the hundreds of movements started around the world, less than 1% of them were started directly through foreigners that shared the gospel and led someone to faith that multiplied. The vast majority of the movements happened through those foreigners finding, training, and coaching a national believer from that context towards multiplication. We call this role of the outsider, ‘Being Barnabas’ to a national ‘Paul’-type leader.

So when we arrived in Thailand seven years ago, our team pursued partnerships with local churches. We were looking for national leaders to come behind, like Barnabas was looking for Paul to encourage and empower towards multiplication. That’s how we met Mint.

Mint is a church planter in a rural area of our country. She is strong-willed, sassy, and she never gives up. She used to be the church secretary before she received a calling from God to plant churches. With almost no church-planting training and very little support, Mint was sent to a new province to plant a church. In her first year, Mint didn’t have a car, so she biked 20 kilometers a day trying to sell second hand clothes so that she would have enough food to eat. She said she cried almost every day at the beginning because of the many personal, financial, and ministry-related difficulties. But after 2 years of faithfully persevering and sharing the gospel hundreds of times, she finally planted her first church of about 15 people.

When we first met Mint, we asked her, “What do you hope to see happen in your ministry?” She said, “I want to see my church multiply, so that people throughout my country and the surrounding areas could hear the gospel. But I can’t get my people to obey God, much less make more disciples!” She was exhausted all the time from trying to lead the ministry by herself, and her phone was constantly ringing, with her members bringing their problems to her.

So after getting to know her and casting vision for multiplication from the Bible, we, together with Mint, started to train a small group from her church in simple tools for how to share their faith and how to disciple new believers.

In the first month, Mint and her team led seven people to faith. The next month, another eight. After three months, there were 20 new believers. They saw miracles every week—people healed through prayer, evil spirits cast out, families restored, and so many answered prayers. Keep in mind, it took Mint two years of sharing to reach 15 people. In those early months, Mint was more surprised than anyone at all that God was doing. 

Fast forward several months later, and 20 new believers multiplied into 80 new believers, and Mint planted five more house churches. At one house church training, a new believer gave us his lunch of sticky rice and ginger juice to use as the communion elements!

Soon after this, the church planting pastor from Mint’s network said, “Mint and her team have had more fruit in the last several months than all the other church planters combined. We want to train all of them in the things you’re doing with Mint!” Our team started training about 15 church planting teams in early 2019; in just one year they had led over 200 people to faith and started over 30 house churches. It would have taken my wife and me 200 years of sharing to get to the number of new believers that our national partners saw in just one year.

For us, serving and empowering Mint isn’t just about training or methodology. That’s honestly just a small part of our interaction. It’s being part of her life, being a listening ear, caring about her thriving. It is hours and hours in the car together on our way to visit new believers and train others, discussing and ranting about every possible topic together. Our favorite food to eat together on the road is KFC—which is way better in our country than in the US! When we go to visit Mint, her mom always cooks for us and calls us her own children. Mint has a deep abiding relationship with God, and she is an easy crier when she shares what she’s learning from Him.

Being Barnabas to Mint is getting to celebrate with her when there is success and fruitfulness, but also sharing in her burdens and sufferings. We walked together with Mint and mourned with her when she told us her dad decided to leave her and her mom to go live with another woman. We wept with her when she told us that two new believers decided to leave the church because of a conflict. They just left their Bibles on her doorstep and disappeared without a word. She said the hardest part was not that they rejected her, but that they were rejecting Jesus.

We can’t do what Mint does. But we can serve her, we can encourage her, and we can equip her with tools for how to multiply. We cannot directly start a movement in our country. But we can help her to do it. We were at a prayer retreat with Mint when she received this vision from God to plant 100 churches. We continue to believe that 100 churches is just the first step for what God has in store for her. Mint is currently overseeing seven church planting teams as a regional leader, and her teams are planting multiplying churches throughout the country, on their way to 100.

I have never baptized a single person in Mint’s province. Mint and her team have seen over 120 people come to faith and baptized them in the river. I have never planted a church among the people in our country, but Mint has at least 10 healthy churches who each have a goal to pioneer in new areas. When I originally thought about missions, I always imagined that I would be the one leading people to faith. But there is something so much richer and better in seeing Mint succeed—because she is a national leader, called by God, and multiplying among her own people.

In 1 Thessalonians 2, Paul writes to one of his churches, and his words perfectly reflect what we feel towards Mint. Paul tells them, “What is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before the Lord Jesus at the time of his coming? Is it not you? For you are our glory and our joy.” We love Mint so much, as a friend, a co-laborer, and a sister in Christ. Knowing and helping her is our joy and if no one ever knows our names, it doesn’t matter, because God is using Mint to multiply the gospel in our country.