“You can’t work with the Thai church.”

“They’re lazy, they don’t show up on time, and they lie to you by saying they’ll do something and then not do it.”

This was the repeated sentiment we heard from experienced missionaries during our early years in Thailand. We had learned that most CPMs are started by in/near culture believers, so we wanted to find Thai believers with a vision for multiplying disciples.

We sought out long-time workers in Thailand to learn how to approach this. But over and over, we heard: don’t even try. It won’t work. It’s too hard. Just do it yourself.

At the same time, we began visiting local Thai churches that seemed to carry a vision for disciple-making and church planting. We met vibrant, growing, Thai-led churches with goals like planting 100 churches or starting groups in every province in their region. And to our surprise, they warmly welcomed us to learn from them and partner together.

Over the last 12 years on the field, we’ve continued to hear that working with the local church is too difficult for cross-cultural missionaries — not just in Thailand, but in many places around the world. Yet by God’s grace, our experience has been marked by deep partnership and friendship with our Thai brothers and sisters. We also know many CPM practitioners who feel the same way, some even brought to tears when speaking about their local partners and friends.

So why is there such a massive gap between these experiences? Why do some cross-cultural workers grow skeptical or even bitter toward local believers, while others develop rich, life-giving relationships?

We believe one big reason lies with ethnocentrism. It’s one of the most sinister and destructive barriers for cross-cultural workers that sabotages their desire to have an impact among the fields they’re called to.

It affects not only their relationship with local believers, but their relationship with the local culture, their thriving on the field, and ultimately their long-term perseverance in their calling. 

In this post, we’ll look at what ethnocentrism is, how the Bible addresses it, and ways we can reflect on our own ethnocentrism. In our next post, we’ll discuss how ethnocentrism affects your vision and practical ways you can combat it.

What is Ethnocentrism?

Ethnocentrism is defined as “the tendency to evaluate other cultures based on the standards and values of one’s own culture, often leading to perceptions of superiority.”

When a goer moves overseas, it’s an extremely jarring experience. The language, climate, foods, traditions, expectations, and social dynamics can be completely different from the place you grew up. For many goers, there can be an initial honeymoon phase where they’re excited to learn and experience many new things. But after a few months, the ongoing feelings of confusion, of homesickness, of not fitting in can start to impact you. You get tired of being stared at on the street, being laughed at when you try to speak the local language, and you just want a dang burger instead of this funky tasting mystery meat.

Thoughts of judgment and criticism start creeping in:

“Why can’t they just do it the way we do it at home? It’s so much better that way.” 

“Why are people here so dishonest? Why can’t they just tell it to me straight?”

“Why is this thing so weird? Why can’t it just be normal?”

All missionaries have had thoughts like these, including myself and those on our team. Naturally, in an attempt to assuage the confusion we experience, we begin to measure things in our host culture against our home culture. The criticisms that we heard from experienced missionaries in Thailand assumed that certain cultural values in the West, like being hard-working, punctual, and communicating directly, are the cultural standards in Thailand. They aren’t! But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Without an understanding of ethnocentrism, cross-cultural workers can become frustrated, bitter, and judgmental against the very culture and people they came to serve. And unfortunately, it’s not just an early season culture shock thing for many people. We’ve met several decade-plus missionaries who still say things like, “I honestly hate everything about this country but I guess we’re supposed to be here.”

Dr. Craig Ott in Teaching and Learning Across Cultures writes that “ethnocentrism not only can blind one to the beauty of other cultures but can also lead to condescending attitudes that block meaningful relationships with others and the ability to learn from them. In the worst case, it can foster racism and prejudice.”

The Lawnmower

In a pre-field cultural training that Jenn and I attended, the facilitator explained that the different places we were going to would have different cultural values and to be wary of ethnocentrism. To illustrate this, he told a story of his time in Indonesia where a neighbor asked to borrow a lawnmower. But after the neighbor used it, he kept the lawnmower in his own garage. After a couple of weeks, the facilitator, somewhat annoyed, finally asked the neighbor for his lawnmower back.

The neighbor said, “Of course!” When the facilitator asked the neighbor why he had not returned his lawnmower several weeks after using it, the neighbor explained, “In our culture, since we are part of the same neighborhood, it means we are part of the same community. What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine! I was just keeping the lawnmower in my garage until you needed it back, but you could have asked for it anytime!”

The facilitator posed a question to the group of future missionaries: did my neighbor steal my lawnmower? Jenn and I looked at each other and both thought – “of course not, the neighbor was just explaining communal culture. The facilitator even just explicitly said so.”

But the entire class answered in an uproar: “Yes! He stole it! He should’ve given it back immediately because it’s your personal property!” Some even aggressively contended that the facilitator should have called the police on the neighbor for theft.

We were shocked. Not only that the explicitly explained difference in cultural values went over everyone’s head, but also at the anger and disbelief that was in the response.

As we’ve reflected on this interaction, we’ve realized that the angry energy in the class’ response was because they had made a cultural misunderstanding into a moral issue. It was morally wrong that the neighbor did not return the lawnmower because of Americans’ high value of individuality and personal ownership. But the neighbor did not see it that way at all because of his own more collectivist cultural lens.

The lawnmower is a somewhat trivial example, but still such a small issue resulted in such a strong response from the group. We have seen missionaries, including ourselves, make this ethnocentric mistake in much higher stakes situations. We do this in how we train and model expressions of church, how we discuss theology, how we choose leaders, how we evaluate moral and discipleship issues. We measure local believers against our cultural interpretation of Scripture, instead of looking at how Scripture speaks into the local context.

Ethnocentrism and Paternalism in Missions History

There are countless examples of ethnocentrism, paternalism, and even cultural imperialism throughout missions history. Entire books, courses, and degree programs have been devoted to these topics, so we won’t try to cover them in depth here.

But we do want to briefly acknowledge how the painful parts of missions history can compound the problems that come with ethnocentrism today. We’re also troubled by how many workers are unaware of the historical dynamics in the places they serve, and how often the same mistakes continue to be repeated.

Paternalism “occurs when missionaries and their sending churches and agencies consciously or unconsciously assume that they possess superior knowledge, experience, and skills and, consequently, exert control over local Christians and their leaders. This control is almost always exerted through financial arrangements and the implicit authority of money.”

Missions history is littered with examples of paternalism, racism, and cultural imperialism (the imposition by a dominant community of its own culture onto another community) that led to destructive consequences for the name of Jesus around the world. In the most extreme cases, some missionaries had a view that they were not only bringing the gospel, but Western civilization to the “savage” or “heathens” in other parts of the world. They viewed non-Western cultures and peoples as inferior, and thought that planting churches meant dismantling the local culture. Is it any wonder that in many unreached places in the world, Christianity has a negative reputation and is seen as a Western, foreign religion?

Missionaries today need to be aware of what previous generations of workers have done, both good and bad, and in some cases, explicitly acknowledge the negative impact that has come with paternalism and imperialism. It’s especially important for those of us from the West to guard against a “Western savior complex” – the assumption that we are coming to rescue people who are helpless without us. Jesus is the Savior, not us. We should be aware of where he is working and join in that, which often is through the existing local church!

How the Bible Addresses Ethnocentrism

One of my favorite Bible studies is comparing and contrasting Jesus’ interactions with Gentiles and with Jewish religious leaders. I might post a blog on this topic in the future but I’d encourage you to study this if you haven’t!

The story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37 is the clearest example of how Jesus addresses ethnocentrism. When challenged by a lawyer about how to inherit eternal life, Jesus answers with the Great Commandment: love God and love your neighbor. And the lawyer, perhaps looking for a loophole to focus his “love” on those he prefers, replies, “who is my neighbor?”

And Jesus tells of a man beaten and left for dead, passed on by supposedly holy leaders, a priest and a Levite. But a Samaritan – avoided, judged, hated by the Jews – showed compassion to the man, cared for him, sacrificed his own resources, and showed mercy. The ultimate example of obedience to the Great Commandment was a person not just from a different culture, but a culture that the Jews hated.

Jesus’ example is love, humility, and compassion towards those from different cultures. He left heaven’s culture to walk on the earth as a Jewish man and make a way for all cultures to receive grace through the Cross. He condemns and rejects ethnocentrism by declaring God’s heart for all nations and explicitly showing his love towards non-Jewish people. The gospels are full of examples of this: the salvation for the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), the grace for the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7), the faith of the Roman centurion to name just a few.

Paul also embodies an anti-ethnocentric posture: “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings” (1 Cor. 9:22-23). He is willing to lay down his own values, preferences, and even rights to be a minister to the Gentiles.

Scripture culminates in Revelation 7, perhaps the most anti-ethnocentric passage in the Bible, where the multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language is worshipping around the throne of God. There is no higher or lower culture, no better or worse cultural values – there are only the people rescued by Jesus clothed in white robes. And yet, the peoples still preserve their cultural identity – representatives from every culture are in the new heaven and the new earth but redeemed perfectly.

Reflection: Have I Been Ethnocentric?

If we are honest with ourselves for a moment, whether from our upbringing, personal experiences, or plain ignorance, there are people from other cultures that we instinctively judge, feel superior to, dislike, or even hate. We know missionaries that will travel half the world away to serve another culture but speak disparagingly and condescendingly about people of another skin color in a different part of their own hometown.

I was brought up to ignorantly fear black people and hate Japanese people for what they did historically in China, and believe that ethnic Chinese people were somehow superior to all others. I’ve had bitterness in my heart from racist experiences with white people. It took years of seeing God’s heart in Scripture and repenting, befriending people from different cultures, learning different perspectives, and even living in another country to unlearn these prejudices from my upbringing and my sinful heart.

Reflecting on our own ethnocentrism can be challenging because our cultural values are deeply tied to our cultural identity and therefore our personal identity. It also requires us to be honest with our own motivations in serving overseas. It can be overwhelming to discover and admit pride, sin, or a sense of superiority towards other cultures, perhaps even the people God has called us to serve.

Our encouragement is this – honest reflection about our ethnocentrism is necessary and it is worth doing. At best, we have some blind spots that can be removed to help us be more loving and effective in our calling. At worst, there are some deeply rooted and sinful perspectives that we didn’t even know we had and they are directly sabotaging what we are trying to accomplish in serving across cultures.

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus knows our hearts and loves us, even if we aren’t aware of these sins or haven’t reconciled them yet.

As you reflect on the questions below, try to come before God with openness, honesty, and humility. Come in a posture of surrender and repentance. Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal hidden assumptions, pride, fear, or bitterness in your heart. Allow God to heal and change your heart! From that, we believe you will not only become a greater servant to the people you’re called to, but become more like Christ in his love for all peoples.

Reflection Questions

• What kinds of people or behaviors are you quickest to judge? What standards are you using to judge them?
• Are there ways you subtly view local believers as less capable, less mature, or less trustworthy than believers from your own culture? How do you react when local believers do something differently than you would?
• Have past wounds, stereotypes, or experiences shaped the way you see certain cultures or ethnicities?
• In what ways might pride, superiority, control, or a “savior mentality” be affecting your ministry?
• Where are you failing to have the Philippians 2 posture of considering others more significant than yourself?

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Now that we have learned some principles from Barnabas and know what we’re looking for in a National Apostolic Visionary (NAV), how do we find one? From here, we’ll start to get into the practical steps of what you might do to filter for and find a NAV to partner with in pursuing movements.

The process will generally follow this order, but different things can happen simultaneously or there might be some back and forth. CPM methods are often presented as a step-by-step manual for the sake of clarity and confidence, which is important, but the reality is that any kind of ministry – especially CPM – is messy, random, and frequently not what you expect or plan!

So you’re bought in to pursuing CPMs among the unreached, you have an understanding of CPM methodology and have received some training, and you’re on board with a ‘Be Barnabas’ approach of finding a NAV to partner with in catalyzing movements. Now what do you do?

Learn language and culture

To us, this is still an essential component for goers that want to live and serve among the unreached! In a few places in the 10/40 window, English may be commonly used, or perhaps working through translators is a standard method of ministry. For most goers, this won’t even be an option and learning language will be a necessity. Although there are benefits to the translator approach (e.g. don’t have to spend time learning language before entering into ministry, automatically have an insider to help train and hopefully develop as a leader), there are also shortcomings and limits (e.g. immediately brings a paternalistic relationship / power dynamic as you are the one paying the translator, limits your understanding of what’s happening in the other language and even in cultural interactions). 

Even if working through a translator might be a faster way to get started in ministry, our personal experience is that it can really help in a partnering relationship to speak the heart language of your partner. Conversely, not speaking the heart language can potentially become a limiter over time. It’s a way we can serve our local friends by not making them speak our heart language at the cost of their discomfort, as we are there in a Barnabas role to support and encourage them. Additionally, language learning leads to cultural learning, as deeper concepts relating to life, spirituality, family, and ministry will not directly translate to English and a Western worldview. 

We’ve heard from more than a few goers about the confusion that can happen in working through translators. CPM practitioners will often hear reports through translation that don’t line up with what is being reported in the local language. Sometimes it’s an unintentional translation mistake, but other times a paternalistic situation or cultural components might cause a local partner to over or under report or otherwise miscommunicate for the sake of saving face with the outsider who is paying them.

There’s an abundance of other reasons to learn the local language, including your own thriving in the culture, the ability to deepen in relationship and fellowship with local believers including your partners, and at least some ability to help national partners contextualize tools and lessons used in ministry.

This does not mean that you cannot engage in the process of connecting with potential NAVs until you’ve mastered language! For local leaders that do speak English or that you can fumble through conversations with basic language, you can still spend time connecting and networking. Meeting leaders is also a great way to stretch your language learning and motivate yourself to improve by preparing for those types of meetings in a different language.

Network With Leaders

Whether you’re starting to learn language and need to have initial conversations in English, or you’re advanced in language and able to communicate fluently, the next step is to network with many national or near culture leaders. These can be local pastors, ministry leaders, or lay leaders, but the emphasis is on connecting with leader-types, as we are looking for NAVs! These leaders might be potential NAVs themselves, or might connect you to other leaders who are NAVs.

How do you meet these local leaders? This can range from cold-contact showing up at a church (if possible) to having other expat missionaries connect you with local believers. Conferences and trainings can be places to meet many leaders in one place. One CPM practitioner we know moved to a new area and decided to contact nearly 200 churches on facebook in his region with a simple message about desiring to learn from their church about what they do in disciple making. In Thailand, we had a long-time missionary connect us with two main churches when we asked, “Who has a vision for disciple-making and church planting? Could we learn from them?” These are still our team’s main two partners after 9 years!

Obviously, if you’re in a creative-access country, you’ll need to be much more discerning in how you meet these local leaders, for the sake of their safety. Additionally, there will be areas in the 10/40 window that have a very low number of local believers, but very few countries that will have none at all. You could potentially find near culture believers from a nearby country in the region that has a larger number of believers and more available access to them. As the world is increasingly globalized and peoples move from place to place, mobilizing near culture believers to some of the least reached places could be an extremely effective approach, or at least likely to be more effective than Westerners entering these closed countries. Whatever your situation, think creatively about how to connect with national or near-culture leaders. Of course more connections is a bigger pool of leaders to filter, but remember – you only need to find 1 NAV, one ‘Paul’ in order to start a movement! Even finding one or two local believers to partner together with in the work can greatly increase your effectiveness.

When you get connected with these leaders, have a posture like Barnabas! Humble, others-focused, serving. If you’re younger or newer to a country, you can lead with, “I’ve heard amazing things about your church or ministry – I would love to buy you a coffee and hear your story and learn from you!”

Once you’ve secured a meeting with them, here are some things you can do during that meeting. This is just an outline, so follow the Holy Spirit’s guiding! You’re looking to see if that leader has the characteristics of a potential NAV, but in particular you’re looking for a vision to make disciples or plant churches. Even if the other characteristics are not apparent or possibly have yet to emerge, it’s likely that a leader with outward vision can connect you to other outward-focused leaders that they know.

Ask Questions to Learn About Them and Their Vision

After short personal questions and introductions, we almost always lead with the question, “What is the vision that God has given you?” One pastor that we asked this question to in southern Thailand said, “I’ve met many missionaries, and you are the first to ask me what vision God has given me. They normally want me to join them in their vision!” It may come out of a personal excitement or vision for CPM that God has given them, but many earnest missionaries may lead with sharing their own vision instead of coming in with an empowering approach. This can result in national leaders not wanting to work with us! 

We’re looking for outward focused ministry visions, not just a desire to add to their own church or ministry. For this particular pastor, he said, “I want to see a church planted in every province in southern Thailand – I believe God has given me the responsibility to see the gospel go to all these places!” Good start! Another Muslim-background believer (MBB) NAV that we partner with said, “I want to see 1 million Muslims come to faith in my lifetime!”

When we asked this question to the head church planting pastor of the network we partner with, he literally pulled out a multiplication table from his pocket. The Lord had given him a vision for multiplication to see 33,000 churches planted throughout Thailand. For context, there’s only about 5000 churches currently in the country. All of these are great examples of potential NAVs with big vision! Some of these leaders with great vision ended up being ready to receive training and help towards catalyzing CPM, and others decided to pursue different paths. That’s fine and not every leader with a big vision will end up being someone you partner with. But having externally focused vision for God’s glory – in evangelism, making disciples, multiplying churches, or reaching peoples and places – is a necessary component that we’re looking for during this investigation process.

Other questions you can ask include how they came to faith, about their current church or ministry’s history or current goals, asking about their family or hometown, or about a mutual connection that you have. In general you’re trying to learn how God is moving in their lives, get to know them in general, and build rapport and relational trust along with discerning if they have an externally focused vision.

One more note about the Barnabas approach is that our personal conviction is to honor the local church and generally try to preserve unity with other Christian leaders, even if we don’t end up partnering with them. Other leaders have legitimate and wonderful ministry visions from God that might be to rescue women in sex trafficking, start schools for marginalized children, develop online ministries, raise up more worship leaders, or any variety of visions, and these are all great! We don’t chastise or shame them for goals that God has given them. But we are looking for these apostolic type leaders that want to explicitly pursue the Great Commission, who have a Romans 15 vision to bring the gospel where it is not known. Again, for earnest and apostolic missionaries who are excited about CPM, we can sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot by perhaps unintentionally shaming other leaders that don’t have a similar vision to us. But as 1 Corinthians 12 tells us, no part of the body can say we have no need for other parts. And that the local church is the bride of Christ who is to be cherished (Eph. 5:29-30). We see in Scripture and we find in our experience that honoring all the parts of the body, including the traditional or ‘legacy’ local church results in a good reputation with leaders that leads to opportunities to partner with others. In short, don’t burn bridges! We’ll have a future post about how to “speak church” and communicate in an honoring way with leaders in the local church about CPM.

Share About Yourself and Vision Cast for Movements

While every conversation will be different, we’d encourage you to mostly ask questions, listen, and learn from potential leaders, at least for the first couple of meetings. However, you should share at least some about who you are, what God has called you to, and your vision for movements! In vision casting, we recommend that you listen well in order to shape your vision cast to the things you hear that they are passionate about. If they’re passionate about sharing the gospel, vision cast about how CPM helps believers sow broadly. If they’re passionate about raising up leaders, share about CPM is focused on empowering and developing lay leaders. After hearing their vision, we will ask a follow up question – what’s your approach or plan to get to that vision? How is it going? From their answers, we are looking for a felt need that we can meet with CPM training.

As we mentioned in the ‘Why Be Barnabas’ post, many times as believers from the West we have a low credibility in evangelism, but a high credibility to other believers as a trainer or leader. Our experience among Thai believers is that they are drawn towards our story of how God called us to be a part of the Great Commission – leaving our families, jobs, homes to obey God and see the gospel go to every people. Share your story!

Also share briefly about movements and gauge their response. As you hear about what their felt needs are in pursuing the vision God has given them, you can share about what you’ve learned in Scripture about multiplication and about what God is doing around the world in movements. 

As a reminder, when we meet with these potential NAVs, we are looking to see if they fulfill all or at least some of the NAV Definition: a National Apostolic Visionary who is willing to be flexible in their methodology and is surrendered to God. If we meet a leader with big vision who is a die-hard Alpha Course or G12 advocate, they might not be a great fit yet to partner with. If we meet a leader who has external vision and is open in methodology but he and the people in his church are too consumed with executing the Sunday worship service to have time for evangelism and disciple-making, we’ll keep the relationship with them but we might spend more time with other leaders who are more open.

As an example, here are some points that we’ll share in the vision casting component:

• Share briefly about how God called us to go overseas.
• Emphasize that we believe that Thai believers are the ones that will be best in reaching their own people, and that we believe our role is to support and come behind them.
• Introduce movements: “Before we moved to Thailand, we learned about an amazing thing that is happening all around the world through multiplication called Church Planting Movements. It follows the principles from Jesus’ ministry and the book of Acts, and it’s bearing much fruit in many different places around the world.” Here we’ll share a brief story of some movements that we know and the impact that it’s having in multiplying disciples and churches.
• Explain that we have some simple and Bible-focused training to help believers make disciples and plant churches in a simple, reproducible way.
• “Would this be something you’re interested in?” And gauge their response!
• If they want to learn more, we might draw a framework of the process and explain it in more detail – we use a framework called the Multiplication Cycle, and others might use Four Fields.

Connect with Other Leaders in Their Network

After hearing from them and vision casting, we’ll ask – “Who are 5 other leaders that you know who have a vision to multiply and might be interested in this? We would love to connect with them and learn from them as well.” After a few meetings, hopefully you will have a potential NAVs list of one or two dozen people to meet!

Build Relational Trust

A key learning we’ve discovered in trying to find and develop relationships with NAVs is that Trust = Relationship + Credibility. When we find a potential NAV who we think is someone that we could partner with, we want to build enough trust with them (in both directions – us trusting them and them trusting us) to engage in a new type of ministry and be given the opportunity to train them and their people. If you have high credibility, whether from previous movement experience, seminary degrees, or even just being older and experienced, you don’t need to build as much relationship. If you have low credibility, you’ll need to spend more time and effort to build relationship with these leaders to gain their trust. For many new goers to the field, you’ll likely have low credibility, so be willing to build relationship through spending time with these leaders and their people or church, through humility in your approach, and through serving like Barnabas! 

In the early days of trying to build trust with our current partners, we were 25 year olds who didn’t have seminary degrees and hadn’t seen much movement fruit, so we spent significant time as learners and in relationship building. This was primarily during our language learning season and according to people’s bandwidth, but we attended small groups, helped serve in various ministries in the church, and had a lot of meetings (and hundreds of texts!) with leaders to learn and vision cast. Over time, as our partners have seen fruit, we are increasingly invited and requested to meet with other local leaders who are hearing about what God is doing through our partners. Thai leaders will now quickly invite us to train them and we have to be discerning about how we spend our time, which is a good problem to have! As our credibility has gone up, mainly through our partners, other leaders are quick to trust us.

As an example of building relationship to gain trust, we heard a story of one CPM practitioner who knew of a national ministry leader that oversaw 400 church planters in India. Over a span of 10 years, whenever he was in this national leader’s city, he would ask for a meeting and ask how he could help. He would assist with various needs like providing educational materials, medical supplies, or Bibles, but whenever they met, this goer would have a posture of humility and heart to serve, knowing that this church planting ministry leader was clearly a NAV. After nearly 10 years, the national leader asked, “I know you want to be involved in church planting but you have never planted a church. How do you think you could help me?” The goer replied, “We have some simple methods for church planting we’d like to try – give us your newest, most immature, most troublesome church planter and let us try partnering with him for 18 months.” Through that ‘immature’ church planter, they were able to catalyze a movement – and he ended up inheriting the leadership role of the national leader and overseeing the entire ministry.

Especially if you are starting out in trying to find new partners, be willing to serve and do anything to gain trust if you meet a key leader who you think is a NAV. Pray and discern from the Holy Spirit who you should spend your time with! The above story is not to say that it will take 10 years to build enough relational trust to partner with someone, but that it’s all dependent on God’s timing! You can’t control if it’s in year 1 or year 10 that God connects you with the NAV that He desires to use to multiply. But you can control your approach and your posture of humility and serving. One of our CPM coaches told a story of how they invited their main partner to an early CPM training. Our friend literally ran into this national leader on the street and said, “Hey! We are doing a training about church planting this weekend, would you like to come?” Later on, the national partner shared with this practitioner: “Honestly, when you invited me, I thought – what do you have to teach me about church planting? I have planted several churches and you haven’t planted any. But because you were kind to me, I came to your training. And God revealed a way to multiply churches through this training!” They are now seeing exponential growth and multiplication all throughout their country.

Conclusion

Hopefully these are some helpful steps and examples to help you begin to connect with potential NAVs and build relational trust with them. In our next post, we’ll share a general process and scoreboard that will help you filter down to the best NAV candidates to begin partnering with.