Introduction: Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Welcome to Exploring Missions, connecting mission needs with those equipped by God to meet those needs—across the world or across town. And now, the host of Exploring Missions, Bert Harper.

Bert Harper: Many times on Exploring Missions, we have part one, and then we'll have part two. Well, today is going to be part two of a mission strategy that you can look at and understand, and we're praying that it would help you and encourage you. But while Exploring Missions wants you to buy in to what God wants us to be as witnesses for Him, a lot of people have come to me and said, "I have learned a lot through Exploring Missions—not just about missions and evangelism, not about just ministries that are doing the work, but biblical principles and, I would say, illustrations that demonstrate how to be effective in your witness for Christ." Again, this is Bert Harper along with Nathan Harper. And Nathan, today we're going to have one of those sessions of part two. Would you mind setting this up?

Nathan Harper: Yeah, for sure. So in part one, we kind of looked at some random animals or some various pairing and comparison, contrast of different animals, and what we could learn from those animals as it relates to living on mission and being strategic and biblical in our mission strategies and our way we start working purposefully to make disciples. In this part, we're going to expand from that, and we're going to look at some animals—some different ones, a few different ones—but we're going to kind of look at what they can teach us about the mindset, a biblical mindset of maybe mission leaders.

Bert Harper: Well, Nathan, let me say this before we get started. God's used this many times. He's used animals. Let me see: a donkey talked, a rooster crowed, a fish carried a missionary to a place he needed to go to. And Jesus said, "Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head." So I love what you're doing with this. You're combining God's creation and God's redemption plan. So, brother, I'm excited about it, so take us through it.

Nathan Harper: All right. Well, I'm no expert, but I've done a little bit of study and taken what some people have already noticed, and we're just going to notice it along with them. But what can some animals teach us about the right mindset for mission leaders? If you see yourself as a leader in any sort of capacity when it comes to missions—maybe you're a pastor or on staff at a church, or maybe you're part of a mission team, or you just have some experience on the mission field in one way or the other—what are the good mindsets we can learn?

Well, let's start out looking at a camel. How about that? And you do find camels in the Bible, right? I'm—

Bert Harper: That's right.

Nathan Harper: Now, I don't know, but I do believe the Wise Men did come to Bethlehem on at least three camels. Now, I don't know for sure, but I just can't imagine us being wrong all these years with all the nativity scenes. Go ahead, man.

Bert Harper: And the question is, was it one hump or two humps, you know?

Nathan Harper: That's right.

Bert Harper: Have you ever ridden on a camel, Bert Harper?

Bert Harper: I have not. I was in the Holy Land, and they brought a camel. Your mom did, okay?

Nathan Harper: Okay, gotcha.

Bert Harper: Of hers! She got up there, and she sat up high. So, yeah.

Nathan Harper: Rachel and I got to ride a camel in Egypt right in front of the Pyramids. It was pretty interesting right there in the Sahara. And don't ask me how much I paid for a little souvenir glass camel with Saharan sand filled in it—that's another story, so...

Bert Harper: I know, yeah. That's tourism! Go ahead.

Nathan Harper: Yeah, that's right. So anyway, with a camel, what we want to learn is simply: we need to have the mindset of flexibility. And you've probably heard this if you've ever been on a mission trip and done any sort of training for a short-term mission trip. One of the first lessons you have to learn is how to adapt, how to be flexible. It requires flexibility. One way of calling—we call this sometimes "contextualized methods," but it's being adaptive. And so, as we think about a camel, I can't help but think about my friend Yob.

So, my friend Yob is from the country of Eritrea originally, but he and his family are now American citizens living here in the United States. And Yob, however, told me one time—actually, we had a discussion about—he was kind of new to the country, and so he was not familiar with our healthcare system and how things worked. Like, how does insurance work, and why are doctors' medical bills so expensive, and things like that. And he told me a story one time of back in Eritrea—which is the Horn of Africa, so if you look at Northeast Africa, that continent, you could find Ethiopia, and the small country between Ethiopia and the Red Sea is Eritrea. And that's where Yob was from.

But he was telling me about how he used to own a camel. And the story goes, basically, he had a camel that he had for many years, and he would sometimes go on a several-hour journey basically to get water. I think he would ride for three or four hours to go collect water from a place where there was clean, fresh water, and then with all the canisters of water, he would travel back. And so it was a whole day trip. He had to make that trip every two weeks.

And so the camel got so used to taking that same journey that Yob could get on the camel, get going in the right direction, and then he knew his camel knew where to go and how to get there. So Yob could actually lean back, lay back on the hump, close his eyes, rest his feet on the camel's neck, and he would sleep most of the journey. Imagine that—sleeping on the top of a camel as it's driving or riding down the road. So...

Bert Harper: Now, you've heard of smart cars—this is a smart camel!

Nathan Harper: Yeah. So anyway, the story goes that Yob one day traded in his camel for a new camel. And he made the first journey to go get water with the new camel, and he forgot that this camel didn't know where to go and what to do, and the camel wasn't used to him. And so Yob got going down the road, and so he did what he always did: he leaned back and rested his head on the camel's hump, and then he put his feet up on the camel's neck. And when he did, it startled that camel, and it basically threw him off. And you know those camels are really tall! And so he fell a long distance to the ground, and he broke his wrist.

So, all that long story about the camel just to talk about a broken wrist!

Anyway, in case you're curious, guess what? For the doctor to fix his wrist, guess how much that cost him in his country?

Bert Harper: Okay, not in America, but Eritrea. I just can't wait. A lot less!

Nathan Harper: Well, it was—it was a lot less. It wasn't money, actually; it was two chickens. So he took the doctor two chickens, and the doctor fixed his wrist. So...

Bert Harper: Okay.

Nathan Harper: Anyway, but here's the thing about a camel: camels are very, very interesting. From their toes all the way up, and even to the insides of them, they are adaptive. They have grown to where their context has kind of—well, they fit into their context. You think about desert sand, hot weather, the sun beating down, scarce water—all those things that, you know, when you think of a camel, you think of where they are located.

And so, did you know this? A camel's feet and toes are specifically designed to where they can walk on top of sand. Their feet don't get buried down into the sand; they're actually walking on top of the sand.

Bert Harper: Yeah, you can see how wide they are. So I understand that, sort of like ducks with them paddling in a pond. They're made for that. That's awesome.

Nathan Harper: That's right. Now, the most distinguishing feature maybe about a camel is their hump. You know what they store in their hump?

Bert Harper: No. What—I always heard water.

Nathan Harper: So it's actually not water; it's fat. And the body of the camel turns the fat into energy. So that's kind of a myth. You can correct someone on that when they talk about the camel storing water in their hump—it's actually fat.

Now, their eyelashes—think about a camel's eyelashes. They're extra long to protect them from sun and sand, so extra long eyelashes. So if you want to give somebody a compliment, maybe a lady, you can say, "Hey, your eyelashes remind me of a camel."

Bert Harper: I would not suggest that! I would not!

Nathan Harper: Yeah, let's not do that. But their mouth—this is really, really interesting to me. So their mouth—God has designed their mouth to be able to eat cactus and thorny plants. And so to do that, they don't have any front teeth on the top. On their top teeth, there's no front, middle teeth. And their mouth inside is extra padded and leathery. Well, actually, their tongue is very leathery. And they actually—you've seen this probably—they chew side-to-side for grinding their food.

So sometimes all they have to eat is cactus. Well, their mouth has been designed—there's some adaptation there that has occurred to allow them to eat thorny plants and cactus.

Their nose has been adapted and been designed to where their nose serves as like an internal air conditioning. And it cools their brains even when their body temperature hits 106 degrees. Their brains are cooler because of the way their nose is designed.

Just a couple of other little things about drinking. You know a camel can even drink seawater if necessary? Their kidneys can filter out the salt in the seawater.

Bert Harper: They're amazing animals, all I got to say!

Nathan Harper: Yeah. And here's the thing—this is what Yob would tell me: he would go every two weeks to get water. His camel would drink first. He said, "That's the one thing you can't go to a water hole without the camel drinking first. They'll trample you if you try to get off and get in their way." But they can go up to 14 days between drinks of water. They can drink up to 50 gallons in 3 minutes, if necessary. I think that's the record: 3 minutes, they're drinking 50 gallons!

Bert Harper: That's better than a pump!

Nathan Harper: Yeah! So all that about a camel to kind of demonstrate and illustrate: when we're living on mission, a missional leader must have this mindset of flexibility. Just like a camel has adapted to their context of desert heat, lack of water, only cactus to eat, all these type of things, you can look at a camel and see how flexible they have become, how adaptive they have become. And the principle is that we have to contextualize our methods for reaching people based on the people—based on who they are, and where they are, and what their culture is like, their—

And here's the thing: we're doing this right now to a small degree. Bert Harper, you and I are speaking what language?

Bert Harper: English.

Nathan Harper: Yeah, English.

Bert Harper: American—Southern English for me! Devin's over here laughing, so anyway, yeah—Southern English.

Nathan Harper: Yeah, some people—yeah, some people might say—they might question, "Are we really speaking English?" It's a version of it! But yeah, we're speaking English. And guess what? We're speaking to English listeners. People that understand English can listen to this. But people that don't know English, guess what? They won't get anything out of this episode, this podcast.

If we wanted to speak to someone that only understands Spanish, we have to translate what we're saying into Spanish. That whole idea of translation—whether it's Bible translations, language translations—that's contextualization. You just want to take the message that doesn't change, but communicate it in a way that can be understood, and it requires flexibility, adaptation, contextualizing your methods. And there's other things, but the language is an easy one to understand.

So, the mindset of a missional leader, it's a mindset of flexibility.

Bert Harper: What else?

Nathan Harper: All right, let's look real quickly at a next—it's a pair of animals that we're going to compare and contrast. So, think of a starfish and a spider. Now, they have a few things in common, maybe one or two things. What do they have in common that you kind of recognize right off the bat?

Bert Harper: Yeah, you think about their appendages. They have—that's the first thing that comes to my mind.

Nathan Harper: Yeah, and I think that's what we would all say is we recognize there's kind of a central body or hub, if you will, then there are legs or tentacles or something that comes out of the central place. And so, we're going to talk about the mindset: movement.

So in mission terminology, you may come across the phrase "church planting movement," or maybe "disciple-making movement." Have you heard of those, Bert Harper, those phrases?

Bert Harper: Yes, both of those. We talk about planting churches quite often.

Nathan Harper: So in thinking about movements, what we're talking about is the sense that the gospel can grow and go from one person—it starts with one person—but it expands to reach the whole group. And it usually does so what we would say is rapidly. The point is not the speed, but the point is that it's faster than what a person can make happen, because it's the Spirit who is guiding the movement, who is making something happen, who is moving people in this mission.

Now, to make sure there is a movement that occurs—we want to see movement happen, right? We want to see God moving. We want to see the Spirit moving, not just static, not just stagnant, not a plateau, but a growing kind of thing. So to have the mindset of movement, it requires several things, but the spider and the starfish can teach us one of those specific aspects of movement, and that is the idea of centralization or decentralization of leadership. You can take a hierarchical model, or you can take a non-hierarchical model, more of a flat-type model, and a movement occurs when it's decentralized and flat, when there's not a hierarchy and where there's not a centralization of leadership or of power. So let me look at the spider to kind of see what centralized or hierarchical models might look like...

Nathan Harper: How do you kill a spider? Most people are just interested in how quickly they can kill it because it creeps them out and scares them. I remember my brother, Matthew, when we were younger—he moved out of his room for three months because he thought he saw a spider in there once. He's deathly afraid of spiders.

Bert Harper: What's funny about that is when your mom was carrying you, she let down the sun visor and a spider came down. She lost control of the car, ran into an embankment of dirt, but you both were all right. You survived and weren't afraid of spiders, but it marked your brother Matthew for the next one, so that was passed down.

Nathan Harper: I guess I almost wasn't here because of a spider!

Before we get into this, let me read a passage in Matthew Chapter 20, verses 25 and 26. Jesus is talking to his disciples and says: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them." He is talking about a centralized, hierarchical model.

Then verse 26 says: "Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant." In other words, we want to take on a servant mindset where power, authority, and the work of the mission in front of us has been decentralized and flattened as best as we can. That's how we see movement happen.

A spider teaches us about centralization and hierarchical models. Other than squishing or stepping on a spider, you could kill it another way if you had the patience: you could start pulling off its legs one at a time. At a certain point, that spider would die because if it doesn't have any legs, it can't move or go anywhere to find food. You've stopped the movement. It's kind of a grotesque picture, but...

Bert Harper: For those of us who do not like spiders, that was a fine example.

Nathan Harper: Here is what the spider shows us: what stops the gospel from moving throughout a community or country is a single point of failure. We sometimes set things up to rely heavily on one lead pastor, a big physical building, or a small staff of leadership where all the power is invested. If that leader falls into moral failure or leaves, sometimes that entire ministry collapses.

A missionary shouldn't be there to run the show. Someone leading in missions should be a servant, just like Jesus discussed. There can also be a consumer mentality where church attendees become passive consumers of a religious product created by a few professionals on a stage. We certainly don't want to pass that consumer model on to areas of the world where the gospel is first arriving.

Under external pressure—like persecution—if a government bans public gatherings or targets church leadership, a centralized church will struggle to survive because the central head has been removed. Even buildings can be targets. If church is simply about coming to a specific building on a specific day, and that building is destroyed, it can cripple a church.

Bert Harper: I've seen it happen. You're right.

Nathan Harper: Now let's move on to the starfish. What makes a starfish different from a spider is that with certain kinds of starfish, if you separate one of its legs or tentacles just right, you don't kill the original starfish—another starfish will actually grow out of that leg.

Bert Harper: I'm going to look that up! That is great.

Nathan Harper: That represents a decentralized, flat model that is set up for gospel movement and multiplication to happen. The Body of Christ is a picture of this. Every believer should act as a minister living on mission using their unique spiritual gifts. Who is the head of the church?

Bert Harper: Jesus Christ.

Nathan Harper: Jesus—not a human leader. The body takes its commands from Jesus and its cues from the Holy Spirit. That is how we function as we're called to.

Instead of trying to grow by adding more people to one large building, a starfish ministry multiplies by planting small, autonomous micro-churches, cell groups, or house churches. If you split one small group, it becomes two fully functioning communities. Think about exponential multiplication and indestructible resilience.

Throughout history, persecuted churches—like the early church in Rome, the modern underground church in China, or the church in Iran—have thrived because they function like a starfish. Without central buildings or official CEOs, they are impossible for external forces to shut down. That is an example of a movement mindset.

Now for the third mindset for missional leaders: we're going to talk about lions... but actually, we're going to talk about dandelions.

Bert Harper: I'm following you!

Nathan Harper: Think about the long stem with the fluffy seeds on the end. You've probably blown those seeds into the wind before.

Bert Harper: Well, I have them in my yard, so I have that opportunity!

Nathan Harper: In the book of Acts, you see the church growing early on by addition—the Lord added to their number daily. But by the end of Acts, the church is growing exponentially by multiplication. That is the dandelion mindset: exponential disciple-making where disciples make disciples who make disciples, and churches plant churches that plant churches.

It's good to plant a church and make a disciple, but it shouldn't end there. We need to go on multiplying. Like a dandelion spreading hundreds of seeds on the wind to grow new flowers, this promotes an exponential, viral approach to making disciples instead of addition-based growth.

One disciple makes another, giving you two. Those two make two more, giving you four. Those four make four more, giving you eight. It starts small and slow, but in our lifetime, the whole population of the earth could be reached through that model of multiplying disciples.

Bert Harper: When you hear that, Nathan... the first time I ever heard that, I had a hard time believing it. But when you take it out and do it yourself, by the time you get to 32, and then those 32 become 64, it just grows and grows. That's what the New Testament church was, isn't it?

Nathan Harper: That's right. So let's not stop short. Once we see God using us, let's not get stuck. A tree that bears fruit will be pruned so that it will bear more fruit, much fruit, multiplied fruit.

Let's take on these mindsets of a missional leader: flexible and adaptive to our context, possessing a movement mindset where we don't centralize authority in a few hands, and adopting a multiplication mindset. Aslan is on the move—Jesus, the Lion of Judah, wants to reach the entire world until His glory covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Bert Harper: Nathan, thank you for taking us through this. This has been more than a science lesson; this teaches and gives energy and excitement about what God can do when we do it His way.

Thank you for listening to Exploring Missions today. We pray that God would use you in His plan to multiply believers all over the world, beginning right where you are. Thank you for listening to Exploring Missions on American Family Radio.