When Jonathan and Sarah Alexander met in Central Asia in the early 1990s, most of the countries in the region were a part of the Soviet Union. There were only a handful of Christians and no churches among the people group the Alexanders were working with. In 30-plus years, the existing believers in the country grew to tens of thousands of Christians and hundreds of churches.
“We’ve been able to watch the church grow from nothing to a fledgling church,” Jonathan said.
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As regional leaders for several Central Asian countries, the Alexanders see their churches confronting the same kind of Scripture-versus-culture clashes that marked the early Church in the Bible.
The cultures in these countries operate within a shame/honor context, where, Jonathan explained, everyone is paying attention to what everyone else thinks.
“The thing that we’ve noticed is that Central Asians in general are just really quick to be offended at one another,” Jonathan said.
Jonathan and a local pastor saw the need to address this in the house churches where they are invested.
“The ‘light bulb’ for me is the area of expectation,” Jonathan explained. “As Christians, we have high expectations for one another. It’s right for us to expect that we’re going to treat one another well, that we’re going to show honor. When that doesn’t happen, people get offended. The other side of it is forgiveness and learning to forgive.”
Jonathan gave an example of correcting children. In Western cultures, when a child does something wrong, a parent will explain why that is wrong and instruct them to not do it again.
In honor/shame cultures, parents often say, “Don’t do that, it’s shameful.”
“The idea is that the way that you behave brings embarrassment or dishonor to our family. That has a lot of implications in terms of somebody coming to Christ,” Jonathan said.
‘Everybody’s watching’
In other words, “Everybody’s watching, and my whole family is going to be affected by the decision that I make to follow Jesus.”
“That’s a burden that they always carry,” Jonathan said.
Jonathan said there are a lot of broken relationships.
He asked a pastor friend to draw a sketch of the relationships in his family, drawing lines to represent relationships. His drawing looked like a plate of spaghetti — there were so many relationships where people weren’t talking to one another anymore.
Jonathan said they tell Christians it’s OK to be offended but encourage them to forgive.
While they were recently in the U.S., the Alexanders learned a church member left their church because she was offended by someone else in the church.
Another cultural issue the Alexanders grappled with is family hierarchies.
Daryn, a believing friend of Jonathan’s, has a drinking problem. Jonathan and Yasina, Daryn’s daughter, have been talking about how to help, but Daryn’s sister is the matriarch of the family and makes the decisions. The two women disagree on rehabilitation, and Yasina has no power in the relationship.
From a biblical perspective, Jonathan has counseled Yasina to show respect for her aunt and build a relationship of trust.
The most difficult person to be in Central Asia is the daughter-in-law, Jonathan said. When a man gets married, his wife moves into the home where her in-laws also live, and she essentially becomes the family’s slave.
The mother-in-law often torments the daughter-in-law because she was tormented by her mother-in-law. It becomes a cycle of emotional and sometimes physical abuse.
Forgiveness
Jonathan believes the biblical precedent is found in 1 Peter 2, when Peter talks about honoring your masters. For a young woman suffering at the hands of her mother-in-law, he counsels for her to respond with love and respect.
“Forgiveness has to be right at the very heart of it, knowing that often she’s going to be powerless to affect change,” Jonathan said.
“The American response tends to be that we run away from suffering. Whatever kind of difficult situation you’re in, get out of it, which sometimes that’s appropriate, but sometimes the biblical response to suffering is we walk toward it,” Jonathan said, making the comparison to Paul’s visit to Jerusalem in Acts 21, even when he knew it may cost him.
He said there are times when running is needed and necessary for protection. He points to the example of Paul escaping from Damascus in Acts 9. The Alexanders advised one believing woman to leave her abusive, non-Christian husband. However, her father told her to stay. If she left her husband, shame would come to the entire family.
“For a first-generation Christian who’s trying to grapple with the claims of Christ and the claims of society, it is really hard,” Jonathan said.
Jonathan teaches men that when they marry, their first obligation becomes their wife. He hopes they will become advocates for their wives. This is a challenge, because societally, the men are raised to honor their mothers first. If they say no, guilt and shame falls upon them.
Jonathan said he’s seeing more Christian men understand their duty to prioritize their wives.
“One of the things that I’ve been teaching to Christians is the world is watching,” Jonathan said, “and if they look at Christian families and they see that we don’t have all these broken relationships, that’s going to be a real testimony. How we get there is if we are slow to take offense and quick to forgive, the world is going to notice.”
Looking back and looking forward
“What’s most encouraging for me, and this has to do with our longevity, is that we can remember back 30 years ago. Thirty years isn’t a very long time, and so we remember when there was no church anywhere, and now there are churches everywhere,” Jonathan said.
He recently spoke with a local believer who pointed out that the Book of Acts covers a time span of just over 30 years.
“We see the growth of the church in the Book of Acts, and if you compare that to our little corner of the world, the Church has grown more over the course of 30 years than it did in the Book of Acts,” Jonathan said.
“We deal with a lot of junk, but that’s what the church is — Christians living life together, dealing with their junk and helping each other to walk toward Jesus,” Jonathan said. “Paul’s epistles were written because Christians had junk in their lives.”
Jonathan said it’s a gift to watch first-generation believers understand the truths of the Christian life and God’s mercy.
Looking forward to the next era of church history in Central Asia, the Alexanders and other IMB leaders established 10-year goals. One is theological education, ensuring that pastors and leaders have a strong biblical foundation to preach the Word. With church members, discipling them on doctrine, so they can sift through the noise of the perceived Christian teachers they encounter on YouTube.
Their next goal is for churches to network well and to gather around shared vision and shared doctrine. Their third goal is for churches to partner to send out missionaries.
The Alexanders pray the next 30 years will be just as fruitful for churches in Central Asia.
Some names changed for security
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Tessa Sanchez and originally published by the International Mission Board.
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