In my first reading of this book, I found myself in awe at the audacity of Jacob in action over 22 years in the capital city of a country that defeated the United States in what they called “The American War.” But then I realized that I had seen this same scenario on my visits to the toughest Red Light districts and urban drug centers in six continents. I delighted in calling YWAM the “urban Wycliffe translators” because they went straight for those urban centers and turned them into training centers. This book has the DNA of YWAM radical spirituality all over it.
By the third reading of this book with my theological educator’s glasses on, I realized that the world needs to know HOW Jacob learns and not just WHAT he knows.
Readers should be careful not to rush to the 5-step process. Instead, they should internalize it, which might lead to other programs or even more steps in other cities. Follow Jacob’s journey. Identify the process that sustained him for the end game was not seen at the beginning. You will discover that he was re-equipping himself in stages on that journey, and it sustained him for more than 20 years of going deep and imbibing on the culture and history of Vietnam. Like Jesus in Mark 3:14, Jacob knows that ministry is both taught and caught.
Maintaining relationships and having peers of all kinds are critical to urban staying power. It’s inverse to programmed mission, so common in our time, which has the solution and only waits for the opportunity to launch the program they’ve been sent to do. They seek to “take the city” in military fashion or go to claim their “market share” of the audience they wish to reach. It’s always the outside in game.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’” One of my late mentors, the quotable John Stott in the Lausanne movement, said many times: “Leadership begins with vision, and vision begins with a holy discontent with things as they are.” A vision—of and then, for the city—is critical, and it begins with immersion in the cities in both testaments, and all the hundreds of ways the Lord God and His priests, poets, prophets and politicians, sometimes separately; more often collaboratively, combined to show God’s redeeming and sustaining love for cities in both testaments. The truth is theology of the city is much more than a ministry to or merely in a city.
While serving as a ministry practitioner in cities and a teacher of global urban ministry, Jacob became a voracious reader. He would seek and test out the things he read from peers. Somewhere along the way (although he doesn’t say so himself), he has picked up St. Augustine’s idea of “pleasing pagans” and acquired the capacity to see Hanoi as a gift of “common graces,” even when “saving grace” ministries are highly restricted.
Sometimes the leaders of ministry in the so-called tough or restricted access places, which so often characterizes urban mission, neither executives or funders, fail to see the results they hoped or planned for from a distance, and they are tempted to pull the plug. Imagine what the report of Jesus’ three-year public ministry must’ve looked like, planned since before the foundations of the earth according to Paul (see Ephesians 1). Jesus opts to They feel it extremely difficult to achieve or maintain erections needed for a healthy sexual activity between a man and the cost of cialis world of work. However, I am able to use a complement like Provacyl that will help to prompt the body to produce more feel good hormones that are essential to make the men relaxed and confident. order viagra levitra levitra professional online This can be a great opportunity for the ED sufferers to obtain the medication without visiting a physician. This is quite different from tackling the aging process itself, and a wide array of strategies and therapies are currently available. tadalafil cheap spend 50% of His short working time with 12 people, carefully called, chosen, and prepared. The result: The CFO sold Him and the CEO denied knowing Him (thrice!), and the rest hid behind a locked door in an upper room in a widow’s home in the city. Can you imagine trying to spin that as success in the press room of heaven?
In this book, you will also discover that Jacob did not ignore that battered 100-year-old church that had survived. Every city has those “Lord have mercy” 5th-commandment churches as I call them. They keep the refugees from “praise worship churches, barely alive, and often behind stained glass.”
There was a time when these churches were the biggest and the best the kingdom had. But the passage of time and incidence of wars, inside and outside, have taken their toll. Should we plant our new church beside them and let these old churches die? Jacob, looking closely inside, sees a Simeon or Anna in Luke 2, who’ve never left for 86 years. They are being pastored by memories and promises more than by their current pulpit leaders. Jacob, and his little group of outsiders did not hold on to their new power and privilege, but widened their kingdom lens to build the bridges across unequal and potentially hostile, theological, and sociological divides, leading to the citywide consultations and celebrations so a gathering of the Body of Christ could be the harvest of a century of prayer and patience by so many, both seen and unseen. Billy Graham would have agreed that this is what implementing Jesus’ prayer truly looks like; the Lausanne Covenant Article 6 in action: “Let us help the whole church, take the whole gospel to the whole world.”
God is now clearly bringing all nations into urban neighborhoods in all six continents. The mission fields have shifted from across oceans to across the street. No longer geographically distant, ministry is now culturally distant, and that is the challenge Jacob and his team have come to understand, and the rest of us need to learn from them.
But I hope this book is not the last word from the Hanoi team. I leave them with another challenge; a historical challenge and perhaps a more consequential one going forward.
There is a Vietnam diaspora in several continents. As a long-time professor of biblical, mission and world Christian history, I know the gifts of diasporas can be huge and transformative over time. Jacob has begun to reach out, and I hope that the scattered Vietnamese will get beyond the pain of war, evacuation, and all the tragedies as well as the loss of the country they knew, to take the steps toward those who remained to work with those among the enemies they left behind.
Dr. Ray Bakke
Founder, Bakke Graduate University
Author, Theology as Big as the City
Pentecost 2019, Acme, WA USA
