Editor’s Note: Below is an edited portion of the letter that Douglas Clawson, General Secretary of the Committee on Foreign Missions, wrote to the missionaries whose articles appear in this issue: Heero E. C. Hacquebord in Ukraine, M. in Asia, and Octavius Delfils in Haiti.

Dear Brothers,

Let me remind you of my hope for the articles. Currently, we have one applicant for foreign missions, and that family would be serving in more of a diaconal role. There just aren’t ministers (other than guys still in seminary) applying for foreign mission service, and we chiefly need men with pastoral experience at this juncture.

For the April New Horizons, I asked James Folkerts to write an article about doing ministry in Uganda after the traumatic carjacking he experienced, in which he thought he would be killed, and the memory of which he still lives and works with each day. I also needed the article to describe how the work in Karamoja will transition into the future, following the Folkerts leaving the field at the end of May. He gave me a fantastic article. It was everything I could have hoped for.

For the articles this month, the common theme is the hardship of doing missionary work in the contexts of the suffering experienced by the church and the unchurched in the nations where you are working. Obviously, in each nation the church and the unchurched look at that hardship and suffering differently.

One of you is doing ministry amid war and people moving east to west and west to east.

Another is working with men who are ministering amid persecution and what, at times, seem to be draconian and senseless COVID restrictions.

Another is doing ministry in the midst of a nearly nonexistent governmental structure and collapsed infrastructure, in which there is no safety to go shopping, let alone attend church.

How do you encourage believers to keep their focus on Christ? How do you hold out the hope of eternal life and forgiveness to people who no longer have jobs; people whose homes and neighborhoods no longer have electricity and water, or worse, have been destroyed; people who have to worry about the bullets of soldiers, roaming gangs, and the threats of sickness and disease? How does the church display the love, joy, and peace of Jesus Christ when people can no longer trust their neighbors?

I know that this is a big ask.

The church in North America thinks that it has “‘peace, peace,’ . . . when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). Spiritually, it is surrounded by the same opposition and challenge that surrounds you and those with whom you work.

I hope that what you write will help those within whom the Spirit works to see that they need to minister as you are ministering—and that experienced men will say, “Here I am Lord, send me, to go wherever you want me to go and to do whatever you want me to do.”

In our Lord,
Douglas Clawson

New Horizons, May 2023.