July 01, 1986 by

A researcher with a mission that seeks to place missionaries in "closed" or, as he prefers to call them, "restricted access" countries spoke recently at the US. Center for World Mission. He talked about some of the pressures one might experience while working in countries with varying degrees of restriction upon people who want to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. "The following stress points, though not typical for everyone, are common among missionaries in restricted countries," he said.

Four Stress Points

1. Not Knowing.

Ceiling into restricted countries is not so difficult. Your problems really begin once you're in¬You don't know how far you can go or what you can do. You're always wondering: Who is an informer? Am I being watched? Am I free to go about doing this? Should I show this guy this piece of literature? Is this a nick question? Should I get together with the other members of my team?

CM missionaries were thrown out of Pakistan en masse in 1983, They'd been warned, "Watch out for who your supposed converts are. They may be informers. Sure enough, one of them was, and they were all ousted."

You may not know what they are up to, but you certainly know what you are doing, and this can lead to

2. Feelings of Guilt.

Missionaries in restricted countries often feel like deceivers.

There was a time when I was trying to come up with strategies for planting churches in a Muslim country. I had a key informer, a friend, who came to me onedayandsaid, "tamangry! lam furious! That man, the Pope! He is trying to make us all Christians! And they even have a plan from people in the United States! They have a plan to make people Christians!"

It infuriated him to think there were people from the United States who were so tow as to come up with plans for leading people to Christ! And here he was, telling me, someone to whom he had said, "You're a brother to me." thought, "If he only knew!" What would have happened had he found out I was on the forefront of the movement that so infuriated him?"

3. The Threshold of Success.

Generally, you can stay in a restrictat country as long as you're not successful. But when and if you are, successful, then your days are numbered.

Consider the difficult position in which the governments of these countries find themselves. Suppose a convert from Islam to Christianity is killed by his uncle. In a Muslim context, this is the way things arc supposed to be done. Now how are the authorities supposed to handle that? Do they prosecute for murder? They'd have all the religious fundamentalists down their backs. Do they let the uncle go? Then they would slip into anarchy. They don't want to face these problems, so they'd rather shut you down.

But this all leads to tension. Missionaries with whom I've spoken have a high frustration level because they really want to go all out, yet they always wonder, "Maybe it would be better in the long run if I could stay here. Maybe I'd be more fruitful ill backed off a little bit and could keep these relationships going."

4. Limited Communication.

When you're in a restricted situation it is so hard to communicate. Sometimes you'll be bursting with good news and be almost incapable of sharing it.

I just had a conversation with a missionary in the middle of an airport in a restricted country. He said, "Well, we have a soccer player who decided to play football He'd like to go to a beach patty, though."

I'M!" I said. "Is that so?" CI took him to be talking about converts andbaptisms. But how do you follow up a statement like that?) I wanted to know more, but how much could I say? "How many are you planning to have at your beach party?"

The missionary asked my advice. I said, 'Well, just try to remember to put together a whole football team ... Communication. Loneliness.Mother stress point.

Having spoken of some of the tensions of working in restricted areas, the speaker turned to the positive side of things .

...And a Mitigating Factor

Joshua and Caleb and ten other spies were sent on an expedition to check out the restrictions in Canaan. Joshua and Caleb came back and said, "Let's go for it! Let's do it!"

But the other spies said, "No! We can't go in there! We ate like grasshoppers in their eyes, and their cities are fortified to heaven!"

Can you imagine? What an exaggeration: "fortified to heaven"! But the thing is, we can easily get the impression that that is the way the restricted countries of today really are. For instance, Russia: "Me KGB is there!" It's like the Israelites: "We even saw the Ann kim there the big giants!"

But this is wrong. We need to see, like Joshua, that our God is Lord over all. '"The shadows of these people" as the Hebrew says have been removed from them." The spiritual chemistry has changed and God is, indeed, Lord over there. So we want to be encouraged and realize world evangelization is worth doing, it is happening, and we are going to do it, whether we get invited to doitornot.