Move People on the Scale

Ted Rabinold, a missionary supported by First Baptist Jackson who has served in Tanzania for over thirty years, brought the message this past Sunday. He walked through the agricultural and discipleship work his team does in Southwest Tanzania, then drew a larger point about what the gospel actually reconciles and what that means for how we understand our own daily work and witness.

What was said

Ted opened by describing the context: a remote region of Tanzania where 97 percent of people are farmers, where 120 people groups exist alongside a shared Swahili language, and where his team of 18 men and women are being trained to evangelize and disciple their own people. The agricultural work, fish ponds, papaya orchards, coconut trees, beekeeping, apple and avocado cultivation, pottery, and a tree nursery, is not separate from the ministry. It is the platform through which the team earns wages, serves schools, and builds relationships that open doors to the gospel.

He described the worldview his team works against: fatalism, the belief that poverty is inherited and unchangeable; zero-sum thinking, the belief that another person's gain comes at your expense; and animism, the use of witchcraft and shamans to gain control over life. He was careful to note that the desire for control is universal. In the West, he said, people use the US dollar the same way a Tanzanian farmer uses a fetish charm. The mode is different; the underlying impulse is the same.

The theological anchor of the message came from Colossians 1:19-20, which Ted read as saying that God reconciled all things, physical and spiritual, through the blood of Christ. He traced this back to the Garden of Eden, arguing that the cross buys back three broken relationships: our relationship to God, our relationships to one another, and our relationship to creation. If the cross only addressed the first, he said, we would have no reason to remain in these bodies. We do have a reason, and it is to love our neighbors and engage creation.

This framing led directly to a challenge about how the people in the room think about their own work. Ted quoted Martin Luther's line about the humble milkmaid, that she serves God by providing milk and butter to people made in God's image. He pushed back against the assumption that pastors and missionaries occupy a different spiritual category than plumbers, teachers, or housewives. Every vocation, he said, is a context for moving people along in their understanding of and openness to Christ.

He described that movement using a mental model he encountered in a discipleship training course: a line running from negative ten, someone who finds Christianity repugnant, to positive ten, a mature believer, with zero as the moment of conversion. The Holy Spirit's job is to take someone from negative one to positive one. Our job is simply to move people along the line. He said he had burdened himself for years with guilt over people who did not convert during his time with them, and this framework freed him. Faithfulness means that by the time you part from someone, they should know you love Jesus and that you are a real person living a real life.

He closed with Saint Patrick, who was captured as a boy, enslaved in Ireland, escaped, returned as a missionary, and taught the pagan Celtic people to pray without ceasing by tying prayer to every ordinary act of the day: lighting the fire, drawing water, laying down to sleep. Ted offered this as a practical picture of what it looks like to hold the spiritual and the physical together rather than dividing them, and he left the congregation with that image as they headed back into their week.