THEY CAME FOUR HOURS EARLY

By Jason Law, President of OneCoMission

The distribution was set to begin at 2:00 p.m. By 10:00 a.m., most families had already arrived.

More than a hundred came that morning to a community outside Yangon: mothers with children on their hips, men who had walked in from surrounding villages, and grandmothers who found a place to sit and waited. Myanmar has been at war with itself for years now, and hunger has followed the fighting. They came because they had heard there would be rice and other staple food items.

Four hours is a long time to wait for a bag of food. It tells you something about how hard things have become.

Pastor Jonathan had planned the outreach. Our team happened to be visiting that week, and he asked me to say a few words. As I got up to speak, I thought about Adoniram Judson, the pioneering missionary who arrived in Burma more than 200 years ago. Judson once compared the difficulty of the work there to “pulling the eye tooth from a living tiger.”

Nearly every person there was Buddhist. Most had never once heard the Gospel before. What I felt led to speak about was not religion. It was purpose. Why were they made? Who made them? To let them know there is a God who knows their names and has a purpose for their lives beyond simply existing.

When I finished, I asked whether anyone wanted to begin that journey of purpose through a relationship with Jesus. Nearly every hand in the room went up. I’ve been doing this work for a long time and have ministered in Myanmar many times, but I didn’t think that would happen. There was more than a hunger for food. There was a hunger to discover their purpose. One can only truly do that by coming to know Jesus. 

Some of our local leaders spent another hour with them, explaining what had just happened and encouraging them to continue to come back to Pastor Jonathan’s church. This part is critical: connecting them not to a program or a visiting American, but to a pastor who lives on that road, who has our discipleship curriculum in his hands, and who will still be there long after we fly home.

I did not do that outreach. Pastor Jonathan did. He prayed over it, identified the families, arranged the food, and opened the doors. He speaks the language. He understands what it costs his neighbors to walk through those doors. He will be there the next day and the one after that. All we did was help him get the resources to make it possible.

That is what our mission is. Equip and empower the local church.

We currently have about 400 churches in and around Yangon, Myanmar, already using our ABC discipleship curriculum. Four hundred pastors like Jonathan, already in place, already trusted by their neighbors, already carrying the risk of following Jesus in a difficult place. Most of them simply lack the means to put on an outreach like the one I witnessed.

Our conviction is that compassion and evangelism belong together. When people experience genuine love expressed in practical care, hearts open to hear about the One it comes from.

We have watched that pattern repeat thousands of times across Asia and the Middle East. We have become convinced of something else along the way:  one of the most effective missionaries to an unreached community is almost always a believer who already lives in it. Our calling is not to replace that Church. It is to strengthen it, equip it, and stand behind it.