What our mission partners around the world are teaching me – and why the Wolof Bible is worth celebrating.
Recently, after years of prayer, partnership, and patient labor, the Wolof people received the Scriptures in their own language. Let that land for a moment. Millions of people in West Africa — most of whom have never held God’s Word in the tongue their mothers sang over them — can now read Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path (Psalm 119:105) and hear it as their own.
That is a win. A real one. And it belongs, in no small part, to you. Your giving, your prayers, the teams who went — Browncroft’s fingerprints are on this. Thank you. We don’t often get to celebrate “finished” in this work, and this is a moment to do exactly that.
But I want to tell you something I’ve been learning slowly, in conversations with partners around the globe. The shape of mission is changing — and it is good news.
For most of our lifetimes, the picture of “missions” ran one direction: from the strong, sending the West out to the rest of the world. That map is now out of date. The majority of the world’s Christians today live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The church is no longer strongest where it began. And the sending has flipped: South Korea is now among the largest missionary-sending nations on earth, and believers from Nigeria, Brazil, and beyond are planting churches in Europe — and, increasingly, here in our own country. Mission has become, as one of our partners put it to me, “from everywhere to everywhere.”
The most loving posture is often partnership, not patronage.
That has reshaped how I understand our role. Our partners rarely need us to lead. More often, they invite us to listen, to learn, and to walk beside them. I’ve also learned a harder lesson: that our resources, however well-meant, are not always the gift we assume them to be. Support sent from a place as wealthy as ours can quietly crowd out what God is already growing in a community — teaching a young church to lean on us when He is trying to teach them to lean on Him. The most loving posture is often partnership, not patronage.
Not long ago, at a global gathering of mission leaders in Seoul (the Lausanne Congress), the church began describing its work less as a project to complete and more as a way of being: presence, proclamation, and practice. Less doing for, more being with. That rings true to everything our partners have shown me. And it cuts both ways — some of the deepest, bravest faith I have ever encountered belongs to believers who have far less than we do and trust God far more. We have as much to receive from the global church as we have to give it.
Which brings me back to the Wolof. A translated Bible is not the beginning of dependence; it is the beginning of freedom. The Word is in their hands now, in their voice, doing what only the Word can do — without needing us in the room. That is precisely what we prayed for. It also means our traditional season of work among the Wolof is, in the best possible sense, evolving, and becoming perhaps one more of maturity and legacy.
I encourage us to remember that a significant change, should that come, is not a loss. Ask any parent who has watched a child they raised stand on their own two feet. We never came to build something that would need our boots-on-the-ground forever. We came to hand over a lamp.
So what now? Honestly — we’re not sure yet, and I’ve come to believe that’s the right place to be. Before we reach for the next map, the next budget, the next trip, I want us to do something harder and holier: listen. To our partners. To the Spirit. To the One who says, “I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun!” (Isaiah 43:19).
Will you listen with us? Keep praying. Keep giving. And keep your ears open for what He wants to do next.
Our next Short Term Trips meeting for 2027 will be held on Sunday, September 27.
For the long obedience in the same direction,
Rich
