From Brian Hogan’s story of a CPM in Mongolia:
We had been trained to expect that cross-cultural evangelism would be one of the first and most difficult hurdles our team would face. I know that many church planting teams working among unreached groups experience much of their struggle just getting the Good News across the cultural divide in a bold and effective manner. We were ready for this battle, but it never came. The one church planting task our team did not handle “in-house” was evangelism. We outsourced this job to overseas Asians. Mongolians have a natural gifting when it comes to sharing their faith. They just can’t keep good news to themselves. After short-term teams of Mongolian believers won a foothold for God in Erdenet, we had watched in amazement as those first converts, not hindered by cultural differences, quickly began to win their friends and neighbors to Christ. In the first year the teenaged girls who formed the early core won their peers, but through summer and fall of ’94, the Gospel spread like a grassfire through all age groups and both genders. Our New Believers classes were crowded, with many older people getting saved, and even some of our shyest and most unassuming members leading their neighbors to Christ. The believers poured out their hearts in prayer for family, neighbors, their countrymen and even other nations in our weekly prayer gatherings and in the house church meetings. And those prayers were answered. We church planters were so quickly thrust into discipling the growing band of converts that we never really had to do much evangelism ourselves—at least among Mongolians. But we did look for opportunities anyway, at work, on the long overnight train journeys between Ulaanbaatar and Erdenet, and as we lived out our lives in the community. Indeed, with so many Mongolian believers, it made little sense to cross barriers of language and culture to carry the Good News ourselves when we were far more effective training Mongolians to win their own people. We had learned during our training that when locals began sharing the Gospel with their neighbors, it was a signal to the church planting team to shift gears and concentrate their energies on discipleship and leadership training.
From There’s A Sheep in My Bathtub
by Brian Hogan