Have you ever tried to do a big puzzle without looking at the picture? A thousand small pieces, and half of them look alike. Where do you start? You try joining this piece with that, and nothing seems to match. Your frustration mounts—that feeling of hopeless defeat that makes you want to quit.

When beginning a large puzzle without a picture to guide you, it’s much better to have a strategy: edge pieces in one pile; like colors in other piles. As you start with a corner piece, you still try to match it with others by trial and error, but at least you have created some structure to help you succeed. The options are fewer, and the chance of success is greater. Slowly, match builds on match. As the picture starts to emerge it becomes easier to see what the next step is. Eventually you achieve the satisfaction of a fully assembled puzzle.

As a church-planter, you are a professional puzzle solver. The puzzle is an entire people group and culture, and there is no picture to guide you. You arrive in your host country to plant a church, but what should the church look like? Not the same as your old church back home. These people have consistently rejected Western-style thought patterns and worship, so you face a challenging puzzle of what your success will look like. You realize you need to create a church community where people will feel at home; where the music, worship, conversations—everything—touches their hearts and draws them to God. You realize you need to create an environment that tells them God loves them just the way they are even as He leads them into new life. But how does that look? What are the particulars and details that come together to form the wholeness of spiritual community?

This is the question our missionaries face constantly. They invest deeply in learning the language, studying the culture and making key friendships, but that is just the beginning, like turning all the puzzle pieces face-up on the table. Then what? How do they strategically sort the pieces into piles? Where should they start? The task can seem entirely overwhelming and frustrating. At times, they wish it was just a meaningless cardboard puzzle they could walk away from. Thank God, our missionaries don’t do that. They are committed to finding strategies and joining the pieces together until the picture is complete—an indigenous church-planting movement of people worshiping a God they call their own.

Gideon and I have been through our own church-planting puzzle among the Himba people in Namibia. We’ve struggled to lay all the pieces on the table and then worked out how to sort them strategically. At times, we felt overwhelmed and didn’t know what our next step should be. At those times, God, in His providence, brought people into our lives to help us each step of the way. Now, the Himba Project puzzle is taking shape. The picture is emerging, and it is easier to see what success is going to look like.

Now, we are beginning a new phase of our work with AFM. We have an opportunity to help other AFM missionaries as they struggle to piece together their church-planting puzzles. We have put ourselves at God’s disposal to place us in the lives of missionaries at just the right time, pointing them to the next step. We would like to come alongside them before they feel overwhelmed and ready to give up, using our experience to guide them to succeed. In the power of the Holy Spirit, we will work shoulder-to-shoulder to piece together the puzzle picture of God’s will for unreached people groups.

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