Lynn Thomas - Life Of A Missionary, Intercultural Ministries, And Global Missions
You're listening to The Cumberland Row, and I'm your host, TJ Malinowski. The following is the faith journey of Reverend Doctor Lynn Thomas, the director of Global Missions for the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Lynn is a former missionary and the first to hold the position of Intercultural Ministries for the denomination. In this conversation, Lynn shares his early introduction to mission work, his calling into ministry, and areas of hope for the church. Enjoy this faith journey with Lynn Thomas.
T.J.:Lynn, you are a minister, a former missionary, former director of Cross Cultural Ministries, and current director of Global Missions. And of all these different touchstones in your vocation, where have you found joy?
Lynn:Well, I'm I think in all of those roles, I mean, I believe that God called me to all those things. And in all of those things, there were challenges and rewards. I think there was joy in all of it. Missions was adventurous and, a lot of good things happened on the mission field. And then, that was about 11 years of, working as a missionary.
Lynn:And then the cross cultural USA stuff, that I did, that was a new area in the church that hadn't been done before. And that was exciting to do things, to plant churches, to work with the immigrant populations in the states. And I learned a lot. I learned a lot in that as well. So it was it was joyful and fulfilling.
Lynn:It was different. And then being involved in Global Missions was also, a new experience for me to be in an administrative position in missions. I certainly understood once I was a director of global missions, while my prior bosses, when I was a missionary, made some of the decisions they made. So, I think I understood the dilemmas they were in once I had their position. So Global Missions was exciting because it kinda returned me to my roots, which is, cross cultural ministry outside the United States.
Lynn:And, so all of them were rewarding. I don't think all of them were rewarding and all of them brought joy, but in different ways and because they were different type ministries.
T.J.:When you were younger and you were a little boy growing up, what did you envision yourself doing? What did you dream? Did you wanna be an astronaut, a ball player?
Lynn:I did write to NASA when I was about 7 or 8 years old in a letter saying I wanna be a astronaut. Funny you should say that. And, they sent me a bunch of posters and stuff, which was really neat. They sent me really nice posters of the Apollo program. But they never got in contact with me, so it never developed.
Lynn:So they never they never returned the call to send me some posters. I think all of those boyhood dreams are probably what you think. I think the interesting thing is my dad is a minister. My granddad is a CP minister. My great granddad was a CP minister.
Lynn:So we go back generations. So people often assume that I would be a minister when I was in probably high school. And I said, no, I I wasn't. And not because I had a problem with ministry or pastors or I actually loved being a preacher's kid. Or pastors or I actually love being a preacher's kid.
Lynn:Everything about the church, I just love because church is a place of activity, the path the churches my dad pastored. So there's always things to do. And, and I also learned as a preacher's kid that everybody knows who you are, not like that. So, people talk about the, the fishbowl effect of being a preacher's kid. That can be bad, but it can be good too because you can be the center of attention.
Lynn:And if you don't mind that, then, that can be fun. So, I tell people, no. I'm not gonna be a pastor because I don't wanna be a pastor. I don't have any passion for that. And so my area of interest even in high school was like biology.
Lynn:That's what I really liked. I don't know why, but, anyway, I did. But, eventually, God did call me, and that was, later in high school and college. And, when God called me, I did want to pastor to be in ministry. So that really was, to me, the thing is when until God calls you, there's just no spark in your heart for that kind of thing.
Lynn:But after you get the call, all of a sudden, you have sleepless nights thinking I really wanna do this. So, I believe that in my my younger years, I didn't really have a career track because by the time I got later in high school, God had called me to the ministry. And, when he did that, then that was my career track, and that's what I worked
T.J.:Those sleepless nights, were they filled with anxiety or joy? Were you looking were you looking to the future in terms of what that would look like? Were you thinking about things that you had to give up? I guess in a roundabout way, I'm I'm asking were you a were you a good kid, a bad kid? Were you a mischievous teenager or good as gold?
Lynn:When I was in, I I accepted Christ when I was 6, and it was real. People have misgivings about young children professing their faith. But my dad shared it with me one night, and, I remember it. I don't remember much about being 6 years old, but I do remember sitting in an old Chevrolet in the parking lot, and he's sharing with me, and I accepted Christ. And it was real.
Lynn:And from that time on, I just, you know of course, being raised in a Christian home has a big impact on, you know, your worldview and how you see God. So even as a kid, I was sincere about my faith, always was. And then when I was in a a freshman in high school, in a public school in West Tennessee, there was a revival that broke out in the high school. We had about a 1000 students. And, it was incredible.
Lynn:I've never seen I have not seen anything like it since. It was just 100 of kids who were giving their lives to Christ and people weren't going to the lunch room anymore because they were going out front to have prayer meetings. And it was just a really amazing time. We would have, prayer meetings on Monday night in different homes. We'd have a 152, 100 teenagers.
Lynn:But they don't even fit in a home. People were just sitting everywhere. And it was not led by any church. It was not led by any pastor. It was lay led by lay people, and a lot of the teenagers.
Lynn:So I was part of that in high school, and that kinda shaped my, once again, my worldview. So to say I had, sewed my wild oats, and high school didn't. And then by the time I was a junior, I started traveling doing mission work. So at 16, 17 years old, I was spending my summers doing 2 months' stints on the mission field. And, you know, you live in a jungle for the summer, and I was.
Lynn:And then you come back to high school and that just seems dumb. A lot about high school just seemed dumb. After you've, you know, done the things I was doing. So even as a teenager, I was doing mission work every summer. And then I'd come home and go to school, whether it was high school or college, and, it just kinda put all that in context.
T.J.:So what was that like? You know, you're a young person, and you're leaving what you know and what you're comfortable with, your safe parameters, and you're going into the unknown for a long period of time. It isn't a weekend. It isn't a week. It's for a couple months at a time.
T.J.:And, it's not like you can call home and say, come and pick me up. I'm homesick.
Lynn:No. No. We, it was an organization that worked primarily with teenagers. And, in that day, we're talking about the mid 19 seventies. My first mission trip was 1976.
Lynn:I was 16 years old. I don't know what my parents were thinking. They were out of their minds, but they let me go for 2 months to the jungles of South America. And I went through 2 weeks of jungle training in Florida, and then we flew, to Bogota, Colombia. And then I called a DC 3, a cargo plane, set in cargo nets, landed on a dirt strip, and lived in the village for almost 2 months, in a tent.
Lynn:I loved it. It was adventurous. It was, before Indiana Jones and all that was on television. So I was living the life of adventure and we were building a church. So we worked and and worked hard.
Lynn:Got malaria, lived in a tent, bathed out of a bucket, didn't even really have an outhouse. You know, we did the best we could. It was, and I loved it. And it was in the middle of that that God called me. It was an adventure.
Lynn:It was tough. But when you're 16 years old, you're made for that kind of stuff. There was no Internet, no cell phones. So communication with my parents was pretty limited. I think 2 or 3 postcards showed up and I sent a few.
Lynn:And then by the time you got the mail, it was 2 3 weeks old anyway. So whatever news you got was pretty old.
T.J.:Yeah.
Lynn:But, that that experience was my first mission experience, and I did a bunch of others after that. But it was because of that first experience, and as tough as it was and challenging as it was, it really, resonated. And, I liked it. So not everybody's built for that, and that's okay. But when I was a kid, I did that, and I don't do that kind of stuff now.
Lynn:Trust me. I'm not gonna sleep in a tent, and I'm not gonna bathe out of a bucket. Those days are over. But I I did that as a teenager for and a college kid for for a lot of summers, doing mission internships in different countries.
T.J.:Well, let's live here for a moment. How familiar were you with the language and the culture in the settings that you participated in in the mission trips?
Lynn:I didn't know anything. At the time I I did the first mission trip to Columbia at 16 years old, I just wanted to take a trip. I didn't even know what I was getting into. It's not like I aspired to be a missionary. It was a summer, to travel and to do some new things.
Lynn:And so, you know, the motives were not bad motives, but they weren't motives of ministry and giving back to the world and all all those noble things. It wasn't in noble, but it wasn't you know, I didn't go thinking about missions or being a missionary.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:So in the process of doing that, God did call me, and I saw, man, I could do this. I didn't have the language. We had translators, on the on with us. So, you know, that was that. And it was a work team.
Lynn:So and that's why I don't like work team so much, is because you do physical work and you disconnect from the people a lot. So, you know, near the day, you're working and you're doing block laying blocks and doing concrete and tie and steel and all that kind of stuff because it was a serious building we were building. But you're not around the nationals. And then on the weekends and sometimes in the afternoon, you are. But when you are, I had a translator.
Lynn:So, I think that, you know, you learn a lot by observation. It was a poor village I lived in, and you you just see how the rest of the world lives. You know, a lot of people at that in in the 19 seventies, they didn't wear shoes. And you could tell by looking at their feet, they'd never worn shoes. Mhmm.
Lynn:And, you could see the mud huts they lived in with the thatched roofs. So you you saw things in for the first time and understood that the world is a different place than the world you've lived in all your life.
T.J.:And some of those early trips then, it was more of a visual, encounters than actual human to human interactions.
Lynn:Well, there were human interactions like on the weekends and and other trips were different things.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:Some of them, you know, were building projects and others were other type projects, where you're more interactive. But, well, I was in Liberia. In Liberia, they speak, English. A lot of them do. So I was spent a summer there in West Africa, and then I spent a summer in Suriname.
Lynn:Suriname is a country in in north in the northern part of South America. It's an Amazonian country. It's all connected to the Amazon jungle. And I was back with the tribe, lived with them for 2 months. And then I worked in the Republic of South Africa during apartheid.
Lynn:All that was in high school in 1st years of college. So, you know, my first summers, during high school and college, all of those were in different places. And there's there's different levels of English in some of those countries. South Africa spoke English. So everything I did there was in English.
Lynn:So, and the good thing was going to different parts of the world and seeing different things is you it broadens your mind that there is such a diversity of cultures and diversities of how people relate to each other and the foods they eat and all that kind of stuff, and diversities, of worship styles, because I was always involved in church stuff. So, you know, those things I think were helpful because I didn't just see a lot of people do a summer a summer or short term mission trip, and they see just one thing. And I think the advantage I had is I got to see a lot of different experiences or expressions of different cultures.
T.J.:Any experiences or stories looking back on those early mission trips that you were a part of that you'd like to share that are memorable?
Lynn:Oh, there are a lot of memorable things, and there are a lot of things I forgot. I actually kept journals on some of those, and I've gone back in past years and looked at the journals, and I totally forgot stuff. Just have no recollection. If it wasn't written down, I wouldn't remember it. But but many of them were very adventurous.
Lynn:I lived with the tribe, in Suriname, and it was an Indian tribe. They wore loincloths, and that was it, men and women. So they were, you know, not not dressed. The 1st week or 2, that was kind of, shocking, and then you kinda get used to it. I lived in a tent there.
Lynn:We worked, they lived in thatch huts. It was, and living and working with them was an amazing experience. Several years after I left there, National Geographic went and did a whole big piece on the Wanda Indians. And I knew those guys because some of them were elders in the church because there was a church there. Like I said, I'm probably one of the few people that's ever been to a topless church because on Sunday, the came in their one clause.
Lynn:They didn't you know, there weren't church clothes. So we met in a big round hut with a grass hut and open walls, and we sing hymns and we'd hear a sermon and they would pray. And it was amazing. But it was it was, you know, typical of of their tribe, everything we did. So, it was an that was, an interesting summer because of the type people I was working with were very culturally different than anybody else I'd been around.
Lynn:So, I remember that it was 2 days, but I dug up the canoe to get in there. We've ate in the river, lived in tents, I ate some interesting things, and people say, well, what's the most interesting thing you ever ate? I say the most interesting thing I ever ate are the things I didn't eat because I've been offered things that I just would not eat, like ants or cocoons where you pop the top out of a cocoon and you eat the larva out of it. I'm not gonna eat that. So those are the things I didn't eat.
Lynn:But it was it was an amazing experience.
T.J.:So you won't eat exotic foods, but you will attend a topless church.
Lynn:Yeah. Like to say, after 2 weeks, you kinda don't notice it anymore, but but I think about it. The thing that was funny is that, you know, back in that day, you had cameras and I took pictures and they were slides.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:Because when you come home, you know, churches wanna see and people in our churches wanted to see what I was doing, so I I took pictures. And I remember the 1st slideshow I did in my dad's church. Dad said, you can't do that. I didn't even notice it, but there were nude people all in those slides because you well, you really do get used to this. It's a natural thing.
Lynn:And so, anyway, I didn't even notice it. And dad said, you got to take some of those slides out because you can't show those. Fortunately, it was a Winston Metcraut. It was all adults the first time I showed it. But I had to clean up my slideshow because I didn't even notice.
Lynn:After you lived there for, like, say, several months, you don't it it just becomes normal, so you don't think much about it.
T.J.:When you came back, as a teenager and as a college kid from these trips, what did it feel like to come back? I mean, obviously, that impacts you. It shapes you. You come back to the western world. You come back to the United States of America.
T.J.:And what is that rhythm like? Because it's certainly different than other parts of the world.
Lynn:It is a culture shock coming back, even on a 2 month trip. When you lived in the jungle or you've been in West Africa or you worked in, you know, different places. It was, high school and college were, on one level, rewarding in some ways, But they were always tough because, you know, there's just a a mindset in college, and high school that is, I think, more playful and more trivial in some ways, and things that are important to people are that are really not important. Mhmm. And it's hard to be patient and watch people do stupid stuff and think things are important that are really not important.
Lynn:So
T.J.:I can see some of that in you now.
Lynn:Yeah. It's still true now. And know, when we were missionaries in Colombia, gone for 11 years, coming back to the states, there was culture shock. It took time to readjust. Mhmm.
Lynn:I don't think we're expecting that, but it did take a while for us to finally come back emotionally to the United States.
T.J.:Well, before we get to your missionary work, let's live in the college aspect. So you were looking at biology as a potential field and career, but you had these experiences during the summer that were shaping you as well. So how did they inform your call into ministry, and how did that change your vocational path in to become a minister and then a missionary?
Lynn:Well, I knew by the time I graduated from high school that I was gonna go into ministry. In in that first summer when I was in Columbia, South America, God spoke to my heart. And the good news is he didn't call me to be a pastor, I thought, and called me to be a missionary and I thought, yeah, I can do that. So I felt God touched my heart to be a missionary, when I was 16.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:And so from then on, my travels each summer were were really now in preparation of that day. I told my granddad, who was alive at that time, and he'd been, he's a CP minister, been the president of Bethel University many years ago. I said, granddad, I don't need to go to seminary. You know, there are a lot of mission organizations that'll take anybody. And I said, I'm just gonna go be a missionary.
Lynn:I'll I'll go maybe through college, but I'm just gonna go be a missionary. He said, well, you can do that, and you might do a good job. But he said, the more education you have, the more doors that will open. He said education just opens doors. He said either you got the skills or you don't have the skills when you walk through those doors, and sometimes education gave you good skills, but some people are just born with it.
Lynn:But at least education opens the doors and people think you know what you're doing because you have a degree. And he was right. So I'm you know, I reluctantly said, okay. I'll finish college, and then I'll go to seminary, and then I'm going to the mission field because I was, you know, at 16, 17, 18 years old, you're ready to go. Mhmm.
Lynn:And, granddad held me back and said, you can do what you're doing, which is the summer internships, but, you need the education because it'll give you more opportunities. And he was absolutely right. It was it was tough not going to the mission field when you felt called at a young age and going through the process of education. The funny thing that happened in the middle of that is when I went to Bethel, my freshman year, a church called Mill Creek Common Presbyterian Church outside of, Peoria, Tennessee. They called me to be their pastor, and I loved it.
Lynn:I pastored them for 3 years while I was in college, and, absolutely loved it, which shocked me because I thought, you know, when you see your dad being a pastor and it and it's it's tough. Mhmm. Although he never complained and he enjoyed being a pastor. When I saw that, I thought, well, I don't I don't think pastoring will be fun. It really was.
Lynn:I had a blast, And, Mill Creek took really good care of me. I I tell everybody I had more spendable cash in college than I've ever had in my life because Mill Creek paid me so well. They overpaid me. So as far as money just to spend on, you know, Dairy Queen Hamburgers, I had more spendable cash probably when I was in college than any other time in my life because I didn't have anything to take care of but me.
T.J.:Let's talk about the viewpoints of the mission field from the perspective of the United States and and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in the early eighties. Because this is early to mid eighties is when you're preparing and going out into the mission field. And so what did that look like during that time period? Because I believe it is it has shifted in terms of what a missionary missionaries purpose and skill set can be. But you can you can convey that that's wrong, but has the missionary work well, first let's begin with what it looked like in the eighties, and then we can kind of converse about how it's changed over the years.
Lynn:Well, we went, my wife, Nona, and I and our newborn child, Erin, at the time, we went to the mission field in 86. Mhmm. So I finished seminary, and, I'll get these years probably wrong. I finished seminary at about 84, 85. We got married, had a baby.
Lynn:And then about a few months after that, we left the mission field. So the the the deal about missions then was it was to all, American missionaries, which has changed since then. Everybody that went to the mission field came from the United States. And our mission fields were Hong Kong. There had never really been any missionaries in Hong Kong.
Lynn:Japan, there had been a few missionaries from the United States and Japan and then Columbia. Columbia had a bunch of missionaries. When I went, Bill Wood and Catherine Wood were just leaving. So I kinda went in right when they were leaving. John Lovelace had left.
Lynn:Boyce Wallace was there. James Canty was there, when I went. And so, the idea, 1, is that missions was the United States sending out missionaries to other parts of the world. The second big thing, I think, was is the idea was we only gonna work in Japan, Hong Kong, and Colombia. And they had just started to work in Liberia, but, had never worked successful in putting any missionaries there.
Lynn:They put some people there, but the civil war broke out and they couldn't stay. So they didn't stay long. So those were really Hong Kong, Japan, and and Columbia were really our mission fields. That's what the board of missions did, and they sent missionaries there. But one thing I wanna say to the credit of the board of missions, which we continue to do, David Brown was my boss, and he was a good boss.
Lynn:I like David. I like working for David. David Brown emphasized that the presbyteries will make decisions and we're part of the prescriptariat. Missionaries don't get to go down there and say this is what we're gonna do and and do it. Whatever ideas, plans, or programs you've got, you've gotta get the Colombians to buy into that through the Presbyterian process, and then, you know, we all do it together.
Lynn:And that was that was really revolutionary for it today in the eighties. Because every other mission organization, you send a missionary into a country, they've got all the money, and they make the decisions. They say, we're gonna put a church here. We're gonna put a school here. We're gonna do this ministry.
Lynn:And it's the money from the states that we're gonna use to do that. So we get to make the decision because it's our money. The board of missions, even in the eighties, didn't have that mentality. It might be our money from the states, but we were gonna have the work in that that, Columbia or Japan or wherever, they have to make the decision, and say, this is what we're gonna do. So it's a partnership.
Lynn:It might be our money, but ultimately, they make the decision. And that has continued to be kind of the way we do it even to this, that has continued to be the way we do it to this day. We don't impose programs or things on the mission field. And that started even before I was a missionary.
T.J.:During that time, were there were there general expectations, though? I mean, there has to be a reason for sending a missionary to a specific area of the world.
Lynn:I don't know. You know, that's a good question. Whatever the theology of missions was, it was never expressed to me. I guess I had my theology missions, but nobody ever explained this is why we're sending, this is why it's important to the CP churches in missions, or missionaries. I think, I think part of it is our history.
Lynn:And as you know, we always have seen ourselves as a frontier church. And we've always seen ourselves as a sending out missionary church. And I don't know why we've seen ourselves that way, but that's in our history, I guess. And so I I think that's just part of the cultural DNA of the CP church. Those CP women and the mission program they had, by the time I got into missions, they weren't in charge of the mission program anymore.
Lynn:It was the board of missions, which was a board of men and women. No longer was the CPW, board admissions. It was just the board admissions.
T.J.:Oh, yeah. That's right. So from a historical perspective, that that shift occurred seventies, maybe early eighties. So you're kind of on the cutting edge in terms of missionary support and and maybe even some of the goals of what, being a missionary in the missionary field would look like?
Lynn:Yeah. I was after the CPW board of missions. Yeah. So I was part of the board admissions, which was the unified board. And they were really strict.
Lynn:I think part of that was because of CPW. When the CPW turned over the missions to the board of missions to the general assembly, there were several agreements. One of those was that, like, a large percentage of OUO would go to support missions. So so and you couldn't raise money outside of OUO. They were real strict about that.
Lynn:So there were no offerings, no special offerings, no nothing. Everything had to come to OUO, which really wasn't workable. But that's where we started. We sent him move past that because, you know, people want flexibility to give what they wanna give to. You can't tell people, no.
Lynn:You're gonna give to o u o, and that's all you're gonna give to. But that's when I started. You couldn't talk about anything but o u o, and that was it. No other mission giving.
T.J.:How was Columbia chosen as your area for ministry?
Lynn:It when I was in, when I graduated from, seminary, I was pastoring a Presbyterian Church USA in Adamsville, Tennessee, although I was the ordained CP minister. So I was on loan to the Presbyterian. And my wife and I decided to move to Mozambique, Africa. And we had signed up with the Evangelical Alliance Mission, a non denomination mission organization. I'd done an internship with them in South Africa.
Lynn:And, they were trying to develop a ministry in Mozambique, which was a communist country. It was gonna be a tough it was gonna be a tough a tough project to be a missionary there. So, anyway, we had signed up for that. We'd gone through their orientation, all their training, and they were accepting us. And we were about ready to start deputations, start raising a lot of money to go work in Africa.
Lynn:And I called David Brown up on the phone, and I said, David, I just wanna tell you I'm gonna be a missionary, but not with the CP church. I'm going with evangelical Alliance Mission and that's where we're gonna work. And David, and I was pastor in a church And David said, well, would you come talk to me? And I said, I'm pretty busy and I'm pretty full. My calendar is, I said, what day are you thinking?
Lynn:And so he set a date, and it was actually one day I didn't have anything. So I said, alright. I'll drive over to Memphis and talk to you. And, I didn't know why. I really thought I was going to talk to him about telling him what I was gonna do, that I was still gonna be a CP minister, but I was gonna work for a nondenominational organization.
Lynn:And I thought that's what the kind of conversation was. Anyway, he offered me a job in Columbia. He said, we'll pay. I said, you'll pay? He said, yeah.
Lynn:You don't have to raise money. We'll pay. We'll pay you a salary. And I said, well, when would I go? He said, quickest you can go, the better.
Lynn:Can you go in a month? Now this is a kid since 16 who wanted to be a missionary. And now I'm in my early twenties. And, and a guy saying, you can be a missionary in whatever you wanna be, and I'll pay you to do it. But you have to go to Columbia because that's where the position is.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:So I went home and talked to Nona. We prayed about it, and we felt good about it. And I called David and I said, yeah. And I said, I was ready to go in a month. And Nona said, no.
Lynn:It'll be 3 months because I need time to say goodbye to everybody. Mhmm. So, we left pretty fast. Still, we left within 3 months. So David Brown convinced me and offered me a job.
Lynn:And, it's just it's I look back on it. It was just a it was a God thing. It was really not what I was expecting. I was planning to go to Africa. Noona and I were planning to go to Africa.
Lynn:And then we ended up in Colombia. Because I had traveled to different countries and I had seen missions in different countries, that's what made that possible. I wasn't, I was, I was a missionary waiting to happen. I didn't care where it happened. And I realized that when I accepted the position in Columbia, I've been to Columbia.
Lynn:16 years old, I knew what Columbia was like. I'd been to a lot of places. So all of those would have worked for me, I realized, and it didn't really matter where it was because I knew it was a skill set and a ministry more than it was a place.
T.J.:Mhmm. And Nona, your wife, you know, she said you needed 90 days. But Aaron hadn't been quite born yet in this initial He was
Lynn:3 months old. He was just a few months old.
T.J.:Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Alright. Let's talk about your ministry in Columbia.
T.J.:You were there for 11 years. Looking back on that time, let's talk about the relationships, the friendships that you made, and what Colombians taught you, and maybe what you offered to the people that you lived with and worked alongside?
Lynn:We spent a year in Costa Rica studying Spanish because that was the style back then in the early eighties, mid eighties. But when the dialect
T.J.:in the dialect and and the words, though, they're different. Right?
Lynn:Not much. Spanish is Spanish. There's a misconception that, it is so vastly different. You can't if you can speak Spanish and you're good at it, you can't understand any Spanish. Although the words are different, but it it works.
Lynn:It's like English. I can take the Australia, the United Kingdom, to Canada. You'll understand it all. But there are different words and there's different accents, the same with Spanish. So we went to Costa Rica.
Lynn:Costa Rica, San Jose. Costa Rica has good language schools, and the language is really clean in San Jose. So what language schools are looking for is a place where the language is kinda like a consistent, well pronounced Spanish, and there are various places you can find that. So I went to Costa Rica because that's where San Jose, that's where most of Spanish language schools are. And, spent a year there.
Lynn:It was a tough year. Learning another language is, just tough. Okay. Everybody thinks it's fast and easy and all the advertisements on TV said that it's fast, easy, and cheap. It is not.
Lynn:It takes time, a lot of time, and it's humiliating. So that's part of what you deal with. I tell all the cause I'm a director of missions and I work with missionaries, I tell them all, if your self esteem can handle learning new language, you'll learn it because the self esteem thing is the biggest obstacle you have. You're humiliated badly. Learned Spanish, then we moved to Colombia.
Lynn:We went to Manizales, which is a remote city way up in the mountains. We were the only missionaries up there. There weren't hardly any other Americans up there. I think there was one other American couple there in the whole city of half a 1000000 people, which was great. So we were totally immersed four and a half years in money's office.
Lynn:It's a remote city, hard to get up to, hard to get down from because of the mountainous roads, which they've greatly improved since I've left. It was great. We loved it. The Montezales Church is excited to have us. We made a lot of friends.
Lynn:It was a young church, had a lot of young professionals in it, young college kids. And so, it was a really active dynamic church and we stayed there, like I said, for four and a half years. And I think that helped our language. It helped our culture, become acculturated. It was, it was a great place to be a missionary.
Lynn:And then after four and a half years, we went to Armenia for a couple of years, which is another city in the Andes. And then we went to Maine, Colombia for another 4 look little over 4 years, before we came back to the states.
T.J.:Were the 4 and the 4 half years were those terms? Are those contracts? How was that time, determined?
Lynn:It was different. I mean, when I became director, I changed the phone act because I didn't like it. We had 4 years. We're supposed to do 4 years. That was a term.
Lynn:And then you would go back and spend a year in the states touring churches. And, we did 4 years, and I said, I don't wanna spend a year in the states living, like, you know, we had, by the end, 3 kids. I don't wanna spend a year running around the states with 3 small children from city to city, you know, it this will be crazy. And putting the kids in a school for a year and then taking them out, I said, we'll go 3 months. So they agreed to that.
Lynn:David Brown did. I believe he was the first one to agree to that. So we went home after 4 years and did 3 months. We visited during break in school, and then we came back, to Columbia. And so then after that, they switched it to, 3 month tours.
Lynn:And I think we were going, every, I think it was still every 4 years, but somehow we ended up going back. I don't remember exactly what happened, but we didn't go 4 years the second time. For some reason, we came back and did a a tour, and then we went back again. So, now it's 3 year terms, and you get 3 months. So, it's a 3 year zone, and then you get a 3 month in your country wards in your home country, to visit churches and to take a break, and then you go back for another 3 years.
Lynn:But in that day, it was 4 years and then 1 year off.
T.J.:From the, perspective of the missionary, these tours, these return to your home country, what is that like? How is that being used? How did you use it during during your time as a missionary, and what does that look like in contemporary times? Because I would imagine that unless you've been a missionary, the perspective is the opposite. You're looking at it from the viewpoint of of learning about the country, learning about the the ministries that are happening, and the ministries that can happen.
T.J.:But from the missionaries' perspective, what is it like for those return trips to your your home country?
Lynn:The first time we came back, they worked us to death. We did 58 churches in 3 months because I kept them written. Yeah. They set them up. We were all over the place.
Lynn:We had a 4 tar station wagon. They provided for us, which was great.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:And we packed our 3 kids up in there, known or none, all our worldly possessions. And we were gypsies. We went city to city, church to church every night, potluck. Back in that day, churches would turn out. And we were talking about the eighties.
Lynn:If you do a pollock on a Tuesday night, people would come. So every night we had a church we were in, and then on the Sundays, we usually did 2 churches. Sunday morning and Sunday night somewhere else. And, board admissions at that time would set it all up, so they did the churches. And sometimes geographically, it was crazy.
Lynn:You know, you can go one side of the state, then you go back to the other side of the state, but that's just the way it worked out. So we did, the first time we did like 58 churches or 56 churches in 3 months, and Nona and the kids traveled a lot with me and, and we were a lot of churches. We stayed a lot a lot of times in homes. So you every night, if I were to sleep, everybody, and you're staying in homes. And sometimes, you know, they're nice homes, and sometimes it's it was, you know, it was constantly you're trying to figure out your situation.
Lynn:So it was tough. Physically, it was tough. And we did that several times, not just one time. Now after the first time, because I was young and inexperienced, I've accepted 56 churches. After that, we kinda said, no.
Lynn:We got a limit. We're not gonna do more than 40 or 30 or there's still a lot, but we can't do that physically with the kids what we did to them the first time. When we told the kids, after 11 years on the mission field that we're gonna move back to Columbia, I remember Desiree, one of our daughters who's still young, she said, oh, no. She said, we gotta live in that van because by that time, we had a van. We gotta live in that van for you know?
Lynn:Because all they knew about the United States was being in station wagon or later a a minivan, which the board owned and traveling, you know, city to city, church to church. So they thought that's what we're gonna go do again. And I said, no. We'll have a house system.
T.J.:Wow. That's an amazing and to think about it, your impressions of a particular country is the vehicle and essentially living in a vehicle.
Lynn:Oh, yeah. We lived in a van and a station wagon.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:And, stayed in a lot of houses. Staying in hotels a few times, but most churches were responsible for housing us. And so they didn't wanna spend the money on a hotel. So they ended up putting us. Stayed with a lot of pastors, which meant and and this is another thing that made it exhausting is no one would get the kids bed and sometimes she'd go to bed.
Lynn:But the pastors felt very comfortable talking to the missionary because they knew I didn't live there. They knew I lived on the other side of the world. So a lot of them were unloading themselves on me, and I realized we'd set up till midnight, and they'd be talking about their struggles in ministry or their, you know, frustrations with the church or whatever. And and sometimes it wasn't, like, you know, critical things, but it was they just wanted to talk, and they knew, I I realized, they knew they could talk to me because I wouldn't I didn't live there. And so that with some freedom, they could tell me things that they probably wouldn't normally tell people because they knew I'd be gone.
Lynn:And, plus, I was a missionary. For some reason, people think missionaries have a certain level of spirituality that you don't have, but they thought, you know, that this is somebody that could, tell their stuff to. So that often happened that I would be in homes with pastors, and, they would share with me, you know, what was on their heart. And, that was good, but, oh my goodness, you're doing it every night, you know, because they've been waiting all for a month for you to show up, so they're excited.
T.J.:Right.
Lynn:And they and they don't realize that everywhere you go, they've been waiting a month for you, so they're all excited too. So you're just you're just in a it's it's just physically, it was very demanding.
T.J.:Doing the that many churches and sharing the same information, I would imagine it's probably similar to, a musical group or maybe even a comedian where Yeah. That repetition. Did it become did it become dry? Did it become
Lynn:Oh, no. It got better. Got better and better because I knew what would work. Because you start testing it. And so by the end of it, it's all memorized.
Lynn:The whole presentation was. It was a slideshow. That's they have slideshows. You didn't you didn't have power points. I had a Kodak slide projector and a screen, and that one on top of the van or the station light, that screen did.
Lynn:So we would take that and I would do a slideshow and it was good. I'm telling you, by the end of it, I was really good. I knew when they were gonna laugh. I knew pretty much the questions they were gonna ask because you do a q and a question and answer time at the end, and people are predictable. So so, you know, I was hearing the same questions most every night.
Lynn:So, anyway, it actually got better. It didn't get dry. It actually got better because I was faster at it, and, I knew what the responses were gonna be. I knew when they were gonna laugh. I mean, it was so predictable.
Lynn:So, it got better. It didn't get worse.
T.J.:What was the reason for the tours and and such the heaviness in terms of, how many places you had to visit?
Lynn:O UO. We were I had to you know, I was told at the end of every, presentation to encourage people to support OUO because that paid my sound, and it did in that day. And then, also, we would have 2nd mile projects. So if there was a 2nd mile project, I could mention it. And so it was with fundraising and mission education.
Lynn:But it was fundraising and partly mission education.
T.J.:If you could briefly, for those who may not know, what is a 2nd mile project? And then did that 2nd mile project pertain to your specific ministry?
Lynn:A second mile was bigger when out in the eighties than it is now. It's not a major offering now. But in the 19, eighties, the board of missions would approve second mile projects, which would be a foreign mission project. Maybe build a a new church or maybe, usually, always it was building. So usually it was building a church somewhere or helping the Callejo Americano in Colombia.
Lynn:Most of the projects were in Colombia because Japan had money. So Japan, because it's a developed country, had a lot more income just in their churches and presenters, and they could pretty much do what they wanted to do with their own money and same with Hong Kong. So pretty much all the mission projects were in Columbia because it just didn't have financial resources. So once that project was approved, and they were big projects, some of them were 50,000, a $100,000. Then we had permission as missionaries to go promote those, and we did.
Lynn:It was easier to promote a project that I was part of and I knew about because I could tell more about it. So, but sometimes I was promoting other projects in other parts of Columbia that I didn't have anything to do with. So we would promote 2nd mile projects, and then we would promote, OUO. Now 2nd mile is usually just really small offerings of 2 or $3,000 for small projects. Mhmm.
Lynn:And, it doesn't take a big meeting to approve those. Usually, staff approves those based on the need of the moment, which is different than it was back then. And part of that was they were very strict about offerings back in that day, because everything was focused on OUO. And, they really discouraged anything out of OUO. OUO.
Lynn:So 2nd mile was one of the few things that had authorization to get, offerings that was asked on the OUO.
T.J.:Oh, yeah. And just for clarification, OUO is our United Outreach, and it's the main funding mechanism for the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.
Lynn:Yeah. It does funds all the administrative and some of the programming, things that the denomination does. Also, it helps, the Children's Own Memphis Theological Seminary in, Bethel University.
T.J.:How did you know when it was time to no longer be a missionary?
Lynn:I don't think it's like all decisions I made, it's never just one thing. It's several things. We lived in Colombia during the mafia wars. And, so the mafia war initially was between the Megan Cartel and the Cali Cartels, and it was serious. They they both cartels went to war with each other and a lot of car bombings, a lot of violence, a whole lot of violence.
Lynn:And that was tough. I mean, it's it's one thing to see things on the news, but it's one thing to live in it, and that's what we were doing. We were seeing firsthand that. Paolo Escobar was killed. He was the Medellin mafia boss.
Lynn:And, he was killed and, that was only about 2, 3 blocks from where our apartment was in Medellin where they got him. We had just moved well, we've moved, he was killed and then we moved to Medellin just about a month after that. We planned to move to Medellin anyway, so we're on our way And then he got killed, which kinda helped. So that that was over with, but what happened is that the, the FARC, which is a communist subversive guerrilla organization in Colombia, they took over the drug trade. And they, you know, you you give the communist aversives money who are a violent group anyway, and and they only do worse things.
Lynn:So the money started flowing to them, and then, they went to war against the civil war essentially against the Colombian government, and it was brutal. I mean, massive bombings, kidnappings like crazy. And as a result of that, we lived in the middle of that. I was in several shootouts, not with a gun, but just got caught up in the middle of it. There was, you know, there was lawlessness everywhere.
Lynn:And so in the middle of that, I mean, our kids were going to school that was unmarked because it was unsafe to even advertise that it was a school and there were foreign kids there. Because the FARC said they were gonna kidnap, and they weren't. They were kidnapping all kinds of people for money. That's how they raised money. So with all the drug trade and all the kidnapping and all then, we couldn't leave the city anymore.
Lynn:It's too dangerous. There were roadblocks all out on the highways. I think TDA, you've been in Columbia, you've driven the highways of Columbia. When I lived there, you couldn't do that. It's too dangerous.
Lynn:So you you basically got kinda landlocked in your in your city because it's too dangerous to go out. So we lived that way for years. We would vary our schedules. We would go to, church at different times on Sunday morning. We'd show up early, we'd show up late, because if you're gonna kidnap somebody, you've studied their routines.
Lynn:And so we tried to break up our routines. You just live that way and you get used to it. You see dead people. We saw, you know, like I said, people that have been assassinated on the side of the road, even outside our neighborhood, we saw people on the side of the road. You get tired.
Lynn:And I think we had pro post traumatic stress syndrome by the end of all that. And so our kids, because of the age they were at, it was a transition time. We're gonna have to think about if we stayed in Columbia, we're gonna have to stay another bunch of years to get them through high school. So we, evaluated all that and decided to resign. And so we did.
Lynn:We resigned. And, at the same time, I resigned, the new well, I guess it was relatively new, executive of the board of missions, who was Jack Barker, offered me a job, to come to the states and start churches among the immigrant population in the United States. I didn't think I wanted to do that, and I thought I was gonna go back and be a pastor. But after talking to my wife, knowing about it, we decided that I would do that. I thought the job would last a year.
Lynn:It would fail, and then I would go into the ministry. I thought it'll be a good bridge year. I'll get acclimated to the United States, and then after a year, that job will fail, and then I will go, into the ministry as a pastor. Job lasted 13 years. Didn't fail.
T.J.:How long were you the director of Cross Culture Cross Cultural Ministries? What did that
Lynn:entail? I think it was 13 years. So we came back in 96, and, then I started working for the board of missions. My immediate boss was George Estes, because Cross Cultural Ministries was underneath the, they called them units back in that name, which I thought was a horrible word, but units. So I was under the unit of Evangelism and Church Grove, I think is what it was, And George was the guy.
Lynn:So George is actually the one that talked to me about the position and and then I'll answer directly to him. So George and I worked together. He was doing the same thing I was doing, but he was doing it with the English speaking normal church growth side
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:And, church planting. And I was, tasked to start working with, with the immigrant population in the United States. So initially, they knew a couple of Hispanic pastors in Texas, down towards San Antonio, I think it was. And I went down and met them, and that they'd already had small churches, but I kinda learned from them. There was a guy, a Baptist guy down there that I was introduced to.
Lynn:His name was Rolando Lopez. He lived in San Antonio and he had done church planning. He had bilingual churches and I went and met him and I got some ideas from him. So my first few weeks was just meeting people that were doing it, trying to figure out what it is we should be doing. And then after that, I started reaching out and making contact with, Cumberland Presbyterian that were living here.
Lynn:One of them was Milton Ortiz, who is now the team leader of the missions ministry team. He was living in Boston, and I knew Milton because he's Colombian, and we'd worked together in Colombia. And so I contacted him and asked him if he'd start the church in Boston. And he said, well, sure. It didn't seem to be really, you know, complicated for him.
Lynn:He said, sure. And I said, we can pay you, like, $1,000 a month, which is what we paid. I think we paid him that much, maybe not even that much. And so he started the church in Boston, and I talked to Ruben Al Baracine, who was a pastor from Colley, Columbia, CP pastor. He lived in Houston.
Lynn:He said, yeah, he would help. And so I went to their presbyteries or in the case of Boston, they had to find a presbytery to put them in. And so that was part of my job. And, then I began to identify non Cumberland Presbyterian pastors, Hispanic and eventually Korean, and started talking to them about working with us and they agreed to help. And so I'd connect them to the secretaries.
Lynn:Presidors sometimes would have some money and never lose a lot of money. Most of these people work for small amounts of money, part time salaries. They were like tent makers. And so we started finding people. Part of the reason I think it worked is that some of these Hispanic pastors and Korean pastors had groups and they were trying to find a place to meet.
Lynn:So invariably what would happen is they would approach a church, a CP church, and say, could we share facilities with you? And as we got the word out more and more throughout the denomination that we had across cultural office now, these, CP pastors would call me and say, listen, this Hispanic group wants to use our facility. And I would say, hey, why don't you ask them if, if they're affiliated with anybody and most of the time they weren't. So I said, why don't you ask them if they'd like to be CP? And then I would go meet with them because I spoke Spanish and begin to develop their relationship.
Lynn:So we did all kinds of ways to connect Hispanics, Koreans, and even some Sudanese African groups, to us. And, usually it was because we had facilities we could offer them that we would share with them and they could use those. So that was one way we were able to do that. And, so that's how I began. I began, identifying groups we can work with and CP ministers that lived here that would work for us.
Lynn:And we started working through all the presbyteries that were willing to do projects. At one time, almost every presbytery in the United States had at least one cross cultural project they were working with. So I would go meet with the president of your board's emissions, or I would meet with the task forces they've named. And then obviously, I had to go meet with the cross cultural churches that we were starting. I traveled a lot.
Lynn:I was gone a lot from home. We lived in Birmingham, Alabama because, Jack Barker said, it doesn't matter where you live, you're not gonna be home that much anyway. So he said, if you live in Memphis, you wouldn't be here anyway. And he was right. He I think he had the vision of what this could be more than I did.
Lynn:And once he got up and going, I mean, it was, it was a lot of work, a lot of traveling alone because Nona didn't travel with me, obviously the kids and Nona didn't travel with me anymore. So I would travel a lot by myself. I go into these different projects to check on them and meeting with task forces and also meeting with president.
T.J.:What was one of the greatest challenges in that role of director of Cross Cultural Ministries?
Lynn:I don't know. There were, you know, there were one thing I think that was not a challenge is because this was new to the church and everybody in the United States was seeing the immigrant populations coming even into small towns and rural parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi. People were excited. They were really excited about starting these churches. So when I would go before president and say, hey, have you ever thought about starting a non English speaking church in your presbytery?
Lynn:And, you know, these are some models, these are ways we could do that. They were excited about it. So that part wasn't a challenge. I think the challenge was once you started bringing these groups in, these pastors and different ethnic groups, Hispanic or Korean, there are cultural differences. And I don't think people have realized, I think what what people think is that we're gonna bring this group of people in and they're gonna conform to our ways.
Lynn:They're gonna learn our language. They're gonna sing the songs we sing. And so they see them being assimilated into our culture, and that's not what happens. And I think for some people that was kind of, maybe not frustrating, but it was an eye opening experience.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:That if you're gonna start Hispanic church, they're gonna sing in Spanish and they're gonna do everything in Spanish, and it's gonna be a Spanish speaking congregation that's culturally Hispanic. That's not gonna change. So I think it took time for people to realize that, that working cross culture was not assimilating other cultures into the US culture. It was having congregations that could meet the needs of that immigrant population, which means they would have to say in the language and the culture of that population to be effective.
T.J.:There's a church culture as well, a denominational culture as well. Were there challenges there at that time in terms of the assimilation? Because you're bringing not only language, but a culture and a unique perspective, you know, from life experiences that help inform how you read the scriptures, how you understand confessions of a particular denomination, and its form of government, or, in some cases, lack of government, depending on which, you know, church you become affiliated with?
Lynn:I think, we did I think what part of the challenge was in the beginning is the idea of assimilation and an assimilation process we had to develop. So initially, when we started, working with the immigrant population in the United States, we didn't even know the word assimilation, I don't think. I don't think we thought about it. But as we got deeper into it, we realized we had to have a process of assimilation where you don't lose your culture or language and your value systems from your culture, but you find a home in the CP church, in the in the government of the church, and in the life of the church. So I think that was, partly a challenge, and and we did a lot with that.
Lynn:There's even things now in the confession of faith that reflect the changes we're able to make. One of those is provisional status, is giving people the right to serve in the CP church and continue to do their ministries with their people without taking their ordinations away from them, which were not ordinations we gave them, but somebody else gave. And at the same time, have a process where they can learn how to be a CP and learn all things relevant to the CP church. So those were all things that we implemented over time. And thanks to people like George Estes, who was a really smart guy, he had a lot of ideas that influenced that and helped us push that along as far as, figuring out how to do that.
Lynn:So, there was, there were, you know, there were issues that we I think we had to deal with as far as assimilation. We had to learn what that meant, what that looked like. And I don't say we're there yet. I think we started down a process and hopefully we continue that process to figure that out. So, you know, that was part of the, I think, part of the challenge we were dealing with.
T.J.:And then you became the director of Global Missions, which is a position that you currently hold now. What does that role entail?
Lynn:Well, let me say the transition, I guess, is, you know, we had a lot, in cross cultural ministry in the USA, we had a lot going on and had it going on for several years. So it it gets to be pretty complicated. There were a lot of projects that I was dealing with in different states around the United States and cities. And we had Koreans, we had Sudanese, we had Hispanics. At one time there were probably 40 to 50 different projects I was working with.
Lynn:So anyway, you get, you know, you, you get tired. And it was, I felt like a time for a change, for me. And then when, Bob Watkins was retiring and that's who was the director of global missions, Bob was at a point in his life where he was ready to retire and and walk away from that. I had been helping Bob. So I had taken over Mexico by the end in Guatemala, even before Bob left because, we were doing some expansion in the overseas world.
Lynn:And so I was kinda helping out with that. And it was an obvious transition for me to take, over from Bob because I was already working with Bob and, overseas. And so, this is sad, but this is true. Every job I've had, I didn't ever interview for him and there was no competition. Days have changed now.
Lynn:Now there's a whole process and whole policies policy manual around employment. But I was part of the old system where, you know, it's the next man up kind of deal. And Lynn was, you know, he's probably the best suited for the job. So there wasn't any competition. I didn't interview.
Lynn:I think, the board of missions and the missions ministry team was just coming into play at that time. I think, George and Bob and Mike Sharp looked at me and said, Lynn's the guy for the job to take Bob's place, so I got it. So I was glad to get it because I wanted to get back in the overseas mission work. That's where my first love was. That's, where my early life experience was.
Lynn:I was looking forward as an ex missionary, working again with Columbia and all the things that I had been involved in when I was a missionary down there. So I transitioned into that position and brought me the thing that's I learned in cross cultural ministry, to, the new work in Global Missions. What does that ministry entail? It entails working with everything outside the United States, as well as working with the missionaries. And it entails recruiting missionaries, and once you recruit them, provide guidance and supervision of those missionaries.
Lynn:I've always, even when, I was doing Cross Culture USA, I was supervising new church development pastors. And I had a bunch of people that were working under my guidance. I've always been administratively responsible for probably more people than anybody else that works for the denomination, just the way it worked. So I've always been a supervisor in a way of NCD pastors in the states, and then I was the supervisor of church planters outside the United States as well as missionaries that worked outside the United States.
T.J.:Let's talk about where the presence of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church is around the world and how your role plugs into those different areas.
Lynn:When I was a missionary, we had mission work in Hong Kong, Japan, and Colombia. There were 2 presbyteries in Columbia, which were in East and Kaka Valley. And then we had to work in Liberia, which we eventually lost. It has to be disconnected from the CP church and once again become an independent presbytery in Liberia. They have regretted that decision, but, at least from communications I've heard in the past years from some in Liberia, They probably wish they hadn't have done that.
Lynn:But once it's done, it's done. There's no way to really go back and redo that. So my point is, when I was a missionary, there were really 3 mission fields and then Liberia, which was a mission field, but we never were able successfully to put a missionary there. It was just too difficult. So then about the time I took the global mission position, we'd already expanded into a few other countries over in Cambodia and Laos, we're in the Philippines, and that was through Bob Watkins efforts.
Lynn:We were just getting into Mexico, which I was working with and Guatemala, which I was working with. Then from there, we began to expand into other countries. We went into Europe and Spain and France, and, we started a project in Belize. We went in, we were all we were not in Brazil, but we went into Brazil when Japan press just said they no longer were able to successfully work there because the Japanese they were working with over 50 years, they totally assimilated into the Brazilian culture. So the church was no longer Japanese, it was Brazilian.
Lynn:So Columbia, not Columbia, Japan pressed their turn all that over to us, which was a project they were doing. And, then we began to expand into Brazil, doing some other projects with Brazil. So we went into Australia, we went in to some of these other countries, not too long ago, went into Canada. And, so we began to expand into different countries around the world, either through, making relational connections with people there, which is mostly what we do, or through sending missionaries there, which is a more complicated, expensive way to do it. But we also do it that way by sending missionaries into those countries.
Lynn:So we've expanded into almost 19 different countries around the world. Well, not expanded, but we are in 19 countries around the world, including what we used to do and the new stuff we're doing, 20 including the United States.
T.J.:Looking into the future in terms of global missions and the role that you have, what do you envision for it?
Lynn:I think we have to continue, and I think that is the vision still of the missions ministry team. We have to continue to be risk takers, and we have to, pursue opportunities where they open up. Where doors open, we need to try to pursue those. It doesn't make financial sense to do that sometimes because all this stuff costs money, and we don't have much money. But I think the feeling is you walk through the door and you figure the money out once you get there.
Lynn:You work with what you got. And if you got a little money, you use what little you got. If you don't have any money, then you you do the best you can. You say, we don't have any money. So I think, when I first started, money was everything in the 1980s.
Lynn:We didn't open new emission because we, new emission fields because we just didn't have the money for it. And that was the reason. We're not gonna go to Ecuador. Remember those conversations in the sixties, happened in the sixties, in the eighties, because we don't have any money. And so we didn't go to Ecuador.
Lynn:Although, Columbia said we should go to Ecuador because that's a neighboring country in Columbia, and we can do that. But we didn't. And, and I remember the conversations with my superiors at that time, I said we just didn't have the money to do it. We don't think that way now, but it, you know, it creates challenges for us into the future. We're gonna do ministry, we're gonna do the best we can, but we probably won't have the financial resources that other people probably have to do this kind of stuff.
Lynn:But it works in some way, somehow, we find ways to navigate through those opportunities and pursue them even though we don't have the financial resources to do it. So I see the features will continue to expand into other countries. We do have a leadership problem all around the world, even in the United States. It is tough to find leaders to lead things, pastors to lead projects, to lead churches. It's difficult, extremely difficult to find missionaries.
Lynn:It's hard enough to find somebody who wants to be a pastor. It's even harder to find somebody who's willing to leave their country, whether it's the United States or Columbia or whatever country they live in as a common Presbyterian, and leave that country and that culture and move to another place and kinda start all over. Learning the language, the culture, and, and becoming acclimated in that country. It's just hard to find people to do that. But we need those.
Lynn:We have opportunities where we need missionaries, and we we don't have people. We don't even have people that are interested.
T.J.:What's next for you, Lynn? Not just in your vocation, but in terms of your faith and your family?
Lynn:Well, as you know, I've resigned this position. I worked for the denomination for 36 years, which seems like a long time, and it is.
T.J.:And you're you're only 42.
Lynn:Right. I'm I'm not even 42. I've always no. I'm still not retirement age. Everybody thinks I'm retiring, but I'm, I mean, they don't everybody thinks that they assume that, but I'm not.
Lynn:I'm not old enough to retire yet. I'm close, but not old enough. So after 36 years of working for the board of missions and then the missions ministry team, there's one more thing I wanna do. And that's why I'm doing it now. Because I'm, I have, I have enough youth left in me, then I think I got a few more years I can do something that matters.
Lynn:I'm gonna resign the position the 1st July, and, hopefully, somebody, capable and responsible will apply and take this position and continue to move forward with it. And, and starting in July, I'm gonna work for the opt in program, which is the trade school for Christian formation. And it is a program, that was started by my daughter and my son-in-law, several years ago that that uses the idea of developing, skills, like a trade school does with carpenters and plumbers and mechanics. So I think it uses the idea of developing skills as a way of doing Christian formation, As opposed to content driven stuff, which is the way we usually do discipleship, we sit down and teach people in a workshop. Opt in uses a different methodology, which is we learn skills.
Lynn:And it's not as much content driven as much as it is practice driven. So if you're gonna learn to share your faith story, which is what we're doing here, what are the skills you need to do or have to be able to share your faith story? That's not a lecture, that's a practice. And so they have a series of things you do to learn how to do that. So I'm gonna be part of that.
Lynn:I'm excited about that, working with them. And, hopefully it brings church revitalization and renewal, in the CP church, in the United States, outside the United States, and even outside the CP church, because Optune is not just for the CP church. So I'll be working with them starting in July. They presented their ideas a few years ago to the Lilly Foundation and Lilly really liked what they were talking about. I think they liked it because it wasn't content based, that it's skill development based, which is a whole new concept.
Lynn:And so Lilly, gave them a pretty good, grant, and that grant will fund us to do the things we're gonna be trying to do over the next few years. So, that's what I'll be doing. I'm excited. It's a new program. I've done this before with New Church Development in the United States among immigrant populations.
Lynn:I I had nothing. I started with nothing and was able to move that along. And so I'm hoping I can bring those skill sets to opt in and help them move this to a different level, to a higher level of of success and efficiency. So that's what I'm gonna be doing for the next few years, I hope. Let's
T.J.:talk about the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and hope. What hopes do you have for the denomination looking into the future?
Lynn:Being a, you know, statistically, I think everybody realizes being a denominational church and we are a mainline church. We've fit every characteristic of mainline, except we're not very large. But historically, in the way we do things, we're certainly a mainline church. It's a tough time to be a mainline church. And it's a tough time to be a denominational church.
Lynn:So I think the CP church is, has got challenges ahead of it because of that. We're struggling, as all mainline churches are to retain our numbers and to grow. So I think that's gonna be a challenge. As far as the halt part, I've been in too many situations on the mission field and in the United States working in ministries here where things seem hopeless. And when I sat down with a piece of paper and plotted it out, there's just no way.
Lynn:There's no money to do it. There's no leadership to do it. There's just a thousand reasons why we can't do it. But I'm always amazed that something out of nowhere comes and happens. And, and things come together and and things that you thought couldn't work start working.
Lynn:So I guess that's my hope because I can't figure out what the solution is for mainline churches and denominational churches. And there's just a lot of, you know, there's a lot of negative energy all around us that's working against us, from the culture, from society, even from the church itself. And, I I think how do we get past that to a place of success, into a place of of thriving as a church and bringing life into our community and into our world. I don't know. But my hope is that God shows up somehow, some way, and the ways that we might not have expected, God does something, and and it's miraculous event.
Lynn:It's a resurrection. So, that's my hope. I can't figure it out personally, but, been in this situation more than once where I've been figured out and something happens, and it starts working in ways that you just couldn't imagine.
T.J.:You've written a couple of books. One of them is Relational Missions Concepts, Perspectives, and Practices That Inform Global Missions. I'm wondering, as I read over your book and I was looking over it again yesterday, I'm wondering if there's pieces there that can help inform and maybe point to some of the hopes that you were addressing. In some of the later chapters, you get to a place where you talk about, groups having a central focus in terms of missions. And groups, I guess, specifically in in the conversation that we're having is is, a church group, a denomination.
T.J.:Do you think your approach in terms of central focus, defining, finding, identifying the central focus, coupled with the relational aspect and interpersonal aspect of human beings. Do you think that is the hope moving forward?
Lynn:Well, it's an approach.
T.J.:And maybe you should unpack some of the things, assuming that folks who are listening haven't read Relational Missions. So kind of unpack some of the key terms and words that I've used from your book.
Lynn:Well, the, the the central focus idea, I believe, was Paul Hiebert's idea.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:He was a missiologist. He was a missions professor. And, his understanding as he studied cultures is that cultures have different ways. All cultures have different ways of relating to each other. And unfortunately, I think a lot of times we, any of us think that all cultures do things the way we do.
Lynn:We don't we know that's not true, but we don't know how untrue that is until you begin to live and work in other cultures. So Paul Hebert was doing research and, different cultures and how they interact. And he realized for instance, that the Western Anglo worldview is that we have rules and boundaries, and we set boundaries, and that's how we define our groups. Our group has membership. And if your membership, and your membership has certain criteria.
Lynn:So that's the bounded, or boundaries idea of how groups are formed. And we do that very well as Westerners. We have boundaries, we have rules, we have membership criteria. Being a common Presbyterian member has certain vows that you take. We have a confession of faith and all those things are setting our boundaries.
Lynn:And so it leads to this kind of weird conversation, which he talks about. So how many of those rules can you break and still be a good common press hearing? TJ, we've heard that conversation all our lives. Do I have to believe the whole confession of faith? Or how much of it do I have to believe and I'm still a common press hearing?
Lynn:That is the kind of conversation that Westerners have to have when you do a boundary set. Hebrews says other cultures do another type of group formation, which is a central focus, And that's what you're talking about. And and and there are parts of that that might be helpful to us as a church. What he says is you identify something that y'all are excited about. It's like being the fan of a football team.
Lynn:If everybody is a Tennessee balls, fan, football fan, then, you don't really care if you're Republican or Democrat. You don't really care if you're black or white or brown. You don't really care about a lot of those things because, hey, we're Vols fans, and that's your central focus. And so what you find is you go to a football game and you see an incredible diversity of all kinds of people there because they're focused on a central focus, and that's what draw draw them together. And so they sit together in the stands and interact with each other, and they wear their horrible you know, I'm an Alabama fan.
Lynn:They wear their horrible arms jerseys, and they sit there and enjoy each other, although they're very diverse. That's what Paul Hebert says, sir, other cultures are formed around that, that concept as opposed to boundaries and rules. And so he says, you know, as missionaries, we have to be aware of that. Now his point was if you're gonna be a missionary, you gotta realize that the way they relate to each other. And another way to look at that is what if we could adapt some of those items ideas to our own culture?
Lynn:What if the common Christian church could identify? And I actually did that, several years ago before the pandemic. I did a research project outside the United States asking people what were the things that made them most excited about the CP church. And, there were several things, and one of the things kinda shocked me was the history. Born in the revival movement in the United States, although it was in the early 1800, everybody around the world, even people who know nothing about CP American history, and other countries around the world, they find that fascinating.
Lynn:When they hear that story about the revival and what happened in 18/10 and the 2nd great awakening, they that resonates with That's the central focus. When you talk about spiritual renewal and revival with CPs anywhere in the world, they get excited about that. So if that's what you wanna talk about, they're excited about that. If you wanna talk about Jesus Christ, they're excited about that. And that shouldn't surprise us, but it's amazing how little we do that.
Lynn:We need to talk more about Jesus and less about these other things that we often talk about. Because Jesus brings us together. Revival brings us together. The revival movement of the early 1800 is something we all think is a positive thing that brings us together. And that's what Paul Hebert would say.
Lynn:That may be another way to do group formation and maybe that's what we need to think more about the CP church, is find the 4 or 5 things we all get excited about. Let's just talk about that. Because we talk about the other things, we become haters. We become angry with each other and we become divided and wanna be away from each other. So that was kinda Paul Hiebert's and that's in the book on relational missions.
Lynn:But the point of it is, is to show that different cultures do group formation differently. And that really was the point. But it has an application to the bigger issue outside of that book, which is you can do group formation by having rules and boundaries. You can also do group formation by finding the central focus things that draw us together, like being a fan of a football team and focus on that. And by coming to that central focus, we come into fellowship with each other.
T.J.:And is that where the relational aspect comes into play? Because you had written in your book that, you know, a central focus and the key to the central focus in group formation is in the relationships, not the rules.
Lynn:Yeah. The key to the central focus and a lot of cultures function that way. Asian cultures do and certainly Latin cultures do where relationships are more important than rules. And we call that nepotism. We Westminster.
Lynn:Or we call that, well, they're not qualified for the job. And there's, you know, are there's a lot of things we see when we see that happening that we misinterpret Mhmm. In a negative way when it's really a positive thing, is that relationships are more important. I've I've said in the, you know, Latinos, Hispanics are notorious for being late. And it's not because they're late.
Lynn:It's not that at all. It's because relationships are more important than time. So if a Hispanic is in a relationship and they're talking to somebody, and they're visiting, and they're socializing, and they have an appointment at 9 o'clock, they might they might go to that appointment late because the relationship they're in right now is more important than the appointment. So they may show up late and then so they show up at 9:15 and everybody says, well, they're just, you know, they're they're not disciplined and they're lazy. No, that's not it.
Lynn:Is that relationships are more important. And so their values are different in in in that the relationship is the focus more than the boundaries of the rules, which is you gotta be on time. And so once you understand that, everybody kinda relaxes. And when I do, in the past, I've done workshops and cultural differences and how people manage time differently and manage space differently, and why they're doing that, there's a good reason why they're doing that, then everybody kinda relaxes. Said, oh, now I get it.
Lynn:Now I understand that it's it's not what I thought it was. Because showing up white in the American context is disrespectful, and that's how we interpret it. In the Latino context, it's not disrespectful. It's honoring because you spent time with the people before, and that's why you're late now because you were fulfilling a relational obligation, which was a a priority. So, those are some of the things that are in the, you know, the book kinda addresses.
Lynn:The the book talks about a lot of different things. And what it really is is kind of an encyclopedia of of mission, mission strategies and mission methods and mission theology. And so it kinda goes through a lot of different, experts as far as cultural stuff and theological stuff related to missions. And the the focus there is just part of that.
T.J.:And let me be, yeah, let me be be transparent because I focused on just a couple of areas. In the in the book, some of the chapters actually does a deeper dive into different concepts and perspectives. And I just hit you with just a couple of them if you wanted to expand more on them. Because I I think they are relatable to us as Cumberland Presbyterian and can help inform our our mission, our decision makings, our ministries currently and in the future.
Lynn:Well, it's interesting when you study missions. A lot of the most innovative ideas that the church uses today, in the United States came from the mission field. The whole church growth movement, which was kinda controversial in the eighties, 9th, I guess, it's kinda had its day. There are other movements that have come after that. But the whole church growth movement and actually the denomination, the board of missions had a church growth director and a church growth office back in the late seventies and early eighties.
Lynn:But it was such a big movement that even our denomination adopted a whole church growth thing, and we had people that go went through that church growth training that came out of California, out of Fuller and Don McGavin and Peter Wagner and all those guys. That came from the mission field. Donald McGavin was a missionary in India, and he observed the churches that were growing and what was going on in India, and he translated all that into the American context and brought it to the United States. And so a lot of what he learned in all of that came from mission field. That's true of a lot of things.
Lynn:And that's just an example of the ring the reason I bring it up is that you learn things from the mission field that can be used in the United States effectively. So hopefully, that book has some ideas in there that if you that's not the intention of the book, but the book could be used that way. Like we were talking about the boundaries and the central focus, that could be, something adapted to, our situation in the United States if we wanted. And there's other things in there. One of the things, I'll mention, because it was a big part of what I learned on the mission field and also what I did in cross cultural ministry in states and our global missions, the years I've worked with that, is that chapter on opportunists.
Lynn:That was really the hallmark of what I the the strategy I was using, when we started churches in the United States. When I first started, immigrant churches in the United States, you know, we said, well, we need Hispanic pastors to lead these new Hispanic churches we're gonna plant. There might have been 2 that we knew of in the whole denomination in the United States, maybe 3. There was another guy in California, in Chicago. And so when we said, okay, well, where are we gonna get the leadership to start these Spanish speaking immigrant churches?
Lynn:We realized it was impossible. Mhmm. Because to find young high school kids, put them through Bethel, then seminary, we were looking at 10 years away before we would even have the leadership if we could even do that way, do it that way. So that's when we realized we're gonna have to outside the CP charts and identify, who we could get to work with us. That's where the idea of opportunism helped us is to find opportunities, pursue those opportunities, and walk through those doors and figure it out as you go, as opposed to doing it the way we had always been doing it, which was much more a linear, clear, confession of faith type approach.
Lynn:We didn't have that option. And so opportunism gave us the idea that we will identify opportunities, and we will pursue those opportunities if they're in Boston, if they're in San Diego, if they're Houston, or if they were Korean and Hispanic pastors that in the past have had nothing to do with the CP church, but they're willing now to affiliate with us and work with us. So that was, that chaplain opportunism was an application of a mission concept I learned in in Columbia, watching Colombian mission Colombian pastors that were able to apply to our situation here in the States.
T.J.:You have to know going into it that not every opportunity is gonna come to fruition. And I think that scares folks that from if you look at it through a statistical lens or from a baseball metaphor, it might be a low batting average.
Lynn:Yep. You do. And I think that's, that was probably all through my ministry in the United States. I think that's the thing you run into, is you it's always funny to be a denominational representative sitting in a presbytery, and they're afraid.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Lynn:And you're thinking, you all think we're afraid. You think we're the ones at the denominational level that won't take risk and and and take chances. Whereas I often felt I'm the one here in the room that's saying, let's go for it. And they said, well, I don't know. They might not be good CPs.
Lynn:You know, it's what they're, you know, who knows if they're gonna conform to the CP church? Well, we won't know that until we get down this road. And we have things in our confession of faith that deal with people that are not good CPs. I mean, we have a whole whole war chest of things we can pull out if we have to do that. Fortunately you don't have to do that very often, but that's just that fear factor that you run into.
Lynn:You know, well, what's this gonna cost us? This could be real expensive. It could be, but if you don't have the money, you don't have the money. So Yeah. So while we're about the super high expense of something when we don't have the money anyway to do that.
Lynn:So we're gonna do what we can afford to do, and
T.J.:that's the reality we live in. Yeah. There's something about, overcoming the fear of just trying. And I think there's a level of trust there as well in terms of it's not really we don't have hands wrapped over the future. So the future is unknown, but we here's a potential opportunity, to use your words.
T.J.:Let's pursue it. Let's explore it, knowing that it may be very fruitful or it could be just a dead end or it may just be for a season. As the older I get, the more I tend to really recognize the Ecclesiastes in terms of for everything there is a season. Sometimes things move in seasons. Just because it's been created today does not mean it will exist forever and ever and ever.
Lynn:No. I was this is probably a little bit related. I was in Edinburgh, Scotland 2 or 3 weeks ago. And the thing that's striking about old town Edinburgh, the old part of the city, which is 100 of years old, is the number of churches. I thought it's like a southern town.
Lynn:There's a church on every corner. Right. But they're 100 of years old. There are these massive, you know, stone buildings that are architecturally amazing, and that's why they never tore them down. There are no churches in there.
Lynn:There's, stores in them. There's bars in them. There's pubs in them. There's all kinds of things, but very few of them have churches in them. But it speaks to the day in Edinburgh, which is kind of a bastion of Presbyterianism.
Lynn:It speaks of the day when there were churches all over that city, vibrant churches that somebody spent a lot of money building back in their day. That's that season you're talking about. There was a day where Edinburgh was a hotbed of reformed Protestant Christians, And that was a long time ago, and those churches reflect that. And those Presbyterian missionaries went all over the world. Presbyterianism is all over the world now because there was a church on every corner at one time in Edinburgh that was active, and it had people in it, and they were doing things.
Lynn:And now, they're not. There are not that many churches in Edinburgh. There are not that many, Christians or protestants in Edinburgh like it used to be. But it had its day, and it sowed seeds around the world, and, and that's okay. That's okay.
Lynn:And the CP charts, I believe, you know, speaking of the hope of the future, it may be outside the United States. The CP church is growing outside the United States. And I think a 100 years from now, if we could come back and see the CP church, it might be there's not much of the CP church left in the United States. I don't know. And it might be there's a huge number of congregations in Brazil and in Colombia and the Philippines.
Lynn:That can happen because that could be the new beachhead of the CP church. So if that happens, that's okay. And it might be that, you know, a 100 years from now, somebody comes from the Philippines and they're driving around seeing these old CP church buildings that are now just hay barns, or tobacco barns, or totally gone, and there's just a cemetery out there. And they see what used to be here, but they're here because of what used to be here.
T.J.:We've been talking about seasons. Lynn, where are you in your season of life with your faith in god? Is it a season of harvest? Is it a spring season? And what do those metaphors mean if you were to use 1?
Lynn:Well, I think it's a new, I'm on a new adventure because I am leaving this position, and I'm gonna do something new. And part of that new thing working with Optin is to take opt in to a new level. And that's what everybody understands I'm gonna be trying to do as far as the people I'm working with. And so I'm excited to get one more shot at that to see if I can bring, some growth and success to opt in. So far, as far as my ministries in the CP church, I've been able to bring growth and success, to the different things I was involved in.
Lynn:It wasn't because of me. I worked with good people. I really did. And, you know, unfortunately, that's probably a whole another interview is to talk about the people I've worked with and, and the the successes we've had. You know, they were always behind me letting me do the things I could do and I was called to do.
Lynn:And I remember George Estesan early on when we were starting these cross cultural churches, he was my boss, at that time. He said, Lynn, I think I've learned how to work with you now. And I said, well, how's that, George? He said, just stay out of your way. I said, you're absolutely right.
Lynn:And it wasn't that he was in my way. George did much more than that. He figured things out I couldn't figure out. And, he brought a lot of wisdom and insight about what I was doing to help me understand better what I was trying to do. So George was more than that, but he knew that there's a certain personality that you need to kinda back away and let them run and, you know, run close behind, but let them run, and they'll do best that way.
Lynn:Other you know, I've supervised a lot of people, and I know how that works. Some people just gotta kinda stay out of their way. They're a race horse. When the gate opens, you just gotta let them roll. And other people, they wanna partner or they wanna ride or you know, everybody's got their style, and you gotta understand that.
Lynn:And not one is better than the other. But I understand my style, And I'm looking forward to using that approach and that style with the new thing that I'm gonna be doing. I'm young enough, I can do it, and I wanna do it, and I look forward to seeing what's gonna happen with it.
T.J.:Lynn, thank you for giving me all of your morning for us to have this conversation. And I know we talked ahead of time before we started recording that we thought maybe that the chronological aspect of your faith journey would be best and I think that worked out well. Everybody tells their faith journey and shares their faith story differently And, we took the career approach just because so much of who you are and and your relationship with God is also part of your career. It's it's a outpouring of your ministry. And thank you for sharing it.
Lynn:You're welcome.
T.J.:Thank you also for, working with me for 11 years.
Lynn:I appreciate that. No. It's, like I said, it's been it's been good working with, a lot of the people I've worked with. You know, like I say, I think there's a whole thing we could talk about about the different people I've worked with, but some of them are have died and gone on. But as I'm collecting over 30 years of documents and getting them uploaded and where people can get to them, I'm reminded of those people because I have letters of people that are deceased now that I worked with that were valuable to me in my life.
Lynn:So, nobody, none of us, and that includes me, is able to do what we do without a lot of other people surrounding us and helping us as we do that, and you're part of that.
T.J.:Thank you for listening to the faith journey of Lynn Thomas. If you've enjoyed Cumberland Road, please share it with others. To end this podcast, I thought it would be appropriate to read from Lynn's book, Relational Missions. Because cultures are different, they have different sensitivities, skills, and perceptions. These are gifts, and they are gifts god intends for the church to enjoy. Missions is gathering nations and cultures into one family to experience new revelations about god. Thanks for listening.
