Advocating a Boring Passport

At 18, I received my first passport. 10 years later, once the passport expired, the diversity of “stamps” became a source of pride – you see every time you enter a country, immigration stamps your passport. Each country has a unique stamp, and often at the end of a trip I enjoyed sitting down and looking through all the stamps and visas in my passport. I marveled at the littlest countries with the biggest stamps (like Lichtenstein) and the manner in which stamps reflect the culture (the German stamp is unadorned yet efficient). My passport had stamps from 5 continents, and a couple dozen countries – stamps from mission trips to Venezuela, Peru, Central Asia, India, England to name a few. My passport was the James Dean of passports.

However, today, I want to advocate a boring passport.

My first passport revealed a misunderstanding of effectiveness in short-term missions. I loved going to a new country, sharing the gospel, seeing many “pray to receive Christ” and plan on going on mission again the next year – just to a different country. This allowed me to have an amazingly colorful and diverse passport.

A little over three years ago, my attitude about short-term missions changed. Now my passport is boring. In the last three years, I have been to two countries on mission trips – India and Argentina. I’ve been to India once in this time span and Argentina nine times. As I flip through the pages of my passport, all I see is the same entry and exit stamp over and over again – in a word, boring.

Rather than going on several mission trips a year to several different countries, I decided that the best way for the missions ministry at North Richland Hills Baptist Church to make a lasting impact was to go to fewer countries more frequently per year. In the last three years, our primary international partnership has been in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (If you want to learn more about the partnership check out adoptabarrio.wordpress.com) NRHBC has sent fifteen mission teams to Buenos Aires in the last three years.

Pretty boring, huh? However, we have seen lives impacted by the gospel – just this week I enjoyed studying the Bible with a young man who a year ago became a believer and couldn’t find a single book in the Bible. On Wednesday, he didn’t miss a beat – able to find books in the Bible just as quickly as I could. Iker is well on his way in discipleship.

Prior to the change in philosophy, discipleship was an afterthought. Now it is our passion. After all, Jesus did not call us to make converts, he called us to make disciples.

A boring passport is not an empty passport. We live in a day and time in which travel is easy and relatively inexpensive. There is little reason for an American Christian to have an empty passport in regards to missions.

Boring passports reveal a white-hot passion for contributing to God’s mission to redeem humanity – in other words making an impact on one location – one people group – one partnership through evangelism, discipleship and church planting.

If you don’t have a passport – get one and use it for missions. If your passport is exciting – join with NRHBC’s work in Argentina and make it much more boring.

How boring is your passport?