Bearing Witness: Trading Missions and Evangelism for Friendship and Curiosity

Editor’s Note: The following appeared in the January-March issue of Good Faith Magazine, which is free for all Good Faith Advocates. Learn more about becoming a GF Advocate here. 

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In 2015, I was in a dark place. I had just experienced a decade of loss usually reserved for those much later in life. Accidents had taken the lives of my closest friend (who was also my pastor) and my dad. One of my childhood best friends died from AIDS, and a college mentor died from a heart attack. Another friend succumbed to a long battle with alcoholism.

One of the few bright spots of that period was becoming a pastor at the church I had loved and been a part of. Then, that was taken away when my position was eliminated. I felt rejected by the people I loved. For the first time since I was a teenager, I was unemployed.

However, with a severance package and the church’s generous gift of a sabbatical, I also had time on my hands. The world was open that summer before I had to start looking for work. I knew I needed to get away to rest and heal. With no one urgently needing my attention, I took advantage of the situation and placed as much distance as possible between myself and my home in Waco.

I went to Estonia.

Located at the crossroads between continental Europe, Scandinavia, and the northern edge of what had been the Soviet Union, Estonia was emerging from a transformative period of its own. It had successfully risen from the rubble of a fallen empire to become a truly digital society. I knew it was a remote, quiet place that wouldn’t require much of me. A church in Tartu in the country’s southern region offered me a guest room at a reasonable price.

When I arrived at Salem Baptist Church in mid-May, Aino, the church’s caretaker, welcomed me. After explaining a trick to the doorknob at the church entrance in broken English, she showed me to my room.

The days were getting long. By midsummer, the sun would be in the sky almost around the clock. I still slept an entire day before emerging to explore the neighborhood. I was jet-lagged, but in retrospect, I realize I was also sleeping off the various traumas I had experienced over the previous ten years.

I spent much of that summer walking around Tartu – first, zombielike, then with increasing wakefulness and curiosity. On Sunday mornings, I worshipped with the Salem congregation, and on Sunday afternoons with an English-speaking congregation down the street. I made friends and would occasionally visit with them for coffee or meals. Mostly, though, I made myself at home in the Salem church building and wrote.

The book that emerged was what veteran writers warn against. It was written too soon – from my wounds rather than my scars. Regardless, it was cathartic, and although I would do it differently now, I’m glad I got it out of me.

What I was most thankful for, though, was the summer in Tartu. The long walks and lingering evenings in its cafes and coffee shops reinforced seemingly mystical ties between my heart and the city. I left that summer in the early stages of healing.

I vowed to return.

The Karlova Living Room

Located on the Adriatic Sea, Bari is a port city near the Achilles heel of the “Italian boot” and is known as the gateway to the Puglia region. In the late 11th century, merchants from the city stole the remains of an early Christian bishop in modern-day Turkey and brought them to Bari, where a cathedral still stands in his honor. Pilgrims travel from the East and West to visit the site. The bishop it honors was Saint Nicholas, a patron saint of brewers, repentant thieves, and children.

In 2007, Simone Cassano, then in his 20s, met a girl from Tartu who was in Bari with the Erasmus Program, a European Union student exchange initiative. It wasn’t long before he had exchanged his Mediterranean paradise for the short summers and long, cold, dark winters of Estonia.

Simone spent several years teaching Italian in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital and primary tourist destination, across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki. On class days, he would wake up at four to make the journey, and while in Tallinn, he would crash on friends’ couches. The bus ride from Tartu in the south to Tallinn in the north is just two hours. Still, even for a young person, that rhythm of life was grueling, especially on dark winter mornings when temperatures dipped below minus 30 F.

As the grind of living in one city and working in another wore him down, something in Tartu propped him up. His girlfriend, Anu, lived in a communal-style building on Tolstoi Street in the Karlova neighborhood. The building consisted of four flats, each housing four people.

In Tartu, neighborhood identity is often a stronger tie connecting people than city identity. Each neighborhood has its distinct architecture, character, and pace of life. Karlova is a bohemian neighborhood of artists, craftspeople, and academics. It is the home to one of Estonia’s most prestigious art colleges. Students from Pallas and Tartu University, located in the city center, piece together living situations in Karlova’s labyrinth of 19th-century wooden buildings.

Anu’s flat teemed with life. Doors were always open. Neighbors walked in and out of each other’s spaces to borrow food or clothes. Simone marveled at how different life was in Karlova than elsewhere in the country. Estonians are not known for their openness and public displays of enthusiasm. Like midwesterners in the U.S., an Estonian who says, “I like that” is the equivalent of them jumping up and down and screaming for joy. There wasn’t a lot of jumping up and down and screaming for joy in Anu’s flat, but there was warmth and vitality that gave Simone hints of Italy, stirring something in him.

He noticed that many of the young people in Karlova didn’t go out on the weekends. Instead, they hung out in their kitchens, drinking and leaning out of second-story windows to blow cigarette smoke. He also realized that Karlova didn’t have any substantive indoor gathering space for people. He dreamed of a bar, a “living room” where all his neighbors could gather.

Like all young men who see visions and old men who dream dreams, he verbalized the idea but didn’t expect much from it. But word circulated and eventually reached an investor’s ears. Before long, Simone, his friend Sasha, and the investor were drawing plans for a neighborhood bar in Karlova.

They found an old wooden building on the corner of Tähe and Eha streets and enlisted the services of a master craftsman with an otherworldly eye for detail to create the space. The curved, 90-degree-angle steps outside the building were designed to mirror the angle of the bar top inside. The stucco bathroom walls had Italian landmarks etched into them. Front and back spaces would serve as living rooms.

By late summer 2015, the project was behind schedule. Sawdust clouded the space. The craftsman stared trance-like at every detail, wanting to get everything right. Simone was frustrated at how slowly things were moving.

Meanwhile, a weary American staying at a church in the neighborhood wandered the streets outside the building between napping and writing. He was oblivious to what was happening inside or that it would ever mean anything to him.

The bar opened in November 2015.

Simone, from the Bari region of Italy, opened a bar in the Karlova neighborhood of Tartu. Naturally, it was named Barlova.

Coming Home

By 2018, the sting from the events culminating in my 2015 sabbatical to Estonia had subsided. I had been in a fulfilling new job at a university-based non-profit for two years. After a brief time away from my church, I returned and slowly reintegrated into the congregation. Challenging family issues began to improve, and I was breathing easier.

I was also thinking about Estonia.

In 1918, several East European countries took advantage of the end of World War I to declare their independence from just about all their neighbors who had ever occupied their territories. Though their freedom was only temporary, it marked a significant period of national awakening for these small countries surrounded and threatened by empire. It also ensured that 2018 would be a year of centennial celebrations across the former Soviet Union.

I kept my eyes on the Estonian celebration. There would be festivals, parades, and commemorative events. It occurred in February, fulfilling the dream of a lifelong Texan to experience a frigid winter. I booked a flight and a room at Salem and was in Tartu a few days before the celebration began.

After spending the summer of 2015 in the city, I knew my way around Tartu and was excited about walking the streets of Karlova again. The cold didn’t disappoint on the first day, with darkness, sub-zero temperatures, and almost constant snow. It was magical.

After spending the first day in the city center, I meandered back to the church early in the evening, taking out-of-the-way detours and marveling at the snow on the ground and the ice on my beard. Few people were on the streets, as everyone had the good sense to be inside.

Walking up Tähe Street, I noticed a glow from one of the old buildings with chipped paint. I walked by slowly, shyly glancing to my right into the window, assuming I was peering into someone’s flat. Karlova only had a few cafes open for breakfast and lunch, so I didn’t expect to find a place of business. So I was surprised when I realized the apartment I was looking at didn’t have a bar with people standing around it. It was a bar. I remembered reading about this place while preparing for the trip.

I approached the door, shuffling the snow off my boots. I walked in from the bitter cold, removing my scarf, jacket, and hat, placing them on the hangers at the door. I wiped the fog from my glasses and surveyed the place. Near the door were a table and couch. A small bar anchored the right wall, where a few people mingled, talking quietly. I looked toward the back room and noticed more couches and chairs. A couple of young women were drinking wine and catching up with each other. A guy was working on his laptop.

I felt immediate warmth and life, the kind you feel watching Christmas movies or videos of soldiers surprising their loved ones. I knew my life had changed since walking around Karlova three years before, and I suspected it was about to change again. I whispered two things to myself: “This feels like home,” and “Remember this.”

I found a seat with a view of the entire room at the far corner of the bar, and I observed the place slowly come to life. At first, everything felt very Estonian — quiet, reserved, and a little cold. But at staggered intervals, customers, presumably regulars, walked through the door. The gregarious Italian behind the bar greeted almost everyone by name with a “Ciao!” and a hug. It still felt Estonian, but different. Whatever was happening here, I needed to be a part of it. I returned every night for two weeks.

Each evening was different, but I began to put my finger on the place’s pulse. There was a distinct social dance that felt simultaneously new and ancient.

The most distinct move of this dance centered around language. Several years ago, Tartu University began offering many programs in English, bringing the world to the city. I noticed that English and Estonian were the default languages at the bar, but conversations could shift in and out of both without notice. Sometimes, Italian, Russian, or German would also make appearances. But there never seemed to be confusion or frustration, as a shared Barlovan language emerged.

I also identified a core cast of characters. This included a close-knit group of bartenders who never applied for the job but slowly found themselves on the payroll after stepping in to pour drinks or wash glasses during busy times. There was Elina, a master of languages who was warm, wise, and kind. She was often joined by Rivo, a tall, lanky artist with a handlebar mustache and a quiet, quirky way. And, of course, Simone was the director and often the show’s star.

There was a professor from Ireland, a student from Iran, a former bartender from Malta, and a Russian lady who had lived in the neighborhood for 50 years.

As I got to know people, I met anarchists, capitalists, and socialists. There were old and young and middle-aged people. There were straight and queer people representing all the letters. Sober drunks were sipping on hot tea while some customers stopped in for one drink and ten minutes of respite from caring for ailing parents. I noticed many young people drinking non-alcoholic beverages, and there were those for whom the bartenders made a point to take their time before pouring them another glass.

At shift change, another dance occurred when the closing bartender relieved the opener. Shots were poured and shared among the staff and select regulars who were standing around. One night before the end of my trip, I heard my name and looked up from my phone to see a shot of Amari, an Italian herbal liqueur, sitting in front of me.

I had become one of the cast of characters.

Since February 2018, I have returned to Tartu eleven times. At Barlova, I’ve made friends who have become family. I make unannounced visits and love to see the surprise on their faces when they walk through the door to find me on my regular barstool. Some assume I live in Tartu.

New people I meet are intrigued and almost invariably ask the same question — “Why this place?” Embedded within the question isn’t just curiosity about why I love Barlova. It is mainly about how I discovered Tartu, Estonia, this remote town in such a far-flung spot on the planet.

If my Tartu origin story began in 2015, the question would be easier to answer. But I didn’t pick a random place to take a sabbatical that year. I had a prior history with Tartu – a history that can be complicated to talk about with friends and strangers at a bar in a university city of one of the least religious countries in the world.

Divine Appointments

Growing up, I was a model Southern Baptist kid. As a child, I “walked the aisle” to “accept Jesus as my personal lord and savior.” I paid attention in Sunday School and dutifully checked the “read Bible daily” box on my weekly offering envelope. I learned about missions in Royal Ambassadors. In high school, I organized and led “See You At the Pole,” a yearly event for students to gather at their school’s flagpole and pray. Little old church ladies loved me and prayed their grandchildren would follow my example.

I was active in the Baptist Student Ministry in community college before studying theology at a Baptist university. There, I studied religion and, in my free time, read books about missionaries in far-off places who shared God’s word bravely and without shame. One such book was God’s Smuggler by Dutch missionary Andrew van der Bijl, known as “Brother Andrew.”

The book describes Brother Andrew’s ministry of smuggling Bibles into the Eastern Bloc nations of the Soviet Union. The story is full of suspense and intrigue. It presents a God who laid it on the hearts of strangers to donate a car and made contraband scripture invisible to border agents. It tells the story of a dark, bleak society where expressions of Christian faith were discouraged and restricted.
God’s Smuggler was published in 1964 but gained traction with the Soviet collapse in the early ‘90s. This period introduced a heightened interest in Christian missions to former Soviet nations.

In 1996, against this backdrop, I stepped off a plane in Tallinn, Estonia, with a dozen other Texas Baptist student missionaries to spread the love of Jesus. Ideally, in our minds, this would lead to them becoming Christians and joining one of the small handful of Baptist churches scattered throughout the country.

We immediately went to Tartu for two weeks to learn about Estonian history, language, and culture. After this time together, we went out into the country to “do God’s work.”

I was assigned to stay in Tartu.

I worked with Salem Kogudus (Church ), a congregation of incredible people emerging from a half-century of being marginalized for their faith. I had two jobs: I worked construction on the new Salem church building in the early mornings and afternoons. At midday, about a mile away, I taught English classes at the old Salem prayer house.

In the in-between times, I looked for “Divine Appointments,” which, I had been taught, were encounters that God would arrange for me to tell anyone who would listen that they were sinners going to hell unless they gave their life to Jesus, as I had.

I enjoyed teaching English and tolerated construction. Though it gave me anxiety, I convinced myself that telling people they were sinners was holy work. But what I loved, what gave me deep peace and meaning, were the quiet daily walks between the construction site and that old prayer house, walks that took me down the narrow streets and alleyways of Karlova, with its wood-slatted century-old houses with chipped paint, ancient doors, secret backyard gardens, and cats peering out the windows.

During those walks, I used several routes, one of which passed an old building on the corner of Tähe and Eha streets, a place that would eventually house some of the people and memories I love most.

I ended that summer young, energetic, idealistic, believing that I was God’s ambassador, carrying light into dark places. But a love for Tartu had also overtaken me. I vowed to return one day.

Transcending Mission

Between 1996 and 2015, Estonia was transformed. It went from an isolated outpost of a fallen empire to the “Silicon Valley” of Northern Europe. It invented Skype and revolutionized the digital world, becoming the first nation to offer “e-residency,” allowing anyone worldwide to access Estonia’s e-services and business environment. Estonians do everything, including voting and paying taxes, simply, quickly, and on their phones. Socially, Estonians went from being cold and closed off to, well, slightly less cold and closed off.

During that time, I underwent a transformation of my own, particularly in how I approached faith and the concepts of missions and evangelism.
I first traveled to Estonia during my peak “evangelism era.” My childhood and adolescent years in church formed me. As a theology student at a Baptist university, I was armed with all the tools of biblical studies and apologetics – the practice of explaining and defending the faith. Immersed in an interpretation of the Bible that said Christians go to heaven and everyone else goes to hell, I was trying to cultivate what was referred to as a “heart for the lost.”

But as much as I tried, I couldn’t overcome the uneasy feeling that something was off. Approaching someone who didn’t share my faith as if their eternal life depended on them praying a prayer to ask Jesus into their heart was unsettling. It felt cheap, as if I was commodifying other people’s souls. Our teachers anticipated this and passed on strategies to make it easier. But no matter how many aphorisms I absorbed – “Evangelism is just one hungry beggar telling another hungry beggar where to find bread!” – I couldn’t shake the sense that I wasn’t made for this. After seasons of shame over my inability to “share the gospel,” I reached an impasse with the pressure and decided my gift was “planting the seed” for “others to water” (1 Corinthians 3:6-9).

In the early 2000s, during the “Emerging Church” movement, many of us who had grown up evangelical were given tools to interrogate everything we believed. Some deconstructed our faith, only to build up another belief system that looked, more or less, like the old one. Others looked around at the rubble and simply walked away from the Christian faith altogether.

I rummaged through the debris and rebuilt a faith that retained elements of my previous confession: Christ has died, risen, and will come again. I kept a robust ecclesiology, a conviction that the Spirit is active in the local church. It retained a love for the Bible as inspired by God, yet explored the possibility that my interpretation of it wasn’t. This allowed more freedom to approach scripture with a playful reverence.

I cast aside almost everything else. Yet some pillars of my old faith — including ideas about missions and evangelism — were still lying around, and I didn’t know what to do with them. Something about my emerging faith still believed that Jesus has something to offer everyone, but I was sure it didn’t include fear, shame, or a tightly monitored system of belonging.

Everything, however, came together in 2018 when, while in Estonia, I read the book “Transcending Mission: The Eclipse of a Modern Tradition.” The dense, almost 400-word tome was written by Dr. Mike Stroope, who spent over 20 years as a missionary in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. He is currently a professor at Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, where I got to know him as one of his students.

I can’t do justice to his work in such a limited space, and I will likely be working through its implications for the rest of my life. In short, what he discovered after much prayer, study, and a growing unease with the enterprise of Christian missions, is that missions doesn’t have a problem. Missions is a problem.

He revealed in painstaking detail how the entire concept of missions is a non-biblical invention of modernity. I had been partially aware of this, knowing all the problematic (to say the least) issues around crusades and colonialism. But Stroope helped me see the levels at which we have imposed a non-biblical term onto the entire text of Scripture.

The challenge, then, is figuring out how to dismantle centuries of damage done by this concept hijacking our ancient sacred teachings and using them to build massive institutions and empires, neither of which we seem capable of disentangling ourselves from. A good starting point is embracing two activities that do have solid biblical and theological grounding: Pilgrimage and Witness.

“Pilgrimage activity,” according to Stroope, “is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Hebrew Scriptures recount Abram setting out from his homeland and family to a new land … The Israelites sojourn in the Sinai on their way to the Promised Land, and in their Babylonian Exile, they long for their ancient return to Jerusalem.” (p. 189) The book of Acts recounts pilgrimage. Peter describes early Christians as “aliens and strangers” (1 Pet 1:1).

Stroope writes, “The biblical image of sojourner or pilgrim encouraged early Christians to move beyond the bounds of the familiar and become strangers, to set out for new places to encounter the world.” (p. 190)

Once we realize we are all pilgrims on a journey, the second concept to embrace is witness. The term comes with some baggage for those of us who grew up being taught that “witness” is wrapped up in “mission.” But at its core, Stroope writes, “Witness is not a synonym for persuasion, argument, or coercion.” Instead, it consists of two interdependent acts: beholding and telling.

As participants and witnesses to the story of God in our lives and our world, we cannot help but tell what we have seen and experienced. But witnessing the story of God unfold in our world also compels us to behold God’s loving and liberating activity wherever we find it, even in those places we don’t think to look. These places include music, long walks, literature, and films created by people who don’t hold the same convictions about God as I do – even in a bar on a remote outpost of northern Europe.

Pilgrim Witness

One night, I was sitting at the bar talking to Meriliis, an acquaintance and former bartender, who asked me a question I once dreaded, “Why this place?” I responded with hesitation and led with the words, “I’m ashamed to say,” and then told the story of my early missionary activities in Tartu. I saw a look of confusion in her, one I had seen on others before. She gave voice to it by asking, “Why are you ashamed?”

The question stopped me in my tracks. Not because I didn’t have an answer. I did: I was ashamed for having once reduced Estonians to nothing more than potential converts to my religion. But what struck me was that when I feared being pushed away for this, Meriliis leaned in with grace, trust, and curiosity.

This truth has been in front of me all these years: Estonians, among the least religious people in the world, don’t have a positive view of religious faith and those who practice it. But it is also true that they don’t have a negative view of religious faith and those who practice it. What they have, instead, is the gift that Meriliis extended to me, which is the gift of curiosity.

Spontaneous moments of dance break out at Barlova. Last year, on a majestic May day, a jazz band decided to hold their rehearsal on the outside porch. Sometimes, nights just linger, with words sparsely piercing the silence. I’ve watched playful inside jokes develop and endure. One day, in the bitter cold of winter, death and tragedy hovered over the bar as all the regulars gathered to be near each other. They created a space of care I have only ever seen in sacred places.

In those moments, as in so many before and since at Barlova, I have beheld the work of God shining light into dark places. I have witnessed. Occasionally, my witness has been to share about my faith – without the hope for a spiritual transaction. More often, it has been to behold the work of the Spirit in the lives of my friends, most of whom will likely never share my faith. But what they do share is a light that has shined deep into the darkest places of my life, a light that has bathed me in warmth and joy.

 

 

Sashami is an artist who draws incredible renderings of Tartu. Follow them on IG @sashami_art
Follow Barlova on IG @barlova_baar