Planting Churches in the Most Difficult Places: An interview with Dick Brogden

PneumaReview.com: LIVE|DEAD is an interesting name for a ministry, please explain the meaning of the name.

Dick Brogden: Live Dead was birthed out of a desire to see teams planting churches among every unreached people group (UPG) in East Africa. At the time, my wife and I were leading a multi-cultural church planting team in Northern Sudan and our Area Leader (Greg Beggs) asked that we develop that model so that we could reach all UPGs in East Africa.

As we looked across the area, we realized that the unreached were located in places like Somalia, Djibouti, Northern Sudan, the Comoros Islands, and Eritrea – in other words, places that were difficult to access, difficult to evangelize, and difficult to plant churches. The UPG contexts of East Africa were hostile in climate – both physically and spiritually. We further realized that we needed many missionaries for many peoples.

I happened to be in the United States and was being interviewed by a woman named Charity Reeb, for part of her master’s research. I found out she was gifted in marketing and I shared these twin challenges. How do we mobilize many missionaries to difficult places and peoples? They would be going to places where they would struggle to enter and struggle to stay, and where their disciples would certainly suffer. I asked Charity to help us present this idea for mobilization purposes.

And in the night, the Lord woke Charity up with that expression: Live Dead

To Live Dead is nothing new. Galatians 2:20 talks about being crucified with Christ. This idea is in John 12:24, being the seed that dies to bear much grain. Paul speaks of dying daily. Every Christian everywhere is meant to take up their cross and follow Jesus. If the crucified life is expected of every Christian, then the missionary called to take the gospel to unreached peoples is not exempt. We felt that by challenging God’s people to live dead we could be honest about the challenge and the difficulty of reaching the unreached, while at the same time be unapologetically Biblical.

 

PneumaReview.com: What is the primary mission of Live Dead?

Dick Brogden: We have one single-eyed focus: Planting Churches among Unreached Peoples through Teams. We call these our non negotiable aspects (CP – UPG – Team). They are undergirded by 12 values that we collect in three core values: ABIDE (intimacy with Jesus), APOSTLE (take the Gospel where it has not gone), ABANDON (pay whatever price is necessary).

 

PneumaReview.com: You started in East Africa, where in the world are you operating today?

Dick Brogden: Live Dead has eight areas we are currently active in: Sub-Saharan Africa, The Arab World, Israel and Palestine, Central Eurasia, Russia, Iran, India, and China.

 

PneumaReview.com: Who participates in the ministry of Live Dead?

Dick Brogden: The beauty of Live Dead is that it functions as a partnership. Live Dead started as an initiative within the Assemblies of God (USA) to do pioneer church planting among the unreached. Our first team in Sudan however had no other American AG workers other than ourselves. Our team members were Malawians. Our second team was Africans, Swedes, Finns, and a Scott. We realized early on that the work of church planting among the unreached must be done in partnership with the body of Christ.

So while the AG started Live Dead, and while we continue to steward it, Live Dead has become a movement of many mission agencies and many nationalities. In the Arab World for example, we have 20 CP teams, 20 different sending agencies, and 20 different nationalities. Other Live Dead areas have similar partnership diversity. We have team leaders who are not AG, we have team leader overseers who are not AG. Live Dead is an intentional effort to collaborate with the wider body of Christ to plant churches among the unreached.

Live Dead is not a missions agency. Everyone who joins a Live Dead team must be sent by an evangelical agency or sending church that is focused on planting churches among unreached peoples. We use the Lausanne Covenant as our statement of faith.

 

PneumaReview.com: What have you found to be most effective in bringing people to Christ in unreached people groups?

Dick Brogden: There is no silver bullet. Peoples and contexts vary. What we have found is that three encounters almost always interact in the process of the unreached coming to Christ.

• Love Encounter. This is life on life of the missionary and the lost person. Serving, caring, laughing, crying, speaking, living together in contextual and empowered presence.
• Truth Encounter. This is the intentional bold proclamation of the Gospel and the steady invitation to study the Bible together. Faith still comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
• Power Encounter. This involves miracles, dreams, power encounters, and supernatural acts of God.

The first two, missionaries can actively pursue and even guarantee happen. The third, missionaries pray for and position themselves for God to act, but in the end the Power encounter is an act of God.

Almost invariably, these three aspects (love, truth, and power) interplay when an unreached person, family, or people is reached with the gospel. Other helps have value (media helps us evangelize), but what is required is boots on the ground: missionaries, imbedded in context, fluent in the heart language of the unreached who do life (love, truth, and power) together day in and day out in the elongated discipleship process.

[Editor’s note: Read what missiologist Charles Kraft had to say about this in “Allegiance, Truth and Power: Three crucial dimensions for Christian living.”]  

PneumaReview.com: What are some of the greatest challenges that your ministry faces on the field?

Dick Brogden: The peoples and places of the world that remain unreached do so for a reason – ideological strongholds (Islam in Oman), difficult to access (North Korea), war (Libya), harsh climate (Djibouti or Eastern Chad), remote and lonely (Comoros Islands), hostile (Caucus region of Southern Russia), civil strife (Syria), zenophobic (Iran), or even just overwhelming (2000 UPGs in India).

So one challenge comes from the shallowness of the sending church in America: We don’t want to send our missionaries (children and families, loved ones and friends) into harm’s way.

Ironically, it is noble to die for your country in these very same places, but foolish to die for Jesus. The American church does not seem to have the will to send its best to difficult locations. We are unwilling to see our loved ones suffer and die. We are unwilling to send more missionaries after the first ones we sent suffer or die.

Another challenge is persecution. Persecution does not always strengthen the church, sometimes it stamps it out. Those who follow Jesus are seen as betrayers, threats, dangers, and as evils to be eradicated. Often the first believers are harmed and hounded, and if their theology is not robust, they do not stay or survive. If the partnership response by the missionaries is to remove these first believers from the context of suffering – it is nigh impossible to plant a church when all your members flee or are extracted.

 

PneumaReview.com: In the experiences that your teams have had on the field what gifts of the Holy Spirit have been seen in operation?

Dick Brogden: From the 1 Corinthians 12 list, there are two general arenas where we see the gifts operate: our private team meetings and our public ministry. Gifts such as words of wisdom and knowledge, tongues and interpretation, prophecy tend to operate more in the private team meeting arena. Gifts like faith, miracles, and healing tend to operate more in the public arena when we are interacting with unreached peoples in their homes and communities.

Let us also remember that the greatest gift is Love.

 

PneumaReview.com: Tell us what some of most pressing needs on these mission fields are right now?

There is one pressing need. It’s the same need that Jesus identified and asked us to pray for in Luke 10:2: Pray to the Lord of the Harvest to send forth laborers into the harvest fields, the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.

With over 7000 UPGs in the world (by some counts), and with those UPGs – amounting to 3.15 billion people, or roughly 42% of the world – what we need are more church planters, laborers who work hard in the most difficult places. We need followers of Jesus who work smart, both contextually and biblically, and who work together under the direction of the Holy Spirit and in the unity of the brotherhood of faith.

 

Learn more about the ministry of Live|Dead: LiveDead.org