Through Their Eyes: Nate Saint — Use every Available Tool

Nate was a pilot and a mechanic, but he was a missionary too, one in mind and spirit with the missionary families of the jungle.  Some time before he had written of his feeling for the pioneering missionaries he loved to serve:

“Their call of God is to the regions behind the ends of civilization’s roads — where there is no other form of transportation. They have probed the frontiers to the limit of physical capacity and prayed for a means of reaching the regions beyond — a land of witch doctors and evil spirits — a land where the woman has no soul; she’s just a beast of burden — a land where there’s no word for love in their vocabulary — no word to express the love of a father for his son.  In order to reach these people for whom Christ died, pioneer missionaries slug it out on the jungle trails day after day, sometimes for weeks, often in mud up to their knees, while up above them the towering tropical trees push upward in a never-ending struggle for light.” 

“It is our task,” Nate’s record continues, “to lift these missionaries up off those rigorous, life-consuming, and morale-breaking jungle trails — lift them up to where five minutes in a plane equals twenty-four hours on foot. The reason for this is not a matter of bringing comfort to the missionaries. They don’t go to the steaming, tropical jungles looking for comfort in the first place. It’s a matter gaining precious time, of redeeming days and weeks, months and even years that can be spent in giving the Word of Life to primitive people.” [emphasis added]

Jungle Pilot, Chapter 1, pg. 35-36

Pragmatism should never be the driving philosophy of the Gospel ministry.  In all areas of ministry and missions, the goal should always be to be biblical in our methods and faithful in our service.  The results are up to God Who brings the harvest in His time and in His way.  However, there is a big difference between pragmatism and using every available tool at your disposal to reach people with the Gospel.  One is decidedly unbiblical.  The other is being a wise steward of the gifts, abilities, and resources that God has given you.

This is one of the striking perspectives that Nate Saint brought to his approach to missions work in Ecuador.  Although much of his work as a pilot would be viewed as “logistic support” for other missionary families, Nate understood that without that critical support, the other missionaries would not be able to serve in the places that they did.  By providing transportation to and from the remote areas, food and medical supplies, and building materials, he was freeing up the missionary to spend more time learning the language and focusing on evangelistic endeavors.

In the same way, regardless of our location of service, God expects us to be wise stewards of the Gospel. (1 Cor 4:1).  Proper stewardship means wisely using the resources and tools at our disposal to accomplish the task that God has given us to do.  I would even go as far as to say that effective Gospel ministry demands that we use the tools and means required that each ministry and location requires. Two thoughts come to mind, both from experience and observation.

Don’t make life on the mission field unnecessarily difficult — use the tools that are available.

One of the mindsets that I struggled with early on as a young missionary was the idea that we were supposed to struggle and have things extremely difficult simply because that is part of the job description of being a missionary.  This mentality, I believe, arose partly from the accounts of yesteryear and the genuine sacrifices and hardships that missionaries faced as they went into remote, unreached areas.  The nature of the location and the people with whom they lived and ministered often demanded that a missionary live more “primitively” than they would have had they stayed in their home country.  Thus, we (my wife and I) almost had the idea that if it wasn’t difficult, it wasn’t true missions work.

As an example, when we first moved to Siberia, my wife started out trying to bake her own bread because “that’s what missionaries do.”  However, it didn’t take us long to figure out that when we could buy fresh-baked bread for 75 cents a loaf, baking bread at home was an unnecessary waste of time and ingredients.  It was a simple lesson, but one with profound impact for our later ministry. Thankfully, we had wonderful coworkers who helped us work through those many early growing pains as green missionaries.

The truth is that life on a foreign field is filled with many difficulties — some small and some great.  The challenges of learning a new language, life in a new culture, and keeping up with immigration paperwork are daunting in and of themselves, and a missionary who chooses not to avail of certain helpful tools only adds to the already crushing burden he is carrying and exponentially increases the likelihood of burnout and leaving the field.

Several years later when the Lord moved us out of our city of 1.5 million to a remote village of 3000 in the middle of the Siberian taiga, we took these lessons with us.  We knew that life would be a lot more difficult and require a lot more time and effort just to live.  So, if it was an essential item, we bought the best that we could afford to try to not make things unnecessarily difficult.  Things like a good meat grinder, a high-powered satellite dish setup for internet, a rugged 4×4 vehicle that was suited for hauling supplies up and down the winter road, and a proper tiller for gardening were all tools that made living in the village more manageable.  As a result, it helped make ministry easier as well.

Each mission field and location will have its own “tools” that are necessities, not comforts.  Some may be considered luxury items to those back home, but certain mission field often require specialized tools for effective ministry.  Arctic missions may require a snowmobile or AWD vehicle; island missions may require a boat or a jetski; jungle missions may require an airplane and generators; and desert missions may require a rugged 4×4 vehicle like a Toyota Landcruiser.  

My point is this — don’t make life unnecessarily difficult by not using the tools that are necessary in your field of service.  Redeeming the time is still a Scriptural principle (Ephesians 5:16; Colossians 4:5), and the right tools for the job enable us to do just that. 

The second though that is spurred by this perspective is this:

Use the tools to accomplish God’s purposes.  Don’t make them a replacement for the Gospel ministry.

A tool should be an instrument that help accomplish a given task.  When the instrument used becomes more important than the task at hand, it has ceased to be a tool and has become a master.  Anytime there is a master in your life that compete with Christ, it is a recipe for disaster in both personal life and ministry.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Matthew 6:24

This does not just apply to missionaries on the field, but it is applicable to all Christians.  Things like technology, social media, a second job, etc. are all tools that can be valuable in our service to the Lord.  However, the struggle to keep them in their proper place as useful instruments and not usurping masters is an ever-present and real danger. Use the tools that are available, but use them to fulfill God’s purposes.

While there have, no doubt, been missionaries who have taken advantage of God’s people and “gone to the mission field” for personal gain, I believe that most would echo Nate Saint’s sentiment that the tools we use are not for the purpose of comfort, but in order to live and minister effectively to the people to whom God has called us.  What those tools look like will be as varied as the locations in which missionaries serve, and they are often just as important to the ministry as Bibles and discipleship material.  Because without them, the work of the ministry would be severely hindered and the Gospel could not go to the unreached.