Most of the conversation around missions concerns going out: boarding planes, crossing oceans, and carrying the gospel into the neediest places on earth. That work matters, and it remains at the center of what we do. Yet there is another movement worth attending to, one that runs in the opposite direction. Sometimes the world comes to us. On a small farm eight miles outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that truth has taken the shape of cows and chickens, sweaty children, halal lunches, and friendships formed across a dozen languages. What began as a way to teach city kids where their food comes from has become a quiet study in what it means to live missionally without leaving home.

The Problem Is Not Belief, but Practice

The pro-life conviction can be stated very simply. It is morally wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being. Therefore abortion is wrong. A great many people will nod along with that syllogism and describe themselves as pro-life. The real challenge has never been acknowledging the reality of abortion; it is learning how to live the conviction out. How does a person demonstrate a commitment to the sanctity of life and the supremacy of the gospel in a broken and fallen world? That question sits beneath everything PassionLife was founded to do, and it presses on every Christian, not only those in vocational ministry.

The default answer, and a worthy one, is to give. People who cannot do the work themselves partner with those who can, and financial support is a genuine expression of conviction. But the answer goes further than the checkbook, and what it requires depends a good deal on where a person lives. Living out this faith in China is not the same as living it out in the United States; the cost can run far higher abroad. Even here, in a strangely self-censoring season when many of us are afraid to say plainly what we think, faithfulness may look like nothing more dramatic than the courage to speak simply and kindly. To sit with a woman in a pregnancy-related crisis and say, let’s talk about that; how can I help you find God’s provision for your life, takes more nerve in our culture than it should. It also takes intentionality.

Holiness in the Ordinary

That intentionality has deep roots in the Christian tradition. Brother Lawrence, the seventeenth-century French monk whose little book The Practice of the Presence of God has shaped so many believers, devoted his life to doing everything, however mundane, to the glory of God. He wrote of picking a straw up off the floor and throwing it away as an act done in God’s presence and for God’s honor. The Apostle Paul puts the same principle plainly in 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” Martin Luther pressed the idea into still humbler territory, writing that even the changing of a diaper, when done in honor of Jesus Christ, is made holy in that moment. The parent feeding children and tending to the daily routine is not somewhere beneath the work of the kingdom; done for God’s glory, that ordinary labor is the work of the kingdom. This conviction, that the common things of life are full of holiness when offered to God, is the soil in which the farm camp grew.

A Farm Camp Becomes a Mission Field

Thirteen years ago, returning to America from more than a decade as church planters in China, our family began farming a small piece of land in North Carolina, raising cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and sheep. Almost as an afterthought, my wife and I started a summer camp with thirty-five children gathered on our front porch. We are now, as the saying goes, holding a tiger by the tail. This summer the camp runs six weeks and will welcome close to a thousand children. It remains a side endeavor and a deliberate ministry, begun as a way of drawing families to the farm and teaching children where their food comes from and what it takes to care for animals.

Counterintuitively, most of those children come not from the surrounding county but from the city. These are parents who want their kids to learn about sustainability, ecology, biology, and a bit of theology too; to get sweaty, to get off the iPad, to do something real for a season. Some of it functions, frankly, as babysitting. But it is at heart an educational farm camp, and it gives us a natural opening to introduce a Christian vision of stewardship: the truth that God has given humanity a mandate to tend and cultivate the earth and make it productive, a vision that quietly answers the fashionable despair which treats human beings as a plague upon the planet.

The farm draws a remarkably broad crowd, because no one in our society is against healthy eating, and no one is against the humane treatment of animals. Homeschool mothers and earthier, belly-button-ring sorts walk hand in hand through the meadows, people who would disagree about nearly everything else, united in their interest in clean food raised well. We do not run the camp as an explicitly Christian program. There are no Bible readings woven into the day. We run it to serve the community, and because we are Christians, we bring our Christian worldview and ethic to it. We pray, and we speak openly of the Creator who made these animals and intended them to be raised according to a natural order rather than crushed into the factory-industrial model. That is, after all, exactly how the Bible itself begins: with creation, before it moves toward redemption. The mistake many of us make is to choose neutral ground as a starting place and then never move past it. The aim here is to begin with what interests people of every culture and creed, and to move them gently toward a Christian worldview, and finally toward the gospel.

That gospel work happens partly one child at a time over the course of a week, but its clearest expression is among the teenage volunteer counselors. My wife visits area high schools as a guest speaker in AP environmental science classes and recruits teenagers to serve a week at camp, where they earn the thirty-five certified service hours many of them need for scholarships. Most of these young people are not believers. Behind the scenes, in orientation and staff meetings, we are explicit about the faith that motivates the whole enterprise, and we anchor the staff with a core of believing students. We also host a Thursday-night Bible study pitched precisely to those for whom church has never appealed; this year we are studying the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus made claims no sane religious leader would dare to make, turning outward religion inside out. By summer’s end roughly sixty teenagers attend, about a third of them unbelievers, many drawn to Christ through the friends they serve alongside. It is no small thing that most people come to faith around the age of seventeen, exactly the age of these counselors.

David’s International Week

Last year something changed. In 2024 we lost our third child, our son David, at twenty-one. David had grown up on the mission field in China, loved international people, traveled widely, and was forever drawn toward international students and toward serving the world’s displaced. In his memory we set aside one week of camp for international students and called it David’s International Week. Partnering with World Relief and other Christian organizations that resettle refugees who have fled terrible circumstances and come to America legally to seek asylum, we brought in children who often live clustered together, speaking Arabic or Amharic among themselves and assimilating only slowly. The week is free to every family. We raise the funds, hire the staff, organize parents to ferry children who have no transportation, and bring in halal catering at roughly a thousand dollars a day. Last year children came from eleven countries: Congo, Libya, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria, Lebanon, El Salvador, and more. Most spoke no English. Within a single group of ten there might be no common language at all, so the week ran on gestures, laughter, and a great deal of joyful goofing off. We welcomed younger siblings and parents we would normally turn away, even the eighteen- and twenty-year-old siblings, and folded them all in.

There is something of Pentecost in it, the Lord gathering people from every nation into one place, except that here the gathering happens in our own backyard. We do not all need to move to Timbuktu. Roughly eighty percent of the international students and refugees who come to this country will stay two to four years and never once be invited into an American home, never share a dinner or a Christmas. To open the door, to let a stranger watch an American family laugh and talk and enjoy life, is a wonderful and wholly achievable form of missions.

Scripture, after all, addresses us as sojourners: “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.” We are all on a journey toward the kingdom of God, aliens even in our own homes. To welcome the sojourner, while remembering that we too are sojourners, is among the truest ways to live for the glory of God. If you live near a university, reach out to an international student. There are countless ways to get involved. Think missionally, and keep challenging one another to take part in the work of the whole world, all the time.

This article is adapted from the episode transcript.