Haggai International founder, Dr. John Edmund Haggai, went to be with the Lord in 2020. As we uphold his legacy, we continue to draw from the wisdom he left behind.

Review the personnel profile of the faculty, staff, and leaders of Haggai International, and you’ll find the majority are non- Western. That was the intention. It’s hard for Westerners to realize that the day of Western dominance is over! I repeat the question everywhere I speak in the West, “Do you have the humility to support what you can no longer dominate?” Tragically, for many years, we in the West have come up with ideas and then simply imposed them upon the peoples of other cultures.

I think of one massive effort to send a large staff to share the Gospel in a country in the Middle East. It was to be preceded by 3,000 letters to the country’s citizens. The government would have intercepted the letters, realizing they all came from the same place. Secondly, the personnel to be deployed did not know Arabic. Thirdly, it violates the Arabic culture for a man to talk to a woman he does not know, and vice versa. As one Middle Eastern-American Christian leader said, “It’s a disaster in the making.” Fortunately, the effort was derailed before great damage occurred.

Commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ and a passion to see the Gospel pervade the non- Christian nations are no substitute for solid knowledge of the situation. Reflect upon Ezekiel’s words, “I sat where they sat.” Jesus approached the Samaritan woman differently than Paul approached the people in Athens. In each case, the objective was the same. The method was different — the difference required by the different cultures.