The first time I tried to visit Pastor Gustavo Banda’s church in Tijuana, my local guide and I got lost driving around and around the steep canyons in pitch darkness. Eventually, already two hours late, we gave up. The second time I tried to visit, Pastor Gustavo sent a text dissuading us: The winter rains have made the roads here too terrible for travel, he said. Best if you don’t risk it. 

New York City’s metropolitan area became the world’s first megacity in the 1930s, when its population passed the 10 million mark. By 2015 New York City had fallen to No. 9 in a rapidly urbanizing world with 30 megacities. By 2018 there were 33 such cities, and forecasters anticipate 15 more megacities by 2035—perhaps six within the next decade. A World Bank report of a decade ago was right to pronounce urban growth “one of the most important challenges of the 21st century.”

Gospel for Asia agreed last week to a $37 million settlement with donors over accusations that the nonprofit mission group mismanaged funds. The agreement brings to a close a three-year legal battle, in which donors said the organization misused funds it promised would go directly to mission work in South Asia.

Last fall, missionary John Miller sat in the back row of an unregistered church in Sichuan province, worshipping as he had every Sunday morning for the past year and a half. Then eight police officers walked in. As the only foreigner in the room, Miller tried to sneak out of the building, but police noticed him and ran down the aisle to stop him. They asked for his passport and took down his information before allowing him to return to worship.

Here’s something I’ve learned as a journalist over the course of my many interactions with missionaries: Don’t entrust your schedule to the hands of missionaries, unless you’re prepared to spend the whole day with them visiting all sorts of people and places.

You see, their ideas of time management and efficiency may differ from yours. For them, spending a three-hour lunch with someone, traveling long distances to visit a family in the middle of nowhere—all those long periods of seemingly doing “nothing” aren’t nothing, but mission work.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution for you: If you don’t already have a missionary for a friend, find one. I have the incredible blessing of being born into a missionary family, but I can never have enough missionary friends who remind me of God’s mission for us on earth: to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ. 

Indian authorities continued over the weekend to search for a way to recover the body of John Allen Chau, an American Christian missionary who was killed a week and a half ago by inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, an isolated island in the Bay of Bengal.