It’s rare that I get a Sunday morning to myself when I’m on mission here in SE Asia. It’s usually a travel day for me, spent mostly on back country roads or traffic jams getting from one hotel to another in the next city.

Good morning Vietnam

But today, I had no travel plans, which meant a rare opportunity to hop in a cab after breakfast to join a local expat church for Sunday worship. I was pretty stoked. It’s such a neat thing to worship with strangers who are brothers and sisters in Christ on the other side of the world—this realization that, no matter where I am in the world, I can connect on a significant level with a fellow Christian, never gets old.

The worship team started up and I was instantly transported back to high school. The song was an oldie, and they played it just like my old youth group praise team did back in the 90s: clunky and spunky.

The gathering was mostly of young-ish students and other ministry-related workers, serving the Lord in varied capacities throughout the city. From what I could gather, the pastor was a missionary here in the city with legitimate pastoral credentials. But his sermon lacked clarity and depth, with hardly a thread of scripture woven into it. I struggled to take notes as he led us from one tangent to the next.

I’m not writing about this just to be critical of the church or experience. What I’ll remember most of this experience—which is why I’m memorializing it here—is how sad I was as I left the church. A church filled with so many workers but without a solid preaching of the gospel. It felt dry and I wonder if I might be right.

I heard a sermon the other day about a church somewhere in some remote village that sits far away from my reality.  The pastor of this tiny village church had six sermons he rotated through every Sunday. There were only six, because that’s all the bible knowledge he had. Can you imagine? Your spiritual leader, with no bible to reference and only six passages of the bible committed to memory from which to rely on.

We Americans are spoiled. It’s something we forget all the time.