Missionary Minds is a series of ten questions with missionaries around the world.
Nico Van Zyl, his wife Roxanne and their son Nicolas, are serving as missionaries in Thailand with Timothy Two Project International. They focus their evangelism, church planting, and leadership training among the Thai people.
Pray for the strenuous process of language learning, that they would persevere until they can speak fluently and teach in Thai and find joy in the process. Also pray for their spiritual growth, their Timothy Two projects in Thailand, India, and Myanmar and for their new church plant, Sovereign Grace Fellowship, constituted in August 2025 with ten members.
1. Finish the sentence: Do not become a missionary if…
You think you are going to learn a new language and master it in a year or two. You are in it for the long haul. Think about learning a new language as getting a degree or an advanced degree. If we want to do missions effectively, we need to put in time to learn the heart language of the people. This is by far the most difficult thing to do for me and probably one of the most rewarding, I believe, in the end.
We need to focus on investing time in the local language so we can make the gospel understandable and make sure the locals understand the gospel is not only for Westerners and that they don’t need to learn English to worship God effectively and truly.
That is also why Protestants believed and believe in translating the Bible into local languages. This has escalated since the Reformation and especially since William Carey went to India in 1792.
Here is a common joke I’ve heard outside the US. The speaker of two languages is called bilingual, the speaker of three languages is called trilingual, and the speaker of one language is called an American.