Be Not Frogs, but Become "Retoold Lizards"

Quotation from p. 169 in Ministry in the image of God : the trinitarian shape of Christian service / by Seamands, Stephen A., 1949-  

In 1989, at the Lausanne II Congress on World Evangelization in Manila, Lee Yih, a businessman from Hong Kong, contrasted how frogs and lizards acquire food. “The frog just sits and waits and lets the food come to him. As soon as an insect gets close enough, all a frog has to do is stick out its tongue and get it. If a lizard behaved in the same way, it would soon starve. It can’t afford to sit and wait. It has to go out into the world where the food can be found and hunt.” Yih went on to suggest that many full-time Christian workers are like frogs. They go off to Bible school or seminary, get a degree, become a pastor or join a staff at a church, and they expect that somehow the people around them will know that they are in the business of meeting spiritual needs. Soon their froglike habit of waiting for others to come to them becomes deeply ingrained. 

Several years ago, guest lecturer Donna Hailson challenged the students at our seminary not to allow this to happen to them: “We can’t just sit in our cozy little God boxes waiting for the world to beat a path to our doors,” she insisted. “To reach the world, the Church has to break out of walls, go out of doors and lead people to the path—the narrow path that leads to life.” Given the increasingly post-Christian environment of North America, she challenged those whose training and experience have taught them to be ministerial frogs to become “retooled lizards.”