I never thought I could start a sentence...

[from chris]

...with "After sitting down for tea with a drunk witch doctor" but now I can. On one of the villiage trips with eMi team, we visited a non-Christian village to scout out a potential church site. As we were walking around the village a small, noticeably drunk man walked up to one of the eMi members and placed his arm around him like they had known each other for years. We all laughed and didn't think much of it [even after he did this to 3 or 4 other people]. Appearantly he wanted to have us over for tea... we all laughed again and figured that by the time we left he wouldn't remember us. But as we were walking toward our cars the man walked up to us again and asked us to tea.
Luke invited the team of 10 into this man's hut for tea. As it turned out this man was the village's witch doctor and second only to the headman in authority within the village. With the billows of smoke rising and swirling around the ceiling from the freshly restarted fire and the temperature rising from the dozen people gathered in this small witch doctor's house, we sat anxiously waiting for our tea to cool so we could take one sip and try to find somewhere discreet to dump it. But Luke was talking and laughing with our drunk friend in the tribal dialect, Lahu [one of the 7 languages he speaks].
He told me later that this is one of the ways he evangelizes in villages. In this village he had already made friends with the headman [a liter of Coke never hurts when making friends] and now needed to make friends with the witch doctor. He does this so that they don't feel threatened by him or the gospel he brings. If he is friendly with the headman and witch doctor everyone else will respect him; He can then share the gospel throughout the village.
Luke has been working like this in villages for over 25 years. In the past he would walk two or three days to villages, but now he drives his truck nearly every week to a hill tribe village inorder to share the gospel or check on those who have become Christians. When he arrives; he sits; he laughs; he drinks lots of tea; and he shares the life transforming news of Christ in a way that his culture understands.