The Question I Asked From A Grab Car

By Theodore X.

Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

I'm terrible. I don't go to church on Sunday mornings. So Sunday mornings, I drive Grab (for those of you outside Asia, it’s a local version of Uber).

That's not a confession — it's context. Because one Sunday morning, I picked up three Filipino ladies very near where I live. They were going somewhere out of town, a long ride, so there was time to talk. And being Filipino, they were obviously Christian or Catholic or something along those lines. So I just threw out a question.

How come you're not in church?

Simple as that.

What happened after a simple question

We began talking. And it came out quickly: they couldn't get to church. Not because they didn't want to — but because they had irregular hours. Sundays, many of them had to work. When the job calls, you go. That's the reality of migrant domestic workers. The church service exists at 10am on Sunday. Their lives don't bend that way.

So I offered, “If you like, my wife and I can come to your place, and we can study the Bible together.”

They said okay.

We started in their home on a Thursday night. First problem: trying to get them to open the Bible on their phones, the English version and the Tagalog version couldn't connect properly. So I went online, copied the Gospel of John in Tagalog, pasted it, and printed out a small booklet. No resources. No training materials. Just the Word, in their language, in their hands.

We began going through the Gospel of John together on Thursday nights, using the Discovery Bible study process.

The Night The Word Did the Correcting

My wife was leading one of the early sessions — I wasn't there that night. They were working through Genesis. Go forth and multiply. One of the men in the group, trying to be funny, said something along the lines of: “How am I going to obey God? I'm going to go and multiply.” In a very unspiritual sense.

You know the type. There's one in every group.

But before my wife could say a word, the others in the group corrected him. They told him plainly: “That's not what God is talking about here. That's not what God is telling you to do.”

We don't have to be the ones to tell them when something is wrong.

As a community, as they explore the Word together, they themselves will know what is right and what is wrong and what should be done. The fear of making a mistake — the fear that if you're not there to manage the discussion, someone will misread something and go sideways — that fear, I realised, is not as necessary as I thought.

They knew. The Word was doing its work.

What the Community Carried

Three people became thirty in about a year.

Not because of anything we did. They were excited. They started calling everyone. Come, we're having Bible study in our home. God is coming to our house — we have no excuse. They ate together, then did the study. They themselves did the publicity. We just turned up.

We had a team praying in the background all the time. That was real and important. But the energy, the inviting, the gathering — that came from them.

One year. About thirty people from that Filipino worker community connected with the Word of God, people who otherwise would not have had any connection at all.

Then circumstances changed — work commitments shifted for many of them — and the group couldn't continue. I let it go. But I'm thankful for that one. Genuinely.

One More Thing

The woman who opened the door for us at the beginning — the one from that original group of three on Sunday morning — she came to a point where the Word confronted her. And it was hard. She couldn't handle what it was asking of her, and she stopped coming.

The person who opens the door is not always the one who goes furthest.

I've seen this more than once.

The person of peace — the one who says yes, come in, meet my friends, let's do this — that person has done something significant. They opened something real. But whether they continue is between them and God. We don't have to make them stay. We're not under pressure to keep the numbers where they were. If it becomes a burden, we let it go. We can let people go.

That freedom — to hold things loosely, to let the door-opener move on without treating it as failure — that's one of the things that makes this kind of work sustainable. And honest.

It started with a question from a car.

It reached thirty people who drank from the Word together and learned how to facilitate a discovery Bible group by doing it.

It came to an end when the season ended.

And that was enough.

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Getting Practical

As you think about God's vision for your city and/or affinity group:

1) A Scripture — Luke 10:5–6

"When you enter a house, first say, 'Peace to this house.' If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you.

"What does this passage tell us about how God uses people of peace to open doors — and about what happens when the door is opened?

2) What is one ordinary moment in your week — a commute, a conversation, a service interaction — where a simple, genuine question might open something you didn't plan for?

3) Think of someone in your world who can't access a church service because of how their life is structured — irregular hours, a language barrier, a different context entirely. What would it look like to bring the Word to them, in their home, in their world?

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Born and bred in Southeast Asia, T. Xavier has thirty years of living as Kingdom worker in Europe and Asia - sometimes ‘full time’, sometimes tentmaking. He is currently serving with an urban Disciple Making Movement Team in his city.

© 2026 Theodore X. All rights reserved.