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Gone are the days when missionaries packed up their things, their families and spent a lifetime in another country. Today's missionaries are in constant contact with home, due to technology; they are educated in the spiritual battles in which they may have to engage in other cultures; and most often, they aren't Western. Missions in the 21 century is far different than it was in past centuries. Michael Pocock is co-author of The Changing Face of World Missions and chair and senior professor of world missions and intercultural studies at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Globalization has significantly changed the way people around the world are doing missions. Not only are Christians in the West sending missionaries out, but they're also receiving them from non-Western countries. Missionaries are going from just about every country to every other country.

That is exactly the way things are happening. There are roughly 97,000 Western missionaries and about 101,000 non-Westerners working cross culturally. So the line between Western and non-Western was crossed a few years ago, probably within the last three or four years.

A lot of two thirds world missionaries are simply moving because of economic conditions or other conditions in their country.

Because many majority world churches don't have the resources of Western churches or of some of the churches in more prosperous Asian nations—nations like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, places like that—they have had to think of innovative ways of getting mission work done.

It's not that the churches in these countries are saying, "Okay, how many people have we got that went overseas to get a job someplace? Okay, we'll count them all as missionaries." Because I think that's one of the problems, churches could be imparting a missionary consciousness and a greater preparation in terms of cultural preparedness and the ability to lead people to Christ, conduct small group Bible study, the basic stuff that evangelism and discipleship really implies. Many churches haven't intentionally sent their emigrants forth as missionaries.

As the center of gravity for Christianity moves south, there is an increasing concern with spiritual warfare, which could be a corrective of the Western mindset that doesn't see the spiritual as something to be regularly engaged.

The southern churches are much more ready to, because of their worldview, which Paul Hiebert has written about. You can read about folk religion in his book Understanding Folk Religion. He looks at the world in three tiers and sees God and the transcendent in the top tier. Then the bottom tier is that which is concrete, the created world, and that leaves this big gap in the middle, what he calls the "gap of the excluded middle."

For us, that realm is relatively empty, but for a non-Western person or a majority world person, that middle world is pretty strongly inhabited, and it's impacting the concrete world. It's not that they have a majority world point of view that's not right, and we are right for having a relatively empty middle. The point is that we've neglected the information in the Bible that tells us about that middle part.

If Satan blinds the eyes of those who don't believe so that they won't believe, a majority world person says, "Okay, I wonder how he's doing that? In what sense is Satan doing that?" The Bible says he clearly is doing it. If Satan is like a roaring lion going around seeking whom he may devour, it sounds like he's a lot more proactive than a lot of Western people think he is. The Bible is clearly telling us that he does that. I'd say that the majority world churches are taking the whole Bible—and particularly the supernatural elements of Scriptures—more seriously than we do.

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November (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49