For the past generation pioneer thinking about missionary methods has focused in the deepening conviction that the goal of missions everywhere should be the development of mature, responsible, and self-governing local churches. Continuing debate has not questioned this consensus, yet radically different conclusions have emerged therefrom.
Out of respect for the “indigenous” church’s responsibility should the missionary or should he not be insofar as possible a “normal member” of the emergent fellowship? Examination of this question continues in the current issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Seldom does such discussion reveal, however, that this problem is not the deepest nor the most urgent in planning for tomorrow’s witnessing outreach. The same vulnerable definition of “missionary” is presupposed by both sides as they debate the missionary’s relationship to the indigenous church, or even his selection and training. A “missionary” is presumed to be a Christian from North America or Western Europe, someone sent and financially supported by churches in the “homeland” while he is “on the field,” and until he returns “home.”
By-Product Of A Modern Era
This universally accepted definition of the “missionary” has its obvious place in the foreign missionary movement of the last two centuries. But we do not seem to recognize to what extent this great movement, including its concept of missionary “sending,” was the product of an era of Western cultural and political expansion—an age whose passing we may welcome or deplore, but cannot prevent.
We are not discounting nor discrediting the immeasurable achievements of this epochal work of God in the recent past when we ask how the old mission approach is to be carried out in a new day. Nor do we imply any concession to anti-Christian misinterpretation of missionaries’ motives when we recognize the cultural context of their work and the particular congruence of their methods with the political and economic expansion of their nations.
Normal Expansion Of The Church
If we study historical precedents for Christianity’s response to shifting cultural tides and to the closing of many younger nations to professional missionaries, we soon discover that the Church’s growth down through the ages was not usually the result of sending “foreign missionaries” to untouched pagan peoples. Rather, it was the migration of groups of self-supporting Christians to found local self-governing, self-propagating, self-supporting churches that started the evangelization of any given region. Christian migrants went first; ministers and teachers followed. This pattern has been the case in every age of church expansion from apostolic times to the settling of the American frontier.
Even the Apostle Paul was no “missionary” in the modern sense of the term; he received no regular financial support from either Jerusalem or Antioch. When he arrived in a new city, he did not preach to the pagan multitudes; rather, he sought out the synagogue, that is, God-fearing migrants from Palestine who had rooted themselves in every major city of the Roman world. The migration of numbers of God’s people preceded his outreach with the Gospel into new ethnic and cultural groups.
So today, while doors and hearts around the world are closing to religious professionals who maintain their cultural and financial base in North America, what could be more normal than a return to the classic means of church growth? Why cannot we help plan and guide what in other ages issued spontaneously from Christians’ search for greater freedom and opportunity? In architecture, food processing, medicine, education, science, engineering, agriculture—professionals are needed and wanted around the world in every category but “religion”! Let these experts migrate, taking with them their faith and their future. Let them earn their bread by serving the real needs of the people and of the land that will henceforth be their home. Let them go in sufficient numbers to form a sturdy Christian fellowship from the start and to help one another in making the necessary adjustments to a different way of life. Let them be neither so numerous nor so unadventurous, however, that they form a culturally self-sufficient island. From the outset they are to serve and not to rule. For themselves and for their neighbors let them provide schools, hospitals, churches, and preachers only as they themselves can support them. Let them be prepared to surrender their mother tongue, their racial distinctives, their denominational attachments, even their political preferences; “sowing” these precious particularities that they may die as a grain of wheat to bring forth fruit for the household of God in the land of their choice.
“Mission” literally means “sending.” But the Great Commission nowhere talks about sending. Its subject, rather, is going. The Lord expects not just a few specialists, chosen for their deeper spirituality to be sent abroad at others’ expense, but the whole church to go and to make disciples as it goes. Perhaps the worst shortcoming of the modern idea of “missionary” is not its effect on the pagans who hear the preaching or the young churches under foreign guidance, but what it does to the “nonmissionary” in the homeland. Missionaries and preachers would certainly never deny that bearing the Gospel witness is every person’s duty; but the title, the training, the furlough privileges, and the financial situation of the special few deny this implicitly. Only by rediscovering that the entire phrasing of the Great Commission is in the plural, is an imperative to the whole Church, can we sever the fetters of professionalization in missions that has immobilized our evangelistic imagination and commitment. God sends not a heroic minority but the whole Church. Linguistic, pastoral, institutional, or other special assignments do not therefore cease to exist. Rather, their particular place and function must no longer divert or excuse the rest of us from choosing that profession and that homeland in which to exercise our joint missionary responsibility to the world.
