Crisis of Identity for Some Missionary Societies

“Am I a sophisticated agnostic or a devout Christian? Am I a dutiful son, bound to the ways of my ancestors, or a modern who has rejected all authority and does whatever ‘feels good’?” In times of rapid social change, confused persons, trying to adjust to radically new conditions and not sure of their function, may face what is called a crisis of identity.

A few years ago every missionary society knew who it was and what its work was. It was an organization of devout Christians intent on carrying out the Great Commission. It existed to make Christ known in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was not the Church. It was not a denomination. It was an agency of a denomination. It appealed to individual Christians and congregations saying, “If you believe God commands every Christian to proclaim the Gospel to the ends of the earth, then in obedience to God either go as a missionary or help send others.”

But today, many missionary societies are no longer sure who they are or what their task is. Some of their leaders say one thing and some another. Several causes of their confusion are apparent.

First, despite an enormous apparatus and an annual income of hundreds of thousands—in some cases, millions—of dollars, it looks to missionary societies as if foreign missions might come to an end. Missionaries have been thrown out of China, North Korea, and parts of India. Younger churches are irked by missionaries. To be sure, nationals always say, “Send us missionaries of the right sort,” but often they are not happy with missionaries and missionaries are not happy with them. Missionary societies wonder whether they can send missionaries to Asia and Africa and Latin America much longer. “Do we not need another outlet for our resources?” they are asking.

Secondly, the word mission has been redefined. It used to mean “the proclamation of the Good News to the non-Christian world,” but now mission is held to mean any activity of the Church that God desires. Theologians say the mission is God’s, not the Church’s. Hence anything God wants done, anything God is doing, is part of his mission and thus part of the mission of the Church. This is a very wide mandate. The Church-in-mission becomes the Church-in-action. American Christians sending their sons and daughters off to summer camp, winning their neighbors to Christ over a cup of coffee, or conducting a sit-in in favor of school integration are said to be “in mission.”

As soon as this definition is accepted, the foreign missionary society is seen to be engaged in, not foreign missions (which may fold up), but God’s mission everywhere, at home and abroad (which will never fold up). This new identity is pressed upon the missionary societies by some of their leaders.

In the third place, younger churches have helped create the confusion over the function of missionary societies. Some of their leaders have resented being the subjects of mission. It was time, they said, to end mission from the white churches of the West to the brown churches of Afericasia (Africa, Latin America, Asia). Mission must be defined in much broader and truer terms. Mission must be something that Afericasia churches could do in sinful Eurica (Europe, North America) as well as what Eurican churches could do in sinful Afericasia. Mission must be mission in all six continents. Helping older churches as well as helping younger churches is to be considered mission. From this new angle, mission ceases to be gospel proclamation to non-Christians and becomes inter-church aid or good work done anywhere.

A fourth source of confusion is that now the missionary society becomes “the whole church in mission.” In the beginning, the missionary society knew very well that it was not the whole denomination and did not speak for it. It was a special agency. Often the denomination opposed it and accused it of siphoning off resources needed at home.

With the passage of the years, however, missionary societies became more and more powerful. Some became the most powerful organizations of their denominations. Each began to think of itself as the organization that spoke for the denomination in all matters concerning foreign mission.

Finally, the denominational society conducting missions in many lands became “a division of the denomination carrying on world mission.” It now had a secure income often in the millions, a competent staff whose task involved looking at ecclesiastical matters from a global point of view, and a new mandate arising out of the new concept of “the mission of God.” It began asking questions like these: What is the mission of God for our great church? In the largest possible sense, what has God called us to do? What is the plan so comprehensive that it takes into account all activities that God wants done in this rapidly changing world? What should our church be doing in view of the hunger to come? What in view of the illiterate billions? What in view of racial tensions in North America? And revolutions in South America? Parochial North American concerns often outweighed those abroad, and empty bellies seemed more terrible than empty souls.

In short, the denominational missionary society, which in the beginning had thought of itself solely as an agency for the proclamation of the Gospel and the disciplining of the nations, suddenly saw dangling within its reach a new identity: The Church Carrying Out Its Worldwide Mission. Denominational societies have been particularly susceptible to this trend of thinking. They have the men and the resources. They have been getting rid of the connotation “foreign missions.” They have been obtaining their funds not from “missionary” offerings but from that portion of each congregation’s income that is set apart for “outreach,” a secular word covering everything any church might consider the mission of God. The Church Carrying Out Mission—this is the new identity of the missionary society that some leaders are strongly advocating.

The confusion in identities just recounted would have intellectual interest only, had it not meant that the task of proclaiming the Good News and discipling the two billion who have yet to believe has often been pushed to the background. In a few cases it has disappeared from view.

The Church in 1970, like the Church in every age, has many urgent and good things to do. As soon as the foreign missionary society assumes its new identity, it believes that its God-given duty is to do all of these. If William Carey were to stand before some modern denominational missionary societies, pleading for them to send evangelistic missionaries to far-away Bengal, they might well reply, “The mission of God is far wider than the evangelization of those few million Bengalis. Urgent social and humanitarian needs at home and abroad must be met first, and then, if there is anything left, we shall consider your plea.”

Christians who supposed that a missionary society existed to preach the Gospel and bring the nations to faith in Jesus Christ suddenly find that the society has transformed itself into an agency of the Mission of God, and is concerned with many urgent duties. Preaching the Gospel is—to it—only one small part of the whole. In some denominations, if a Christian in some local church gives a hundred dollars to “our world mission,” he can be certain that less than twenty dollars will get out of the United States, and less than two dollars will go into any kind of preaching of the Gospel with intent to persuade men to become disciples of Christ.

As Pierce Beaver has pointed out, missions have become a vast system of inter-church aid—and, he might have added, of general philanthropy. If Christians in the denominations wish to support the task of conversion of the non-Christian world, they have to do one of two things:

1. Give designated gifts through their own church’s mission society, spelling out exactly that they want this five dollars or that thousand to go “over and above the general budget to the work of such and such a national or missionary.” Even after they have used the phrase, donors will do well to make sure that the gift arrives intact. Missionary societies are honest, but mistakes are possible, and the society is under constant pressure to carry on its general work.

2. Give through interdenominational or faith missions dedicated to carrying out the Great Commission. The search for a new identity on the part of the denominational missionary societies has been paralleled by the establishment of numerous interdenominational or faith missionary societies that have addressed themselves strictly to the preaching of the Gospel and the multiplying of churches. These groups have grown amazingly during the past fifty years.

Denominational missionary societies, of course, since they have a hundred-year head start and have large affiliated Afericasian churches, are through them doing a respectable amount of church planting. In fact, they can truly claim to be doing more church planting than the missionary societies specifically dedicated to propagating the Gospel. But the claim must be understood. They may get more church growth, but they are scarcely aiming at it. Indeed, many of their spokesmen, possibly in reaction to denominational striving, go out of their way—as the World Council of Churches Uppsala document on mission clearly shows—to define mission in predominantly non-evangelistic terms.

To some denominational missionary societies, in their new identity as “The Church Carrying Out Its Worldwide Mission,” gospel proclamation and church growth are minor objectives only.

However, the interdenominational and faith missionary societies, while theoretically devoted to carrying out the Great Commission, often in practice have become as institutional and evangelistically ineffective as the denominational agencies. One typical conservative missionary society with a roster of about 150 missionaries engages most of them in orphanage, hospital, school, seminary, and other institutional tasks. The society talks as if its supreme goal were evangelism and church planting, but the total membership of its affiliated congregations overseas is under five thousand. Fewer than a third of its missionaries could be called evangelists in any sense, and fewer than a tenth, church planters. Conservative missionary societies staunchly maintain that they have an overriding interest in evangelism; but they seem quite happy to carry it on in resistant populations and by methods that add few converts. Dr. George Peters has been calling this fact to the attention of the missions world.

These confusions of identity among both old-line and new-line societies are temporary. In the rampaging flood in which we carry on Christian mission, so many changes have happened so fast, and so many adjustments are demanded, that most missionary societies have deviated from their central goal and have been scarcely aware of it. At least this is the way it seems to me in 1970.

It does not seem so to some of my friends. They maintain that the deviations of some denominational boards are permanent and due to theological latitudinarianism. When you cease to hold that the Bible is God’s infallible Word, that belief in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation, that man is an immortal soul, and that “no man comes to the Father but by me,” how, they ask, can you carry on Great Commission mission? You will, naturally, continue philanthropic mission and humane assistance of your fellow men on the physical plane. Even Gentiles do the same. But conversion mission will be forever beyond you.

When I listen to some avant-garde spokesmen of some denominations, the argument of these conservative friends of mine sounds convincing. But when I listen to other spokesmen of those very denominations, I discern rock-ribbed theological conviction. Furthermore, the unhappy fact that the conservative boards so often appear content to “carry on splendid mission work whether the Gospel is, in fact, communicated or not” must be held steadily in view as we decide whether the shift in identity is temporary or permanent.

The next ten years will tell the story. I hope old-line companies will swing back to that which they have done so faithfully for so many years—carry on a vast program of church planting together with a vast program of service. I hope they will begin again to meet men’s need for life-in-Christ as well as men’s need for loaves, fishes, and social reconstruction. I do not imply that these should be assigned equal efforts. The balance between reconciling men to God and feeding them wheat or graduating them from the eighth grade is one that must be determined in each piece of the human mosaic at a particular point of time. The proportion needed in Harlem in 1970 is not that which was needed there in 1870.

We all must hope that interdenominational and faith missions also will resolutely bring their practice into line with their promise. With a theology like theirs, they ought to be greatly used by God to multiply churches.

The decades immediately before us are rich with promise that great populations will turn to Christian faith from materialism, animism, and purely nominal membership in the ethnic religions. Dr. David Barrett’s projection concerning Africa, originally published in the Church Growth Bulletin for May, 1969, and now widely copied in the religious and secular press, affirms that by the year 2000 there will be 357,000,000 Christians in Africa. In Indonesia more than 100,000 Muslims have turned to Christ in the last five years. And with them 300,000 animists. In Taiwan, which had a Christian population of 30,000 in 1946, there are now 750,000 Christians. The Church in Korea more than doubled between 1953 and 1963. In Latin America the enormous increase of evangelical churches shows no sign of leveling off. Great campaigns of evangelism, carried on by workers who are increasingly willing to measure their efforts by the number of responsible Christians added to the Church and still there at the end of the decade, are being seen on every hand. Even the absorption of some churchmen and some missions in the social, physical, and intellectual improvement of mankind helps create a climate in which faith in Christ can multiply.

In these coming decades we shall see (1) whether the denominational societies (so often representing the interests of whole churches) can swing back unashamedly and enthusiastically to proclaiming Christ and multiplying his churches in receptive populations; and (2) whether the interdenominational and faith missions will go through that agonizing transformation of existing patterns of action so desperately needed. Their goal should be to secure a proclamation of the Gospel so biblical and so suited to each separate population that it is believed, men are baptized, and new churches multiply. Denominational societies (in the face of their budget distributions and proclamations made by their most vocal leaders) can no longer assume that “of course we are concerned with church planting.” To be credible, they must demonstrate it. Interdenominational societies (in the face of minuscule growth of so many of their churches abroad and their unwitting drift to institutionalism) can no longer assume that it is sufficient for them to point to their own impeccable statements of theology. They must find ways to evangelize effectively.

In the meantime, the two billion who have yet to believe are living and dying without hearing of Jesus Christ. This cannot be God’s will. He who sent Paul to the Gentiles, Judson to Burma, Patrick to the Irish, Morrison to China, Taylor to the Lisu, and Livingstone to Africa will do two things: raise up new agencies of evangelism that are sure of their identity as missionary societies, and reform old agencies (both conservative and liberal) till they devote an adequate share of their resources to giving starving multitudes a chance to eat the Bread of Life and drink the Water of Life.

Possibly the word missionary will be so effectively captured by the whole-church organizations that it will cease to mean “those dedicated to the evangelization of the unbelieving world.” If so, God’s obedient servants, both old-line and new-line, will create organizations dedicated to the advancement of the Gospel and give these another name. Under some name, the task will go on. Under some aegis, the discipling of the nations and the reconciling of men to God will continue. If the present denominations and interdenominational societies default, God can raise up true and evangelizing agencies and churches from the very stones.

But why talk of default? We all must fervently hope that the old missionary societies—abundantly blessed with resources given by Christians for the evangelization of the world—will make sure that an honest proportion of their income and their missionaries and national colleagues is devoted to conversion evangelism, to a “multiplication of cells of the redeemed” in every tongue and kindred, every tribe and nation. And we must fervently hope that the interdenominational and faith missions, remembering that they are missionary societies, will study their fields to find out where the Spirit of God is turning multitudes responsive; that they will renovate their methods and train their missionaries so effectively that the disease of slow growth that afflicts some of them may be cured; and that they will be the means under God of bringing population after population out of bondage into the promised land.

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