Getting More Hooks in the Water Is Not Enough

World Evangelization Requires the Right Tackle

Resources, personnel, and money are the problems that must be faced today by Christians who are concerned about getting on with the task of evangelism.

These key areas need to be evaluated by something greater than quantity and quality, however. Two words that have become important are “more” and “better.” The implication is that the world can be evangelized if we can just do more of what we are now doing, if we have better coordination—more tools, better methods, more money, more people, better people, better techniques, more technology, more resources.

I disagree.

It is not bad to have more things and better things, but it is fatal if we Christians think these hold the key to the success of our mission. World evangelization will remain little more than a pious slogan if we pursue a business-as-usual approach, even if it is more business and better business.

Let’s be honest. Most of what we have been doing to reach the unreached is not working well enough. If it were, the size of the task would be diminishing, not increasing. Just “more” and “better” will not reach the three billion unreached. “Different” might. At least, it is worth a try.

Professionals Versus Nonprofessionals

Let’s look at some of the church’s status-quo thinking. For example, what about the widely held notion that evangelism, particularly across cultures, must be done by professionals with special training? I thank God for all who are specially trained in theology, pastoral skills, and cross-cultural communication. But world evangelization is too big a task to be left to an elite corps, even if we had more of them and even if they were better trained.

The clear biblical responsibility for evangelism lies not with a professional class, but with the entire church and with every believer. Witness is not the privilege of a few: it is the obligation of all.

When mission leaders complain about the shortage of personnel, they are subtly communicating to the average Christian that he or she lacks the necessary qualifications to share Christ. This diminishes the mandate of the Great Commission, which makes every believer an evangelizer. It was nonprofessionals who carried the burden for evangelism in the early church. While the apostles kept the spiritual fires burning in Jerusalem, persecution scattered the rest of the believers like glowing embers, and each one started a fire wherever he or she landed.

The Holy Spirit, who is the Great Evangelizer, can take stumbling, weak men and women and turn them into powerful witnesses. In 1973, a Cambodian schoolteacher and his wife came to know Christ in an evangelistic campaign. God called Sin Soum and his wife to move into a large refugee settlement outside Phnom Penh where there was not one Christian. It was a hard decision, for it meant personal hardships. Shopping meant a half-day’s journey, and the nearest water was a 15-minute walk. Their first shelter was a tiny thatch hut they built themselves.

In a short while that little hut was overflowing with people coming to study the Bible. In six months, 30 people had believed. In two years, this couple—untrained in evangelistic techniques—was shepherding a congregation of over 1,000 people, almost all of whom were their spiritual children or grandchildren. Such is the power of the Holy Spirit working through the nonprofessional.

External Support

What about the cherished concept that poorer churches must wait for richer churches to provide funds before they can engage in cross-cultural mission? While cooperation and partnership has a rightful place, some churches fail in outreach because the founding mission convinced the congregation—or they convinced themselves—that they are too poor to respond to the Great Commission and to sustain their local structure at the same time. But the early churches of Asia Minor did not depend upon the Jerusalem congregation to sponsor their evangelists.

Not long ago I talked with a graduate of a Bible school in a non-Western nation and asked about his plans. He said, “I don’t have any yet. I’m waiting for a mission to sponsor me.” His answer is understandable. He was the victim of a dependency mentality that others created in him.

A study now under way of non-Western missions suggests there are more missionaries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America than anyone had previously thought—perhaps as many as 15,000 in over 400 societies. Most of them are functioning very well without money or support from the West.

Consider the Friends Missionary Prayer Band in India. This movement of 20,000 lay people grew out of deep poverty. Although these Christians have few worldly resources, they are rich in the things of God. They emphasize prayer, godly living, love, the Bible, generous giving. They have developed a strategy to place over 400 of their members in unevangelized villages by 1985. They are doing it with rupees, not dollars, Deutsche marks, or francs. They have learned that even when outside money is available, it is sometimes best not to take it.

The Lure Of Technology

For mission agencies looking for an easy way to reach the unreached—a way not marked with blood, sweat, and tears—the allure of evangelism by mechanical device is almost irresistible. It is here that the “more and better” syndrome reaches its peak. The church is presented with a sparkling array of technological gadgets that are supposed to make the fulfillment of our mission easier, faster, and more efficient.

Technology must be appropriately evaluated and used. At World Vision we use every enhancing tool that God has made available through science. But we try not to forget that gadgets are always second-rate evangelists. No scientific breakthrough will ever replace Spirit-filled men and women whose hearts are so aflame with Jesus and so burdened for hell-bound souls that they will agonize with God as did John Knox, who cried, “Give me Scotland, or I die!”

The whir of a computer cannot replace the agonized cries of an evangelist who carries on his heart the burden of a lost world. It is time to recover and restore the human dimension in evangelization.

Emulating Western Models

It is appalling the way Western programs and structures are exported, as if their blueprints were given in the Old Testament along with those of the tabernacle. An Asian pointedly asked, “Does everything God sends the church in Asia have to come through New York?” (He might as well have said Los Angeles or Wheaton.)

Some Western models are good; some bad. Some work; some don’t Some may be adapted with profit; others may not. Churches on the receiving end must be discerning and discriminating. If Western missions send something that doesn’t work or isn’t needed, overseas Christians should send it back freight collect. We have acted as if program methodology, ecclesiastical structure, and even terminology can be franchised worldwide like hamburgers and fried chicken.

This is not a new problem. But we learn so slowly. Almost 100 years ago, Alexander Mackay, a pioneer Scottish missionary to Uganda, wrote: “There is much in our ways and methods that strengthens the idea of foreign rule—Englishmen, English church, English formula, English bishops. When will they learn that Christianity is cosmopolitan and not Anglican?”

The words might well have been written today and he might well have said Americans and Methodist, Baptist, or parachurch. Most often we still seem to believe that “our way” is the only way—or, at least, the best way.

Western models should be rejected outright if they truncate the gospel and divide the needs of human beings into “social” and “spiritual.” When we stop treating people as if they were souls without bodies, and when we start treating the gospel as the instrument for holistic redemption and change, our message will gain a new, powerful credibility.

Misplaced Priorities

Perhaps the most deeply entrenched and deadly missions practice is that of concentrating most of our personnel and resources on already-reached areas of the world. The emphasis of mission has shifted over the past century, with disastrous consequences: from planting and cultivating to storing and conserving. Most missionary energies and resources go toward places where the seed of the gospel has already been sown and taken root. Some 91 percent of the Western missionary force are estimated to be assigned to maintain and strengthen established churches. Only 9 percent are sent to do the tough pioneering work of cross-cultural evangelism.

The goal, we must never forget, is not just to send missionaries. The goal is to reach people. Every church, society, and agency should evaluate every program and activity to see if its priorities have changed from reaching people to sending missionaries.

So we must ask the question: What will work to reach the three billion unreached?

First, the world will be evangelized when Christians act on the belief that the Holy Spirit indwells each believer and empowers him or her to carry on the work of God. The Holy Spirit is our chief resource.

Second, the world will be evangelized when Christians implement God’s mission strategy. The first part of that strategy is for those who have been evangelized to send cross-cultural missionaries to plant churches among the thousands of unreached people groups. The second part is for the planted church then to accept its responsibility to evangelize its own people. These are the evangelists upon whom Christ is depending. They are his body in diaspora, scattered through every society and vocation, speaking every language, having a face of every color.

Third, the world will be evangelized when local churches apply new criteria for measuring ministry. The strength of a church is not revealed by how many people it seats, but by how many it sends. When you say your church seats 500, you really say nothing significant. Tell me whether it sends 100, or 50, or 10, and you immediately communicate something about its value system.

Fourth, the world will be evangelized when every congregation sees that it has a responsibility to reach someone who is unreached. It may be a town, a square city block, a province or a tribe, but each congregation should be able to say, “Here is where God wants us to work in outreach.”

One example is the recent Korea/Indonesia church-planting project. Working in a three-way partnership with a committee of Indonesian church leaders and World Vision, over 20 Korean churches with a passion for planting more churches initiated an innovative ministry that has resulted in 20 new churches being started in one year. The Korean group is now meeting with Thai and Filipino leaders to bring about more partnerships.

Fifth, the world will be evangelized when money and personnel are seen as having an international character instead of a national identity. Why cannot Western funds be used to help support non-Western personnel? Multinational teams will break down suspicion that the gospel is Western. When staff and support come from many nations, fewer doors will be closed. The Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship has members from nine nations. Overseas Missonary Fellowship draws people from 22 countries. Wycliffe Bible Translators reports 30 nations represented among its missionary force. The Asia Evangelistic Fellowship has staff from nine countries.

Sixth, the world will be evangelized when churches are truly free to adopt or develop flexible methods of evangelism that are suited to the cultures in which they work.

Here, too, examples abound. Tentmaking ministries are becoming respectable again after nearly 2,000 years. A young Indonesian Bible school graduate and his wife were sent by a mission agency to a remote area where he was able to get land to farm and his wife could work as a midwife. They are a cell nucleus to bring Christian families together to witness to others. In another Asian nation, Christians with professional skills as teachers and nurses deliberately accept government assignments to villages as an opportunity to evangelize. As a result, the gospel has reached areas that had no prior Christian witness.

A group in Nigeria has sent over 200 missionaries, most of them trained in agriculture. These missionaries support themselves in part by working at farming and improving agriculture while doing evangelism. They describe their ministry as “saving souls and saving crops.”

Let us stop complaining that we don’t have enough people, enough money, enough tools. That simply is not true. There is no shortage of anything we need—except vision and prayer and will.

Prayer is the one resource immediately available to us all. If more Christians were on their knees praying, more Christians would be on their feet evangelizing. Robert Speer, a great Presbyterian missions pioneer and leader, wrote: “The evangelization of the world … depends first of all upon a revival of prayer. Deeper than the need for men; deeper, far, than the need for money; deep down at the bottom of our spiritless lives, is the need for the forgotten secret of prevailing, worldwide prayer. Missions have progressed slowly abroad because piety and prayer have been shallow at home.”

The liberating Spirit of God can free us from the paralyzing guilt of our past mistakes. He can free us from slavish attachment to ineffective traditional methods. He can free us from schism and division that dishonor his name and cause men to reject his salvation. He can free us from a gloomy, defeatist attitude about the future. He can liberate Christians to go gladly, love limitlessly, serve sacrificially, witness powerfully, suffer joyfully, and if need be, die triumphantly.

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