This post is from my friend, Frank Daugherity. I liked it so much I posted it here. It is serious ( you know me, Mr. Happy Go Lucky! ) and important. I hope it speaks to you. If you want to explore this further, see more of Franks writing about mission and missions at http://daugherity.com/frankly.
Has it come to a contest between "missions" and “missionality” in our churches today?
Has it come to a contest between "missions" and “missionality” in our churches today?
What has happened to "missions"
(traditional cross-cultural evangelistic and church-planting ministry) since
the "missional" emphasis has really began to gain traction? Is it
dying out?
I was a cross-cultural missionary for 21
years (8 in Japan, 13 in greater NYC among Japanese expats), and
contemporaneously a missions pastor in a large church in northern NJ for 8
years, so I know the older traditional picture pretty well. My oversight
responsibilities included liaison with 66 missionary families.
When I was asked to give my perspective on
what's going on now, I realized that I needed to update my understanding with a
look at the available statistical picture. It "feels" like things are
worse than they may be. According to what I can find out, the number of
cross-cultural missionaries has not appreciably dropped in the past decade.
However, many of them are in support roles rather than as front-line
evangelists and church-planters.
From anecdotal evidence though, it feels like
traditional missions has lost its place in evangelicalism, that traditional
missionaries are being abandoned, that many of the new crew of missional
churches just don't seem to care about the global picture… How will the
unevangelized hear the gospel when the vast majority of those who have not
heard the gospel live in cultures where there still is no effective local
witness? (This is upwards of 3 billion people).
How indeed will the Great Commission be
completed? This is a major worry to those of us who have dedicated our lives to
this cause, believing it to be central to God's purposes for all believers
everywhere.
For both traditional churches and missional
churches, two factors seem to be keeping us from really fulfilling the Great
Commission: our church people are ignorant
of what has been happening worldwide, and to put it bluntly, many just don't care. This includes many
pastors who are consumed with keeping the local body alive and have no time or
interest for "missions." For missional churches, the concern for the
lost seems to stop at the local or regional area, and doesn't extend to a global
vision anymore.
Great strides have been made since the
mid-seventies, when a large number of traditional missionaries were needed to
begin to supplement and replace the missions force which had swelled post-WWII.
This was the true heyday of traditional missions, even more than the fifties,
because two things began to make themselves evident: Christianity became a
global movement, and the center of the demographic expansion began its shift
away from Europe and North America to Africa, Latin America and Asia. Think of
the vast numbers added to the Kingdom over that past 40 years in S. Korea,
China, sub-Sahara Africa, Brazil, Singapore, and most strikingly in
Muslim-majority countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait.
What? You didn't know about this global
picture? A lot of dedicated Christians don't… We evangelicals are, by and
large, ever more myopic and are not presented with the global picture. The
global lost take the back seat to our local and individual concerns. How many
sermons have you heard over the past year that touched on this issue? How much
of your church's giving (or your personal giving) goes to support those who are
working cross-culturally to bring the gospel to those who have not heard? Does
this question sound really out-of-date to you?
What is contributing to this loss of global
Christian perspective?
First, traditional missions has become
(paradoxically) more effective, more commercialized, more specialized and more
popularized than at any time in the past 100 years. It has for many people
become a business, a professionalized commodity to be promoted and marketed, in
much the same way that Christian books and music have become commoditized. In
the long run, this may be a terrible detriment to long-term commitment.
Secondly, traditional missions is expensive
and requires a long, sustained commitment on the part of both "goers"
(missionaries) and senders. Two decades is the minimum to reach real
effectiveness in most cases. Which of our bodies of believers is stable enough
to sustain a 20- or 30-year commitment to a people group and to those who are
sent?
The average cost to support a missionary
family from North America is $10,338 per month (low of $4,000 a month up to
$16,000), according to the EFCA. This is an average for North American
missionaries. Globally, there are 417,000 people involved in evangelical "missions,"
with 285,250 of them being full-time career missionaries. North American
missionaries are more expensive than others across the globe.
Globally, $32 billion dollars is given to
support "missions," truly a staggering figure… However, it is
actually much less than what is raised and spent locally on a whole host of
other priorities. It is estimated that something over 100,000 more traditional
missionaries are needed to complete the task of evangelization across the
world, at a cost of something like $640 billion over the next twenty years
(figuring in the cost of replacements to those who will retire). Truly
staggering numbers… but the annual income of evangelical believers is at least
$6 trillion.
So we could actually do this, if we change
our priorities. But I believe that is unlikely. I pessimistically believe that
most evangelicals are too focused on themselves and local or regional concerns,
and will not make the sacrifices or serious, long-term commitment to reach the
global unreached.
However, God can move, and is indeed moving
continually in ways that do not fit our Western traditional missionary
patterns. That's another story, and a wonderful one…
In the meantime, there are things we can do
in increasing our effectiveness. We need to explore, update and further develop
other models for "mission work":
· Expand on "tent-making" and Kingdom Business models - seriously
developing Bible college and seminary-level partnerships in making Business As
Mission a sophisticated powerhouse (it's headed that way now).
· 'Bloom in Place' models where missionary candidates take a
full decade of learning the language and culture of their target group while
still living and working in their native country, before they relocate overseas
for another decade or two of mature ministry.
· 'Shadow Supporters’ - dedicated teams of "lay
people" who are unpaid (and paying) partners - knowledgeable, trained
supporters of individual missionary families and teamed-up singles living in
another culture.
· Ever-more-effective support of local leaders, in
partnership with local churches, in ways that avoid manipulation and dependency
- this is tricky but essential for global faith.
There is so much we can do. Will we?
We
need a renewed commitment, and a fresh perspective on what can be done.
Comments
Post a Comment