MIssional or Missions

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?

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":

·       Self-funded teams like the Moravians did back in the 1700s.

·       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.