Last month I was speaking at a missions conference in California, and the pastoral staff were explaining some difficulties they were having within the missions department. Recently, they had become convinced that their overseas church planters (missionaries) needed to be held to some common standards regarding language fluency and better definitions for what qualified as a New Testament church.
Unfortunately, many of their missionaries had been overseas for quite some years and it was turning into a Herculean task to convince them, and some in the church, that while in the short-term these standards would be challenging, in the long-term, for the sake of the church, it would be worth it.
Stories like this are quite common. As a growing number of churches want to know more details about what their missionaries are doing overseas, what methods they are using, and how they measure “success,” the accountability will ratchet up. The pushback to this can be quite strong though.
At Radius, I am reminded on a regular basis that some of the things we openly question, and standards that we will advocate strongly for, put us in a slim minority these days. There is an unquestioned orthodoxy in missions today and woe to the one who steps out and questions it. The stories are too many, the movements are too large, and, dare I say it, the interests are too vested for it to be called into question.
But there still remain hills worth “dying on” in the world of missions. Not because they are my home church in San Diego’s hills or Radius’ hills, but because they are biblical hills. Surely there are principles that we can pull from Scripture, not stories, that are worth mandating for our mission’s department, our missionaries, and ourselves as we seek to see the gospel spread to every people group on earth. Let me propose three.
1. Men do not naturally come to a clear understanding of the gospel.
In Acts 8:30 we read:
So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. (emphasis mine)
No one naturally seeks God, or comes to gospel clarity, without a working of the Holy Spirit through the clear teaching of Scripture. Syncretism (the mixing of the previous belief system with the introduced one) is real and dangerous. The missionary or missions committee who believes that gospel truth will naturally bubble to the surface is not dealing in reality. Truth must be painstakingly taught for it to have a chance to take root. Paul himself asks for prayer from the Colossian church that “I may make the (gospel) message clear” (Col. 4:4). If Paul, with his full fluency in the languages he taught, his worldview knowledge of Greek, Roman and Jewish culture, and his incredible gifting, was concerned that he might not make the gospel clear, how much more should we?
2. Good ecclesiology is critical.
I am constantly mystified how poorly thought-out quips or out-of-context Scripture tend to sneak out when some speak of the church. Examples of this would be “Where two or three are gathered in my name there am I among them” (drawn from Matthew 18:20, a common “proof text” for defining the church by its smallest element). Another is, “God didn’t call us to plant churches but to make disciples,” based on Matthew 28:19 (the implication being that churches will spontaneously come into being if we just make disciples). Or the new one: “The church is too Western.” (This is code for, ‘The church overseas should look nothing like your home church.’)
But upon closer examination, these statements fail the burden of proof. Matthew 18:20 is referring to church discipline, not as a model for church structure. Those who read only Matthew 28:19 and stop there miss how disciples are made, and part of that teaching is how they are to gather as churches. There are objective standards of a strong New Testament church. Those are neither Western, Eastern, nor belonging to any particular culture. The church is the city of the living God, the golden candlestick, the inheritance, the bride of Christ. Let’s know her and speak of her in a way that honors her husband.
3. Discipleship takes time.
If there is one dominant theme to the stories that are so common in missions today, it is speed. The speed at which the gospel is understood, speed in disciples being made and speed in those disciples spreading out to make their own disciples. Can disciples of Jesus Christ be made in quick bursts, or is it inherently a longer-term task? Jesus spent three years with his disciples; Paul also three years with the Ephesian church elders. Then there are Silas and Timothy. I often think of the conversations on ships, walking the trail, in jail, or time watching Paul teach that each of these two men was privileged to see. And remember in all of this Paul did not have to learn Silas and Timothy’s language or the Ephesian language. Jesus had 30 years of growing up in Jewish culture and using the local language before he began his three years of ministry. For the modern-day gospel messengers, those are luxuries they do not have. Speed, if the New Testament serves as our model, is antithetical to discipleship.
I was recently blessed by reading The Life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and hearing some of the withering battles he endured. The culture of his time and ours is captured well in this quote:
Alongside a willingness not to insist on Scripture, there came an excessive fear of being thought negative, controversial and belligerent. Criticism of any kind had become unpopular, and a “loving attitude” which accepted everyone for what they appeared to be was in vogue. If discernment between truth and error and the need to ‘beware of men’ were still counted as Christian virtues, they were now low down the list of priorities. (Iain H. Murray, The Life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, East Peoria, IL: Banner of Truth Trust, 2013, p. 373)
There are hills worth dying on in the world of missions. Those hills though will rarely be discovered if we rely on numbers, stories or experience to guide us. We will only end up with emotions and pragmatism as our guide. We must allow the infallible guide, the Word of truth, to inform our theology—which will inform our missiology, which will inform our methodology.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the Radius Report.
