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Mission to Where?

The Great Commission as Christ Intended

by Thommo

This book is dedicated to my wife who challenged me get serious about Gods mission my daughter who gave this book its title and my son who never stops praying for the unreached in Pakistan

Contents
Introduction 1. Gods Redemptive History through the Bible 2. Theological Basis and Definition of Mission 3. New Testament Model of Mission 4. History of Mission 5. The Status of Missions Today 6. Cross-cultural Considerations 7. Planting the Church in New Areas 8. Challenges for Mission Today 9. How Australian Churches Can Engage in Gods Mission 10. How to Become a Missionary Conclusion: Where to From Here? Bibliography 4 5 17 31 42 45 67 87 91 96 107 127 131

Thommo, 2013 Email: mtw@swissmail.org Cover picture by my daughter Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Most books about missions are written by missiologists.1 I am not a missiologist. I am a student of the Bible, a New Testament lecturer and a pastor, and I have been a missionary. What does that mean? It means that my approach to missions is a bit different from what you might expect in a book such as this. As a student of the Bible, my fundamental starting point is the Scriptures. As a pastor and missionary, I then want to look at how effective the contemporary church is at fulfilling its biblical mandate. So this book is a study of where the biblical theology of mission meets with what is actually happening on the ground. It then attempts to address the shortcomings in the modern missions movement. For that reason, this book challenges many of the practices that are common in modern evangelical Christian mission, and because of that, for many people, it may seem to be quite critical. While many of the ideas in this book may be new to you, I dont think any of the ideas are new in themselves. Each idea has a good amount of research behind it to back up my argument. However, as far as I know, what is new is that all of these ideas have been put together in one book. Because this book challenges so many assumptions, you are likely to find that you will disagree, sometimes strongly, with at least a few of my ideas. Some of them may even upset you! If that is you, I ask that when you are challenged, to please put aside your previous assumptions and search the Scriptures to see if what I am saying is true or not. If, after you have done that, you still disagree, thats fine, but please dont disagree without at least first checking out what I have to say with the Scriptures. And of course, even if you dont agree with everything I have written, I am sure you can still learn from this book. My prayer is that God would use this book to challenge us to do a better job, and more importantly, a more biblical job, of completing this most important mission He has given us proclaiming Christs name to all people. Because I am a Bible scholar, there is a lot of research that undergirds each of the ideas presented in this book. However, because I am also a pastor, I wanted this book to be accessible to all Christians. For this reason, it is not loaded with footnotes and references to the academic literature. Interaction with the original languages is limited to that which is essential for explaining my arguments. If you are interested in the academic side of things and would like to know more of the scholarly support for my arguments, please contact me directly at mtw@swissmail.org.

A missiologist is someone who specialises in the study of Christian missions.

Chapter 1 Gods Redemptive History through the Bible


Missions is not new. As you read this book, you will see that missions has been going on for many years. In fact, it has being going on since the Fall. But before we study mission in any depth, we have to define it. We have to ask and then answer the question, What is mission? We will do this in detail in chapter 2. In this chapter, we will look at the biblical history of Gods dealings with people that is, how God does mission. Looking at how God does mission will help us to define what mission is. Lets start at the beginning: Genesis chapter 1. In the beginning, God created the world and He created humanity (Genesis 1:26-27). We can ask many questions about this time when God created humanity, and get answers from the first two chapters of Genesis. Questions such as, In whose image was humanity made? What task did God entrust humanity with? What was life like? What was humanitys relationship with God like? Was God being glorified? And, What was humanitys purpose at that point in time? Genesis 1:26 tells us that our purpose was dominion over the earth. Genesis 1:28 tells us that our purpose was to multiply. There was no need to evangelise. Why? Because all humanity at that time was already glorifying God. Were there any limitations on humankinds dominion? Yes, there was one. Genesis 2:17 tells us that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was off-limits. And so we then read of the fall of humanity in chapter 3. In Genesis 3:1 we read of the temptation. In Genesis 3:4-5 we read about satans lie. Eve had two choices: believe God or believe satan. Which one did she and Adam choose? Genesis 3:6 tells us that they chose satan over God. The result of this choice was that God asked, Where are you? (Genesis 3:9) and its been like that ever since. Since then, God has been asking all people, Where are you? Of course, God knew where Adam and Eve were. But God had been insulted, which is the opposite of being glorified. He had been insulted by humankinds rebellion, disobedience, and believing the lies of satan over the truth of God. And so the relationship between God and people was sundered. But even back then, there was a glimmer of hope.

As a result of our forebears rebellion, God issued three curses: one to satan (Genesis 3:14-15), one to Eve (Genesis 3:16) and one to Adam (Genesis 3:17-19). Genesis 3:19 tells us that the end result of their disobedience was death. What does death mean? It means the termination of life as we know it, eternal punishment and eternal separation from God. But there is also a promise of hope and it is found in the curse given to satan. Genesis 3:15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. This offspring speaks of Christ. So the problem is that now there is a sundered relationship between God and people. People do not glorify God. What will be done about this? In the early chapters of Genesis, we read about God reaching out to restore humankind. First there was the flood. In Genesis 6:5-8, we read that God decided to destroy humankind because of their evil, which grieved God. But there was a remnant Noah and his family. Noah and his family were saved through the flood. But sin was not destroyed. Immediately after the flood was over, we read in Genesis 9:20-28 of Noahs drunkenness and of Hams sin when he exposed his father Noahs nakedness. Again, the human race is in an out-of-control spiral dive into sin. This culminates in Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel. In Genesis 11:4 we read that the people were full of pride and that they were ignoring God. Again, God was not being glorified. As a result, God confused their language and dispersed them throughout the earth and thus we see the birth of multiple languages and cultures (Genesis 11:7-9). Things were pretty bad.

The call of Abraham and Israel and their mission


Abraham was very important. From Abraham we see the inauguration of Gods plan of redemption for humanity. Genesis 11:26 tells us of the birth of Abraham. Abraham was born in a city called Ur, which is on the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq. Abrahams father took him and his family to a place called Haran, which is near the modern city of anlurfa in Turkey. Abraham is in Haran as Genesis 12 begins. God speaks to him and gives him a command. . Genesis 12:1-3 Now the LORD said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your fathers house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Abraham obeyed and went. He arrived in the land God told him to go to, which was called Canaan at that time and would later become Israel. God said something else to Abraham in verse 7:

Genesis 12:7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, To your offspring I will give this land. On the face of it, this just looks like God is telling Abraham to get up and move. However, these few verses are about so much more than just moving house. These few verses are quoted and referred to in later parts of the Bible. In these verses we see Gods redemptive plan. God tells Abraham that he will give this land to his offspring, and that his offspring will be a great nation. But Abraham and his wife Sarah didnt have any children at this point in time. How could his descendants become a great nation and inherit the land if Abraham and Sarah didnt have any children? He and his wife Sarah kept trying to have children, but to no avail. The promise is repeated in Genesis 13:14-15. God tells Abraham that He will give to his offspring all the land he can see. But, still no children. Then in chapter 15 God makes a covenant with Abraham. In verse 1, God tells him that his reward will be very great, and Abraham finally says something to God which seems to be quite obvious by now. In verse 2 we read: Genesis 15:2-3 But Abram said, O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus? 3 And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir. And God replies in verse 4: Genesis 15:4 And behold, the word of the LORD came to him: This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir. Then God takes Abraham outside and shows him the night sky with all its stars and tells him to count them, and tells him that his offspring will be like that. And then in verse 6 we read: Genesis 15:6 And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness. Thats just a few words, but do you get the full impact of that? What had mankinds problem been since Eden? Sin! The flood. The people of Babel. Sin. All were sinners - even Abraham was a sinner. What is the opposite of sin? Righteousness. Righteousness was something no person since Adam had had, including Abraham. But Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. That is, that faith in God can be counted as righteousness. The New Testament talks about that too, as we shall soon see. Then in verse 18 God says yet again that He gives the land to Abrahams offspring. In Genesis 17 God makes another covenant with Abraham and changes his name from Abram to Abraham, which means, father of a multitude.

Genesis 17:7 And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. In Genesis 21, Sarah finally has a son, Isaac, the son of promise. So what do we learn from the life of Abraham? Well, we learn a lot about redemptive history, that is, our salvation. We learn not just about our salvation, but also about the salvation of others, which is what mission is about. We see in Abraham the beginnings of the Jewish nation. We learn as we read through the Old Testament that through his son Isaac, Abraham does indeed become the father of a great nation Israel. While Abraham was just a wanderer, a nomad in the land of Canaan, we learn later in the Old Testament that his descendants, the Israelites, actually came to own the land called Israel. But what is even more significant for us as Christians is that Abraham was not just the father of the Jewish nation but he is also the father of all those who are in Jesus Christ. Two thousand years after Abraham lived, Jesus Christ was born a Jew a son, or descendant, of Abraham. It was through Jesus, a descendant of Abraham, that redemption was achieved for humankind. The curse of sin was broken and death was defeated. You see, Abrahams calling in chapter 12 when God told him to leave Haran, that He would bless him, and all the nations would be blessed through him, was not just about the physical nation of Israel, but about something much bigger and much grander than that, grand as that was. When in Genesis 12:7, and in a number of other passages in Genesis, God promised to give Abrahams offspring the land, he wasnt talking just of Israel, or even primarily of Israel, but of Christ! How do we know this? We know this because of the New Testament. Abraham and the promises God made to him are a major theme in the New Testament and especially in the book of Galatians. Galatians 3 is in many ways an exposition of the life of Abraham and of the chapters of Genesis that we have been looking at. In Galatians, Paul explains that the promises given to Abraham find their fulfilment in Christ, and in us Christians the ones who believe in Christ. Firstly, Paul uses Abraham to show that we are saved by faith, not by works. Remember we looked at: Genesis 15:6 And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness. Paul then says in Galatians: Galatians 3:5-6 Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith 6 just as Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness? Paul is saying that being counted righteous by faith is not something new. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.

The next thing Paul needed to address was the Jewish attitude at that time. You see, the Jews thought they were Gods people, just by virtue of being physically descended from Abraham. They thought they were acceptable to God because of their physical descent from Abraham. Conversely, they reckoned that the Gentiles were outside of Gods plan because they were not Israelites, and therefore were not eligible to be part of Gods people. But Galatians 3:7-9 reads: Galatians 3:7-9 Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. 8 And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, In you shall all the nations be blessed. 9 So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. In these three verses Paul teaches us a lot from the life of Abraham. Firstly, that the true sons of Abraham are those who are sons by faith. That is, a Jew who doesnt believe in Christ is not a true son of Abraham, whereas a Gentile who does believe is a true son of Abraham. Many of the Jews of Pauls time questioned whether Gentiles could be Gods people, but Paul says it was always Gods plan to justify the Gentiles. He says that the Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and he quoted Genesis 12:3, In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. The justification of Gentiles was not an afterthought, but was part of Gods plan right from the beginning! The purpose of calling Abraham and starting the Jewish nation was for the justifying not just of Jewish people who believed, but of people from any nation who believed who had faith. Secondly, this passage in Galatians tells us that the Gospel was even preached beforehand to Abraham in that statement, In you shall all the nations be blessed (Galatians 3:8). How was the Gospel preached beforehand? We know the Gospel is centred around Jesus Christ, and what He did for us on the cross. It was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, dying for our sins and taking our punishment on Himself, that dealt with our sin and death problem. This means that those who through faith believe in Him can have their sins forgiven and conquer death and receive immortality. They will live forever! How did Abraham have the Gospel preached to Him before Jesus was born? It was through the promises given to Abraham, that all the families of earth all the nations would be blessed through him. That blessing of salvation would come through Abrahams descendant Jesus Christ. Thirdly, Paul now gets even more specific. As we have seen a number of times in Genesis, God promises an inheritance of land to Abrahams offspring. The first time is in Genesis 12:7: Genesis 12:7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, To your offspring I will give this land.

God gives a promise to Abrahams offspring five more times in Genesis! example: Genesis 17:7 And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

For

Now its interesting to note that the word offspring in the Hebrew is singular. Some Bible translations have descendants with an s on the end, but in the Hebrew, the word is singular: offspring or seed, not offsprings or seeds. Paul picks this up in Galatians: Galatians 3:16 Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, And to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, And to your offspring, who is Christ. That one offspring is Christ. Yes it is true that the Jewish nation were Abrahams descendants, that they did inherit the land and that they did become Gods covenant people. However, they were only the forerunner of something far greater. The fulfilment of the promise, as Paul says, noting the singular use of offspring, is in just one descendant, that being Christ. Then towards the end of Galatians 3, Paul says, Galatians 3:26-29 For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptised into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christs, then you are Abrahams offspring, heirs according to promise. These are wonderful verses! They tell us that anyone - Jew or Gentile (from any ethnic group), slave or free (from any socio-economic group), male or female any of these can be in Christ and be part of Gods people! These people are one in Jesus Christ. And they are Abrahams offspring through Christ and heirs of the promise that God gave to Abraham. So thats Galatians 3 and Abraham. Other parts of the New Testament also talk about Abraham in a similar way. So what have we learnt from Abraham? The promise of salvation is through a descendant of Abraham. That this salvation was for the descendants of Israel, but not only for them. That through Abraham all the families and nations of the earth would be blessed.

So we can see Gods salvation is for all people, not just for Jews, and that this was not an afterthought. This was not just a New Testament idea or Pauls idea. This was Gods plan from the beginning. Although God called the Israelites to be His special people, the intention was that they would be a light to the Gentiles.

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So, who are Gentiles? They are not Jews. In Hebrew the word is goyim, which can be translated as nations or gentiles. The meaning of this word will be discussed further in the next chapter. But for now, know that the Gentiles are nonJews, and that in your English Bibles, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, wherever it says nations, it is usually the same Hebrew or Greek word which is also translated as Gentiles. Now the Jews considered themselves to be the chosen people, which is correct. However, look at these verses and note that the Old Testament had provision for nonJews by birth to become Jews by circumcision. Exodus 12:48-49 If a stranger shall sojourn with you and would keep the Passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised. Then he may come near and keep it; he shall be as a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person shall eat of it. 49 There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you. We also see in the Old Testament that God cared for the stranger and sojourner and told the Israelites to care for them too: Leviticus 19:33-34 When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. 34 You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. Deuteronomy 10:18-20 He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. 19 Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. We also see from Solomons prayer when he dedicated the new temple that he saw Israels role as attracting foreigners (Gentiles) to the one true God: 1 Kings 8:41-43 Likewise, when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a far country for your name's sake 42 (for they shall hear of your great name and your mighty hand, and of your outstretched arm), when he comes and prays toward this house, 43 hear in heaven your dwelling place and do according to all for which the foreigner calls to you, in order that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and that they may know that this house that I have built is called by your name. What do we notice from Solomons prayer? That all the peoples of the earth may know Gods name and fear Him that is, bring glory to God. Isaiah also speaks a lot about God being glorified among the nations or Gentiles (Isaiah 49:6, 60:1-3 and 42:1-6, which is quoted in Matthew 12:18-21). So Israel was meant to be a light to the nations or Gentiles so that they could know God and so that God could be glorified by them.

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But how well did Israel do this? Lets look at the book of Ezekiel. What is the book of Ezekiel about? It is about Gods judgement on Israel because of her sin. One of the worst results of Israels sin was that it defamed God. Ezekiel 36:22-23 Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. 23 And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Lord GOD, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. Occasionally the Israelites were a witness to the Gentiles or nations, but most of the time they profaned Gods name by their sinful behaviour. They did not fulfil their task of being a blessing to the Gentiles or nations. Instead Gods name was profaned and defamed amongst the Gentiles. We also see here Gods desire for His name to be glorified among all the nations not just among one group of people. In the Old Testament we also see that the coming of the Messiah would be the occasion for all the families of the nations to know the Lord. For example, in Psalm 22, which is a Messianic Psalm (that is, it foretells the coming of the Messiah), we read: Psalm 22:27-28 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. 28 For kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations. So we see from these verses that the goal is that: All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord. All the families of the nations will worship before God. The LORD will rule over the nations.

So in summary, in the Old Testament we have noticed that: In the beginning, humanity was in right relationship with God. The Fall brought about the rupture of that relationship, which ushered in death, Gods name not being known, and God not being glorified by people. The call of Abraham was the beginning of redemption history. Abraham was to be the father of Israel, and was also to bless all the families of the earth. Israel generally did not fulfil its task of being a light to the nations and instead defiled Gods name rather than glorifying it. The Messiah was not to be just for Israel but for all people.

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The coming of Christ and His redemptive purpose of calling a people to Himself from all the peoples of the world
Why did Christ come to earth? What was His mission? Luke 19:10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. Jesus died on the cross for the salvation of the lost. But whom, precisely, did He die for? The Jews were expecting the Messiah, but they thought the Messiah would come to save the nation of Israel militarily. Even after the resurrection, and just before Jesus ascended into heaven, this was what was on the disciples minds as we read in Acts 1: Acts 1:6 So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? So lets have a look at whom Christ came to save. When Jesus was presented at the temple as a baby, Simeon prophesied: Luke 2:30-32 For my eyes have seen your salvation 31 that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, 32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel. During Jesus ministry, Isaiah 42:1-4 is quoted as being fulfilled in Jesus: Matthew 12:18-21 Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. 19 He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; 20 a bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory; 21 and in his name the Gentiles will hope. In one of His I Am sayings in John, Jesus calls Himself the Good Shepherd and says about Himself: John 10:16 And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. This no doubt refers to the Gentiles, with the original sheep pen being Israel. So believing Gentiles will be combined with believing Jews to form one flock under one Shepherd. In Jesus eschatological discourses (speeches about the end-times), the Gospel being preached to all the Gentiles is listed as the goal of the age in which we now live:

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Matthew 24:14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations [Gentiles], and then the end will come. Mark 13:10 [Gentiles]. And the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations

Then after His resurrection we have three accounts of Jesus commissioning to us. The most well-known is at the end of Matthews Gospel: Matthew 28:18-20 And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. This is known as the Great Commission and well be talking about it a lot during this book. For now, notice: This was a commission given to Jesus disciples. If we are His disciples, then it is for us. The main verb in the sentence is make disciples and that is to be done to all the nations. We will be looking more closely at who the nations are in the next chapter.

Luke also records Jesus commission for us: Luke 24:44-49 Then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things. 49 And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. Some important things to note in Lukes recording of Jesus commission to us are: What is the message? Repentance and forgiveness of sins. Who is the message for? All the nations. Some of them? Most of them? No, all of them. Who is to tell the message? The witnesses of these things. That is, if you have witnessed and experienced Jesus, then you are the messenger, and you cant fob it off onto someone else. Do we have help? Yes, the Holy Spirit, the promised one of verse 49.

Then in Acts we read Jesus commission to us just before His ascension into heaven:

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Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. Note the following: The Holy Spirit gives us power for what? To be witnesses! Where are we to be witnesses? Everywhere! Note that it does not say, first Jerusalem, then Judea, then Samaria, then to the ends of the earth. There are no thens in this verse. The command for us to be Jesus witnesses to the end of the earth is just as strong as the command to be His witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea.

So we can see from the Gospels and from Jesus life and teaching that He came to bring salvation for whom? Yes, He came to bring salvation to Israel, but not just to Israel. He also came to bring salvation to all the nations and all the Gentiles. In the next chapter, we will look more closely at who these nations and Gentiles are.

The Final State


It might be useful to see who will be in heaven and in the new heavens and the new earth. In the early parts of the book of Revelation, we read about the host of heaven falling down and worshipping the risen and glorified Lamb. Revelation 5:9-10 And they sang a new song, saying, Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, 10 and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth. What does that mean? It means that Christ purchased people from every tribe and language and people and nation, meaning there will be some from every tribe and language and people and nation in heaven. Later in this book we are going to look at Christianity across the globe today to see if there are some Christians from every tribe and language and people and nation. We will see how well we as the worldwide church are progressing towards this goal. We should also note that these people from every tribe, language people and nation will be a kingdom and priests to serve our God who will reign on earth. We see a similar scenario in Revelation 7:9-10: Revelation 7:9-10 After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10 and crying out with a loud voice, Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb! 15

Notice that there is a great multitude, and also notice that, as in chapter 5, they are from every nation, tribe, people and language. There are lots of them! They are saved they declare that salvation belongs to our God!

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Chapter 2 Theological Basis and Definition of Mission


Recommended reading: Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert. What is the Mission of the Church? Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission. Wheaton, USA: Crossway, 2011. Why do mission? What is mission? In the last chapter, we looked at Gods mission throughout human history as recorded in the Bible. In this chapter we will ask, Why do we do mission? and then ask, What is mission?

Gods glory
The Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647 asks as its first question: What is the chief end of man? The answer is: Mans chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Now of course we follow the Bible, and a catechism from 1647 is not authoritative. But this catechism has nicely summed up the Bibles evidence. Our purpose in life is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. In fact, we could go further and say that the purpose of the entire creation is to glorify God and indeed this is Gods own purpose: for His name to be glorified. Here are some of the Bible verses that the catechism uses to support this: Psalm 86:9 All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name. Isaiah 60:21 Your people shall all be righteous; they shall possess the land forever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I might be glorified. Romans 11:36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. 1 Corinthians 10:31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

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Revelation 4:11 Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. But the question is, How is God glorified? God is generally glorified b y people both in the way we live and in worshipping Him. People can only do that when they are in right relationship with Him. So, how can we glorify God when we are sinners? We do it through Christ and His work on the cross. We can see from the following Scriptures that Christ and the Father were glorified at the cross: John 12:27-28 Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name. Then a voice came from heaven: I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again. John 17:1-5 When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, 2 since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3 And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. 4 I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. Why is God glorified in the cross? How can God be glorified in such a gruesome event, in which God the Son is humiliated by the insulting death of crucifixion? John 17:2 tells us that because of the cross, the Father grants Jesus authority over all people, so that He gives eternal life to all those the Father has given Him. Therefore, God is glorified as people are saved, redeemed from their sins and come into relationship with Him and worship Him. For that to happen, people everywhere need to hear the Good News. The first Scripture the Westminster Shorter Catechism draws from sums it up nicely: Psalm 86:9 All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name. God is glorified as the whole earth the whole of creation hears of Him and people from everywhere come in faith and repentance to Christ. As John Stott has written, Here lies the supreme missionary motivation. It is neither obedience to the Great Commission, nor compassion for the lost, nor excitement over the gospel, but zeal (even jealousy) for the honour of Christs name no incentive is stronger than the longing that Christ should be given the honour that is due to His name.2

John Stott, as quoted in Jason Mandryk, Operation World, 7th edn. (Colorado Springs: Biblica, 2010), xxiii.

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God is also glorified in our own lives when we sacrifice for Him, especially when we sacrifice in order to take the Gospel to those who have not heard or believed. Jesus tells us: Matthew 19:29 And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. [my emphasis] The apostle Paul suffered much in order to glorify God by carrying His name to the Gentiles, as we read in Acts 9:15: Acts 9:15-16 But the Lord said to him, Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. 16 For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name. [my emphasis] So we can see that God is glorified as all people from everywhere in the world hear of Christ and some repent and believe. As they repent and believe, they are made right with God and are able to worship and glorify Him. As Christians, we also glorify God as we sacrifice and work for Him in making His name known to others. Therefore our primary motivation for mission is the glory of God.

Gods love and the salvation of the lost


As well as Gods glory, the other motivation for mission is Gods love and the salvation of lost souls. We need go no further than John 3:16-18 to see this: John 3:16-18 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. So we can see that God the Father sent Jesus to die for us, not only for His own glory, but because of His amazing love for us. And He did this while we were still sinners. Romans 5:8 But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Those of us who are saved can develop a tendency to look down on those who arent saved. Instead of reaching out to them with the Gospel, we look down on them and dont love them. But consider Titus 3:3-7: Titus 3:3-7 For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. 4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the

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washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, 7 so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. In other words, we who are now Christians were once foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by our passions and desires. Yet through His love, God saved us. What should our reaction be to those who dont know Christ? Love. God loves those who dont know Him, and seeks their salvation. As John 3:18 tells us, those who do not believe in Jesus stand condemned. Without hearing the Gospel, people cannot believe and be saved. Therefore, as well as Gods glory, we also ought to be motivated to do mission from love and concern for those who are lost. We ought to love these lost ones because God also loves them, just as He loved us, even before we repented and trusted in Him.

Who are the Gentiles and the nations?


Now this is really the $64 million dollar question. Everything in missiology (the study of missions) hangs on this question and the next question, What is mission? The question What is mission? is an important one which well answer shortly. Its important because so many things are classified as mission today. For example, among other things, various people list the following as being mission: Foreign mission. Cross-cultural mission. Local missions. Feeding the poor. Environmental mission. Inner-city renewal.

Just about anything and everything is classified as mission these days. The problem with that is that when you make the definition too wide, you lose your focus. However, before we look at what mission is, we need to look at who the Gentiles are, because the Gentiles are the target of mission. Gentile is a very important word in the Bible, but unfortunately its meaning is not very clear to us. One of the problems is that the root Hebrew and Greek words are translated a number of different ways in both the Old and New Testaments. They are usually translated as: Nations. Gentiles. Or sometimes, pagans.

In English, nations, Gentiles and pagans seem to be completely different words. Because of this, there is some confusion as to what Gentiles means, but there is even more confusion as to what nations means. This is compounded because when we read nations or Gentiles in the Old Testament and the New Testament it is not always the same Hebrew or Greek word. Let me explain what those Greek and

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Hebrew words mean. The next two or three pages might get a bit technical as we look at some Greek and Hebrew, but please persevere and keep reading as it is important. Lets look at the Old Testament first. There are two words usually used for nation in the Old Testament. One of the words is am, and the other is goy, or in the plural, goyim. Both words mean people or nation. Originally, am referred more to a group of people bound by common racial characteristics, much as we might use the term ethnic group today. Goy referred to a people who lived in a particular territory, spoke the same language and who often had a common government, much as we might use the term nation today. So that means that the Israelites generally didnt regard themselves as a goy until they had their own government. While they were in Egypt they were just an am.3 Over time the plural goyim came to be used for those nations that were not Israel. Now remember that for the Jews, nationality and ethnicity were greatly tied up with religion. That is, to be Jewish wasnt just national or racial, it was also religious. The Jews were the people of God the am of God. In contrast to them were the other goyim (plural of goy). That is, the other nations, who didnt worship the Lord and who, in being other goyim other nations were automatically excluded from being part of the people of God. So over time, goyim came to mean heathen nations, or those people outside the covenant of God. After the Babylonian exile, some Jews returned to Israel but many didnt. In fact, Jews were scattered throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Over time these Jews forgot their native Hebrew language, and Greek became the mother tongue of many of them. As a result, what we now call the Old Testament was translated into Greek. This translation of the Old Testament is known as the Septuagint and was completed around about 200 BC. Its important to know how am and goyim were translated into Greek in the Septuagint. Two words were used. Am was usually translated as laos. In the singular, goy was usually translated as ethnos and the plural goyim was usually translated as ethne, the plural form of ethnos. This is the word we get ethnic from, but you must be very careful with English words derived from Greek because they dont necessarily mean exactly the same thing, as we will see. In normal Greek, laos means people in a similar sense to how we would use the word people in English: a crowd of people, the people in contrast to their leader, or people as in a nation. In the Septuagint it was usually used to translate am and so in the Hellenistic Jewish context (that is, Greek-speaking Jews), it came to have a similar meaning to am. That is, laos meant a people as in an ethnic group or a nation, but it was usually used by the Israelites to refer to themselves as the chosen am. That is, they used the Greek word laos to refer to themselves as Gods chosen people.

The material in this section is a summary of the findings of my Honours thesis, Thommo, Who are the ?: A Critique of the Common Evangelical Understanding of in Matthew 28:19 as People Groups (Honours thesis, University of Queensland, 2011). Copies are avail able on request from the author by emailing mtw@swissmail.org.

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In normal Greek usage, the singular ethnos meant a group of people, such as a people (ethnic group), nation, or any other group of people with some sort of common defining characteristics. The plural ethne was generally used for other people outside ones own group of people. So if you were a Greek person, the plural form ethne meant non-Greeks. If you were an Israelite, then ethne meant non-Israelites that is, Gentiles. In the Septuagint, the translators usually used ethne to translate goyim. This was consistent with its Greek meaning, because the Hebrew word goyim had come to mean non-Jewish people (that is, Gentiles). So for Jews, ethne was the right Greek word to use for non-Jews, otherwise known as Gentiles. It should be noted, that ethne was used in a very general sense. That is, it was not used to describe a plurality of nations but it was used in a general sense to describe anyone who was not part of your particular nation or group, much the same as we might use the word foreigners, or outsiders. Remember that goyim for the Jews also had a religious meaning, not just a racial or cultural one. So when they used ethne, it was used in the same way. The plural ethne was a general term used to describe racial, cultural and religious outsiders. Gentiles (ethne) were not part of the people of God: they were outsiders to the covenants that the Jews had with God and were therefore damned. So in New Testament times, when a Jew used the word ethne he meant Gentiles, and therefore most of the time ethne is used in the Greek New Testament, it is translated as Gentiles in the English Bible translations. However, most of the time when you read nations in your English New Testament, the Greek word behind it is ethne, the very same word that is elsewhere usually translated as Gentiles. This is because for the Jews, all the other nations were Gentiles! The (other) nations and the Gentiles were the same thing. So from now on when you read nations in the plural in your New Testament, remember that it is not primarily referring to a whole lot of countries, or even ethnic groups, but that it is a general term used to describe all those people who are not Israelites, and who are therefore outside the covenant people of God. In English then, the best way to translate ethne in a religious context would be pagans, heathens or nonbelievers. That is, those outside your religious group. In a general sense, we could simply translate ethne as others, or outsiders. Now we come to the early Christian era in which the New Testament was written. What does ethne mean in a Christian context? We must remember that the New Testament was in a transition period. That is, at the outset, the Jews were the people of God, but Jesus message about the people of God was twofold: 1. Only those Jews that accepted Jesus as the Messiah and believed in Him were really part of the people of God. 2. Believing non-Jews (Gentiles) were included in the people of God (Matthew 8:10-12, Romans 11:17, Ephesians 2:11-19). So while ethne is used with the same general meaning of others in the New Testament, who the others are depends on who is using the word. From a Jewish point of view, ethne means, Gentiles, or non-Jews. But as the early church started to realise that the people of God was now the church, ethne began to be used to

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describe pagans, or what we today would call, non-Christians. We can see an example of that in 1 Corinthians 12.2: 1 Corinthians 12:2 You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. The Greek word that is translated here in the English Standard Version and many other English translations as pagans, is ethne. So now you know that when you read the word nations (with an s on the end), most of the time it is ethne in the Greek. Think of the context, and very often you will see how much sense it makes if you translate it as pagans, non-believers, or just simply as others, or outsiders. Take Matthew 28:18-20, the Great Commission, for example. Matthew 28:18-20 And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the outsiders, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. You might ask if it is possible that all the outsiders, or unbelievers, will become disciples. However, remember the word ethne is used in a general sense, not necessarily meaning that every single unbeliever will become a disciple. And also, literally in Greek the grammar doesnt mean that either. A literal Greek translation of Matthew 18:19-20a could read something like: Matthew 28:19-20a Therefore, going, make disciples from all the outsiders, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to keep everything that I commanded you. [my translation]

Definition of mission - What is mission?


Now we know who the Gentiles are, this will help us answer the next question: What is mission? Before you do something, you have to know what it is. What is mission? Stephen Neil writes, If everything is mission, nothing is mission.4 On the other hand, Christopher Wright writes, If everything is mission.everything is mission.5 But is this right? Is this what the Bible says? Does the Bible define what mission is? Is mission everything? Or is the Bible a bit more specific? Should we be more specific? We might not realise it, but the Bible does actually define mission. Our English word mission, comes from the Latin word missio, which means to send, which is a direct translation of the Greek word apostello. Apostello means, to send

Stephen Neil, Creative Tension: The Duff Lectures, 1958 (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1959), 81, quoted in Keith Ferdinando, Mission: A Problem of Definition, Themelios 33.1 (2008): 46. 5 Christopher Wright, The Mission of Gods People: A Biblical Theology of the Churchs Mission (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 26.

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forth or to send out.6 This means that mission means to be sent out. So biblically, mission is to be sent, such as we find in Matthew 10:5. There are lots of things Christians can do and should do, such as helping the poor, working for justice and looking after our environment, but just because they are things that we should or could do, does not mean it is our mission in the biblical sense of what mission is. Mission means to be sent but sent to do what? We now need to look at what it is that the New Testament sends us to do. To do that we will examine the famous mission passages of the Bible.

An examination of key Bible missionary texts


Matthew 10:5-8 Matthew 10:5-8 These twelve Jesus sent out [apostello], instructing them, Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, 6 but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7 And proclaim as you go, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. 8 Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay. These verses describe the first stage of Jesus mission, which was prior to His death and resurrection, and was to the Jews only. Despite the difference in whom the mission is to, there are still some important things to note from this first stage of mission. The first is that the apostles are sent. In Greek, the word sent is the word apostello, which we have just looked at. In other words, Jesus is missioning them or we might say He is sending them on mission. What does He tell them to do when He sends them? He tells them to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. That is, they are sent to proclaim a message. Jesus also tells them to heal the sick, to raise the dead, to cleanse lepers and to cast out demons; however it is important to note that they were the signs that accompanied the message. The primary task was the proclamation of the message that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.

Matthew 28:16-20 This is the second stage of Jesus mission. This is the mission that Jesus gave His disciples after His death and resurrection and therefore it is the stage of mission that is still applicable to us today. In verse 16, we see that the recipients of the mission are the 11 disciples who worship Jesus. Jesus then speaks and gives the disciples their mission. The mission has three components (enthronement, commission, and promise of presence), and we will look at each of them in turn.
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Timothy Friberg, Barbara Friberg and Neva Miller, Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 71. The is also where we get the w ord apostle from. The English apostle comes from the Greek word apostolos, the noun describing the person who is sent.

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Matthew 28:16-20 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. Enthronement:
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And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Commission:
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Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. Promise of Presence: And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. . Enthronement (Matthew 28:18) In verse 18, Jesus says that He has been given all authority. Now, which places has Jesus been given all authority over? He has been given all authority not only in heaven, but also on earth. This giving of all authority reminds us of Daniel 7:13-14: Daniel 7:13-14 "I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. 14 And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. In these verses in Daniel, we notice that the Son of Man is given dominion and authority over all peoples, nations and languages in other words, over everyone. Jesus Himself refers to this verse during His trial. Matthew 26:63-64 But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God. 64 Jesus said to him, You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven. Jesus is asked by the high priest if He is the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus confirms this, and then refers back to Daniel 7:13 and applies it to Himself. From now on the Son of Man will come and receive His authority. In the Greek, the sense is not that this will take place after the passage of hundreds or thousands of years. It is the sense of something that will happen right now, or at the most, very soon, such as the few days it would take for Jesus to rise from the dead. This is very significant, because on

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that mountain top in Galilee at the end of Matthews Gospel, Jesus tells His disciples that He has now received all that authority that He was talking about at His trial. But what does it mean that Jesus has all authority? And how is Jesus authority to be brought to bear?

Commission (Matthew 28:19-20a) We have just looked at the Son of Man in Daniel 7. If we keep reading through Daniel 7, we notice that the saints of the Most High are mentioned three times: Daniel 7:18 But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever. Daniel 7:21-22 As I looked, this horn made war with the saints and prevailed over them, 22 until the Ancient of Days came, and judgement was given for the saints of the Most High, and the time came when the saints possessed the kingdom. Daniel 7:27 And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them. Now it is certainly not easy to interpret everything in Daniel 7 and we arent even going to try and interpret what the horn means here! But what is interesting to notice is that in some way, the saints of the Most High will share in the kingdom. They wont just be in the kingdom, but they will share in possessing and having dominion over it. Now the saints of the Most High are Gods people. That means that the eleven disciples on the mountain top in Matthew 28 are some of those saints. As we shall see, it also means that if we too are Jesus disciples, it also includes us. So, how do we, saints of the Most High, also known as Jesus disciples, share in ruling and possessing His kingdom? Jesus does this by co-opting the disciples and us in His mission of redemption. How does He do this? He sends us to proclaim His authority to those who arent aware of His authority. We do this by proclaiming His message of forgiveness of sins through repentance and faith in Christ, because it is only by repenting and believing in Him that sinners recognise the authority of Jesus and come under His rule. For some reason, God has chosen to make the authority and rule of the Son of Man known throughout the earth through the proclamation of ordinary believers like you and me. Lets re-read the commission of Matthew 28:19-20a: Matthew 28:19-20 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations [outsiders], baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20a teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

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It is not so obvious in our English translations, but in the original Greek, there is only one main verb in this sentence and that is the verb matheteuo, which means, to make disciples of. Now notice that in verse 16, it is to the eleven disciples that Jesus gives His commission. In other words, as the initial eleven disciples make more disciples, they are to teach the new disciples to observe all that Jesus commands them which includes this Great Commission. This means that the Great Commission is not just for those first eleven disciples, but it is for all subsequent disciples too, which includes you if you are Jesus disciple! The next thing we note is from whom the disciples are to be made. We are to make disciples from all the ethne that word that is translated as nations in most English translations, but, as we have seen, more accurately means outsiders. From a Jewish perspective, outsiders are Gentiles and from a Christian perspective, they are non-Christians. From either perspective it is non-believers and so for those early disciples it most likely meant those people who had not yet come to believe in Jesus. We also need to note which of the ethne are to be discipled. Is it just some of them? Half of them? Two-thirds of them? No, it very clearly says, all the ethne. That is, the target of our mission is all the unbelievers, wherever they may be. The other verbs are subordinate to this main verb make disciples.7 These three subordinate verbs explain how we are to make disciples of all the unbelievers. 1. Go. In Greek this is the word poreuomai. It is just a word meaning some sort of movement. When we read our English translations, we can sometimes get the impression that the main thing about the Great Commission is that we must go. However, in Greek, the main thing is that we make disciples of all the unbelievers. Going is not the main thing; it is merely something we must do so that we can get to the unbelievers so that we can make disciples from them. 2. Baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. This speaks of conversion and is the first part of the process of making disciples. 3. Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. This is the second part of the process of making disciples. Making disciples is not just about leading people to make a decision for Christ, but involves the life-long process of teaching them everything that Jesus told us to do, which we find contained in the pages of the Bible. These include things like the Sermon on the Mount, as well as teaching them this very commission of spreading the wonderful Good News of salvation in Christ which they have already experienced. Remember, our literal translation of Matthew 28:19-20a looks like this: Matthew 28:19-20a Therefore, going, make disciples from all the outsiders, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20a teaching them to keep everything that I commanded you. [my translation]

In Greek, the other three verbs are participles and two of them introduce sub-ordinate clauses to the main clause of make disciples of all the outsiders.

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We could also show this verse diagrammatically like this: Make disciples from all the outsiders, by going by baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and by teaching them to keep everything that I commanded you.

Promise of presence The second half of verse 20 is the promise of presence. Notice that this promise is valid until the end of this current age. This is because it will be at the end of this current age that the commission will be completed that is, that disciples will have been made from all the outsiders, from all the non-believers. Notice that this does not mean that all non-believers will become believers, but as we see in Mark 13:10, they have all had the opportunity to hear the Good News. Mark 13:10 And the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations [outsiders / non-believers]. The Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 has a lot of similarities in language to Matthew 24:14, which is part of Jesus speech about the End Times: Matthew 24:14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations [outsiders / nonbelievers], and then the end will come. Both verses mention: Proclamation of the Good News. To all ethne that is, outsiders / non-believers. Then the end will come / end of the age.

That is, that this age we are in now is the age for proclaiming the Good News of repentance and faith and salvation in Christ to all the outsiders that is, people who dont yet believe in Jesus. Notice also that we enjoy the presence of Jesus as we go on this mission. That is, Jesus does not promise us His presence to give us nice warm fuzzy feelings, but He promises His presence in order to help us as we go on this mission of His! So, to recapitulate, those things that we need to know and apply to our lives from these verses are: 1. Who is commissioned? The disciples of Jesus, and not just the Christian superheroes. Not just the super-spiritual Christians. We could look at this in a corporate sense as the church. The whole church receives Jesus commission.

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2. What is the mission? It is making disciples. That is, it is not feeding the poor! Sure, feeding the poor is something that disciples ought to do, but thats not the mission. 3. Who is the mission to? It is to all the ethne. That is, it is to all the outsiders, to all the non-believers. This is where the massive implications for mission are, as we will see. But to give you a preview, the problem is that at the moment, we are not focussing our mission effort on where most of the unbelievers are. In fact somewhere around 95% of mission effort is to places which have a comparatively high number of Christians, or to places which already have a relatively strong Christian witness. So, what does studying these verses mean for our mission strategy? Have we concentrated too much on the Go, without thinking about where exactly we are going, or more accurately, to whom we are going? Clearly, we ought be going to where the unbelievers are. The emphasis in the Great Commission is on where the unbelievers are, not on how far we have to go to get to them. Where are the unbelievers? They are across the road from you, in your local town or city. They are the unreached people on the other side of the world. What does that mean? Where is missions? It is wherever there are unbelievers. That means missions is partly local, but it also means that it will involve physical movement to get to where the unbelievers are. Please notice that the emphasis on mission is NOT: How far you travel. Whether you cross cultural barriers. Whether the people are poor or not.

Rather the emphasis is on where the unbelievers are. Thats why in some countries with very few Christians, I encourage people not to leave their countries! Why? Because they only have to go across the street to come across hoards of unbelievers who have never heard the Good News. What does this mean for us? What is mission for Aussies? It includes proclaiming the Good News to our own people here in Australia. However, in chapter 5, we will find out when we look at the state of the world that there are still about two billion people in the world who have never heard the Good News and we must, collectively, go to them as well.

Luke 24:45-49 Luke 24:45-49 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations [ethne = outsiders], beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things. 49 And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.

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Jesus commission to us as recorded in Luke is very similar to that recorded in Matthew 28:16-20. The main difference is that the account in Luke actually gives us a summary of the message we are to proclaim. Verses 46-47 tell us that the message we are to proclaim is the death and resurrection of Christ, repentance and forgiveness of sins. These four things are the essence of the Gospel message. We also note that the four components of Jesus death, His resurrection, the call to repentance and the promise of forgiveness of sins are consistently repeated throughout the book of Acts whenever the Gospel is preached. Just as in Matthew 28, the message is to be proclaimed to all the outsiders all the non-believers. The target of the mission is clear those who arent already believers. In verse 48, Jesus tells the first disciples that they are witnesses of these things. If we are true Christians, we too have witnessed Christ and so we too are commissioned to tell others about what we have witnessed. But ultimately, what we learn from both Matthew 28:16-20 and Luke 24:46-49 is that the main reason we do mission, and that we do it Gods way, is obedience. Its what He has told us to do.

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Chapter 3 New Testament Model of Mission


Recommended reading: Roland Allen. Missionary Methods: St Pauls or Ours? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962.

Survey of mission in Acts


The Book of Acts is a book about mission. Thats the function of the book it describes how the early church obeyed the Great Commission. In Acts 1, Jesus had just risen from the dead and was about to ascend to heaven. What was uppermost on the disciples minds just before Jesus ascended? Acts 1:6 So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? That is, they were thinking of politics. The Jews at that time did not have independence. They were under Roman government, which they didnt like. So they pressed Jesus to do something about the political situation. We can be like that too cant we? Many Christians spend their time and energy pushing for Christian government. But is that what Jesus has commissioned us for? Lets see how Jesus answered the disciples request for Him to get involved in politics: Acts 1:7 He said to them, It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. Wow! Jesus is saying thats not your problem. Thats Gods job! Sure, one day Christ will rule the world politically. But Jesus is saying, thats up to the Father. Thats not your concern. Thats not what Ive commissioned you to do. So what is our job then? Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.

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This is similar to Matthew 28:16-20 and Luke 24:45-49 which we looked at in the last chapter. We are to be His witnesses where? In Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Now, how do we often remember this verse? Perhaps something like this: Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and then in all Judea and then Samaria, and then to the end of the earth. That is, we are to witness in our Jerusalem (our local town or city), and once weve done that, then we are to go our Judea (our state or country), and then once weve done that, then we can witness to our Samaria (the marginal groups in our state or country), and then, only once weve done all that, should we then go to the ends of the earth. But is that what this verse says? Look in your Bibles. Notice that in the original, there are no thens in there! We must be careful not to misquote this verse. Jesus does not say that Jerusalem is more important than Judea, and that Judea is more important than Samaria, and so on. All places are just as important as the others. The end of the earth is just as important as Jerusalem. After all, if the early Christians had waited until everyone in Jerusalem or Judea had believed in Christ before they went elsewhere, the Gospel would never have left Israel, and unless you are of Jewish descent, you, yes you, would not be a Christian today! In Acts 2, the Holy Spirit came down and the church was born. This happened on the day of Pentecost, at a time when there were Jewish people from all over the known world dwelling in Jerusalem. In Acts 2:5-11 we notice where they came from from places in the west such as Rome, Crete, and North Africa. They also came from places in the east, such as Arabia and the regions we now know as Iraq and Iran. They came from all over the place. So right from the beginning, the people in the church came from a wide geographical area, even though the church remained based in Jerusalem until chapter 8. In Acts 8:1, persecution broke out on the church in Jerusalem, which finally forced many early Christians to leave the city. Also in Acts 8, an Ethiopian trusted in Christ and continued on his way to Ethiopia. Acts 8 also sees the Gospel preached in Samaria and many there believe. In Acts 9, Paul was converted, and in Acts 10-11, Cornelius and his household were converted. These are the first people recorded in Acts who became Christians that we know for certain were Gentiles.8 The repentance of Gentiles led to the issue of whether Gentiles converts ought to keep the Jewish Law. This issue will be discussed briefly in chapter 6. In Acts 11:19, the Gospel spread even further to Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, however initially it was spoken only to Jews who lived in those places. In the next verse (Acts 11:20), we read that some people started to preach to Gentiles too. The Gospel was truly starting to go to all people! To all the outsiders! In Acts 13:1-3, Paul and Barnabas were commissioned and sent by the Antioch Church on the first of their missionary journeys. Paul completed four such missionary
8

The Ethiopian eunuch may have been a Gentile, but he could also have been a proselyte, although this is unlikely since he was a eunuch. However, after his conversion, he continued his journey to Ethiopia and we never hear about him again. As for the Samaritans, although they were regarded by many Jews as Gentiles, they were probably a Jewish-Gentile mixture both racially and religiously.

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journeys that we know of. Now, if you have a look at a map of Pauls missionary journeys, you will notice Pauls very simple missionary strategy.9 What do you notice about his strategy? It is simple he went all over the place! His goal was to cover the whole known world. We catch a more detailed glimpse of Pauls missionary strategy at the end of the book of Romans, where he explains to the Romans why he is coming to Rome and what he plans to do when he gets there. This insight into Pauls missionary strategy is so important that we are now going to have a very close look at these verses in Romans 15.

Pauls missionary strategy in Romans 15:19-29


Romans 15:18-29 For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience by word and deed, 19 by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; 20 and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else's foundation, 21 but as it is written, Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand. 22 This is the reason why I have so often been hindered from coming to you. 23 But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to come to you, 24 I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. 25 At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. 26 For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. 27 For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. 28 When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you. 29 I know that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ. It is very important for us to understand Pauls missionary strategy that he gives us here, so that we can understand what is happening today in missions. Actually, this passage helps us to see what is not happening today in missions that should be happening! From this passage we can see three things that Paul is telling us: 1. Pauls priority was always for those who had never heard. That is, his priority was to go to those places where Christ had not yet been named. 2. Paul needed the Roman Christians to help him on his future missionary journey to Spain. 3. Helping the poor is not the same as proclaiming the Good News. Perhaps this last one is a bit of a surprise, but I will explain what I mean shortly. Before I do that, lets look at the first two points.
9

Many Bibles have a map or maps of Pauls missionary journeys to which you can refer.

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Pauls priority was always for those who had never heard In our passage, Paul makes a few extraordinary statements. In Romans 15:19b he says: Romans 15:19b So that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ. If we look at a map we can see that Paul is referring to the region of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea between Jerusalem and Illyricum (modern Albania and the former Yugoslavia). This region covers much of the Balkans, Greece and what we now know as Turkey, including places such as Antioch, Ephesus, Macedonia, Athens and Corinth, where the New Testament tells us Paul had preached. (See Figure 3.1) It is a large area with lots of people, and what is extraordinary is that Paul says that he has fulfilled the ministry of the Gospel of Christ in all those places! In verse 23 he says something similar: Romans 15:23a But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions.

Figure 3.1 Pauls area of ministry

He no longer has any room for work in these regions! How can he say that? That was a large area, with lots of people. Paul probably wrote Romans about 56-57 AD, that is, less than 30 years after the resurrection of Jesus. How could Paul say that his 34

work had finished? How could he say that he had no more room for any more work? How could he have finished his work across such a large area, among so many people, in such a short period of time? Surely he hadnt had the opportunity to tell everyone in those regions about Jesus in that short space of time? Well, he probably hadnt. Lets go back to verse 19 again and read verse 20 as well: Romans 15:19b-20 So that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; 20 and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else's foundation. You see, Pauls ambition was to preach the Gospel, but not where Christ had already been named. Now, while not everyone in the area from Jerusalem to Illyricum had heard the Gospel, Christ had been named throughout it. Throughout that area, churches had been established. Throughout that area, some of the local people who before had been lost in darkness, had heard the Good News of Jesus Christ, had repented of their former way of life and had come to believe in Jesus. Some of that work had been done by Paul, and other work had been done by other missionaries. In other words, even though the task of evangelising and of building those churches was not yet complete, Pauls task was complete. Why? Well there are two reasons. Firstly, when we read through Acts and Pauls letters, we notice that everywhere Paul went, he was very quick to establish local leadership. He did not hang around for years pastoring the churches he established. His task was to stay as long as necessary to see some local people repent and saved in each place he visited. He then discipled them, and then entrusted them with leadership of their own churches and with the task of evangelising their local area. As for Paul the missionary, his task was then to move on to other areas areas where Christ had not yet been named. Areas where there was yet no witness for Christ. Areas that were still in complete darkness. You see for Paul, the question was, how could he stay and minister in an area that already had a witness, that already had a local church that could reach its local area, when there were still regions without any witness at all? So we see in verse 24 that Pauls goal was now to go to Spain. (See figure 3.2) Spain was at the other end of the Mediterranean, and at that time was completely untouched with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

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Figure 3.2 Spain in relation to where Paul had already ministered Lets now look at the other two things Paul talks about in this passage, because they will help us to see more of Pauls missionary strategy.

Paul needed the Roman Christians to help him on his future missionary journey to Spain Romans 15:24 I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. Pauls purpose in going to Rome was not to stay there. Why? Because Rome already had a bridgehead for the Gospel. It had a church. Paul didnt plant the church there. Others had, and Paul had no desire to build on anothers foundation. Paul was just stopping over in Rome on his way to Spain. Why did he want to go to Spain? Because in Spain, Christ had not yet been named. Paul had another purpose in stopping over in Rome. We see it here. He hoped to be helped on his journey by the Roman Christians. The word for helped here means practical help, as in financial help and supplying provisions for his journey. There is a financial cost to missions. It is expensive to travel and to live in another country, and Paul was asking the Roman church to help him with those needs. So too, todays missionaries often need help. They need financial help, logistical help and prayer. Let us now go to the third point.

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Helping the poor is not the same as proclaiming the Gospel I had probably better explain myself here, because many people say that helping the poor is proclaiming the Gospel. It is certainly true that often they do go together, however this is not always the case. Let us jump back to Romans so you can see what I mean. Weve already seen that Paul was planning to go to Spain by way of Rome that is, in a westward direction from Corinth, from where he wrote this letter. But he wasnt going straight to Spain via way of Rome. He had somewhere to visit first, and we read about that in verses 25-26: Romans 15:25 At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. 26 For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. Now this is interesting. Pauls desire, as he has told us, was to preach the Gospel in regions where Christ was not already named that is, to the west of Rome. But now he tells us that before he does that, he is going back to Jerusalem to the east, in the opposite direction to where Spain is. Its a pretty long detour to go from Corinth to Spain via Jerusalem. (See figure 3.3). But he is not going to Jerusalem with the primary purpose of preaching the Gospel. Why? Because we know that Christ has already been named in Jerusalem. In fact, it was in Jerusalem where it all started. Sure, Paul will preach the Gospel in Jerusalem when he has the opportunity, but its not the main reason he is going there. What is Pauls reason for going the other way to Jerusalem? Our text tells us that it is bring aid to the saints there. His purpose is to help the poor among the saints in Jerusalem.

Figure 3.3 Pauls travel plans 37

Now can you see the distinction? The poor materially, are not necessarily the ones who have the greatest need of the Gospel. In Pauls day, Jerusalem and Judea were rather poor in comparison to the rest of the Roman Empire. The wealthier areas were to the west. Paul saw helping the poor as being something different to preaching the Gospel. You see, people can be poor materially, but rich spiritually. The people of Jerusalem and Judea at that time were poor materially because of a recent famine, but they were rich spiritually. On the other hand, others to the west were rich materially, but poor spiritually. (See figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4 Location of the spiritually and materially rich and poor We can see that Pauls concern was not just for those who need the Gospel, but it was also for the poor. We know this because he was willing to delay his mission to Spain, in order to deliver aid to the poor in Judea. But it is important to note that Paul only intended to stop in Jerusalem briefly to deliver the aid before he got on with his main task of taking the Gospel to those who had never heard it.10 This also reminds us of what was discussed in the last chapter, where we looked at the difference between what Christians should do, such as feeding the poor, and what our mission is, which is proclaiming the Good News of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

10

We do not know if Paul ever made it to Spain, but the point is that it was his plan to go to Spain, a place where Christ was not yet named.

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So we see that Pauls idea of mission is often quite different to ours. We often think that mission is: Going to people who look different to us, for example, they are a different colour.11 Going cross-culturally. Going to people who are poor.

Now these things might be part of a particular missionary work but are they the main focus? For Paul, the focus was about going to where Christ was not yet named. Yes, sometimes we need to do those other things because if people who havent heard about Christ are in another culture, then we have to go cross-culturally. If people who havent heard about Jesus look different to us, then we go to people who look different to us. If these people are poor, we can help them materially as well as proclaiming the Gospel to them. We will, however, learn later when we look at the state of the world today, that many of the people who are poor, or of a different culture or colour to Westerners, actually have stronger churches than we do, yet we still send missionaries to them. On the other hand, there are some cultures that are similar to ours, and who have people who look like us, but where the church is nonexistent or very small, and we send hardly any missionaries to them because we have the wrong idea of what missions is. In chapter 5, we will look more closely at the state of Christianity in various countries around the world, but just to give you an idea at this stage of the book, I have listed below the evangelical populations of a sample of countries around the world.12 Country Kenya (East Africa) Uganda (East Africa) Zambia (Southern Africa) Brazil (South America) El Salvador (Central America) Vanuatu (Pacific Islands) Solomon Islands (Pacific Islands) Haiti (Caribbean) Australia (Pacific) France (Europe) Czech Republic (Europe) Austria (Europe) Tajikistan (Central Asia) Turkey (Middle East) Tunisia (North Africa) % Evangelical 49% 37% 26% 26% 32% 46% 33% 16% 14.5% 1.0% 0.7% 0.5% 0.1% less than 0.1% less than 0.1%

11

Take note of how many photos advertising mission organisations have a picture of white missionaries working among black people. But it should be the other way around, because these days, statistically speaking, the darker someones skin, the more likely it is that they are a Bible -believing, born again Christian! 12 These statistics are taken from, Jason Mandryk, Operation World, 7th edn. (Colorado Springs: Bilbica, 2010), 29, 44, 46, 57, 73 and 83.

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Just from this sample list, are there any countries or regions that surprise you? To which of the countries from this short list should we be sending the most missionaries? Which countries need the least missionaries, if any? There may be some more surprises in store in chapter 5!

Early handover to local leadership


Roland Allens book, Missionary Methods: St. Pauls or Ours?13 is a very thoughtprovoking book on this matter. Allen was a missionary in China about a century ago and lived in and visited various other missionary fields such as India and Africa. He noticed that the missionaries of 100 years ago were very reluctant to hand over leadership to the locals. This is the opposite of what the apostle Paul did. Right from his first missionary journey, Paul quickly installed local leadership. On his first missionary journey, after he visited Pisidian Antioch, Paul and his companions travelled to Iconium, then to Lystra and then to Derbe. In each of these places they preached the Good News. Some people accepted Jesus and some rejected Him. After this, they returned by the same route by which they had come. On their return journey, as they again visited the churches they had founded, they appointed elders in every church. Acts 14:23 And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed. Notice that: Although the churches were young, every church had its own elders. Each church had more than one elder. We notice this pattern of church leadership throughout Acts and the Letters, for example, Titus 1:5.

This pattern of quickly establishing local church leadership is the reason Paul was able to move on so quickly and why in Romans 15 he could say that his work was completed. Here are some of the benefits of an early handover to local leadership: It helps greatly with indigenisation, which well talk more about later. It allows local believers to take ownership of local churches. It treats locals as equals rather than as inferiors. It frees up missionaries to go on to new areas that havent yet heard.

Pages 141-144 of Roland Allens book contain a very good summary of these principles. In many ways he was ahead of his time, and although 100 years later many missionaries have learnt from his observation, a lot of paternalism still exists on many mission fields. This is not helpful either for the places where missionaries have stayed too long or for the places that have no or few missionaries. This is because those missionaries wont move on to those places where Christ is not yet named.
13

Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St Pauls or Ours? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962).

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This is really important because we are still tying up around 95% of missionary resources on work in countries with established churches, doing things local believers should be doing. As well as tying up resources that should be going to needier places, it also hinders the spiritual development of the Christians in those places. At times, it can also be racially condescending. Of course the opposite extreme is handing over leadership too early, and the New Testament warns us against the dangers of doing this (1 Timothy 3:6, 5:22). However, the problem of handing over leadership too early isnt nearly as widespread as the problem of handing it over too late. In chapter 7, we will look more at the stages of establishing the church in a new location, and the sorts of missionaries and how many of them that are needed at each stage.

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Chapter 4 History of Mission


Recommended reading: Stephen Neill. A History of Christian Missions. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1964. Philip Jenkins. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia and How it Died. Oxford: Lion, 2008.

The early church and rapid expansion, Christendom and decay


Probably most of us are familiar with the expansion of the church in the New Testament era. During New Testament times, Christianity reached as far as Rome to the west, and we know that Paul had plans to go to Spain. But what happened after the close of the New Testament? For the first few centuries, the church maintained its missionary zeal, obeying the Great Commission, and expanded east, west and south. Unfortunately we usually focus only on the westward European expansion, because thats where many of us come from. In Europe to the west, it took some time for the whole continent to be reached, but by about 300 AD most of Europe had heard the Gospel. During these first few centuries Christians had intermittently been subject to persecution. However, the year 313 AD saw the Edict of Milan promulgated under the Emperor Constantine. This edict legalised Christianity so that very quickly it became the favoured and then even the state religion in the west. This lead to the development of Christendom that is, state Christianity. While some missionary activity still occurred, the vision for going beyond the boundaries of Christendom died. Most progress for what was called Christianity was now either by conquest (such as the conquest of Spain from the Muslims) or by convincing pagan kings to adopt Christianity, whereupon all their subjects would also adopt Christianity (such as happened in Russia and the Ukraine). The story to the south and east is also interesting. Lets look at what happened in Africa to the south. Remember that in the ancient world, Northern Africa was part of the Roman Empire and Christianity spread there fairly early on, for example, to Alexandria in Egypt. The great church father Augustine was from Hippo, which is in what is now known as Tunisia. Even when Islam came to Egypt, not everyone converted to Islam, and today in Egypt around 10% of the population is Coptic Christian.

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The Gospel also spread further south beyond the Roman Empire. Remember the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8:26-40? He went back to Ethiopia and whether from him or other missionaries, or both Christianity spread to Ethiopia and became the state religion even before it did in the Roman Empire. Even today there are over 30 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians who trace an unbroken line of history and tradition from the early centuries. In Asia to the east, according to reliable tradition, the Apostle Thomas made it to Kerala in southern India and brought Christianity there. The Mar Thoma Christians of southern India claim their descent from him. It wasnt just to India Christianity spread throughout Asia, mainly as part of what we call the Nestorian Church. Nestorian Christians spread the Gospel throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, Mongolia and China. According to some estimates, at various points in time in the first millennium, as much as 5% of Asia was Christian! Then from about 1200-1400, for reasons which remain unclear, Christianity was virtually wiped out from most of Asia until recent times. However, remnants of this ancient branch of Christianity persevere to the present time. The Assyrian Church of the East exists in Iraq and Iran, but survives under intense pressure. This persecution has intensified since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 which released significant sectarian violence in that country, much of which has been directed at the Christian population. Maronite and other Christian groups continue to exist in Lebanon and other Middle-Eastern countries.

The Reformation and rebirth of missionary vision


Going back to Europe and the west, missionary zeal was mostly lost with the rise of Christendom. Europe saw the Reformation of the 16th century, but this was not accompanied by any sense of obeying the Great Commission. Martin Luther and John Calvin argued that the Great Commission was binding on the apostles only and that since that special office had been discontinued, the Great Commission was no longer binding. Philip Nicolai, a German Lutheran pastor (1556-1608), managed to prove that the Great Commission had already been completed. In 1664, Justininan von Welz (1621-68), an Austro-German Lutheran, published a plea based on Matthew 28:18-20 for a worldwide missionary enterprise. His views were dismissed by the Lutheran Church of the day, who saw the Great Commission as territorial rather than universal (that is, you are only supposed to evangelise in your own territory), and that the heathen had already rejected the Good News long ago so it was actually wrong to go to them. Von Welz could not get people interested in going to heathen lands, so he went himself to Suriname in South America. He died within two years of arriving, possibly of malaria, with no known converts. However it wasnt long afterward, with the spread of the Dutch and English empires in Asia, that Christian ministers went along with them, both to minister to the European population and also to try and convert some local people.

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The modern missions movement


Perhaps the best-known missionary of days gone by is William Carey (1761-1834), a Baptist now known to us as the father of modern missions. In 1792 he published a book called, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. One reported reaction to Careys ideas from a senior minister was, Young man, sit down; when God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid and mine. However, Carey persisted and founded the Baptist Missionary Society. He then went to India and did much good work including translating the Bible into Bengali, Sanskrit and other local languages. More missionary societies were formed, both denominational and interdenominational, and more missionaries went out to various lands. They went to China, to the South Pacific, to other parts of Asia and to Africa. The South Pacific saw great missionary activity during the 19th century, with great success. On most of the South Pacific islands, the Good News was well received and many people converted to Christianity. Some of the islanders even went to other islands as missionaries. In China there was some limited growth in the 19th century, but after 1949 when the communists expelled the foreign missionaries, the church grew very rapidly. Sub-Saharan Africa (south of the Muslim north), has seen a continual expansion of Christianity from the 19th century right up until today. South and Central America remained very Catholic until recent times. However, the post World War Two years have seen great growth in the evangelical church across most of Latin America. The most recent rapid growth in Christianity has been the growth of the church in the ex-Soviet world over the last two decades since the fall of Communism in the USSR and its satellite countries. For example, the church in Mongolia has grown from an estimated four Christians in 1989 to 40,000 in 2010. Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia have seen similar rapid growth.

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Chapter 5 The Status of Missions Today


Recommended Reading: Jason Mandryck. Operation World. 7th ed. Colorado Springs, USA: Biblica, 2010.

Overview of Christianity in different parts of the world


In this chapter, we will look at which parts of the world have the most Christians and which have the least Christians. This chapter also looks at where most missionaries are going. This is a fascinating study and unfortunately one of the areas of greatest ignorance among Christians today. This ignorance on the part of most Christians is a tragedy, because the result of this ignorance is that hundreds of millions of people are not hearing the Gospel. Remember what we looked at earlier in this book when we looked at the definition of mission? Mission is making disciples from all the ethne. That is, from all the outsiders, the unbelievers. If we are to proclaim the Gospel to them and disciple them, we need to know where they are. In this chapter, I will be quoting from Operation World a lot. It is a very useful book that lists every country in the world and the religious statistics for each country, along with prayer points. But as we use it, we do need to remember two limitations of this book: 1. The statistics listed for each country are averages across the whole country, and some countries have large variations within them as to the prevalence of Christians. This is especially so for some very large countries such as Nigeria, China, India and Indonesia, where sharp regional differences as to the prevalence of Christians exist. This means that in each of these countries, the relatively high average percentage of Christians masks the fact that some parts of each of those countries are unreached with the Gospel. 2. For our purposes, we will be using the statistics for evangelicals, rather than for Christians. This is because Christians includes nominal Christians and people who believe a wide range of theological beliefs that are not necessarily biblical. Operation World has defined evangelicals as those holding to salvation through faith in Jesus Christ because of His crucifixion and resurrection, have had a conversion experience, who recognise the Bible as inspired and who have a commitment to evangelism. However, Operation World is clear that this is a theological definition and that only a portion of evangelicals so defined may

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actually be born again.14 In my own personal experience of working in Christian ministry in five different countries across three different continents, the numbers of evangelicals quoted in Operation World is, in each case, about double what the local church estimates it as being. However, in each of these five diverse countries, it is consistently double! This, along with Operation Worlds own disclaimer, leads me to believe that the number of evangelicals listed for each country is consistently double the actual number. Even though the figures are overstated, they are consistently overstated for each country, and therefore, because we are mostly concerned with comparing one country to another in this chapter, the statistics of evangelicals in Operation World will serve our purposes well in this regard. We are now going to do a world survey, continent by continent, to see where the most, and the least, evangelical Christians are located. We will go through each continent of the world, in the order that we find them in the front of the 2010 edition of Operation World. If you have a copy of Operation World, it would be helpful to have it with you as you read through this next section; however if you dont, you will still be able to follow along easily. It would also be helpful to have a world map in front of you so you can see where each of these countries is located.. Each country is placed into one of three columns: countries with over 5% of the population being evangelical Christians, countries with 1-5% of the population as evangelicals, and countries with less than 1% evangelical. The reason for this division is that when an area or people has an evangelical population of 5% or more, the church it is well and truly established and is large enough to be able to reach the rest of the population itself without outside help. Conversely, when the evangelical population is below 1%, there is an insufficient number of Christians in that area for them to reach their compatriots with the Gospel. When the evangelical population is between 1% and 5% it is at an in-between stage. It generally does not need outside help for evangelism, although it can be helpful, but may need outside help for some specialised ministries. As Ive already mentioned, these statistics are averaged across the whole country. In some countries, the proportion of evangelicals is relatively uniform across the country (such as Australia), whereas in other countries there are very large variations and so while the overall number of Christians may be high, there can still be large areas that are virtually untouched with the Gospel.

Africa This information comes from page 29 of Operation World. Over 5% evangelical Kenya 48.9% Uganda 37.0% Central African Republic 32.3% Zimbabwe 30.9%
14

1-5% evangelical Equatorial Guinea 4.4% So Tom & Prncipe 4.3% Egypt 3.9%

Less than 1% evangelical Gambia 0.8% Guinea 0.7% Mali 0.7% Libya 0.3% Algeria 0.2%

Mandryk, Operation World, 958-959.

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Nigeria 30.8% Burundi 27.0% Rwanda 26.9% Zambia 25.7% Swaziland 25.1% Ghana 24.2% Angola 22.5% South Africa 21.1% Ethiopia 19.6% Malawi 19.6% Congo-DRC 18.7% Tanzania 17.9% Congo, Republic of 15.9% Sudan 14.7% Liberia 14.6% Gabon 12.7% Namibia 12.2% Lesotho 12.1% Madagascar 11.5% Mozambique 11.1% Togo 10.7% Cote d'Ivoire 10.5% Chad 10.1% Mauritius 10.1% Cameroon 9.0% Burkina Faso 8.9% Saint Helena 8.8% Benin 8.3% Botswana 8.1% Cape Verde Islands 6.6% Runion 5.9% Seychelles 5.9%

Sierra Leone 3.9% Eritrea 2.1% Guinea-Bissau 1.6%

Comoros Senegal Djibouti Mauritania Mayotte Niger Somalia Morocco Tunisia

0.2% 0.2% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% <0.1% <0.1%

We can see from these statistics that most African countries are either very Christian or very non-Christian! If you look at a map, you will notice that the countries with very high evangelical Christian populations are in southern and central Africa, and the ones with extremely low Christian populations are in the north. There is a dividing line that runs roughly horizontally across Africa through the Sahel that divides the predominantly Muslim north from the Christian and animist south. These two parts of Africa are often labelled as Sub-Saharan Africa and Northern Africa. Thus we can see that most of Sub-Saharan Africa has a very strong evangelical Christian witness and indeed has some of the most evangelical countries in the world, such as Kenya and Uganda. On the other hand, the north of Africa is a spiritual wasteland and has some of the least reached countries in the world, such as Morocco and Tunisia.

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An important thing to note is that this line dividing the continent between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south passes right through the middle of several countries, such as Cote dIvoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. This means that although on average these countries have a high evangelical population, there are large tracts of each of these countries where there are very low numbers of Christians. Africa has 14 countries with less than 1% evangelical Christian population. The total population of these 14 countries is 152 million people. Of these countries with less than 1% evangelical, 7 are 0.1% evangelical or less. That is, only 1 in every 1000 people is an evangelical Christian. 73 million people live in these countries. Two countries, Tunisia and Morocco, have so few evangelical Christians that they literally are off the scale with Operation World listing them as less than 0.1% evangelical Christian. Not even 1 in every 1000 people is an evangelical Christian. So, if you were sending missionaries to Africa, to which part of Africa would you send them?

North America This information comes from page 42 of Operation World. Over 5% evangelical USA 28.9% Bermuda 24.3% Canada 7.7% 1-5% evangelical Greenland 4.7% Less than 1% evangelical St Pierre & Miquelon <0.1%

Apart from the tiny French overseas territory of St Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, North America has a very strong Christian presence.

Caribbean This information comes from page 44 of Operation World. Over 5% evangelical St Vincent 39.1% Bahamas 35.9% Barbados 34.2% Turks & Caicos 32.4% Jamaica 28.0% British Virgin Islands 27.3% Puerto Rico 25.2% US Virgin Islands 23.8% Montserrat 23.4% St Kitts & Nevis 21.8% 1-5% evangelical Guadeloupe 4.3% St Martin 2.5% St Barthlemy 2.3% Less than 1% evangelical

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Cayman Islands 21.3% Trinidad & Tobago 20.2% Antigua and Barbuda 19.9% Grenada 19.6% Anguilla 17.2% Dominica 16.8% Haiti 16.0% St Lucia 14.6% Dominican Republic 9.1% Cuba 8.8% Netherlands Antilles 7.7% Aruba 7.6% Martinique 6.1% The Caribbean has no countries with less than 1% evangelical Christian, and almost all of them are over 5% evangelical.

Latin America This information comes from page 46 of Operation World. Over 5% evangelical El Salvador 31.7% Nicaragua 29.8% Brazil 26.3% Guatemala 24.4% Honduras 23.0% Guyana 19.8% Panama 19.3% Belize 18.8% Chile 18.4% Bolivia 16.2% Costa Rica 14.8% Suriname 13.8% Peru 11.6% Falkland Islands 10.8% Venezuela 10.8% Argentina 9.1% Ecuador 8.5% Mexico 8.3% Colombia 7.5% Uruguay 6.2% Paraguay 6.1% 1-5% evangelical French Guiana 4.5% Less than 1% evangelical

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Latin America, which includes South and Central America, has more than 5% evangelical populations in all countries except French Guiana, and even that is almost 5%! How much missions focus should we be giving to Latin America and the Caribbean?

Asia This information comes from page 57 of Operation World. Over 5% evangelical South Korea 16.8% Philippines 12.4% Armenia 8.7% Singapore 7.8% Brunei 6.1% Hong Kong 6.1% China 5.7% Indonesia 5.6% 1-5% evangelical Myanmar 5.0% Malaysia 4.3% Bahrain 2.9% Taiwan 2.8% Nepal 2.8% Laos 2.6% East Timor 2.3% India 2.2% Bhutan 1.8% Vietnam 1.8% Macau 1.7% Cambodia 1.6% Georgia 1.6% Kuwait 1.5% United Arab Emirates 1.3% Mongolia 1.2% Sri Lanka 1.2% North Korea 1.0% Qatar 1.0% Less than 1% evangelical Oman 0.8% Kazakhstan 0.7% Kyrgyzstan 0.7% Pakistan 0.6% Japan 0.5% Lebanon 0.5% Thailand 0.5% Bangladesh 0.4% Israel 0.4% Jordan 0.3% Saudi Arabia 0.3% Uzbekistan 0.3% Azerbaijan 0.2% Iran 0.2% Iraq 0.2% Maldives 0.1% Palestine 0.1% Syria 0.1% Tajikistan 0.1% Afghanistan <0.1% Turkey <0.1% Turkmenistan <0.1% Yemen <0.1%

Asia has only two countries with more than 10% evangelical Christians South Korea and the Philippines. It has many countries with just a few percent of the population being evangelicals and many countries 23 in total with less than 1% evangelical Christian. These countries have a combined population of 925 million people. Can you imagine that? 925 million people for whom Christ died for live in countries with less than 1% Christian. And of those countries, 8 have 0.1% or less Christians the Maldives, Palestine, Syria, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Yemen. The total population of these countries is 169 million people! Of these, four Afghanistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Yemen are off the scale with less than 1 Christian per 1000 people! There are a few countries here that deserve special mention. While India averages 2.2% evangelical Christians across the whole country, they are very unevenly

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distributed. Some of the northern states of India are some of the most unreached places on earth. For example, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh has 203 million people, which is more than most countries in the world. It has only 0.1% Christian population. Operation World states that if Uttar Pradesh were its own country, it would be the third largest unevangelised population in the world! Indonesia and China also deserve special mention. While both average out at over 5% evangelical, each of them has large clusters of peoples who are unevangelised. So, did anything surprise you when you looked at this list? Did it surprise you to learn that China is far more Christian than Japan is? Did it surprise you to know how many Christians there are in the Philippines? Should we be sending missionaries to Asia? How much focus should Asia have in our missions strategy? To what parts of Asia should we be sending missionaries?

Europe This information comes from page 73 of Operation World. Over 5% evangelical Faeroe Islands 28.8% Finland 12.1% United Kingdom 8.8% Norway 8.4% Latvia 7.0% Sweden 6.9% Romania 5.4% 1-5% evangelical Estonia 4.9% Switzerland 4.4% Netherlands 4.3% Iceland 3.8% Ukraine 3.8% Moldova 3.7% Denmark 3.5% Portugal 3.0% Gibraltar 2.9% Hungary 2.8% Vatican City 2.5% Germany 2.1% Bulgaria 1.9% Ireland 1.6% Belarus 1.3% Malta 1.3% Belgium 1.2% Monaco 1.2% Russia 1.2% Slovakia 1.2% Italy 1.1% Lithuania 1.1% France 1.0% Spain 1.0% Less than 1% evangelical Cyprus 0.8% Czech Republic 0.7% Serbia 0.6% Albania 0.5% Austria 0.5% Liechtenstein 0.5% Luxembourg 0.5% Andorra 0.4% Croatia 0.4% Greece 0.4% Poland 0.3% Macedonia 0.2% Bosnia 0.1% Montenegro 0.1% Slovenia 0.1% San Marino <0.1%

Are you surprised by the low numbers of evangelical Christians in most European nations? Whenever I show people these statistics, this is the continent that people seemed to be surprised about most because we often just assume that Europe is

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Christian. It certainly does have a rich Christian heritage but today that is by and large very nominal or largely forgotten and in some cases very much repudiated. Europe has many countries 16 in total with less than 1% evangelical Christian. These countries total 93 million people. Four of them belong in the 0.1% or under club Bosnia, Montenegro, Slovenia and tiny San Marino with a combined population of a little over 6 million people. Does it surprise you that Europe is less evangelical Christian than sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean? Should we be sending lots of missionaries to Europe? Should we be sending more missionaries to Europe than sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean?

Pacific This information comes from page 83 of Operation World. Over 5% evangelical Vanuatu 45.9% Marshall Islands 44.5% Solomon Islands 33.3% Papua New Guinea 25.7% Fiji 25.2% Micronesia 24.3% Palau 23.9% Norfolk Island 22.7% American Samoa 21.3% New Zealand 18.2% Samoa 18.0% Tuvalu 17.8% Tonga 15.5% Australia 14.5% Guam 14.2% Northern Mariana Islands 12.7% Cook Islands 12.6% Nauru 12.1% Niue 8.0% French Polynesia 7.2% Kiribati 7.2% New Caledonia 7.0% 1-5% evangelical Tokelau 3.4% Christmas Island 3.0% Cocos (Keeling) Islands 1.3% Less than 1% evangelical Wallis & Futuna Islands 0.9%

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As you can see, the Pacific is one of the most Christianised parts of the world. Only one country, the tiny French territory of Wallis and Futuna Islands, with 15,000 people, has less than 1% evangelical Christian. Most of the countries in the Pacific region have a very strong evangelical influence. Some of the Pacific island countries, such as Vanuatu, the Marshall Islands and the Solomon Islands, have a third or more of their population claiming to be evangelical Christians! These are some of the most Christian countries in the world! Should we be sending many missionaries to the Pacific islands, if at all?

World summary Unless youve looked at these statistics before, you were probably quite surprised at some of them. Which are the most Christian parts of the world? Which parts of the world are the least Christian? I hope your compassion has been stirred by those countries with really small Christian populations. Over one billion people (1,170,000,000 people to be a little more accurate) live in countries with less than 1% evangelical Christian. 925 million of these are in Asia, 152 million in the Muslim parts of Africa, 93 million in Europe, just 15,000 in the Pacific and just 6000 in North America. No countries in Latin America or the Caribbean are less than 1% evangelical Christian. Notice also the super-unreached places those marked as 0.1% or less. That is, there is only 1 evangelical Christian per 1000 people, or less. With those types of ratios, most people in those countries will spend their entire lives without ever having someone tell them about salvation through Jesus Christ. 248 million people live in these 21 countries or territories 169 million in Asia, 73 million in the Muslim parts of Africa, 6 million in Europe and just 6000 in North America. Of special mention is the under 0.1% club the Christian population is so small it doesnt even register as a significant statistic! Morocco (33 million people) and Tunisia (10 million people) in Africa, the tiny French territory of St. Pierre and Miquelon (6000 people) in North America, Afghanistan (29 million people), Turkey (76 million people), Turkmenistan (5 million people) and Yemen (24 million people) in Asia, and San Marino (32,000 people) in Europe. These statistics are not just numbers. They are people. They are people who have virtually no opportunity to hear of the message of repentance and faith in Christ Jesus, for the forgiveness of their sins and the eternal salvation of their souls. As we have noted, there are limitations regarding country by country statistics because some of the larger countries have a reasonable Christian presence when you look at the country average, yet large parts of those countries are unevangelised. Another way to look at the world is by ethnic group rather than country, which is what the Joshua Project does. They have some great resources at their website (www.joshuaproject.net), such as the map which is reproduced in Figure 5.1. On this world map, they have divided the world into three regions:

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Red the unreached or least reached, with less than 2% evangelical Christian. Yellow the formative or nominal church, with less than 2% evangelical Christian. The Christian percentage is the same as for the unreached areas but the difference is that these areas have a nominal Christian background, such as most of Europe. Green established or significant church, with more than 2% evangelical Christian.

Figure 5.1 Joshua Project map progress of the Gospel by people group

The Joshua Project states that out of a total world population of 6.93 billion people, 2.9 billion people are unreached with the Gospel 42% of the population of the world! This is a staggering number. This is not just a few hundred or a few thousand people. Those red areas on the map are 42% of the worlds population! If you look at the Joshua Project map in Figure 5.1, you will see the same trends we saw using the Operation World statistics. The main difference is that the Joshua Project information is more useful in seeing differences within countries, such as Nigeria, India, China and Indonesia. From this map we note that generally: The green areas (strong Christian witness) are: o The Americas o Sub-Saharan Africa o Pacific Islands o Parts of Asia including parts of China and South India.

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The red and yellow areas (little or no Christian witness) are: o Northern Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, which are predominantly Muslim. o Northern India o Thailand and Japan. o Most of Continental Europe.

What surprises you about this? Remember what was discussed in previous chapters? Where do we instinctively want to send missionaries? We tend to send them to the poor. We tend to send them to people of a different colour, race or language. Does this hold up as a sound method for choosing where to send missionaries? Note that Sub-Saharan Africa is poor and the people are black, yet they are mostly much more Christian than we are. Note that the people of Continental Europe are the same colour as most Australians,15 and are rich, yet they are post-Christian with very few evangelicals! Which group needs the most missionaries?

Overview of missionary focus to different parts of the world


Now, based on the research weve just done, and what weve been learning about where we should send missionaries, if it was up to you, where do you think we should be sending most of our missionaries? In previous editions, Operation World used to track how many missionaries went to each country in the world. Unfortunately though, when preparing the most recent 2010 edition, the Operation World team found that it was now too difficult to track how many missionaries go to each country any more. For this reason, for the next exercise we will have to use the data from the 2001 edition of Operation World, as it is the most recent edition that gives these statistics.16 For the sake of consistency, for this exercise only, I will also be using the evangelical percentage for each country as in the 2001 edition, which means that the evangelical percentage will be a little different from the percentages I have been quoting previously when I used the 2010 edition. I have selected a sample of eleven countries for this exercise. We are going to look at how many evangelical Christians are in each country, and at the ratio of missionaries to the total population. For example, if a country has a population of 10 million, and it has 1000 missionaries, its missionary ratio would be 1 missionary for every 10,000 people (10 million people divided by 1000 missionaries = 1:10,000). Here is the list of countries in one column, and the list of ratios in another. They have been mixed up. Your job is to think about them, grab a pencil, and match up the ratios with the countries in the way that it should be!

15

I am writing this from the context of a provincial Australian town where most of the people are white. I understand and rejoice that in many parts of Australia there is a greater mix of cultures and racial backgrounds than where I currently live. 16 Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandryk, Operation World, 21st Century (6th) edn. (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2001).

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Country: Poland 0.2% evangelical Syria 0.1% evangelical Kenya 35.8% evangelical Uganda 46.3% evangelical Belarus 1.5% evangelical Pakistan 0.4% evangelical Papua New Guinea 21.1% evangelical Georgia 1.4% evangelical Bangladesh 0.4% evangelical Vanuatu 31.7% evangelical Solomon Islands 34.6% evangelical

Ratio: 1 missionary for every 166,000 people 1 missionary for every 1,800 people 1 missionary for every 1,008,000 people 1 missionary for every 10,500 people 1 missionary for every 1,900 people 1 missionary for every 245,000 people 1 missionary for every 4,000 people 1 missionary for every 138,000 people 1 missionary for every 141,000 people 1 missionary for every 123,000 people 1 missionary for every 17,000 people

Finished? What did you come up with? When I give this exercise to people to do, this is invariably how they assign the ratios to each country as they think it should be: Country: Uganda 46.3% evangelical ---------------Kenya 35.8% evangelical ---------------Solomon Islands 34.6% evangelical ---Vanuatu 31.7% evangelical -------------Papua New Guinea 21.1% evangelical -Belarus 1.5% evangelical ---------------Georgia 1.4% evangelical ---------------Pakistan 0.4% evangelical ---------------Bangladesh 0.4% evangelical -----------Poland 0.2% evangelical ---------------Syria 0.1% evangelical -----------------Ratio: 1 missionary for every 1,008,000 people 1 missionary for every 245,000 people 1 missionary for every 166,000 people 1 missionary for every 141,000 people 1 missionary for every 138,000 people 1 missionary for every 123,000 people 1 missionary for every 17,000 people 1 missionary for every 10,500 people 1 missionary for every 4,000 people 1 missionary for every 1,900 people 1 missionary for every 1,800 people

Why do people invariably match the countries and ratios up this way? There are two reasons: 1. It is logical. After all, shouldnt the countries with the least numbers of Christians receive the greatest number of missionaries? Therefore, we ought to send the highest numbers of missionaries to places like Syria and Poland. On the other hand, the countries with large numbers of evangelical Christians dont need so many missionaries so it makes sense not to send so many missionaries to them so that resources can be better allocated to those countries that need them the most. 2. It is biblical. In previous chapters we learnt about the biblical concept of mission. It is the proclamation of the Good News of Jesus to the ethne the outsiders. That is, to non-believers. So mission is taking the Good News to where the most nonbelievers are. So it is biblical to send the most missionaries to those places with the lowest numbers of Christians. Okay, lets now look at reality! This was the actual ratio of missionaries in 2001:

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Country: Uganda 46.3% evangelical ---------------Kenya 35.8% evangelical ---------------Solomon Islands 34.6% evangelical ---Vanuatu 31.7% evangelical -------------Papua New Guinea 21.1% evangelical -Belarus 1.5% evangelical ---------------Georgia 1.4% evangelical ---------------Pakistan 0.4% evangelical ---------------Bangladesh 0.4% evangelical -----------Poland 0.2% evangelical ---------------Syria 0.1% evangelical ------------------

Ratio: 1 missionary for every 17,000 people 1 missionary for every 10,500 people 1 missionary for every 4,000 people 1 missionary for every 1,800 people 1 missionary for every 1,800 people 1 missionary for every 123,000 people 1 missionary for every 166,000 people 1 missionary for every 245,000 people 1 missionary for every 141,000 people 1 missionary for every 138,000 people 1 missionary for every 1,008,000 people

Are you surprised by this? I hope so! And perhaps shocked! The very countries that need the most missionaries are getting the least. How is the church ever going to grow in Syria if only 1 missionary per million people is going there? How is the church in Bangladesh ever going to grow if one missionary per 141,000 people is going there? Yet countries with very high Christian populations are receiving the lions share of missionaries. In Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, where about every third person claims to be an evangelical Christian, there is one missionary for every few thousand people! No wonder the church isnt growing much in the unreached countries. No wonder they are staying unreached. They are staying unreached because we are not sending most of our missionaries to them. Not only is that not logical, it is also not biblical. Christs name is not being proclaimed and therefore glorified amongst 40% of the worlds population. What happened to the Great Commission? What happened to Jesus command to us to make disciples from all the outsiders, from all the nonbelievers? These figures about where we send most of our missionaries sound hard to believe but they are true. Think about the missionaries you know personally or have heard of. Then look up Operation World and see how many Christians are already in those countries where they work. Look at the Joshua Project Map in Figure 5.1 and see if they are in a red or yellow area, or if they are in a green area. Various studies have been done to see how many missionaries actually go to the neediest peoples on the earth. Different research methodologies produce different results, but the most generous say that only about 10% of all missionaries go to the unreached. Remember the unreached are not just a few thousand people. They are over a third of the people who live on this planet. Other studies put the figure as low 0.1% of missionaries and missionary giving as being directed to the unreached. For the remainder of this book we will use the mid-figure of about 5%. Somewhere around a third of the worlds population havent heard the Gospel and we are only sending 5% of our missionaries to them! In terms of finances, Figure 5.2 shows how missions spending is distributed.

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Allocation of world-wide missions giving


Unevangelised World 2% Evangelised NonChristian World 12%

Christian World 86%

Figure 5.2 Allocation of world-wide missions giving17 It reminds me of Jesus analogy of the harvest in Matthew 9:36-38: Matthew 9:36-38 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; 38 therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Can you imagine a farmer who takes his combine harvester to harvest his field and harvests not even two-thirds of it? Then he goes over that two-thirds over and over again and almost totally ignores the remaining third of perfectly good wheat. It is illogical. Yet, that is what we are doing with the world harvest. Jesus saw the crowds and had compassion on all of them. He saw the whole harvest. Do we have compassion on these 42% of the worlds population who are unreached? You may not know them personally. You may never have heard of their ethnic group or even their country. But they are not just numbers or statistics. They are people for whom Christ died and to whom He commanded us to go and preach the Gospel. Lets now look at what some of the sources say about the allocation of mission resources: 90% of foreign missionaries work among already reached people groups. 10% work among unreached people groups.18
17

Graph drawn from data obtained from David Barrett, and Todd Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30 - AD 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2001), 40. 18 Ralph Winter and Bruce Koch, Finishing the Task: The Unreached Peoples Challenge, in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader , eds. Ralph Winter and Steven Hawthorne, 4th edn. (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2009), 543.

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Target groups where foreign mission funds are spent: 87% goes for work among those already Christian. 12% for work among already evangelised, but Non-Christian. 1% for work among the unevangelised and unreached people.19 Only 0.1% of all Christian giving is directed toward mission efforts in the 38 most unevangelised countries in the world.20 Today there are about 453,000 missionaries from all denominations of Christendom on the field. However, only 6-7% work among unreached peoples most work among reached areas of the world.21 Distribution of Protestant Missionaries among cultural blocks: 74% among nominal Christians, 8% among Buddhists, 8% among tribal peoples, 2% among Hindus, 6% among Muslims, 2% among Chinese folk religions, 4% among non-religious/atheists, 1% among Jewish peoples.22 Money that goes toward Unreached Peoples: $310 million (thats only 1% of what is given to Missions.). Thats also how much Americans in 2011 spent on Halloween costumes (for their pets). The $310 million (going toward Unreached People Groups) is only 0.001% of the $30.5 trillion income of Christians. (for every $100,000 that Christians make, they give $1 to the unreached.)23 40% of the church's entire global foreign mission resources are being deployed to just 10 over saturated countries already possessing strong citizen-run home ministries.24 There are over 3.6 billion unreached people in the world today. It is estimated that only 4% of foreign missionaries today are working to reach these unreached people. The other 96% are working in unevangelised, but not unreached areas. According to the World Christian Encyclopaedia of all the money designated for "missions" in the U.S. only 5.4% is used for foreign missions. Of that 5.4%, only 0.37% is used to take the gospel to unreached people who don't have access to the gospel. That's about two cents out of every one-hundred dollars given to missions! The rest goes towards efforts to further evangelise reached people.25 Of the more than 135,000 North American missionaries now actively commissioned, fewer than 10,000 are working among totally unreached
19

R. Mark Baxter, The Coming Revolution: Because Status Quo Missions Won't Finish the Job (Mustang, USA: Tate Publishing, 2007), 12. 20 Data from Barrett and Johnson, 656. 21 Kate Dempsey, July Why Go? The Travelling Team, http://www.thetravelingteam.org/onthebrink/2007/july-why. 22 Dempsey. 23 The Travelling Team, General Statistics, http://www.thetravelingteam.org/stats. 24 Barrett and Johnson, 3. 25 Bryan Lee, Lesson 4 The 10/40 Window, The Travelling Team, http://www.thetravelingteam.org/team_resources/12-lessons/lesson-4-1040-window.

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peoples. The vast majority are working among the existing churches or where the Gospel already is preached.26 Christians still give only about 1% of our money to Christian causes. Of this money given to Christian causes, 95% is spent on the Church. Less than 1% is used to reach the 28% of the world [which has little access to the Gospel]. Only 2-4% of Christian cross-cultural witnesses serve this 28%. Projections show that the percentage of the least evangelised peoples will not diminish significantly in the next several decades. The world percentage of Christians is also not projected to grow if ministry and mission continue to follow current patterns.27 The number of current Unreached People Group missionaries compared to the total 2 billion Christians in the world equals the same probability of being in a plane accident (0.0005%). . You have a better chance of being in a plane crash than being one of the few missionaries to the unreached out of the total 2 billion Christians in the world.28 The exact figures used by various researchers differ slightly depending on their methodologies but you get the picture only a small fraction of the global missions effort is being expended on the people who need it the most and they are about a third of the worlds population. Is this right? Is it biblical? Why is this so? The following are perhaps some reasons why we still send the bulk of our missionaries to places with a high Christian population, oftentimes higher than our own sending country: People are confused about what missions really is. There is ignorance about the numbers and statistics mentioned in this chapter. Remember that behind these statistics are people whom Christ loves. Colonial and patronising attitudes to those of different colour and race prevent us from letting go and handing over ministry to locals. In the past just about everyone outside of Europe was both poor and unreached, so that in the past the same people who were poor were also unreached. This is not the case anymore! We often do not keep abreast of what God is doing. For example, the growth of the church in South America has only been in the last generation or two. Mongolia was completely unreached just 23 years ago with no known believers. Now over 1% of its population are Christians!

26 27

K. P. Yohannan, Revolution in World Missions (Carrolton, USA: GFA Books, 2004), 164. S. Kent Parks, What Happened to People Group Thinking? Joshua Project, http://www.joshuaproject.net/people-group-thinking.php. 28 The Travelling Team, General Statistics.

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There is an incorrect perception that most of the unreached countries are closed and that it is not possible for missionaries to enter and minister in them. While it is true that many unreached countries do not grant missionary visas (although some do), there are many other ways to enter and live in these countries on other types of visas. There are only a handful of countries that are impossible or exceedingly difficult to enter and live in. What I call the Snowball Effect. How do people choose which country they will go to as a missionary? It is quite often from meeting a missionary from that country or reading or hearing about them. Where are most of the missionaries working? Most are working in already reached places. That means we hear about the ministry that is going on in reached places far more than we hear about the unreached places. So we tend to go as missionaries and send resources to the places we hear about the most, which are the already reached places. Hence the snowball effect. More and more people go to the reached places, which increases the exposure of the reached places so more and more people go to them. Conversely, we rarely if ever hear about the places with no or few missionaries because there are no or few missionaries to tell us about them. Because we dont hear about them, we dont send many missionaries to them, yet they need missionaries the most!

Now do you really think that it is true that most missionaries go to the already reached places? Think about the missionaries you know personally or have heard of. How many missionaries do you know working in the Pacific Islands, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America or the Caribbean? Most of us can probably think of several. Now, how many missionaries do you know working in the Middle East or North Africa? Most of us probably know far fewer, if any. Yet which of those areas needs your missionary friends the most? The irony of all this is that many of these countries to which we are still sending missionaries often have more Christians than Australia, and many of these are now sending out their own missionaries! China now sends more missionaries than the United States. India, South Korea and Nigeria send more missionaries than the United Kingdom does. The Philippines sends more missionaries than Australia does.29 Are we keeping up with what God is doing in the world?

What about the poor?


Many of these locations that we have been looking at that have high evangelical populations are also poor, and some desperately so. Does that mean we shouldnt send missionaries to them? What do you think? My opinion is that, no, we shouldnt send missionaries to them; however, we should help them in their material poverty. Remember Paul in Romans 15? He was concerned for the poor but he saw physical poverty and spiritual poverty as being separate things.

29

Page 951 of the 2010 edition of Operation World has a table of some of the more prolific mission sending countries.

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Romans 15:26-27 For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. 27 For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. That is, Paul recognises that the Jews in Israel were spiritually rich but materially poor, whereas the Romans were materially rich but spiritually poor! So we should help the poor. Sometimes that can mean sending people to serve them as aid workers but more often than not it means sending money but thats another topic beyond the scope of this book! The main thing is that we shouldnt call helping the poor missions! Why not? Because biblically it isnt missions. As weve seen, missions is proclamation of the Good News to the unbelievers. That is, to all the ethne who havent heard the Good News, to where Christ is not yet named, to the parts of the harvest field that havent been harvested. Helping the poor is helping the poor it is not missions. They are two separate things. By combining missions together with helping the poor, we lose the ability to track properly how we are actually going with allocating missionaries and resources to the unreached because its all mixed in together. It can lead to some very condescending colonial attitudes when Westerners are still doing things in other countries churches that the locals should be doing themselves. We often do this because we have confused spiritual poverty with material poverty. Just because someone is poor doesnt mean they are incompetent to lead and pastor their churches, to teach the Bible, to train future pastors and to translate Scripture.

Having said all that, in many parts of the world there is still a big overlap between the materially and spiritually poor. For example, Northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Central Asia are both poor and unreached. In those cases you may well combine aid work and missionary work. However, in other places this model wont work. Some places are spiritually rich but materially poor, such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific Islands. They need our material assistance but usually they dont need our help in church ministry. In fact in many cases, we can learn more from them than they can learn from us. On the other hand, there are spiritually poor places which are materially rich, such as most of Continental Europe and Japan. They generally dont need us to help them materially, but they sure need to hear the message of the Gospel!

Why havent we completed the task after nearly 2000 years?


Have we completed the task that Jesus gave us of proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sins to all the unbelievers? I think the answer is clearly, no. We have only completed two-thirds of the task: one third of the world still waits for us to go and proclaim Jesus message to them. 62

How long have we had to complete this task? Almost 2000 years. Is 2000 years not enough time to complete this task? Why havent we finished the task Jesus gave us? Here are some possible reasons: 1. Often, Christians dont understand that the Good News is not just for them. Just like the disciples in Acts 1:6, people think that the Good News is just for their own people. For example, when William Carey wanted to go from England to India in order to preach the Gospel, his church didnt understand why he wanted to do that. They thought that the Good News was only for Europeans. But is that what the Bible says? They arent the only people to have thought that. Often when missionaries prepare to go overseas to an unreached country, many of their friends and family in Australia dont understand why they are going. Friends and family will often tell prospective missionaries that Australia has lots of unbelievers, and therefore there is no need to go overseas. Ive even had Acts 1:8 quoted at me like this: Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and then in all Judea and then Samaria, and then to the end of the earth. But as weve already seen in chapter 3, remember there are no thens in Acts 1:8! If someone quotes Acts 1:8 to you with thens in it, they are misquoting. This is Acts 1:8 as it appears in my Bible: Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. The imperative to preach to the end of the earth is just as strong as to preach in Jerusalem. We need to recognise that the Good News is for all people. Where there are people who have not heard the Good News, we need to go to them in order to preach to them, so that some of them might accept Jesus. In Acts we see how the apostles and other believers travelled throughout the Roman Empire in order to preach the Good News to everybody. 2. Throughout its history, the church has often been distracted from its goal. For many centuries the so-called church didnt even know the truth about the Good News! Even after Martin Luther and the Reformation, the church has often been distracted from its task, even amongst evangelical Christians. For example, many people spend much time and energy splitting theological hairs. Of course doctrine is important, vitally important, but when arguments about doctrine distract us from our task of proclamation, it is not good. Correct doctrine is very important, but so too is the spreading of the Good News. Throughout Acts and the Letters we notice that the apostles and leaders of the early church concentrated on correct doctrine and on the spreading of the Good News. In more recent times, many believers have been distracted from our task by the Prosperity Doctrine, or Health and Wealth Gospel. Believers focus their energy on how to become a successful business man or woman and how to succeed in life and

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become rich. In the process they forget to proclaim the Good News or at least the Good News that Christ taught. Others are distracted by overly focussing on the modern nation of Israel. I have met people who want to become so-called missionaries to the Jews in Russia in order to help them immigrate to Israel. However, they dont preach the Good News to them they only support their wish to immigrate to Israel. Why? For what reason do they do this? Where in the Bible does it tell us that the task of the church is to help Jews immigrate to Israel? What use is it for a Jew to immigrate to Israel and never hear the Good News and then die in his or her sins and go to hell? Better that they stay in Russia if it means that they hear the Gospel and inherit eternal life! The resources spent on projects like these could be better used doing what Jesus actually did tell us to do, which is to proclaim the Gospel! Politics is another potential distraction. There is certainly a place for Christians in the political arena as a voice for righteousness. However, when we are tempted to try and solve the worlds problems politically and to try to make our nation Christian by political means, we have lost sight of the fact that God has told us that this age will have trials and sin and pain until Christ returns. We can certainly use politics and other means to mitigate the effect of sin on our society, but if the time and energy put into politics distracts us from our primary task, then that is not good. Christians can be distracted by a myriad of other good tasks too, not all of them wrong. Some of them can in fact be very noble endeavours. Some of them can even help us in proclaiming the Gospel. However, if any of them distract us from our primary task of making disciples, then we need to re-evaluate what we are doing. Throughout Acts we notice that the early church focussed strongly on the main task the proclamation of the Good News and the discipling of those who repented of their sins and came to faith in Jesus Christ. 3. We have not adapted to other languages and other cultures. As we shall see in the next chapter, the main source of contention amongst the early believers was about adapting the Good News to the Gentiles. Notice the opinion of the Apostle Paul: 1 Corinthians 9:20-23 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. 23 I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings. Of course we need to be careful that we dont compromise the Good News as we adapt it for other cultures. But on the other hand, we need to be careful that we dont reckon that our culture is part of the Gospel! One reason we study the Bible deeply is so that we are able to discern what part of our church life is part of the Gospel and what is just part of our culture!

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4. We havent been focused enough on sending missionaries to the unreached places. Our resources are not correctly balanced, which is what this chapter is all about. In fact, there probably are already enough missionaries serving overseas. Its just that they arent distributed in an effective, or biblical way. Instead of sending 95% of our missionaries to the two-thirds of the world where there is already a Christian presence, we should be sending the majority of our missionaries to those places where Christ is not yet named. 5. Its personal. What do I mean by this? This book has grown out of a missions course that I teach. Normally, when we get to this stage of the course, my students are horrified to discover that so few of our resources are directed at those who have never heard the Gospel. They are astounded that 95% of missionaries work in areas that already have a reasonable Christian presence while less than 5% of our resources are directed at the 2 billion people who have never heard. They ask, Why is this so? It shouldnt be like that! Why dont those missionaries in reached areas go to the unreached areas? Why arent we sending more of our missionaries to the unreached rather than to the reached? Then I ask them about the missionaries they know. I ask them about their friends and their family members who are missionaries. Then I ask them where these missionaries they know are serving. Most of the time, my students missionary friends and family members are serving among the more reached parts of the world. Thats when it gets real when we see that these statistics are real. Most missionaries we know serve in the more reached parts of the world! But that also makes it more difficult. No-one wants to say that their uncle or cousin or friend who is serving in Zambia or Vanuatu or the Caribbean is using up missionary resources that could perhaps be better used in Tunisia, Uzbekistan or Bangladesh. Its not just my students who battle with this I also have friends who serve in these places. These people do good work. Should we say that they shouldnt be there? When we know the missionaries first hand who serve in more reached areas, it is now very difficult to say, Why is this so? It shouldnt be like that! Why are you there? The result is that we justify our friends missionary service in a more reached country and point out the special case reason why that particular missionary still needs to work there. Now, in very rare situations, there may be special cases where we may still, from time to time, need missionaries in somewhere like Kenya or the Solomon Islands. But the problem is that if we make a special case for our particular friends serving in a relatively reached country, well, everyone else who also knows a missionary serving in an already reached country could also make a special case for their missionary friend. If we do that for everyone, then the problem remains unchanged. 95% of our missionaries will remain in reached countries and we will still only have 5% of our missionaries in unreached countries. Those 2 billion unreached will remain unreached. It is hard when it gets personal with people we know. However, what we have to learn to do is to also get personal with those statistics in books like Operation World. Those numbers in a table that say that Mauritania only has 0.1% evangelical Christians are not just numbers. They are people. 99.9% of Mauritanians that is, 999 people out of every 1000 real people like you and me have not repented and trusted in Christ and there is virtually no-one in their country to tell them that they need to do that. We need to get personal with this. Dont be afraid to ask your friend who works in a more reached country if they would consider relocating to somewhere

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like Mauritania. Dont be afraid to redirect your own resources, including your financial support, to those few missionaries and ministries who are working where Christ is not yet known. Yes, it will be difficult to redirect support away from your friends working in a more reached country. But remember, this is personal. Just because we may have never met a Mauritanian, or even heard of the place before now, doesnt mean that we can ignore them because our friends are missionaries to a more reached place and we dont want to offend or upset them. Rather, we need to be offended and upset that people in Mauritania and places like it have not yet heard the Gospel, despite Jesus clear command, given nearly 2000 years ago, to take it to them.

Dear friends, we have still not completed the task that Christ gave us nearly 2000 years ago! In this world there is still much work to be done in order to complete this task. With the help of the Holy Spirit, let us complete the job Jesus gave us to do!

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Chapter 6 Cross-cultural Considerations


Weve already touched on the fact that missions often involves cross-cultural ministry. However, remember that the purpose of mission is not to be cross-cultural. The purpose of mission is to proclaim the Good News to non-believers, particularly where non-believers live in lands where Christ is not yet named. Sometimes that will be within our own culture or to similar cultures. However, reaching those places where Christ is not yet known often requires us to cross cultural barriers. We will start this chapter by looking at an issue in the early church that was both cultural and religious.

Paul and the Jewish-Gentile debate


1 Corinthians 9:19-23 For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. 20 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. 23 I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings. What did Paul mean in these verses? Was he referring to a cultural thing or a religious thing? The answer is that it was a bit of both. Much of his discussion refers to the issue of the Jewish Law and whether or not Gentile Christians had to keep the Jewish Law. This was one of the major points of contention in the New Testament church. Lets look at the Council of Jerusalem where they resolved this debate.

The Jerusalem Council of Acts 15.1-35 Acts 15:1-21 But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. 2 And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question. 3 So, being sent on their way by the church, they passed

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through both Phoenicia and Samaria, describing in detail the conversion of the Gentiles, and brought great joy to all the brothers. 4 When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they declared all that God had done with them. 5 But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up and said, It is necessary to circumcise them and to order them to keep the law of Moses.
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The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter. And after there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, Brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. 8 And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, 9 and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith. 10 Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? 11 But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.
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And all the assembly fell silent, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles. 13 After they finished speaking, James replied, "Brothers, listen to me. 14 Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name. 15 And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written,
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After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen; I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, 17 that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things 18 known from of old.
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Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, 20 but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood. 21 For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues. In Acts 15, we see the debate over, and resolution of, the sharpest disagreement within the early church. In verse 1 we see that some Jewish believers claimed that every believer needed to be circumcised in order to be saved. Now, they didnt just mean circumcision, but they also had in mind the keeping of the whole Jewish Law (verse 5). Notice also that Acts 15 is not the only place in Scripture where this dispute is found. The issue of Gentiles keeping the Jewish Law is also the main theme of Galatians, which was probably written about the same time as the Jerusalem Council was held.

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Imagine that you were one of these Jewish believers. For you, the Jewish Law had been the centre of your faith. It would be natural that you would claim that all believers must follow the Jewish Law in addition to faith in Christ. But Paul and Barnabas very strongly disagreed with these people. Why? The central point of Pauls theology and therefore of the New Testament, is that we receive salvation only through faith in Christ. We cannot add any requirements onto that. If we add other requirements to faith, we claim that faith in Christ is insufficient to be saved. We weaken the power of the death of Jesus Christ. Of course, as believers we cannot just live the way we want to. So what is the difference between Judaism and Christianity when it comes to keeping the Law? We dont follow the Old Testament Jewish Law but we follow the Law of Christ. 1 Corinthians 9:21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. [my emphasis] Following the Law is not the requirement to be saved but the result of being saved. It is the evidence that a person has indeed been saved by Jesus Christ.

Therefore the Jerusalem Council was very important. Thanks to their decision, the church decided that we receive salvation only through the grace of God (Acts 15:11). Of course, this was not just the decision of the church but it was the decision of the Holy Spirit, or more accurately, the decision of the Holy Spirit who worked through this church council, as Acts 15.28 reminds us: Acts 15:28 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements. For the Jerusalem Council, this issue was mainly a religious question, not a cultural one. Notwithstanding this, we can still learn cultural principles from this issue, especially from Pauls statement in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23. A clearer instance of a Bible passage dealing with cultural adaptation is to be found in Pauls visit to Athens in Acts 17:22-31. Acts 17:22-31 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, To the unknown god. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, in the hope

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that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for In him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said, For we are indeed his offspring.
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Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. 30 The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. This is a remarkable sermon because some aspects of it are very different from Pauls sermons to Jews, but other aspects are unchanged. What is unchanged is the central message: the death and the resurrection of Jesus and the call to repentance (verses 3031). However, the way he presented the message was adapted to a great extent for the culture of his Athenian audience. Firstly, he observed and noticed where they were at religiously (verses 22-23). He then used their current religious practice to explain its deficiencies and then explained who the real God is. Perhaps most interestingly of all, he quoted not from the Old Testament, but from some of their own poets! Notice, he didnt ascribe any sort of authority to them, but noticed some points of contact in which their poets had made some true statements and then used them to make the Athenians think.

Cultural differences
In the old days, missionaries would travel and export their culture. For example, Africans converts were made to dress in western clothes. Now we are more attuned to cultural adaptation, but many issues still remain. It should be noted that this cross-cultural stuff is not just useful for overseas work but also in Australia because we have many cultures in Australia. Even the most monocultural provincial towns are becoming more multi-cultural. There are a few key terms that are used to describe what influences people in the way they think about and view the world around them:

Culture Culture is a societys integrated system of ideas, feelings and values and their associated patterns of behaviour, which are shared, organised and regulated. For example, Australians and Mongolians use a different procedure in getting on and off public transport. In Australia, when a bus stops, the people who want to get on the bus wait for those getting off the bus to actually get off before they try and get on. In

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Mongolia, the people getting on the bus push to get on as soon as the bus stops and the people getting off have to push their way through those getting on. People from both cultures dont think about what they are doing and why. The only time they notice it is when they go to a different culture and they get on and off the bus differently. Another example is the different attitudes to punctuality between Australians and Czechs. If you are invited to dinner in Australia, it is acceptable to turn up about 10, or in some parts of the country, even 15 minutes late. If you actually turn up exactly on time you might even catch your host off guard!. However, in the Czech Republic you are expected to be exactly on time. One minute late is too late! In fact, the meal is timed to be cooked and ready to eat as soon as the guests arrive on time. I remember once our family was invited for a meal with a local family in the Czech Republic. We turned up 10 minutes late, which is quite normal for Australians. Our hosts were not impressed. The food was already going cold as it had already been sitting on the table for 10 minutes waiting for us to show up!

Religion Religion is a peoples belief in a divine being(s), theology, dogma and its effect on behaviour, ethics and morality. It is very closely tied to culture and this poses challenges for Christians trying to adapt Christianity to different cultures. Missionaries must be able to discern when an issue is purely cultural or when it includes religious aspects too. This is not always easy as the two are often intertwined to some extent.

Language Language is not just the words but the thought patterns that people use to communicate with each other. There is no such thing as a direct translation from one language to another, which is why there are different Bible translations. Language affects culture because it affects the way people think. For example, many languages of the world have two forms of you one for use with friends and those lower than you in hierarchy and one for use with strangers or people higher than you in hierarchy. It is important to use the right you. The word you is a very common word in conversation and so we can see how languages that have two forms of you tend to reinforce hierarchy within that culture, whereas languages that only have one form of you, such as English, dont have that reinforcement.

Worldview This is the underlying way that people see and interpret reality. It is the hardest to define and discover, yet everything else flows from this deep seated way of viewing the world. An example of this is the difference between Australians and Americans. On the surface, both cultures appear quite similar, but deep down our worldviews are very

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different. For example, our cultures are similar in that we use similar rules for dress and etiquette. Our sense of right and wrong as reflected in our laws is very similar. But at a deeper level, we view the world quite differently. For example, Australian and American humour is very different. Australian humour is dry and is often deprecating, both to the person speaking as well as to his audience. Most Americans usually dont even realise that we are being humorous, or if they do, take great offence at some of the things we say. On the other hand, Australians often find American humour corny and cheesy. On a different aspect of worldview, Australians and Americans have quite different takes on their place in the world. Americans are much more idealistic about the role of their country in the world and take great pride in outward shows of patriotism, whereas Australians view their country as just one of many in the world and are not as interested in outward shows of patriotism. Thats not to say we arent patriotic. Its just that we express that patriotism in different ways. Worldview is very dependent on upbringing, and even within one culture there can be great differences in worldview. An example of this is generational passing on of voting preferences. Many people vote Labor or Liberal because thats what their parents did. Its not that they blindly vote for their parents party, but because their parents party reflects the same worldview that they themselves hold and which has been inculcated in them since birth. For example, the Labor party platform is based on the worldview of the rights of labour over capital and the right for labour to organise. Conversely, the Liberal party platform is based on the worldview of the rightness of the free market and liberal economic policies. It is hard to move outside of and understand a worldview that you have not been inculcated with since birth.

Here are some specific cultural differences that missionaries need to be aware of and to adjust to when working in a different culture: Different perceptions of time. Different guest/host relationships. Different taboos. For example, in Mongolia, if you accidentally step on someones foot, you must immediately apologise and shake the persons hand, otherwise great offence will be taken. In Central Asia, it is taboo to place books, especially holy ones, on the floor. Never place your Bible on the floor during a church service or home group meeting in Central Asia!

Individual versus community In the west we see ourselves as individuals, whereas in many other cultures of the world, people see themselves more as part of a community. Decisions are made as a community. If individuals become Christians they are ostracised from their communities. Because of this, some people have advocated evangelising whole groups rather than individuals, frequently targeting the decision-maker in that group. They state this is biblical because:

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Ethne means ethnic group or people group, and therefore Matthew 28:19 tells us to disciple ethnic groups rather than individuals. However, as we saw in chapter 2, ethne does not mean people groups but rather is a general term to describe all those who are outside your own group. Also, the grammar of Matthew 28:19 would indicate that we are to make disciples from all the ethne, and not that every single person from a particular ethnos would actually become a disciple. When the Philippian jailer in Acts 16:25-34 and Cornelius in Acts 10 converted to Christianity, their whole families were baptised along with them. That is certainly true, but in both cases there is every indication that each member of their families also believed for themselves. On the other hand, there are plenty of other cases throughout the New Testament of individuals rather than whole families or communities coming to Christ.

One danger of targeting the key decision-maker in a family or social group is that while other members of that family or social group may appear to believe, it is often not something that is heartfelt and genuine, and therefore they may not be truly converted. They just go through the motions of believing out of respect for the decision-maker, not because they have personally come under conviction of sin and repented for themselves.

What the Good News is and what it is not


So the question is how do we adapt ourselves, our message and our church for different cultures? If we dont adapt enough, we wont relate to others and we will bring unnecessary hurdles to cross from our own culture. We will be converting people to westernism as well as, or instead of, Christianity. But there is the opposite and greater danger of going too far in adapting to other cultures and religions. We could help bring into being a syncretistic church! For example, the Roman Catholic Church in South America has often encouraged the mixing of Catholic belief and practice with that of the pre-Christian pagan religions of the region. So how do we know to what measure we should adapt for other cultures? The first thing we have to do is to know what the Gospel is, and what it is not. How do we know that? We know that by knowing our Bibles. A lot of what we think is Christianity is actually our own culture or tradition.

The church service Think about the format of the worship service of the church you attend. What components of the service are biblical imperatives, and what components are just your cultures way of worshipping God? What components of your churchs worship service could be altered in a different cultural setting and what components must not be changed? To help you think this through this, here is what the Bible says about New Testament worship services: 73

Acts 2:42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Acts 2:46-47 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Ephesians 5:18-20 And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, 19 addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, 20 giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. From these verses we can see that the essential components of a biblical church service are: Teaching (Acts 2:42). Fellowship (Acts 2:42). Lords Supper (Acts 2:42). Prayers (Acts 2:42). Praising God (Acts 2:47), which includes singing and using music (Ephesians 5:19-20).30 Evangelism evidenced in people being saved (Acts 2:47). So provided a church service has these things, it is fine and good to adapt it to a local culture. For example, in many Asian cultures, you may find the people engage better in a worship service if they all sit on the floor in a circle around a meal. They will eat their meal while talking to each other. After the meal is finished, they will sing songs praising God with their native musical instruments and in the local musical style. The preacher then will put his Bible on a small raised stand to keep it off the ground, read from it and preach. The sermon will teach the Christians, as well as explain the Gospel for any non-believers present. Interspersed during the service they will pray, with their hands open, facing up, and resting on their crossed legs. Is this sort of church service okay? It has all the components of a biblical church service, so yes it is fine!

Other cultural differences There is the well-known anecdote of a conversation at an international womens conference. Towards the end of the conference, the German delegates got together and complained about the worldliness of the American delegates. I cant believe how worldly these American Christians are with all the make-up they wear, one of the German women said as she passed around her pack of cigarettes to her friends and lit up. Ill leave you to think about the rights and wrongs of that one!
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The word psallo in Ephesians 5:19, translated in the English Standard Version as making melody, actually refers to the plucking of stringed instruments. Yes, there is biblical evidence for using musical instruments in worship!

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Alcohol consumption is another area where Christians from various cultures differ in their opinions. In many European cultures, drinking beer is like drinking juice and you would be hard pressed to find an evangelical pastor who doesnt drink! Yet, in many churches in Australia and America, any sort of drinking is regarded as taboo. Who is right and who is wrong? Could it also depend on what alcohol might be associated with in each respective culture? Here are a few other cultural considerations you might want to think about in the light of Scripture: Sunday / Sabbath observance. When does the church meet in Muslim countries where Sunday is a day of work and the common day off for everyone is Friday? Christmas / Easter: What do you do if you are in a country where these are normal working days? In many cultures it is acceptable and even desirable for first cousins to marry each other. Is that okay? Arranged marriages are they okay? What about if non-Christian parents arrange for their Christian daughter to marry a non-Christian man? Different forms of prayer. Many Christians in Muslim countries close their prayers by wiping their faces with their hands in a manner similar to what Muslims do when they pray. Is that okay?

The C5 Insider movement Islam has proven especially resistant to the Good News. We noticed this in the previous chapter when we did our survey of Christianity in the world today. Most of the least-Christian countries in the world are Muslim. There are many reasons for this. The most obvious one, which we looked at in the previous chapter, is that we are sending hardly any missionaries to these places. It is not surprising that we dont see many Muslims becoming Christians if we arent sending many people to them to tell them about Christ. Although the sheer lack of missionaries is probably the main reason few Muslims have become Christians, there are other reasons too that make it hard for Muslims to repent of their sins and follow Christ. These include the following: In Muslim cultures, religion and culture are very tightly intertwined. If a Muslim becomes a Christian he or she faces enormous cultural challenges in trying to live for Christ in a culture that is Islamic. There are severe penalties for leaving Islam. At best, a Muslim who converts to Christ is likely to be ostracised or even expelled by his or her family. At worst, he or she could be killed by his or her family or community. In some countries, they could be fined, imprisoned or even executed by their government.

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To address these issues, some missionaries and missiologists have advocated a very extreme form of contextualisation called Insider Movements and posited a C scale of enculturation as follows:31 C1 Model: Traditional church using non- Christian churches in Muslim countries indigenous language. that exist as islands, removed from the culture. Christians exist as an ethnic/religious minority. C2 Model: Traditional church using Church uses indigenous language, but in indigenous language. all its cultural forms is far removed from the broader Islamic culture. C3 Model: Contextualised Christ-centred Style of worship, dress, etc. are loosely communities using Muslims language from the indigenous culture. Local rituals and non-religiously indigenous cultural and traditions, if used, are purged of forms. religious elements. May meet in a church or more religiously neutral location. Majority of congregation is of Muslim background and call themselves Christians. C4 Model: Contextualised Christ-centred Similar to C3 except believers worship communities using Muslims language looks like Muslim worship, they keep the and biblically permissible cultural and fast, avoid pork and alcohol, use Islamic Islamic forms. terms and dress. Community is almost entirely of Muslim background. Though highly contextualised, believers are not seen as Muslims by the Muslim community. Believers call themselves followers of Isa Al-Misah, Jesus the Messiah. C5 Model: Christ-centred communities Believers remain legally and socially of Messianic Muslims who have within Islamic community. Aspects of accepted Jesus as Lord and Saviour. Islam incompatible with the Bible are rejected or if possible, reinterpreted. Believers may remain active in the mosque. Unsaved Muslims may view C5 believers as deviant and may expel them from the Islamic community. If sufficient numbers permit, a C5 Messianic mosque may be established. Bill Nikides explains the C5 level thus: C5 describes the closest accommodation to Islam that is possible and still encourages the Lordship of Christ. C5 describes a community of Messianic Muslims who have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior. They remain legally and socially within the ummah. They call themselves Muslims without any
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The following table with definitions is taken from, Jim Leffel, Contextualization: Building Bridges to the Muslim Community, Xenos Christian Fellowship, http://www.xenos.org/ministries/crossroads/OnlineJournal/issue1/contextu.htm.

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reference to their relationship to Christ. Believers are free to remain active in the mosque, although actual practice varies. They perform the salat like any other Muslim; though the content of their prayers may vary. They affirm the shahada (creed), underlining the prophethood of Muhammad and may go on Hajj. They may participate in their own communities for worship. In certain C5 communities, evangelical Christians can legally convert to Islam and join the mosque community. They seem to gather justification for their ideas by drawing parallels between what they do in a Muslim context and the early co-existence of churches and synagogues in the first century, focusing on the apparent lack of coercion concerning Samaritan or Gentile conversions. Joshua Massey, an apologist for Insider movements, goes so far as to posit Pauls apparent ban on religious conversions. The hope, of course, is that Messianic Muslims will rethink and redefine Islam according to the Bible and interestingly by correcting folk Islams misinterpretations of the Quran.32 What do you think of this? Is it contextualisation or syncretism or a bit of both? Does C5 go too far or is it a legitimate, biblical adaptation of the Gospel message to Muslims? Can we use the Koran in evangelism? Can we use the Koran in teaching Muslim Background Believers? If you think C5 is going too far, how far down the Cscale would you go? C2? C3? C4? My personal opinion is that anything beyond C3 compromises clear biblical teaching and will ultimately lead to syncretism and a heretical form of Christianity. It is interesting to note that the C5 strategy is generally pushed by foreign missionaries and not much at all by Christians who have been converted from a Muslim background. The Muslim Background Believers that I know are actually quite strongly against C4 or C5 contextualisation and see it as a grave threat to the purity of the Gospel.

Issues of terminology Some Christian terms we use can be either meaningless or offensive to those in other cultures. Do we adapt our terminology and even our Bible translations to avoid offence and increase understanding? Again, this needs to be thought through from a biblical perspective and whether or not the new term may carry non-biblical connotations with it. Here are a few examples: In the Islamic world, should we call Jesus Isa? Isa is the name for Jesus that most people from an Islamic cultural background understand. In fact, it is just the Arabic name for Jesus. Most Christians in the Muslim world see no issue with using Isa to translate Jesus. Similarly, should we use Allah for God? Strictly speaking this should be fine because the name Allah predates Islam. Hebrew and Arabic are from the same language group, and Allah probably has a similar etymology to the Hebrew word Elohim (God). However, for some people, the name Allah is too closely
32

Bill Nikides, Evaluating Insider Movements: C5 (Messianic Muslim), St Francis Magazine 4 (March 2006): 1-2. Accessed at http://www.stfrancismagazine.info/ja/pdf/2006/2006-3_2.pdf.

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associated with the Muslim concept of God for them to feel comfortable using it. So the use of Allah probably depends on the specific context and how comfortable local Christians feel using it without it leading to confusing the nature of the one true God with a false Islamic notion of God. Other languages have similar issues. Before the modern growth of the church in Mongolia from 1989 onwards, there was no Mongolian word for God. There has been an ongoing debate over how to translate this most fundamental of words and there are different Mongolian Bible translations that use alternate renderings for God. One camp advocates using a word that was already in the language which comes closest to describing God. The other camp feels this word has unacceptable Buddhist connotations and therefore uses a short phrase, which loosely translates as Lord of the Universe, for Gods name. As you can see, the answers to many of these questions are not always easy to find! It often requires much time of reflection, prayer and study to work through these issues. Even after that, sound, biblical Christians can disagree on some matters of terminology.

Culture and the Good News


Along with all this comes the question, Do we challenge or accept the culture of the people we are ministering to? If we do challenge their culture, to what measure do we challenge it? If we challenge it, is that having an attitude of superiority about our own culture? To answer this question, we first need to understand that all cultures are marred by sin. What this means is that other cultures have sinful elements that we should not adapt to and that we should challenge. But it also means that our own culture has sinful elements that also need to be challenged! So, before we are too critical of other cultures, we should examine our own culture to see its faults. As Jesus reminds us: Matthew 7:5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of you r own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye. Can you think of some aspects of our own culture than need challenging? What might a non-Australian Christian see as sinful in our Aussie culture? Think about the following: The Aussie My home is my castle mentality, versus the Bibles emphasis on hospitality. The need for keeping up appearances and not letting others see our weaknesses. Materialism. Obsession with sport. The revealing clothing that some Australian Christians wear, or perhaps more accurately stated, what they dont wear.

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How would a non-Western Christian view Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? Would they see them as syncretistic? After all, the Easter Bunny and Easter Eggs predated Christianity. They were symbols of pagan fertility gods. We often dont realise this in Australia because our seasons are reversed from our cultural roots in Europe, but in the northern hemisphere, Easter coincides with the Spring equinox when nature wakes from its winter slumber. The Easter Bunny and Easter Eggs come from this pagan celebration of fertility! So if Western Christians can take over the pagan Spring equinox feast with its fertility symbols of eggs and rabbits, can Iranian Christians also take over their New Year symbols and redefine them with Christian meaning? Or have we gone too far with the eggs and the bunnies?

Honour and shame In western culture we tend to think in terms of what is true and false, or right and wrong. For many people in eastern cultures, what is more important is the concept of honour and shame. That is, something is good if it brings honour and avoids shame. Something is bad if it brings shame. This plays out a lot in the area of telling the truth. Honour is more important than truth. This means that it is better to lie than to lose ones honour. For example, if you invite someone to come to an event they will never say no because that would be shameful. They will tell you that they will attend, even if they have no intention of attending. Or, they may have every intention of attending, but then something of a higher priority comes up, such as the unexpected arrival of a relative that they are duty bound to provide hospitality to. They owe a greater obligation to their out-oftown relative who has suddenly stopped by for a few days than to you, so all previous promises are broken! Linked to this is the concept of the patron / client relationship. This is far too complex to go into here, but it basically means that the people who are clients have a patron who has a position of greater influence in society than the client has. The client helps the patron out and is loyal to him. In return the patron grants favours to him, such as giving the client or the clients relatives a job at the company or government department in which the patron has some sort of management position. We would call that corruption or jobs for the boys. For these people, however, this is merely the correct functioning of a patron / client relationship. Bribery is also an issue that is often also related to honour and shame, and sometimes the patron / client relationship. It takes many years of living in these cultures to know how to deal with these things. The missionary in such a context needs to be careful not to jump to conclusions when first encountering the honour / shame paradigm. It is a good idea to listen to local believers understanding of this cultural phenomenon. It is also worth bearing in mind that both Testaments of the Bible were written in cultures where honour and shame were more important than they are in our western cultures. This is especially true of the Old Testament. Living in a modern eastern culture where honour and

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shame is important, and learning to understand it, actually helped me to understand better the honour and shame that is very prevalent in the Old Testament.

Other things to be challenged There are other aspects of culture that also need to be challenged. I cannot list them all here, but they include attitudes to women, how to raise children, authority, bribery and the work ethic.

Who should be doing the changing? Should the missionary be the one who tries to change the culture? Should we tell others how they should do church? Or should we teach local believers the Bible and then let them grapple with these issues themselves? After all, they understand their culture better than we ever will. In the previous chapter, we looked at how missionaries often remain in some countries even after the local church has grown to be quite large and self-sufficient. One of the reasons missionaries dont withdraw from mission fields when they should is because they think the local believers are still immature and still need the missionaries because they arent yet like the missionaries. In other words, the local believers arent western enough yet. For example, missionaries often think they are still needed because the local Christians still havent learnt to be as punctual and organised as they should be. But is that a Christian thing or a cultural thing? Often these issues are more a cultural thing than a spiritual maturity thing. And even when there are issues of culture that need challenging in the local churches, we need to be humble and realise that usually there are just as many errors in our own culture that we are blind to. Its just that they are different errors!

Missionaries, culture and money


In most Bible colleges and missionary preparation courses, they teach you heaps about cross-cultural stuff. Many missionary books teach you a lot about cultural adaptation, but it is hard to find much teaching about money and missions. Money is a big issue. Why? Because in many places where missionaries work, there is a gross imbalance between the income of the western missionary and that of the local person. For example, the average income in Australia in 2012 is something around $5000 per month. In most of the third world, $400 a month (not a week), is a very good wage. Most get much less. The western missionary in a poor country lives a financial double life. Compared to his home country, he is poor. When he is on home assignment, he feels like the poor cousin because everything seems so expensive to him. People in his home country seem to flash their money around like there is no tomorrow. Then he returns to his country of service and he is suddenly rich. He has far more money than the average local. They think he flashes around money like there is no tomorrow! It can be difficult for the missionary being both poor and rich at the same time!

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This difference in finances can create huge barriers in sharing the Good News. Ive personally found it a much bigger barrier than the cross-cultural barrier. Jonathan Bonks book, Missions and Money: Affluence as a Western Missionary Problem,33 makes for a very interesting read. Bonk basically says that this barrier can only be overcome by the western missionary living at or near the same standard of living as the locals. What do you think of this? My personal opinion is that while this concept is great in theory, how many of us could realistically last for very long at local standards of living that we are not used to? Would we be comfortable sending our kids to local schools, local hospitals and so on? Would we risk the lives of our children by denying them access to western standards of medical care? However, Bonks book is still worth a read in order to help us think about the barrier money creates and how we might overcome it as best we can. Our relative wealth also creates a sense of obligation and expectation to help locals financially. Missionaries from wealthier nations are often approached to give loans, employ people, and pay for them to go on conferences. This is a particular problem with short-term teams who spend very brief periods of time in the country but leave behind money or even worse commit to regular financial support. Why did I say even worse? The reason is that money, unless it is used very wisely, can do more harm than good. Read this comment about the use of money in poorer countries: Many missionaries have come back to the States from the mission field, pleading, Please stop sending money to the overseas churches. They are becoming dependant on American funds and cant learn to take care of themselves and grow if this continues. Bob Finley, chairman of the Christian Aid Mission in Virginia acknowledged that, The most effective indigenous missions organizations are those independent of foreign control and not affiliated with foreign denominations or missions organizations. Churches that are self-supporting can rely on God to carry their mission forward. However, churches that depend on outside funds are paralysed, relying on human beings to supply their needs.34 Many local believers in poorer countries also realise the double-edged sword that financial help from the outside brings. The following article put together by local believers in a particular Asian country is very helpful.35

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Jonathan Bonk, Missions and Money: Affluence as a Western Missionary Problem (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991). 34 Alex A, David E, Taylor T and Rob L, The Changing Face of World Missions The Strategic Context, The Travelling Team, http://www.thetravelingteam.org/articles/changing-face-world-missions-strategic-context. 35 The author of this document is personally known to me, and has given me permission to reproduce this article, but for security reasons has asked to remain anonymous.

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Guidelines for Using Outside Funding with Regard to the First Generation Church in Asia One Asian church leader said, The same money that builds the church, demolishes it. Another said, I have seen many of my friends, young believers, turn away from the Lord because of Western money. A pastor said, People in my church do not listen to my sermons because they think that Im preaching because Im paid to do so. Comments like these have given rise to the discussion of the issue of how outside funds can be used in ways to bless, not hinder, the growth of the church in Asia. Recently church leaders in one Asian country met to discuss this issue. Partly in response to this discussion, this document was drafted. A group of these leaders then discussed this document and heartily agree with the guidelines presented to expatriate believers. They are grateful for the financial partnership they have had with expatriates, but are also very familiar with the dangers involved. Their, and our, hope in writing this document, is that it will provide guidance to expatriates in how to give in ways that promote, instead of hinder, the health and growth of the church in Asia. Recognizing that Our goal in ministry efforts is a healthy, mature Asian church. While finances play an important role, the primary foundation of a healthy church is Jesus Christ, himself. The Asian church is currently small, young, and has very limited financial resources. The western church has substantial financial resources, and its healthy for them to be giving. Many scriptures warn of the dangers of money (The love of money is the root of all evil; Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also; He who is faithful with little shall be trusted with much, etc); And the first generation church is learning these lessons for the first time. A healthy church is a self-supporting, self-governing church. The perception from unbelieving Asians is that believing Asians have sold their religion and converted to Christianity for material gain of some kind. There have been many, many mistakes in giving by well-intentioned outsiders that have resulted in hindering, not fostering, the healthy growth of the church in Asia. Many Asian believers have the idea that those who are whole heartedly committed to Christ are in full-time ministry, and that to have a secular job is worldly. The following guidelines are recommended to outsiders 1) Take time to pray and seek advice from both expatriate and local leaders before you give. 2) Give only to church leaders, or only after getting advice from these leaders.

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3) Give for ministry needs more readily than for personal needs. 4) Give for evangelistic/outreach ministry much more readily than ongoing church needs. 5) Sometimes give for one-time personal needs. 6) Dont give without ongoing relationship with, and accountability from, recipients. (And have relationships with other local leaders who can also give you perspective.) 7) Dont give too much too fast. 8) Encourage believers to develop and maintain marketable skills. 9) Give for things and in ways that are reproducible (that is, the Asian church, as it grows and has financial resources, will invest in these ways). 10) Dont give in ways that discourage Asian believers from giving themselves (they can easily think, we dont need to give; the expatriates will pay for it.) Below is a list of different kinds of things in Asia expatriate funds could be given towards. At the top of the list are the ones that are least likely to hinder the healthy growth of the Asian church. At the bottom are the ones that are the most likely to hinder the healthy growth of the Asian church; or rather, where I have observed the most mistakes made. The rest are on a continuum. Granted this is simplistic, and certainly there are caveats, but in general this accurately represents my experience and observation that the farther down the spectrum, the more careful planning, preparation and prayer are needed. Otherwise, so often the best intentions are dashed on the jagged rocks of reality. In fact, the options at the bottom of the spectrum are almost always discouraged because they do not promote health and growth in the local church. Some of the factors to consider include: 1) maturity of the believers involved, 2) amount of money, 3) whether it meets the entire need, or only part of it, 4) is the person/group involved investing their own resources, 5) level of relationship between giver and recipient, 6) perspectives of other Asian church leaders.

LEAST DANGEROUS Scripture translation and printing Development and production of materials for seed-sowing, either printed or digital (in country) Development and production of materials for training/encouraging believers (in country) Bible and ministry training (in country) Providing a means (in country) for rest/refreshment of church leaders

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Providing help to cover ministry/outreach expenses Hiring believers for secular work (business/NGO) Enabling believers to receive training in secular skills Providing loans to believers for small businesses (through a structured micro-credit program) Sending Asians to trainings/conferences in the same part of Asia Paying salaries for evangelistic/outreach workers Hiring believers for work at expat homes Providing loans to believers for small businesses (informally) Paying salaries for church workers Paying for church buildings and equipment Sending Asians outside of Asia for Bible training Ongoing giving to needy believers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MOST DANGEROUS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please take a careful note of what are the most helpful and most dangerous things to support financially. Missionaries need to be very careful about what they help local believers with financially. Often, financial help can actually do more harm than good. I would also like to implore anyone going on a short-term mission trip to be extremely careful about giving away money, especially for ongoing needs. In my experience working overseas, I have seen far more damage from outside money than good. Applied properly, outside money can be helpful, but unless given with the utmost care, it is more likely to be harmful than good. Please take a careful note of what are the most helpful and the most dangerous things you can support financially. Note that one of the most dangerous things you can do is to send local believers out of the country for Bible training. Why? Because usually they dont return. And the few who do return usually find it very difficult to adjust back to their own culture. Because they have done their theological training outside their home culture, they often bring back the cultural baggage of the country where they have studied and have the same sorts of problems re-adjusting back to their home country as missionaries have adjusting to that country! Notice in contrast, that helping Bible and ministry training in-country is the third most helpful thing you can support! Bible training is very important, but whether it is helpful or not depends a

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great deal on where it is done. I cannot stress how important this is, along with the other pitfalls mentioned on this list.

Cross cultural ministry in Australia


You might be reading this chapter and thinking, This is all very interesting but Im not an overseas missionary so its not very relevant to me. Well, you dont have to go overseas to use all this stuff. Australia is a multi-cultural country. Dont see other ethnic groups in Australia as a threat as many Christians do, but see them as an opportunity. Stop thinking like an Australian but start thinking like a citizen of heaven. What do you think God is more concerned with: Preserving the remnants of a Judeo-Christian heritage in the Australian culture, or Bringing people here from unreached countries so they can hear the Good News of Jesus Christ?

Many of the different peoples in Australia come from regions and countries in which it is difficult to preach the Good News or where there is very little, if any, Gospel witness. This is a great opportunity to reach these people now that they are in Australia. You can use the same principles mentioned in this chapter when you befriend and invite people from other cultures into your homes and when you witness to them. For example, dont be frightened of Muslims as so many Australians Christians are. When you are witnessing to Muslims, it is important to know that: Most of them are actually more willing to talk about spiritual things than the average Aussie because religion is an integral part of their culture. They are open to Christians because the Koran says they must respect the People of the Book Christians and Jews. If you invite them home, forget the bacon! Ask them before they come what they can eat. Watch what you wear! Save the low cut tops for another time! Be aware of terms that will make more sense to them. The New Testament is called the Injil, Jesus is called Isa and so on. Know something about their beliefs. Did you know that they believe that Jesus (Isa) was a great prophet?

Think about what you can do to reach out to peoples of different cultures who are around you. What is your attitude towards these people? And at the end of the day, lets not forget that the biblical definition of mission is not cross-cultural mission. What is it? Mission to where? Mission is to the outsiders, to the unbelievers. There are plenty of people in our own town and our own culture who havent responded to Christ, and even some who may not have heard the Gospel before. As Aussie culture is becoming increasingly post-Christian, this is going to worsen, especially as many evangelicals are adopting a siege mentality and

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keeping to themselves rather than mixing with unbelievers and sharing the Gospel with them. What can we do to reach people in our own town? Mix with the world, particularly at work. Dont lets all work for Christian organisations! Show hospitality to non-Christians. Invite them around for a meal. Support Religious Education and chaplains in state schools, especially as many of the Christian students and teachers are now in Christians schools. This means there is less of a Christian witness in the state schools than there used to be.

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Chapter 7 Planting the Church in New Areas


Recommended reading: Roland Allen. Missionary Methods: St Pauls or Ours? Grand Rapids, USA: Eerdmans, 1962. This chapter is not just about planting individual congregations, but about Christianity becoming established in a new location or amongst a new people. The penetration and growth of the church will go through various phases and at each different phase we will need different sorts of missionaries. Remember Paul? He didnt hang around forever but handed over responsibility to local believers quite early on in the piece. I have listed below a rough analysis of how I think it should be done based on how Paul seemed to do it. Now of course these are generalisations and each country has its own specific needs; however these categories are useful as a starting point. It should also be noted that Bible translation may be needed at any stage.

Pioneer stage
Condition: No or very few Christians. 0.01% or less of the population is evangelical Christian (1 in 10,000 people or less). Aim: To evangelise and see people repent and come to faith.

Type of missionaries: Evangelists, pioneers. Examples: Yemen, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco.

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Emerging church36
Condition: Church is very small 0.1% or less is evangelical Christian (1 in 1000 or less). Aim: Continue evangelising. Church planting by missionaries. Identify and train local church leaders.

Type of missionaries: Evangelists, pioneers, disciplers, teachers. Examples: Niger, Tajikistan, Slovenia, many places in Northern India.

Establishing church
Condition: Church still small but leaders are starting to mature. 1% or less is evangelical Christian (1 in 100 or less). Aim: Continue evangelising and church planting but increasingly in cooperation with local believers. Church planting by locals and missionaries. Training local church leaders.

Type of missionaries: Evangelists (the pioneers will be getting bored by now), disciplers, teachers. Examples: The Gambia, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh.

Established church
Condition: Church is established with mature leaders. 1-5% evangelical (between 1 in 100 and 1 in 20). Aim: Handing over to local church leaders (delaying this will actually build unhealthy patterns of dependency). There may be a continued role for external missionaries in specialist roles, such as Bible translation and theological education.

Types of missionaries: Specialised roles not yet able to be done by locals BUT missionaries ought be training locals to do these roles and have an exit plan for handing over their ministry and moving on to a lesser reached area. Examples: Nepal, Ukraine. Mongolia is perhaps just entering this stage.

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My use of the term emerging church here is not to be confused with the recent western emergent church phenomenon.

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Sending church
Condition: Church is well established and is large enough to do its own evangelism and should be sending its own missionaries. Over 5% evangelical (more than 1 in 20). Aim: Relationship as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Types of missionaries: There is very little need for missionaries, if any. The only exception might be in some highly specialised roles that cannot be filled by locals. Examples: Zambia, Uganda, El Salvador, Solomon Islands, Samoa.

Established but very small church


Condition: Church is well established, has a long history with mature leadership, but is a very small. Less than 1% Christians. Aim: To evangelise the unbelievers in co-operation with the local church.

Type of missionaries: Evangelists and church planters who will be willing to learn the local culture and work with, and under, local leadership. Examples: Czech Republic, Austria and many other European countries.

Consequences of staying too long


Is it possible for missionaries to actually stay too long? Perhaps we could turn this around to help us understand this question. What would you think if your church was run by Zambian missionaries? After all, Zambia has more Christians than Australia has, so why not? The Zambian missionaries did most of the preaching. When they went away on their many conferences, they would bring in someone short-term from Zambia or another African country because they didnt trust you to run the church while they were away. They did let some Australians do some things, but always under strict supervision. Sometimes they would let an Australian preach but first he would have to submit his sermon for checking to the Zambian missionary. If the Zambian missionary saw that the Australians sermon contained too many references to the beach or to football they would be deleted (unless of course it was about George Gregan). In fact, they were very critical of some unique aspects of Australian culture which they considered sinful and insisted that you were still an immature Christian because you were so slow to deal with these issues. Whenever there was a project, such as extending the church building, they would bring in a team from Zambia or another African country, often consisting of teenagers, to build it, because they didnt trust your workmanship or thought you were too lazy. However, they would encourage the local Australian 89

Christians to help out but always under the supervision of the visiting Africans, who were often teenagers. How would you feel? Would it be good for your spiritual growth and development as a Christian? Roland Allen, who lived from 1868 to 1947, was a missionary in China and later Africa, and also visited India. He was ahead of his time and in 1912 published a book called Missionary Methods: St Pauls or Ours? It is a brilliant book and ought to be required reading for all missionaries. In it he questions the paternalistic approach whereby missionaries stay too long because they dont trust the local believers and contrasts this with Pauls methods. From early on in his ministry in each place, Paul entrusted local believers with running their own church. When do you think missionaries ought to withdraw from their mission field and hand over to local leadership? Do you think we withdraw early enough? The two main reasons we need to withdraw at the right time are: 1. To enable the local church to develop and indigenise. 2. To redeploy missionaries to needier areas. As a worldwide church are we doing this or not?

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Chapter 8 Challenges for Mission Today


Closed countries, tentmaking and integrity
Back in the old days a western Christian could go just about anywhere and openly be a missionary. Missionaries would establish mission stations and be full time evangelists, church planters or disciplers. But these days many countries will not give out missionary visas, although some countries still do. Even those countries that do give out missionary or religious visas normally impose quite strict quotas on how many they give out. In addition, most of the countries that do give out missionary visas already have a strong Christian presence, and therefore arent the places where we should be sending most of our missionaries. Should we just give up on the spiritually dark countries because they dont give out any or many missionary visas? No, of course not. We must find other ways to gain access to these countries. This has led to the term Restricted Access Nations or Creative Access Nations. What it means is that you need to have another reason for entering the country. In other words the missionary is bi-vocational. One vocation is his or her visa job and the other is some sort of mission work. Some common examples of the visa work are: Employment. Student. NGO (Non-Government Organisation) / Humanitarian work. Business (Business as Mission or BAM).

The term that is used to describe this bi-vocational approach is tentmaking after the apostle Paul who sometimes worked as a tentmaker to provide an income for himself. Acts 18:1-4 After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. And he went to see them, 3 and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade. 4 And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks. 2 Thessalonians 3:6-10 Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us. 7 For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, 8 nor did we eat anyone's bread without paying for

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it, but with toil and labour we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. 9 It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate. 10 For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. Pauls reason for being bi-vocational was financial rather than for a visa. As a Roman citizen he had the freedom to go anywhere in the Roman Empire. Today one motivation for being bi-vocational can also be financial. It can be difficult to raise the money as a fully supported missionary, so being able to be fully or partially support yourself can ease the financial burden of that. But many of the least reached peoples are also in poor nations with local salaries to match. It is unrealistic that an Australian missionary working as a university professor in a poor country would find the $50 per month salary very helpful. However, a missionary can use his or her other vocation to support him or herself if they are working in a wealthier country such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Japan or a European country. These days, many missionaries are bi-vocational not for financial reasons but for visa reasons. They need the other vocation to obtain a visa to live in the country. However, this creates an integrity issue. That is why are they there? There are two approaches to answer this problem:

Visa platform That is, the missionary finds something, anything, that will give them a visa for being there but the real reason is for missionary work.

Wholistic ministry This philosophy of ministry sees the visa platform approach as lacking integrity. That is, it is in some measure deceitful. The missionary is saying one thing to the government about their reason for being in the country, and another thing to supporters. So advocates of wholistic ministry say that the reason for getting the visa ought also to be a part of the missionarys ministry. For example, if the missionary gets an NGO visa doing humanitarian work, then that humanitarian work is a vital part of his or her ministry. If the missionary has a business visa, then running the business is part of that persons ministry, perhaps because the business is providing jobs or helping to build the local economy. If the visa is a visa to teach English, then teaching English is part of the ministry, perhaps because teaching people English will help them get jobs. This is often linked with the idea that how we do our job is part of our witness to Jesus. Some variations of this also say that we shouldnt just preach the Gospel with words, but just as Jesus healed the sick, our mission is not just proclaiming the Good News verbally but also improving the living conditions of the people we serve. For

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example, part of mission is also providing better health care, raising education standards, and so on. What do you think of this in light of what was discussed in chapter 2 regarding the biblical definition of what mission is? I think we need to be careful to realise that our mission is the proclamation of the Good News and that it is not these other things. However, doing these other things can be part of our witness in demonstrating our love and concern for the people we are trying to reach. Many things that missionaries must do in order to secure a visa can be acts of love that Christians ought to be doing anyway, even if they may not be mission in terms of proclamation.

What do you think the advantages and disadvantages of each approach are? I have listed below some that are commonly given:

Visa platform

Advantages Disadvantages More time for evangelism, Difficulty with integrity discipleship, etc (spiritual between visa and ministry. ministry). Better integrity between Less time spent engaged in visa and ministry. spiritual ministry. May help with the finances Proclamation ministry can of the missionary. be neglected. Gives natural opportunities for witnessing to Christ in the workplace. Good example to local people of work ethic.

Wholistic ministry

Apathy and ignorance about missions in the west


Most Christians in the west are just not aware of the scale of the problem. They just do not connect the commands of Jesus about proclaiming the Good News to every creature and the fact that one third of the world still hasnt heard the Good News. They dont realise that the reason so many people havent heard the Good News is because we are allocating such a tiny portion of our resources to this most important of tasks. Consider the following statistics: Despite Christ's command to evangelise, 67% of all humans from AD 30 to the present day have never even heard of His name.37

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David Barrett, and Todd Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30 - AD 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2001), 3.

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In the last 40 years, over 1 billion people have died who have never heard of Jesus, and around 30 million people this year will perish without hearing.38 Target groups where foreign mission funds are spent: 87% goes for work among those already Christian. 12% for work among already evangelised, but Non-Christian. 1% for work among the unevangelised and unreached people.39 Though Christians number only 33% of the world's population, they receive 53% of the entire world's annual income and spend 98% of it on themselves.40 Only 0.1% of all Christian giving is directed toward mission efforts in the 38 most unevangelised countries in the world.41 Christians spend more on the annual audits of their churches and agencies ($810 million) than on all their workers in the non-Christian world.42 Out of 648 million [evangelical] Christians, 70% have never been told about [the] 1.6 billion unevangelised individuals in the world.43 These statistics are sobering and ought to be a wake-up call for us. The question is: How important, according to the New Testament, is the task of taking the Good News to all the unbelievers? What I mean is, where does it rate in terms of New Testament priorities? There are lots of things Christians can do, many of which are good. Here are some of them: Christian schools. Christian influence on politics. Aid programmes for the poor. Christian music.

Now of course each of these can have an evangelistic element to them, but generally, where do they rate on a biblical priority scale? And where are you placing your priorities? Where is your church placing its priorities? Is it focussed on reaching the 2 billion unreached people in the world? What can we do about this? Remember the quote from above: Out of 648 million evangelical Christians, 70% have never been told about the 1.6 billion unevangelised individuals in the world.
38

R. Mark Baxter, The Coming Revolution: Because Status Quo Missions Won't Finish the Job (Mustang, USA: Tate Publishing, 2007), 12. 39 Baxter, 12. 40 Barrett, and Johnson, 656. 41 Data from Barrett and Johnson, 656. 42 Barrett and Johnson, 3. 43 Barrett and Johnson, 3.

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One of the aims of this book is to change that! The purpose of this book is to raise awareness about the massive number of unevangelised people in our world. And, dear reader, now that you know this, part of your task is to inform other Christians about this massive problem. So why do you think we in the west have this apathy and ignorance about the scale of the problem? Here are some educated guesses of mine: The sin nature and being self-centred. We tend to think mainly of ourselves and just arent interested in people who arent like us. The influence of the world on our theology and ministry practice so that ministry becomes centred on the most important person in the world me. For many, involvement in ministry has become a path to self-fulfilment and significance rather than a sacrificial giving of our lives in gratitude for what Christ has done for us (Romans 12:1). Lack of biblical teaching on the subject. Missions being relegated to a church department for those with the inclination. Missions is for all Christians, not just for a small segment of the church who likes to eat exotic foods and watch Foreign Correspondent. Ignorance about the scale of the unreached. Ignorance about what mission is. Ignorance about where the needs are.

So with this lack of focus by the west on the unreached, does this mean that they are not being reached? No! This is because the missionary force from non-western countries is growing rapidly and is now approaching and even exceeding the missionary force from the west.44 But the tragedy for us is that we, the Western Church, with so much history, with so much of the worlds wealth, with so much Christian teaching, is not doing what it should be doing and is missing out on being involved in the greatest enterprise God has entrusted us with. Luke 12:48b Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more. What can we do to remedy this state of affairs? What can you do?

44

See Mandryk, Operation World, 2010, 951, for some interesting statistics of the number of missionaries sent from various countries.

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Chapter 9 How Australian Churches Can Engage in Gods Mission


Mission to Australians45
We must not forget that mission is the task of proclaiming the Good News to the unbelievers and there are plenty of them right here in Australia. Even though people in Australia have a much greater exposure to the Good News than someone in say, Bangladesh, we still have a responsibility to preach the Good News to them. Why? They are on our doorstep so we have a special responsibility to them. Even if theyve heard, most people take a while to come to the point of repenting of their sins and trusting in Christ. Some may not have heard the Gospel at all, or may not have heard enough of the message to understand what it is to be a Christian. More and more Australians, especially the younger generation, are growing up with little or no exposure to the Gospel message. Christians are tending to keep to themselves more and more (for example, with the growth of Christian schools and home-schooling) and thus we are not mixing with the non-Christian population as much as we used to.

What can we do to reach Aussies? We can reach them by both establishing outreach programmes, and also by building relationships with non-Christians. Some examples are: Programmes: Religious Education in state schools. Chaplaincy. Your church could run Introducing God, Christianity Explored, Christianity Explained, or other such courses. Relationships: Dont disengage from the world, but look for opportunities where you can build relationships with non-believers. Work in a job where you interact with people and can form friendships. Get involved in a sporting club or a community organisation where you will have an opportunity to make friends with non-believers.
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If you are not in Australia, you should still be able to apply many of the principles of this chapter to your own local context.

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Invite non-Christians around for a meal.

Remember too that even within your own community you will have some sub-groups who have less exposure to the Good News than other groups have. They might be people from a different socio-economic group from the people in your church, or immigrants from other countries. You may even have immigrants or international students from unreached lands in your community! Many other books have been written about how to reach Australians so please consult them for more ideas.

Education about the need and where the need is


In this book, we have learnt about: 1. Gods priority for mission. 2. What were actually doing and not doing about it. 3. The discrepancy between points 1 and 2. One of the roles of the church is to educate its people about mission. Here are some ideas about how to do that: If you are one of the preachers at your church, preach expositionally, going through the Scriptures. Mission is everywhere in the Bible, so if you preach through books of the Bible, you will educate your church about Gods plan for people everywhere to glorify Him as the Good News is preached to everyone. Be aware of mission statistics and the needs that exist, and let other Christians know about them in a way that they can understand and which is personal. Use visual reminders in your church building, such as maps and pictures. Pin up a large copy of the Joshua Project map in Figure 5.1 in your church building, so that people can visually see where the spiritually neediest parts of the world are and where the already reached parts of the world are. Put up pictures of your missionaries with lines to where they are on the map so people can see if most of your missionaries are working with the unreached or not. Teach a missions course based on this book.

Can you think of others?

Raising up missionaries and sending them out


Usually it is all left up to the missionary to approach their church leadership about becoming a missionary, but wouldnt it be great if we identified those who showed good potential in ministry and encouraged them to pray and consider overseas missions to the unreached?

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If someone from your church wants to be a missionary, what could you do to help them? Here are some ideas: Encourage and help them to be trained. Put them in touch with mission agencies and help them access mission resources. Give them a copy of Operation World and help them understand the concept of the least reached areas if they dont already know about this. Help them work through such things as where to go, how long to go for, and what sort of ministry they should do on the field. Help them raise their financial support.

How churches can effectively partner with missionaries


Romans 15:23-24 But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to come to you, 24 I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. One of Pauls reasons for writing to the Romans and visiting them, was to seek their help, presumably financial, for his missionary journey to Spain. So how should churches partner with missionaries, whether from your own church or from another? The typical pattern for a prospective missionary trying to raise financial support is this: Missionaries raising support contact as many churches as they can. Some of these churches respond and ask them to speak at one of their meetings either a sermon, a 10 minute spot or to a small group. Usually, after the missionary leaves the church and goes home, he or she never hears from that church again. Occasionally, the church or people in the church will support the missionary. When the missionary is away you pray for them occasionally and send off your money at regular intervals. When the missionary is on home assignment/furlough you give them another 10 minute spot, or even let them take the service, and wonder what they do for the rest of their six month holiday.

Now put yourself in the missionarys shoes. With this typical model: If you are preparing to go overseas, you have limited time before you leave Australia and this means a limited number of Sundays in which to speak at various churches. If you are on home assignment/furlough you have an even more limited number of Sundays available to speak at churches. You are expected to use a number of these limited Sundays to speak in various churches, most of which youll never hear from again.

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Every Sunday you are away on deputation, you are missing a precious Sunday with your home church. If you have children, all this travelling and staying in different peoples homes is very draining and unsettling for the children.

Is there a better way? I believe there is. This is what we have adopted in our church when we support missionaries from outside our church.

Before they go, or while they are on home assignment 1. Select only a few missionaries and really focus on them. Say no to everyone else. How will you select them? Use the Where? Who? What? selection process: Where? Where are they going? Choose those going to the most spiritually needy the red or yellow parts on the Joshua Project map (Figure 5.1). Who? Who are they? Are they godly people with a track record of ministry in Australia, accountable to their church and are they going with their churchs endorsement? What? What do they plan to do there? Do they have a plan that is biblical? Is it in line with what weve learned about what mission is, or supporting someone else doing that? An example of a support role is teaching in a missionary kids school.

2. Do 90% of the selection process of new missionaries your church will support before you invite them to speak. Ask for details about them, where they are going and what they plan to do. Interview them, in person if close by, or via phone or Skype if further away. Get a reference from their pastor. When you are 90% sure you will support them, then and only then invite them to speak. That way, you are not needlessly using up one of their precious Sundays and moving their family around for nothing. 3. Once you have decided to support a particular missionary, heavily promote their ministry to the church. As well as inviting them to take the Sunday service, invite them to share at the youth group on Friday night (or whenever your youth group meets). Cancel all home groups for the week and ask everyone to come instead to a church barbeque on Saturday evening to meet the missionary and to hear the missionary speak for about 20-30 minutes on their work. For the next few Sundays after they speak at your church, mention their ministry from the pulpit and encourage the congregation to support them. 4. Check regularly on their progress in raising their financial support and be their advocate. Most missionaries find it very difficult to ask directly for funds (wouldnt you?). But you can ask for them! You can present their financial needs to the congregation. Explain to your congregation how the support raising system of their agency works. Most agencies work on a pledge system and the missionary needs to receive a certain percentage of their support target before the mission agency will let them go. That means it is really important for people to fill out the pledge cards that most missionaries have. Encourage your people to do that.

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5. Help them with the following when they are going out for the first time: Storage of their goods. Legal arrangements, such as Power of Attorney Mailing address. Newsletter distribution (however this is mostly by email these days). Looking after the children while they pack, send their stuff and attend to other aspects of preparation. Look after their property if they will rent their house out while they are gone. Ask them what they need help with.

6. When they are on home assignment, be proactive and help them with: Finding accommodation (it is very difficult to find short-term rental accommodation from abroad). Find a car they can borrow. Listen to them. Spend time with them if they want it, and give space if they need it. Be interested. Baby-sit the kids. Understand that home assignment for most missionaries is actually more stressful than being on the field. Be sensitive to their financial situation which is most likely somewhat below yours. If they are working in a poorer country, they will be financially confused because on the field they were rich in comparison to the locals, but back home they are poor in comparison to you.

We have had great success with this focused approach at our church. By concentrating on just a few missionaries, but really getting behind those few, our church has become a second home for a few of our missionaries even though we are not their home church. Many people in our church keenly follow our missionaries progress and some of them personally support them financially, which is in addition to the churchs corporate financial support.

When they are on the field Encourage your people to sign up to their newsletters, which are mostly sent by email these days. Pray for them often in your church prayers. Give regular updates to the church on how they are going. Every now and then ask them if there is anything they need. If they do have needs, make the congregation aware of them. Keep them up to date with changes in Australia, such as elections in which they may be able to vote, or changes in laws that may affect them. Remember they are not in the local news cycle (although with the Internet this is changing).

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If they are from your church, keep them up to date with changes in your church. When we were overseas, we had one lady faithfully send our kids the Sunday School materials! It was great! Visit them if it wont get in their way. However, be careful about imposing a shortterm team on them. Some missionaries like short-term teams, while others dont. How would you like 10 people turning up on your doorstep for a week or two, expecting to be entertained? Take your cue from the missionary as to whether a short-term team would be a help or a hindrance.

Short-term missions
One thing that has been growing greatly over the last decade or so is short-term mission trips. In the case of North America, in 1965, only 540 people went on shortterm missions trips each year. By 1989 that had grown to 120,000, by 1992 to 250,000, by 1998 to 450,000 and by 2003 to a least a million.46 Many Christians are not aware of this, but short-term mission trips are actually highly controversial in missions circles! Why? Well, let me give you a hypothetical example of a short-term mission trip and see what you think. Here is the scenario: This time you are not sending a short-term mission trip but you are receiving one. There is a short-term mission trip consisting of 10 teenagers and their adult youth group leader coming from Russia to minister in your church. While they are with you, they take your Sunday service. During the service they sing songs in Russian that no-one in the congregation understands. One of the teenagers preaches a very mediocre sermon in Russian. You have to try and find someone who can translate for him. It is the first time he has ever preached. During the week, the team want to evangelise your community. They want to go to the main shopping street of your town or suburb and give out tracts and tell people about Jesus. Now, none of them speak English, so you need to find translators for them. So you go with the two or three Russian-English translators that you managed to borrow from other churches in town down to your local shopping district. The Russians go up to shoppers, say, Dobry den, and give them a tract. At least the tract is in English. The translators are kept busy trying to explain to confused shoppers what is going on. Once theyve done that, they tell you they would like to help you out with a building project that needs to be done. You really welcome this because your church has been trying to build a playground for the last six months but because of poor organisation and difficulty in getting people to commit to building it, it is taking a while. So this is great to receive this offer of help! The Russian teenagers all descend on the playground building site and in no time it is erected. Then they fly back to Russia to go home and tell their church back in Moscow how they took your service, built your playground and gave out thousands of tracts and lots of people got saved. Three months after they leave, the playground collapses during a storm because it wasnt built according to the instructions. After all, the instructions were in English which

46

Roger Peterson, Whats Happening in Short -term Mission? Lausanne World Pulse, http://www.lausanneworldpulse.com/perspectives/265/03-2006?pg=all.

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the Russian teenagers couldnt read, and theyd never built a playground before. In fact, theyd never built anything before. What do you think? Would you like such a team in your church? They had good intentions but how helpful was it? Perhaps the most useful thing was building your playground. Now just say they had built it properly, and it had stayed up, would it still have been helpful? Maybe, in the sense that it got you a playground. But on the other hand, your church should have been able to build your own playground and that this team built it only papered over some issues of disorganisation and commitment in your church that needed to be addressed but will now be put off to another day. Does this example of a Russian mission team sound fanciful? It does, doesnt it, until we realise that this is almost exactly what we do to other people. We send over teams to other lands to do things we would never let them do in our own church, in a language the locals dont understand. We come back home and paint a rosy picture while the impact on the ground is minimal, and in some cases can even be harmful. Okay, so my example is based on a fictional story, but heres what some people are saying about the reality of short-term mission trips: Something is awry in the mission commitments of many congregations. Enthusiasm is easily generated for short-term missions, yet career missionaries discover that few people want to hear about their work. Auctions and car washes raise funds for short-termers, while money for established projects can suffer.47 Unfortunately, much of our short-term work fosters dependency instead of empowering people. And because of inadequate preparation, some shorttermers damage existing Christian witness or exhaust missionaries and national leaders.48 Some local churches find missions as a way to help their members be discipled and be fulfilled. As a result, the main mission strategy seems to be mainly short-term workers. Yet these same churches would not try to run their church with rotating short-term teams. How then, can Christ-followers think that whole societies can be transformed from the Kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of light through quick, easy, surface efforts?49 Estimates today range from 1-4 million North Americans taking short-term trips every year, with the cost of such trips surpassing the annual support of all long-term missionaries combined. Priest calls this explosion of participation, the first mission movement in church history that is based largely on the needs of the missionary. Other critics have suggested that these trips condition the people in the host countries to wait for help from
47

Miriam Adeney, Editorial: McMissions: Short-termers have their place, but not at the expense of career missionaries, Christianity Today 11 November, 1996. Accessed at http://www.ctlibrary.com/ct/1996/november11/6td014.html. 48 Adeney. 49 S. Kent Parks, What Happened to People Group Thinking? Joshua Project, http://www.joshuaproject.net/people-group-thinking.php.

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their wealthier visitors rather than building their own ministries, businesses, and programs. In the process, pastors and other Christian leaders become glorified tour guides, the indigenous Christian communities develop a sense of dependence, and the more foundational work of missions discipleship and church-planting gets pushed to the back burner.50 A Princeton University study found that 1.6 million people took short-term mission trips an average of eight days in 2005. Estimates of the money spent on these trips is upward of $2.4 billion a year. Vacation destinations are especially popular: Recent research has found that the Bahamas receives one short-term missionary for every 15 residents. At the same time, the number of long-term American missionaries, who go abroad from several years to a lifetime, has fallen, according to a Wheaton College study done last year.51 But research has found that the trips tend to have few long-term effects on the local people or on the mission travellers. Some projects take away work from local people, are unnecessary and sometimes dangerous.52 A 2006 study in Honduras found that short-term mission groups spent an average of $30,000 on their trips to build one home that a local group could construct for $2,000.53 What peasant scratching out a bare existence could refuse suitcases bulging with new clothing for his family? What struggling pastor could resist the temptation to accept a steady salary and generous church income in exchange for hosting visitors, organizing volunteer work, and staffing funded programs? What village would borrow money to dig a well or buy books for their school library or save money to build a church if these things were provided for them free of charge? If all they had to do was make their wish lists, show up for the schedule arranged by the donors, and smile graciously until their benefactors head back home, who would blame them for accepting this easy charity? 54 Some believe that short-term missions trips whet the appetite for long-term mission involvement. Research does not support this claim however. In spite of all the moving testimonies of life-changing experiences by returning short-termers and the occasional example of full-time missionaries who point to a mission trip as the catalyst for their calling, there is no evidence that missions as a whole has benefited. As a matter of fact, while short-term mission trips have increased dramatically over the past two decades, support of long-term missionaries has declined. Strangely, the
50

Chaplain Mike, Open Mic: Short-Term Mission Trips, Internet Monk, http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/open-mic-short-term-mission-trips. 51 Jacqueline Salmon, Churches Retool Mission Trips, Washington Post, 5 July, 2008. Accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402233_2.html. 52 Salmon. 53 Salmon. 54 Bob Lupton, Religious Tourism, FCS Urban Ministries, October 2008, http://fcsministries.org/urban-perspectives/religious-tourism/.

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correlation seems to be inverse. Perhaps because we have spent so lavishly on religious tourism we feel that our financial responsibility to missions has been discharged. Or is it that long-term missionaries do not serve the immediate self-interest of our church?55 What do you think of all this? It is sobering to realise that in the United States at least, where these statistics come from, more money is spent by Christians on shortterm mission trips than on long-term missions to the unreached. I suspect that the statistics would be similar in Australia. Americans saturate the Caribbean and Central America with their short-termers while we saturate the South Pacific with ours. As well as being a big distraction from long-term work, short-term work, if not done very carefully, can actually cause more harm than good to the people we are attempting to minister to. As some have pointed out, short-term missions really does seem to be the first mission movement in history based on the perceived needs of the missionary, rather than on the people he or she is going to. In many ways, this is at the heart of the problem. Our current generation, in the west at least, is a very me-centred generation, and this has affected all aspects of church life. Is short-term mission yet another expression of this me-centeredness, in which mission has become a path to selffulfilment for the participant rather than a journey of sacrifice, denial and hardship in obedience to Christs commission to take the Good News to those who have never heard it? Another disadvantage of short-term mission trips is that most of these trips are made to locations which already have a strong Gospel witness. It is difficult, and sometimes dangerous, to organise short-term trips to the one-third of the world which is unreached. This means that most short-termers do not actually get to experience what it is like to live somewhere without exposure to the Gospel. When they come back home, their experience of missions is to a country which already has the Gospel. This then feeds into the snowball effect. That is, if they do return later as long-term missionaries, they are more likely to go back to the place they went as a short-termer. When they tell of their experiences to others, it promotes mission to places that already have the Gospel. In other words, it just feeds that snowball discussed earlier in this book, in which the countries that already have a strong Christian presence get most of the mission promotion, at the expense of those places with little or no Gospel witness. Does this mean we should abandon short-term mission trips altogether? Are they irredeemable? Probably not. Short-term missions were originally designed to promote interest in long-term mission. Although most short-term trips dont achieve that goal anymore, they still can if run properly. There are two categories of shortterm missions that can be useful and helpful: 1. For those people who have a genuine interest in long-term missions, a short-term mission trip can help them have a first-hand look at a possible future field of service and help them hone their plans for future long-term service.

55

Lupton.

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2. To fill specific needs on the field that can be done by a short-term team. That is, to fill a real and not manufactured need that cannot be done by locals already on the ground. Examples of this include: Running a childrens programme during a conference for long-term missionaries. Participating in an English summer school outreach in conjunction with longterm missionaries who run English camps during school holidays in nonEnglish speaking countries. They often look for short-term participants who will be English conversation partners with the local people. A group of optometrists running an eye clinic in a remote area in conjunction with a long-term missionary or local ministry, which could give them a breakthrough in that particular community.

So there are useful things the short-termer can do. But we must get away from this idea of sending hordes of people to do things that should best be done by the local people. It is important to come with a humble attitude and to ask, Should we come or would it be better if we stayed at home and supported you in prayer and in finances? If the people on the ground do say, Come, then ask, You set the agenda. You tell us what you want us to do. What about the positive effects that short-term missions can have on the participants in terms of their growth in the Lord and their exposure to another culture and to the poor? It is certainly true that the effect on the participants can be positive; however a similar positive effect can often be achieved by becoming involved in local outreach, or engaging in local mission at a fraction of the price. In Australia, many churches and other groups run beach missions over the Christmas holidays. Other groups run outreaches into some parts of Sydney and Melbourne which have very high immigrant populations and these can be a very good cross-cultural experience. Others run outreach programmes to Aboriginal communities which are also opportunities to experience another culture.

What are the pros and cons of short-term mission? Pros: Cons: Diverts money, resources and people from long-term missions. People can think they have ticked missions off their list and therefore dont have to worry about it anymore. Can create dependency on foreigners amongst the local population. Helps increase awareness of other countries and cultures. Can be life changing for the participant, but probably not nearly as often or as profoundly as is claimed. Sometimes, if done very carefully, it can be helpful on the field.

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My personal opinion on doing short-term missions better is this: Firstly, there should be a lot fewer of them. We are currently spending more on shortterm missions than on long-term missions so we need to address this imbalance. There ought to be far, far, fewer short-term trips, and these trips ought to be much better planned and thought out. Short-term missions should be renamed to something like Missions Exposure Trips if they are to a place with no or little Christian witness. However, if like most current short-term trips, they are to places that already have a strong Christian witness, then they should be called something like, Cross-cultural Exposure Trips or Mercy Ministries Exposure Trips. This might avoid people thinking that short-term trips can somehow replace long-term missions. We ought to be upfront in recognising that short-term missions is usually of more benefit for the person who goes than for the recipients. It is very similar to work experience that high schoolers do. A business would not rely on work experience people to run the business, but they do it as a community service to help the high school students get some work experience. Short-term missions is similar it is work experience in a cross-cultural situation. Short-term teams should not do what locals can do. Why build things for them when they can do it themselves? There are some things that short-term teams lend themselves to which can be helpful, such as: Providing a kids programme at conferences for long term missionaries. English speaking camps.

Along that line, the more you can target a short-term trip to a specific need the better. Think about sending a team of doctors or optometrists for a field clinic. Wow! Rather than sending a team, it can often be more beneficial to send an individual to do a specific task. For example, a librarian could go for a few weeks to a Bible college or missionary kids school to help them set up their library catalogue. A theological college lecturer could go and teach an intensive course at a Bible college. In terms of fund raising, if the trip is mainly for the benefit of the person going, then my opinion is that it is that persons responsibility to provide the funding. Fund raising should be reserved for those things that are of more direct benefit to the field.

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Chapter 10 How to Become a Missionary


Recommended reading: Garry Friesen and J. Robin Maxson. Decision Making and the Will of God: A Biblical Alternative to the Traditional View. Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 2004.

The decision to be a missionary, including the call


So how do you know if God is calling you to be a missionary? Well, first of all, we need to discuss the idea of a call. When we were missionaries, people often asked us how we were called. What did they mean? How does the Bible define the idea of call and the will of God? Ephesians 5:15-17 Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. So what is the will of God? As Ephesians 5:17 says, we need to understand the will of God.

Understand the will of God As soon as the phrase, the will of God, is mentioned, you refer to something that for many Christians just seems to be a big mystery. Christians often ask, What is the will of God for my life? or If God would tell me what His will for my life is, then Ill do it. Weve made out the will of God to be such a mystery. It has become this elusive, hard to find thing. Whom shall I marry? What job shall I do? Where should I live? Should I be a missionary? And if so, to where? We seek to hear from God so that He will tell us what to do. Weve made the will of God such a mystery, yet in the Bible it is never a mystery. Im going to tell you where you can find the will of God. You find it in Gods book the Bible. If you do a search in the Bible for where it talks about the will of God, it doesnt anywhere tell us that it is something elusive and hard to find. In fact, when we look through the New Testament, you may be surprised at what it says about the will of God. Here are some passages that talk directly about this subject:

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1 Thessalonians 4:3-6 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; 4 that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honour, 5 not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; 6 that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. So we can see that, according to these verses, Gods will is for us to live holy and sanctified lives. Later in 1 Thessalonians, Paul tells us more about Gods will: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. It couldnt be clearer. Gods will is for us to be joyful, praying and giving thanks. So there we have it! Is that all there is to Gods will? No of course not. The Bible tells us about other aspects of Gods will for us. But the point is, that you will find Gods will for your life in the Bible, because the Bible tells us how to live the way God wants us to live. Through the Bible, God tells us to live wisely and not unwisely. But you might ask what about things the Bible doesnt talk about? Such as, whom do I marry? What job should I do? Where should I live? Should I be a missionary or not? And if so, to where? Firstly, if the Bible doesnt give us these answers directly, it means that we actually have a lot of freedom to make those decisions ourselves! However, there are some restrictions on this freedom. For example, when we look at the question about whom to marry, the Bible has some very clear instructions. 2 Corinthians 6:14 Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? If you are a Christian, you should only marry another believer. Paul reminds us of this principle again when he gives instructions as to whom widows may marry: 1 Corinthians 7:39 A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. A widow may marry whom she wishes, so long as he is a Christian! Although this instruction is specifically for widows, in the light of 2 Corinthians 6:14, it makes sense that this principle applies to any Christian. Theres a lot of freedom in that marry whoever you like provided they are also Christian. Its like that with a lot of things in life: where to live, what job to do. Provided it is ethical and moral, then we have a lot of freedom. However, within that freedom we do need to remember what it says in the passage in Ephesians we looked at before, especially in Ephesians 5:16, where we are told to be making the best use of the time. We have a lot of freedom in our choices, but some

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choices will make better use of that time than others. Whatever the lifespan God has given each one of us, some choices will use that limited time better than other choices. And in making the best choice, so as to make the best use of the time God has given each of us, we also need to look at Gods will. This is not just His moral will of holy living, which of course is important, but also Gods overarching will and purpose throughout the ages. Thats what weve been looking at in this book. That is what has God put us here to do? What has God given us as the church to do? Ephesians 3:10-11 So that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. 11 This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord. God has given us, as His church, a task a mission. That mission is to make His wisdom known that is, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, this is the purpose of God in this age for the Gospel to be preached to all who have never heard about Jesus. How do we know that? Because the Bible says it clearly. In 2 Peter 3:9, it talks about why the Lord is taking so long to return. It tells us why we are waiting so long for the second coming of Jesus Christ. Two thousand years after Jesus first coming, its good to ask why we are still waiting for His second coming. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. The Lord is patient because He is wanting people to come to repentance. There are still millions actually not millions but billions an estimated 2 billion people on the planet, whove never heard about Jesus. Jesus Himself talked about this. Matthew 24:3 As he sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age? His disciples wanted to know the signs of Jesus second coming and of the end of the age, so Jesus told them what these signs would be. Those who watch for the signs of the end of the age usually look for things like wars and earthquakes and so on. They tell us that when there are lots of wars and earthquakes that the end will be soon. But what does Jesus actually say about wars and earthquakes? Matthew 24:6-8 And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. 7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are but the beginning of the birth pains. What does Jesus say here? He tells us that we will hear of wars but the end is still to come! Even things like earthquakes are only the beginning of birth pains, not the

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actual sign that the end is upon us. But later on, Jesus gives the decisive sign of when the end will come: Matthew 24:14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations [ethne = outsiders], and then the end will come. The Gospel, that is, the Good News of Jesus, must be preached in the whole world to all the nations and then, and only then, will the end of this age come. Remember of course, that this word nations is the Greek word ethne, which actually means outsiders, or non-believers. That is, the Gospel must first be preached to all the outsiders that is, everyone and then the end will come. Whose job is it to do this preaching? Well, a few chapters later, right at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us whose job it is to preach the Gospel of the kingdom to the whole world. Matthew 28:19-20 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations [outsiders / non-believers], baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Jesus talks about the same concepts in Matthew 28:19-20 as He did in Matthew 24:14. That is, He talks about preaching to the ethne (the outsiders), and He talks about the end of this age. But in Matthew 28:19, we see that Jesus is commanding us, His disciples, with this task of preaching to everyone before the close of this age. So how are we as the worldwide church going with completing this task? Still, 2000 years after Jesus came, 2 billion people out of 7 billion havent heard. That is, 2,000,000,000 people. We are sending missionaries, but usually we dont send them to the places with the greatest spiritual need. Even in our own country, its quite obvious that many young people today are growing up without any knowledge of Jesus Christ and the Gospel of salvation through Him. For some young people, the only opportunity to hear the Gospel is through chaplaincy and Religious Education in state schools. So, going back to Ephesians 5:15-17 where it tells us that we must understand the will of the Lord, we need to understand that part of Gods will is His moral will. That is, the call to live a holy life. But we also need to understand that there is more than this moral will to doing Gods will. There is also Gods will for us in proclaiming the Gospel and discipling people, and doing what we can to support that, both here in Australia where God has placed us with responsibility to evangelise our own area, and also to those areas in other parts of the world where there is no or very little Gospel witness. Thats Gods will too, and its Gods will for us. So individually, we need to make the best use of the limited time that God has given each one of us. Each one of us needs to be wise in the choices we make, such as the choice of whom to marry, what job to do, where to live, what to do with our money, what causes to donate to and where we put our spare time and energy. We need to use the specific gifts and talents God has given each one of us, so that as Ephesians 5:15-17 says, we will be wise in understanding the will of God, so that we can make

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the best use of our time our limited lifespan here on this earth. This is so that when we near the end of our earthly life, we can look back on it and know that we used the time wisely. None of us knows how long our time on this earth will be. But it is a set time that God knows and has given us. His will for our life is to live a moral, godly life, and to use this limited time period as best we can in proclaiming Christ where He is not known. So the question is not really, Am I called to be a missionary? God has called each of us to be part of the churchs work in proclaiming the Good News to all the ethne the outsiders, the unbelievers. As weve seen, the storyline of the Bible, from the fall to the new heavens and the new earth, is all about God proclaiming His glory and His salvation to the whole of humanity and drawing a people to Himself from those who hear the message of salvation. So the question is not, Do I get involved? Rather the question is, How can I use my gifts, abilities and resources to further Gods mission? If you are in a position where you could be a missionary to unreached people overseas, then that would be a good thing to do. I cannot see any instruction in the Bible that tells you that you need your own specific call to do this! Lets look at the apostle Paul and how he made decisions about where to go on his missionary journeys. Romans 1:1 tells us that Paul was called to be an apostle. However, remember that Pauls calling was very unusual. It was a dramatic calling that he received personally and visibly directly from the Lord Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. And remember that no-one today is called to be an apostle in the sense that Paul was called to be an apostle. It is going too far from this verse to conclude that everyone needs a specific call to be a missionary. Lets now have a brief look at Pauls ministry. In Acts 13:2, we read that Paul and Barnabas are called. But note that this is narrative literature. This means, that the passage is describing what happened in that particular instance with Paul and Barnabas. This does not mean that this specific type of call needs to happen to everyone. In fact, many others, such as John Mark, Timothy, Silas and Luke, accompanied Paul on his journeys at various stages and there is no record at all that they received some specific, personal call. Some say we need a specific call for a specific place or people. But what about Paul? Going back to his call in Acts 13:2, how specific was it? Acts 13:2 While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. This call says absolutely nothing about what country they were to go to or which people they were to go to, or how long they were to go for. So, how did Paul and his companions decide where they would go? Well, lets see what the Bible tells us!

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Acts 13:4 So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus. In this verse, they were sent out by the Holy Spirit. However, it is reading too much into this text to suppose that the Holy Spirit told them specifically to go to Seleucia and then on the Cyprus. The Bible just says that the Holy Spirit was with them as they went. Lets now look at what happened when they had to leave Pisidian Antioch because of persecution: Acts 13:51 But they shook off the dust from their feet against them and went to Iconium. Why did they go to Iconium next? The Bible doesnt tell us, but if you look at a map you will see that it is the next place on the road. That is, its the next logical place to go to. Okay, so now they are in Iconium, but they run into trouble there too. Lets have a look at their decision-making process after they leave Iconium: Acts 14:5-7 When an attempt was made by both Gentiles and Jews, with their rulers, to mistreat them and to stone them, 6 they learned of it and fled to Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and to the surrounding country, 7 and there they continued to preach the gospel. Why did they go to Lystra and Derbe? It was because they were fleeing from Iconium. What did they do when they got there? They continued preaching the Gospel. They didnt mope around in a motel in Lystra waiting for some word from God about where they should go next. They just got on with the job of preaching the Gospel. Okay, so thats Pauls first missionary journey. Lets now have a look at the decisionmaking process that Paul went through when he decided to go on his second missionary journey. Acts 15:35-36 But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch, teaching and preaching the word of the Lord, with many others also. 36 And after some days Paul said to Barnabas, Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are. So, why did Paul go on his second missionary journey? Did he receive some word from God, or inner impulse? No, it tells us that he decided himself, so he could see how the Christians in the cities they visited on their first journey were going. The decision was based on reason, logic and on Jesus general commands to all believers to preach the Gospel. Most of the time it seems Paul just went to the next place where people needed to hear the Gospel. The decision to go to Macedonia was an exception: Acts 16:6-10 And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. 7 And

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when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. 8 So, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas. 9 And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us. 10 And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. This case of the Macedonian Call is often used by Christians as the norm for how Christians are to make decisions about where to go as missionaries. Yes, in this case, Paul did receive a specific, personal call to go to a specific place Macedonia. But it is very important to note that this specific, personal call was the exception rather than the norm. Weve already been looking at how Paul normally made a decision about where to go the next place on the road that needed to hear the Gospel. We can even see Pauls normal practice in Acts 16:6-10 above. Notice what Paul was doing when he received the Macedonian vision. He was trying to go into Bithynia. Why? Because that was what he normally did just go on to the next place. But in this particular instance, God intervened by giving Paul a vision. It was not the norm, but the exception. . So for the apostle Paul we see that occasionally he did receive specific supernatural guidance about where to go. However, he usually made decisions about where to go based on common sense and logic in finding those places where there were people who had never heard the Gospel, and then he went and preached to them. After all, isnt that what Jesus had told Paul, and us, to do? If it was good enough for Paul, it ought to be good enough for us. If the Bible doesnt tell us that we need our own specific, individual call to be a missionary, why do we impose this man-made idea of an individual call on potential missionaries? In fact, the whole idea of a call has more often than not hindered missions and other ministry, because Christians often evade responsibility for missions and other ministry involvement by claiming that Im not called to be a missionary / pastor / giver of money / Sunday School teacher. I wonder what God thinks of such copouts?

Preparing to be a missionary
So you want to be a missionary? How do you prepare? Here are some things you should consider, which most or some mission agencies will require:

Mature Christian walk You need to show evidence of faithful Christian living. You should know your Bible well and also be living it. You should be progressing in holiness. You should fulfil the same character requirements that elders and deacons need to meet as found in 1 Timothy 3:1-12. Work on these things:

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Regular devotional prayer and Bible reading time. Regular attendance at church and accountable involvement with your church. Regularly sharing your faith with non-Christians. Becoming more Christ-like. In co-operation with the Holy Spirit, work on holy living. For those married, work on your marriage relationship. For those with children, work on your relationship with your children. For those who are single, work on remaining pure, while praying for a spouse if that is your desire. Most agencies will also expect to see visible evidence in some areas, such as not being addicted to drugs or alcohol and not being in debt.

Unencumbered Make sure you are free to leave the country for extended periods of time. For example: Dont sign up for the army for six years if you think you want to be a missionary in two years time! Pay off your debts and dont take out new loans. A house mortgage is probably fine as the rent can pay off the mortgage. A HELP debt should be fine too as you are only liable to repay your HELP debt once your income reaches a certain level.56 If you have children, consider their educational needs and how they will be met when overseas. If going for a long time, dont hoard too many possessions as you wont be able to take most of them to the field. Think twice about major purchases such as cars, TVs, furniture and so on.

Bible College Most mission agencies require at least one year of Bible college, preferably two. However if you wish to be involved with theological or biblical education you will probably need more Bible college, such as a Bachelors degree or, more likely, a Masters degree. The more Bible education you can get, the better. Remember, as a missionary, you will most likely be looked on by the locals as a source of biblical information and therefore the more you know about the Bible the better you will be able to help the people you are ministering to.

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HELP (Higher Education Loan Programme) is an Australian Government loan given to Australian students to pay for higher education that is paid back through the taxation system once the persons income reaches a certain level. If it never reaches that level, the person theoretically never has to repay the loan.

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Secular skills You cannot get a missionary or church worker visa for many unreached countries. You will need to get a visa for some sort of secular job or activity. Therefore secular skills are important. Possibly the most universal and easiest secular job for us is teaching English. Some countries require you to have a Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) qualification, while others just require you to be a native English speaker. By virtue of your language you all have a very open door into most nations of the world. Use it! However, I think that it is more important to acquire biblical knowledge than secular skills. Unfortunately, many missionaries are very qualified in their chosen profession but dont have much biblical training. The result is that they find that their effectiveness on the field is limited by their lack of Bible training. So make sure that as well as secular skills, you have good, sound, biblical training

Church backing Talk to your pastor and church leadership team very early on in the process. It is really important for your pastor and the church to believe in what you are doing. It is also important for you to be accountable to your home church. Remember, missionaries should be sent by their home church. Also, letting you pastor and church know well ahead of time means they will have time to budget possible financial support for you.

Ministry experience Get as much ministry experience as you can, especially in the area you think you will work in. This has two benefits: If you cant do it here, how can you do it there? Learn to do it here first! It demonstrates to your church and potential supporters that you can do the job. People are more likely to financially support people with a proven track record of ministry experience.

Cross cultural preparation If you know which country you are going to, read as much as you can about it. For obscure countries you may not be able to find many books, but you can find lots of information about just about anywhere on the Internet. If there are people from that ethnic group in your local area, try and track them down. If you can study the language here, make a start. Read books about crossing cultures. Make friends from other cultures, even if theyre not from the country you plan to go to. It will give you an idea of how different other cultures are and you will learn how to relate to people from different backgrounds.

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If you can afford it, you may wish to go on a short-term mission trip. Bear in mind, however, that short-term trips are usually of most benefit to you and not of much real benefit to the people you are going to. The money may be better put towards your longer-term goals. If you do go, it would be best to go on a tailor-made trip where you can scout out possible future opportunities, and meet people you might work with in the future.

What are you going to do when you get there? What do you want to do as a missionary? It is not good enough to just say, I want to be a missionary. That is too broad. Missionaries do all sorts of things. Jobs missionaries do include: Bible teaching. Bible translation. Church planting. Pastoring. Evangelism. Mercy ministries. Support services such as teaching missionary kids, accounting, administration.

Most fields today are in restricted countries, meaning you may need to do another job as well as the ones listed above, such as: Teaching English. Accounting. Medical. Something else your imagination and the imaginations of the people you will be working with are the limit.

Think about the gifts God has given you and how you can use them in the country you will go to. Then develop a plan of what you will do when you get there. We have met a lot of people on the mission field who are aimless. They just turned up on the field without much direction, and to be honest, they are not very effective. The ones who have a plan tend to be more effective. However, you also need to be prepared for things to change, as they no doubt will!

Choosing and applying to a missions agency


To be or not to be: why have mission agencies? Some people argue that there should not be mission agencies. After all, the apostle Paul did not use a mission agency. In Acts 13:1-3 it was the church at Antioch that sent them out. Consequently, some argue that mission agencies are not biblical and that only churches should send missionaries. They have a point. Let us look at the advantages and disadvantages of using a mission agency.

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Advantages of mission agencies They have the resources and knowledge to send people to the other side of the world. They have a lot of experience and expertise in looking after missionaries who are a long way away. They have the networks to help people get visas, look after them pastorally or to place them into effective ministry, in countries a long way away. They have the resources to provide emergency help or evacuation in the case of war, political instability, injury or sickness. They offer the possibility for people from many different churches to work together rather than each doing their own thing. They provide accountability on the field.

Disadvantages of mission agencies They are not specifically mentioned in the Bible. Mission agencies can ignore the sending church and usurp the churchs role in sending and providing accountability for the missionary. Mission agencies can be expensive, typically charging 10-20% of the missionarys support in administration fees. Mission agencies can be unnecessarily bureaucratic and inflexible.

It would seem that the best solution is to use a mission agency that involves the sending church as much as possible. This way, it is still the church that does the sending, as in Acts 13, and the agency is precisely that: an agent that facilitates the local churchs involvement in world mission. It does not take the place of the church, but rather helps the church in its mission. The mission agency should also be flexible and take care to be as financially efficient as possible.

Different types of mission agencies

Tasks Some mission agencies are general. That is, their missionaries do many different things. These agencies tend to find out what you could do with your training, abilities and experience, and then try and find something for you to do which fits that. Some examples of these types of agencies are Operation Mobilisation (OM), Interserve, Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), SIM and Pioneers. Other agencies are more specific in their focus. They concentrate on one particular thing. All the missionaries either do that thing, or are involved in a support function which contributes to that goal. For example:

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Wycliffe Bible translation and literacy training. Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF) operates an air service to support other ministries. Trans World Radio and HCJB radio broadcasting.

Other missions, while being general, have areas of specialisation. Not everyone is involved with the specialisation, but it is a strength of that mission. For example: OM, with its ship ministry. However, OM also has many missionaries in land-locked countries who never see a ship! World Vision is mainly involved with alleviating poverty but they do other things as well, such as theological education in some countries.

If your desire is to be involved in one of these specialised areas, then one of these agencies may be for you. They will probably know more about the specialised area than the general agencies. But if they dont cover your area of interest, they probably wouldnt be the best to go with. For example, dont go with Trans World Radio if you want to be involved with Bible translation!

Location Some mission agencies concentrate on particular parts of the world. They may concentrate on a particular country or region, or on a particular type of people such as Muslims or Jews. This may be due to their history or may be so they can concentrate on one particular area or group. Others may restrict themselves to unreached people, or the 10/40 Window. In this case, their choice of location is more determined by their theology of mission (missiology) that is, a belief that we should concentrate on those areas that do not already have the Gospel, such as I advocate in this book. Examples of missions concentrating on particular areas are: OMF Asia. European Christian Mission (ECM) Europe. Middle East Christian Outreach (MECO) the Middle East. Jews for Jesus worldwide, but only to Jews. Interserve Asia and the Arab world. People International Muslim peoples of Central Asia.

Some, by virtue of their task, only operate in those areas where their task is to be done. For example: Wycliffe only those places needing Bible translation.

Other missions operate just about everywhere. For example: Youth With A Mission (YWAM). OM. SIM.

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So then, where you plan to go is pretty important in deciding which mission agency to go with! A mission agency that concentrates on a particular area or group may have a better knowledge of that area than a more general mission agency.

Denominational vs cross-denominational Some mission agencies are only for people within that denomination, and sometimes only work with that denomination on the field. For example: Global Interaction Baptist. Church Missionary Society (CMS) Anglican.

Other mission agencies, while being interdenominational, are made up of people from a particular theological stream of Christianity. For example: Middle East Reformed Fellowship (MERF) people who hold to Reformed theology. YWAM while open to all Christians tends to focus on Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians.

Other agencies accept and have people from all streams of evangelical Christianity. For example: OM. Interserve. SIM. Pioneers. People International.

Listed below are some advantages and disadvantages of denominational and interdenominational mission agencies.

Advantages of denomination missions You can work with people with similar beliefs and outlook to yourself. Home churches of your denomination are familiar with the mission agency.

Disadvantages of denominational missions It limits unity if you work only with people of your denomination. You may only be allowed to attend or work with those churches from that denomination. The mission agency may be quite small in some countries, limiting choice of work. It may limit support raising if you have potential friends and churches not from your denomination.

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You dont get to learn from and appreciate fellow believers from different denominations and theological streams.

Advantages of inter-denominational missions You get to work with Christians of all types to achieve common goal of world evangelisation. It provides a broad support base if you have friends and churches from many different denominations.

Disadvantages of inter-denominational missions They can be too accommodating to a general form of Christianity to keep everyone happy. You can feel restricted in the expression of your own theological beliefs so as not to offend others. Potential supporters may not have heard of the mission agency.

Structure In the past, most important decisions about operations on the field were made from the home country, often over-riding the wishes of the missionaries on the field. In recent times this has been seen to be counter-productive as it is actually the missionaries on the field who usually have a better idea of what is going on in the field than the people back home. Therefore most mission agencies today will divide the decision-making between home and field staff. Decisions about field operations are generally made by the missionaries on the field, while decisions about home operations are generally made by home staff. As missionaries are initially sent by the home office, it is generally the home office who will make the decision about whether the mission agency will accept you as one of its missionaries.

Financial support Not every mission has a similar financial support structure! There are many variations. It is really important to ask the agencies questions about their methods and philosophy of financial support. For the sake of this book I will divide agencies into the following broad categories below. Some people will object to the names but we have to call them something.

Faith mission agencies This term normally describes those mission agencies where the missionary receives exactly what his or her supporters send him or her, minus a certain percentage that the agency deducts for administration costs. It is up to the missionary to determine how much support they need. For example: 120

YWAM the supporters actually send the support directly to the missionary. OM support is sent to the regional office, where a percentage is deducted for administration and the rest is forwarded to the missionary at periodic intervals. This saves the missionary from having to worry about the collection of funds and international transfers because the agency does it.

The advantage of this sort of support-raising is that it is left up to the missionary as to how much they think they will need. It also helps the missionary to live by faith. A disadvantage is that it is difficult for the missionary to make a long-term commitment to the mission field. If support levels drop off too much, the missionary may be forced to come home early, which is very disruptive for their ministry. The faith mission support model can be difficult to sustain in the long term. Another problem with this model is that supporters tend to decrease support while the missionary is on furlough/home assignment, which paradoxically is when the missionarys expenses are normally at their highest!

Minimum support mission agencies These mission agencies are like faith missions, except the mission agency sets a minimum level of support that must be promised before they will let you go. Once on the field though, the missionary gets exactly what the supporters send, minus the administration costs that the agency deducts before forwarding funds. This is probably the most common type of mission agency. Some examples include Pioneers and OMF. This type of support model has similar advantages and disadvantages to the faith mission model, except that it does make sure missionaries do not go with inadequate support (although it can become inadequate if support drops off later while the missionary is overseas).

Pooled support mission agencies With this type of mission agency, the missionary still has to raise their support. However, once the pledges have been received and the missionary is sent, the missionarys expenses are covered and they are paid a set amount regardless of what actual support comes in. This means that if support received is lower than promised, the missionary is still paid the same allowance. Conversely, if the missionary receives more than is promised, they do not get the extra, but it goes to the mission agencys general fund, which is usually used to make up the shortfall for other missionaries with the agency whose support is low, hence the term pooled. There are very few agencies who use this method. Examples include Interserve (missionaries from Australia and England only) and Global Interaction (the Australian Baptist missionary agency). This model has many advantages. It means the missionary can concentrate on ministry rather than worrying about where their next dollar is coming from. It also

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means the missionary can plan ahead, knowing that they will not be pulled off the field if their support drops dramatically. The missionary is also fully paid on home assignment, even if their supporters do not send in enough money during that period. The main disadvantage is that there is not a direct link between support raised and costs per missionary and this can be confusing to explain to supporters. There is also a lack of transparency and accountability about where funds raised actually go. Some people feel that this system is also a bit socialist, which can lead to some inefficiencies.

What does the support include: When you start to make up your budget, you need to make sure you dont leave anything out. At the very minimum, support needs to include: Airfares. Accommodation. Food and other living costs. Insurance including medical evacuation.

It is also wise to include: Ministry costs. Language learning costs. Education costs (for missionaries with children). Home assignment costs.

For longer term workers it is also wise to include: Superannuation / retirement / pension fund contributions. Re-entry and resettlement allowances.

For short- to medium-term missions (up to about two years), you could get away with the basic costs. However, if you only allow for the basic costs on a long-term basis, you are going to have big problems when you eventually return home. Remember you will have been out of the local job market for many years. Imagine arriving back in Australia at the age of 60 after spending 30 years on the mission field with no superannuation, no savings and no marketable employment skills with which to get a job!

Pastoral care Different missions provide different levels of pastoral care while on the field. Some agencies send their missionaries out and then forget about them. Others are excellent, ensuring that longer-term missionaries on the field provide pastoral care to new missionaries, and also sending people at periodic intervals to see how they are going. The best way of knowing who is good at pastoral care is asking missionaries from

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different agencies what their agency is like. You should also encourage your sending church to provide pastoral care. Your home church leadership team should take an active interest in you, keep in regular contact and be available for you. In this day and age with email and Skype, it is not difficult to do this. It is great if your pastor can also visit you on the field.

Lifestyle What lifestyle does the mission expect you to adopt when you are on the field? In many mission situations, missionaries come from wealthy countries and live in poorer countries. If you will be in that situation, will you live as you would live in Australia, at the local level, or somewhere in between? Some mission agencies leave that decision up to the missionary themselves. Others dictate that they must live as the people do. For example, Servants to Asias Urban Poor requires that their missionaries live in the slums at the same level as the local people living in the slums. Other mission agencies are known for their missionaries living at a western standard even when based in poor countries. Most mission agencies expect their missionaries to live at a level which approximates to how a professional (such as a doctor or teacher) in the field country would be expected to live. That is, at the upper level of that country, but still lower than how we would live in Australia.

Networking and secondment Often home mission agencies will work together with, or second to, other mission agencies on the field. For example, in a particular country in northern Asia, around 15 mission agencies work together under the umbrella of one organisation. Most of the on-field support for missionaries is provided by that one organisation rather than the specific agency. With secondments, the home agency helps with support-raising and liaises with the on-field organisation to find a job placement. Sometimes this means you can get the best of both worlds go with the home agency who provides the support model you are happiest with, and on the field work with the field agency who is doing the work you have an interest in. But it can also become quite bureaucratic and unwieldy with two or even three accountability structures your home church, your sending agency and the receiving agency on the field.

Choose a mission In prayer, consider the different mission agencies. Consider which one will best enable you to help build Christs church using the gifts and resources that God has given you. Consider the things discussed above. Have a look at their doctrinal statement and consider if you agree with it. Get in contact with the different agencies and ask them specific questions. When communicating with the different agencies, also note how quickly they respond to your queries and how well you get on with them. The responsiveness of different agencies is a pretty good indicator of how

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efficient they are generally and if they will be efficient when you are stuck in some remote part of the world and need a quick response about some issue. As a starter, here are some questions you may like to ask agencies:

About your mission agency 1. What parts of the world do you work in, and do you specialise in a specific type of ministry (e.g. translation, mercy ministries, church planting, and so on)? 2. Please detail how your support structure works: How do your missionaries raise support (please include here if you have selfsupporting tentmakers in your mission)? Once on the field, how do your missionaries receive support? What happens if their support drops while they are away? What does your support figure include (for example, does it include medical insurance, superannuation, home assignment costs and house set-up costs)? What is your administration fee? What would be a rough estimate of a support target in dollars for myself and my family? As compared to locals, what is the living standard at which your missionaries are expected to live?

3. What sort of pastoral support do you provide to your missionaries and how do you provide it? 4. How is your mission structured? 5. How are decisions that affect missionaries made? Are decisions about field operations and work assignments made locally or back in Australia or elsewhere? How much input does the missionary have in his work assignment and location? 6. Considering that missionaries come from many different theological backgrounds, how narrow or wide do you feel your doctrinal boundaries to be? Do missionaries have the freedom to follow their own doctrinal convictions or do they need to keep quiet about their doctrinal distinctives in order to keep the peace? 7. Do you have your own work on the field, or do you mainly second to other organisations? To what extent do you work with other missions and/or churches on the field? 8. What is your policy on language learning? 9. What are the key distinctives of your mission? What are its primary strengths?

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About potential applicants 1. What are your entry requirements for missionaries (for example, requirements for Bible College, ministry experience, secular skills and character)? 2. What is your entry process (for example, interviews, medicals, psychological tests), and how long does it take to go through the application process? 3. How can applicants best prepare themselves if considering future missionary service? Notice how these questions are quite specific. They move beyond the nebulous information the glossy brochures contain to more practical issues.

Application process Out of consideration for the amount of time and effort it takes a mission agency to process an application, you should apply to only one agency at a time. Bearing in mind how involved the application process is, and that after the application process you still have to raise support, allow plenty of time. You should allow an absolute minimum of six months to go through a typical agencys application process and another six months at an absolute minimum to raise financial support. That means, from the time you apply to an agency, if you can actually leave for the field in a years time, you are doing very well! It is best to allocate even more time than that to allow for potential delays. The application will normally involve filling out forms, attending interviews, undergoing medical and psychological tests and obtaining references.

Raising support Here are some things to consider as you think about raising financial support.

Who Most missionaries are supported by a combination of their own church, other churches, friends, family and other Christians who believe in their work. If you have sufficient financial resources of your own, you can even support yourself (for example, self-funded retirees). Some mission positions may also attract a salary that can help cover your expenses. Your first point of call is your pastor and church leadership team. They should already know that you are planning to be a missionary by now, so it should come as no surprise that you are asking for financial support. You should discuss the issue of financial support well before you actually need to start raising it.

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Next, approach your friends and family. No doubt, they will have been aware of your plans for some time now. If they are not, let them know now! Do not be pushy in asking for money. Just let them know of what you plan to do and that it will take money for it to happen, and then leave it with them. Dont let them think that your friendship is any way related to whether they might support you financially. Remember that not all your friends are in a position to give, and some may already be fully committed supporting other ministries. So do not be upset if your closet friends do not support you financially. You can also approach other churches. Your pastor may be able to give you recommendations to other churches, and help you arrange to meet with other pastors or even speak in other churches. Bear in mind though that most churches receive many more requests for funding than they can possibly give to. Unless you already have an established relationship with a particular church, then you may find it very difficult to get a hearing. Even if you do get the opportunity to speak in a church, unless you have a strong relationship with that church, it is unlikely you will get much ongoing interest from that church. Do not be discouraged by this, and dont waste a lot of energy trying to get support from people who dont know you, because like all of us, they may be reluctant to support someone they dont know well. Spend your time with those who do know you and are more likely to get behind you.

Why should they support you? You need to put yourself in a potential supporters shoes. Why should I support this missionary? If you are yourself a missionary supporter you will probably better understand this. In my experience people look for: Someone they know and trust. Someone with a proven track record. If they have seen you in ministry and know you can do it, they are more likely to put their money behind you and your ministry. Someone who is a mature Christian and who is theologically sound. Someone who has clear purpose and knows what they intend to do on the field. Someone who keeps them informed. Start sending out newsletters now.

Final preparation Shortly before you go, most mission agencies will require you to attend some orientation and maybe some linguistic training. You will also need vaccinations and visas. Then you will need to book your airfare, pack your luggage, have your church send you out in prayer and.. GO!

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Conclusion Where to From Here?


So this book is nearly finished. What do we do with it? What will you do with the ideas presented in this book? It is not just written for information. It is written for action. It is written to try and encourage Christians to obey better Christs commission to the church, and to do it in a biblical way so that God is glorified in every part of the planet. I would like to close this book by issuing a challenge to various types of people. As you will realise by now, the biggest challenge I want to issue is to do something about the gross imbalance of where we send missionaries. Only 5% of missionaries are working among the one-third of the world who have never heard the Good News of Jesus Christ. There are lots of people saying that, but there are probably only a few like me who actually say that we should stop sending missionaries to places that already have a reasonable Christian presence. Why do I say that? Because when we send 95% of our missionaries to places that already have a Christian presence, we are diverting valuable resources away from those who have never heard. Am I being mean saying that? Many think I am. Fancy telling someone they shouldnt go to Uganda, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu or Nicaragua just because its already got lots of Christians and lots of missionaries. Am I not being a bit harsh? Well, think of it another way. Isnt it being a bit harsh to the vast majority of the people of Yemen, Turkey and Mauritania who have never even heard the Gospel once not to send them missionaries because 95% of our missionaries and mission dollars are tied up with people who have already heard? We must do something about this gross imbalance. You must do something about this gross imbalance. Why? Because as we have seen, Matthew 28:19 tells us to go to all the outsiders, and we havent yet done that. Think about it. There probably are enough missionaries already to get the job done. 5% of the missionaries work in the one-third of the world that is unreached. Now, if we only evened it up so that one-third of the missionaries went to this one-third of the world that is unreached, that would mean there would be more than six times the number of missionaries in these places than there are now! The unreached country in Central Asia with only 100 missionaries would have 600 missionaries! The unreached city in India with only 20 missionaries would have 120 missionaries! The unreached town in Pakistan with only 3 missionaries would now have 18! And those unreached villages across North Africa with no missionaries and no-one at all to tell them about eternal life, would finally get a missionary of their own! Now that would be Good News!

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Lets go further. Imagine now if instead of 95% of missionaries going to already established places and 5% going to the unreached, it was the other way around? That is, 95% of our missionaries were going to the unreached, with 5% going to the reached. There would be 19 times more missionaries in the places that really need them! Now that country in Central Asia with only 100 missionaries would have almost 2000 missionaries! That unreached city in India would go from 20 missionaries to almost 400 missionaries! That unreached town in Pakistan would go from 3 missionaries to 57! And across North Africa, every village may be able to have its own missionary! So you might ask, What can I do about this? You can do a lot. Heres my closing challenge to various groups of people who may be reading this book.

To those Christians who stay behind in your home country and support those who go
Be informed about where the most spiritually needy places are. Buy Operation World so you have that information. Direct most, if not all, of your missionary giving to those missionaries who are working in places with less than 1% evangelical Christians.57 Dont direct your missionary giving just to the missionaries you hear about and who give impassioned appeals. Remember, it is the people who most need missionaries whom you wont hear about! Thats precisely why they are still needy because they dont have missionaries! Actively seek out those missionaries who are working amongst the unreached and if you cant find any, contact mission agencies to ask if they have missionaries working among the unreached. If a friend of yours tells you they are thinking of being a missionary, ask them if they are aware of the places where the greatest spiritual needs are. Lend them this book and ask them to read it and think about what it says. If they are planning to go to somewhere that is already reached, challenge them on this. If they tell you that God has called them to a specific country that is reached, challenge them on that. Any inward impression needs to be accountable to other Christians and, most of all, to clear biblical teaching. Dear Christian who stays at home, you can sometimes think you dont have much influence in taking the Good News to the unreached. But you do. Missionaries cant do what they do without your prayers and financial support. Your releasing of financial and prayer support to those working among the unreached, and withholding of that support from those that arent, will really make a difference to get the Good News to those who have never heard.

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Remember of course, that some countries listed in Operation World may have a nationwide average of more than 1% evangelical Christian, but that could be very unevenly spread so that there are still large pockets of unreached people within that country.

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To church leadership
Everything I have written in the section above to Christians who stay at home and support missionaries also applies to you, but even more so. As a fellow pastor, I know that we hold an influential position in our churches. Sure, not everyone agrees with us, or does what we ask them to do, but our influence is actually greater than that of most Christians! If you have become convinced of the principles in this book, then teach them to your congregation. When you are expounding a Bible passage with mission in it (and there are lots of them), then talk about this. Make your church aware of the unreached and that they only receive 5% of mission resources. Establish a missions policy in your church that prioritises mission work among the unreached. Be very clear to missionaries that want your support that most, if not all, of your overseas missions budget is directed to the unreached. If you dont know of missionaries going to the unreached, be pro-active and contact mission agencies and ask them to recommend missionaries who are working with the unreached. Encourage people in your congregation to consider being missionaries. When someone does approach you with an interest in being a missionary, lend them this book and a copy of Operation World and encourage them to focus on the unreached. Make it clear that the churchs policy is to direct missions funding to the unreached. That might sound harsh if one of your members insists that God has called them to somewhere that is already reached. Remember, however, that missions is not about the missionary, but it is about the people they are going to. Above all, it is about Gods glory being proclaimed to all people. While it might be hard for your church member who is told by you that you cant support them going to an already reached country, you are doing a favour for and advocating for those unreached people whom youve never met and who wont hear about Christ unless pastors like you go in to bat for them.

To mission agencies
When I read magazines from many mission agencies, I am astounded at how many of their missionaries are still working with the reached in comparison to the unreached. In the country where we used to be missionaries, which is one of the most unreached countries of the world and which has a population of several million people, most of the major agencies have no missionaries there at all! Churches and Christians in sending countries look to you for leadership in missions. Missionary applicants come to you. Be informed. Stop sending missionaries to reached places. Yes, sure there are needs in the reached places, but dont just oil the squeaky wheel. Mission agencies often advertise those roles they hear about from their missionaries on the field. Where are those missionaries? Most of them are in reached places. This leads to the snowball effect which has been discussed in this book. The reached places which already have the missionaries attract even more missionaries, while the places with few or no missionaries fail to attract many missionaries. 129

So, be intentional. Be strategic. When someone contacts you enquiring about mission service, tell them about the most spiritually needy places on the planet. Write about these places on your websites and in your magazines. Inform churches about them. So, maybe you dont do that because you dont have people in the unreached places to give you a report. Well, do some research. Attend consultations on those areas. Visit those places. Find out ways to get into these places. Then promote them, and gather a team, perhaps working with other agencies, so you can get people in there.

To the 95% of missionaries who work among already reached peoples


It is for you that this book may be the hardest to read. First, I want to thank you for reading it. You may not agree with everything I have written here and I understand that. I also respect the great sacrifices you have made to leave your homeland to go and minister to another people. But I also want to challenge you. Please, for the sake of the unreached, for the sake of the 2 billion people who havent heard the Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ, and who only get 5% of the missionaries, would you consider handing over your work where you are and relocating to work among the unreached? Sometimes missionaries who are working among the already reached find the teaching of this book hard to accept because it implies that what you are doing is not useful. That is certainly not the case. The very fact that the country you are working in is reached is because of the many years of sacrifice and labour of you and your predecessors. But, now the people are reached, would you consider moving on? Yes, theres still much work to be done. Even the most Christian country in the world, Kenya, according to Operation World, is still more non-Christian than Christian! So theres still evangelising to be done. And yes, even in reached countries, Christians need teaching and discipling. But, the same is true of your home country. The point is that when a country is reached, there are local people from that country who can, or should, be doing that themselves. You, the missionary, who is used to leaving home and moving country, are now needed elsewhere. Dear missionary friend who is working in a reached country, do you realise how much you have to offer in the unreached world? You have already gone through the process of leaving behind the comforts of the west that still so strongly ensnare so many of our friends back home. You have learned principles of cross-cultural ministry. Sure, if you move you will have to learn a new language, but unlike a brand new missionary, you already know how to learn a language! You are experienced missionaries. Please come over to Macedonia, to the Balkans, to North Africa, to the Middle East, to Central Asia, to Northern India, and to wherever there are unreached, and help us.

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