Message Magazine Online - Vol. 53, No. 01, Spring 2005

In This Issue

• A Church on Every Block
  By Donna Messenger
• Preparing the Bride
  By Michael G. Loftis, President
• Tsunami Relief
• DNA and The Church: Biblical Church Multiplication
  By Norm Nicklas
• The Most Powerful Human Force in the World
  Dr. Michael G. Loftis, President
• Why Is Missions So White?
  By Bill Commons
• Invoking the Hand of God Together
  By Rev. Charles Ware
• The Missions Committee
  By Jim Ruff
• Equipping a Generation of Global Leaders
  By Jim Jeffery
• Global Access Partnerships: One Church’s Story - Part Two
  By Dave Livermore
• Missions Conferences With Impact
  An Interview with E.C. Haskell
• Women’s Missionary Groups: A Thing of the Past?
  By Dotty Ashley
• Into Life Eternal
• Children’s Corner

Why Is Missions So White?

By Bill Commons, International Vice-President for Stratgic Initiative and Research

It is the “elephant in the room.” Everybody sees it, few acknowledge it, and nobody wants to talk about it. But it is HUGE—and a major obstacle in mobilizing believers for global ministry.

If we do interracial ministry overseas, why aren’t we interracial in our missionary teams? Is missions only for Anglos? Why do we conduct monocultural missions to a multicultural world? Could it be (shudder) the “R” word? Nobody wants to admit to racism.

Unfortunately, prejudice is part of our American heritage. Many of our churches are so white that minorities feel unwelcome. The “Jerusalem Ministries” of our constituent churches to their communities seldom proactively seek to reach minorities and to become multicolor churches.

The ends of the earth are now on the street where you live. But we flee to the suburbs and fear the immigrants the Lord of the harvest has graciously brought to our streets.  It is now possible to reach most of the world’s unreached peoples without ever leaving our shores, but most of our churches don’t have the heart for it. “That’s what we pay our missionaries to do.”

The first New Testament church to send out church-planting teams to the nations (Acts 13) had a leadership team composed of Barnabas, a church-planter from Jerusalem; Simeon, who was called Niger (likely a black African immigrant); Lucius from Cyrene, a blue-blooded Manaen (who rubbed shoulders with the politically powerful); and Paul, the hotheaded, Christian-persecutor who claimed conversion and became an evangelist-intern. What a combustible mix of cultures, races, ethnic groups, and political backgrounds the Holy Spirit used to launch the first international church-planting movements!

Increasingly, our constituent churches are awakening to the adventure of reaching the total community and becoming what God intended—beautiful snapshots of the global church Christ is building around the world. These churches are enjoying the kind of colorblindness (or, better yet, celebrating the beauty of racial diversity) that spawns a passion for reproducing similar churches through multicultural missions teams that will effectively penetrate mixed communities everywhere with Calvary’s love.

Minority missionary prospects look at missions and wonder why we are so white. They will believe we are sincere in inviting them to join our ranks when they see more people of color on our boards, our office staffs, and our field teams. It is beginning to happen, but we have a long way to go.

It is past time to demonstrate convincingly to a skeptical world that we have left in the dust the racial preferences of the past, and enthusiastically embrace colleagues from every people, tongue, and nation—in our home communities and in the world beyond.