Sharing the Mission
Dr. Bill Commons, Strategic Initiative and Research
Fifty years ago, as I was training to be a missionary, the cry was “To Every Nation.” The unreached multitudes beckoned, the harvest was ripe, and so few were willing to go as reapers. Few nations had strong churches that were multiplying and effectively evangelizing their populations.
Back then, American missionaries thought it was our job to disciple the nations. One famous Christian leader said, “It’s up to us. If we don’t send the missionaries and reap the harvest, nobody will.” Even then I wondered, “Is it really true that God has put all His eggs in our basket?” Somehow, the biblical passion to reach the world got tangled up with an Anglo-American Messianic complex.
During the colonial era of missions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was often considered “the white man’s burden” to bring civilization and Christianity to the “benighted heathens of the world.” Seeking to bring the gospel from the West to distant lands, Christ’s ambassadors accompanied the ambitious pioneers of European empire expansion. Colonialism’s cultural condescension and racial prejudice tainted the missionaries’ reputation. As a result, many nations formed the tragic misperception that Christianity is a foreign religion.
During the twentieth century, however, Western missionaries learned to embrace the heritage of every people group and sought to follow the incarnational model of Christ by teaching and living out the gospel in each cultural context. Since we sought to identify with the people and not seek foreign privilege, we went and still go as servants, not masters. We discovered we should learn from local citizens before we teach, and listen before we speak.
Now in the twenty-first century, we reject the tired, neocolonial pattern of exporting American religion and transplanting American-style churches. We urge national believers to implement the supracultural truths of Scripture by establishing culturally authentic churches that are faithful to the Bible.
As the gospel spreads and Christ calls out “a people for His Name” from the ethne (all people groups), churches grow and reproduce. Turning from a missionary mindset focused on planting and pastoring one church, we now seek multiplication in order to foster church-planting movements.
It is our greatest calling, after evangelizing, discipling, and “churching” the ethne, to pass on the torch of world missions and cheer them on to complete the task. When national leaders see that foreign missionaries do not seek to control, but that we urge them to be the leaders, they gain the confidence to believe God can use them in even greater ways than He used us as foreigners among them.
Planting, growing, and multiplying churches in any people group is an overwhelming task. Attacking the “gates of hell” internationally is not for the faint of heart. Exhausted by spiritual warfare, we missionaries tend to stop short of leading our churches to become sending forces that launch our own ambassadors for Christ out to the nations.
Looking back on the two churches I helped plant in Hong Kong in the 1970s, I praise God that they picked up the torch of parenting daughter churches and thus reproduced often. But I grieve over my failure to implant a passion to disciple the ethne into their spiritual DNA. It was not until thirty years later and after half of a century of labor by American missionaries and Chinese partners that our ABWE Fellowship of Churches (thirty-one congregations) created an interchurch partnership and sent forth their own missionaries to other regions of the world.
We have not completed the church-planting task until new churches have embraced their biblical role and are, in turn, sending and supporting their own gospel ambassadors to the villages, towns, and cities in their nation, and to the nations beyond.
Thus our cry is no longer “From America to the nations,” but “FROM every nation TO every nation!”
Copyright © 1996-2007 ABWE, Inc. All Rights Reserved.