The World Awaits

The other day I was reading a missions piece that recommended a link to a blog by a person who has traveled to 50 countries doing mission. Besides the fact that the blog site itself was really designed to play to the fears of a western comfort oriented audience (being held at gunpoint, illness, dangerous travel and so forth), the whole idea intrigued me that the activities of this person were being framed not only as “mission” but were being held up as exemplary. My interest here is not to make a value judgment on the person’s work, since there is not enough information to do so, but rather to examine the premises behind this being a form of mission.

The frame that can be constructed from the information given is someone who lives in the United States, and forays out from there to various countries at the direction of the Spirit, connecting with people-apparently Christians who have enough English to get them involved in these various adventures for varying lengths of time, and then a return home to get on a circuit to talk about what they have done, as well as blog about it.

To me this is a great recipe for fascinating travelogues and action adventure stories, but in terms of being the vessel for accomplishing Kingdom work, I find it an extremely limited model. Again, I am not asserting that some or all of this activity is not directed by the Holy Spirit, rather that it is activity with massive inherent limitations for doing mission on the terms that we would find in the New Testament. I am going to expand on a few of these areas of limitation.

1. Language. Anyone who has lived somewhere where they have been forced to learn another language to communicate and survive knows that what you are able to do is phenomenally limited by this factor.
2. The need for someone to precede them. What follows then is that without language you are relying on other people, in which case it is probably Christian people, meaning again that you are in a place where the church exists. By definition then you are not going to be able to do meaningful work in a place where the church does not exist since there is no supportive infrastructure since you don’t have language.
3. Church to Church sharing where we cross geographic and cultural boundaries is a good thing, particularly if guided by the Spirit to meet needs and build one another up. The problem is that when we call this kind of endeavor “mission” we cut out the apostolic dimension of going where the church does not exist. Winter’s E and P scales illustrate clearly the inherent duplication of effort when we go to places the church exists and highlights the need for going to those who don’t have existing church movements.
4. Naive interventions. When we don’t understand language and culture, we see the problems that people have and interpret them through our frameworks. The tendency is to create western driven and financed interventions that do more to massage the feelings of donors than actually bring about kingdom values on the ground.
5. Depth of relationship. Again, anyone who has learned a language and culture knows that it takes time to gain trust in order to have some kind of influence on converts and local believers. Stepping in and stepping out does not allow for that kind of interaction.

This would be much more palatable to me if it were framed as some kind of “ministry” to the body of Christ, without hijacking the term “mission”. The notion that something is mission just because a geographic boundary is crossed is so solidly implanted in people’s minds that it is easier to “sell” and “promote” what you are doing by drawing on that term. But in doing so it reinforces misunderstanding and models something that at the end of the day does not move us forward in making disciples of all the tribes and tongues of this world.

Recently I read through Miller and Yamamori’s book “Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement”. It was very encouraging on several levels.  Miller is a sociologist interested in religion and has been studying Pentecostalism. Together with Yamamori (of Food for the Hungry) they decided to investigate the churches in the world that are both fastest growing and the most active in social concern.

What they discovered is that the the vast majority of churches that fit such criteria are part of the Pentecostal/Charismatic stream of Christianity. They developed a term to describe these socially concerned Pentecostals–Progressive Pentecostals. They not only reach and disciple people, but they are also involved in their social settings caring for the poor.

First of all, I was encouraged to realize that we are a part of this global stream, of people who believe in the empowerment of the Spirit to proclaim the good news and who take the social realities of the people they work with seriously. It was wonderful to hear reports of this happening all over the world.

Second, it was stirring to read the testimonies of people from an amazing variety of backgrounds who were asked by the Spirit to focus their efforts on the poor, marginalized, and broken.

One of the points that I think has great implications missiologically was their description of four orientations inside of the Pentecostal/Charismatic orbit. So within their categorization system of the Pentecostal/Charismatic world (they have 5 different types, and other scholars have their own systems as it is notoriously difficult to try and make clear distinctions on such a large and diverse movement) they see these orientations cutting across categories, denominations, and organizations.

Interestingly, three of the four types do not have much to offer the world at large. These include the legalistic/otherworldly types who separate themselves off from the world, the prosperity, health and wealth folks whose main focus is themselves, and routinized Pentecostals who are Pentecostal in name and by tradition but not in practice.

We cannot assume that “being baptized in the Spirit” and things like speaking in tongues will automatically lead to a focus on the mission of God and obedience to the Great Commission. Their research confirms what a lot of people have felt…that it is quite possible to keep the Pentecostal label and get very sidetracked from God’s purposes.

This highlights for me the need for confession of sin and repentance. As Pentecostals it is easy to get caught up in the cheering at all of the successes over the past 100 years and to forget to have time before the Lord in searching our hearts and our churches and organizations to see if we have allowed other things to get between us and the Lord of the Harvest.

Recently I have been reading a couple of pieces by N.T. Wright and have found him to be wonderfully thought provoking in many directions. His work on Jesus and Paul has given a more panoramic view of the kinds of themes and issues that were part of their first century world and that shaped their ministry and writing.

I came across a wonderful quote about what it means to follow the crucified Messiah. One of the expansion points in my own understanding of my faith has been seeing how much broader salvation is than in the way I originally conceived of it. We experience coming to know Christ as our own wonderful personal salvation-”I” am saved and delivered from sin. All of that is gloriously true. But if we continue on in our faith and take the Scripture on its own terms, it becomes clear that we cannot just sign up for Jesus as some kind of personal talisman for blessing, but that we have to take on his plan and mission as well.

I like the way Ralph Winter put it: he said it is not so much about getting people into heaven as it is about getting heaven into people. Meaning it is more than just personal salvation but is about having God’s rule change our hearts so that we become the instruments of his kingdom rule. This makes Christ Lord of all and wipes out the secular/sacred divide that we fall into so easily in the west.
Here is how Wright expressed it:
“When we speak of ‘following Christ,’ it is the crucified Messiah we are talking about. His death was not simply the messy bit that enables our sins to be forgiven but that can then be forgotten. The cross is the surest, truest, deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God;…and when therefore we speak…of shaping our world, we cannot-we dare not-simply treat the cross as the thing that saves us ‘personally,’ but which can be left behind when we get on with the job. The task of shaping our world  is best understood as the redemptive task of bringing the achievement of the cross to bear on the world and in that task the methods, as well as the message, must be cross-shaped through and through.” (The Challenge of Jesus, 94-95).

This captures beautifully the centrality of the cross as God’s methodology that has to be reflected in all we do. It becomes so easy for us to reflect instead in our efforts the values of the world system of power and human arrogance. So wherever you find yourself, in whatever arena God has placed you in, we have a part in God’s redemptive task to bring the victory of the cross to bear on human brokenness.

What fascinates me is that whether explicitly as in the Evangelical position where you intentionally place the bulk of your workers in the most receptive areas, or implicitly in the Pentecostal view in that you go where the Spirit is working, what you end up with is a kind of blank spot for what to do with the places that are not currently receptive/responsive. Going to the responsive/where the Spirit is working in terms of a mission principle is wise, as long as there is an important qualification that is made very clear. The qualification is simply this: we need to pour resources and personnel into receptive/responsive peoples who have few believers and church movements. Once you take away the controls provided by that qualification, mission stops being taking Christ to where he is not known and becomes church renewal or cross-cultural workers helping or doing evangelism that can or should be done by local Christians. And this is precisely where the problem lies today. Without the qualification this general principle can actually move us in a direction away from taking the Gospel to those who have the least access.

This issue highlights the need for what I call a theology of the hard work. Two things make this missiological oversight much clearer than perhaps at any other time in the history of Christian mission. The first is the massive success of the Christian mission around the world, and the second is the increasingly clear data about all the places where the church does not yet exist. There is a clearer line than ever between work that is fraternal in nature, assisting already strong church movements to develop, and that which is pioneer in nature where the first generation of believers needs to be won and the first church movements planted. In such a condition the principle of receptivity/responsiveness without the qualification of going to the least reached will nearly always result in workers being placed where the church exists rather than where it does not exist. An unintended consequence of the receptivity principle and the Western passion for tangibility and quantification has shaped a view of mission that makes results the primary evaluative tool for determining success. The downside of this is that anything that does not produce results is avoided, and many important activities that are preparatory to harvest are neglected. This value system then is transmitted from the West into the newer emerging missions, making the criterion of successful mission numerical results alone and discouraging any activity that does not meet that standard.

I believe that a critical component that we are going to need to develop in terms of our theology of missions if we are going to seriously engage the unreached world is our stance toward non-responsive, historically slow to respond groups. I call this a theology of the hard work. Without it we are doomed to neglecting the foundational tasks of clearing the fields, preparing the ground, and planting the seed needed for harvest. In the remainder of this section I will sketch out briefly the outline of a theology of the hard work.

The idea of a theology of the hard work came to me one day as I was reading through John 4. I have always been very moved by 4:34 where Jesus says his meat is to do the Father’s will and finish His task. But on this particular day as I read further a statement jumped off the page and gripped me. In 4:35-38 as Jesus is talking to his disciples about the present harvest, he makes the statement that others have done the hard work (vs. 38), and they are now reaping the fruits of those labors. When I went back and worked through commentaries on this passage, I discovered that scholars are not really sure of the antecedents that Jesus is using here. Who are the “others”, what harvest Jesus is talking about, where did he send them to reap, who are the reapers drawing their wages, and so on. What is quite clear however, is that Jesus is acknowledging here the well known agricultural fact that in order to get a harvest you must do hard preparatory work first. It encouraged me greatly that Jesus recognizes and honors the hard work. He notes that both the sower and the reaper rejoice together (vs. 36). I have always appreciated the urgent eschatological view of our Pentecostal forefathers and mothers, but living among a slow response Buddhist people it has bothered me at the same time because such a view, without intending to do so, tended to devaluate the preparatory hard work where the ground is still hard. I was excited to find out that Jesus is not only aware of the need for hard work to be done but he applauds it.

A theology of the hard work is founded on Jesus’ acknowledgement of the role of hard work in preparing for a harvest. He lets his disciples know that they are standing on the shoulders of others; that those who have gone before have done the really difficult labor and now they will reap. Today, in the excitement of the worldwide expansion of the church there is a diminished tolerance for the often backbreaking labor of preparation for a harvest. I found a quote in an essay on mission societies citing a letter from an Irish missionary to Iran requesting prayer for the slow progress of the gospel in then Persia. He said, “I am not reaping the harvest; I can scarcely claim to be sowing the seed; I am hardly plowing the soul; but I am gathering out the stones. That, too, is missionary work; let it be supported by loving sympathy and fervent prayer.”[1] The wonderful harvest today among Iranians did not grow out of a vacuum, there was preparation. We need to revive the perspective of heaven in order to instill steel into the souls of the workers that will go to places that require preparation before a harvest will be gained

Another factor in a theology of the hard work is one that comes from empirical observation, that the non-responsive may be so not because they are resistant to the Gospel, but because they have never heard the message in a way that makes sense to them. We are hearing a growing number of reports from many places, with some being in what are regarded as highly resistant blocs of people, where peoples that had never responded in the past are coming to faith in Jesus in large numbers. This is often associated with a presentation of the message of Christ that is disconnected from Western forms and which helps converts remain in their sociocultural context while faithfully following Jesus. Resistance and non-responsiveness often turn out to be not the problem of the people group, but rather the messengers and the version of faith they are trying to proclaim. If our strategy does not include a missiology that legitimizes going to groups with the smallest response and fewest Christians we are making a large strategic error, potentially cutting off those who would respond to a message put in their context.

A theology of the hard work revives a theme that is prominent in the Gospels that we will be hated for Jesus’ sake (see for example Matt. 5:10; 10:21-25; 24:9). With the huge expansion of the Christian movement around the globe it is easy to forget how divisive Jesus can be in certain social settings. We need to hear his call to his followers to endure and hold firm when they are hated, reviled, and persecuted for their identification with him. Finally, I think there is more theological work to do in the area of understanding the spread of God’s glory among the nations at a larger level than just the salvation of individuals. It is right for us to long for the people that we work among to experience eternal salvation through Christ, but we also have to adjust our horizons to the larger picture and remember that the goal of missions is the glory of God. It is also right for us to pursue bringing glory to God by turning people who have been rebels, and who love darkness to his light and truth. There is no doubt that the growth of the worshipping community in all its diversity of the various tribes and tongues is a major part of bringing glory to God. Yet we have to admit that there may be more to this that remains unseen to our eyes and is not yet understood.

When I was a missionary candidate we had a speaker whose name I no longer remember, who was laboring in one of the toughest unreached blocs of people in the world. One of the statements that he made rang in my heart, giving me a brand new perspective on what it means to serve among the unreached. The gist of it was that even if no one ever is saved, it was worth it to live among the people and share the message and bring glory to God by proclaiming his grace and mercy in Christ. I think that if we are going to sustain activity among the unreached world that we need to refine this vision of the glory of God more so that workers see it as honorable, noble, and pleasing to God to spend their lives telling the story of Jesus in a place where at that given time in history there is limited response. We cannot let the good concept of church growth become some kind of idol that keeps us from spending time with the unreached because they are not immediately responsive to the preaching of the Gospel. If we lower the bar to church growth only and then neglect these major blocs of unreached people because they are not easy to win and add to our churches we may protect ourselves in the eyes of our peers, but shortchange the glory of God by not bearing witness to his saving work. I believe that a robust theology of the hard work will be used by the Holy Spirit to break through the fear of failure that is a major inhibiting factor in having individuals and mission agencies embrace such groups.

Periodically I read articles that advocate missions as a project with a short term approach. Interestingly, nobody arrived at those conclusions by an examination of the biblical text or of mission history. It is something that has been created by the intersection of technological innovation bringing growing affluence, ease of travel, and inexpensive communication with cultural change in the West. I don’t want to review the arguments in the long-term/short-debate, other than to note that I am decidedly a long-term advocate and tend to feel like something of a dinosaur in the current climate. Now there are a number of reasons why I believe that going somewhere, learning a language and cultural system, and staying a long time to make a contribution to the planting, growth and development of local church movements is important. I also believe that cross-cultural workers adept in those ways are critical to the future prospects of missions, whether they are sent from the West or majority world emerging agencies. However, rather than discuss the reasons here, I want to illustrate one of them that I have begun to experience on a frequent basis as I moved into my second and more recently third decade of service.

The other day my wife and I decided to drop in, unannounced, at a small church in the city we live in. As is often the case, the pastor came up and asked me to speak that morning, reasoning that since his people hear him all the time a change would be good. So I tend to come prepared for anything in such circumstances. One of the families that attends this small church is E*, her husband N*, and their young son. We have known E* since she was 7 years old. Her parents were the pastors we worked with in L* in our first and second terms. Our daughters grew up playing with her, and she was often in our home in those years. She is now about the same age as her mother was when we first met her. Her mom passed away in her mid-40s with cancer, and seeing E* is like seeing her all over again. I shared a message out of Acts 18 looking at the implications of how Paul evangelized and planted new communities of believers and what that might mean for us in our setting in Bangkok.

After the prayer time we sat down to talk with E* and N* and had a very interesting conversation that reminded me again of why staying a long time means so much. E* shared about how her heart was burning within her as I spoke about sharing the Gospel as Paul had, and that she felt like she needed to rekindle the flames of spiritual zeal in her own heart. She also confessed how having grown up in a Christian home she feels very inadequate and unsure of herself in how to talk with Buddhist neighbors where she lives. It was a critical conversation because in this tiny group of believers E* and N* are key people. He is a new believer and she is a second generation Christian. If they become more than just Sunday attenders, it will have a real impact on this little church. E* has never turned from her faith, but like too many of us, she has seen the underside of enough church life. The messy lives of those who profess to follow Christ have taken a big chunk out of the joy of that first love. Her mother was a high-impact Christian in a very humble and unassuming way, and if E* and N* as a family can catch that vision for living a life on purpose, it could help tilt the church in a new direction. As we drove home later that day, we talked about how unique that conversation was in terms of its transparency and openness.

It was not the kind of discussion you can have with a relative stranger, or someone who does not know the language well. It is one of the benefits and open doors that come from knowing someone when he or she was a small child, helping them get their first real job in the big city, and just being a part of their life so that at a teachable and open moment, that kind of conversation can happen. I have come to see that part of what staying a long time means is that you are strategically placed to be on the ground and ready for that unplannable, unstrategizable, miniscule window of time when a word needs to be said, comfort given, or a warning delivered, and you become God’s agent-on-the-ground to carry the message. It is precisely those least-controlled moments that so often turn out to be where spiritual leverage happens or seeds are planted in good ground that bring abundant harvest down the line, in a time horizon unseen by us.

When God wanted to speak he wrapped the message in a person; He has spoken to us by a Son the writer of Hebrews reminds us (Hebrew 1:2). God does not do drive-by evangelism, tract blitzes, canned evangelism, or disembodied verbal presentations of the Good News in easily digestible sound bites from a safe distance. He became one of us, and lived and died among us. And although we are but fuzzy shadows and blurred images of his incarnation, the chance for an imperfect vessel to be used by God for his purposes in that way, is what, by God’s grace, will keep us on the ground in another culture for the long haul.

Not long ago I finished working through Lesslie Newbiggin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. He had a sentence that jumped off the page in one of his chapters dealing with the logic of mission.

He begins by noting that there has been a long tradition of seeing the mission of the Church as primarily obedience to a command. While this certainly has justification, it can seem to make the mission a burden rather than a joy.

He then argues that, “If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression. Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possible be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact? the mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving” (116).

He also points out that the majority of the proclamations of the Gospel in the book of Acts are done in response to questions asked by those outside the Church (116). “In every case there is something present, a new reality, which calls for explanation and so prompts the question to which the preaching of the gospel is the answer” (117).

I often find myself using the terminology of “telling the story” rather than “preach” when I talk with people about evangelism because the latter term has so much baggage related to giving sermons from behind a pulpit in a church building setting. This fits well with Newbigin’s “explosion of joy” because our role is not to convert or to force anything on people, but rather to tell the story of what has happened in Jesus Christ.

The question then becomes how do we live and conduct ourselves in a way to raise questions in the minds of those who surround us? In the book of Acts these questions are primarily raised after some kind of supernatural intervention. Being present in real-life situations so that we can be the channel for God’s power to operate is critical to releasing his grace in lives and circumstances so that questions can be raised.

Now that my wife and I have been living and working cross-culturally for nearly 23 years, the question will often be posed to us, ‘How do you stay a long time?’
Younger people who are missionary candidates are often wanting to know the secrets of longevity as they contemplate moving into another cultural setting. I first would say that many of these same answers would equally apply to longevity in ministry in one’s own cultural setting. Working cross-culturally is simply taking your spiritual gifts and using them in a new setting, rather than using them within the culture of your birth. Although I have never sat down and tried to make some kind of comprehensive list, these are the things that come first to my mind.

Before I begin my list, I want to share a picture that has been very helpful to me over my years of service. It came from a book put out by Overseas Missionary Fellowship on living cross-culturally and I read it early on after arriving on the field. It was an article on the distinction between culture shock and culture stress. Culture shock is a pretty familiar term to most people and refers to that sense of disorientation we all have when the familiar cues of our own culture are removed and we are trying to navigate in the unknowns and ambiguities of a new setting. It wears off as you begin to learn and understand the new social system. Culture stress however, is something that does not go away entirely but can only be reduced. It refers to the stress points that we will have in a new culture, where cherished values and ideas that we have are opposed or in conflict with something in the new culture. We may be able to understand it to a degree within the framework and perspective of the new culture but never totally accept it. It also may be something that is so deeply wound into us that we can never fully divorce ourselves from that perspective, even though we can understand and operate to a degree in a new framework.

The article said that while you cannot remove the stressors, you can lessen their impact by dividing them out with stress reducers. So the picture is that of a numerator and denominator with the stressors being on the top and the stress reducers on the bottom. Thus if your stressors are say a level ten, and your reducers are only a level 1, you have a total stress level of 10.  But if your reducers are at level 100 then your total stress level is only .10. Many of the things in the list below function as stress reducers, they are things that lessen the impact of external stressors that you don’t have much control over.

Each one of these could be expanded, and perhaps in future entries I will take develop some further. For now I will just list ten things that are the first things I think of when come to the topic of longevity

1. A rich personal devotional life. This is the primary spiritual resource. You need to have lots of tools and variety to keep your prayer life fresh.
2. Ministry flows out of who you are as a person and family. Ministry is not in opposition to family.
3. Do not take yourself too seriously. Relax and enjoy. God is big and you are small. We all tend towards a messiah complex. Embrace grace and minister to those God brings to you.
4. There is no substitute for quantity of time in raising children. When you have emotionally healthy and spiritually strong children who are able to leave you home and make their way in the world, it makes it much easier to continue your work in another place.
5. The number one indicator for a successful cross-cultural worker is getting along with people, both local and your team.
6. Remember that stuff happens wherever you are, you cannot blame your new culture for everything. There are life cycle issues.
7. Language. You cannot overestimate the importance of learning the local language and culture.
8. Keep a culture journal, suspend judgment, use local informants to help explain things, find local mentors in ministry and culture.
9. Take a day off.
10. Learn to say no, work in your gifts and strengths, play to the crowd of one and not your home constituency.

One of the verses that is a missions classic is Habakkuk 2:14

“For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

There are themes in the Bible about God’s glory already being present and other times where it is a future event. I got curious one day to see how this verse fit into its context in Habakkuk chapter 2. It is in a series of “woes” being pronounced by the prophet and for the life of me I could not figure out what the “for” connected to. The woe it sits in starts out with pronouncing woe on one who build a city with bloodshed.

So I went back and picked up the thread in 2:4 and followed it through the series of woes 2:6, 2:9, 2:12, 2:15, 2:19. This is part of the Lord’s answer to the inquiry of the prophet as to why God is allowing the wicked Bablyonians to be  his instrument of judgment while they themselves remain unjudged and act with impunity.

So the one who is puffed up and arrogant here is Babylon personified in 2:4-5 and God says that he will be taunted and ridiculed, and this starts the series of woes pronouncements.

What helped me make sense of the passage is the final woe that mocks the person who has to call out to lifeless idols to come to life and wake up. By contrast, the God of the earth does not need people to wake him up, the whole earth instead should be silent before him.

So the classic verse in 2:14 starts to make more sense when see in terms of the judgment on this arrogant one (Babylon personified) and his program of greed, extortion, destruction, violence, plunder, building by unjust gain, bloodshed, drinking, and trust in idols. God is saying that he is going to take all forms of human aggrandizement and self-centered seeking of personal (or ethnic group, state, and so on) gain, and instead see that his glory will cover the earth. And in this he reminds us that he is the active agent, and there are times where it is completely appropriate to be silent before him, to tremble in his presence, and to listen for his guidance that puts us on a trajectory for his glory and not that of our own human projects.