So, Who is a Missionary Anyway?

In the middle installment of this series of questions about the mission, the church, and missionaries, we rode a bus with Lesslie Newbigin from India to England and learned about a missional perspective on the West. I hope it helped us apply our more expansive view of the mission of God to our own lands. However, I have a sneaking doubt about this whole conversation, and it stems from Stephen Neill's corrective warning: “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.” (6)

Church and Mission: A Chicken and Egg Question

The West Requires Post-Christian Missional Thinking

I was a young pastor in a church in the United States, and we were contemplating putting someone in charge of our prayer ministries. Along the way several people objected to the idea, saying, "All of our ministries are infused with prayer, we don't want it to be just one of the things we do." This was a nice notion, and I do hope all our ministries were prayer-focused. However, we came to believe that if "everyone is in charge then nobody is in charge," and we appointed a leader over prayer, and it greatly increased our intentionality and prayer-culture for everyone.

I wonder if the same principle is at work with mission. If everyone is a missionary, maybe nobody is. What I mean by that, is if we call everyone a missionary right where they live, will that remove the inclination and motivation for people to be involved in the more specific role missionaries have worldwide?

Our missionary friend Lesslie Newbigin didn't want that effect of missional thinking. He valued cross-cultural missions so much that he committed the prime of his life (four decades) to the task right up to retirement. He even said, "If I think I can keep it to myself, then I do not in any real sense believe it. Foreign missions are not an extra; they are the acid test of whether or not the Church believes the Gospel." (7) What he called foreign missions is not optional for the church.

There is perhaps some distinction to be made between me, the one who drove out of that megachurch parking lot and saw the sign calling me a missionary, and my friend who quit his job, sold his home, raised prayer and financial support, and moved to a Muslim country for two decades to make disciples in a place that had none? Yes, there is quite a difference.

But what is the nature of that difference? What distinction can be made between living life "on mission" where I live, and being a called, appointed, and sent out missionary? I see two: a different scope and different focus.

A Cross-Cultural Scope

A missionary moves cross-culturally. They are sent out, much like Paul and Barnabas, to other countries where they will live as strangers in what often will feel like a strange land. There is a reason that historically, this work has been known as "foreign missions." As David Bosch says, "The difference between home and foreign missions is not one of principle but of scope." (An exception might be made for those more extreme cross-cultural contexts in one's own country, but those are rare in most countries.)

Perhaps we can "think like a missionary" in our context. I certainly try to myself. Much of how I want to live my life is learned from missionaries living on other continents. Does that mean I am "doing what they do"? No. Instead, I simply say I am trying to "think like a missionary" and leave it at that. I don't want to diminish or in any way make it seem like I've sacrificed like they have for the gospel. I have not.

But that doesn't mean I don't learn from them. The scope of how they are engaged is meaningful, and it informs my smaller scope. This is why Howard Snyder says "God calls the church into mission; that the church is essentially missionary, or missional; that the gospel of Jesus Christ is powerful to reach across cultural barriers and to draw people to himself" (8)

An Unreached People Group Focus

On top of moving cross-culturally, a missionary works to reach unreached people groups. This would also include those who move to another culture to assist newer churches begin to reach unreached people groups in other places themselves. They are all involved in a worldwide networked strategy to reach those without access to the gospel, perhaps the greatest injustice in the world. Newbigin himself defined it that way too: "Missions must concentrate on the specific missionary intention of bringing the Gospel to those who have not heard it." (4)

Strategic missionary work involves thinking intentionally about those who have not had the chance to be discipled by someone in their language because there is not an indigenous self-sustaining church among them. This is the end goal of the work of missions, and why the Five Phases of Global Partners (the org I work with) are so important. It does not make the work in later phase missionary contexts unimportant, any more than it makes the work of those in North America unimportant as they "think like a missionary" in their daily missional living. But, as Newbigin said, we must have the specific missionary intention of reaching the unreached people groups.

Doubled in My Lifetime

I recently turned 50 years old. A Ukrainian couple my wife and I have become close to in our community gave me several meaningful gifts. One was an artsy post of facts about the year I was born. It said there were 4 billion people on the earth in 1974. Now there are 8 billion!

That statistic stopped me cold. In just my lifetime the population of the planet has doubled! And four in ten people now do not have access to the gospel. The challenge has grown immensely, so… what am I doing to support the work of missionaries to be a part of the solution to that problem, even as I think like a missionary where I live?

So that’s my answer to implied question “so what do I do now?” at this pint in this discussion:

A) Support the global work of missionaries.

B) Think like a missionary where I live.

For now I’ll take a break on writing on this subject. Leave a comment below if you’d like to discuss this more, or send me a message if you’d like to start a conversation about getting more involved globally yourself.

NOTES:

(6) See https://www.jdpayne.org/2020/09/if-everything-is-mission/ and the book When Everything Is Missions by Denny Spitters and Matthew Ellison

(7) "Mission of the Church to All Nations" by Lesslie Newbigin

(8) "Theology and Mission in Wesleyan Perspective" by Howard Snyder