Who Is a Missionary Anyway?
Who is a Missionary Anyway?
I had some trouble locating my car in the megachurch parking lot. I wondered if they could add some Disneyesque labeling of the lots with Bible characters instead. Finding Samson Lot B might have been easier. As I joined the lines of cars heading for the exits, a half dozen cheerful parking lot attendants with florescent security vests signaled me along the way. Then, just as I left the church property, I saw a little sign with the church logo on it that read, “You are now sent as a missionary!”
This was an entirely unexpected promotion. At first, I wondered if the sign might not apply to me. I was not a part of that church. I was there for a conference is all, the first and last time I was there. But now I was apparently counted among the missionaries of this impressive church!
Back in the days of Antioch in Acts 13, after prayer and fasting, the faithful gathered around Paul and Barnabas to lay hands on them and send them out to parts unknown on what became known as the First Missionary Journey (like many classics, they stopped with a trilogy).
However, for my new missionary journey, prayer and fasting were replaced by merely exiting the parking lot. The laying on of hands was replaced with the waving of the traffic safety batons at me, confirming my missionary call out the exit. Thus, I was commissioned by a church I have yet to return to – and frankly, forget the name of – for my immediate missionary journey to buy myself a grande skinny vanilla latte across the street.
We have all heard the exhortations from pastors by now. It is a new and perhaps compelling refrain to some of us: “You are a missionary right where you live!”
Is this accurate? Is this helpful? Is it problematic in any way? I want to think this through with you.
Is the Church the Chicken or the Egg?
The first thing we might need to figure out is defining what “mission” is. There is the mission of God and the Church of God. Which one comes first, the chicken or the egg, in this situation? Does the church have a mission?
Perhaps you have noticed that specialists love to disagree. It is hard to move forward in any academic field without having some territory of your own, an area that perhaps all those before you find to be a little suspect. But one idea everyone that studies it seems to agree on is this: The Church doesn’t have a mission after all, God’s mission, in fact, has a church.
What this idea means is that the church is a tool to achieve the mission of God, as opposed to the mission being a “part” of the church, the church is a part of the mission. This is why Christopher Wright said, “It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission.” (2) Nearly everyone in the theological fields of missiology and ecclesiology (1) across a vast diversity of backgrounds and persuasions agrees that the mission of God is a fundamental nature of the church and of all of Christianity. Renowned missiologist David Bosch adds, “The Christian faith, I submit, is intrinsically missionary…. This dimension of the Christian faith is not an optional extra: Christianity is missionary by its very nature.” (3)
Therefore, the answer to the question, “Does the church have a mission?” is, no it does not; God’s mission has a church. On a theological level, all followers of Jesus Christ are a part of, whether they know it or not, the mission of God. Bosch said, “Missionary activity is not so much the work of the Church as simply the Church at work.” (3) Or put another way by Bosch, “The church is not the sender but the one sent.” (3) The church is the egg, not the chicken
That somewhat resolves the first part of my questions about the church, missions and missionaries. But it doesn’t fully answer the questions I asked myself as I exited that megachurch parking lot on the Apostle David’s First Missionary Journey to Starbucks. For that, we’ll have to take a bus ride with Lesslie Newbigin from India to England.
Post-Christian Missional Thinking
Whether most know it or not, a missionary journey sparked this new way of talking. It was not a missionary journey out, like Paul and Barnabas, it was a missionary journey back home. Lesslie Newbigin had served for many decades as a missionary to India. He and his wife returned to England over land, only taking two suitcases and riding local buses. Upon return to his home country, Newbigin found that things had changed dramatically. In his autobiography, Newbigin wrote, “England is a pagan society and the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church.” (4)
The country that had sent Newbigin out as a missionary now needed its own form of missionary-kind-of-thinking to reach. Over time, this came to be known as the missional movement in the West (you may have heard of that term and not known of its origin). One of the particular problems Newbigin saw was that the Western church no longer seemed to understand its evangelistic task. “As time went on I began to receive invitations to take part in conferences… I began to feel very uncomfortable with much that I heard. There seemed to be so much timidity in commending the gospel to the unconverted people of Britain.” (4)
Whether they have read any missiology or not (Newbigin or otherwise), many church leaders in North America subscribe to what amounts to a missional movement mindset in talking about where they live. It takes on vastly different forms, but in the end, many churches think of the area in which they live as a mission field and the people they are equipping to share their faith as missionaries in their own land. I share all this to say that this idea did not come out of nowhere and was not invented by some pastor in his study on a Friday trying to gin up his sermon, nor was it invented by the guy who made the sign I saw on my way out of the megachurch parking lot.
The idea of approaching the culture around us in the West with a missionary mindset comes from missionaries themselves coming back to the West and declaring, with alarm, two points:
1) The culture of the West shifted and required a more intentional ministry mindset that was similar in some ways to a missionary one.
2) The church of the West had not taken its redemptive task seriously enough and needed to equip its members to start doing so.
So, along with the best missiologists like Bosch, we can say, “Since God is a missionary God, God’s people are a missionary people.” (3) and with Bavinick, “Missions is not simply a by-product of ecclesiastical life and theology. Missions belongs to the very essence of the church.” (5)
If Everything is Missions
I am left with a doubt about this whole conversation, and it stems from Stephen Neill’s corrective warning: “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.” (6)
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 bathed in 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 the belief 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 focus 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 nearly his entire life to the task. 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.
Is there 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 difference of scope and difference of 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 lives life among 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. 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 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 as they “think like a missionary” in their daily missional living where they are. 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?
NOTES:
- I find it generally helpful (even if over-simplified) to think of theology as the study of God, missiology as the study of the mission of God, and ecclesiology as the study of the church of God. Basically these are God-focused fields of study with more and more specialization.
- The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative by Christopher J.H. Wright
- Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission by David Bosch
- Unfinished Agenda by Lesslie Newbigin
- An Introduction to the Science of Missions by J. H. Bavinck
- See https://www.jdpayne.org/2020/09/if-everything-is-mission/ and the book When Everything Is Missions by Denny Spitters and Matthew Ellison
- “Mission of the Church to All Nations” by Lesslie Newbigin
- “Theology and Mission in Wesleyan Perspective” by Howard Snyder