Thursday, July 21, 2011

Missions Discipleship

If you are more concerned about the future of your church than the future of the world, then your church has no future.

We had a missionary from Thailand share in church a few weeks ago about his work with Burmese national church planters. Afterwards, our pastor passed on the above quote. He heard it a pastor's conference he attended earlier this year. The timing of this was perfect as that previous week I had been burdened by what I have observed to be a lack of "discipleship in missions" in The Church in the past 15 years or so.

Side note: This happens so often lately that it is starting to amaze me. I will be burdened almost to the point of distraction about something. I'll talk and "process" it over and over again with my husband, pray about it and then our pastor will teach about it on Sunday. It’s as if God has been preparing my heart all week for "the Good Word" (as one pastor I know would say).

Moving on: My husband and I both came to Christ around the same time, in the early eighties. We didn't know each other at that time, in fact we lived in different states. During that time period, though, there must have been a surge in foreign missions (long term) or something, because both of us had experienced a missional emphasis as part of our discipleship experiences, the courses of which looked really similar.

Long term missionaries from foreign fields would come and do presentations, we would have missions conferences every year, "prayer letters" and "prayer cards" were openly displayed in the foyer (unless of course the missionary was in a "closed" country and needed anonymity), missions was discussed and emphasized both in our youth groups and from the pulpits.

Our youth pastors told us about missionary heroes like Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, William CareyMary Schlessor, Bruce Olson, and Hudson Taylor. Furthermore, they read missionary biographies and encouraged us to do the same. When we were college aged, we learned about those living in physical and spiritual poverty in the 10/40 window and were encouraged to pray for them. "Christmas in July" dinners were held to raise money for Christmas packages for missionaries over seas.

Although we both attended Conservative Baptist (CBA) churches, it wasn't just denominational missions that we were exposed to. We had missionaries from a variety of agencies at our church equally represented along with the demominational ones -- organizations like Wycliffe, Operational Mobilization, Frontiers, AIM, SEND, CAM, New TribesCompassion International, etc.

Both Eric and I feel that the expanded world view that missions discipleship offered us has lead to a deeper level of faith than we would have had if we not been discipled this way. We have observed this not only in our own walks with the Lord, but in the commitments of others in our former youth groups. When we look at members of our groups today, many if not most of them have strong relationships with the Lord. Some of them are serving in ministry and/or missions.

Knowing how God is working around the world and seeing others serve sacrificially – sometimes risking their lives for the Gospel --  has been inspiring, convicting and motivating. Missionaries set the example of the type of radical commitment God asks of all of us. I’m not saying that all of us are called to be missionaries, but I am saying that all of us are called to "count-the-cost" levels of obedience. This life is a vapor. The next is "ages to ages". Missionary examples encourage us to live with full abandon in light of the "ages to ages" and not settle for a satisfactory, comfortable "vapor".

When we were in high school, the short-term missions movement was just beginning to take off. I was in tenth grade when I first went to Mexico for a week to do evangelism. I think that this movement has had both positive and negative effects on the overall missions emphasis of the church. For myself and my husband, it has been significantly positive, mobilizing us into a life-time of vocational ministry, both pastoral and missional. In fact, we served as full time missionaries for 17 years with a short-term missions organization focusing on the border regions of Mexico (My husband worked in the administrative office. We lived stateside and commuted several times a year). When short-term missions serves to mobilize The Church toward long-term missions, it can have hugely positive effects.

What seems to have happened in the past 15-20 years, however, is that an emphasis on short-term missions has replaced an emphasis in long-term missions. I was surprised several years ago when I was sitting on a church missions committee whose members had never heard of some of the largest and most prominent long-term, missionary sending organizations in evangelical Christianity (I mentioned some of them above).

Additionally, when I go into churches today, I no longer see missionary prayer letters displayed. One person told me this was because displaying prayer letters was not "seeker friendly". I don’t think visitors are going to walk into a church, see missionary prayer letters and say "Uh oh! I’m outta here!" -- especially if they receive a welcome that is warm and accepting.

Another pastor mentioned that it disturbed the asthetics of the church to have prayer letters displayed. My mother-in-law’s church has opted to place prayer letters/cards in some decorative file folders in wall pockets with an individual missionary’s name printed on each one.  These are displayed in the back of the foyer as an alternative to the former practice of displaying them openly on shelves in the entry way. Although I’m disappointed that they made this decision, at least the letters are available for members to take.

I attended a mega church in California for 14 years.  Although I love this church and experienced significant growth while there, it bothered me that we had attended the church for 12 years before we knew the name of one single missionary family.  This was rather ironic because it turned out that the church generously supported almost 50 missionary families!  I discovered this when my husband and I, along with another couple, decided to facilitate a missions prayer meeting. 

We received all of the financial statements along with the contact information of the missionaries.  While the church was extremely generous with finacial support, they weren't as good about educating the congregation as a whole about who the long-term missionaries were.  When I would visit the church's website, there was a missions page, but only short-term missions trip information on it. The missionary page was "coming soon" for about 4 years. When we were commissioned for our missionary service, we had one person come up to us and say "I didn't know there were full time missionaries anymore".  Unfortunately, for a church of 8,000 people, we only had about 5 to 15 people attend our prayer meetings.  When I visited last month, I noticed that they no longer have a missions pastor.

Question: I realize that my observations are based on my limited exposure to churches I am familiar with or had some involvement in.  If my experience is representative of a larger trend, however, what can those of us who are more missions minded do?

Answer: We must be intentional and disciple ourselves and our children in missions – and not just denominational missions. God is at work around the world in powerful and amazing ways. If we just focus on what He is doing in our denomination, we will miss some incredible opportunities to worship and praise God for what He is doing through other agencies. We also miss out on the chance to pray for these agencies and the countries they serve in.

I’ll include practical ideas for missions discipleship in my next post. In the mean time, check out this Youtube video to see the reaction of one tribe in West Papua, Indonesia upon receiving a the New Testament translated into their language for the first time.


2 comments:

  1. Great post! I appreciate the time you put into this. I will definitely take it to heart, especially after attending a Missionary Alliance Church.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Christine.

    The CMA is one of the stronger denominations in this area, along with the Southern Baptists (although when we were serving in Mexico, one of the churches there called themselves "La Alianza Christiana y M." The "y M." part was because they weren't doing missions and so they didn't want to put "missionera" in. I don't think the CMA was too happy with them about this though)

    Some strenghts of the CMA are that their missionaries are fully supported financially and very well trained in missions philosophy and ministry.

    Eric is licensed and ordained CMA. Most CMA churches have missions spotlights and CMA missionaries do "tours" when they are home on furlough. We also receive, via email regular updates on all of the CMA missionaries in our district.

    Some CMA churches are very denominational when it comes to missionary support, however. I used to comment to Eric that it seemed like they were more focused on the kingdom of the CMA than on the kingdom of God. And that bothered me.

    I can understand the denominationalism to a certain extent, because their missionaries are supported out of the Great Commission Fund which individual members of the churches contribute to, so there is a "competition" of sorts going on.

    As good as an organization that CMA is, however, they can't fill every demand of the great commission. For example, they focus primarily on cities. If one has burden for church planting in tribal ministry, they wouldn't be a good fit. New Tribes or Wycliffe would be a better avenue to pursue.

    Emma wants to be a missionary to India. Other than doing relief development,through CAMA their isn't a place for her to do what she wants to do in the CMA, so she is looking at another organization that can help facilitate her call.

    It does bother me, though, when I hear of CMA churches not contributing anything to the Great Commission Fund. One older CMA pastor who was doing some checking up in this area for the denomination, told me that several of the pastors of Alliance churches he contacted had never heard of the GCF. That is sad, because it is a defining factor of the Alliance.

    A few years ago CMA pulled out of Urbana to start their own missions conference, "Envision" I think it was called, but I may not be correct. The tag line was "Its like Urbana, but for the Alliance." I thought that was really funny since, although it is sponsored by InterVarsity, one of the defining factors of Urbana is the hundreds of missions agencies represented. The focus isn't on any one agency.

    A good missions discipleship program will present all the legitimate options, along with the denominational ones, so that individuals can become fully educated and more clearly hear the call of God on their lives.

    ReplyDelete