One measure of the ethnocentrism of American evangelicals is the uncritical assumption that the evangelization of the world in this or any generation rests primarily on American, or at least Western, shoulders.
It is true that the churches of Europe and North America are responsible before God for the stewardship of their very considerable resources of men and materials. Since World War II some 60 per cent of world Protestant overseas missionary personnel and nearly 80 per cent of the finances have come from North American churches. Nevertheless, one must agree with Arthur Glasser’s words:
It is both physically impossible and demonstrably unscriptural that missionaries from the West are responsible to evangelize all the people of this generation throughout all the world.
The evangelization of the world is the task of the whole Church throughout the world. No Church attains fullness and maturity without participating to some degree in the missionary purpose of God (“February Theses,” East Asia Millions, May, 1961, p. 67).
Even if it were possible for the Christians of one country to evangelize the world, from a biblical perspective it would work an irreparable loss on believers in other lands, who are also under the mandate to “go disciple the nations.”
Today American evangelicals are becoming aware that in the twentieth century “the Church which is His Body” has at last become a worldwide reality. One of the important corollaries of this is that now the “home base” of missions is everywhere—wherever the Church is planted. This opens up the exciting possibility of church and mission cooperating in every nation to bring the whole Gospel to the whole world.
We are passing through an era in which many missions have pursued a pronounced objective of establishing “self-propagating, self-governing and self-supporting” churches. C. Peter Wagner in Frontiers in Missionary Strategy observes that the “three selfs” were useful and necessary concepts when mission societies were trying to shake off an inherited colonial and paternalistic mentality, but the terms have now become senile. We need to replace them with something more contemporary without losing what remains valid in the ideas they express.
Henry Lefever also cautions against the use of these terms, since “the New Testament speaks of ‘self’ only as something to be denied, or at least something to be discovered only through being set aside and forgotten” (with Peter Beyerhaus, The Responsible Church and the Foreign Missions, p. 16).
A church that is too self-conscious may also be self-centered and selfish, and not infrequently this has been a failing of so-called indigenous churches established as a result of this ideology. The Church was never intended to be self-centered; it is to be Christ-centered, with an outward, rather than inward, orientation to the world for which he died. In Archbishop Temple’s words, “The Church is the only society in the world which exists for the benefit of those who do not belong to it.”
The goal of mission is not simply establishing indigenous churches in the “third world” of Afericasia, but making disciples in the “fourth world,” which in the March, 1972, issue of Church Growth Bulletin Wagner defines as embracing “all those people who, regardless of where they may be located geographically, have yet to come to Christ. In that sense the fourth world is the top-priority objective of missions. This pushes the statement of the goal of missions one notch further than the indigenous church.”
Wagner pointedly asserts that “the proper goal of the Christian mission is not to establish an ‘indigenous church’.… The true goal of missions is making disciples” (Frontiers in Missionary Strategy, p. 168). Normally, indigenous national churches functioning on New Testament patterns should be the most effective instruments for implementing the Great Commission. But we all know of instances where local churches (in America as well as abroad) are not effective—and may actually be a hindrance—in discipling the fourth world. Where they can be helped to realize and pursue the Church’s primary objective—fine! But until they can be brought to do this, they may simply have to be bypassed in pursuit of the prime objective. The proper goal of missions is not simply planting indigenous churches in the third world; it is planting missionary churches that move out in responsibility to the fourth world of lost men.
A missionary from Cameroon reported that leaders of his mission were so committed to “indigenous principles” that when they heard of a new, responsive tribe they refused to evangelize it on the grounds that this was the responsibility of the younger churches. But the Cameroon church was not prepared, and the task was not carried out. Whenever so-called indigenous principles interfere with any church’s primary goal to disciple men and nations, they should be rethought or abandoned.
Simply establishing indigenous churches is no longer seen as an adequate goal of biblical missions unless such churches become “sending” churches in, and from, their own setting. The New Testament knows nothing of “receiving” churches that are not also in turn to be “sending” churches (1 Cor. 15:3; 2 Tim. 2:2). The early group of believers in Rome was a receiving church only until it could marshal its resources for sending the good news on to Spain and central Europe. We in the so-called sending churches of the West need to remember that we too were once on the receiving end of God’s message of reconciliation.
The truth remains that every church in every land ought to be and remain a sending church. Even in North America, the spiritual vitality of any fellowship of Christians should be measured not simply by the number of believers it attracts but by the number of disciples it sends out empowered for witness and service.
With respect to new churches Peter Beyerhaus advocates something similar when he says in the volume mentioned previously: “The ultimate aim of missions is no longer the organizational independence of the young Church; it is rather the building up of a Church which itself has a missionary outreach.” If we believe this to be the ultimate expression of the Great Commission, then we must regard the growing entrance into mission of churches on every continent as a cause for profound gratitude and continued encouragement in our day.
If Western nations and institutions are on the decline, God may well use the churches of Afericasia to bridge the gap as they increasingly are accepting the missionary responsibility that lies upon the Church in every place.
The emergence of foreign-mission societies in the third-world church is not altogether a new development. American evangelicals know the exploits of Livingstone and Moffett in opening large areas of Africa to the Gospel, but they have seldom heard of the unnamed or little-known local African missionaries who were responsible for much of the subsequent Christian advance in those areas.
One of the great accounts in missionary annals is the record of the evangelization of the Pacific Islands through the dedication of island inhabitants who went out under great risk and hardship in their small boats and canoes from Samoa, Fiji, and the Solomons to other island territories, until today three-fourths of the inhabitants of the South Pacific islands (apart from New Guinea) are reportedly members of Christian churches. Notable among these islander missionaries who crossed linguistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries with the Gospel are the more than a thousand members of the Melanesian Brotherhood who over the years worked so effectively for the Christianization of the islands, yet are all but unknown to most American mission enthusiasts.
Unfortunately, many indigenous national missionary organizations were more active around the turn of the century than they are today. To what extent does the responsibility for this lie with our generation of mission planners and activists?
What can we do to aid emerging churches overseas in developing a missions strategy and passion?
1. As American evangelicals and evangelical mission societies, we must clarify, sharpen, and update our own understanding of the biblical mandate for missions. The emphasis should be that the command to “preach the Gospel to every creature” and to “make disciples of all nations” must parallel and even supersede the intermediate goal of planting indigenous churches as a means of discipling the nations.
The Foreign Missions Department of the Assemblies of God recently restated its mission objectives to include an emphasis upon the Church’s continuing responsibility:
IN FOUR CELLS
(About Christians under attack: A parable)
Four girls sat in four little cells.
Gray soundproof walls were ink-smeared,
Scratched with graffiti.
When the spokesmen came to Cell 1
(Came shuffling, oozing;
Came like greasy smoke,
Like undulating snake backs)
They slithered whispers at her:
“Lonely, aren’t you?
Only … lonely …”
When she cried
Morosely enough
They let the cell walls disappear,
But she sees the same graffiti
On all other walls, everywhere,
Now.
Sees, sobbing; whining.
The girl in Cell 2
Was passive when they whispered,
But when they ran technicolored travelogues
Against a little fog screen
She smiled
And stepped over into
The next lurid journey.
“Lonely? Only …”
The spokesman whisper-snarled
For weeks on end
Inside Cell 3.
Weeks? Years.
She always nodded.
“Oh, yes.
But that’s quite irrelevant.
Of course, of course.
It matters, and doesn’t matter
Because He matters
So utterly.
You see?
Irrelevant.
Irrelevant.”
Their film screen wouldn’t coagulate
And finally they themselves couldn’t coagulate, either.
They flaked off into puddles of dust
And she swept them out
When she chopped the cell walls
Into kindling
For the big stone fireplace
In her oak-paneled living room.
(“And the street of the city
Was pure gold,
As it were transparent glass.”
Her city.)
Cell 4:
When she nodded agreement
At their very first whisper
They signaled to Neanderthal’s cousin
Who was waiting just outside.
They handcuffed her to Neanderthal’s cousin;
They fastened other chains to ankle, neck, and knee.
They flung a gummy plastic serape
Over her, over him,
Making them into another kind of Siamese twins.
And the spokesmen laughed at her
For the rest of her life,
Laughed like demons.
Well, of course.
Like what they were.
ELVA McALLASTER
The Foreign Missions Department is dedicated primarily to the fulfillment of the Great Commission—“Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). Its basic policy is to evangelize the world, establish churches after the New Testament pattern, and to train national believers to preach the Gospel both to their own people and in a continuing mission to other nations.
This statement of objectives, after affirming the importance of establishing indigenous churches as an instrument of fulfilling the Christian mission to the world, goes on to stress the need for missionary-national “cooperation and unity in the mutual God-given responsibility for complete world evangelization”:
In so doing, the missionary must not abdicate his responsibility to world evangelism and church planting, either by perpetuating the mission’s authority over the national church or by succumbing to nationalistic interests that would prevent him from fulfilling the Great Commission.
2. It is imperative that we communicate the missionary mandate by precept and example from the inception of all evangelistic and church-planting ministries.
A Chinese youth leader at the Singapore Congress on Evangelism commented that while he knows his missionary friends preach the missionary imperative on furlough in their homelands, he had never heard one preach a sermon on missions to the new churches they had helped bring into being in Asia. He went on to observe the same failure in most seminaries and Bible schools of his acquaintance: they had no courses on missions in their curriculum, he said. It is little wonder if pastors trained there have no informed and compelling sense of missionary outreach to communicate to their congregations.
Missionaries responsible for pastoral and lay training must be prepared to imbue new leaders with the principles and practice of multiplying disciples and churches, both in their immediate environment and across adjacent cultural and geographical boundaries.
3. Let new Christians everywhere prepare for immediate involvement in the evangelism of their own cultural “Jerusalem” (sometimes called M1), with the needs of their respective “Judea and Samaria” (i.e., communication at a slight cultural or geographical distance, M2) regularly set before them, so that some of those proved and approved of God through faithfulness in nearby witness may in time be entrusted with even more difficult missions to totally different peoples (the M3 dimension at “the ends of the earth”) as men and means become available.
4. Rather than simply internationalize existing mission organizations, let us encourage new church fellowships to develop their own patterns and forms of missionary expression.
We should be ready to share with them the best of what we have learned in a century and a half of the modern missionary movement, but then give these maturing churches full liberty under the Holy Spirit to determine what they will adopt as applicable to their situation and what they will modify or leave behind as relics of another day.
5. Finally, while seeking to manifest the unity of the Spirit through fellowship among like-minded participants in a world mission that transcends all boundaries of color and culture, let us not involve others in over-organization, nor embarrass them by insisting on ties that might compromise their effectiveness.
Above all, within the missionary movement of third-world churches we must respect the same principles of spiritual voluntarism that brought most of our missionary societies into being. Spontaneous response to the Spirit’s leading and voluntary participation by believers passionately devoted to making Christ known may well produce a greater tide of missionary advance in the third world than history has seen to date.
George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”
