Skip to main content

Issues Facing Missions Today: 4. Mission Strategising

Issues Facing Missions Today: 4. Mission Strategising

I recall the enthusiasm of a mission committee back in the 1980s as its members redirected their resources and attention to the 10/40 window [the largely non-Christian region of the world lying between 10 and 40 degrees latitude north of the equator] and ‘unreached peoples.’  Here, it was thought, lay the unfinished task to take the Gospel to the nations.  Such mission strategising clearly pointed away from ministry in, say, Rwanda, where the statistics reported an overwhelmingly evangelised and Christian country.  Just a few years later, the Rwandan genocide took place in ‘Christian’ Rwanda.  Such strategising also took the focus away from post-Christian, northern European countries.

In this post, I wish to challenge the use of statistics alone to determine mission strategies and offer five topics for mission strategising instead.  I’ll be the first to say that I appreciate all the statistics, maps, and historical trends that contribute to the discussion of missions today.  These are, however, merely tools for mission strategising, and they are insufficient for determining what the Church, a mission agency, or a missionary should do.  This should be an obvious comment to make, but too often this is not the case.

Along a similar line of thinking, I recently heard a talk about trends in theological education in North America in which the meat of the lecture was a statistical report.  The conclusion of the talk involved claims about what needed to be done next.  If female enrollment is down, more women students need to be recruited.  If African-American and Hispanic enrollment is up, more resources should be directed to teaching them.  If there is a trend in closing theological colleges, then there is a crisis facing theological colleges.  And so went the reasoning from statistics to strategies for moving ahead in seminary education.  After hearing these and a variety of other such conclusions, I could not help but think of that philosophical claim, ‘You cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”.’  We simply cannot derive a plan for mission work today from demographics and statistics alone—even if those statistics are correct (be warned!).

Over against such approaches to determining mission strategy, I would offer the following for consideration:

1. Understand the mission of God from Scripture and how the mission of the Church relates to it.  For this, we need Biblical scholars, theologians, and Church historians.

2. Explore where there are needs in the world that the Church’s mission can meet.  Here there is a place for the analyses of missiologists armed with statistics and other arguments.

3. Determine where there are open doors for ministry at this time.  Mission practitioners are needed to clarify where doors for ministry are open.

4. Identify the resources (whether resources in general or individuals with specific gifts in particular) available for mission work and what can be done to appropriate them.  Here, denominations, seminaries, mission societies, churches, and individuals need to offer their insights and cooperate with one another.

5. In prayer, listen to the Holy Spirit’s guidance.  All the best reasoning may be turned on its head as people prayerfully submit all their human wisdom to God and ask for His guidance.  How wonderful when the Spirit confirms the careful reasoning involved in the first four steps!  Here, everyone needs to be concerned to wait upon the Lord for His direction and empowerment.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alasdair MacIntyre and Tradition Enquiry

Alasdair MacIntyre's subject is philosophical ethics, and he is best known for his critique of ethics understood as the application of general, universal principles.  He has reintroduced the importance of virtue ethics, along with the role of narrative and community in defining the virtues.  His focus on these things—narrative, community, virtue—combine to form an approach to enquiry which he calls ‘tradition enquiry.’ [1] MacIntyre characterises ethical thinking in the West in our day as ethics that has lost an understanding of the virtues, even if virtues like ‘justice’ are often under discussion.  Greek philosophical ethics, and ethics through to the Enlightenment, focussed ethics on virtue and began with questions of character: 'Who should we be?', rather than questions of action, 'What shall we do?'  Contemporary ethics has focused on the latter question alone, with the magisterial traditions of deontological ('What rules govern our actions?') and tel...
Post a Comment
Read more

Was Jesus’ Criticism of the Pharisees’ Ethic Its Legalism or Lawlessness?

The popular understanding of the Pharisees is that they were legalists.  This is not, however, Jesus’ criticism of their ethics, even though the charge of Pharisaic legalism comes from a (mis)reading of the Gospels.  The Pharisees are cast in popular imagination as the quintessential example of legalists, overly focussed on rules and promoting works in order to attain righteousness apart from God’s grace.  The latter view, that Judaism overall and the Pharisees in particular advocated works righteousness, has been loudly criticised in light of numerous texts in second temple Judaism, celebrating God’s grace in choosing the Jews, not self-righteous works. [1]   Be that as it may, the Pharisees have remained the foil to Christian ethics precisely over their purported legalism—a focus on unloving, unforgiving rules and regulations that also places norms above, purportedly, higher moral principles.  Jesus’ ethic is contrasted as an ethic of forgiveness, mercy, love...
Post a Comment
Read more

Early Christian Views on Wealth, Possessions, and Giving

[The following post continues notes and studies on the issue of wealth, poverty, and Christian ethics.  It originally appeared in an online publication: Rollin G. Grams, 'Early Christian Views on Wealth, Possessions, and Giving,'   Explorations (Fall, 2010), an online publication of the Robert C. Cooley Center for the Study of Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.  Online:  https://www.scribd.com/document/41882213/The-Cooley-Center-Articles-Early-Christian-Views-on-Wealth ]  For several reasons, study of early Christianity in Protestant circles is on the rise.  Ecumenical dialogue, for instance, requires a return to the common ground of Christian writers prior to the great schisms of the Church throughout history.  Also, an increasing interest in worship and spiritual disciplines has sent some Protestants on pilgrimage to more ancient and liturgical forms of the church.  Recent challenges to long-standing Christian practices...
Post a Comment
Read more