Let's Reform Christian Missions

Let’s reform Christian missions.  

One day, our family was together in the car and my father happened to mention a problem with one of the missionaries serving in our mission.  My older brother commented, ‘It seems that the only requirement to be a missionary is to be able to crawl across the border!’  After many years of missionary work on different continents, that once humourous comment from one little boy to his family has continued to ring in my ears.  Crawling across the border seems, at times, a higher requirement for missions when the requirements seem to be: (1) are you a Christian?, (2) do you ‘feel’ called?, and (3) have you raised your support?  I would like to focus on reforming missions with respect to theological education and mission training--one of several topics for reforming missions in our day.  (And I know there are exceptions to comments made here, with some great examples of good practice.)

I think, for example, of the Cambridge seven—missionaries at the end of the 1800s who, with an advanced level of education, committed themselves to mission work in China.  Preceding them was a skilled doctor already on the mission field.  You can read about them in J. C. Pollock’s biography, The Cambridge Seven.  Imagine if the mission force we fielded today were made up of highly trained, well-educated, and skilled missionaries.  One of the challenges the mission agency my parents worked with decades ago was that the understanding of ‘calling’ was so spiritualised that there was some pressure to accept people into ministry not because they were skilled but despite their lack of skills.  ‘God calls the meek and the lowly.’  Yes, He does.  But that does not stop them from getting the best training around.  Jesus turned fishermen into world-class apostles.

A number of mission agencies require some theological training.  It is very minimal, and nothing like what would be obtained through seminary training.  There are a few reasons for this under-educated mission force today.  First, seminary education is far too expensive—for anyone.  The Church needs to reform theological education in radical ways, and this should have happened twenty years ago already.  The expense of seminary education is especially challenging for missionaries, who are not paid large salaries by any means. 

Second, the notion of ‘missions’ has expanded greatly as ‘Evangelical’ mission theology and practice has emphasized holistic missions—that is, the notion that missions is not limited to evangelism, church planting, theological and ministry training, and Bible translation.  A holistic mission will have teachers, well-diggers, and, well, anything that can be framed as a service to others.  The plethora of mission ‘jobs’ has, to a large extent, reduced the pressure for some Bible school level of education, let alone seminary training.  Relatedly, we are forever being told things like, ‘Everyone is a missionary,’ or ‘Missions does not have to be over there, it is also right here.’  This is like saying, ‘We are a priesthood of believers, therefore nobody is a priest/pastor.’  Nor is ‘next-door ministry’ the same as foreign missions—if you think so, give it a try!  (Or don’t—please don’t!)

Third, missionaries are eager to get to the field, and education can stand in the way.  In fact, in my parents’ day, their mission board required both a basic, Bible school education and ministry experience before being sent to the field.  While missionaries can easily be sent early and then educated on the field today (such as through online studies), many missionaries find themselves overwhelmed with life and ministry once on the field and hard-pressed to add a programme of study on top of this (but they could—and this is one possible solution to the problem). 

Fourth, the trend in the West, at least (including in countries like South Africa), is towards non-denominational churches.  This is a result, in part, of mainline denominations giving up orthodoxy and, in part, frustration with the alternative denominational structures and definitions.  That is a discussion for another time.  The result of this, though, is that these non-denominational churches themselves are under no pressure to educate their ministers, let alone value education for their missionaries.  They might more likely appoint someone to minister and then suggest some theological education afterwards.  But the sending ‘group’ is not greatly committed to theological education for ministry preparation. 

Fifth, a number of large mission agencies (and there are some great exceptions) that are non-denominational—and therefore lack denominational standards—do not want to scare off recruits with too high standards.  The agencies may be dependent on a constant flow of new recruits contributing a percentage of their fund-raising to the mission as missionaries come off the field and leave the mission.  Standards cannot easily be elevated in the non-denominational world of church and missions. 

Sixth, undertrained missionaries might not be able to get away with being poorly trained if they are, say, pilots, but they often can get away with it if they are involved in lay theological education—study groups, discipleship training, and the like.  One reason for this is that only about 5% of all those in ministry in the world have had any formal theological education.  The problem of people without any ministerial training—let alone theological education—is so bad in South Africa that the government is threatening to require churches to have ministers with some education.  (There can be nothing good about government control of the Church, but the Church needs to wake up and set its own standards.)  In such a climate, how much more education does a missionary need? 

It is thought that Jesus’ ministry lasted three years (the reasoning does not make sense to me, but I’ll go with the idea it lasted awhile).  Was it because he wanted to heal one more person in another village?  Certainly, he wanted his kingdom message and ministry to reach the villages and towns of Israel—but this is accomplished by Matthew 10.  I appreciate that the Gospels are not chronologically arranged, but there was still more to Jesus’ ministry.  It is captured in the fact that those whom he called were called ‘disciples’—students.  Jesus’ public ministry took place around his teaching of his disciples.  When this training was completed, Jesus ended his earthly ministry by going to his death in Jerusalem.  Whether they could read or not, could speak Greek or not, knew the Scriptures or not, understood the plan of God or not (they didn’t) at the beginning of their calling as disciples, they were educated by Jesus in all this by the end of their in-service training.  This same approach to training for ministry—and missions—today could easily be replicated.

So, let’s reform missions.  Let’s send our ‘Navy Seals’ team, not our ‘Crawl Across the Border’ team.  Let the best of the best be recruited and sent by the united churches.  This starts with having a clearer understanding of ‘mission’ than the blurry concept of ‘holistic missions’ that we have had. 

It also involves sending-churches networking together (the independent church is the death of missions.)  These networks must define, articulate, and fund the mission.  They are the ones to send missionaries, support them, encourage them, and enable them.  Right now, most of Evangelical missions is turned upside down, with missionaries having to run around to independent churches and try to get funding.  Where this is the case, it is a fundamental dereliction of duty on the part of the Church/the churches. 

We can solve the problem of theological education/ministry training mentioned above, but it will require radical changes.  The first ‘error’ in theological education is to understand it as academic education, mirroring tertiary education of the colleges and universities.  What made this work in the past was lower costs in education, a still-Christian ethos in the culture that meant that higher educational institutions were Church-friendly, and denominations that practiced internships or curacy as they received and further-trained graduates for ministry.  Today, the Church must take back theological education entirely.  This is not in the least a suggestion to lower academic standards.  In fact, the cultural changes in the West are so undermining the academic integrity of the universities that the Church needs to own the educational process, not turn it over to institutions.  There is a lot to be said here, but one benefit of doing so will be to reduce the costs of education radically.  Another benefit will be that training may last as long as desired—it might even be life-long learning (why not?).  A third is that people will be trained for the work needed—and missionaries would get the theological training they need without trying to involve costly seminaries.  Most importantly, such education would have nothing to do with government loans for education—an albatross around the neck of Christian education that will ultimately (I am surprised it has not already) bring about its downfall. 

Also, the need for missions is too great to have so many missionaries.  I must admit that I love the irony of that statement.  Imagine, however, a military campaign against a formidable foe that enlisted a rag-tag army of farmers and persons without the greatest commitment to the cause.  They are there because they can be and not much more.  This was Gideon’s situation as God told him to cut back his forces for the fight (Judges 7).  God’s reasoning was that a large force would claim glory for any victory.  The point, however, is that there is such a thing as having too large a force, for whatever reason.  As long as the Evangelical churches replace support for long-term missionaries with mission exposure trips for their youth in the summer (as valuable as this can be for those participating), and as long as they send anyone who wants to go for whatever they want to do, the mission force will be made up out of the untrained, uncommitted ‘too many’ with no clarity of the mission rather than the highly trained, committed few who know exactly what the mission is.

If we focus on the mission, the Church, and the best mission force, we will also move away from ‘the West to the rest’ version of missions of the 19^th and 20^th century.  We can involve the Church in its global reality in our day, recruiting from wherever and sending to wherever to accomplish the mission (not whatever).

Finally, we can now reform theological education from being the residency-based, highly expensive education that it has become to online, tutorial education wherever one lives.  (This is what we are developing at the Ridley Institute, a ministry of St. Andrews Church in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina that reaches from South Carolina to South Africa.)  A Church-based, tutorial educational model can train missionaries already on the field at low costs.

So, let’s reform missions.