Anonymous Asks (408)

“Why are missionaries obsessed with getting everybody else to go to the ends of the earth with the gospel?”

If you’ve never had a missionary to another country visit your local church while on furlough, let me tell you what to expect. You will not get a nice little forty-minute message from scripture. You will definitely not get deep exposition that will help you to grow in Christ. You’ll get a rousing, urgent call to join the missionary out in the world somewhere preaching the gospel to the lost.

If you’re like me, you’ll end the meeting feeling slightly guilty and a little annoyed. I guess I’m saying I can relate to this question, and maybe you can too.

Sending and Being Sent

The fact is that for anyone to be sent to preach the gospel, there have to be a significant number at home who free them up to go and encourage them in it. Paul and Barnabas were able to leave Antioch on their missionary journey in no small part because others stayed in Antioch to fill the holes their absence created. When the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work”, it was necessary for there to remain something from which the two were set apart. A church where every member rushed to the mission field would be unable to support anyone, assuming we believe financial fellowship is a good and necessary thing.

Still, there are plenty of very logical reasons for missionaries to be obsessed with the gospel, and perhaps considering them a little may help us respond slightly less grumpily when we hear what sometimes sounds like a lecture from someone who is visibly doing the work of God while many Christians labor unnoticed at home.

Here are a few possible missionary motives for firing up the troops:

1/ Martha Syndrome

Obsession with a specific area of service in the body of Christ is not unique to missionaries. Not by a long shot. I call it Martha Syndrome. You remember the incident at Bethany in the home of a disciple of Jesus named Martha, which Luke tells so elegantly and relatably in a mere five verses. Martha was a hospitable woman occupied with serving. She had a houseful of guests and was determined to treat them well. That’s a great goal. Martha’s sister Mary was listening to Jesus teach. Despite being a woman, she was nowhere near the kitchen. This frustrated Martha. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?” she complained. “Tell her then to help me.” Jesus … didn’t.

Martha lived in the era before the Holy Spirit came to indwell the people of God and give spiritual gifts to believers. Perhaps she would later exercise the gift of hospitality and learn to chill about getting food on the table when the Spirit is at work teaching believers. But the tendency to feel that one’s chosen area of service is the most important ministry in which anyone can ever engage is both completely understandable and a tiny bit short-sighted. I get excited about teaching because that’s what the Holy Spirit equipped me to do. Others get exciting about giving because that’s their gift. Evangelists get really excited about evangelizing, and for good reason. Their job is to help save sinners from hell. But, like Martha, we all need to chill, go re-read 1 Corinthians 12, and remind ourselves that the body of Christ is made up of many members. All spiritual gifts have value. As long as our fellow believers are exercising the gifts God has given them, who are we to tell them what they should be up to?

Still, the syndrome exists, and those of us who get a bit tired of appeals to go to the field need to make allowance for it. Why? Because …

2/ There is Genuine Need

If our missionary friends come to the local church platform full of enthusiasm for what they do, it’s distinctly possible the Lord is using them to stir up the heart of some potential evangelist in the audience who has yet to come to the place of surrendering his life and future to the Lord. That would not be a bad thing. If you’re content doing what the Lord has called you to do in your local church, tune out the parts of his message that irritate you and pray he succeeds in his mission.

We live in a needy world, yet churches in the West are simply not as mission-oriented as they once were. When was the last time your church commended anyone to go anywhere? Hopefully it was fairly recently, but if your church is anything like many evangelical groups, it’s probably been a while. Perhaps that’s a shift in the emphasis of the Holy Spirit’s work in the world, or perhaps it’s a sign of lassitude and indifference on our part. I cannot say with certainty which it is, but I’m not going to be the one to tell the Lord’s recruiters that they shouldn’t be recruiting in my backyard.

Yes, there’s been lots of mission work done in this world over the centuries. Much more remains to be accomplished.

3/ Different Eschatology

There’s no getting around the fact that different denominations understand the prophetic parts of the Bible differently. That means they have different expectations about what missions should be accomplishing.

Believers in a dispensational church may be content with a world in which every country has within it a small group of believers testifying to Christ. It might be nice to see entire nations won over by the gospel, transforming their politics, education systems, legal systems and so on, but most of us are not looking for or expecting that. We see our obligation as preaching the gospel and making disciples, planting churches and watching them grow. Once we have done that, at least in theory, local disciples ought to be able to take on the work of preaching Christ much more economically and effectively than foreigners who may need to learn new languages to be useful and, these days, may even be legally banned from proselytizing. Like Paul once did, our job is to get the word out in one place, then to move on where the need is greater.

In theory at least, Reformed churches ought to have a larger mission. If they are correct that their job is to disciple entire nations (rather than just individuals in those nations), it should not surprise us to find missionaries from the Reformed tradition who are never content with the level of gospel preaching in any given country, and who never will be. At least, that should be the case if they are thinking and living consistently with their theology.

4/ They Love What They Are Doing

Sometimes in my cynicism I wonder if missionaries promote the work they are doing elsewhere in the world so effusively because they are looking to encourage greater financial support. No doubt this is the case with a tiny minority, but most principled servants of Christ do not think like that at all.

In reality, their excitement may not be designed to elicit anything from you or me personally. It may not be calculated at all. If they are gushing about what the Lord is doing in some largely atheistic or Muslim city five thousand miles away, it’s because watching Christ at work in the world fills their hearts with joy. Having had a front-row seat for a bunch of transformed lives, they can’t wait to share their experiences with others who may be interested.

If that’s the case, and the people of God react by reaching into our pockets to find ways to help them do it, I’m not sure there’s much of a downside. Most of us can afford it, and it’s pretty hard for people to support mission work they don’t know about.