May 13, 2019

Why Good Ecclesiology Matters for Global Missions

By John Hammett

Good ecclesiology matters for global missions.

Ecclesiology is the term referring to the doctrine of the church, involving matters such as the nature and functions of the church, polity and leadership of the church, church membership, and related issues.

It may seem to some that such matters deserve little concern and have little impact on a local church’s heart for global missions. But I want to offer some reasons for reconsideration of such thinking.

Baptism

The Great Commission associates making disciples with “baptizing them” (Matt. 28:19), and baptism is a thoroughly ecclesiological matter. Baptists have defined the church as a body of baptized believers, but what is the meaning of baptism? Are infants proper subjects of baptism or not? Moreover, does baptism regenerate the one baptized, or in some way complete the process of salvation, as some groups believe? Or is it the appointed means by which believers identify with Christ and a local church?

If a church here in the US does not think through these issues well and practice them faithfully, it will not be a healthy church itself. For example, how careful are we to baptize only those who are truly believers? Many churches have practiced baptism carelessly by baptizing those whose conduct casts severe doubt on the genuineness of their profession. The presence of such members in our churches can’t do anything other than hurt our churches, including in the area of zeal for missions.

Also, such a church will not be in a good position to send out missionaries who will be fulfilling the Great Commission because those missionaries will not have learned from their church what Jesus means by commanding us to make disciples, “baptizing them.” Our practice of baptism relates to how churches are gathered, who their members are to be, how they understand faith to be made visible in obedience, and historically, it has been related to the question of who is encouraged to participate in the Lord’s Supper.

Obedience to Everything Jesus Commanded

Jesus says in the Great Commission that we are to teach these new disciples “to obey everything” that he has commanded us. Nineteenth-century Baptist theologian John Dagg wrote these words on the importance of ecclesiology: “Church order and the ceremonials of religion [i.e., ecclesiology], are less important than a new heart; and in the view of some, any laborious investigation of them may appear to be needless and unprofitable. But we know, from the Holy Scriptures, that Christ gave commands on these subjects, and we cannot refuse to obey.”

We can’t obey the Great Commission and we can’t teach new disciples to obey everything Jesus commanded unless we include his commands regarding matters like church governance, church membership, structure, and ministry. As with baptism, lack of obedience to such commands will render our own churches weaker and thus less able to motivate and mobilize its people for global missions. And lack of obedience to such commands will not give our missionaries patterns from which to learn while they are here, patterns which they can follow in planting new churches overseas.

“We can’t obey the Great Commission and we can’t teach new disciples to obey everything Jesus commanded unless we include his commands regarding matters like church governance, church membership, structure, and ministry.”

Moreover, lack of attention to such commands may disqualify us from working with Jesus in his great concern. Jesus said, “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18 ESV); he died to present the church to himself “in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:27 ESV). If we’re not concerned to be such a church, obeying everything that Jesus commanded, will we be a church in and through which Jesus will build his church?

Such a church would be obedient in the lesser matters of church governance, polity, membership, as well as the greater matter of a new heart.

Great Commission Ecclesiology

If we’re careless in our churches about these matters of ecclesiology, why would Christ use us in the fulfillment of the Great Commission? We may be so disobedient in these lesser matters that we will be unhealthy and more a mission field than a mission sending agency. Moreover, we send out missionaries to make disciples, “baptizing them” and “teaching them to obey” all that Christ commanded us. In short, we send them out to plant churches according to Jesus’s instructions. Have our churches given them a model to follow? They need to know what a Jesus-honoring church looks like if they’re to plant them.

The situation is even more complex once the missionary arrives on the field. How far can they adapt the healthy and obedient practices of their US churches in their new context? What will baptism look like, especially if the churches they plant are house churches? How can congregations composed of new believers who live in non-democratic societies come to a healthy practice of congregational governance? Will they be obeying all that Jesus commanded concerning church membership and leadership, in a culture in which relationships and leaders are viewed in vastly different ways than in North America?

The goal of adaptation to the culture—or what we call contextualization—is to produce churches that are both culturally relevant and biblically faithful. Churches that foster global missions should model for their prospective missionaries how to be culturally relevant and biblically faithful here. It will be the missionary’s task to do that elsewhere, but at least they will have healthy models to draw on.

John Hammett has been a professor of theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary since 1995. Prior to that, he was a pastor for nine years and a missionary with the International Mission Board. He is the author of Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches (2nd ed.) and 40 Questions About Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as well as numerous articles on church leadership and the Christian faith. He and his wife, Linda, have two adult children.

AUGUST 18, 2016

Missions: ecclesiology with a passport

by Joel James

Missions is your ecclesiology armed with a passport.

The American evangelical culture has demonstrated a remarkable confusion about the nature of the church. This in-turn has led to an equally critical confusion about the nature of missions.

While a Western missionary might need to leave his PowerPoint presentation and carpeted, air conditioned auditorium behind when he hikes over the mountain to a remote village, the important things that make a church—the biblical things—transfer directly and immediately into any culture.

In the past, the majority of theologically conservative missionaries were sent out to do church planting, leadership training, and Bible translation. No longer. Today a growing percentage of new missionaries are being sent to focus on social relief, with the church and the gospel tacked on as something of theological addendum. In fact, in my twenty years as a missionary in Africa, I’ve seen a major shift in evangelical missions away from what I call “book of Acts missions” toward social reform projects or social action missions.

It’s no surprise. The influential voices dominating the evangelical conversation about the church and about missions today are promoting a new kind of mission: shalom, social justice, or the gospel of good deeds and human flourishing. And it appears that the new generation of evangelicals—the Young, Restless, and Reformed—has bought in, enthusiastically embracing social upliftment as their central missions strategy. Most of the resulting evangelical missionaries value the church and the gospel, but in many cases, they seem to view the church primarily as a platform from which to run their favourite relief project. As a missionary who has served the Lord on the pointy end of the spear for two decades, I have a significant concern about these changes.

The New Testament apostles were the Christ-appointed and Christ-trained interpreters of Jesus’ Great Commission, yet it appears to me that how the apostles defined and enacted Jesus’ commission to reach the world is often being ignored by evangelicals in their rush toward social action missions.

I believe that the book of Acts should rigorously shape our approach to missions. While no one would say that Acts is absolutely prescriptive in regard to missions, it is certainly must be considered to be more than merely descriptive. In short, the apostles’ interpretation of Jesus’ Great Commission is a timeless, definitive, and authoritative interpretation (Eph 2:20). What they did as the Christ-instructed interpreters of the Great Commission lays down for us the lane markers for the church’s missions efforts in any era. And, as evangelical churches shift from proclamation-oriented missions to social-action missions, I wonder if we aren’t running diagonally across the track rather than straight down our lane.

The current tug-of-war between proclamation-oriented missions and social-action missions is not new. However, in recent years key voices in evangelicalism have enthusiastically promoted social action missions, including prominent evangelicals such as John Stott and Tim Keller. In fact, John Stott has for decades urged the church to make social action and evangelism equal, fifty-fifty partners in the fulfilling of the Great Commission. Years ago, Stott wrote, “They are like the two blades of a pair of scissors or the two wings of a bird. This partnership is clearly seen in the public ministry of Jesus who not only preached the gospel but fed the hungry and healed the sick.”[i] More recently, Tim Keller has played a key role in promoting social action. Peter Naylor sums up Keller’s view this way: “Keller’s main thesis is that the church has a twofold mission in this world: (1) to preach the gospel and (2) to do justice, which involves social and cultural transformation and renewal.”[ii]

It’s a dicey line that Stott and Keller have drawn for the church to walk. In essence, they are saying, “We’re going to keep the gospel the main thing and focus the church on social reform; in fact, in a sense, social action is the gospel too.” In theory, it’s a noble blend of word and deed. Naturally, however, the further one pushes into the realm of social action, the closer one gets to the place where social involvement ceases to be distinctly Christian, and at some point, social involvement even starts to supplant that which is distinctly Christian.

In the 1990s, Stott acknowledged the danger of his dual emphasis: “The main fear of my critics seems to be that missionaries will be sidetracked.”[iii] In fact, I believe that fear is a perfectly valid one, and has been repeatedly proven to be so. Today, many churches and missions committees barely seem aware of the distinction between missionaries who focus on social action and missionaries who focus on Bible translation, theological training, church planting, and gospel proclamation. Tomorrow I’ll post on some of my concerns about social action missions.

[i]“Evangelism and Social Responsibility: An Evangelical Commitment,” Grand Rapids Report No. 21, Consultation on the Relationships between Evangelism and Social responsibility (CRESR) (Wheaton, IL: Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization and the World Evangelical Fellowship, 1982).

[ii] Peter Naylor, in Engaging With Keller:, 137. Peter Naylor, “The Church’s Mission: Sent to ‘Do Justice’ in the World?” in Engaging With Keller: Thinking Through the Theology of an Influential Evangelical, eds. Iain D. Campbell and William M. Schweitzer, (Darlington, England: EP Books, 2013), 137.

[iii] John Stott, The Contemporary Christian: Applying God’s Word to Today’s World(Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1992), 342.

Training the Untrained to Reach the Unreached — by Darren Carlson

August 13, 2011

Why take the time train people to be faithful teachers of Scripture when untold millions are going to hell? That is a helpful question for me to wrestle through as I spend a good deal of my time training international pastors and church leaders.

When most people recount the Great Commission, they usually say something to the effect of, “We must go to all the nations and share the gospel.” To that I say amen! But then something strange happens — we stop. So what about the command in Matthew 28:20 to teach? It is what David Sills has called the Great Omission.

Reached Can Move Backwards to Unreached

If we are not careful, those precious people groups and nations that we have deemed to be reached will be moved back to unreached. Why? Because in our need for speed, we have not helped to deepen the roots of faith, and instead of trees firmly planted by streams of water, the church is blown over with just the slightest amount of false teaching. The supposed explosion of Christian faith around the world has left us with lots of Christians and very few trained pastors.

When I say “trained,” I do not mean “gone to school.” Theological training is just part of a discipleship process, and for a pastor it means learning to rightly handle the Bible. Many pastors have been trained by sitting in jail cells, but they still don’t know their Bible. Or they know a lot of Bible verses, but have no idea how they fit together. So this particular training that is needed is deliberate theological education that is God-centered, Christ-exalting, and Bible-saturated.

I have met many zealous Christians who are clearly gifted evangelists but who hardly know anything about the Bible. I have heard of pastors who asked my friend, “When was Jesus converted?” I have heard the strangest sermons you can imagine — no where close to anything Christian. I have a good friend from West Africa whose country is no longer on the unreached list, and yet he admits he knows only a handful of churches in the entire nation where the gospel is faithfully preached.

Four Ways to Be Strategically Involved

As someone who is currently giving his life to training pastors internationally, I'm convinced of the strategic role that training plays in reaching the unreached. Here are a few thoughts about how the Western Church can be involved:

As we are deeply concerned in going to the unreached peoples of the earth, we should recognize the unique impact of non-Western missionaries and seek to train them. These untrained messengers of the gospel often know at least five languages — they just need theological grounding. What is the main point of the text? How does the whole Bible fit together? They need to see where they fit in God’s story of redeeming the nations and we should be committed to serving them.
Send unemployed PhD-holders to the international classroom. Our seminaries and graduate schools stock Starbucks and UPS with highly competent minds. Might instead we consider our brothers overseas and ask, "How will they teach faithfully if they are not trained? And how will they be trained without someone teaching? And how are we to teach unless we go?"
Send your pastor overseas twice a year to work with another organization that is providing theological education to international pastors and church leaders.
Send your pastor overseas for good and free up pastoral positions for seminary graduates. We need men who have been in pastoral ministry to go. Guys in seminary need a place to land. Makes sense to me!

The end goal is to strengthen the existing church internationally with deep truth that will sustain them and equip them to reach the unreached people groups we long to see worship Jesus.

Darren Carlson is the founder and president of Training Leaders International, a ministry that mentors and sends graduate students and pastors to bring theological education around the world.

6 Theses for Saturating the Nations With Sound Doctrine — By Tony Merida

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

I recently returned from a week in Uganda and Kenya, where I was helping to train pastors and church planters. I was in Africa as part of Acts 29’s Emerging Regions Network, a team that works in various parts of the world where we want to see churches planted.

I had the privilege of serving with some other Acts 29 pastors, and the trip left quite an impression on us. Here are six personal reflections about theological and pastoral training in underdeveloped regions of the world.

1. Join the fight against theological poverty.

There are many good, global causes that one can be part of today. I’m part of many, from orphan care to fighting gendercide. But I would love to see an increased excitement and commitment to fighting theological poverty.

There are many good, global causes that one can be part of today. But I would love to see an increased excitement and commitment to fighting theological poverty.

As I’ve traveled the world the past 15 years, teaching church planters and other church leaders, it has become clear to me why many false gospels abound. People simply haven’t been taught the true gospel. What I found in Uganda and Kenya is a real hunger and openness to historical Christian orthodoxy. The only problem is, certain truths have never been well articulated and distinguished from false teaching. Consequently, people tend to believe what they hear.

It has been said that humanity is incurably religious, that we are religious beings who will believe something. And if we don’t saturate the nations with sound doctrine, then people will believe something else.

Whatever means of influence you have in this world, would you consider leveraging some of it to help make robust theological training available to such hungry students?

2. Realize that online training is insufficient for much of the world.

During the course of our teaching, the subject of online learning came up periodically. While a few students said they have decent internet access, most don’t. So online learning simply isn’t an option. These students need life-on-life teaching, and they need printed materials. (By the way, even if online training is an option, it’s no replacement for embodied, communal learning.)

As I’ve traveled, I’ve become increasingly grateful for resources like the little 9Marks books. These are so important and beneficial. A big thank you to Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman, and others who contribute to that series.

On this particular trip, I gave out a copy of my commentary on Acts, and the response was remarkable. You’d have thought I’d handed the students gold. They thanked me endlessly. We need to get more good resources in their hands.

3. We need context-sensitive theological training.

I gave one talk called “Church Planting 101.” Along the way, I encouraged the students to “plant the church that fits you and your community.” I encouraged them not to do an American church model, but to plant a church that fits their context. That is, to consider their city when they think about music, discipleship programs, outreach events, and so on.

So much training from the West has failed to make the distinction between timeless, biblical principles for the church and the flexibility for doing church in our context. There was an audible affirmation from the students (some even clapped) when I said, “Do church for Uganda or Kenya, not America.”

When we train people, we must give them biblical ecclesiology.

Now, these students, as in every other country, must start with Scripture when it comes to ecclesiology, preaching, eldership, and so on. When we train people, we must give them biblical ecclesiology. But as we provide training for pastors in other countries, let’s not mistake our Western practices for biblical principles.

4. The majority of the world needs basic-level training; they’re not ready for an MDiv.

Thanks to our friends at Church in Hard Places, our team was able to use the two-year program for mentoring our students. Church in Hard Places has broken down the (rigorous) Acts 29 assessment into monthly learning models, which includes reading, writing, and meetings.

We’ve found over the years that most of the guys we train in emerging regions are not ready for an MDiv degree or a thorough theological/pastoral assessment. They can get there if we will walk with them, which we plan on doing. But most haven’t had the basic training many assessments often assume.

Most seminaries cater to educated people with undergraduate degrees. I’m not throwing stones, just pointing out the fact that we’re overlooking millions of people when we don’t have a plan for bringing basic training to theologically hungry students.

5. To increase theological depth for generations, we need churches planted and pastored by trained leaders.

Part of the problem of rapid multiplication efforts in missions is that they are not taking the long-view of ministry. We need to be thinking in terms of 50-plus years, not five weeks (or even five years).

To see the theological landscape change in a country for the long haul, we need to identify, train, and resource faithful pastors who will serve their churches for years to come.

To see the theological landscape change in a country for the long haul, we must identify, train, and resource faithful pastors who will serve their churches for years to come. And we need them to plant churches that will plant churches for generations to come. So let’s give ourselves to this task.

6. Let’s challenge people who have access to resources and training to recognize this privilege, and take advantage of it.

There really is no excuse for people in various parts of the world not to engage in serious study of the Bible, theology, missiology, church history, and spiritual disciplines. From books to blogs, seminars to seminaries, conferences to computer software, the resources in the Western world are vast. Yet many don’t take advantage of this precious privilege.

Our worldliness is evident when we prefer endless entertainment, and the pursuit of more possessions and comforts, over soul-nourishing education. If many would substitute learning God’s Word for even half the time they spend on Netflix, maybe we’d see a spiritual awakening.

One Goal

The goal of training leaders—who will lead and plant churches in the neediest places in the world—is the glory of Christ. That’s what’s at stake. Robust theological training is for his glory in his church throughout his world. And there are brothers and sisters who are hungry—and I mean really hungry—to be trained for this task.

Robust theological training is for his glory in his church throughout his world.

So for those of us in privileged positions with resources galore: will we spend ourselves for the glory of Christ and the good of his people in the neediest parts of the world? How I pray that we will.

Tony Merida is pastor for preaching and vision of Imago Dei Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. He’s also the content director for Acts 29, producing blogs, podcasts, and other resources on church planting. Tony has an extensive itinerant ministry and has written several books, including The Christ-Centered Expositor, Ordinary, Orphanology, and eight volumes in the Christ-Centered Exposition commentary series, of which he also serves as a general editor, along with Danny Akin and David Platt. He is happily married to Kimberly, and they have five adopted children.

Two Ways Missions Should Focus on the Local Church — By Andy Johnson

SEPTEMBER 11, 2017

Usually, the most strategic mission work we can support is work that aims to establish healthy local churches. This can mean two things.

It may mean pioneer evangelism and church planting among a group of people largely unreached by the gospel. Or it may mean laboring to strengthen local churches in places where they exist but are weak, poorly taught, and vulnerable.

We find examples in the pages of Scripture of both presented as strategic missionary work.

Plant New Churches

Pioneer church planting was the heartbeat of the apostle Paul. It was his passion when he wrote:

Thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, “Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.” (Rom. 15:20–21)

Such work remains critically strategic today. While statistics vary widely, most agree that only a tiny portion (maybe 20 percent or less) of Protestant missionaries labor in the least-reached half of the world’s peoples. The remaining 80 percent or more work among peoples with significant gospel access and established Christian churches.

What this means for your own missionary support seems clear. Suppose you have funds to support only one worker and must choose between two—both competently engaged in evangelism and church planting. One is working among a people with hundreds of churches and thousands of Christians. The other is laboring in a highly restricted nation with only a few Christians and hardly any churches.

All other things being equal, you should generally fund the work among the unreached. I know there are extenuating circumstances, and strategies to reach the unreached from a more reached place do exist. Yet the general leaning of the New Testament seems to be toward churches spreading the gospel to “those who have never been told of him.”

It’s vital to note that missionary evangelism should aim to establish local churches. That’s what we see throughout the Bible. Granted, there’s no verse that says, “Go and plant churches.” But we know all Christians should gather into local churches, “not neglecting to meet together” (Heb. 10:25). Everywhere the missionaries in Acts saw a harvest of souls, a church was soon gathered (Acts 14:1–23; 18:8; 19; 20). The goal of missions is to gather churches that plant other churches.

Strengthen Established Churches

But pioneer work isn’t the only missionary work we see commended in Scripture as strategic. At the beginning of his letter to Titus, Paul writes: “This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you” (Titus 1:5). Putting churches into better biblical order was also high on Paul’s agenda, and it should probably be higher on our agenda too.

It can be exciting to send and support workers who are pushing back the boundary of darkness in an unreached place. But Paul also demonstrates that it’s worth investing some of our best people in church strengthening where the gospel is already known and churches already exist. In a similar way, Paul reminds his young co-missionary Timothy: “As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith” (1 Tim. 1:3–4).

Along with helping churches to be biblically structured, Paul wants to establish sound, robust biblical doctrine and to guard new churches against error and false teaching. He’s willing to invest perhaps his most valued associate not in his pioneering work in Macedonia, but in the ongoing work of building healthy churches in Ephesus. Perhaps we who love new vistas and greater speed should more readily heed Scripture’s instruction in this regard.

Many of us can imagine what pioneer mission work looks like, but strengthening ongoing church work may be harder to picture. It doesn’t mean encouraging missionaries to hold on to the reins of leadership in a church long after capable local leaders have emerged. That has been done, and the fruit is generally quite poor.

Rather, it means purposefully empowering and equipping leaders for emerging local churches. It may mean working for church health in communities where the churches have long been established but are neglected and weak. In a more formal and traditional sense, it may mean teaching in a Bible college or training local church planters in an established local church. Less formally, it may mean discipling and training church leaders in a worker’s home in a more restricted-access country.

The point is that once churches are organized, there will still be strategic work to do by outside missionaries. We shouldn’t let our good passion to find lost sheep in new pastures fool us into neglecting flocks that have already been gathered, purchased by Christ’s precious blood.

Andy Johnson (PhD, Texas A&M) serves as an associate pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. He’s the author of Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global.

WHY ONE OF THE GREATEST MISSIONS NEEDS IS TRAINING MORE PASTORS — By Lisa Green and Bob Smietana

July 20, 2018

Francisco Medina had been preaching for three decades in the rural Dominican Republic when he first came to a training event for pastors in 2013. He arrived as a skeptic. “Francisco very respectfully said, ‘I’m here mostly out of respect for the person who invited me,’” recalls Cris Garrido, Spanish publisher for LifeWay Christian Resources, who was leading part of the training.

“He said, ‘I have the Bible. I have the Holy Spirit. I’ve been a pastor for 30 years—longer than you’ve been alive. And I really don’t think all this theology and all this study is necessary.’” By the end of the first week of training, Medina was weeping.

The training, he told Garrido, had changed his life. And he planned to come back for more. “I quickly learned that I’d been teaching a false gospel,” Medina says. “I had wrongly believed that salvation required works. “I was broken by the reality that I had been teaching a false gospel for so long.”

The training that transformed Medina’s life is part of a new movement aimed at developing local pastors on the mission field with programs that are accessible, practical, and low-tech. Ministry leaders who work with untrained pastors in unreached parts of the world say the need is great. After missionaries start churches among unreached people groups, their pastors are hungry to learn more. But in parts of the world where there are few or no indigenous Christians, trustworthy information can be scarce.

Few of the training programs and seminaries for pastors overseas are equipped to serve pastors from these new people groups. Most training programs are in bigger cities, where it’s too costly for these new pastors-in-training to live. Some pastors don’t speak the same language or have the educational background to attend seminary. Others can’t read, making seminary all but impossible.

Without trained—or even spiritually mature—pastors, new churches often collapse. Or inexperienced leaders try to combine their old beliefs with their new faith in Jesus. Medina says he and other untrained pastors had absorbed misconceptions about God’s truth. “I thought that people must earn their salvation,” he says. “But this seminar helped me to see that my thinking was wrong.”

The onetime skeptic has become a strong advocate for pastor training. “He said, ‘I’m going to be in every session. I’m going to be in every class. I’m going to invite everybody I can,” says Garrido. “And he did. He brought his son. He brought leaders of his church. “Today he’s leading studies like these for others in his area.”

By sharing with others, Medina says, he multiplies what he has learned. “I’m grateful for this seminar,” he says. “It has helped me in my understanding of the Scriptures and has taught me to preach the gospel in a comprehensive way. “Our community has benefited greatly. I have benefited greatly—and so can the rest of the world.”

THE POWER OF PREPARATION

Melvin Ardon knows from personal experience the importance of getting the right training as a pastor. Ardon spent years as a volunteer minister and preacher at Hispanic churches in California. But he always felt something was missing. Ardon had never had any formal biblical training—and he feared he didn’t understand what he was preaching.

“Every time I went up to preach, I felt like a thief, almost,” he says. “I felt like somehow I was cheating people of a bigger blessing.” That feeling came to a head about a decade ago, when Ardon was helping lead a revival meeting while on a mission trip to Kenya. The revival had gone well. On the last day, Ardon says he felt God speaking to him—telling him he needed more training and study as a pastor.

As Ardon thanked God for all that had happened at the revival, he felt as though God was asking him, “Do you see what I have done? Now imagine what I could do if you would only prepare.” He eventually enrolled at the Los Angeles-based Centro Hispano De Estudios Teológicos (CHET), which has been training evangelical Hispanic pastors since the 1980s. During his studies, he returned to Kenya, befriending a number of pastors there. On one trip, he asked his new friends what their biggest needs were. Along with buildings for the churches to meet, the pastors needed training. “That’s when a light bulb went on,” Ardon says. “I said, ‘We can help with that.’”

He pulled out his cellphone and soon was on the phone with CHET’s president, who gave the go-ahead to use the school’s materials in Kenya. After working through the details, Ardon and two friends led a two-year pastoral training program for 14 pastors from Kenya. The Kenyan pastors were able to stay at their churches while studying—a huge benefit, Ardon says. Many would leave the classes, then go home and teach their church the same material the next week.

At the end of one class, Ardon says, a pastor told him it had transformed the way he saw the Bible. “He said, ‘I have to go back to my church and ask for forgiveness—because I haven’t been teaching the way the Bible asks you to teach.’” Those feelings sounded familiar to Ardon. He’d felt the same way before coming to CHET—that he wasn’t teaching the Word of God rightly, because he didn’t rightly know the Word of God. “Without training”, he says, “you are teaching from what’s in your heart. And that’s dangerous.”

These days, Ardon has a sense of urgency to return to Kenya to train more pastors. That’s in part because he and his friends are grateful for the people who made it possible for them to be trained as pastors. “We want to give back from what we have received,” he says.

Lisa Green is a senior editor and Bob Smietana is a senior writer at LifeWay for “Facts & Trends”.

Is There Such a Thing as Bad Missions?

Brooks Buser | Dec 7, 2021 | Blog, Radius Report

When Nina and I lived among the Yembiyembi people it was always a bit of a surprise to see outsiders. The YYs were known for being a dominant hostile people group so even other lowland language groups rarely ventured into their territory. So, it was an unprecedented shock in our second year of language study to hear the YYs tell us that a group of “mofoktebim” (skins of whites) were hiking over the mountains trying to reach the village by night fall. Once they arrived it was apparent that this group of U.S. college students had bitten off more than they could chew. They were nearly out of food, dehydrated, tired and the thought of hiking out brought most to tears. Nina and I attempted to feed and water them and arranged for them to sleep in a donated house in the village.

The next day they had recovered sufficiently to do what they came for. After gathering the village together through the promise of “great gifts” they acted out through wordless skits an approximation of the gospel. Those who understood the point of their acting got a bar of soap which resulted in anyone who was ambulatory going forward. It was deemed a great success by the visiting group and the following day they mustered their strength and hiked back out of the village.

One of the implicit assumptions that seems to be prevalent in our time is that there is no such thing as “Bad Missions”. As long as the intentions of the missionary are pure and the goal of the church sending them out is Biblical, then there are no grounds to question what is done overseas. This should not be.

But how do pastors evaluate what is good missions, especially when it comes to long-term, church-planting, missions? Let me offer three questions that can be a helpful baseline for overseas ministry.

How will the gospel be preached?

All overseas ministry should be rooted in the gospel and its clear proclamation. Helping the sick, caring for the poor, and all manner of good works are helpful platforms, but without the gospel they are impotent to alleviate true human suffering. As Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert put so well in their book What is the Mission of the Church? “…there is something worse than death and something better than human flourishing. If we hope only for renewed cities and restored bodies in this life, we are of all people most to be pitied.”[1]

But if the gospel is to be clear, it must be preached in a manner that is understandable to the hearer and engages his existing worldview. This is the downfall of so many of the current methodologies that populate modern missions today. Very little time is given to understand the worldview that animates the unbeliever. When that existing worldview receives scant attention then what is communicated and understood is usually far from what the missionary intended.

Paul speaking to the value of understanding the worldview says in II Corinthians 10 “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” How do you destroy arguments and opinions raised against God if you don’t know those arguments and opinions? You can’t. So skits, mimes, airdropping tracts and similar practices find their way into use as viable tools to communicate the gospel across cultures. Pastors, good motives do not overcome bad methodology. Make sure your missionaries know what they are speaking into before they speak.

What is the definition of the church?

In 2014, a book titled When Helping Hurts pushed back on the idea of short-term missions as being all good. Through numerous illustrations, the authors made clear that there is a brand of short-term missions that actually hurts the very people that are supposed to be helped. If churches didn’t think through HOW they were helping it was very likely that the only beneficiaries were the people on the trip, and those on the receiving end were more deeply impoverished than before the team “helped” them. This same principle applies to church planting overseas.

The definition of what is and isn’t a church is regularly debated today, as well it should be. The definition of a church determines how ministry will be conducted. Where the definition of church is thin, light, or squishy, the practice and life of that church will reflect that definition. What is meant to be a lasting bastion of light — the church — will rise quickly but die just as quickly. What is supposed to bring life, joy and grace will, in the long run, be worse than if nothing had been taught in the first place. A person who has been exposed to a counterfeit is quite difficult to win over to the authentic item.

Praise God though for good church planting teams that think through how the gospel will be preached, how the converts will be discipled, the sequencing of teaching the books of the Bible, the qualifications for new leaders, and the marks of maturity that need to be evident before they leave. There are teams like this, but they take time to train and form.

Have they counted the cost?

The task of missions, especially church-planting, will extract a high cost. When I am asked by pastors what they can do to prepare their people prior to Radius, high on my list is the reading of good books together.

When they read of John Paton[2] listening to his own children bury their newborn sibling just outside his window, while both parents were too weak to attend, how do they process that? When they learn of Adoniram Judson seriously putting forth a plan to bring over teenagers as missionaries because Burmese was so difficult for adults to master[3], do they catch the weight of that task? When they hear of Hudson Taylor being beaten regularly, Choo Kichul examined under torture 10 different times and refusing to endorse shrine worship,[4] Amy Carmichael bedridden for 2 decades…and still conducting ministry,[5] are they counting the cost?

The dreadful cost of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth is not new. But for each generation, those costs must be brought up again so that they don’t become part of the legion of starters who never finish. Pastors do well to unflinchingly show them what the King of Kings may ask of them, their wives, and their children.

There is much to point at that is bad in missions today. But I would be painting too dark a picture not to balance it out with the glory our Lord is receiving through the work of those that are largely unknown. I thank the Lord for the great platform God has provided for the team in Southeast Asia that is seeing marked progress in a closed access country. For Justin and Lauren who are nearing the finish line of translating, for the first time ever in the history of the “P” people, the book of Ephesians. For my dear friend John who by God’s great grace will next year celebrate 50 years of a strong, Bible teaching, N.T. church in the heart of the Arabic world. For the P and S families who had their houses burned down by the unbelievers, but, for the sake of the church, are moving back in next month. All glory to God for what He is doing, in His perfect timing, around the world.

[1] DeYoung, Kevin. What Is the Mission of the Church? (p. 23). Crossway. Kindle Edition.

[2] The great Scottish missionary who suffered so much to see the church established in Aniwa. https://banneroftruth.org/us/store/history-biography/john-g-paton/

[3] Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore, (Little Brown and Company, Judson Press, 1987), pg. 202

[4] William Blair and Bruce Hunt, The Korean Pentecost, (The Banner of Truth Trust, Carlisle, PA, 1977), pg. 122

[5] Ian H. Murray, Amy Carmichael: Beauty for Ashes, (The Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA, 2015), pg. 84