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Advice for local churches forming mission partnerships with overseas mission agencies and churches. Although written for the Board for Mission Services of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, these principles apply in all denominations. 
1. We foster the development of 4-self churches. Question: What are the signs of a healthy, indigenous church? A healthy indigenous church exhibits four characteristics. They are:
Question: Why are these 4-self concepts so important? 1. In Eph. 4:13-15, Paul the Missionary states that God's purpose is to lead His churches to:
2. Without the 4-self concepts a church fails to grow up as Paul described. Instead it remains stunted and dependent on the missionaries and the mission agency. The traditional name for this unhealthy relationship is "paternalism." The current term is "codependency." Just as we do not desire such a relationship with our own children, so we desire maturity and independence for the mission churches we plant by the Spirit's power.
Question: What do immaturity and maturity look like? 1. A church which cannot self-theologize is only able to state its beliefs in the terms it learned from its foreigner teachers. Like a parrot who can only repeat the exact words it has memorized, such a church cannot think or speak for itself. Thus, it is ill-equipped to respond to the burning issues and questions which arise within its own culture. For example, believers in a Buddhist context must address questions concerning the nature of God, spiritual enlightenment, reincarnation, the law of karma, and nirvana. Because Western theology has not wrestled with these issues in depth, a Western missionary may shy away from them or give them only brief, simplistic responses. But missionaries with the goal of establishing self-theologizing churches, will help and encourage converts to search the Scriptures to discover God's response to Buddhism. Such churches will be like mature adults, able to voice their opinion in clear, intelligible terms. 2. A church that is not self-propagating is like a sterile young adult, unable to bear children. When we raise children, we do so with the hope that someday they will give us the honor of being grandparents. A major cause of ecclesiastical sterility is stressing the pastoral office (and other "professional" ministry positions) above the priesthood of all believers. When people assume only the pastor can witness effectively, they deny the ability of the Holy Spirit to multiply His Church through them (Acts 1:8). We have made this mistake often enough in our own churches. Why export the same mentality to other locales? The goal is to plant fertile churches which pass along the imperishable seed of God's word (1 Pt. 1:23). Therefore, the wise missionary will properly balance the doctrine of the office of the holy ministry with the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, enabling, and training all converts to be faithful witnesses of the hope that they have in Christ (1 Pt. 3:15). When this occurs, we will know the joy of being spiritual grandparents and great-grandparents. 3. A church which is not self-governing is like a young adult who has never been allowed to make his own decisions. Such a church stands under the sway of missionaries and the foreign mission agency. However, we know a parent should provide children both roots and wings. While we are to honor, obey, and love parents, as we grow toward maturity we become more and more independent and able to make our own decisions. Christians in mission fields must be granted similar opportunities to mature. They must be free to choose their own leaders, not ones selected and imposed by the missionaries. The people should be allowed to use their own methods of social organization, rather than methods imported from another culture. Missionaries who, from the beginning of their work, allow converts to develop their own leadership and structures, will before long have a mature, capable, independent daughter church of which they can be proud (Phil. 1:3-6). 4. A church which is not self-supporting will be like a young person who cannot live within his means and is always looking for a hand out. This occurs when missionaries play the role of "sugar daddy," always coming to the financial rescue when a need arises, rather than training people in the fundamentals of Christian stewardship. Another obstacle to self-support is the missionary's tendency to indulge their spiritual children, wanting to provide for them everything that they have: large buildings, residential seminaries, full-time pastors, and institutions such as schools and hospitals. If the local economy and talent pool cannot afford to maintain these things, then the local church becomes dependent on the dole from the mission agency. Wise missionaries pray and plan to avoid these dangers. They establish ministries and structures which can be carried on by the local believers. They encourage even poor Christians to be stewards of what God provides them, because that is the model we are taught in Scripture (Mark 12:41-44; 2 Cor. 8:1-5). When this occurs, young churches learn to trust in God for His provision (Mt. 6:11), and the Lord does provide (2 Cor.9:8; Phil. 4:10-19).
Question: Does the fourfold emphasis on "self" detract from God's role is building churches? On the contrary. Often parents wind up with immature children, because they are unable to trust God to guide and protect their offspring through the necessary, but painful, stages of growth. Rather than allow their kids to experience the risks of life, such parents say, "I'll do it myself." The "self" we as missionaries need to overcome is ourselves. We do so when we trust in the Lord of the Church to be able to lead our spiritual children through the risky steps of maturity which we ourselves must experience. If anyone could have thought, "I can do it better myself," it was Jesus our Lord, because He actually could do everything better than we can. But what did He elect to do? He diligently trained twelve leaders who could train others (2 Tim. 2:2; Eph. 4:11-12), and He left behind a Church which was:
Our Lord did it right the first time. Let us trust Him to keep up the good work. 2. We balance physical and spiritual needs Question: What needs do we find among people in our mission fields. 1. We see men, women, and children living without faith in the true God. Led astray by false religions, idols, and demons, they may have a form of godliness but lack its true power (2 Tim. 3:5). Without faith in the crucified and risen Christ, they are foreigners to the promises of God, without hope and without God (Eph. 2:12). Unless they repent and believe, they face God's eternal condemnation (Jn. 3:18, 36; 8:23-24). God's mercy toward us compels us to proclaim to them the only message of hope, the gospel of Christ the Savior (2 Cor. 5:14; 1 Jn. 2:2). 2. We see people enduring the horrid effects of sin in our world. Disease, catastrophes, hunger, poisoning of the environment, violence, war, slavery, rape, prostitution, racism, ignorance, unjust distribution of wealth, unemployment, poverty, oppression of the poor by the powerful, and so on. God's mercy toward us compels us to respond to such human woes with relief (Acts 9:6), rehabilitation (Dt. 24:19-22), development (Lev. 25:8-55), and justice (Prov. 24:11-12).
Question: Which of these needs is most important? 1. From the viewpoint of eternity, each person has only two destinations: eternal life or eternal damnation. What will make the difference is hearing of Jesus Christ, the one name and one way of salvation (Jn. 14:6; Acts 4:12). From this eternal perspective, no temporal human suffering can compare with the predicament of living, and dying, without Christ. Therefore, our first duty is, by the Spirit's power, to try to proclaim the saving word to as many as possible. 2. However, from the viewpoint of strategy, many people are unable or unwilling to listen to God's message while they are preoccupied by hunger, poverty, oppression, and other effects of human sin. Many people will not care how much we know until they know how much we care. Many will not respond to our proclamation of God's love until they experience our demonstration of it.
Question: Does this mean that proclamation and demonstration are divided or opposed? 1. No. In the Scriptures, proclamation and demonstration are always united. Christ went from town to town, "preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness" (Mt. 9:35). Paul the Missionary insisted Christian preachers be united about the content of their proclamation and about their compassion for the poor (Gal 2:2, 10). Peter the Missionary urged believers both to "declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" and to "live such good lives among the pagans that,... they may see your good deeds and glorify God..." (1 Pt. 2:9, 12). 2. Unfortunately, at times in the history of the Church, a wedge has been driven between soul-winning ministries and human care ministries. This was never the Lord's intention. He gave us both:
We will make few disciples if we fail to love them as Christ loved us. We will love our neighbor only superficially if we do not attempt to rescue them from their greatest danger. Neither mandate alone can accomplish its purpose. They each depend on the other for fulfillment. 3. Therefore, what God has joined together, let us not put asunder. We affirm both ministries, serving the whole person, body and soul. We trust the Holy Spirit to use both our proclamation and demonstration to reconcile lost people to God and lead them to a living hope in Christ.
Question: How do mission agencies and their missionaries put this into practice? 1. As mission agencies research and make contact with a target audience, they seek means both to meet temporal human needs and to lead people to recognize their eternal,spiritual need of salvation. For example, during the civil war in El Salvador, the Lutheran Church in San Salvador established a center for war refugees. Lutherans at the center offered housing, opportunity to raise crops, grief counseling, literacy training, job skill training, and fellowship. Woven through all these human care activities was a simple, sincere desire to share why they exhibited such love: because in Christ God had loved them first (1 Jn. 4:11, 19). The Spirit blessed that wise union of demonstration and proclamation with a harvest of conversions unparalleled in any previous era of Lutheran work in El Salvador. 2. Agencies sending short-term missionaries will also seek to balance demonstration with proclamation. Because short-termers lack time to learn the local language or build firm friendship, the temptation exists to focus only on human care and overlook proclamation. Let us not settle for such an imbalance. A mission agency which truly desires to work in tandem with local Christians will discover means to combine the efforts of its short-term missionaries and with the abilities of local believers, so that demonstration of God's love will be linked with proclamation of the gospel. A mission agency which seeks to be both creative and Bible-based, will discover in the Scripture texts which relate their human care ministries to the gospel. For example, short-termers distributing eye-glasses in Haiti could design a French tract based on verses which speak about light, darkness, blindness, and sight. 3. We work to realize and support priorities. Question: What should be the priorities of a mission agency? As mission agencies become familiar with a field, they soon recognize a host of glaring needs. Before they know it, they are being tugged in many different directions. What is wrong with this all-too-common scenario? The agency falls into the trap of doing things which appear to be helpful, but are ultimately irrelevant or distract from mission priorities. A modern proverb says: "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." What is the main thing? Many mission agencies--after repeated mistakes of striking out on distracting tangents--now recognize the main things are: (a) church planting, specifically the planting of 4-self churches (see principle #1); and (b) leadership development, because without it churches don't mature to become 4-self churches. Furthermore, a mission agency should acquaint itself with the unique field strategy that has been developed on the basis of those two priorities for this particular field. What will happen if we blindly go in to do a mission trip or project, without learning about priorities and strategies or committing ourselves to following them? We are likely to wind up doing something where folks ultimately say, "That sure is a nice hospital and all, but what does it have to do with reaching the people here with the Gospel?"
Question: What are some examples of distracting mission activities? How might they be resolved? 1. A mission society sends church planters to a community which lacks a school. With few educational opportunities, the people have little opportunity to better their socioeconomic situation. What should the society do? Here are a few options. Which ones will keep the mission agency on task with its priorities, while still expressing concern for the community's needs? a. Order their church planters to devote half their time to teaching school. b. Order the church planters to encourage local leaders to begin their own school. c. Send a teacher (or two) to start a school. d. Raise thousands of dollars to build a school and pay missionary-teachers. e. Enlist prayer supporters to pray that the local government will fund a school. 2. Perhaps a donor offers a tidy sum, but he or she earmarks it for an activity which distracts from your major ministry. If you follow the donor's suggestion, you will find yourselves expending your limited personnel resources on low priority items. If possible, persuade the donor to redirect the funds to your ministry priorities. If that is not possible, it would be better to tell the donor, "Thanks, but no thanks." 3. Perhaps a Christian drama troupe offers to perform for two weeks in your field. As you weight this offer, you should be asking questions such as the following? Do you need a drama troupe at this time? Are your workers available to host the drama troupe during the dates they propose to be there? Are the dramas evangelistic enough to serve your church planting strategies? Or might they contribute to leadership development? Are the dramas already in the local language? If not, are they worth the effort of having your missionaries or local leaders translate them? Will the troupe merely perform and then leave? Or do they intend to develop your local leadership by offering drama workshops to your church members? 4. A mission agency decides it would be nice to fund a medical van which travels about a Muslim region offering health care services to people who couldn't otherwise afford it. Unfortunately, however, no plans were made to share anything about Jesus with the patients. Literature isn't even handed out. The medical van idea is field-driven in the sense that it met a crying local need. But the van fails the priorities/strategy test. To correct the situation, the agency that funds the van should dialogue with the local church planting agency, so that the van will fit into the priorities and strategy of the field, rather than being an irrelevant distraction.
Question: But what if my mission society has a specific, limited focus? Some agencies do have a specific focus, such as deaf ministry, medical missions, or media outreach. This narrow focus is their driving force, their passion, their reason for existing. Such agencies do not have to expand and become a "full-service" mission. However, their narrow ministry will be more effective when they intentionally relate their work to church planting and leadership development. For example, Wycliffe Bible Translators has historically focused on translating and literacy training--nothing more. They have not see themselves as Bible distributors or church planters. In recent years, however, missionary Don Leonard, an LCMS pastor serving Wycliffe in the Philippines, has prodded them to link their efforts to Bible distribution and church planting. Through two innovative, spin-off mission agencies established by Don (Sowers, Inc. and Vernacular Video Ministries), Wycliffe is learning how to better link its focused ministry to the broader priorities of church planting and leadership development. This is a lesson for all mission agencies with a narrow passion and purpose.
Question: How do we stay focused on the main thing? Be sure to include the priorities of church planting and leadership development in your mission statement. Begin every meeting by reciting your mission statement and praying that the Lord will keep you on task. When faced with a difficult decision about possible actions to take, you may find this hypothetical question helps you clarify the issues: If we knew Christ was returning in six months, what choice would we make? Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. |