Rejecting a Binary Mindset about Missions
If the overarching task of the church in this age is to worship and obey Christ by making disciples throughout the world, and if missions is defined as an intentional and sustained effort to cross cultural and linguistic barriers in pursuit of that goal, then how does missions relate in practical terms to other activities and expressions of ministry? Is cross-cultural missions the only ministry that matters? Should we prioritize it at the expense of other important things? Our time, money, and energy are all limited, both as individuals and as church congregations, and we often feel pulled in different directions. Nearby needs and opportunities abound, and they can seem more urgent and more solvable than faraway global problems.
Defining missions specifically as crosscultural disciple-making does not have to devalue other roles and ministries. It can still feel, however, that missions competes against those other ministries for resources. We only have so many evenings a week to spend either praying for the unreached or mentoring at-risk youth. Should we give toward a Bible translation project or to our local crisis pregnancy center? With so many needs in our own communities, how do we balance competing priorities? We can’t support every cause, so we look at our options, pray for wisdom, make our choices, and trust God to take care of the rest.
The cost of pursuing missions isn’t just a matter of time and resources. Fundamentally, it is a matter of people. As Jesus noted, the laborers are few (Luke 10:2). It is one thing to advocate for hypothetical missionaries to reach the lost. It is much harder to drop your grandchildren off at an airport on their way to the other side of the world. Missionaries who go out to fulfill the “ends of the earth” dimension of the Great Commission are sorely missed by the families, friends, and churches they leave behind. Effective cross-cultural disciple-making requires godly, mature believers, and not many churches think they have a surplus of such people. So do we pursue missions at the expense of our local churches? Does God ask us to choose the unreached over our families? Are we to meet physical needs or preach truth?
When we are under stress, we tend to think in binary categories. We can go or stay. Give or save. Focus local or go global. Simplifying the options can help us cope with a complex world, but it can also reflect what Stephen Covey calls a scarcity mentality and make us susceptible to extreme and unnecessary pendulum shifts. As Robertson McQuilkin observed in relation to balancing scriptural truths, “It seems easier to go to a consistent extreme than to stay at the center of biblical tension.” Easier, but not better. In many areas of life, maturity means holding seemingly competing truths in appropriate tension.
We often think of ministry possibilities like a typical intersection. If one light is green, the other will be red. If we move forward with one option or prioritize one group of people, we must reject or press pause on the alternatives. We can’t do everything, so we must choose between our needs and the needs of the unreached, between home culture ministry and international missions, between evangelism and meeting physical needs. But what if we adopt an abundance mentality instead of a scarcity mentality? What if an active global ministry culture actually enhances our local impact? Perhaps we can think of these decisions as less like a four-way intersection and more like a roundabout.
Americans typically don’t like roundabouts, although they are actually one of our important contributions to the world of transportation. The first circular intersection designed for motorized vehicles was Columbus Circle in New York City, opened in 1905. Well-functioning roundabouts are demonstrably safer, cheaper, and more efficient than four-way intersections. They do not require electricity to operate, they need little upkeep, traffic never stops moving, and it is impossible to have a head-on or T-bone collision because cars move at an angle to one another.
Despite all these advantages, roundabouts didn’t catch on in America. In between accidents, roundabouts jammed up with cars until no one could move. By the 1950s, most Americans concluded that intersections should be binary. A lot of us still think that. If you are the rare American who likes roundabouts, you have the British to thank. In 1966, they figured out what was going wrong. According to the original design of traffic circles, entering cars had the right-of-way, so drivers charged in at high speed without paying attention to vehicles already circling. Once inside, they had to both watch for their exit and avoid incoming drivers. If traffic was heavy, the entire circle filled up with cars and came to a standstill. The British realized they needed to reverse the right-of-way, giving priority to the cars inside the intersection. Entering vehicles then had to pause and make sure there was space for them. Circulating drivers could focus on exiting safely rather than dodging incoming cars. Once the correct right-of-way was established, capacity went up by 10 percent and crashes went down by almost half. Americans still took a lot of convincing. We didn’t build any more roundabouts until 1990.
The story of the traffic circle is an example of coordination for the greater good of everyone. The drivers inside the circle aren’t more important than those outside it, but there has to be a prioritized sequence in order for everyone to get where they’re going. Everyone benefits, even though incoming cars may have to slow down momentarily to find a gap. The difference between an efficient driving experience and total gridlock is the application of appropriate right-of-way rules.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, but we can apply some of the same principles to the tension between global missions and other ministry opportunities in our home culture context. The goal is for the whole system to work well and for everyone to benefit so that the overall objective is realized. Because the Great Commission includes, and even emphasizes, the discipleship of all peoples, the church must ensure that the cross-cultural dimension of ministry is honored. Perhaps, in one sense, we can picture it as giving the “right-of-way” to those with the least access to the gospel. It isn’t that the unreached in faraway places are more important than our neighbors. It’s that getting the gospel to them will require a lot more intentional effort from the church. Most of us don’t need to dramatically rearrange our lives in order to share the gospel with our neighbors. But a significant number of us will have to rearrange our lives to communicate that message to the 3.5 billion people alive today who don’t yet have access to Bibles, churches, or followers of Jesus. For most Christians, the global dimension is the easiest to neglect.
When it comes to ministry decisions, we need to resist simplistic, binary conclusions and focus on nurturing a healthy ecosystem so that we keep the big picture of the Great Commission in view and pursue it actively. If we embrace a biblical vision of reaching every people group, then we can bring other parts of our lives into alignment with that overarching purpose, including ministry to our families and our communities.
Adapted from Is the Commission Still Great? by Steve Richardson (© 2022). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.
Steve Richardson has served as president of Pioneers-USA since 1999. Pioneers mobilizes and supports 3,200 missionaries and marketplace professionals who impact 500 unreached people groups in 95 countries. He is the author of Is the Commission Still Great? (Moody Publishers).