What are you doing?
Are we done sending missionaries to do something, giving themselves
fodder for newsletters to send home?
We send missionaries to reach our world. Our expectation is that they will do something great and we release them with great fanfare. We promise to pray and plan to keep in touch. Our expectation is that they will keep us informed of the great things that are happening. Good enough?
Consider this: “Don’t send your missionary to do something, send your missionary to assist national believers to do something!” When will our priority be turned to training and/or assisting multiple national believers to do something that they as many workers can do that will be greater than what any one of us could ever do alone? It is their Jerusalem and they need to look out to their world. Our reports home should focus on what they have done because we came to inspire them to accomplish the Great Commission.
Multiplication of ministry must become the objective of missionaries today. Our world cannot be reached with the Gospel by the efforts of one here and another there. All the church must get involved. Locally, they must do whatever they can to reach their neighbors, friends, co-workers and even family (often the hardest to reach). But they also must lift up their eyes and see the mission fields of the world lying before them.
What does that look like? For example, there is a missionary here in the USA to Jewish people. He is focusing on training local churches to reach Jewish people, helping them do their ministry as a local church rather than doing their ministry for them.
Consider some ways our missionaries might multiply through nationals:
- Training, training, training – not just pastors but missionaries and servants of the local churches to do what we should not be sending missionaries to do.
- Experienced church planter in a major city assisting four national church planters to plant churches on every corner of that city.
- Why not inspire the national churches planted by our missionaries to take responsibility for the Great Commission so that they select, support, send, and sustain their missionaries? If the national churches do not have enough to support their missionary, then how about partnering with them for a time so that they can send their missionary to reach their world NOW.
- Encourage national missionaries to follow the same strategy in both open and closed countries where they have been sent by their national churches (training nationals and partnering with local national churches) instead of doing the work themselves.
- What about a circuit riding approach to churches planted by the mission/missionary?
- Instead of sending a missionary to reach international people coming into the country, let the missionary train all the local church members to do outreach to all who live among them while the real purpose of the missionary is to find and focus on the persons who will return home to their country of origin as evangelists, church planters, or simply godly people?
We can accomplish so much more (and write home about it) if we are willing to put to work the people of Jerusalem and challenge them to send their missionaries to Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost of their world.
