:You are either a missionary or a mission field.” We have seen this written somewhere in a church or heard said with great gusto from a pulpit. While I can appreciate where it is coming from, it is not true. Everyone is not a missionary. Everyone is not going to cross a cultural barrier, live amongst people who are from a different corner of the globe, learn another language, and do all they can to make disciples among them. Everyone is not a doctor and everyone is not a missionary. To say casually that we are all missionaries is to nullify the unique calling and position that many have right now and have had for centuries.
Several years ago there was this term that began springing up everywhere. Missional. Missional living. Missional church. Missional worship. The premise was that we are going to do all that we can to live, worship, and play in a way that is oriented around the mission of Jesus. I am into it. Clearly, the church in North America has lost its place to a large degree and if we will ever recover our voice it will take a missionary posture to do so. What we found to be effective 10 or 20 years ago in terms of church strategy is simply not true today. Gathering for church things for church people misses the point of mission. Further, if there are no longer any religious church folks to prop up all those gatherings and initiatives, we kind of are in deep water.
A third sort of wave to this conversation is the whole mission enterprise itself. For a long time in missions history, the traditional understanding of missions has been someone from a Western country going to a non-Western country on the backs of middle to upper class folks who supported the mission. The kinds of ministries were mostly conducted by ministry professionals who were bible college or seminary graduates who did things like church planting, evangelism, and other church related work.
Along the way, we began to develop a broader understanding of missions and people in every vocation began to be sent out to serve cross-culturally by various missions agencies. Nurses, social workers, humanitarian aides, computer designers, agricultural experts, coaches – all kinds of people began to raise money through their churches and other missions minded folks and started working cross-culturally.
We are so good at extremes. Where the missionary was once a professional, the missionary eventually became a secular leader who worked cross-culturally. Some of them were trained theologically or missiologically but many were not. What began to happen, from my analysis at least, was a really strange competition between missionaries as trained professionals versus missionaries as secular workers. The Trained professionals can tend to say the secular workers who serve cross-culturally don’t have enough training to do traditional missions work. Agencies and those who are sending out secular workers are arguing that traditional missions is very limited and doesn’t place anyone other than the pastor/teacher types on the mission field.
Sadly, an incredibly important conversation that has largely been silenced with all of this is the voice of the majority world who is serving cross-culturally in profound ways. Africans, Asians, and Latinos have been leading the charge in cross-cultural missions for many years now. They don’t have the sophisticated budgets and long history that the West has but they are sending out missionaries nevertheless. The majority white missions agencies from the West haven’t figured out how to honor this contribution or include this major pool of missionaries in their efforts. They are often not even considered part of this whole discussion which is tragic at best and sinful at the worst.
Can anyone agree that we need all these people working together at the same time? Can anyone agree that we need ministry professionals as well as secular workers serving among the nations? Can we agree that when ministry professionals do not have those with secular skills meeting holistic needs that we limit the transformation that Christ wants to bring? Can we agree that when we send out very educated secular workers without giving them missiological or a theological foundation for why they are there that they will wash out within a short period of time? Can we figure out a way to give a seat at the table to minority leaders and missionaries where they are not bystanders but the frontrunners that they actually are? We can have it all.
We are not all missionaries. Every person with a trained skill can’t serve overseas and be effective. Not all have a specific calling to do this sort of work. When times get tough, people without that calling and direction from God will bail. Missional living is great. Missional churches are great. Take that missionary posture wherever you go. Cross cultural barriers, learn language, and serve with all our hearts. Do whatever it is that we have been called and commissioned to do but in our world when we want to make everything the same, let’s stop calling everyone a missionary.
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