November 01, 1990 by Ralph D. Winter

The October issue of MF presented Part I of this analysis of the critical issues in the church's mission in the 90s. The first 8 points ended with a definition of a "unimax" people as "the maximum- sized group still sufficiently unified to allow the spread of a church movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance."

9. The Challenge of the Cities. The astonishing thing is that once the '82 definition of Unreached Peoples is clear, it is possible to anticipate that the global urbanization of humanity may very soon carry at least a few key individuals from every unimax people into a city somewhere in the world, where they will likely be much easier to reach. In the 90s the gradual urbanization of much of the world will continue, and it may well be that by the end of the nineties a slight majority of the world's population will be found in cities. The continuing existence of nationalities and ethnic groups in the cities, and even the creation within cities of new groups, will require us to be much more perceptive about the different kinds of peoples we need to deal with in the growing cities of the world.

10. The concepts of closure and countdown. One of the expectable and irrepressible trends in the nineties--at least until the middle of the decade--will be for many to do what was done a hundred years ago, namely, to try to answer the essentially unanswerable question, "What will it take to complete the Great Commission, and can it be done by the year 2000?" Those who feel it is necessary to wipe away every tear, resolve every social problem and cure all poverty, disease, and injustice, may not be attracted to schemes to conclude the task by the end of the century. However, the Unreached Peoples terms defined in '82 make realistic, I believe, the year-2000 goal of completing the necessary initial missionary penetration of every unimax group. This is a heartening and strengthening challenge to work toward with all we have to give. This goal is essentially a refined version of the one developed at the Edinburgh 1980 World Consultation on Frontier Missions: A Church for Every People by the Year 2000.

Meanwhile, many other goals are being forged for completion by the year 2000. Some of these are not, strictly speaking, closure goals-- that is, they do not complete any particular process but simply constitute legitimate, measurable goals to shoot for. An example would be the goal of planting a million churches by the year 2000. By contrast, DAWN's closure version of this goal aims to plant a church in every human community of 500 people or more by the year 2000, however many that may be--an estimated total of 7 million new congregations (Montgomery, 1989:). Incidentally, this additional number of 7 million, is about equal to the present number of vital congregations world-wide!

Another significant goal, for which no closure version exists, is the initiative of one Roman Catholic group toward enough individuals being won to the faith that half of the world's population will call itself Christian by the year 2000. I personally think it is best, however, not to think in terms of conquest--how many are won to the faith--but of extending opportunity--how many have been given a chance to respond. The Bible seems to give no basis for assuming that any particular percentage of the world's population will become Christian on a personal level. Rather, the Bible speaks mysteriously of ethnic groups being "discipled" in some sense, which is clearly not a case of winning either a certain number of persons or of winning a certain percentage. To plant "a viable, indigenous, evangelizing church movement," (a paraphrase of the '82 definition) only requires some minimum, vital, incarnational response within a group. Yet the Bible does speak of every single group being at least partially represented in the ultimate family of God.

Changes in Methodology
11. The changing order of worship. Already it is obvious that the world church is rapidly taking on the cultural characteristics of the so-called pentecostal/charismatic tradition. This mutation is being resisted, but mainly by non-growing groups. Our modern world is now irretrievably more of an emotion-accepting world. It is no longer only at football games that the full range of human emotions can be expressed.

This is not to say that emotions are now being invented or created, nor that the Christian movement had no emotional content before. It is certainly not as though the Spirit of God has been out of action all these centuries. Rather, there is a new dimension in what is more and more a world mood, which has allowed Christian groups in recent years to give this element legitimate public expression. It would not appear that the nineties will retreat in this area.

12. Recovering from a professionally trained ministry. Despite the normal perspective of newly arriving missionaries from the United States, the Christian movement on a global level continues doggedly to depend upon informal apprenticeship methods of ministerial training rather than the historically-recent adoption in the United States of a European state-church style of professional education in residential schools. This is mainly because apprenticeship is more versatile and flexible than the classroom. It may even be that movements in the U.S., such as the rapid growth of new "charismatic" congregations often called Christian Centers, will assist the Christian movement to outgrow the kind of "professional" processes of ministerial formation which have been so assiduously cultivated in the past fifty years in the United States. The fact is, wherever seminaries--or other types of lengthy residential programs--have been introduced overseas and made mandatory for ordination, the growth of the church has been severely crippled.

Thus, what has in some circles become almost universally hailed as a legitimate goal--a "seminary education"--may become more clearly a questionable goal in the nineties, even in the United States. Hopefully, the goal of a highly trained ministry will be achieved, but that methods other than an extractive, residential process will be employed. The latter must be seen both as an inappropriate technology for most of the earth's surface, and also as an undesirable method even where it is employed. Even the Assemblies of God now has its own seminary in the USA, although its great strength was achieved without the help of this kind of residential training that tends to exclude older persons as well as those with jobs and families.

13. Going to, through and beyond partnership. In the nineties we will more and more come to doubt the universal applicability of the very idea of partnership in mission. We arrived at the concept legitimately as missionary efforts produced church movements all around the globe. Wherever these efforts succeeded, it became necessary to shift gears from outreach among untouched-populations to church-to-church relations, and the definition of mission has adjusted to fit.

Westerners tend to think in terms of political entities, and mistake them for nations in the ethnolinguistic sense. Many of our church boards have overlooked until recently the fact that in most countries they are dealing exclusively with, or through, one tiny minority population and are therefore unable to deal fairly and effectively with the many other legitimate peoples and nations of that same country.

If Christianity were only today reaching the United States through Japanese missionaries to the Navajo Indians, the logic of partnership in mission might suggest that the resulting Navajo church be called "The Church in the United States." This could happen even though, say, its membership were entirely within the Navajo nation. Worse still, it would then be expected that all other Americans could best to be reached only through Japanese partnership with Navajo Christians. Worst of all it might imply that the Navajoes could not reach out on their own without Japanese being involved. No, the ultimate worst thing is that partnership has been employed to deny the validity to any pioneer evangelism at all--because, some say, a church must already be there to be able to invite missionaries!

Thus, what for Western mission offices has been an administrative convenience (dealing with one church per country) has turned out to be a missiological nightmare. Missiologically, it would be far better to denote church movements by their culture base than their country. However, surging national churches will in the nineties drastically question the significance of the partnership perspective on a country- wide basis.

14. Pluralistic church, plural mission. Pluralism in mission is one of the inevitable developments in all the older church traditions, especially those that have over the centuries expanded into strikingly different parts of the world, and even within the highly pluralistic United States. A wholesome pluralism is the natural outgrowth of an intelligent response to rich diversity. But, a pluriform unity in a sending church cannot easily be expressed through a single office. In fact, a pluralism in mission fully expressing the pluralism of the home church is a goal yet to be achieved for most Protestant denominations as we begin the nineties.

The United Methodist church has sprouted a new mission sending board in Atlanta, which is at least as well accepted by Methodist leadership as the Church Missionary Society was for many decades in the Anglican tradition. Hopefully the nineties will see a more rapid transition than that within Protestantism. The Roman Catholic tradition has provided us with many excellent models to demonstrate that mission orders are in order in Protestantism. The Internal Revenue Service in the United States is right now involved in a study of what the Protestant equivalent should look like.

15. Home and foreign boards. In the shuffle of recent history, many church boards have wondered if the old home/foreign dichotomy is valid. It is easy to put all "mission" in a single board, as some denominations have done, but this may only perpetuate a confusion about the very definition of mission.

Hopefully, in the nineties, the fact that thousands of Unreached Peoples have at least some small representation within the United States will be recognized as requiring classical "foreign" mission work to be pursued "at home." But local churches and donors are not prepared for this. Much mission money goes only to "those unfortunate countrymen who have been willing to go and suffer in foreign circumstances," and thus builds on sympathy for the missionary rather than concern for the mission purposes involved.

This misunderstanding is not something that will quickly be resolved, even though it is eminently clear. Frontier mission work, everywhere in the world, needs to be cut out of cloth different--both in training and approach--from the kind of mission which emphasizes helping churches to expand within their own ethnic nationalities, but which does not necessarily help them to reach out to Unreached Peoples beyond them. The fact is that about 85% of all missionary personnel are at best now engaged in church expansion programs.

16. Value in secular approaches. Dozens of major mission agencies, both denominational boards and interdenominational agencies, have seen fit to found perfectly secular entities through which they can offer valid, understandable services without confusing governments with their religious motivation. This method of approach will continue to increase. It is not helpful here to mention the names of any of these, but it is worth noting that the most widely respected agencies, denominational and interdenominational, have found this approach helpful.

17. Preparation for mission. It is amazing how much progress has taken place in formal education for mission in the past 25 years. It is probably clear by now that off-the-shelf courses and schools can help a person become well-trained for cross-cultural missionary service. What must be recognized more clearly, and soon, is that the present process holds people back from cultural immersion for at least a decade too long. Thus, budding missionaries face an impossible choice between becoming well-trained but arriving on the field too late to make the proper depth of adjustment, or arriving on the field inadequately trained but with greater potential in some ways. The only possible answer to this dilemma is for schools to unbend and allow for field-based education. This can be done. Will it happen in the nineties? I think so.

18. Proportionate share in the task. A hundred years ago, church leaders who were serious about doing something significant by the end of that century thought very concretely about dividing up the work to be done on a proportionate basis among the several major denominations. Recently, in a nationwide, interdenominational mission congress in Costa Rica, evangelicals broke down proportional shares of the remaining worldwide task of reaching the Unreached Peoples for each country in Latin America. Their breakdown was based on the estimated number of people in each Latin American country who might be counted on to fuel a global missionary outreach focused on Unreached Peoples. Since then, other countries have enthusiastically adopted their proportional share. These national-level meetings have been catalyzed by Edison Queiroz, who heads the COMIBAM movement, and by the AD 2000 Movement, a global phenomenon headed by the former international director of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization--Dr. Thomas Wang.

Changes in the Not-Quite-Panaceas
Among the many positive forces in the nineties will be five strategies which each have a great deal to offer, but which cannot, by themselves be considered panaceas. They deserve mention because an overemphasis of any of them may divert attention from a balanced approach and lead to an improper balance of funding.

19. Tentmakers--the bi-vocational approach. History reveals the value from time to time of the involvement of missionary personnel in self- supporting activities not directly related to their ministry. The apostle Paul, for example, "made tents for a living" in certain periods of his ministry. There are literally thousands of missionaries working under standard agencies who are occupied in this way, even though the details are not publicized. It is rather unusual, however, for a person not linked in accountability and supervision to a standard mission agency to have a significant impact just by virtue of working in another culture.

Yet there is certainly no doubt that with proper guidance and encouragement the million committed Christians from the Western world already living and working in the non-Western world ought to be able to be more effective in mission. The same is true for the hundreds of millions of national believers who live as citizens in the non- Western world. Who will encourage and assist them to become involved in true cross-cultural outreach to Unreached Peoples? This question leads to the next point.

20. Native missionaries--a fundamental confusion. When, in 1983 and 1986, Billy Graham brought thousands of "itinerant evangelists" to Amsterdam, he was touching only the hem of the garment of the non- Western church. There are probably at least a million such leaders. Very few of these, however, are involved in the Pauline kind of outreach to other peoples within which there is "not yet a viable, indigenous, evangelizing church movement"--a paraphrase of the March 1982 definition.

Some organizations specialize in supporting "native missionaries," but don't stop to distinguish between those who are faithful, native non-missionary servants of an already existing church movement (created by frontier missions of an earlier era, perhaps) and those very few who are truly frontier missionaries in a language and cultural situation in which they are no longer "natives."

The very phrase "native missionary" is thus a contradiction in terms. I once was a missionary in Guatemala, where I was no longer a native. I am now a native in California where I am no longer a missionary.

21. Short termers in an age of tentativity. The trend to short term missions will continue into the nineties simply because the strain between generations in the Western world keeps young people in a mood of tentativity for a lengthy and unhealthy period. It is unfortunate that young people in short terms usually do not learn about the work of the long-term missionaries, but rather contribute what is almost necessarily of minimal value in view of the limited training, orientation, and language skills involved. In such cases the short term experience may only be an inocculation against further involvement, rather than a basis for lifelong career effort in mission or even loyal support of long-term mission work.

22. Mass media--the value of the air force. One of the truly marvelous dimensions of life in the nineties is the enormously expanded potential of mass communications. Reference has already been made to the extensive ministry of the great missionary radio groups, now working more closely together than ever. The full impact of the cassette recorder was glimpsed in the rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. The significance of the fax machine was seen in the Tienanmen Square in China. The spreading plague/blessing of the ubiquitous VCR is also clearly evident. The printed page is still the most significant single mass medium. But none of these can take the place of incarnational witness any more than mass media can replace parents. Our mission is not less than a global family, and families need more than messages coming in the door, or window, or by electronic radiation. However, the effective contribution of the mass media will be developed much further in the nineties.

23. Church-based missionaries--has it ever worked? This is one of the most delicate issues, and no doubt will continue to be throughout the nineties. Some church traditions have emphasized the sole validity of the local church so strongly that any kind of denominational or mission agency type of collaboration is seen as extra-Biblical. Many large congregations in the United States with thousands of members have established their own mission boards. But also certain long- standing traditions, such as the Churches of Christ, and the Plymouth Brethren, also emphasize the idea of missionaries being under the authority and support of only one congregation. This emphasis is common, too, in the thousands of new congregations in the independent Charismatic Center movement, and among similarly independent Chinese congregations all over the world.

The nature of cross-cultural mission is much too complicated, as well as geographically distant from a supporting congregation, for that home body to be solely responsible for the field strategy and supervision of effective mission work. The direct interest of congregations in a particular missionary is certainly to be cultivated, but it is patently obvious from the historical record that direct congregational supervision is a rather unlikely method for the effective deployment of missionaries.

In Summary

The Lord of History has never been outguessed by mortal man. Perhaps no one thing has more regularly humbled His servants than their inability to control the complexity of human events. At the very moment of this writing it is almost terrifyingly clear how ambiguous the future actually is. At best the comments here are only made in view of what is in view. But as someone has said, "we do not know what the future holds, but we do know Who holds the future," and in that we can seek to give "our utmost for His highest," with profound confidence of His steadfast love and mercy.