This is an article from the December 1990 issue: Which Way to the Truth? How to Follow Through on Mission Commitment

Training to Go Now!

Missionary Training Today & Tomorrow

Training to Go Now!

How are people to be trained for mission in today's world? This is one of the most profound missiological questions that one can ask. In the light of Scripture, the evangelical must stress at least four universals that are essential to all training for this demanding and many-faceted task.

1. Spiritual Development

When we step into the world of the Bible, we meet with people who have been significantly used in mission. Some were highly educated, others had little formal training. But all were prepared by God prior to their being commissioned for their particular ministry.

Moses and Paul are significant examples of the essentiality of this preparation. Both were well educated. And yet neither made any positive contributions to the ongoing of the purpose of God until there was the crisis of personal encounter with God ö and this meant the burning bush or the Damascus road. They had to know God otherwise than by hearsay. As A. W. Tozer said to students at an Urbana missionary conference many years ago:

I believe that it is a tragedy for any man or woman to undertake the higher responsibilities of missionary service until he/she has met God personally and God has become not an idea, not a concept, not a doctrine only, but a living Presence, an indwelling Reality(1955:3).

Fortunately, in our day there is a renewed emphasis on spiritual formation or development in virtually all missionary raining schools and evangelical theological seminaries. Not that our schools can mast of anything approaching significant achievement in this regard. After all:

"All spirituality is a response to God's call. He has made the initiative. It is not up to the creature to get God's attention or to win his favor, Rather he must cooperate with God's preeminent grace and respond wholeheartedly". (Buechlein 1977:3).

This sort of response, of course, can be facilitated by the training school. It involves the deliberate setting up of a spiritual development program that stresses the responsible freedom and personal effort of the students. It requires of them personal asceticism and discipline, and a willingness to be accountable to themselves, to their peers, and to the church of their association. Indeed, they will have to participate in the revitalization of the very spiritual development program through which they are seeking assistance in growth in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ the Lord. But grow they can, and grow they must.

2. Community Experience

In a broad sense we oust say that every gathering of Christians constitutes a missionary situation. By their very existence they constitute what George Web-ber calls "outposts of the Kingdom of God, placed in a particular location in the worl8 to bear witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ" (1960:24). And, since they are to be concerned with the advancement of the Kingdom, it is essential that they be collective expressions of what might be called its "spiritual laws" ö that their posture be one of penitence, that their role be that of the servant, and that their goal for Christians be maturity in Christ (Col.1:28,29).

Such maturity embraces the ultimate in servanthood ö the cross indeed! Derived from these laws are such concomitants as the concern for spiritual renewal, the capacity for critical evaluation of all service, and the awareness that as a community's service enlarges, responsibilities will increase and ever heavier demands will be made of its members

(Schrotenboer 1976:15-16).

Whereas the community derives its sense of obligation to bear witness to Christ's lordship and to disciple the nations from the Great Commission, the possibility for effective response to this mandate arises from Pentecost. For, if Pentecost signified anything, it marked the beginning of a new era in which each and every member of the local expression of Christ's body is given grace to participate in the ongoing of his mission.

All his followers are called to the ministry. And, as any student of church growth will testify, the churches that grow are invariably those that have made ministry and witness the primary responsibility of the laity. Indeed, when the laity see themselves as "the twelve tribes who are dispersed abroad" (James 1: I; 1 Peter 1:1), their corporate witness has far more telling effect upon the non-Christian conscience than we have probably believed hitherto. For if the community reflects in its togetherness the fact that it has been redeemed by Christ, it will express that liberation by being His serving and loving presence in the midst of people.

By the interrelatedness of its members, by their never omitting the least acts of kindness to one another, the community becomes a pattern of corporate life and a way of relating to one another which is a rejection of, and therefore a challenge to, the social and political structures of the world. In this way the Church's very existence becomes both prophetic and evangelistic. And in doing the works of God the Church repudiates the carnal weapons of the world ö violence, force, deception, propaganda, manipulative technology ö and employs the only weapons which, for it, are effective: truth, justice, peaceableness, faith, prayer and the Word of God (Eph 6:14-18) (Snyder 1977:71-72).

Traditional missionary formation was based on the assumption that all essential preparation could be achieved in the classroom. This is in sharpest contrast to the secular worldâs training of lawyers (via case studies), business personnel (via concrete projects), and doctors (via teaching hospitals). Fortunately, the leaders of missionary training schools that are worth their salt are increasingly becoming convinced that missionaries cannot be produced in the classroom. A crucial segment of their training can only be obtained through intense involvement over a period of time in the vital life of a dynamic congregation. And this involvement should increasingly be made part of the training curriculum.

3. Spiritual Gifts

Looking back, we can see that traditional missionary training ö especially at the seminary level ö focused on the creation of but one norm: the full-time, salaried professional. This elite person was understood to be separated from the laity ö ordinary church members. This legacy from the past is no longer valid. Indeed, we are beginning to see that it never was valid in the biblical sense. Furthermore, such professional elites tended to align themselves with those classes of society that were at considerable cultural distance from the poor and the marginal. These latter constitute the majority of the people.

Today, we look at the Bible differently. We recognize it teaches that all Christians comprise the laity and hence all need to be reoriented from the role of "those to whom the clergy minister." Granted that all Christians are called to the ministry ö not to the passivity of receiving the sacraments, submitting to the preaching and accepting the counsel of their pastors. What then? Is there no place for office-bearers in the Church? Hardly. According to the Apostle Paul, within the one Body "there are varieties of gifts... and there are varieties of ministries" (I Cor 12:4-6). More, God has provided various offices whereby these gifts and ministries are to be exercised, so that the Church can have a structured order to balance the ardor of the Spirit. Indeed, all office-bearers and ministers serve in equipping the saints for service, building up the Body of Christ through evangelism, church planting, and the nurturing of converts (I Cor 12:12-27). But this does not mean that ofifice-bearers are not themselves anything other than the laity.

At this point the anthropologist enters the debate and reminds us of the problem the Church faces in its efforts to promote the thesis that all Christians are ministers. For every culture appears to make provision for the professional religionist: separated from his contemporaries by heredity or training or sacrament or charism in order that he might mediate between society and the invisible realm. In all the welter of words currently being written calling for the reexamination of the Church and her ministry, few are challenging the projection onto the Church of this "professional religionist." This fact alone underscores the problem of removing from the minds of Christians this penchant for identifying "ministry" with the functions assigned to one person alone-generally a male! Some argue that the Christian movement should mark the end of the religionist: the whole congregation should be a priesthood; the people of God are a kingdom of priests: all should minister.

All of which brings us to the need for having a clear understanding of how the apostolic Church defined its office- bearers. Concerning this William Barclay writes:

In the early Church there were three kinds of office bearers. There were a few whose writ and whose authority ran throughout the whole church (apostles). There were many whose ministry was not confined to one place, but who carried out a wandering ministry, going wherever the Spirit moved them, and where God sent them (prophets and evangelists). There were some whose ministry was a local ministry which was confined to the one congregation and to the one place (pastors and teachers) 1966:171). At that point in time, the training of office-bearers was probably not an issue. Even today, Yoder states rather emphatically that gifts ranging from the elder-bishop-pastor to the rarer gifts of tongues and healing are not teachable, some because they are the fruit of age, others because they are charismata in the more narrow sense of that word. Some cannot be a livelihood; others risk losing their moral integrity if they are, though a few ö the itinerant, the teaching elder ö would justify economic support. Today this task of didaskalos is the one for which seminaries can prepare a man. The one ministry which can be taught is teaching (1961:5).

4. Cultural Awareness
We would certainly add a cultural dimension to the teachable possibilities. But let's honestly face it ö not even a broad exposure to anthropological insights can "produce" a cross-cultural missionary. However, I'm firmly convinced: a gifted and committed neophyte can be helpfully sensitized; he or she can also be equipped with some coping strategies that may lay a vital base for life-long, on-the-job learning.

Thankfully, the curricula of our training institutions increasingly reflect the need for training in cultural awareness and sensitivity. Past stress on "indigenization" and "acculturation" all too often pressed missionaries to focus the attention of emerging churches on identifying too closely with "yesterday," which invariably meant the conservative and backward-looking elements in society. Today we are beginning to sense the imperative of "contextualization" which calls missionaries to be far more sensitive to the need to help these churches identify with "today" and "tomorrow", not only with the real issue they are currently confronting, but with the probable shape of things to come.

The tragedy today is that some of the ardent enthusiasts for contextualization are virtually ignoring the text because of their preoccupation with the context. This follows from their failure to secure beforehand a solid grounding in the disciplined reflection and use of the canonical Scriptures. Unless one is deeply convinced of the inspiration and consequent authority of this Word of God, he/she will be only casually concerned for the nonnegotiables of our Christian faith: the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel, Savior of the world, and Second Person of the Godhead; the essentiality of the atonement if any human being is to he reconciled to God; the necessity for personal conversion to Jesus Christ, for apart from being thereby reborn by the Holy Spirit, people shall not see, much less enter the Kingdom of God; and the certainty of coming judgment when an eternal separation takes place between the saved and the lost. No person should be commissioned for missionary service who is not only knowledgeable concerning the content of the Bible, but also convinced through and through that this is indeed the utterly sufficient and fully trustworthy Word of the living God.

This knowledge and this conviction can be best secured within a community of faith that is committed to personal discipleship, to individual and corporate worship, and to the sort of practical outreach and obedience that involves its members in ministry.

Conclusion
In the light of all the above, perhaps the most vital question is this: how are these potential missionaries to be identified? How can one be sure that God has called him/her to this demanding ministry? In my judgment, the best way to find out is to ascertain the degree to which missionary candidates have conducted themselves in the life and witness of the local congregations to which they have been attached. For, as we all know, when one seeks to share the gospel with those who profess no allegiance to Jesus Christ, things happen. And questions surface in his or her mind: Is God truly at work where I am? Are there the signs of the Kingdom? Do my brothers and sisters in Christ confirm this? Are they encouraging me to persevere in the mission that embraces evangelistic outreach, and pastoral teaching and reconciling service? If so, I am privileged indeed: I can truly serve this generation in the will of God.

References Cited
Barclay, William 1966. The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians. Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press.

Buechlein, Daniel. O.S.B., 1977. 'The Status of Spiritual Formation in the Theological Seminary." CARA: Seminary Forum, March 1977:3-8.

Schrotenboer, Paul G. 197.6 "Training for Missions".

Unpublished paper. Reformed Ecumenical Synod, Cape Town Missionary Conference. August, 1976, No. 1.

Snyder, Howard A. 1977. The Community of the King. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Tozer, A. W. 1955. "Spiritual Preparation for Christian Service." The Alliance Weekly 90.37:2-3.

Webber, George 1960. God's Colony in Man's World. New York: Abingdon.

Yoder, John Howard 1961. "The One or the Many." Paper delivered at the InterSeminary Movement Regional Winter Conference, Evanston, Illinois.

Arthur F. Glasser teaches at the School of World Mission of Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

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