September 01, 1986 by Ralph D. Winter

One thing the Asia Missions Association conference in Pasadena has done is throw new light on an old subject.

The newest “talk” in certain local church circles today is about “native missionaries.”

“Native missionaries don’t cost as much and, as a matter of fact, they’re better than traditional missionaries,” some people argue.

Why do they say this? Well,

• “Native missionaries” speak the language as natives, not as struggling missionaries from afar,
• They know their people well.
• They don't have problems with the food.
• etc.

I might add:

• They take the heat off Americans who don’t want to “go” themselves. It is much easier to sign a check than to live with a guilty conscience especially if you are getting “more missionary per dollar”!

But wait! ALL MISSIONARIES ARE NATIVES, aren’t they? Who in the world is not a native? Paul was a native Jew, Peter was a native Jew, William Carey was a native Englishman. I am a native of California.

When I went to Guatemala as a missionary I naturally tried to enlist native Guatemalans into the work. Two of the young men out in the mountains where we lived became, one day, the pastors of the two largest Presbyterian churches in the capital city! Yet we did not call them missionaries, and they didn’t need foreign money in order to do their work.

MISSIONARIES LEAVE THEIR NATIVE PEOPLE. In Galatians 2:7 Paul sharply distinguished between the work he was called to do (going to people not his own) and the work Peter was doing (going to his own people). For two years Paul is the one who has been heralded as a missionary. He went where there were no native evangelists, and he produced native evangelists by missionary methods. Any mission field convert working among his own people as a pastor or evangelist may do that job better than a foreigner. But he is not exactly a missionary in the Pauline tradition.

Yes, for the Gospel to “go where it isn’t” someone (Asian or American or Whatever) has to go from among his own people and go to where he/she will no longer be “native,” “NATIVES” BECOME “FOREIGNERS” WHEN THEY BECOME TRUE MISSIONARIES.

At the Asia Missions Association convention we heard about the amazing situation in Bolivia, where the fabulous, globe girdling mission called SIM International is doing work with missionaries from 14 different countries!

We also heard about the phenomenal Indonesian Missionary Fellowship (IMP). Asians make up the largest portion of its staff, but Westerners are also represented. The MM sends workers to many other countries besides Indonesia, including Suriname (in northern South America).

Summary: WHERE YOU ARE “NATIVE” YOU ARE NOT MISSIONARY; WHERE YOU ARE “MISSIONARY?” YOU ARE NOT NATIVE.

The economic reality is that true missionaries, no matter where they are from, usually need support from people “back home,” or from elsewhere in the body of Christ, and their work is among people where the church is just being established. THESE “COSTLY” MISSIONARIES HAVE GENERATED WELL OVER A MILLION “NATIVE” PASTORS AND EVANGELISTS WHO DON’T COST ANYTHING TO THOSE WHO SENT THE MISSIONARIES; the pastors and evangelists are loyally supported by their own people.

Money? The India Mission Association (IMA) is one of the fine entities that was present at the AMA convension, The Indian mission organizations that belong to the IMA are determined to do true mission work. Like all other mission organizations, THEY ARE DOING SO WITH THE IDEA OF ESTABLISHING CHURCHES THAT WILL SUPPORT THEMSELVES. The IMA is keenly sensitive to the criticism of Hindus—that Christianity depends on foreign funds. In Fact, the IMA will not allow a mission to become a member if it receives more than half of its funds from abroad.

I met for the first time this week the General Secretary of the India Mission Association, a former engineer, Sunder Raj. He has just completed a superb new book on the overall situation of missions in India.

Probably the most potent case for sending Western funds to Non Western workers is presented in The Coming Revolution in World Missions, a new book written by the founder of the Gospel for Asia organization. Gospel for Asia specializes in channelling funds to “native missionaries,” especially to India, the native country of its founder, K. P. Yohannan.

Revolution tells a vivid and readable story about how Yohannan reluctantly came to the realization that rich Christians in the U.S.A. ought to fund poor Christians in Asia, especially Asians who are preaching the Gospel to their own countrymen with greater effectiveness than a foreigner ever could.

This book probably presents the most compelling case yet for the “native missionary” of whom churchgoers in the Western world are hearing more and more.

Over 25 years ago missionaries were talking excitedly about the “new day” in which the national church leaders were beginning to take the lead. Now we are finally hearing from some of those very leaders, imploring us in our own tongue essentially to bypass traditional mission agencies and give straight to the field whore the money will go further.

Yohannan is clearly a devout and credible person. He has made friends with many local church leaders in this country, and this new book will no doubt win him many more. Living in Dallas with his German wife he is much more likely to succeed in fund raising than the vast majority of Third World church and mission leaders who are not here but “over there” where their voice is not as likely to be heard so well.

Some say there are hundreds of “native missionary” proponents in distant lands who are sending letters sporadically or systematically to individuals and churches in this country seeking funds, and this sort of thing will no doubt increase significantly in the future.

Some organizations like Christian Nationals (CNEC) and Christian Aid Mission have learned how very difficult it is to be truly helpful if all you send overseas is money. Both organizations specialize in finding worthy people and projects to fund.

The Christian Aid Mission people, however, are very enthusiastic about “native missionaries.” They have recently placed full page ads saying, “Native Missionaries don’t just talk about reaching Hidden Peoples, they’re doing it.” Meanwhile, they claim that their native missionaries work in their own languages and cultures. (But see my article, page 3. that speaks to this issue: as long as a person is working in his or her own culture, he/she can not truly be regarded as a missionary.)

Almost always those who work with their own people can gain their livelihood from those who are gratified by their ministry. By contrast, true missionaries who are pioneering with a hostile or suspicious group are the ones who most crucially need backing.

These same missionaries are the ones who are neither “native” not instantly effective, no matter where they come from. Indeed, in any given situation it is a matter of termed judgment to determine just what kind of person from what kind of a background is most likely to be believed.

Yet Yohannan, in his book, describes many truly missionary situations, where Indians from the southern Paris of India are at work in the hostile, foreign north of India, where south Indians are often detested and even murdered. In other parts of his book, however, he emphasizes how workers are naturally effective when they work with their own people. Frankly, one wonders if Korean missionaries might acquire greater results in northern India than Indians from the south do.

Perhaps one of the most helpful things about Yohannan’s book is for the reader to relive with him his own culture shock as he got acquainted with the misuse of money in this country. Yohannan does not worry very much about misuse of money in his country when he KNOWS much of all money evangelicals have in this country is being used in relatively trivial pursuits!

This valuable aspect of the book does not in itself assure the reader that the problem is easily solved how best to employ money at a distance for the sake of the Gospel. Older organizations like Christian Nationals know very well how exceedingly difficult it is. That’s part of the reason they send people as well as money.

As in many other things, what OUGHT to be (American affluence helping Asian poverty) does not automatically happen. In this there are no "brand new" ideas. The older mission organizations are incredibly wise and efficient in the use of funds.

Other things being equal, long experience has demonstrated that it is usually more helpful to “send” a loving person than a gift of money. The further away money goes, the more likely it is to go astray, compared to a person of integrity who is just as devout when he gets off the plane as when he gets on.

Furthermore there are countless situations around the world among precisely the world’s most needy people where a person of integrity and loving insight is going to be much more helpful than a check. Money does not buy love, but it can send loving people, and those loving people, wherever they come from, are most likely to be a lasting benefit when they are laboring under and within a mission organization of some duration and experience, whether that organization is Asian or American.

Thus the Asia Missions Association, its very existence and its newly established global ties, leads helpfully “beyond the native missionary,” whoever that might be, to the crucial importance of the “native mission organization,” the familiar, disciplined structure which no doubt did the crucial, initial groundwork everywhere in the world that you see a strong church.

At this historic meeting, AMA ’86, the Asian and other non Western mission structures wisely established a “Mutual Fund for Third World Mission Advance,” through which many needy and effective structures, otherwise unknown to Westerners, can be helped.

Such little-known, high-potential structures might not have the best public relations in the United Slates, and would no doubt hesitate to spend that kind of money even if they had it.

Yohannan’s book surely describes a real problem and depicts an area of genuine opportunity. He can’t be everywhere to know what supervisory structure “out there” is doing the best work, he can't raise funds in the U.S. and at the same time administrate them on the field, unless, unless he eventually sprouts the same kind of wings possessed by other longstanding mission agencies.

Wycliffe Bible Translators draws workers from 27 countries and assigns them (and effectively supervises them—no mean task) in well over a thousand specific situations. SIM International has workers of 14 nationalities working in a single South American country. In all such cases the safest and surest way for the necessary funds to be developed is for these workers to rely upon their own people in some significant part, and to be responsible and accountable to some significant extent.

In Paul’s day, was God so weak, or was Paul so untrustworthy that he had constantly to give account directly to his supporters? Healthy accountability is as essential as the money itself.

All of this discussion wells up in your mind as you read Yohannan’s book. But what a totally different book Sunder Raj’s is!

The Confusion of Conversion was not written for an American audience, much less to raise money. It was not even written for Christians, primarily.

It is all the more fascinating, truly fascinating, because it is addressed boldly but respectfully to Hindu critics in India who have been condemning missionary work from abroad and even from within India with increasing stridency in recent years. As general secretary of the Indian Mission Association, this former professor of engineering is by his very position able to understand and speak authoritatively on these issues.

What issues? Sunder Raj patiently presents and then responds to a whole series of basic criticisms by which the government of India justifies unfair policies:

1. “Missionaries are proselytising in India by their power of money and mechanisms, alluring the ignorant and weaker sections of Hindus, taking unlawful advantage of (the freedom of religion article in our constitution) and thereby spoiling with a foreign faith the Indian culture and endangering social tranquility and national solidarity.”
2. Christianity is a foreign import propped up with foreign money.
3. Missionaries are a menace.
4. Evangelism is being carried on by alien funds,

These are the issues dealt with in just the first four (of 26) chapters.

While The Confusion of Conversion is a small book of only 132 pages. it is delightfully clear and cogently reasoned. Probably never before has there been available in one place to the concerned Christian (or non-Christian—the main audience) so many solid facts of history about the reality that is India.

If one was to read just one book about India and the impact of centuries of Christian influence, now being more and more contested by the resurgent and ruling Hindus, this excellent book would have to be it.

Both Yohannan’s and Sunder Raj’s books are available through Mission Frontiers Book Service (see Order Page, inside back cover).