In this work from 1973, Harvie Conn discusses the history of missionary activity in various locations around the world. Careful to recognize the missteps of some of history’s missionary endeavors, he draws attention to the necessity of missions and calls the church to an intentionally strategic deployment of missionaries to the places that need them most. The calling of missionaries, according to Conn, ought to be to the places where the laborers are few, not to the places that are familiar or comfortable. This is a difficult calling, but one worthy of the Lord who calls.
In nineteenth-century India, Alexander Duff sought “to lay a mine to the citadel of Hinduism” by introducing Christianity to a resistant people by means of education. An Indian critic in 1953 spoke of similar efforts as “cultural aggression.” Who needs missionaries?
The missionary beachhead of 100 years ago has solidified into what one missionary statesman calls “the client churches, technically autonomous, but under the influence of foreign missions or denominations, with extraterritorial controls” (Dennis Clark, The Third World and Mission, Word Books, 1971; p. 39). In these client churches are heard prayers like “O Lord, deliver us from the missionaries!” and “O God, break their pride and smash their palaces!” Who needs missionaries?
Bishop Chandu Ray, Director of the Coordinating Office for Asian Evangelism, tells of taking his new-found faith in Christ to Bishop’s College in Calcutta, “where much that I was taught destroyed my faith and first love for the Lord.” A Korean college girl, attending the largest Christian women’s university in the world, tells you in a study group of her professor who ridicules the historicity of the New Testament in his classroom with appeals to names like Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Conzelmann. “This is not what I learned as a child,” she says. Who needs missionaries? The presence of the church in all parts of the world today reminds us that the twentieth-century people of Christ may be closer now to the first century than to the nineteenth!
The latest (1970) North American Protestant Ministries Overseas Directory says that the Christian constituency (understood in the most general of ways) is 97% of Argentina’s population, 99% in Brazil, 18% in Nigeria, 48% in South Africa. Why then does Argentina need 409 missionaries (and 77 of those new since 1966)? Why does Brazil need 2170 missionaries, and Nigeria 1456? Why did South Africa receive 54 new missionaries from 1965–1970? Are these people making permanent the scaffolding or the building, the mission or the church? Who needs missionaries?
Part of the answer to the question lies in a Chinese proverb: “If you are planning for a year, plant rice. If you are planning for ten years, plant trees. If you are planning for a hundred years, plant men.” Part of it lies in the fact that those who have found something vital in Christ “are compelled to be vocal for Christ. The community of the transformed must be the community of the transmitting” (Paul Rees, Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution, Word Books, 1969; p. 88).
THE CHURCH'S UNCHANGED NATURE AND TASK
Jesus constituted his remnant people as “witnesses” (Acts 1:8). And he still defines us the same way. The New Israel now assumes the old responsibilities of witness (Isaiah 43:10; 44:8) from Jesus-Israel, the Elect One, the Great Witness (Isaiah 49:6; Acts 13:47). It is more than commission; it is constitution.
South Korea has the largest church in Northeast Asia. An estimated 9% of its population are professing Christians. Why does it need 610 missionaries? Because of the remaining 91%. Because of its 50,000 prostitutes who hear no good news in Christ. Because of its hundreds of villages where Christians face severe persecution by clan leaders for proclaiming Christ. Because its greatest national holiday is still the day centered on ancestor worship. Because the church does not say in dismay, “Look what the world has come to,” but rather in delight cries, “look what has come to the world!” (Rees, op. cit., p. 21).
In 1939, the first missionary arrived in a particular region of Sarawak, Malaysia. In 1949, the first group of thirty Christians was baptized. Now in 1972, the Methodist Church has alone over 16,000 members in this area. The bishop reports “the door for the gospel was wide open in Sarawak and Kalimantan and we could use a dozen Asian missionaries who would live simply and humbly among the people.”
STILL A WORLD-WIDE FAMILY OF BELIEVERS
A new fact helps us today in our confession of “one holy catholic church, the communion of saints.” It is the world-wide (ecumenical, if we dare say it) character of the sending church and, we may hope, the soon-coming world-wide character of the receiving church. The nineteenth-century missionary asked, “Where are the ends of the earth?” The twentieth-century missionary asks, “Where is Jerusalem?”
First-century Paul told us “there is one body and one Spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all, and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4–6). Twentieth-century Pauls tell us this means Japanese missionaries to Indonesia, Korean missionaries to Los Angeles, Formosan missionaries to Africa. It means fifty evangelists will go from Japan to Okinawa in November 1972. It means the Japan-Singapore Fellowship inviting Dr. Philip Teng for “China-Japan Gospel Nights.”
Who needs missionaries? God says the church—the whole world-wide family of believers— still needs missionaries and will need missionaries until we are all made perfect in Christ.
To many, the word “missionary” has meant white colonialism, western patronization, the “haves” going to the “have nots,” the rulers going to the ruled. And to this missionary spirit, the world—and the church—is crying, “Go home!” Paul Rees reminds us that this was not so in the beginning of the Christian church. “Then it was a case of the ruled going to the rulers, the slaves going to the free, the uncultured going to the nobility, the representatives of the underprivileged classes going to the representatives of the power structures, Antioch going to Rome” (op cit., p. 37). The presence of the church in all parts of the world today reminds us that the twentieth-century people of Christ may be closer now to the first century than to the nineteenth!
GOD'S GIFTS FOR BUILDING THE WHOLE CHURCH
The Lord continues to provide gifts “differing according to the grace that is given to us” (Romans 12:6). The Holy Spirit displays his sovereign presence “given to every man to profit withal” (1 Corinthians 12:7) and he presents his sovereign display in evangelists, pastors, teachers, “for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building of the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11, 12).
South Korea has at least 5,700 Presbyterian churches and, in 1970, over 3,500 national workers and ordained ministers. Why do they need 160 foreign missionaries? Because 5,700 Presbyterian churches are part of the body of Christ which needs evangelists, pastors and teachers. And God makes no stipulations as to color when he distributes his gifts!
The island of Timor, with a population slightly over one million, had 200,000 Christians in 1965. In 1972 only 200,000 are non-Christians. That is 800,000 reasons for the display of the gifts of the Spirit.
In Indonesia, the Christian population has reportedly doubled over the past five years. And among the six million Christians of Indonesia are 100,000 former Muslims in East Java who are now baptized Christians. It is estimated that there will be 351 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa by 2000 A.D. In fact, by that same year, if Christ should tarry, statistical projections indicate that 60% of all the world’s Christians will be found outside of North America and Europe.
Can God not give his gifts to a white missionary to edify the 60% as a teacher? Can God not give his gifts to an African missionary to edify the 40% as an evangelist?
All of God’s gifts to the church, all the variety of gifts and receivers of gifts, all these blessings from God are given “till we all come in the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).
Who needs missionaries? God says the church—the whole world-wide family of believers—still needs missionaries and will need missionaries until we are all made perfect in Christ.