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Identifying the Right and Wrong Motivations for Being a Missionary
What’s Driving You?
The world is filled with people who are made in the image of a God whose name and whose gospel they do not know. Churches are filled with people who, by the patterns of life they keep, seem largely disinterested in making the effort to get the gospel to the places where Christ has not been named. So, if someone in our church is willing to go, should we even pause to consider what is motivating them? Can we justify any delay when the need is so great?
Without eclipsing the true urgency of global need, I think we must be conscious of motivations even if it causes us to delay purchasing airplane tickets. We are often aware that we can and we should pause to consider the character, conviction, and competencies of those who present themselves as willing to go to the nations. However, sometimes an obscure aspect of character assessment is to consider what is driving a person to the field.
While our motives will never be totally pure or stable, there are some priorities we should have as we assess what is primarily driving a person to missions. In this brief article I want to highlight two wrong motivations that I see all too often. The first is guilt and the second is pride. Finally, lest we spend all of our time focused on what is wrong, let me conclude with a series of rightly ordered motivations for desiring to serve among the nations.
The Path to Being a Missionary
Ryan Robertson, Matt Bennett
In The Path to Being a Missionary, Ryan Robertson and Matt Bennett help readers honestly evaluate their character, convictions, and competencies to determine if missionary work is the right fit for them and the kingdom of Christ.
Missionary Guilt
If you attend a missions conference, at some point you are likely to hear a message from a well-intentioned speaker who will ask how those born in gospel-saturated privilege can justify staying in that privilege when so much of the world is in need. When eternity hangs in the balance, and yours is already secure in Christ, how can you justify withholding the opportunity to hear of Christ from the nations just because it is presently uncomfortable or cumbersome for you to go? If we have such a profound reason to go, why should we stay?
These are, on one hand, fair questions to ask. We do have a God who has expressed throughout his word that he has a desire to bless the nations of the world through the gospel of his Son and by the work of his Spirit. Normatively, God does this work through his people serving as his mouthpiece. So, it does logically follow that we should consider where God wants us to go for the sake of the name before assuming we are to passively stay.
However, in a society that is prone to identifying any disproportionate distribution of goods as injustice, we need to recognize how this rhetoric can also be problematic. It can call into question God’s justice for allowing places of gospel saturation to exist, and it can create an unnecessary sense of guilty burden driving someone to the field. In order to assuage that sense of guilt, then, a family prematurely boards a plane, underprepared but overburdened, with a sense of how unfair it is that they have so much access to things of God when others have so little.
Missionary Pride
Another bad motivation for becoming a missionary is the idea that the world needs you and you can meet the world’s problems. On one hand, as a bearer of the gospel, you do have the answer to the problems of the world. On the other hand, however, your ministry of it falls short of seeing the world deal rightly with their problem. All you can do, Christian, is herald the good news, confronting and comforting with Scripture, and calling sinners to repentance. For the world’s problems to be resolved, the Holy Spirit needs to do what you cannot do.
All too often, missionaries hear stories or read biographies that report the incredible works of the Lord in far away places and think, I’m going to be the next William Carey, Adoniram Judson, Lottie Moon, etc. While rarely would this be identified as pride, such an attitude often smuggles an outsized self-confidence in to the task of missions. A prideful heart can disguise itself as a God-confident boldness to charge ahead and to take a hill for the kingdom. Yet if we are not careful, we will start to think that the Lord is really lucky to have us and to have our willingness to go and do what others before us have either failed or refused to do.
Pride is a corrosive thing. Its influence can distort even the best actions into something unworthy of the Lord. Let us not be so confident in ourselves that we think the Lord depends upon us. Instead we entrust ourselves to the Lord’s service and know our work to be wholly dependent upon the Lord.
All you can do, Christian, is herald the good news, confronting and comforting with Scripture, and calling sinners to repentance.
The Glory of God and All These Things
Before we close, however, I said I wanted to consider what rightly ordered motivations for missions might be. Of course our sin-influenced hearts are always battling to keep our motives in proper order, but this is what we are to aim for—that first and before everything, our days would be aimed at glorifying the God who is worthy of the worship of the nations. We must make it our first aim to follow, obey, please, and enjoy our God. As God is jealous for the worship of the nations, we too should be moved towards the nations in order to call them to offer God the worship they are currently denying him.
The beauty of coming to center our motivations on the glory of the Lord around the world, however, is that the more we come to love God, the more we come to love the things that God loves. And the Bible is replete with reminders that God loves the nations of his world. Therefore, as we make the glory of God our first priority, we also come secondarily to love the nations and long for their good. Their good—their best good—is to know the God whose image they bear through repentance and faith in the gospel. So, we go to declare the gospel that God might be glorified and that the nations might be glad.
Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, not only does the glory of God allow us to be jealous for his worship and zealous for the good of the nations, but we also come to delight in what God is doing as those who get a front-row seat to his work. There is a sense in which a third-tier motivation for missionary service is the joyful privilege of witnessing the advance of the gospel and the word going forth. There is true, personal joy that is a motivation for missions that is downstream from the glory of God headwaters.
The Bible tells us that if we seek first the kingdom of God that “all these things will be given to you.” (Matt. 6:33) Through our prayerful labor to center our motivations on the desire to see God glorified by every tribe, tongue, and nation, our hearts come to be aligned with God’s heart. As that happens, we come to not only rejoice in the glory of God but we get “all these things” of the Father’s desire to call his people to himself, the joyful privilege of serving king Jesus among the lost, and the sweet joy of putting our hands to the plow and seeing the Spirit produce a harvest.
Matt Bennett is coauthor with Ryan Robertson of The Path to Being a Missionary: A Guide for the Aspiring.
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