The God-Ordained Method for Missions
Origin, Means, and End of Missions
In Scripture and throughout history, churches have been central to the missions enterprise. Neither movements nor parachurch agencies nor unaccountable individuals are the God-ordained method—churches are. Indeed, they are:
- the origin of missions, equipping, training, and sending missionaries into the harvest;
- the means of missions, functioning as Jesus’s discipleship program for new believers everywhere; and
- the end of missions, since local congregations serve as the focal point of God’s glory on earth.
We can summarize this by saying churches are the means and ends of missions. This phrase provides one of the foundational planks in the church-centered missions paradigm.
Our Doctrine of Salvation and the Church
Why are the church and missions so intertwined? Because the gospel makes us church members. The church is part and parcel of our very doctrine of salvation. Listen to Peter, and notice the two parallel lines:
Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Pet. 2:10)
Prioritizing the Church in Missions
John Folmar, Scott Logsdon
In this brief guide, experienced pastors John Folmar and Scott Logsdon show how church-centered missiology is essential for fulfilling the Great Commission.
Usually, when Christians tell their testimonies, they focus on that second line. “I was living a life of sin,” we say, “but then God showed me mercy.” What a glorious story that is.
But it’s not the whole story, Peter says. Something else happens in that exact same moment: When we receive mercy, we are also joined to a people. Conversion is corporate. It adds you to a family through adoption.
Maybe we could tell our testimonies like this: “I was living a life of sin, and I wanted nothing to do with other Christians. But then God saved me. He showed me mercy and added me to his family.”
Paul tells the same story in Ephesians 2. The first half focuses on our vertical reconciliation with God by grace: “But God . . . raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places” (Eph. 2:4, 6). Yet that vertical reconciliation brings with it a horizontal reconciliation too. This is Paul’s focus in the second half of Ephesians 2: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13). Notice that this horizontal reconciliation occurred in the same place and at the same time as the vertical reconciliation: when Christ shed his blood on the cross.
Again, conversion is corporate, and the gospel makes us a people. Christ accomplished this—past tense.
This means the Christian life is the church-member life. It means that if missions is all about the gospel, then it’s also all about the church. If the gospel and the church are bound up together, then so are missions and the church. This is why all the authors writing in this church-centered missions project agree that Christianity is church shaped.
Downplaying the Church
Sadly, the Christian life in the West has become more individualistic over the last sixty or seventy years. How? Churches have adopted the devices of the marketplace to attract customers, and a “customer” is hardly the same thing as a “family member.” Several generations of missionaries have grown up in these kinds of churches. Seminaries, too, teach pastors and missionaries to adopt pragmatic, marketplace methods. And what we manufacture at home, we export overseas.
As a result, modern missions often overlooks the church. First, missionaries overlook the church for their own lives and discipleship. Many have a sending agency but not a sending church. Once missionaries have been sent, agencies sometimes ignore their church experiences on the field. In extreme cases, agencies sometimes prohibit missionaries from joining a church on the field. People can do something as dramatic as cross an ocean, obtain a residence visa, begin to acquire the local language . . . and yet forsake the churches that already meet in their new home. Such neglect sadly hinders the missionaries’ own growth and endurance in the faith. It also hurts their parenting and their marriages.
Second, missionaries overlook the importance of a church for the people they are trying to reach. They see the church, at best, as incidental to their gospel ministry. Some even see it as a hindrance. We think of someone like Ahmed (not his real name), a Muslim from the Arabian Peninsula. Western missionaries shared the gospel with him. He professed faith in Christ. The missionaries engaged him in friendship, encouragement, and discipleship. But they never directed him to a local church. They left Ahmed without pastoral oversight, weekly worship, and church fellowship—no sermons, no ordinances, no means to serve. Instead, they told him that he was a member of an underreached people group, that he faced difficulties others did not, and that it was inevitable and acceptable for him to live as a churchless Christian. Those missionaries have since left the country, and Ahmed has been left to fend for himself spiritually.
Everything missionaries absolutely need is in the Bible.
Why was Ahmed not folded into the life of a local congregation—whether an Arabic or English congregation, an established or underground one? Partly because the missionaries who shared the gospel with him downplayed the church. They had weak ecclesiology, a word which refers to our doctrine and practice of the church. The trouble is, weak ecclesiology leads to weak missiology, a word which refers to our doctrine and practice of missions. After all, our missiology is downstream from our ecclesiology. The larger lesson here is simple: What we believe about the church will influence how we carry out the Great Commission.
Many missionaries faithfully evangelize and help God’s people through difficult contexts, for which we’re grateful. But too often the role they give to the church in making disciples is swallowed by pragmatism, minimalism, and neglect. Some missionaries attend churches but remain on the margins. They refuse to join and instead associate only with other missionaries. Some desire to partner with churches overseas but face the disapproval of the mission agencies who sent them. We have both seen this firsthand. Friends have witnessed the same. One pastor friend in Central Asia described to us how the missionaries in his English-language church “seem almost tortured when attending our church.” He explained, “They feel like every moment they give to our church community is a moment they are neglecting the people to whom they were sent. It’s as if they think faithful church membership and faithful gospel work among other peoples are at odds.”
How does this happen? A few ideas:
- Churches at home fail to equip future missionaries with a biblical ecclesiology before sending them to the field.
- Those same churches then outsource too much of the training responsibilities that can be performed in-house to missions agencies and other parachurch organizations.
- As a result, missionaries arrive on the field and get to work “making disciples,” but they do so without regard to biblical conversion or the biblical priorities of preaching and teaching, elder oversight, biblical ordinances, and church membership.
Downplaying Theology and the Bible
Underlying the minimal ecclesiology in missions is a tendency toward minimal theology in general. This trend is nothing new. In 1970 Walter Chantry lamented that missionaries too often go looking for “the lowest common denominator to which all born-again Christians hold.” When they do, the “rest of the Bible will be labelled ‘unessential’ for missions.”1 A generation later, two other missiologists sound the same warning: “Bad theology leads to bad missions, and bad missions spreads more bad theology.”2 This trend is perpetuated by the popular mantra that “missions is the mother of theology.” [I want to] argue the opposite—missions is the application of our theology.
Recognizing these trends toward theological minimalism, a group of theologians and missions strategists known as the Southgate Fellowship wrote a document called “Affirmations and Denials Concerning World Mission.” It pushes back on the critiques against “traditional” or historic missions that have characterized missions conversations for the past fifty years. The document argues that “many in the study and practice of world mission have strayed methodologically from the sure foundation of Scripture.”3 Some of those critiques were on target, as when addressing colonialist mindsets or failures to contextualize. The trouble was that “when the critics threw out pews and hymns and church buildings,” one veteran missionary shared in personal conversation with us, “they got rid of everything. The pendulum swung too far.”
When good doctrine and the Scriptures are neglected, other forces fill the void. For instance, movement-driven missions is an approach to missions that aims at starting movements, as the name implies. It depends on techniques designed to spark revivals in underreached contexts. Its goal is easy reproducibility and rapid multiplication, usually involving superficial and cursory biblical instruction. Movement-driven missions tends to focus on techniques and methods that produce visible results with the hope that these visible manifestations are accompanied by spiritual life. As a result, though visible movements might begin, too often they appear to be works of the flesh rather than the Spirit. They rely on the powers of psychology and everyday human group dynamics, just like any other trend that comes and goes in a culture. Advocates of Church Planting Movements, which is one brand of movement-driven missions, promote them as “the most effective means in the world” to bring lost millions to Christ. They emphasize speed, explosive numbers, and immediately measurable success.4 They also criticize careful attention to ecclesiology and the ordinary means of grace as the “slow to grow approach.”5
A church-centered missions paradigm, on the other hand, encourages conversions and builds churches though “teaching everything Jesus commanded” (Matt. 28:20). That’s why another one of the planks is that missions is Bible led. It’s Bible led in that the Bible tells us how to do missions, and it’s Bible led in that it treats the Bible itself as essential for making disciples.
On that score, Christians have long referred to the “ordinary means of grace.” Churches should not work to make disciples through extraordinary means, through dynamic and exciting new techniques never mentioned in the Bible. Rather, they should use the ordinary, everyday practices like preaching, teaching, singing, praying, and practicing the ordinances. None of this requires fancy marketing methods, a PhD in cultural anthropology, or a “how-to” study guide. Everything missionaries absolutely need is in the Bible.
Notes:
- Walter Chantry, Today’s Gospel: Authentic or Synthetic? (Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth, 1970), 3. 1
- Chad Vegas and Alex Kocman, Missions By the Book: How Theology and Missions Walk Together (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2021), 2. They continued, “Many of the most adventurous, risk-taking mission workers are trained to check their theology at the door of the sending organization and learn a host of man-centered ministry tactics that stem from cultural relativism. These missionaries are told that the same gospel-centered, doctrine-rich teaching that builds faithful churches in the West won’t work elsewhere in the world and that some new and different insight from sociology is needed in nonWestern cultures.”
- The Southgate Fellowship, “Affirmations and Denials Concerning World Mission,” Themelios 45, no. 1 (April 2020): 108. This call to faithful mission, accessible at https://thesouthgatefellowship.org/, was written to “rearticulate biblical mission thought and practice, attempt to locate and expose weaknesses and errors in various contemporary paradigms, and seek to call missiologists, missionaries, mission agencies, and Christ’s global church to biblical fidelity in belief, thought, methods, and goals—all in obedience to Jesus Christ, the Lord of the nations.”
- David Garrison, Church Planting Movements: How God Is Redeeming a Lost World (Midlothian, VA: WIGtake Resources, 2004), 28.
- For example, we are told by movement proponents that “traditional methods take too long, cost too much, and bring about minimal cultural transformation.” Aila Tasse and L. Michael Corley, “The Way of Life: Transference of Spiritual DNA within Movements in East Africa,” in Motus Dei: The Movement of God to Disciple the Nations, ed. Warrick Farah (Littleton, CO: William Carey, 2021), 236.
This article is adapted from Prioritizing the Church in Missions by John Folmar and Scott Logsdon.
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