1
The Dangerous Chart
When people ask me why I became a missionary, the short answer is that I was driven out of my mind by a chart. Nearly thirty years of post-chart life later I remain bent by the experience, and there is no hope (or desire) for a return to my pre-chart days or view of the world. Since most people do not find diagrams of concentric circles so disturbing, let me back up and give some more details.
My experience of the chart was set up by two events that happened before and during my freshmen year of college. Just after high school graduation I began attending an Assemblies of God church and that summer I was baptized in the Holy Spirit. That experience brought a zeal and passion to share the Gospel. During the first quarter at the University of Washington I read a missionary biography and was deeply moved by this manâs example. It birthed in me a desire to use my life in Christian service. These two events ultimately led to a decisive calling into full-time vocational ministry.
Then the chart happened. While working on staff at a local church, a missionary friend handed me a brochure about a group trying to found an organization called the U. S. Center for World Mission. I liked the idea because I thought missions was cool and sent them the $15.95 they were requesting. They sent me a receipt and inside the envelope was a chart. At the time I had a tiny youth pastor office without any decorations on the wall, so I thought this would be nice to lend a little color to the room. That was my mistake. The blue circles making up the diagram hung about five feet from my head where I sat at my desk working on youth pastorish kinds of things like answering phone messages, planning events, writing sermons, and talking with students. Day after day I would look at this simple set of circles depicting the five major blocks of unreached people. Looking turned into praying, which in turn lead to more reading and study until the Holy Spirit used that data to create an unshakable conviction that I personally had to work among an unreached people. I tell people jokingly that the receipt should have come with something akin to the surgeon generalâs warning on cigarette packagesâWARNING THIS WILL MESS UP YOUR MIND AND SEND YOU TO PLACES FAR AWAY AND BEND YOUR THINKING BEYOND REPAIR.
The message of the chart (there are now much more sophisticated graphics and statistics) that so disturbed me was that there were people groups in the world without anybody in their setting to tell them about Jesus. This meant that somebody had to leave their own culture that had the Gospel to go to one that did not have it in order to proclaim it there and plant the church. The irony is that several years of listening to missionary speakers never made we want to become one. It was not because I did not think they were doing something great. Rather with my missiological naiveté and lack of context, the glowing reports I heard were so victorious and exciting they only confirmed my conviction that overseas the job was being finished and someone needed to stay in America to try to bring such revival here.
In my pre-chart life, I never had a sense of personal responsibility towards people in other parts of the world. My local church experience of hearing missionary reports had fanned the flame for evangelism, but it never pushed me toward the conclusion that I must be involved personally. The chart changed all of that. Suddenly I found myself in a world where some people had access to the Gospel and others did notâunless someone crossed a cultural frontier with the message. My heart had already been stirred to evangelism, but study of the chart moved me from a kind of monochrome conception where all evangelism was equal to a brilliant full color picture that showed some people having the potential for access to the Gospel with others having no access at all. Over time I realized that my own setting in North America was filled with potential for people to hear the Gospel through myriads of believers, while in other places there were no Christian near neighbors to tell the story, or so few that they still required help in reaching their people.
My own personal calling to involvement in missions came as the two streams of my experience converged. Baptism in the Spirit brought passion to reach the lost, while missiological data showed me the state of the world and where those with least access to the Gospel were located. I ended up in Thailand working among Buddhist people. My assumption was that everyone in cross-cultural work thought the same way about missions and that sharing the Gospel in places where the church did not exist or was very small was at the heart of things.
Imagine my surprise when later in my career, through reading and meeting other people both within and outside of my organization, I found that not only did many missionaries not know much about unreached people groups, there was often even a feeling of antipathy towards the idea. As time went on I also began to notice confusion at the grassroots level of conceptions of mission. People were moving away from the idea of planting the church among people that had no church movement to going to places with many Christians to help them in varying ways. Sometimes when discussing people group thinking with other missionaries the objection will be raised that the insights that Ralph Winter had thirty years ago are now passé, that they have been left behind and that we have a more sophisticated view of missions today.
The difficulty with this view is that it is plainly not supported by the data. The increasingly sophisticated database about the status of global Christianity shows that nearly 40 percent of the world lives in a situation where there is either no near neighbor witness in their sociocultural setting or a very small one. It is precisely because of this reality that I think the insights that come from what is now known as the frontier mission movement are so relevant to the time in which we live. Recent reflection has led me to believe that the really important contribution of unreached people group thinking and the frontier missions movement to missiology will be its making explicit what has tended to be implicit in our thinking about missions for much of our two thousand year history.
Looking back over Christian mission history we see the variety of ways that mission has been carried out. From apostolic bands to monks and monasteries, the work of Pietists, Moravians, and since Carey, the voluntary missionary society; all found from Scripture their theology of mission that defines the why, what, and how of missions. In sketching the contours of a biblical theology of mission, Bosch notes that such a project seeks answers to these three basic questionsâwhy mission, how mission, and what is mission?âin specific contexts.1 I would suggest that these three questions are not enough; and that implicit within our two thousand years of mission theologizing are also understandings about where mission should take place as well.2 This is the genius so to speak boiled out of all that frontier missions and unreached people thinking brings to us; without answering âamong whomâ and thus âwhereâ mission is to be done in light of the witness of Scripture and Godâs intent for the world, we do not yet have a full blown missiology.
While ideally we would like to think that what we do and where we go as missionaries grows out of our understanding of the Bible and the leading of the Holy Spirit, in reality it is not that simple. At each time and place we have a history, there are commitments made, people have preceded us, and thus there is no isomorphic connection between what we believe about from the Bible and what we do. The âwhereâ question of missions has always been present and is woven deeply into our understanding of Godâs mission and our role in it. While it has often been neglected in missiological thinking (witness Bosch writing in 1993 with no mention of this at all) the observation and growing empirical evidence of the great gulf between a world where church movements exist and where they do not, must put the âwhereâ dimension as a priority focus for all who are concerned about Godâs mission.
The neglect of the âwhereâ dimension of mission is a reminder that we are children of our age, and thus there are some things that we see very clearly, and other things that are obscured by the trends, fashions and tastes of our era. Taber reminds us that:
One must by no means underestimate the degree to which Christians in general and missionaries in particular are people of their age and culture, even with respect to their theology. The missionary movement has surely not been determined by the world in which missionaries grew up, but it has been definitely influenced; missionaries have to an astonishing degree followed the twists and turns of prevalent social attitudes and values, no less really because their conformity was so largely unwitting.3
There are forces afoot today that conspire against seeing the âwhereâ issue clearly in Scripture; therefore, this monograph is devoted primarily to this theme.
My purpose in writing is to present three major arguments that are driven by a problematic. The problem is a lack of clarity about the nature and practice of cross-cultural missions. Over the scope of this monograph, I address this problematic in three major arguments, each of which makes up a part of the solution. The first is that where Christian redemptive activities take place is a critical issue for those who take the Bible seriously. While what we do and how we do it are of vast importance, those who take Scripture as an authoritative revelation have written and wrestled through these two dimensions of mission in great detail. While our practice is never perfect, and always a shadow of the example of our Lord, at this point in our history, collectively we do the what and how of mission well. In addition to this fact, there is vigorous and ongoing debate about these issues that continues to refine and feed our understanding and practice along these dimensions. However, as Christians we can do all the right things for the right reasons, in the right way, but if we are not doing them in the right places and among the right people, we are missing something that is very close to the Fatherâs heart for the world. Thus, one part of the solution to the problem of unclear mission thinking that I am advocating is to get the âwhereâ question answered correctly.
My second point has to do with influencing how we practice mission. At least from a historical perspective, eloquent voices and movements have argued for and become identified with what, where, and how issues of mission. So much so, that entire frameworks or perspectives have grown up around them. While not mutually exclusive by any means, within the Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic (EPC) streams of missions,4 which are based in a view of Scripture as an authoritative revelation from God, there are discernible frameworks represented both in the literature and in organizations around the planting and growing of churches, the expression of Christian social concern, and a focus on getting the Gospel to unreached people groups where no church movements currently exist. It is not too much of an over-generalization to say that on the whole cross-cultural workers, mission agencies, and church movements, while representing lots of interests, tend to find their emphasis in one of these areas. While there is no doubt that some configuration of all three of these frameworks will be found within a single organization (or personâs ministry), it often is the case that actual practice is shaped around values and commitments that grow out of one of these major frames.
My second argument then is based in the idea that in the 21st century all the participants in global mission need to have their practice shaped by an integration of insights from these varying frames rather than seeing or treating them as competing ways of approaching the mission of the church. It is in paying attention to our operating frameworks, and drawing upon more of them that we insure that what we do and where we go are being directed by the Scriptures and the Spirit and not the latest missions fad.
My final argument, and where the title for the monograph is drawn from, is that we can stay clear in our concept of missions, answer the âwhereâ question, and best keep in step with the Scriptural witness to Godâs global plan when our conceptions of mission practice are drawn from the Pauline version of apostleship. When cross-cultural workers take their identity from apostolic function it ties them into the insights of the major mission paradigms, provides a clear answer to the âwhereâ question, and results in a clear view of cross-cultural mission that invigorates the work of the church both within and outside of its own cultural borders.
In the next chapter, I set the stage for the three major arguments by laying out the problematic of unclear thinking about missions. I show that there has been a shift in understanding away from the conception of missions as preaching the Gospel and planting the church in places where it does not exist and develop an account of how and why we are at a critical point in our understanding and practice. Chapter 3 then looks at the notion of paradigms as a tool for thinking about missions. In chapter 4, I argue for apostolic function as a paradigm of missionary identity and then, in chapters 5 and 6, I examine in detail the âwhereâ question of missions in the frontier mission paradigm. Chapter 7 develops my argument for using mission paradigms in a comprehensive and integrative fashion and provides some illustrative material to show what this might look like. In the final chapter, I discuss issues that grow out of addressing the âwhereâ question in missions.