Changing Tides

by Ralph D. Winter, US Center for World Mission

In American history have more local churches been more interested in having a hand in the mission cause. Waves of high school and college students are fanning out across the globe in the hundreds of thousands. Churches in the USA are now fielding 350,000 short-term volunteers annually.

Really, can anything be wrong with this?

Yes – if a highly sensitive, delicate, specialized task like missions is seen as something a volunteer can do in two weeks.

No human endeavor is as full of unforeseen, apparently unreasonable or certainly baffling obstacles. No role requires more intelligence, stability of heart and life, and more dogged endurance than the role of a serious missionary.

The final goal of missions is to win people to Christ and to glorify the Father, but the immediate obstacle is that cross-cultural missions occurs in places where you can’t win people to Christ the way it is done at home. That first task is to understand the un-understandable, to penetrate the baffling complexities of mysteriously “different” situations. Only then can “winning people to Christ” begin effectively.

It simply isn’t true that short term volunteers can help much with the complexities of that initial breakthrough, which is the most crucial mission task.

Suppose a local hospital were short on surgeons. Would it invite volunteers to pitch in for two-week turns in the operating room?

Suppose a legal firm were to lack attorneys. Would it ask local churches to send in two-week volunteers to help?

Suppose the Air Force lacked pilots. Would they call upon short-term citizens to help out?

If pioneer mission is a complex, specialized enterprise, volunteers are not an alternative to in-depth missionary wisdom.

I know of one congregation of about 400 which in ten years got almost its entire membership overseas to visit its “adopted people.” No standard agency was in the picture. In ten years little more than a few wells were drilled. No thrilled followers of Christ have resulted. Little or no understanding of the cultural context of the tribe has been employed or resulted. Even if $1 million of the Lord’s money had not been mainly wasted, think of the disheartened congregation that can see no real results after a decade of earnest and expensive, but largely futile, effort.

By contrast, one missionary family in another place, with little money involved, but with advanced understanding of the tribal culture has sparked a movement which, over the years, has created tens of thousands of devout, Bible-reading followers of Christ. In-depth knowledge does make a difference.

Ralph D. Winter is the editor of Mission Frontiers magazine and the general director of the Frontier Mission Fellowship.

New Tribes Mission