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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 138 138 Developing Tomorrow’s Missionaries Timing of the Call The missionary call has often come to people when they are quite young. Researchers like George Barna and Lionel Hunt have said that people worldwide generally come to faith in Christ between the ages of 4 and 14. Because that period of life seems propitious for Christian conversion worldwide, Dan Brewster has coined the phrase 4-14 window. While the 10/40 Window defines a geographic area, this 4-14 window designates a period of life. Research has also shown that this 4 to 14 age is the time when many missionaries first felt God calling them. All the Peoples of the Earth When I was a junior high school student, I tried to read the Bible through. Like most teenagers, I really had a struggle with the Old Testament. But an awesome thing happened while I was wading through 1 Kings. Verse 60 of chapter 8 was thrust into my consciousness, “That all the peoples of the earth may know that the LORD is God and that there is no other.” In the stillness of my bedroom, the Lord said to me, “That is to be your life’s work.” God had ignited a call to mission in the life of a teen. —Charles Gailey Motives The Holy Spirit’s call to missionary service can be accompanied by some secondary motives. For instance, some people like to travel. The romance of learning to live in other cultures intrigues and beckons some people. Others see missions as the highest form of Christian service, and they want to do everything they possibly can for God. One must not, however, mistake the allure of secondary motives for a missionary call itself. For example, when John Wesley went to the New World in 1735 as a missionary to the Indians, he was hoping for a breakthrough in his personal spiritual life. Because Wesley lacked a sense of a definite missionary call, the secondary motivation that took him across the Atlantic was not enough to keep him in Georgia when discouragement came a few months later. Seeing Needs One secondary motivation causing Christians to consider missionary service has been seeing the needs of the world. That was the background of William Carey’s call. To be sure, 2 Corinthians 5:14 says that believers are compelled by the love of Christ to be concerned about human need. As Christians become painfully aware of some of the world’s great needs, they want to cry out with Isaiah, “Here am I. Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8). Becoming aware of
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 139 Developing Tomorrow’s Missionaries 139 human needs may be an initial step to being called as a missionary. However, while such awareness opens the door to hearing God speak, an authentic missionary call is more than people realizing they have the ability to meet some world needs. Missionaries are not God-called simply because they have seen a need; they are called because God has tapped them on the shoulder. The Moravians of the 1700s seemed to understand the importance of being sure the motivation for cross-cultural evangelism was God himself calling and not just a compassionate response to other humans in need. The Moravians living as religious refugees on Count Zinzendorf’s estate were very touched by their encounter with Anthony, an ex-slave who had unevangelized family members still living as slaves on West Indies sugar plantations. However, though feeling a burden to reach Anthony’s family and other slaves with the gospel, the Moravians then spent more than a year trying to be sure of God’s will before sending their first missionaries to the Caribbean. Deep Peace For missionaries to survive the tensions and disillusionments that accompany cross-cultural ministry, they need the deep inner peace provided by having said yes when God called. A strong conviction that being a cross-cultural missionary is God’s will can steady a person like a ship’s ballast in the rough journey through culture shock, dark testing times, and other problems of cross-cultural missionary service. John Seaman, missionary to West Africa, wrote, “Without a genuine God-placed call it is too easy to bail out when the going gets tough. On more than one occasion—once very early in my career and another in my later missionary years—if it had not been for the certainty of the ‘call,’ I just would not have made it.” 7 So, while there may be accompanying secondary motives, the determining motivation for people to enter missionary service should be an unmistakable sense that this is God’s will. Those truly called to be missionaries will never have peace or contentment until they do what God wants them to do. In a lecture titled “The Call to the Ministry,” Charles H. Spurgeon, British Baptist minister in the 1800s, recalled the advice of an older minister, “Do not enter the ministry if you can help it.” 8 That is good advice for anyone thinking about missionary service. If there is anything else that a person can do and feel content and at peace with the Lord, they should do it. H. F. Reynolds was the Nazarene missions leader in the early 1900s. He found himself talking to Roger Winans, a young man who testified to being called by God to South America. While Reynolds’s denomination did not think it had the funds to send Roger Winans overseas, Reynolds was wise enough to say, “Brother Winans, we cannot send you to South America, but if God has called you, you will go or backslide.” 9 Winans did go and successfully pioneered church planting among indigenous peoples in the mountains of Peru.
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discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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