discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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.