discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 142
142 Developing Tomorrow’s Missionaries
government bureaucracies. And, along the way, missionaries will also teach,
preach, and do medical work. One thing missionaries rarely do is pastor local
churches unless they are in a pioneer setting mentoring a new believer who is
about to take over.
Working Themselves Out of a Job
It used to be said that one primary task of missionaries was to “work themselves
out of a job.” Today, rather than using the working-ourselves-out-of-ajob
phrase, missionaries today talk about themselves as catalysts. By that they
mean they are filling a role such as that of the apostle Paul during his missionary
journeys around the northern rim of the Mediterranean. The catalyst
metaphor is taken from chemistry where a catalyst is a substance that starts or
accelerates a chemical reaction without itself being consumed. At any point in
the chemical reaction, the catalyst can be removed intact from the mixture. Using
catalyst as a metaphor for missionaries is a recognition that these expatriates
are aliens who are around for a while to get things going, but their presence
will not be needed forever. To be sure, the catalyst metaphor has one major
drawback. It can give the impression that missionaries remain unchanged by
cross-cultural encounters. That is not true.
Representative or Incarnational?
As has been noted, God’s plan has always been to wrap His message up in
people and send them to communicate that message to others. This makes the
words of Paul about believers being envoys or ambassadors (2 Corinthians
5:20) especially applicable to missionaries. As representatives of a government,
ambassadors are entrusted with messages to deliver. When missionaries are seen
primarily as ambassadors, delivering the Good News by direct evangelism becomes
by far the most important thing to be done.
Another way of looking at missionaries is to view them as “little Christs”
or Christ-bearers. It has sometimes been said that Christians are the only Jesus
some people will see. In this sense, therefore, the missionary is an incarnation
of the gospel for another culture. Mark Elmore, mission volunteer in Slovenia,
said it well, “If you minister out of love, you will never be a failure.” 12 Using
the incarnational model with its emphasis on being the “aroma of Christ” (2
Corinthians 2:15) will foster a holistic approach to missionary work.
So, which view is the proper model for the missionary: the ambassadorial
representative or the incarnational “little Christ”? It is some of both, with each
being ways that the missionary is fulfilling the Abrahamic covenant principle
that when God blesses people, He expects that they will pass on the blessing.