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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 150 150 Contrasting Philosophies and Strategies of Mission such lost people saved. Even William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army whose ministry is very holistic, once said: “Not called!” did you say? “Not heard the call,” I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father’s house and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look Christ in the face—whose mercy you have professed to obey—and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world. 2 Finding God’s Lost Children God wants His lost children found. 3 —Donald McGavran, missionary to India Further down the continuum from those wanting a narrow focus on evangelism are those who say that global mission activities must reflect the compassionate character of God. Indeed, Christians have often been known for their compassionate acts. When unwanted Roman babies were thrown on garbage dumps to die, Christians gathered them up and nursed them back to health. The question on this position is: Are such acts of compassion to happen primarily as part of the individual Christian life or do they belong in the strategic plans of mission organizations? An expansion of the options on this particular continuum came in the early 1900s when theological liberals began talking about the Church’s primary mission as being the healing touch of Christ in the sense of a social gospel. There was nothing new about calling God’s people to be involved in meeting human needs. In the late 1500s, Pedro Claver, Spanish missionary to Colombia, visited the holds of every slave ship arriving from Africa to give material aid and begin a relationship with the slaves, which he hoped would later allow him to preach the gospel to them. Even while doing direct evangelism, the Moravians and Hudson Taylor also met human physical needs. What was new in the 20th century was Walter Rauscenbush and others declaring that there was saving truth in all religions and that social ministry was all the Church should be doing. A watershed came in 1933 when the report of the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry, Rethinking Missions, called on all missionaries to withdraw from direct evangelism. At that point, the opposite positions were no longer solely evangelism on the one hand and a mixture of evangelism and
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 151 Contrasting Philosophies and Strategies of Mission 151 compassionate ministry on the other. A new position, social engagement with no evangelism, appeared further down the continuum. Evangelicals reacted strongly against the call to reduce Christian mission to doing good things in Christ’s name. In the backlash, some evangelicals began to classify compassionate ministry activities as distractions that detoured the Church from its urgent evangelistic task. Let my heart be broken with the things that break God’s heart. —Bob Pierce, World Vision founder In 1968 the World Council of Churches meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, issued another call for missionaries to return to their home countries. That call drew as negative a reaction from evangelicals as the similar one had 30 years prior. At the same time, however, they began reminding each other that this was not necessarily an either/or subject and under the leadership of people like Ron Sider, social concerns were reembraced as legitimate Kingdom interests along with evangelism. Today, most evangelistic mission agencies stake out middle ground on this continuum, running social programs for the poor including child sponsorship and microfinance programs as well as doing direct evangelism. In recent years, social engagement has been evangelism’s partner with compassionate ministries enabling believers to enter areas where immediate direct evangelism would have been counterproductive or perhaps even impossible. 2. Target: Unreached Frontiers Versus Responsive Peoples A second philosophical issue with a continuum of positions relates to which groups of people should be the focus of mission efforts: those that are unreached or those that are responsive. Some point to the number of people groups still unreached while noting that the majority of <strong>missions</strong> resources are spent on groups already classified as reached. In making a plea for a focus on the unreached, Oswald J. Smith has said, “No one has the right to hear the gospel twice, while there remains someone who has not heard it once.” 4 An example of why the question of unreached versus responsive is raised can be seen by looking at Haiti and Saudi Arabia. In recent decades Haiti has been so responsive to the gospel that 30 percent or more of that country’s population is now evangelical. Because the rest of the population, even though largely voodoo in everyday religious orientation and practice, is claimed by the Roman Catholic church, Haiti cannot be classified as unreached. On the other hand, while Saudi Arabia is unreached, it would probably not make anyone’s list of responsive or receptive nations. So, mission organizations have to ask
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discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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