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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 154 154 Contrasting Philosophies and Strategies of Mission ple groups as church planting movements are started. One complicating factor is the issue of receptivity or responsiveness. Several of the unreached or leastevangelized groups are also resistant. No matter how much is invested in evangelizing them, the harvest will likely be somewhat meager. The history of missionary endeavors in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism shows the difficulty of knowing which groups will be resistant and which will be receptive. On occasion an unreached people group may be immediately receptive when the gospel arrives (see “Reaching the Unreached” sidebar) and rapid church growth occurs—the best of both worlds for missionary strategy! 3. Proclamation Versus Church Development A third set of building blocks for a philosophy of mission relates to whether the primary goal should be proclamation of the Good News to large numbers of people as quickly as possible, or whether that primary goal should be developing self-sustaining and self-replicating church planting and discipleship ministries. There are those who, seeing worldwide gospel proclamation as an eschatological sign (Matthew 24:14), say the Church’s task as an ambassador is proclamation and that the results of that proclamation should be left to the Lord. This view sees widespread seed planting as the primary missionary task. Being inclined toward proclamation as a primary goal does not necessarily signify a disinterest in planting churches. Rather, it is a philosophy of harvest that views missionaries as the ones driving the combines in the harvest fields. Those with this philosophy do not see it as their responsibility to organize the transport of the harvested grain and or to build the grain mills. As we plant more churches, the result will be a dramatic increase in our overall growth rate. 8 —Paul R. Orjala On the other end of this continuum are the missiologists who say that the most effective way to move forward with God’s mission on earth is to plant lots of new churches. After retiring from missionary service in India, Donald Mc- Gavran was influential in getting missiologists and church leaders to embrace aggressive church planting as a primary strategy. McGavran argued that the missionary enterprise’s supreme goal was that of spawning clusters of growing churches in every segment of the world cultural mosaic. Although criticized for his homogenous unit principle, McGavran is credited with having fathered the modern church growth movement. It needs to be noted that the Euro-
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 155 Contrasting Philosophies and Strategies of Mission 155 American model of church planting has included the construction of buildings as a part of the strategy. The place that building construction has in one’s philosophy will determine important things about the shape and size of church multiplication efforts. 4. Sturdy Construction Versus Work-in-Progress Another constituent element of many philosophies of mission relates to when missionaries feel comfortable stepping away from leadership roles. The choices along this particular continuum involve the comfort level of leaders in terms of what they can tolerate in the way of loose ends. Some want to build quickly and get the scaffolding down; others move ahead more carefully, wanting to be sure they build in ways that will last. Strategies based on the extremes of this constituent component of a philosophy of mission produce very different results. One example is what two denominations have experienced in Haiti. Both groups have been there over 50 years and both are rooted in the same theological tradition. One group has three churches, all of which are being pastored by missionaries who say they are having difficulty recruiting and training reliable Haitian leaders. The second group has more than 500 congregations, all pastored by Haitians. While the results are rarely so far apart as happened in this case, the example does illustrate how one’s philosophy can shape the end results. Naturally, there are hazards to both extremes. When large numbers of people in a culture come to faith in Christ, questions will be raised about the movement’s validity. Some will wonder if the movement is, as African theologian Tokunboh Adeyemo has lamented about African Christianity, “one mile long, but only one inch deep.” 9 Another downside to accepting a work-inprogress can be illustrated by the experience of Karl F. A. Gutzlaff in China in the mid-1800s. Gutzlaff was a tentmaker missionary whose secular job did not leave a lot of time for pioneer evangelism work. He recruited large numbers of Chinese itinerant evangelists, even setting up a school to train them. At one point Gutzlaff had 300 of these evangelists who were supposedly distributing New Testaments he provided and reporting back the numbers of converts. For a while, Gutzlaff and his Chinese workers seemed to be doing well. The reports he sent home of conversions and Scriptures distributed made other missionaries to China look unproductive. Unfortunately, Gutzlaff had not developed an effective accountability system for his workers, and it was eventually discovered that many of them were deceiving him. Quite a few were opium addicts who simply made up conversion statistics. To support their opium habit, they were selling Gutzlaff’s New Testaments back to the printer who was then reselling them to Gutzlaff. The flaw was not in Gutzlaff’s strategy; the flaw was in a faulty system of accountability.
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