discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 158
158 Contrasting Philosophies and Strategies of Mission
have not been clearly articulated. Mission strategy has to do with envisioning
and developing structures and systems for extending the church into new areas
and communicating the gospel in all parts of the global mosaic of cultures.
Strategizing forces believers to focus on God’s purposes for the world and to
come up with ways they can assist in accomplishing those purposes. While
what works in one place will not necessarily work everywhere, some characteristics
that will enhance every mission strategy are:
• Shedding unnecessary foreignness
• Looking for relevant methods of communication
• Establishing viable roles in the community
• Working relationally
• Looking for things in the culture and language that could be redemptive
analogies
• Having missionaries live among the people rather than clumping together
where a missionary subculture develops
• Getting missionaries to commit time to assimilating the culture of the
people (mother tongue language, history, social structures, institutions,
leadership style, aesthetic values, literature, religious beliefs, and core
identity issues)
• Establishing multigenerational church planting and discipleship movements
that express biblical faith
Let us bear in mind that the best methods cannot do away with the
difficulties of our work which come from the world, the flesh and
the devil, but bad methods may multiply and intensify them. 15
—John Nevius, missionary to China and Korea
One strategy issue has to do with the way to do evangelism. The ways
evangelism takes place can be divided into two categories: mass evangelism,
where the gospel is communicated to people in large groups, and personal
evangelism, where the gospel is presented one-on-one to an individual. John
Wesley, Dwight L. Moody, Charles G. Finney, Luis Palau, and Billy Graham
are examples of those who have had success doing evangelism with large
crowds of people. While Jesus regularly used mass evangelism, He also talked
to people one-on-one as happened in the episodes in John 3 and 4 with
Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Paul Orjala used to say that
a major reason for church growth in Haiti was that Haitian believers “gossiped
the gospel” throughout their country’s network of open-air markets.