discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 78
78 From Every Nation
Western missionaries 4 (see plate 6.1). Some majority world missionaries are
supported by funds from the West, but many are not. Amazingly, churches in
poorer areas of the world have found ways to send out missionaries. While the
U.S. is still number one in the list of missionary-sending countries, that will
likely change in the not-too-distant future. That is because the Protestant missionary
force from non-Western churches is increasing by a phenomenal 13
percent annually while the number of Protestant missionaries coming from the
West is growing at just over 3 percent annually.
Global Missionary Team
When we were in Swaziland, my wife and I worked with three missionaries
who had come from Asia. God had called them from successful
medical practices in the Philippines to serve in Africa. Those
doctors are prime examples of a mission team being internationalized.
Such internationalization or globalization is beginning to extend
to leadership levels. My denomination’s work in Africa is directed
by a man born in the Cape Verde islands. A Guatemalan
directs the work across Eurasia. Our missionary outreach in Mexico
and Central America is led by a Panamanian. The work in South
America is supervised by a Colombian.
Various church planting thrusts into Eastern Europe and countries
of the former Soviet Union and some Asian countries were
spearheaded by a German. Missionaries from South Korea have
founded churches in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In Bangladesh,
churches were begun by members of my church from Western
Samoa and from Ireland.
—Charles Gailey
Thousands of majority world missionaries are from Latin America. As
churches in Mexico and Central and South America began looking at the leastevangelized
parts of the world, they focused attention on Islamic areas with the
thought that their missionaries would carry less political baggage there than
did typical Western missionaries. In Bible schools in the Middle East, Christian
Arab young people are preparing to be missionaries in the Muslim world.
Not to be outdone, churches in Nigeria have sent hundreds of missionaries to
other cultural groups within their country as well as into neighboring nations.
Significant numbers of majority world missionaries are also coming out of
Asia. The mission zeal of churches in Singapore, Nigeria, Korea, and India is
reminiscent of the fervor of the Moravians in the early 1700s. Building on European
and American examples from the past, evangelicals in Singapore now
send out 1.5 missionaries per congregation. 5 The first Protestant missionaries