discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 80
80 From Every Nation
not be seen as a cheap source of warm bodies that can be deployed for less
money than personnel from the more affluent West.
With mission leaders and organizations having arisen in the majority
world, the non-Western world missionary movement provides leadership and
creative thinking as well as needed personnel. Mission strategist Luis Bush,
who coined the term 10/40 Window to describe the area of the globe where
many of today’s unreached peoples live, grew up in Argentina. Samuel Escobar,
whose most recent book is titled The New Global Mission, is from Peru. Missiologist
David Bosch, mentioned earlier, is from South Africa. Gottfried Osei-
Mensah, chairman of African Enterprise and former executive secretary of the
Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, is from Ghana. Theodore
Williams, author of The Local Church and Mission, has been a key mobilizer for
global missionary outreach in India. Through his writings, Puerto Rican Orlando
Costas has echoed many majority world theologians and missiologists in
calling the Church to be holistic in its ministries. Tite Tienou, a native of
Burkina Faso, is a respected authority on missions, theology, and the church in
Africa. Vinoth Ramachandra from Sri Lanka has helped believers think about
and respond to the social, cultural, and political challenges they face in contexts
throughout Asia.
One challenge for the global church is to make sure prospective missionaries
from countries around the world get adequate cross-cultural training. That
is a goal of mission associations springing up around the world. Several denominations
and mission agencies in Asia have formed the Asia Missions Association.
Representatives from 20 countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia
founded the Third-World Missions Association with David Yonggi Cho, pastor
of the 800,000-member Yoido Full Gospel Church in South Korea, as one of
its leaders. The Nigerian Evangelical Missions Association (NEMA) has drawn
together more than 100 churches and mission agencies from that African nation.
The India Missions Association does a similar thing as an umbrella organization
for about 175 denominations and mission agencies in India.
Reprise: Who Is a Missionary?
Sometimes American believers who are discouraged about low rates of
church growth in their country get excited when someone says that missionaries
are arriving in the U.S.A. from other countries. To these Americans, unreached
peoples on the other side of the globe seem far away while their nearby
neighbors who do not have a relationship with Jesus loom large in their consciousness.
So, the American Christians rejoice when they think that evangelists
from abroad are coming to try to lead their neighbors to the Lord. What
they may not understand is that most of those reports about missionaries are
actually about pastors who have immigrated to the U.S.A. to lead churches of