discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 81
From Every Nation 81
fellow immigrants. That is not what the “being sent” part of missionary service
means. Colombians immigrating to the U.S. to pastor churches of Colombians
(or Koreans pastoring Korean immigrants) are evangelists or pastors in the
sense of Ephesians 4, but they are not missionaries who have been specifically
gifted by the Holy Spirit for cross-cultural ministry. Such pastors and evangelists
are almost never sent with the prayer and sacrificial financial backing of
partners in the churches of their home country. On the contrary, believers in
their countries of origin often bemoan the losses of key church leaders who
emigrate elsewhere. These pastors are even envied in their home country because
of their good fortune in getting to a place where they can improve their
standard of living.
To be sure, in relation to their place of residence, these Christian workers
have crossed some cultural and language barriers. Such immigrant pastors may
have had to learn a new language to get a driver’s license. However, on Sundays,
they preach in their mother tongue, and when they pray with parishioners during
the week, it is in that shared heart language they learned as children. Pastors
and parishioners are living together in the same strange land and together share
the struggles of being an immigrant. Hesitating to put these people in the missionary
category does not belittle their service for the Lord. However, referring
to them as missionaries muddies the picture of what they are doing or, in Donald
McGavran’s analogy, becomes a fog that keeps leaders from having a clear
understanding of what is going on. 9 To be a missionary to another country,
Christian workers need to be immigrating to that country for the purpose of
evangelizing people of a different cultural and even language group.
How a person defines a missionary does depend somewhat on one’s pneumatology
or doctrine of the Holy Spirit. That is, does Ephesians 4 mean that
the Holy Spirit calls specific individuals and gifts them for particular roles? If
so, is there a particular giftedness associated with taking the gospel across cultural
boundaries? If the answers to those questions are yes, then that makes a
strong case for having a special missionary category rather than missionary being
another title for all Christian workers or even all Christians.
Native Missionaries?
Majority world mission is not the same as the native missionaries mentioned
in fund-raising advertisements in the pages of Christian magazines.
Those advertisements are usually financial support appeals for village pastors or
itinerant evangelists working among their own people in their home countries.
Such appeals may grow out of good intentions, but that kind of financial subsidy
will likely be as counterproductive under the native missionary label as it
is when mission agencies do it under a national pastor label. The fact that these
native missionaries are not working cross-culturally also raises the question: Is