“Well, you have a Bible, you know how to study it, you know how to lead people to the Lord and disciple them. Just go and do that! That ought to keep you busy for a while.”
Back in 1992 when the Lord opened the door for me to serve Him in the country of Albania, I was thrilled beyond belief. I wanted this for years and spent years preparing so I would be qualified to be chosen to go serve Him somewhere outside the USA. When I left my home in Alabama and arrived in Albania, I had no idea about “missions philosophy”. In fact, once my pastor and church confirmed that God indeed was calling me to go, and the reality of leaving set in, I have to admit I was also a bit scared of what I would actually do once I got there. I found myself thinking like Moses when God called him to lead Israel out of Egypt. I thought, “Lord, I really don’t know what to do. Maybe you better find someone else. I’ve never done this kind of thing before.”
I shared these sentiments with my pastor, half expecting that he would either sympathize with me and call it off, or open the secret box of pastoral wisdom and share with me the keys that would answer all my questions. Well, he didn’t call it off (thankfully) and the “keys of wisdom” were not at all what I expected. His reply to me was simply this: “Well, you have a Bible, you know how to study it, you know how to lead people to the Lord and disciple them. Just go and do that! That ought to keep you busy for a while.” At the time, I thought that was an overly simplistic answer, and I labored to find a good counter-argument to show why that was not good enough advice. Alas, I found none. It turned out that studying the Bible, leading people to Christ, and discipling them actually was the “secret” to a fruitful ministry in a new location.
What I have since come to realize is that far too many people overthink missionary work and strategy. Within a year or so of my arrival in Albania, there were literally hundreds of new missionary families that had arrived. These were missionaries from all the various groups and denominations of Protestant Christianity. Early on, an umbrella organization was formed called the Albanian Encouragement Project, and its purpose was to help coordinate and encourage all mission activity in Albania. They did some good work, but I found one particular flaw in my experience with them in those early years. Too often I found them organizing strategy meeting after strategy meeting and the missionary community spent a significant amount of time with each other, talking about how they were going to effectively reach the Albanians. That may sound reasonable, but for me it was puzzling as many of them were not spending commensurate time actually with the Albanians, trying to reach them. Needless to say, I did not go to Albania to meet with missionaries and talk about missions. I went to Albania to win Albanians to Christ and start Albanian churches.
I just needed to get in there and get to work.
It was my experience in Albania that opened my eyes to what was going on in the world of missions at large. I was just a guy who was trained in his local church, sent out by his local church to make disciples and start local churches. I didn’t know that a person could be a missionary and not be involved in church planting – but there were such missionaries. I didn’t know that a person could be a missionary and not attend a church at all – but there were such missionaries. I didn’t know you could be a “missionary restaurant owner” – but again I was wrong; there was one.
What did I do? I just did what my pastor told me to do: evangelize Albanians and disciple any who responded while starting a local church. Other missionaries would wander in and out of our young church and observe. They would on occasion want to meet with me and talk about why I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing, as it was poor missiology.
It was at this time that I heard discussions about why we missionaries needed to be careful to not impose our foreign culture on the Albanians. We needed to not lead in our churches, but give them the freedom to explore and apply Christianity in their own context. We needed to avoid any direction and just be facilitators of the “national expression”. This was weird to me. I mean, since Albania was an atheist nation and had no history of Biblical Christianity for an entire generation, it was my observation that the young Albanian believers had no idea how to “express Christianity”. They needed a model to follow and then, after they reached some level of maturity, could adjust to a more natural expression. Someone had to stand up and lead by example. They needed to know what biblical preaching was. They needed to be taught and discipled. They needed to learn to give of their resources. They needed to learn to sing songs of praise to the Lord! As I prayerfully considered these things, I also realized that I can only lead them in the pattern that I know. If that happens to be “American”, so be it. I am American. God called me (the American) to go there. He will leverage whatever I bring for His glory. I just needed to get in there and get to work.
In a word, it is the work of local churches to reproduce local churches all over the world. Anything short of that is a compromise.
This leads me to the reason for writing this article. What does a healthy missions philosophy and strategy look like? What are the important elements that Living Faith churches will emphasize when embarking on new ministry opportunities, especially in a cross-cultural context?
A healthy missions philosophy is simply to obey the Lord’s command in the Great Commission: to go into all the world and make disciples (Matt 28:19). In the general sense, that defines our mandate as believers in Jesus Christ regardless of location, and thus describes our mission. While people often want to understand and clearly articulate the biblical focus of international ministry, the general commands of scripture apply to all believers everywhere. There are no different rules for ministry here or there.
Ministry is ministry. Missions, whether foreign or domestic, is simply church planting. The Living Faith Fellowship is a fellowship of local churches, not of individual Christians each with their own visions and goals. As such, we understand that all ministry is derived from local churches and focused on making disciples who will propagate local churches. Any ministry endeavor that is disconnected from the authority of a New Testament local church (like a para-church ministry) is outside the scope of a biblical missions philosophy.
Our focus and calling, therefore, is to identify and train faithful men (2Tim 2:2) from within our churches who will one day desire the office of a bishop (1Tim 3:1), who have proven themselves (1Tim 3:6) through ministry responsibility in the church, and sense God’s call on their lives to separate and be sent by their local church (Acts 13:2-3) to reproduce the life of Christ in new places by starting new local churches. In a word, it is the work of local churches to reproduce local churches all over the world. Anything short of that is a compromise.
God has ordained that His work be done in and through local assemblies.
Jesus Christ died for the church (Eph 5:25). He gets glory in the church (Eph 3:21). Angelic beings take notice of God’s wisdom through the church (Eph 3:10). Only a church has to have biblically qualified leaders (1Tim 3; Titus 1). Only a church is given the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s supper. Only a church is called Christ’s body (Col 1:18). And the New Testament clearly identifies local congregations when it uses the word “church.” There are also uses of the word “church” referring to the entire collective body of born-again believers from the resurrection to the rapture, but that represents the minority of applications. The “universal” church, as many refer to it, is not actually a “church” by definition. The word actually means a “called out assembly” and the “universal” church will not be called out and has never assembled until the rapture of the church.
In the meantime (the last 2000 years of church history), God has ordained that His work be done in and through local assemblies. Any particular local assembly is certainly not perfect. It is full of flawed people and led by flawed people. Any one particular local church is not the perfection of God’s design for the church, but a biblical, New Testament local church is God’s present picture of what that universal church will one day manifest. That is the key. Only a local church can picture what God expects for us all in eternity. Only a local church can provide the structure for young disciples to learn what the coming kingdom will be like. If we are not working through churches to start churches, then we are falling short of what God intends.
the work of the missionary is to work himself out of a job and turn it over to qualified disciples so he can move on to reproduce new churches in new locations.
A foreign missionary must also take into consideration other factors, like adapting to his new environment (1Cor 9:20-23) by learning his new language and culture well, so as to be able to communicate the gospel effectively in the context of his target audience in a way they can understand and receive it. The added challenge of carrying out biblical church planting in a foreign context makes it harder, and therefore deserves our most qualified candidates.
The tangible goal of ministry is to start local churches that will mature into indigenous churches which are independent of outside assistance. These mature churches will then, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, be equipped to continue the work of taking the gospel to all nations. Since “success without a successor is failure”, the work of the missionary is to work himself out of a job and turn it over to qualified disciples so he can move on to reproduce new churches in new locations. Any other noble effort of starting schools, hospitals, orphanages, businesses can be of service to a local church, but can never replace the ministry focus of biblical, New Testament local churches.
Jeff Bartell is a former long-term missionary to Albania and the head pastor of First Baptist Church of New Philadelphia, OH.