Should Missionaries Evangelize or Nurture Churches?

Follow this mythical dialogue between Joe Missionary and his Guru.

Guru: Young man, if God wants to mature an indigenous church, he'll do it without your help or mine. You must get on with the task of being a true missionary. Repent of your truncated church development syndrome. Missions is world evangelization, not national church development.

Joe: Sir, I know the local church in our area of Africa is self- governing, self-supporting, and growing rapidly. But the pastor is begging me to show him how he can disciple the elders in his church. Many parts of Africa are heavily churched, but spiritual maturity is often shallow.

Guru: Your attitude is very much out of date. You're showing advanced signs of the disease of ethnocentrism. First, it appears that you don't trust the national to be able to read his Bible and contextualize it for his own culture. You seem to be saying that if these believers don't follow the American pattern and don't use Western tunes in church, that they aren't growing Christians. Second, you don't trust the Holy Spirit. So you think that the Holy Spirit can only work through Americans?

Joe: Sir, you've made two points that I need to be careful about. I don't want to encourage the church to follow Western patterns, and I must trust the Holy Spirit. But am I not a part of the Body of Christ? Or does each homogeneous unit form its own Body? The Apostle Paul seemed to have a deep concern for the maturation process in the churches he planted. Paul spent most of his missionary career nurturing churches. Are you saying the apostle shouldn't have wasted his time or repeated visits and letter writing to the early churches once they become self-governing? One could use the argument of ethnocentrism against your concern in evangelism and church planting. Don't you trust the nationals to do this? Do you think the Holy Spirit can only use Americans to do cross-cultural evangelism?

Guru: Don't you believe in evangelism? In reaching the least reached?

Joe: Yes, I surely do. I understand the urgency to reach the unreached 2.5 billion. We both need to learn to work more closely with national Christians, and trust the Holy Spirit. But even if we would evangelize the whole world, our job is not finished.

Guru: Son, I can see that you don't know the history of missions. Traditional missionaries settled on a compound, started a dispensary, a school and sometimes a church. Then they spent their time building and administering institutions, while ignoring the thousands of nearby villages.

Joe: Yes, we missionaries have made mistakes. Yet with such a large church in our country, the missionaries must have done a few things right. To say that traditional missionaries did not evangelize is most inaccurate. But we also need to seek new approaches for encouraging the maturation of the church.

Guru: Joe, I know you're a dedicated missionary with a great academic future. But don't you realize that with your present attitudes you're out of step with the whole field of missiology? How can you measure spiritual maturity? We are most interested in quantifiable results. Your interest isn't academic. Son, if you want to get ahead in the field of missiology, get a degree or two with us, write a few articles, and get invited to a couple of world congresses. Soon, they'll be asking you to lead workshops. Forget about the maturation of the indigenous church. It's a dead-end-street, academically.

Joe: Well, sir, I surely appreciate your personal concern. I'm encouraged with the interest on reaching the unreached. But I sense that something's missing from the field of missiology. I look around me in Africa and see hundreds and thousands of churches, yet there are so few well-taught believers. The major emphasis of the New Testament writers seems to be the encouragement of believers toward maturity in Christ. Yet when I search in the field of missiology I see little of this New Testament emphasis.

I'm deeply concerned for the billions who are unreached. But if "being evangelized" results in thousands of weak and dying churches, then something is wrong somewhere. When I compare the church in Ephesis that Paul encouraged with the same church that John criticized in Revelation, I shudder to think of what could easily happen in Africa. The urgent need in the spiritual battle for Africa is to facilitate growth toward biblical maturity in the local churches. But when has anyone suggested a world congress on building up the body of Christ? Church revitalization must be the starting point for world evangelization. A large carnal church must be an embarrassment to the name of the Lord, but a vital maturing church will not only grow but will please the Lord. A vibrant national church will also have a passion for sending missionaries to the unreached.

Guru: Son, this discussion has been stimulating. But I'm sure you'll realize why we can't reserve a place for you in our school. We need students who are less dogmatic and more open to new ideas.

Should Missionaries Evangelize or Nurture Churches? Yes.

Adapted from the article by Jim Plueddemann “Church Maturity: Old Hat?” Evangelical Missions Quarterly, 1980, 19, 139-141.