Pros, professionalism, and periodicals

by Gary Corwin

In Christian ministry circles the terms professional and professionalism have a long history of producing contrary emotions. While everyone celebrates those who do their job like a ‘pro,’ few get excited about people in ministry who go about their duties with professional detachment. The coin of the realm is passionate commitment, not detached objectivity that observes and reports but doesn’t engage deeply and sacrificially.

In Christian ministry circles the terms professional and professionalism have a long history of producing contrary emotions. While everyone celebrates those who do their job like a ‘pro,’ few get excited about people in ministry who go about their duties with professional detachment. The coin of the realm is passionate commitment, not detached objectivity that observes and reports but doesn’t engage deeply and sacrificially.

John Piper’s challenging book Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry is all about underlining this point for pastors who may be tempted by the seductions of professionalism. In it he pleads with fellow pastors to abandon the secularization of the pastorate and pursue the prophetic call of the Bible for radical ministry. The bread and butter of Christian ministry, he asserts, is supernatural. 

 

Put another way, one might say that in ministry of any kind, a spirit-filled life is always the first and most important marker for what it means to be a ‘pro’. This is certainly as true for the missions community as it is for pastors.

For many years, EMQ has billed itself as “the professional journal for the missions community.” The intent of the byline, of course, is to say that we are a journal for the missions community to assist its people to perform like pros, in much the same way that the Journal of the American Medical Association does for the medical community or the Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice does for engineers. 

Some of the assumptions that undergird any journal of this type include: (1) a primary focus on providing personal and professional development help to a select group of doers; (2) high standards for excellence and relevance to the intended audience; (3) a desire to expose readers to genuine breakthrough methodologies, while alerting them to dangers in the false kind; (4) peer review of articles with opportunity for public challenge and interaction; and (5) regular ongoing reviews of new literature relevant to its readers.

With the last issue of EMQ being published this October, a timely question for the missions community of North America is “Has this need ceased to exist?” Have we already learned everything there is to know? Or, has the community itself shrunk to such an extent that mentoring new missions pros is no longer viable or necessary, as missions from North America has become primarily a short-term enterprise adjunct to the long-term strategic missions efforts of others? 

Or, has it just become politically incorrect for North Americans, who have so much controlled the global missions agenda for so long, to even speak about mission methodology now that the Global South has become so vibrantly active in missions? Interesting questions all, but certain aspects of modern life may offer up an even more practical question needing to be addressed.

Could it be that the change that has taken place has less to do with the importance of the subject than it does with the way the intended audience likes to consume information? There is significant anecdotal evidence that consumption patterns are a contributing factor. It is clear already in this Internet age that periodicals of all kinds have been taking a hit. And why shouldn’t they? 

When you can do a word search on a subject of interest (for free once you are plugged into the Internet) and get scores of items related to it in an instant, why would you subscribe to a periodical in your general area of interest, and perhaps find in each issue two or three articles that really interest you and ten that don’t? More and more people seem to be saying, “Why indeed?”

The main caveat to this approach, however, becomes clearer when one considers the more specific attributes of a professional journal that we have already discussed. How do you incorporate guardians of excellence such as editorial and peer review, or provide a welcoming home to discuss the virtues and pitfalls of potential breakthrough methodologies, without actually having a community home for such purposes. 

Yes, it certainly can be done on the Internet—blogs and Facebook have been doing some of this for quite a while—but it will take the same kind of community commitment to make it work well that led the IFMA and EFMA to establish EMQ as a joint journalistic endeavor 53 years ago, and led the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College to sustain it for the last 20 years.

The model and the platform can change significantly, but the need to be addressed, and the commitment necessary to do it successfully, will be very much the same. Detached professionalism certainly won’t cut it. The big question is “Are there still enough pros out there—spirit-filled, spirit-led, and fully committed—to make it happen?” One can hope.

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Gary Corwin is staff missiologist with the international office of SIM.