Six Inflammatory Questions—part 2

by Robertson McQuilkin

Last time we considered three controversial issues: (1) Are we winning or losing? (2) How believable is the A.D. 2000 movement? (3) Why not let the nationals do it? We concluded:

Last time we considered three controversial issues: (1) Are we winning or losing? (2) How believable is the A.D. 2000 movement? (3) Why not let the nationals do it? We concluded:

Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at these critical issues: Are we being faithful, in our proclamation to the church, to both the up side and down side of our present situation? Are we using the coming century/millennial rollover as a legitimate spur to action without raising unrealistic, and hence counterproductive, expectations? Do we rejoice in and promote the advance of missionary vision among the younger churches without allowing their successes to deflect us from fully discharging our own responsibility?

The first three questions are probably more controversial, but misunderstanding the last three can lead just as far astray. (4) Is short-term service valid? (5) Who is your tentmaking model—Paul or Priscilla? (6) Should everyone go through the 10/40 window?

IS SHORT-TERM SERVICE VALID?
Valid for what? Short-term service is not a valid means to finish the task of world evangelism. Short-term service is not a valid means of testing one’s missionary gifts or calling. Short-term service will not fulfill one’s obligation if God’s call is to missionary vocation. Yet those are precisely the reasons many engage in or promote short-term missionary service.

True, Mormons have had remarkable growth based on short-term service by large numbers. Perhaps if we could mobilize all evangelical young people to give, at their own expense, a full two years of service, we, too, would see large numbers of converts. And Paul’s missionary team was short-term in any given field of service.

But these are not valid arguments to uphold the idea many lay people have that the wave of the future for completing the Great Commission is the short-term missionary. We do learn from Paul’s example, of course. The pioneer missionary church starter should learn from Paul not to stay too long after the church has been “planted.” But the entire world in which Paul circulated spoke the same language and the 14 small churches he established began with people who knew and believed the Bible. Today, in a world where language and cultural walls are high and often fortified, and where people do not know and believe the Bible, the pioneer needs to follow the model of Jesus, the great apostolic missionary, who totally identified with those to whom he was sent. The conquest of the nations for Jesus will be accomplished by those who devote their lives to the cause.

Another abuse of the short-term surge is the thought many have of testing their own gifts and calling for career missionary service. It’s like trial marriage. The couple is trying out something, but not marriage. Without commitment to the relationship, a person cannot test what might have been in a committed relationship. So it is with a short-term missionary. The short-termer has no way of proving what he or she might be, or be able to do, with a knowledge of the language and long-term involvement in the lives of the people. The sense of “call” must be based on other things like understanding the mandate, seeing the world’s need as it is, feeling the heartbeat of God. Then the obstacles and traumas of missionary service — short or long — will not deter.

It should not need to be said that the person who senses a call of God to missionary service may not use a short-term stint to fulfill that obligation. Yet many fall to that temptation. One cannot so easily bypass the cross and retain God’s approval.

Those are some of the poor reasons for short-term service. But there are valid objectives which the prospective short-termer should be taught to aim for: inspiration, education, an incomparable equipping to share the vision with others upon returning to the home church.

Furthermore, short-termers can reinforce the ministry of the career missionary, if the short-termer has beenadequately prepared and field planning for his or her participation has been wise. A prime example of this is Operation Mobilization in India, which is thoroughly integrated with local church ministry and has had a formidable influence on the church throughout India, as well as reaching multitudes of the hitherto unreached. In certain cases, the short-termer with special qualifications can make a strong contribution when linked with what the church or missionary team is doing. An example would be the recent flood of short-term educators into the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union).

The major benefit of short-term service, however, is that it is a wonderful way to get involved, to get close enough to God to hear his call. Perhaps as many as 90 percent of career missionaries from North America today have had a short-term experience. Operation Mobilization and Youth With A Mission, for example, have pumped thousands of missionaries into lifetime service. This is the great benefit that converted me, a career missionary who took a dim view of the mobs of untried youngsters who usurped our time and energy to little avail. When I discovered where the new wave of baby-boomer missionaries were coming from, I became an advocate of short-term service.

UNFORTUNATE DROPOFF
Unfortunately, the proportion of short-termers who end up in career service is dropping from an earlier high of as many as 25 percent. More careful promotion, preparation, and deployment is needed.

When preparation — of the candidate and of the field — is thorough, and when it is in line with realistic expectations, when the experience is in a place where things are happening, and when debriefing is a part of ongoing missions education, we can answer the question without hesitation, “Yes, short-term service is valid.”

The contribution can be real, but the church should not assuage its conscience by incorporating short-termers in its statistics of “missionaries” when its actual investment of life is inadequate; and short-termers should not have illusions of grandeur about what they can accomplish without the language, without long-term commitment and incarnational identification with the people they would reach.

TENTMAKING MODEL—PAUL OR PRISCILLA?
Priscilla’s vocation was making tents, Paul’s was starting churches. Priscilla’s ministry was to serve as a faithful “lay” disciple. She taught the Bible in her free time, to people like Apollos, she helped the missionary team, she apparently put Christ and his cause first in her life. But she made tents as her job. Paul, on the other hand, was a pioneer missionary who used his trade of making tents when it was necessary to reach his goal of evangelizing and starting churches.

Another way to put our question: “How many tentmakers start churches?” I once knew one who did. He had the Airwick franchise for Japan, a good place for that business since all the outhouses in those days were inside. The headquarters for Airwick was constantly changing. When Roy and Phyllis got a church up and going, Airwick headquarters would move. I used them constantly as examples of Pauline-type tentmakers. They were trained as missionaries, they functioned as missionaries, and they used a business they could control to put bread on the table. The trouble is, they got into evangelism so much they finally gave up Airwick. I remonstrated with them for ruining my one good illustration of a church-planting tentmaker. Now they illustrate my point that there aren’t many of them.

BIG TROUBLE
If people get the idea that the tentmaker is the answer to world evangelization, our cause is in big trouble. It’s hard to live in another culture and work full time at being a success in one’s profession—and a Christian must be faithful to his responsibilities—and start a church on the side. Even the premier tentmaker role today, teaching English, may not provide the teacher with enough time toactually start a church. And if that English teacher never had a thorough preparation in being a missionary, is it remarkable that not many do a good job of being one even part time?

So what should the church do? We need to mobilize and train those hundreds of thousands of potential Priscillas who go overseas from America as business people, military personnel, educators. We need to train them as true disciples — helping them to become effective witnesses cross-culturally and faithful supporters of the local church or missionary team. We do not need to act as if they would spearhead completion of the Great Commission.

At the same time the church needs to recruit and equip a host of Pauline-type tentmakers to penetrate areas where traditional missionaries are barred. Perhaps the day is coming when tentmaking will be necessary to finance the enterprise as with Paul, or on the model of Islamic missionary-tradesmen forging their way south in Africa. But these pioneers will be called, anointed, and thoroughly prepared as apostolic missionaries. If they already have a secular occupation that opens the door to a closed area, or if they can pick up a profession or trade specifically to get into such a place, they will pursue that occupation only as a sideline to their chief calling, pioneer missionary evangelism. Paul did not go down in history as a first century textile magnate. We know him as the apostle (pioneer church starter) to the unreached gentiles.

RETHINK STRATEGY
If our goal is not merely to “get in” to “creative access” countries but to actually evangelize and start churches, perhaps we need to rethink the strategy. Priscilline tentmakers can fulfill the role of witness — even silent witness — and prepare for the day when the people of the target area become politically and culturally free to change religions. In the meantime they also serve as vindicators of God’s righteousness. But there are so few gifted, called, and obedient pioneer church starters, and the needs of peoples free enough to make choices so vast, the part of wisdom may be to concentrate our limited resources of “Pauls” in places where they can function like Paul.

Not only would such an approach seem strategic, it would be biblical. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the biblical principle of concentrating on the responsive should be factored into the strategic planning of the church at large. If we followed this principle, Pauline tentmakers would be concentrated in unreached areas that prove reachable and Priscilline tentmakers dispatched to areas tightly closed to conversion. There they spread the knowledge of Christ through example and discrete personal witness in preparation for the coming day of harvest.

In any event, if the church is deluded into thinking that the typical “tentmaker” today, a 20th-century Priscilla, is completing the task and that it has thus discharged its obligation to the world, or if the missionary candidate considers “tentmaking” a cool alternative to missionary vocation, avoiding the stigma of the missionary calling, serious preparation for missionary vocation, or the rigors of raising support, we have missed the mark.

SHOULD EVERYONE GO THROUGH THE 10/40 WINDOW?
The short answer is, “Well, not everyone, but far greater numbers and a far greater proportion of our task force should be going to the neediest and most neglected areas of the world.” In helping many strong missions-oriented churches map the location of the missionaries they support, I have seen a consistent pattern. Hundreds of missionaries are sent out to everywhere but the 10/40 window. The 1993 edition of Operation World bears this out statistically.² Surely the church needs to awaken to needs of this majority of humankind now largely out of reach of gospel witness. Many of these areas are indeed closed to the evangelist—whether traditional missionary or Pauline tentmaker. But many are not, and even those which are closed need a saturation penetration at least by Priscillas.

Having said this, however, the church must not use the 10/40 window to deflect us from our responsibility to the rest of the world. We must stand ready, for example, to flood newly opened windows of opportunity whether or not they are “10/40.” This is what the Western church has done in the C.I.S.

And yet many decry this strategy. A leading missiological statistician and influential strategist told the European director of an evangelical mission, “All foreign missionaries should leave Europe immediately. They have absolutely no business being there. Europe is evangelized.” For people like this, North America, South America, Europe, Russia, and Africa south of the Sahara are all off the map for pioneer evangelistic church starting, particularly by outsiders. It would seem that only the 10/40 peoples are legitimate targets for outreach.

This approach is both biblically and strategically errant. The commission is to every nation, every people, and, in fact, every person. When those who have life in Christ are a tiny minority of any people, unable or unwilling to reach the rest of that people, certainly the command stands to the rest of the church: Go! And many of these lie outside the 10/40 window.

Having recognized these cautions, however, I must join those who point out the strategic need—and strategic neglect — of the greatest portion of humankind still out of reach of gospel witness, the 10/40 window.

SUMMARY
Yes, short-term missionary service is valid. Valid for inspiration, education, recruiting for career service, and reinforcing those who carry on when the short-termer is gone. It is not valid to complete the evangelistic task or to test one’s calling and capability for career missionary service. And the large numbers of short-termers should not beguile us into thinking our “missionary task force” is stronger than it is, especially when the American contingent of career foreign missionaries has fallen 20 percent in the last five years, to 40,000, below 50,000 for the first time in decades.³

And yes, tentmakers are needed — both Pauline and Priscilline, Paul for the pioneer missionary church starting task and Priscilla to reinforce the church and missionary team where they exist, and to prepare for the coming open door in places now closed.

Finally, though not everyone should go through the 10/40 window, especially since it is often not an open window, a far larger proportion of our task force should enter those lands. The Priscilla tentmaker may be especially useful in penetrating many of the “creative access” nations of that region.

I have concluded with a positive answer to the questions, but evangelicals need to be warned of the serious consequences of abusing the short-term, tentmaking, and 10/40 window contemporary emphases.

Endnotes
1. Measuring the Church Growth Movement. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), pp 34-43.
2. Patrick Johnstone, Operation World. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), p. 601.
3. Ibid., p. 564.

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