Six Inflammatory Questions

by Robertson McQuilkin

A look at the issues that ignite controversy–part one

There are six questions which, simply by asking, are capable of igniting a firestorm of hot words among missiologists or missionaries. Yet they are of strategic importance and need careful, dispassionate attention.

1. Are we winning or losing?

2. How believable is the A.D. 2000 movement?

3. Why not let the nationals do it?

4. Is short-term service valid?

5. Who is your tentmaking model, Paul or Priscilla?

6. Should everyone go through the 10/40 window?

To ask any of these questions is enough to disturb one who thinks the issue settled, or raise hope in the one who does not hold “missiologically correct” viewpoints. Although we cannot examine each issue exhaustively in the scope of two articles, perhaps we can move toward identifying the issues somewhat more precisely.

1. Are we winning or losing?
We are winning! Two centuries ago there was one Christian to every 49 unsaved persons in the world, today there is one Bible-believing Christian to every 9 in the world (Figure 1). There are 11,000 unreached people groups, but there are 7,000,000 evangelical churches, or six hundred churches to reach each people group. These statistics are “clean,” avoiding the confusion sometimes encountered in missiological data because of those who use inclusivistic numbers of “Christians” so that all of Europe or all of South America, for example, are considered “evangelized” because of the large numbers of nominal Roman Catholic adherents. Our statistics here, we are told, speak of “Bible-believing,” or “practicing,” or “born again” believers. Indeed we are winning! But others demure.

We are losing! There are more lost persons now living than the total of all who have lived and died throughout recorded human history—making us further behind in the spiritual battle to win them than ever we have been before, exponentially further behind. (See Figure 2 page 132.) To make matters worse, one of every two people on planet earth lives in a people group that is out of reach of the gospel. There is no witnessing church movement among them.

Who is right? I recently received an anguished letter from a leading mission executive asking this very question. The answer is, both are right. One advocate speaks proportionately, the other in absolute numbers. For example, as young missionaries in Japan we would worry with fellow missionaries about some strategy for home reports when things weren’t going well. Some wag suggested we should report that attendance had doubled in the past six months, leaving off the part about it doubling from one to two.

Angle the statistics in an optimistic way and speak theoretically in percentages, and we are winning the war. Look at the task remaining in terms of the sheer numbers of people who will live somewhere forever, and who now have no chance to hear, and the cause seems hopeless.

Both truths are needed: The task remaining is vastly greater than it ever was before. But the resources and momentum to do it are greater, too.

2. How believable is the A.D. 2000 movement?
If there are five billion lost people in the world, to speak of evangelizing them in the next six years when the church has won only a half billion—at most generous estimates—in two thousand years seems ridiculous even to suggest. How do people get serious about this goal?

By redefining the task. At first, in the early eighties, some who proposed the goal spoke of giving a witness to every person on earth. Soon that was revised to set a goal of starting an evangelizing church in each unreached people group. More recently, the chief group of advocates has renamed their movement, “A.D. 2000 and Beyond.”

Theoretically, looking at statistics isolated from the reality of church life and the world situation, it seems to be an achievable goal. What do we say to this idea? Four things.

1. It is good to have a goal and this one is truly exciting.Much more will be done in the next few yearsbecause of the goal than would have been done without it.

2. This movement uses a new, anthropologically based definition of “evangelism”—establishing a witnessing church in each people group. The identification of people groups is surely a helpful tool for strategizing. But such an approach should not be used to lull us into thinking the task is completed in any people group where we have a beachhead. Some are 100,000,000 strong, for example, and the Great Commission speaks of discipling the nations, not implanting a nucleus.

3. Since the approaching turn of any century has always induced apocalyptic expectations among believers, what shall we say for the turn of a millennium? Appealing as a century/millennial goal may be, we should not be pressured into short-circuiting adequate preparation. If we had the recruits right now, which we don’t, it would take more than the remaining six years to get them prepared, into the target areas, and usable. And that would be beginning the work, not finishing it. We must not send out unprepared harvesters in an effort to hit the target date, or we risk missing the mark of obedience to our Lord’s command.

4. The church I know—in America and around the world—is not even going to hold its own, let alone push through such an incredible advance. Unless God intervenes in unique ways as he has in China, there is no way the church will finish the task, no matter how “the task” is defined.

Consider the projections of personnel needed as given by Ralph Winter in 1985. (Figure 3 above.) Note that we have long since exceeded the goal of 68,000, if we were to count all career missionaries as the task force. Some think there may be as many as 200,000 cross-cultural missionaries, Western and non-Western included. But only a fraction of these are entering unreached areas. No one knows for sure, but the most optimistic estimates would put the figure at far less than the originally estimated need of 68,000 “frontier missionaries.” Some say that no more than five percent of the worldwide missionary task force is engaged in church planting evangelism among the unreached, or about 10,000 such pioneers. The deployment of North American personnel looks something like Figure 4 below.

In addition to the gloomy picture of the task force available, consider that, in Winter’s original projection, we would have needed to penetrate 2,000 new people groups annually from 1988 through 1995. Even with the surge of missionaries penetrating the former communist block of unreached peoples, we have nowhere near reached those projections.

But there is a reason for caution about optimistic projections that goes much deeper than objective statistical analysis. In the American churches, at least, there is not the spiritual dynamic necessary to mobilize the resources needed. We are committed to a variety of self-oriented agendas, so that without a spiritual revival strong enough to turn our values right side up, we, at least, will not be able to accomplish the task.

3. Why not let the nationals do it?
For two reasons: There aren’t enough of them and, even if there were, we cannot assign our responsibility to someone else. First, so far there are not enough “nationals,” meaning non-Western missionaries, to finish the task. There are several reasons for this conclusion. Thrilling as the surge of “third world” missionaries is, and exhilarating as it is to contemplate that God may be by-passing the deficient Western church to get the job done, there are still not nearly enough cross-cultural pioneer church starting evangelists from third-world countries. One problem is that numbers often do not compare. Third-world missionary statistics often combine what in the West would be called “home missionaries” with “foreign missionaries.”

But there is a more important caution. Those who are out of reach of present gospel witness, the dark half of the world, need foreign missionaries, by definition. Someone has to go in from the outside, no matter where they come from, or these peoples will not be reached. So speaking of the economy and greater effectiveness of “nationals reaching their own” is to miss the point. Foreign missionaries, pioneer evangelistic foreign missionaries is the need.

It is true that a nearby foreigner may be more effective than a Westerner, but this advantage may well be offset by the many situations in which proximity is a handicap. For example, a Serbian evangelical missionary might not be very effective with a Bosnian Muslim. At any rate, so far there are not nearly enough non-Western foreign missionaries to finish the task.

Second, we can’t assign our responsibility to someone else. So long as there remains anyone on planet earth who has not heard with understanding the way to life in Christ, and so long as there is a community without a church, no congregation can stop reaching out and say, “It is finished, the task you have given us to do, we have accomplished.”

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 potentially 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?

There are other “inflammatory questions” which we shall consider next time.

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