What Missions Must Do to Survive in the 1970’s

by Raymond J. Davis

A milestone is a useful measuring device. It will show you how far you have come and where you are in the journey. Looking back may not be pleasant. Looking forward I trust will be profitable. We want to survey the seventies.

A milestone is a useful measuring device. It will show you how far you have come and where you are in the journey. Looking back may not be pleasant. Looking forward I trust will be profitable. We want to survey the seventies.

Predicting is a dangerous and frustrating game. It is much easier to say what should happen or what must happen in the next ten years than it is to say what will happen. There are plenty of people who polish their crystal balls and peering therein tell us what the world will be like in another decade. Much of what they tell us they see, I don’t like.

My approach to the future is basically optimistic. This is not because of what I see or hear, but simply because I believe God is at work in the world and his program is precisely on schedule today as it ever has been and will be. If this is the kind of a world God has planned for me to live and work in, I accept it. I will look upon difficulties and challenges as opportunities and not as obstacles. Such a philosophy is in sharp contrast to statements heard frequently today. One nuclear physicist recently defined an optimist as "someone who still believes the future is uncertain." For the Christian the program of the future may be unpredictable, but the consequences of the future are certain.

The responsible servant of God is one who is willing to admit that he does not comprehend the future in this dangerous era, yet knows he is called upon to deal with and solve what he may not fully understand. As mission leaders we share the world’s uncertainty. We confess our own puzzlement at the turn of events, acknowledge that we don’t always make sense out of things as they are or seem. At the same time we reaffirm our conviction that God is the Lord of history and he knows what is happening. God’s promise of the Holy Spirit’s guidance, if we seek and accept it, gives us tremendous leverage. What do we see ahead for the seventies?

1. The population o£ the world will continue to increase rapidly. It will rise until the year 2000 A.D. before it levels off at six billion. The rate of growth is greatest in the presently unevangelized areas.

2. More than half of the world’s population will be 25 years of age or younger. By 1980 there will be 20 million more in the 20 to 39 age group in the United States, comparably the same in Canada. The middle age group 40 to 54 will diminish by one million, but those 55 and up will number eight million more.

3. The move to the cities and urban areas will be accelerated. The United Nations predicts that by 2000 A.D. 60 percent of the total world population will be urbanized.

4. World hunger will be a huge problem and will grow in intensity.

5. Western culture and civilization will become increasingly unpopular and rejected. Missions, closely aligned in people’s minds with western penetration, will similarly suffer.

6. Literacy will increase but rapid advances in electronics, technology will leap-frog the printed page as the primary medium for propaganda. Great masses of people who cannot read listen to news of world consequence on transistor radios.

7. Governmental control of people will increasingly encroach upon their personal lives, money and freedom, eroding the influence and responsibility of home and church.

8. Governments in receiving countries will continue to raise barriers higher in granting visas and work permits, barring all except those who offer services in realms that are in short supply.

9. Receiving countries will demand from missionaries new and different kinds of service to improve the physical and material well-being of their people as the price for the presence of the mission and gospel propagation privileges.

10. The church in the newly emerging countries will be an increasingly crucial factor, which will make necessary a new attitude, relationship and role for missions from overseas.

11. The easy, simple, cheap ways of conducting missionary work are gone. It will cost more money, it will require better trained people, it will demand greater insights in planning, strategy, and deployment of available resources.

12. The evangelical church in the sending countries of the world will continue to resist greater personal involvement in world evangelization, being weakened by materialism, permissiveness and ego-centrism. Forty percent of all U.S. income in 1980 will be in the hands of young people under 40.

13. The tensions and turbulence of life in the receiving countries will increase, demanding a deeper and more daring dedication on the part of missionaries.

14. The total pool of available missionary recruits will not appreciably increase, but the caliber and quality of those available to us will be in greater proportion if we really want them.

The mention of modifications that will mold and move the world of the 70’s might easily be extended. I would like to state, however, that within the next decade it will be generally found that the prime challenge will turn, not around the production of the nuts and bolts, but around the difficulties and opportunities involved in the world of extreme change and widening choices.

To project five to ten years ahead, a few assumptions must be made. I would like to list a few:

No time-worn way of doing a thing will be safe in an innovating world. No enterprise, however big or successful, is safe in an era of radical change; all organizations must live dangerously and try to hear the potentialities in the marketplace.

No methodology can survive as a conditioned response to a given situation, for the situation will not remain static.

No approach or plan can avoid becoming obsolete when there are vast swings in man’s habits, when there is intense and imaginative competition.

No mission, no missionary, no mission leader is secure in his position unless he can cope with extreme change. Past successes will not secure his future.

It is the role of the mission leader of the future to use his imagination and ingenuity to hitch himself to and harness the God-given tools which could turn the tide and change the tale of defeat into a thrilling, glorious triumph.

Let’s not just read history-let’s make it! Let’s put our Kleenex in our pockets and stop crying about the sad, sick state of affairs. Our future success, under God, will turn on reassessing and redefining our individual and collective priorities. Unless some steps are taken by missions toward the achievement of our paramount common purposes and goals, unless some real revision comes to pass in the present dilemma of divided resources, strategy and planning, we will have had it, as the world of 1970’s will not wait.

So fragile is the texture of peace in the world; so sensitive is our economic mechanism; so rapid is the world’s rate of population growth; so intense are our domestic problems; so vital is the knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; so divided are God’s people in pursuit of God’s program. We must set our minds beyond the things about which we already feel certain. We have to release our initiative, we have to break out of our limited mental environment. Our mood must be exploratory in nature, to experiment, to pioneer in our field of competency; be innovators, not gap-fillers; be searchers seeking out needs and implementing ways to meet them, not just sitting around waiting for programs to come in over the transom. We have to find new and better paths to reach our goals. We have to recognize other equally good ways to do God’s work. We have to :rediscover the single pattern in the fabric of God’s plan and program. Emerson said, "This time, like all times, is a very good one if we know what to do with it."

Some suggestions that may enable individual missions to survive, hopefully to succeed in the fulfillment of God’s purpose in calling them into being:

1. Seek and support the best possible leadership for the organization. The right leader can take you where you want to go.

Find him and give him the opportunity. If he is available from within, well and good. If he is not, don’t stymie the organization and the members of it, slow their progress and stunt their growth. Find him! This is not optional, it is fundamental.

2. Inaugurate a continuous training program from the top to the bottom to lead and to learn how to be led. Develop and use satisfactory management techniques, most of which are sound biblical principles. Let us not leave to industry the skills God gives us to utilize. Groups like the Management Research Group, American Management Association and others are ready to give us the help we need. Let’s use them.

3. Conduct regular think and study sessions fully representative of the organization. No one individual can possibly have all the good ideas. We need the best God has to give us and to find it we must keep open channels of thought and expression to produce healthy exchange and helpful solutions.

4. Have clear-cut, well-defined objectives and .goals clearly understood throughout the organization. We all have personal objectives and goals we desire to reach. The organization that seeks to fit individual goals and organizational goals into mutually satisfactory progress patterns is going somewhere. People must feel their contribution is needed and meaningful. Where will your group be by 1975? Good and godly planning will help make and mold the future.

5. Provide for constant renewal of the organization and its members through freedom of expression, willingness to listen, reasonable expectation of favorable reaction.

6. Recognize that the product is the important thing, not the machine. The spread of the gospel, the establishment of the church is the reason for our being, the reason people join our organization, give us their money, pray for our success. The name, the reputation, the perpetuation of our group is incidental.

7. It is reasonably certain that the demands of the 70’s for excellence in form and function in mission organizations will dictate the disappearance of those organizations who are fearful of change and who fail to find within their ranks the leadership potential to lead them successfully. It may be that you could do together with others what neither can do alone. Keep the goal in mind, not the journey.

8. Realize that falling short of the goal in your organization means not alone failure for you, but eternal loss for those who consequently remain unreached.

Numerous lessons have been learned from the Apollo mission, some of which can be applied in our own backyard. Let’s isolate two that are especially pertinent to our effort, under God, to solve our world-sized problem.

The first is the reassuring fact that in spite of "failsafe" hardware, with billions invested in computerized and technologically superior equipment, the moment of success in Apollo 11 still depended on human, not mechanical, judgment. Forced with a landing zone of forbidding obstacles, Armstrong took control and directed a landing on the most favorable terrain. In the process, computer capacity was strained to the point of alarm, but earthbound human judgment in Houston overrode this mechanical complaint and opted against aborting the mission. Here again man proved that his judgment is still superior to any machine, no matter how well programmed and sophisticated it may be.

In our case, we are not dependent upon human judgment or capability alone, but upon the infinite knowledge and overruling providence of our God.

The second lesson has been pointed out by Fortune magazine-the mix of strategies to achieve the set objective. Never before in history have we seen the mobilization and maneuvering of the massed endeavors of scores of thousands of minds in a close-knit, mutually enhancive combination of effort. In such a framework of team effort, individual elements were working flat out to avoid the embarrassment of failure.

At this crucial point in our history, we can less and less afford to limit ourselves to routine repair of breakdowns in our individual mission and associational processes. Our purpose is not just to be a part of the system, to be a mission or a missionary. Our purpose should be to change the organization for the better. More participation is not the goal. It is possible to enter the system, adjust to it perfectly, even end up at the top-and leave us exactly where we are now. The stakes are high, the cost is great, the dangers are real, but the goal is to win and, by the grace of God, that is what I plan to do.

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