What’s Holding up World Evangelization?: The Mission Agencies

by Jim Reapsome

Something about the approaching arrival of the 21st century has sparked a plethora of new world evangelization initiatives. Actually, according to researcher David Barrett, America’s 200th birthday in 1976 was the catalyst for the launching of not less than 11 new plans. Since then, another 183 have been announced.

Something about the approaching arrival of the 21st century has sparked a plethora of new world evangelization initiatives. Actually, according to researcher David Barrett, America’s 200th birthday in 1976 was the catalyst for the launching of not less than 11 new plans. Since then, another 183 have been announced.

Keep in mind that Barrett categorizes 11 varieties of plans—everything from visions and scenarios to master blueprints and schedules. His inclusive definition enables one to appreciate both the scope and the intensity with which Christians of all stripes are pursuing world evangelization.

(His forthcoming book charts 731 plans to reach the world, A.D. 30 through 1991. He calls this "an immense torrent" of plans.)

At the same time, Barrett catalogues "100 reasons for 400 failures" in the past. Again the scope of reasons staggers the reader: not only inadequate planning, but embezzlement, corruption, disease, personality clashes, power hunger, and one that every mission leader faces all the time—Murphy’s Law.

My own approach has not been encyclopedic. I’ve asked a number of executives and missiologists to tell me what they think are the barriers to world evangelization. Granted, we have the vision to reach the world by the year 2000, but what are the major stumbling blocks?

They gave me about 40 different ones, which I have put together under five headings: (1) the state of the church; (2) mission agency structures; (3) mission agency practices; (4) religious and political opposition; (5) the money cost.

In the April issue, I looked at barriers within the so-called sending churches. In this article, I want to report the barriers to world evangelization that I found within mission agency structures. This critique aims to be helpful; it comes from our friends. Readers need to ponder it in that light. This is not a blanket condemnation of mission agencies, but an inside consideration of some of the barriers we must face and then remove.

At a time when a ripple of networking has gently nudged the missions establishment, apparently we are still pretty much like a cluster of isolated lifeboats, each one struggling alone against a monstrous wave of mounting unbelief around the world. We spend more time and money than ever before sitting around conference tables and filling out questionnaires, but our organizational isolation is astounding.

Not infrequently in my travels do I encounter a harried executive struggling with his staff to hammer out some policy statement. When I do, I gently ask if they know that such and such a mission across town has just completed a major research task on this very same problem. Too often, it seems, we are unnecessarily doing the same basic policy tasks, without benefiting from what others have already discovered.

Missions agencies discuss computer data base links, which will help to make research more accessible and more productive in agency decision making. This year the first steps are being taken by a group of some 20 agencies to make available basic data about fields and specific needs to be met overseas. This should help to avoid overlapping efforts, but according to Barrett’s research, new plans usually are conceived independently without prior consultation with other mission bodies.

On the other hand, new agencies with their own "calls" and agendas proliferate like rabbits. The number in North America alone approaches 1,000, to say nothing of those springing up in Korea, Nigeria, Brazil, and so on.

They will continue to breed as long as some entrepreneur finds a unique "need" that he alone can meet. They will survive only as long as the present economic and political climate permits. The era since the end of World War II has been unique in the history of missions. The Western churches have been free to educate, promote, recruit, and build their missionary enterprises because of unparalleled wealth and freedom from government restrictions. In a word, we have not been forced to cooperate by either political or economic constraints.

"BUILD YOUR OWN EMPIRE"
The problem is much more deep seated than the lack of cooperation and coordination. Generally, the prevailing "build your own empire" mentality means that you have to do just that to survive, which leads to jockeying for power and position, and jealous guarding of funding structures and supporting constituencies. These things in turn produce duplication and waste, plus astounding confusion in the churches and the Christian public.

One leader admitted to me, "We will never get the job done without a deeper level of fellowship in the harvest force, and a spirit of generosity and sharing."

In a sense, we follow the pattern of our supporting churches: we operate as if we are the only one doing the job in our area. Before we can talk about cooperation with another agency, we first have to admit that they are there and doing an acceptable job.

But until we learn to cooperate, we will go on as we have in the past, doing the same work, almost in competition with one another.

DEVELOPING PARTNERSHIPS
Increasingly, churches and mission agencies and national fellowships in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe are forcing us to face up to duplication and competition. They see it as a carbon copy of the way U.S. businesses often operate. These church and mission leaders wish we in the West would figure out how to be partners, rather than dominators.

They wonder why we lack patience and faith in developing partnerships with their churches and mission agencies. They see us consumed by a kind of materialism that requires U.S. business organization and accounting, rather than being willing to take chances so that they can learn to grow, even by making mistakes.

Consequently, fledgling agencies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America seem doomed to copy the North American mission structures of the last 100 years. Rather than continued dependence on Western structures, they need encouragement to do some daring experiments.

The time is ripe for bold structural initiatives. Changing conditions in North Africa, the Middle East, and China require a new mission agency mentality. Take China, for example. One veteran analyst told me, "Even as some innovative approaches are being used in China, everyone is still waiting for the day when that country will be ‘open’ to the gospel, so we can go back and do business as usual."

"Business as usual" will not reach the world by the year 2000, if ever. Changes are coming and they promise better things. One mission executive reported, "It is exciting to see what has happened in the last decade, as Asians have become part of our mission. We are discussing how Africans can become foreign in their witness. The problem is how to achieve this without weakening or damaging the churches in less-developed countries, and without creating some kind of economic imperialism. Perhaps the biggest problem is economic."

THE NEED FOR TRUST
Sometimes, in our eagerness to do better, we attack moribund structures first, or we plan more consultations and more data bases to improve communication between ourselves. Certainly, mission agencies need to consult and plan together, but, as one of my respondents noted, "We have to learn to trust the other guy."

Trust is essential, along with generosity in giving credit to others. We are tied in knots by, "What will the folks back home say if we don’t produce something as big as the other mission?" Our public relations and fund raising efforts demand our own success stories, not giving credit to some other agency.

Increasingly, when mission agencies seem impervious to change, like the Rock of Gibraltar, it may be because of a traditional hesitancy to invite in outside assistance. The customary put-down is "Oh, he doesn’t know anything about missions." Or, "He doesn’t know how our mission works."

Opportunities for change and growth and increasing effectiveness in world evangelization may come in measure as we are willing to forsake tradition and trust some outsiders to help us to find solutions and better ways of getting the job done. The history of missions is replete with examples of men and women who didn’t "fit" the organization and who then went on to hit paydirt with new strategies. George Verwer and Operation Mobilization is one example.

One executive explained, "We don’t want to hear from those ‘experts’ because we really don’t think their suggestions fit our plans. We are afraid to expose ourselves to self-studies, or comparative studies, because we don’t want to look bad. There are those nagging questions we don’t even want to ask, like, ‘What exactly are we doing?’ or, ‘Where exactly are all the funds going?’ or, ‘What would happen to world evangelism if we shut down?’"

HONESTY REQUIRED
Honesty is tough for an agency that has to impress in order to raise money. It’s tough for people who have committed themselves to doing things a certain way. But if we are to improve in world evangelization, agencies must work hard to find honest answers.

Part of our unwillingness to raise hard questions and risk structural change arises out of fear. Not just fear of change, or fear of our constituencies, but fear that we face such horrendous world problems that in the end we won’t make a difference anyway. Mission agencies, above all, should be ready to change as the world changes and that includes rethinking our organizations and our approaches.

However, one missiologist finds that some mission agencies change too often, chasing one strategy after another like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. "Overall," he says, the bright side is that most missions are much more sensitive to the need for effective strategies than in the past. On the other hand, the tendency to ‘go it alone’ and ‘do it our way’ still persists. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of change in that regard."

To overcome this internal barrier to world evangelization, those whom I surveyed suggest we need to: (1) talk with each other; (2) appreciate one another’s ministries; (3) admit we are not alone and cannot do the job by ourselves; (4) trust one another and not question motives; (5) divide the task and cooperate in research. Then we can begin to adjust priorities, strategies, and structures at home and overseas.

In the third article in this series we plan to look at mission practices—goals, methods, tactics, strategies.

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