Dan's Thoughts

Vision #19 - August 30, 2006

Next week, I am planning to visit Ecuador for the first time in thirty years for a family reunion. I will visit the places I knew as a teenager and see a lot of old friends. I will eat fresh papaya for breakfast, cerviche for lunch, jugo de mora for a mid afternoon snack and corvina with mote and fried platanos for dinner.

I am remembering the old cobblestone streets of colonial Quito that I knew as a child. However, I am told to expect a modern highway system and first class hotels. Things have changed since I last saw the old Inca capital.

Well, it’s a different world everywhere. However, many churches seem not to realize it.

Those great missions’ pioneers, the Dubbey Brothers, once sang a song with a prophetic lyric that says all that needs to be said about how missions has changed. In their song, Takin’ It To The Streets, they said, “What was over there is over here.”

When I was growing up, what was here and what was over there were very different things! Most of us knew nothing about what was over there and didn’t really care.

As I grew older, our little denomination started trying to learn how to become obedient to the great commission. We had been an extremely provincial people, having risen from the lower classes of American culture in the early twentieth century. Most of our leaders had been raised in rural settings. They had little experience with foreign languages or with world travel. Their tastes were simple, their reading limited and their formal education modest. As the men who returned from the Second World War and from Korea began to assume the leadership, the denomination began to think seriously about planting churches in other nations. Their desire began as a moderate shift though because at first; missions meant sending white, English-speaking Americans out to establish (and to permanently lead) churches around the globe.

Several things happened that forever changed that picture of missions however.

1. Missionary children grew up viewing the world from a perspective very different than that of their parents, and especially different from that of their fellow believers in America.

2. People whom the missionaries had converted in other nations began moving to America.

3. Most nations began to develop Christian leaders from among their own ethnic and linguistic communities.

4. Technology made it possible for people to communicate between nations with one another instantly, whereas when I was a child, communication required months.

5. Missionaries began going out from many of the world’s nations. Some of them now come to the United States in order to start churches in our backyard. (That’s not rare by the way, it happens all the time.)

All of these things have provoked enormous changes in the way we now work to spread the gospel.

In my opinion, some of the most effective use of missionary money and, training and strategy involves reaching the ethnic communities in our own cities. If we win a Kurdish family here and disciple them, they can reach out to family in Northern Iraq a bit more effectively than what Americans can do at present! If we make friends with a Chinese student today and win him to the Lord, he may well lead a muli million dollar company in Hunan tomorrow that becomes a means of funding the work of God there.

Before I went to Ecuador in the late sixties, I didn’t know a single Ecuadorian. I had rarely heard the Spanish language. I had never even heard of Quechua, the other great language of the Andes. The day my family arrived in Quito, we had to search for someone to speak English so we could find another missionary lady. Then we got down to work, trying to learn Spanish. Years past, and we became effective enough to raise up some churches. Of course, it was when the Ecuadorian pastors began to mature that things exploded.

I am delighted and proud with all that has been done to advance the cause of Christ through American Missionaries. There are still many of them, effective and wonderful servants of God, working around the world. However, where in years past only a few could go and learn a language in order to do missions work, now, any Christian can become an effective missionary. Our lives are filled with opportunities. Most of us know an Indian nurse, a Chinese student or a South American computer engineer. We are all surrounded with Mexican and Central American construction workers. They all need the Lord and they all want friends. Being friendly to immigrants opens up their hearts to hear the words of God. When they do, they often respond. When they respond, they often tell the story to their family and friends in the old country. When that happens, American believers who have never been outside the countries often get an invitation to go help a new community of believers understand the gospel. That makes them missionaries by any definition.

It’s a great way to take advantage of the fact that “what was over there is now over here.”

Dan