Mission (Christianity) - Modern Missionary Methods and Doctrines Among Conservative Protestants

Modern Missionary Methods and Doctrines Among Conservative Protestants

The Lausanne Congress of 1974, birthed a movement that supports evangelical mission among non-Christians and nominal Christians. It regards "mission" as that which is designed "to form a viable indigenous church-planting and world changing movement." This definition is motivated by a theologically imperative theme of the Bible to make God known, as outlined in the Great Commission. The definition is claimed to summarize the acts of Jesus' ministry, which is taken as a model motivation for all ministries.

This Christian missionary movement seeks to implement churches after the pattern of the first century Apostles. The process of forming disciples is necessarily social. "Church" should be understood in the widest sense, as a body of believers of Christ rather than simply a building. In this view, even those who are already culturally Christian must be "evangelized".

Church planting by cross-cultural missionaries leads to the establishment of self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating communities of believers. This is the famous "three-self" formula formulated by Henry Venn of the London Church Missionary Society in the 19th century. Cross-cultural missionaries are persons who accept church-planting duties to evangelize people outside their culture, as Christ commanded in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).

The objective of these missionaries is to give an understandable presentation of their beliefs with the hope that people will choose to following the teaching of Jesus Christ and live their lives as His disciples. As a matter of strategy, many evangelical Christians around the world now focus on what they call the "10/40 window", a band of countries between 10 and 40 degrees north latitude and reaching from western Africa through Asia. Christian missions strategist Luis Bush pinpointed the need for a major focus of evangelism in the "10/40 Window", a phrase he coined in his presentation at the missionary conference Lausanne 1989 in Manila. Sometimes referred to as the "Resistant Belt", it is an area that includes 35% of the world's land mass, 90% of the world's poorest peoples and 95% of those who have yet to hear anything about Christianity.

Modern pioneering missionary doctrines now focus on inserting a culturally adapted seed of Christian doctrines into a self-selected, self-motivated group of indigenous believers, without removing them from their culture in any way.

Modern mission techniques are sufficiently refined that within ten to fifteen years, most indigenous churches are locally pastored, managed, taught, self-supporting and evangelizing. The process can be substantially faster if a preexisting translation of the Bible and higher pastoral education are already available, perhaps left-over from earlier, less effective missions.

A key approach is to let indigenous cultural groups decide to adopt Christian doctrines and benefits, when (as in most cultures) such major decisions are normally made by groups. In this way, opinion leaders in the groups can persuade much or most of the groups to convert. When combined with training in discipleship, church planting and other modern missionary doctrine, the result is an accelerating, self-propelled conversion of large portions of the culture.

A typical modern mission is a co-operative effort by many different ministries, often including several coordinating ministries, such as the Faith2Share network, often with separate funding sources. One typical effort proceeded as follows:

1. A missionary radio group recruits, trains and broadcasts in the main dialect of the target culture's language. Broadcast content is carefully adapted to avoid syncretism yet help the Christian Gospel seem like a native, normal part of the target culture. Broadcast content often includes news, music, entertainment and education in the language, as well as purely Christian items.
2. Broadcasts might advertise programs, inexpensive radios (possibly spring-wound), and a literature ministry that sells a Christian mail-order correspondence course at nominal costs. The literature ministry is key, and is normally a separate organization from the radio ministry. Modern literature missions are shifting to web-based content where it makes sense (as in Western Europe and Japan).
3. When a person or group completes a correspondence course, they are invited to contact a church-planting missionary group from (if possible) a related cultural group. The church-planting ministry is usually a different ministry from either the literature or radio ministries. The church-planting ministry usually requires its missionaries to be fluent in the target language, and trained in modern church-planting techniques.
4. The missionary then leads the group to start a church. Churches planted by these groups are usually a group that meets in a house. The object is the minimum organization that can perform the required character development and spiritual growth. Buildings, complex ministries and other expensive items are mentioned, but deprecated until the group naturally achieves the size and budget to afford them. The crucial training is how to become a Christian (by faith in Jesus Christ) and then how to set up a church (meet to study the Bible, and perform communion and worship), usually in that order.
5. A new generation of churches is created, and the growth begins to accelerate geometrically. Frequently, daughter churches are created only a few months after a church's creation. In the fastest-growing Christian movements, the pastoral education is "pipelined", flowing in a just-in-time fashion from the central churches to daughter churches. That is, planting of churches does not wait for the complete training of pastors.

The most crucial part of church planting is selection and training of leadership. Classically, leadership training required an expensive stay at a seminary, a Bible college. Modern church planters deprecate this because it substantially slows the growth of the church without much immediate benefit. Modern mission doctrines replace the seminary with programmed curricula or (even less expensive) books of discussion questions, and access to real theological books. The materials are usually made available in a major trading language in which most native leaders are likely to be fluent. In some cases, the materials can be adapted for oral use.

It turns out that new pastors' practical needs for theology are well addressed by a combination of practical procedures for church planting, discussion in small groups, and motivated Bible-based study from diverse theological texts. As a culture's church's wealth increases, it will naturally form classic seminaries on its own.

Another related mission is Bible translation. The above-mentioned literature has to be translated. Missionaries actively experiment with advanced linguistic techniques to speed translation and literacy. Bible translation not only speeds a church's growth by aiding self-training, but it also assures that Christian information becomes a permanent part of the native culture and literature. Some ministries also use modern recording techniques to reach groups with audio that could not be soon reached with literature.