MISSIONARIES WHO STAY FOR THE LONG-HAUL
STATEMENT
A good long-term missionary is someone who is elder- or deacon-qualified*, who joyfully submits to the oversight of a local church, and whose ongoing service contributes to the work of planting or strengthening churches in a cross-cultural context. (*1 Peter 5:1-5, Titus 1:6-9, 1 Timothy 3:1-13)
Article Written by Daniel Spandler-DavisonWe were in the middle of a family crisis. Our six-year-old son required surgery, a nerve-wracking situation in any place but especially in a foreign land. As we drove to the hospital, the wife of a missionary couple sent us an urgent message: “Call Jake immediately.” What made the text so alarming was that this couple knew we were on our way to the hospital. They knew what we had going on that day! Yet, in the midst of our family crises, they launched a flare into the sky, calling out for help.
I wondered if Jake was in danger. Had he fallen morally? Was he hurt?
Jake and I met a few hours later in the lobby of the hospital, my son was fine, but it was clear Jake was not – he was in the middle of a mental breakdown. He and his wife had been through trauma after trauma that had never been dealt with.
But here is the real problem: their relationship with their sending church was distant, their team was scattered, and they had never submitted themselves to the care and oversight of a field church. Since I was not Jake’s pastor, I could wrap my arms around this wounded brother, give advice, and offer prayer, but I had no authority.
Jake and his wife ended up having to return home after years of language learning and building relational capital; it’s a tragedy.
Unfortunately, this tragedy plays out repeatedly on the mission field. Good missionaries have to leave the field because of a lack of adequate oversight and support.
God’s design for the church, both local and global, is to use weak and imperfect instruments to build it. The reality is every missionary remains a broken human being, in need of spiritual care and oversight, and often prone to wander. Good missionaries need good churches! Missionaries are not a special category of Christians who no longer require the ordinary means of grace.
The local church is the beginning, means, and end of the Great Commission, yet countless missionaries and sending churches are confused about the church's role in missions. It’s common for men and women to be sent without oversight or meaningful care provided by a sending or field church. They may be engaged in good works, but they are not engaged with the body of Christ.
As we have seen in the GCC article, “Missions and Missionaries: Are We Speaking the Same Language?”, the Great Commission was given by Jesus, and it is a commission rooted in the local church. This command has no geographical limits; it applies to all nations. This command also has no expiration date. Jesus says we will be engaged in the task of making disciples of all nations until the end of the age. This is as long-term as it gets! We know the command is deeply rooted in the church because we are told not only to evangelize but also to baptize and to teach. The scope of the command implies a long-term and intentional effort.
All Christians are tasked with making disciples of all nations. All means all. Some Christians will be given a special assignment to go and make disciples among a particular people and culture that is not their own. This is not an assignment that can be carried out in a few weeks. It’s a long-term, often whole-life commitment. So, what does an aspiring long-term missionary need to have in place to be a long-term missionary?
A good long-term missionary is one who has been sent to cross linguistic and cultural borders and commit a significant period their life to the noble work of building, planting, and strengthening the church of Jesus Christ. Identifying, sending, and supporting long-term career missionaries must, therefore, be handled carefully and diligently.
Unqualified, untested, or unsuitable men and women have been sent; some have not been adequately supported, and others engage in un-strategic work. Many disregard their need for the fellowship and oversight of a local church once they get to the field, so tragedies like Jake and his family get played out over and over again.
Most problems start at home. So, let’s start there. Before he a person becomes a missionary, a missionary must be a member of a local church.
The church must see and know them. The love the church has for this member should be so great that it truly pains them to see them go. The church sees their desire for the unreached; they have witnessed their heart for evangelism; they watch them disciple other believers, they see a godly and humble character. But before valuable resources are spent, the church must ask what markers give us confidence they should be sent and supported over the long term?
A Long-Term Missionary is Elder- or Deacon-Qualified
The Bible gives us examples in Paul, Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, and Titus. All five men were elder-qualified and clear examples of those who were set apart and sent out. On the one hand, as Don Carson says, the notable thing about the list of requirements for elders is that it’s not that notable – just the ordinary expectations we would have for a godly Christian, with the one exception that elders can teach.
This is critical for missionaries to understand. Going into the world involves not only making disciples and baptizing them, but also teaching them all things that Jesus has commanded (Matt. 28:19-20). Teaching is foundational both to planting and to strengthening local churches. The breadth of this teaching responsibility (all things) requires someone who is able both to teach sound doctrine and refute error (Titus 1:9). Through the teaching of God’s Word, the missionary will direct believers in what they are to believe and how they are to live and thus he should meet the qualifications of an elder.
Most of all, missionaries are sent out by a local church to plant local cross-cultural churches. If the church is the beginning and the end of the missionary enterprise, then the qualifications of a missionary should be rooted in God’s design for the church and assessed by the church. Think of it this way: the church has just two biblical offices: elders and deacons. The qualifications of elder and deacon are clearly laid out in scripture in Titus 1:5–9 and 1 Timothy 3:8–13. Since these two offices are concerned with the proper care and shepherding of God’s church, and since missionaries are raising elders and deacons for the churches they plant, career missionaries must possess these biblical qualifications.
Furthermore, planting and strengthening churches also require ministerial management skills. The long-term career missionary will have to lead people through the process of trusting in Christ, baptism, covenanting together as a church, functioning as members in the church, and much more. The skill of management is requisite for elders (1 Tim. 3:4-5).
The work of planting and strengthening churches also involves being an example for others to imitate (1 Pet. 5:3). The long-term career missionary must be above reproach (1 Tim. 3:2), an example of Christ-likeness, through which others can learn how to live a life pleasing to God (2 Tim. 3:10; 1 Cor. 11:1; Heb. 13:7). Through example, the long-term career missionary wins the respect of those he serves.
Indeed, some missionaries are not engaged in regular public teaching. Some serve in a support role. These personnel might be assigned the critical task of managing the many temporal affairs of mission work, such as visa support, ensuring the team complies with government regulations, and ministry logistics. In 1 Timothy 3:12, Paul states that deacons must be able to manage their own households well. This is because deacons manage the temporal matters of the church. Deacons ensure that everything is done decently and in order and in such a way that the teaching of God’s Word is not hindered but advanced. Long-term career missionary support personnel will normally need to make similar contributions, so they should have the same gifting and exhibit the same qualifications as deacons.
Regardless of one’s view on women deacons, women missionaries should also fit the qualifications of deacons as they will be engaging in appropriate ministry as noted in Titus 2:3 5. They will evangelize women on the field, teach women what is good, and train younger women how to live. They will also assist the men in many of their labors.
Finally, long-term career missionaries need real pre-field experience as elders or deacons or, at the very least, to have received substantial mentoring before they are sent. Serving overseas, especially with the added pressure of learning a new language and culture, puts missionaries in high-pressure situations. If a missionary has never been tested when they have a strong support network, the hardships they will face make failure on the field all the more likely. Ministry at home is invaluable in assessing a missionary candidate’s potential for long-term fruitfulness.
A Long-Term Missionary Lives in Joyful Submission to a Local Church
Paul and Barnabus were elders, and Christ commanded them to go, make disciples, baptize, and teach. Yet, wherever we see these men serving, they do so in joyful submission to a local church. After their first missionary journey, for example, Paul and Barnabas returned to Antioch to report in.
"And from there they sailed to Antioch, where they had been commended to the grace of God for the work that they had fulfilled. And when they arrived and gathered the church together, they declared all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they remained no little time with the disciples." (Acts 14:6-28)
Unfortunately, many today call themselves missionaries, serving in hard places, but for whatever reason have never truly submitted themselves to a church, either on the field or a sending church. Certainly, there will be times of transition when the church that cares for the missionary is their sending church, but the hope is that the field church offers primary oversight and care.
At times, the church is at fault. A missionary couple in the country in which I used to serve had to return home after their marriage disintegrated. Their two young children witnessed their parents’ marriage fall apart and their home being taken from them. I’m convinced this trauma could have been avoided if this couple had joyfully submitted themselves to a local church. Yet sadly, their sending church never insisted on their being a part of a field church.
A long-term career missionary needs to joyfully submit to a local church for their own protection and for the integrity of their gospel witness. If they fail to submit to a church joyfully, they communicate to those they disciple that the church is optional.
An unwillingness to submit to a local church is entirely incompatible with being a missionary. As Paul shows us with his deep love for the local church and a joyful submission to it.
Missionaries are fallen and fallible and susceptible to deception. They are capable of falling into grievous sin. They need the church, just like every Christian needs the church. Accordingly, missionaries need to be known and cared for by a local church to sustain their service on the field for the long term.
The missionary endeavor is not an individual pursuit. It’s entrusted to the church.
Long-Term Missionaries Contribute to Planting or Strengthening Churches
So, what should a long-term career missionary do?
There are many noble services Christians can provide in cross-cultural situations. However, over the long haul, missionaries need to plant and strengthen churches in a cross-cultural context. Once there are churches in an area that have reached a certain level of maturity and the service of the “missionary” in that particular place is no longer necessary, there is cause for celebration. The missionary has done the best thing they could do in the world!
At the same time long-term career missionary needs to be ready to move on when the time comes to avoid creating an unhealthy dependence that inhibits an indigenous church’s growth.. Again, we see this modeled in Scripture as Paul moved to new frontiers after he had planted churches and ensured they were in order and well shepherded. As he wrote to the church at Rome, “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation” (Romans 15:20).
Timothy is a product of Paul’s missionary endeavor and his co-laborer. Acts 16 states that Timothy was a disciple known by the believers in Lystra and Iconium. They sent him out to join Paul and Silas in their missionary efforts. Again, we see a man who was known, loved, and thought well of by the community of believers, so he was sent out and supported by them. Later, Paul instructed Timothy to remain in Ephesus to teach and shepherd the disciples there.
Timothy’s endeavors were always tethered to the local church. In Timothy, we see the model of a long-term career missionary. He’s biblically qualified, tested, and joyfully submitted to and serving the local church. He also bears much fruit. May our churches send out and support many such servants, for God's glory and the nations' joy.
So in conclusion, we see that if missionaries are to be long-term, they must be elder-qualified, joyfully submitted to a local church, and have a clear-eyed commitment to church planting. Does that seem obvious? Perhaps it does, but given how many suffer because they forsake these three obvious, biblical, principles it calls for serious commitment to these principles on the part of sending churches, field churches and missionaries.
