MISSIONARY RISK: Counting the Cost
STATEMENT
The Great Commission involves taking up our cross and following Jesus in laying down our lives so that others might be saved. Preaching the gospel to the hardest to reach often requires sacrifice. While being willing to incur risk, we need to exercise biblical wisdom. Biblical wisdom includes counting the cost, Christian freedom, and confidence in the sovereignty of God. As we live in an age that idolizes comfort and safety, we should remember the biblical honor due to those who suffer for the Name and be willing to follow their Christlike example.
Sending churches, agencies, field churches, and missionaries should have a robust theology of risk developed before the moment of crisis. In crisis management, priority should be given to the integrity of the field ministry.
Article Written by Tom RobertsFrom a biblical perspective, it may seem strange to identify churches planting churches as the aim of missions. After all, wasn’t Jesus’s missionary command to make disciples of all the nations (Matthew 28:19–20)? Doesn’t he tell his followers that they will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8)? So, shouldn’t the aim be to share the gospel and make disciples, not necessarily plant churches? And how do we know this mission was given to the whole church, not just individuals?
Churches Planting Churches
The New Testament reveals the church is God’s means of carrying out his mission. Take Saul (Paul) and Barnabas, for example. When they went on their first missionary journey, it wasn’t just a personal endeavor–the Holy Spirit called the church at Antioch to send them out (Acts 13:2-3). Later, they returned to that same church to report everything God had done through them (Acts 14:27-28). The church was involved from beginning to end, showing that missions is not just an individual task but a community effort.
But God not only has a “church for his mission;” “the revelatory activity of God (and those he sends) is to create and redeem a people for communion.”[1] God’s mission is to create the church. The church appears as the fruit of mission throughout the New Testament. Jesus himself assumed his followers would be part of a local church (Matthew 18:17). Everywhere the apostles went, churches were established. Churches were “strengthened and grew in number” through the apostles’ ministry (Acts 16:5). The New Testament letters reinforce the local church’s centrality to spiritual growth and maturity. Believers are called to gather regularly, encourage one another, and serve one another, all of which God uses to mature disciples into the likeness of Christ (Hebrews 10:24–25; 1 Corinthians 12:12–27; Ephesians 4:11–16). If we would be biblical, our understanding of what it means to be a “disciple” and to “make disciples” should be church-shaped.
If making disciples is inherently church-shaped, then the mission cannot be fulfilled apart from planting churches. Discipleship and the church are inseparable because the church is the God-ordained context where believers mature in Christ. Therefore, churches planting churches cannot be an afterthought—it is essential for making disciples as envisioned in the New Testament.
History of Church Planting Philosophies
Church planting philosophies have looked different throughout missions history. During the monastic period, monasteries became hubs of evangelism and learning, spreading Christianity into rural areas. This was true not only in medieval Europe but also among the Church of the East as Nestorian monks traveled with traders along the silk trade routes deep into Asia, forming Christian communities in major trade centers along the way. In the colonial period, Christianity spread through European expansion. Agents of both Roman Catholic and Protestant empires engaged indigenous populations using colonial settlements as a base (though some, such as German Pietists, were less willing to become entangled in political affairs as they went out for the Name).
The Modern Missionary Movement saw the professionalization of church planting as missionary societies sent laborers even to areas of the world where the gospel had not yet reached. Though some emphases—such as translating the Bible into local languages—hugely benefited long-term church planting efforts, two developments stifled a focus on church planting: paternalistic control of the work by the missionaries and missionary societies and the establishment of schools and hospitals. The Indigenous Movement, arising in the mid-nineteenth century, worked to correct the first problem by empowering local churches to be self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. As for institutions of social uplift, they no doubt provided many good and needed services, but they came to displace a focus on evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. This was especially true as the “social gospel” began to replace a biblical gospel amid the rise of Protestant liberalism.
The Church Growth Movement (CGM) of the mid-twentieth century worked to return evangelism and church planting to the center of the missionary task and away from resource-consuming schools, hospitals, and missionary compounds. But this movement also introduced a new reliance on burgeoning social sciences like sociology and anthropology to guide strategy. Above all, the CGM was concerned with measurable growth and defining the methods that caused such growth. In the 1990s, new church planting strategies like Disciple-Making Movements (DMM) and Church Planting Movements (CPM) emphasized rapidly reproducing both disciples and churches. These approaches typically use a more relaxed definition of what a church is, simplify discipleship to focus on obeying a few key commands of Jesus, and encourage quickly identified new leaders to quickly identify and start training leaders themselves. They also stress making every aspect of church life easy to reproduce, and encourage allowing all members to take on roles typically overseen by church leaders, such as administering baptism. The goal is to speed things up and create a multiplying effect, leading to a rapid church planting movement.
While all these approaches in the history of missions can offer us insights into church planting, we are not free to plant churches simply based on what we think works. Nor are we free to redefine what a church is to make them easier to plant. A common catchphrase in missions today among some movement methodology proponents is “plant the church that is,” meaning missionaries should not worry too much whether a church plant meets the biblical standard of what a church should be, especially at the beginning. Our watchword should instead be: “Plant the church as it is defined by Scripture.” A church that disregards Christ’s guidance for churches does not deserve to bear his name. The example of the original apostolic era in Acts and the apostles’ teachings in their letters must guide us more than the latest tool or idea borrowed from sociology, even when it claims to be based on Scripture. True churches are not manufactured through clever techniques but established by the power of the Word and the Spirit of the living God.
Characteristics of a Biblical Church Plant
What is a church according to the Bible? A biblical church includes several key elements. First, the church must be formed of born-again believers who commit to one another as members of the Body of Christ and recognize themselves as a church (Matt. 18:15-17, Acts, 2:42, 1 Cor. 12:14-26, Eph. 4:15-16, Heb. 10:24-25). Second, the church expresses this commitment, in part, through the right administration of the ordinances—baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These symbols function like wedding rings in a marriage. Baptism represents the entry point into the visible, local Body of Christ. By receiving baptism, the believer says, “I identify with Jesus and his people!”(Rom. 6:3-5). By conferring baptism, the church affirms the believer’s confession as authentic and takes on the responsibility of caring for the new member (Matt. 18:18-20, 28:18-20). In the Lord’s Supper, these commitments of the individual believer to the church and vice versa are continually renewed (1 Cor. 10:16-17, 11:17-34).
Third, the church must proclaim the true gospel and uphold the right preaching and teaching of the Word of God (Rom. 10:14-17, Gal 1:6-9). The message of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is the foundation of the church’s life and mission. Without this central proclamation, a gathering of people cannot be called a biblical church.[2] Biblical preaching and teaching shapes the church’s doctrine and practice, guiding believers toward faithful living as disciples of Jesus.
These are the essential elements of a church, but they amount to a minimalist definition. Missionaries, churches, and church leaders must refuse to settle for this bare minimum. The apostles did not settle for it. The balance of the New Testament, from the epistles to the opening chapters of Revelation, testifies to the apostles’ longing to see the churches they had planted attain the fullness of spiritual health—being led by faithful and qualified elders and deacons, guarding the gospel and the church’s doctrine, exercising discipline, abiding in prayer, caring for one another, and engaging in mission. Likewise, missionaries today should cultivate a desire to mature into all the blessings of a healthy church in the congregations they plant.
Key Concerns in Church Planting
1. Speed vs. Health
Sometimes, valuing biblical church health seems to work against speed and the urgency of the missionary task. It would be quicker and easier to artificially limit the size of a church to a believing husband, wife, and their teenage son to avoid getting bogged down in the complications that come with a larger body, enabling the church to reproduce more quickly. While two or three are all that are necessary for a church (Matt. 18:20), this assumes a lean, underfed church will run further and faster than a well-fed one. Church planting would be quicker and easier if we trained an army of new believers with basic skills to become church planters and offered them financial incentives to plant churches. But how would we know if these leaders were truly biblically qualified for such work without taking time to observe their growth and faithfulness?
Consider specifically the importance of developing leaders for church planting. When our family served as missionaries in Central Asia for most of a decade, I gave much—perhaps even most—of my attention to leadership development. In our Muslim context, it was not uncommon to see up to three-fourths of those who professed faith and even many who had been discipled for long periods turn away from the faith, often buckling under the weight of persecution and social pressure. It often felt in our experience that Jesus’ parable of the sower and the soils got the ratio exactly right! Leadership development could be equally challenging. A national partner and I spent nearly two years investing in one brother who showed great promise to serve as an elder or a church planter. Out of nowhere, this brother had a psychological break during which he chased me and my national partner down the street, hurling large rocks past our heads. Many more of our efforts to train leaders ended with similar disappointment.
These setbacks took place in our ministry, which some would criticize for moving too slowly. However, imagine the consequences of minimizing the biblical qualifications for elders, overly simplifying training, or failing to walk with potential leaders long enough to observe their character. Cutting corners could create even more setbacks. How would such an approach help young churches grow strong enough to guard the gospel and make faithful disciples? Introducing financial incentives to speed things up could further compound the problems. During British colonial rule in India, the government offered locals a bounty for every dead cobra. Though the strategy initially met with success, eventually, locals began breeding cobras to cash in on the reward.[3] Incentivizing under-qualified church planters and leaders could produce large numbers of churches quickly, but how many of those churches will endure the testing fire of the Last Day (1 Corinthians 3:12–13)?
2. Cultural Norms vs. Biblical Commands
Contextualization serves as another important concern in church planting. Some missionaries confuse the role of contextualization, making a contextualized church their primary aim in church planting. They modify biblical language, like removing reference to Jesus as the Son of God, in an effort not to offend believers from a Muslim background. Or they modify biblical values, allowing caste distinctions to take precedence over biblical qualifications for church leadership. A gospel church reflecting local cultural forms in a new context is a beautiful expression of how God is acting in the world to redeem the diversity of his image-bearers. But, from a biblical perspective, it isn’t the act of contextualization to a local culture that is sacred, but the gospel itself. The goal of contextualization is not to create or preserve a Christian expression of the local culture as a kind of museum piece but to express the gospel and the Christian faith so that it will be both understandable and relatable to those who inhabit that culture.[4]
The missionary’s main role in contextualization, then, has to do with cross-cultural communication of the gospel. Like Paul in Acts 17, a missionary looks to understand and evaluate the culture and then seeks to communicate the message of the gospel using language that is both understandable and relatable. Learning the local language and adapting one’s lifestyle to both surface and hidden aspects of culture, such as dress and customs, are a part of this process.
When it comes to church forms in church planting, however, local believers should take care of most of the contextualization, and, as cultural insiders, they can do a better job of it than the missionary anyway. As an ambassador from the global church, a missionary can indeed make valuable contributions to discussions about the contextualization of church forms. Still, his aim should not mainly be a contextualized church. Instead, the missionary should make his aim to plant a biblical church, embodying the characteristics outlined above, even as he provides wisdom to locals to help ensure their efforts at contextualization do not lapse into syncretism—the blending of Christianity with other religious beliefs and practices.
A clear understanding of the biblical goals undergirding contextualization is crucial to rightly evaluating the health of a church planted cross-culturally. Missionaries can err in two directions: treating their own culture as superior or, on the other hand, leaving everything up to the local culture. The first mistake—colonial paternalism—happens when missionaries confuse their own cultural preferences with biblical culture and impose every aspect of a foreign way of doing church in a new place. The second mistake—hyper-indigeneity—happens when missionaries imagine they can just drop the seed of the gospel into a new context and walk away, assuming a healthy church will grow on its own without any further guidance. Neither approach resonates with how the apostles planted and cared for the early churches. Neither help establish biblically robust, faithful churches, and in fact, often hinder the work.
The apostles were both willing to leave when the time came (Romans 15:23) and to remain and put things in order when needed (Acts 19:9-10). We read about the apostles’ ongoing concern for the churches in their letters. Likewise, missionaries play a valuable role in the churches they help plant as they teach and model faithful discipleship, leadership, and membership. Recognizing the legacy of colonialist missions in the past, good missionaries participate in local churches with humility, downplaying any attempt to exalt their status as “experts” just because they are foreigners. They seek to raise up local leaders as soon as possible and insist that any role in church leadership should be seen as transitional. At the same time, such missionaries generally should not pass on opportunities to teach by their example what it means to be faithful church members, deacons, or even elders—provided they meet the qualifications.
A fellow missionary friend came to serve among an unreached people in Central Asia years ago. He was convinced that methods emphasizing oral Bible storytelling and keeping missionaries in the background, away from direct, visible ministry, would lead to rapidly multiplying churches. But he grew concerned upon realizing that his partners in Central Asia had been trying similar methods for a decade without seeing a single church planted. His approach entirely changed as he became convinced of the New Testament’s teaching about healthy churches. Recently, the church he helped plant in a place where there previously was no church celebrated as it installed its first local elder. The church has two dozen members and continues growing even as it aspires to plant more churches among its people group.
Conclusion
Despite what church planting gurus may say, and the temptations missionaries will face to cut corners, a concern for planting healthy churches cannot inhibit gospel advance. Instead, a concern for healthy churches is the surest path to gospel advance. That’s because healthy churches, by definition, not only have a white-hot burden for the mission of advancing the gospel through church planting, they also have a zeal to refuse compromise on anything the Bible speaks to—from the nature of the church to the content of the gospel—which guards the gospel from heresy downstream.
As we continue the work of missions today, we must resist the temptation to settle for expedient methods or redefinitions of the church that lack biblical depth. With care and skill, may we commit to planting churches that are faithful to Scripture, embodying Christ’s design for his people (1 Cor. 3:10). By doing so, we participate in God’s mission of redemption, where the gospel is proclaimed, disciples are made, and churches—grounded on the truth of God’s Word—are multiplied for the glory of God. May this be the legacy of our missionary efforts: churches planting churches that stand on the Last Day, having brought the transforming power of the gospel to every tribe, tongue, and nation.
footnotes
[1] Justin A. Schell, The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church, Short Studies in Biblical Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024). Cf. Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 62.
[2] See GCC article “The Priority of Proclamation”
[3] Horst Siebert, Der Kobra-Effekt: Wie man Irrwege der Wirtschaftspolitik vermeidet (Munich: Piper, 2001).
[4] See GCC article “Culture through a Biblical Lens”
