No, Virginia, not everyone is a missionary…

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Deanna

It seems in this day and age, there is much confusion regarding the definition of “missionary”.  This was recently brought to our attention once again when our young adult children returned from their weekly Bible study group having engaged in a discussion of this nature.  This particular interchange of ideas left our MKs feeling slightly agitated.  “How can they say that we are all missionaries when they are still living in the town they grew up in and we’ve had to move multiple times to multiple continents?,” or, “What about the call of God?”, and then the ever popular, “They just don’t get it!”  Sadly, the latter is usually the truth.

As we have travelled the globe training in multiple churches, we often run up against the well-intentioned misunderstanding that we ARE all missionaries.  Many are surprised to learn that the word missionary doesn’t even appear in the Bible and has therefore been oft ill-defined by well-meaning pastors who are challenging their congregations to evangelism.  These same pastors if asked if everyone is a pastor, their prompt and confident reply would be a hearty “No!”  It’s kind of ironic when you think about it.  (Having served along side my pastor husband for many years, there’s a reason for such defense–truly the work of pastoring is often quite challenging!)  Why are not all pastors?  For the same reason not all are missionaries.  If everyone is a pastor, then no one is a pastor–or a police officer, or a teacher, or a doctor, or a missionary–the list could go on.

Now you may be thinking, “So what–what difference does it make?  Doesn’t the Bible say we are to be His witnesses in all those different places?”  Herein lies the key to understanding.  The word God chose was not “missionary” but “witnesses”.  The word for witness in the Greek actually means “martyrs”, which doesn’t sound nearly as appealing as “missionary”.  The actual word that we get the concept (command) of missions is “apostle” which means “sent one”.  (NB:  please note there is a difference between the office of and spiritual gifting of apostleship–another area of confusion is some modern church circles–ah, but that’s fodder for another blog :)   If you note the listing of spiritual gifts in I Corinthians 12:28, missionary a.k.a. apostle (sent one) appears:  “And God has placed in the church first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, of helping, of guidance, and of different kinds of tongues.” Another example can be found in Ephesians 4:11, which speaks of Jesus giving the gift of specifically gifted people to His Church: “And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers,” These are Holy Spirit given and placed giftings for carrying out the work of the ministry.  For those given the gift of apostleship, they are the ones the Church sends out as “missionaries”–people who are divinely gifted and sent by God for a specific and often life-long vocational task of spreading the Gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth (usually in a cross-cultural context).

To be a missionary is not a self-appointed task.  In Biblical times, the church was to recognise the calling on a person’s life and they were to commission them (give them authority) and send them out if the call of God was recognizeable on their lives.  It seems in this day and age with the understanding that “all are missionaries”, we’ve got that a bit back to front.  Case in point, I recently heard a young lady proclaim she would like to take a “missions trip” to Korea because they play soccer and “I’d like to visit there.”  We call this missionary tourism, and it has increasingly become a problem in the Western churches.  While on one hand these exposure trips can be good, far too often teams are ill-equipped and improperly prepared to do more good than harm in the 10-days they devote to Gospel outreach.  Real missions requires a life dedicated to learning another’s culture, language and building real relationships with the goal being sharing the faith–this takes time, and much sacrifice.  Short-term trips do have the benefit of missions exposure, but they cannot replace true missionaries.  Instead, they should bring a familiarity and awareness of the missionaries in the field to better help the church back home pray for and support their front-lines workers.

I do apologise if in reading this, it ruffles your proverbial feathers, but we are in need of greater understanding of missions in the church today.  I believe much of the confusion is partly responsible for why it is so hard for missionaries today to raise much needed support both in prayer and finance without it taking many years–years in which people they’ve been called to carry the Gospel to are dying and facing a Christless eternity.  Can I just end by saying once again that we HAVE ALL been called to be His witnesses.  That’s a here and now command, whether your spiritual gift is mercy or teaching, administration or missionary.  Do I say this because as a missionary I want special recognition or treatment or just have an axe to grind?  The short answer is “no”.  I learned a long time ago through our missionary process that “Man’s goings are of the Lord, how can a man then understand his own way?” (Prov. 20:24)  I will leave you with a quote from one of my all-time favourite missionary heros:

“God is God.  If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service.  I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to….It is not the level of our spirituality that we can depend on.  It is God and nothing less than God, for the work is God’s and the call is God’s and everything is summoned by Him and to His purposes, the whole scene, the whole mess, the whole package–our bravery and our cowardice, our love and our selfishness, our strengths and our weaknesses.”   Elisabeth Elliot, 1996 epilogue “Through Gates of Splendor”

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