When my children were in their early teens, they went on a couple of choir trips along with the youth group of the largest conservative church in the Austrian city in which we lived. One of the songs they learned was universally experienced by the kids as ghastly, but the choir director loved it. (Though a German-speaking church, it was fashionable at the time to sing many songs in English.) The tune is straight out of the 1950s, and the lyrics are as follows:
Be a missionary every day! (clap 4x)
Tell the world that Jesus is the way!
Be it in the town or country or a busy avenue
Africa or Asia, the task is up to YOU!
So, be a missionary every day! (clap 4x)
Tell the world that Jesus is the way!
The Lord is soon returning, there is no time to lose, so
Be a missionary, God’s own emissary
Be a missionary today!
I can’t even begin to tell you on how many levels I abhor this song. Quite apart from the infantile circus-like tune, the required clapping and cringe-worthy choreography, I object quite strongly to the inferred theology behind it, especially when inflicted upon children.
The inferences are that Hell is the default setting for anyone who doesn’t belong to their particular form of church group, and that it is therefore inherently required of each child (child, mind you) to “evangelize” by telling the world that "Jesus is the way" (whatever they might understand that to mean). Why? Because time is running out, Jesus is coming back soon and it’s all “up to YOU”!
*shudder* No pressure, then.
The song also offends me because of its loose handling of the term “missionary”, as though simply being a Christian and sharing our life, which includes our faith, with others (which I believe is the natural and normal Christian lifestyle) is equivalent to “missions”.
I feel a minor rant coming on.
***
I also have a beef with the term “mission trip”. I have no problem with calling something a short-term mission (aka STM), but having been a full-time career cross-cultural missionary for 30 years, my hackles rise when people call themselves missionaries because they once spent 10 days camping while helping build huts for an indigenous church facility in Oahaxa. Or helped out in disaster areas after the fact. Don’t get me wrong: such things are worthy causes and I applaud those who are willing to use their vacation time and invest in Kingdom work elsewhere. But humanitarian aid doesn’t make you a missionary.
(See the Wikipedia definition: "A short-term mission (STM) is the mobilization of a Christian for a short period of time ranging from days to a year; many short-term missions are called mission trips. The short-term missionary is a fairly recent innovation in the global missions movement"...)
What I have more of an issue with is when American Christians think “I'm a missionary too!” because perhaps once or twice a year they go on what are commonly referred to as “mission trips”, but which I prefer to call “ministry trips”. What happens on these trips is also fine and admirable and a good thing, but it is also not missions.
In this scenario, middle-class American (or other Western) Christians sign up with a large ministry to spend one or two weeks in another country, usually doing exactly what they would do at home if they were on a conference ministry team. Much of their time is spent in large gatherings of mostly indigenous believers (though often the music is taken from Hillsongs or the like and indistinguishable from that at home, save for the language). Ministry team members listen to the main speaker along with everyone else and at the end of the meeting are released to pray with conference attendees, just as they would on a ministry team at home. If they are lucky, they have a halfway competent translator to assist them, but this is not always the case.
Most people who have gone on these trips do report a real surge in their personal spiritual lives. They have taken some risks, faced the unfamiliar and pushed out the boat, as it were. They’ve tasted another culture, usually experienced a higher level of effectiveness in their prayers there, made friends with other team members and sometimes with nationals; certainly they benefit from the steep learning curve. However, their actual contact with the foreign culture remains at best just a taste. They have often paid more to go on this trip (not just the plane fares, hotels and meals, but the huge “overhead” many ministries charge on top of that) than many of the people they minister to earn in a year. They travel with other like-minded Americans, stay in Western-style hotels and eat at least two good meals a day. Yes, they work hard and yes, what they do is a good thing. But after a week or 10 days they fly home, exhausted but happy, and slide right back into their comfortable middle-class American lifestyle.
One may perhaps more accurately refer to this as “American Christian missions tourism”, but it is at best a cross-cultural ministry trip-- not missions.
What DO I consider missions, then?
The Oxford dictionary definition: Missionary: A person sent on a religious mission, especially one sent to promote Christianity in a foreign country.
Wikipedia: “A Christian missionary can be defined as "one who is to witness across cultures".[2] The Lausanne Congress of 1974 defined the term, related to Christian mission, as "to form a viable indigenous church-planting movement". Missionaries can be found in many countries around the world.
Jesus instructed the apostles to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19–20, Mark 16:15–18). This verse is referred to by Christian missionaries as the Great Commission and inspires missionary work.”
Up until very recently, a "missionary" was understood as someone who left their native land to go and live in another country, in order to bring people from a non-churched background to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ (whatever the strategy for that) and usually, to form an indigenous church out of those so reached. A missionary in this sense is not taking a break from their “normal life” to “do missions”-- missions IS their normal life. It is a full-time job. It involves great personal investment in learning a language, culture, customs and lifestyle sometimes very different from their own, and submitting to that culture in order to bring the living culture of the Kingdom, like yeast, into it.
Cross-cultural career missions means giving your life and energies to a culture that is not yours, with which you are unfamiliar, many aspects of which you may not agree with. It means raising your children bilingually and bi-culturally, knowing they will experience what is to you a foreign culture as their home culture. It involves constantly discipling a church full of (sometimes difficult) first-generation believers who have no mature Christian heritage or influence. It means identifying so much with your host culture that when someone in a Christian gathering calls out for prayer for various countries, it never occurs to you to stand in the group of your country of origin. It means changing almost everything about the way you live, usually to a far lower material standard than the one you left. It is a whole-hearted commitment to getting a spiritual job done under sometimes almost crushing physical, emotional and cultural circumstances.
I spent 12-15 years of my 30 years as a career missionary regularly going on ministry trips from my host country into many other nations. It was always an enriching experience, and often helped me in the permanent work in which I was involved. I’ve been on the all-frills and the no-frills versions of ministry trips. I’ve been a simple team member, I’ve formed, trained and led teams, I’ve organized trips, I’ve been the main conference speaker. I’ve stayed in the luxurious Hotel Gloria in Rio de Janeiro and with my friends in their 2-room house in eastern Ukraine (they gave up their only bed so I could sleep on it). I know both sides of this coin very well, and I maintain that "ministry trips" are just that: not missions. Granted, there may be some degree of discipling --if the conference is on a theme which equips the saints. There are often some conversions and re-dedications, but a very high percentage of attendees to the meetings are already believers.
In the 30 years I was in my host country, I saw many enthused career missionaries come --and go. I’ve come to believe one must deeply know they are called by God to do the work of a full-time missionary, or it will be too overwhelming. But if you know he has called you, you know you have access to the grace to keep on keeping on, even when (as happened to us several times) it seems you have made no progress or lost everything you’d worked for up to that point.
I suppose that’s why using the term “missionary” for anyone who has ever put their pinky toe across a border and waved a tract in someone’s face is rather offensive to me. I understand the desire to validate the average Christian's need for significance and sense of purpose, but have we not watered down the definition? It used to be enough to say “I am a missionary”; people understood that meant I lived and worked a primarily spiritual vocation in another country. Now I have to use all the descriptive terms: “a full-time, career, cross-cultural missionary” and even then sometimes have to explain what that is. Have we cheapened the term beyond recognition? Or has the English language moved on to embrace a much broader definition? Or is it a bit of both?
In any case, until given some very good reasons to think differently, I’ll personally refer to ministry trips, whether cross-cultural or not, as such; and I will refer to missions, whether short- or long-term, as such. Both are valuable and have their place in the grand scheme of Kingdom influence, but they are not the same animal. I wish our choice of language better reflected that fact.
