Revolution in World Missions

Chapter 11. Why Should I Make Waves? By the end of 1981, Gospel for Asia appeared to be gaining acceptance. People from all over the United States and Canada were beginning to share in the ministry of equipping Native missionaries to evangelize in their own countries. As Gisela and our office staff in Dallas worked to assign our new sponsors to Native missionaries, I felt led of the Lord to plan a road tour of 14 Texas towns to meet personally with new supporters. Calling ahead, I introduced myself and thanked the people for taking on the sponsorship of a Native missionary. I was stunned by the response. Most of the people had heard me on the radio and appeared thrilled with the idea of meeting me. In every town, someone offered me lodging and made arrangements for me to speak in small house meetings in churches. People were referring to me in a new way, as the president and director of an important missionary organization. Far from being pleased, I was more terrified than ever, afraid that I would fail or be rejected. But with the meetings booked solid and the publicity out, an unreasonable fear took over. A weariness settled upon me. As the day for my departure came closer, I looked for excuses to cancel or postpone the whole venture. My family and the office need me more, I argued. Besides, I'll be driving alone. It's dangerous and difficult. I should really wait until someone can go with me. Just when I had almost talked myself out of going, the Lord spoke to me in an unmistakable voice during my personal morning devotion. As on other occasions, it was just as if He were in the room with me. My sheep hear my voice, said the Lord, using His words from John 10, and I know them and they follow me. My sheep follow me because they know my voice. I did not need an interpretation. The message was clear. The trip had been ordained by Him. He had arranged it and opened the doors. I needed to picture myself as a little lamb and follow my shepherd over the miles. He would go ahead of me to every church and every home in which I would stay. It turned out to be a heavenly two weeks. In every home and church, I had delightful fellowship with our new friends, and we added a number of supporters as a result. The church in Victoria, Texas was almost my last stop, and the Lord had a surprise waiting for me there. But He had to prepare me first. As I drove from town to town, I had time alone in the car for the Lord to deal with me on several issues that would impact the future of the mission and my own walk with Him. One issue involved one of the most far-reaching policy decisions I ever would make. For some years, I had suffered deep pain over what appeared to be massive imbalance between our busyness with maintaining Christian institutions like hospitals and schools and the proclamation of the gospel. Both in India and in my travels around western countries, I constantly uncovered a preoccupation with so-called ministry activities operated by Christian workers, financed by church monies, but with little else to distinguish them as Christian. Far too much of the resources of North American missions is spent on things not related to the primary goal of church planning. Wagner, in his book On the Crest of the Wave, says, I have before me a recent list of openings in a mission agency which will go unnamed. Of 50 different categories, only two relate to evangelism, both focused on youth. The rest of the categories include, among others, agronomists, music teachers, nurses, automobile mechanics, secretaries, electronic professors, and ecologists. Social concern is a natural fruit of the gospel, but to put it first is to put the cart before the horse, and from experience we have seen it fail in India for more than 200 years. It was an attempt to exclusively concentrate on people's obvious social needs. Yet while I realized the intrinsic nature of the gospel involved caring for the poor, I knew the priority was giving them the gospel. Meeting their need was a means to share the love of Christ so they would be saved for eternity. I did not go this route because I felt other Christian charities and ministries of compassion were wrong in showing the love of Christ. No, many were doing a wonderful job. But I felt the local church should be the center for outreach, and we needed to bring the balance back. I did not publicly tell anyone about my decision. I knew this subject would be controversial, and I was afraid others would think I was being judgmental, a fighting fundee reactionary, or a fanatic. I only wanted to help the Native missionary movement, and I reasoned that getting into arguments over mission strategy would be counterproductive. Then came Victoria, Texas. My presentation went nicely. I showed the GFA slides and made an impassioned plea for our work. I explained the philosophy of our ministry, giving the biblical reasons why the heathen are lost unless Native missionaries go to them. Suddenly, I felt the Spirit prompting me to talk about the dangers of the humanist social gospel. I paused for the briefest moment, then went on without mentioning it. I just did not have the courage. I might make enemies everywhere. People would think I was an unloving fool, a spoiler of Christian work who did not even care about the hungry, naked, needy, and suffering. Why should I make waves? I managed to get through my presentation, and feeling relieved, I opened up the meeting to questions. But the Holy Spirit was not about to let me off the hook. From far in the back of the room, a tall man, at least 6'3", as they say in Texas, came walking steadily up the aisle, looking bigger and bigger as he came closer to me. I did not know who he was or what he had to say, but I felt instinctively that God had sent him. When he reached me, he wrapped a huge arm around my skinny shoulders and said some words I can still hear ringing today. This man here, our brother, is fearful and afraid to speak the truth, and he's struggling with it. I felt my face and neck getting hot with guilt. How did this big cowboy know that? But it got worse, and I was about to see proof that the Spirit of the living God was really using this tall Texan to deliver a powerful confirmation and rebuke to me. The Lord has led you in ways others have not walked and shown you things others have not seen, he went on. The souls of millions are at stake. You must speak the truth about the misplaced priority on the mission field. You must call the body of Christ to return to the task of preaching salvation and snatching souls from hell. I felt like a zero. Yet this was undeniably a miraculous prophecy inspired by God, confirming both my disobedience and the very message God had called me to preach fearlessly. But my humiliation and liberation were not over yet. The Lord has asked me, the tall man said, to call the elders up here to pray for you that this fear of man will leave you. Suddenly, I felt like even less than a zero. I had been introduced as a great mission leader. Now I felt like a little lamb. I wanted to defend myself. I did not feel as if I were being controlled by a spirit of fear. I felt I was just acting logically to protect the interests of our mission. But I submitted anyway, feeling a little ridiculous as the elders crowded around me to pray for an anointing of power on my preaching ministry. Something happened. I felt the power of God envelop me. A few minutes later, I got up from my knees a changed man, released from the bondage of fear that had gripped me. All doubts were gone. God had placed a burden on my life to deliver this message. Since that day, I have insisted we recover the genuine gospel of Jesus that balanced New Testament message that begins not with the fleshly needs of people, but with the plan and wisdom of God, born-again conversion that leads to righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Any mission that springs from the base things of this world is a betrayal of Christ and is what the Bible calls another gospel. It cannot save or redeem people either as individuals or as a society. We preach a gospel not for the years of time alone, but for eternity. The only trouble with half-truths is that they contain within them full lies. Such is the case with this declaration issued at the 1928 Jerusalem Conference of the International Missionary Council. Our fathers were impressed with the horror that men should die without Christ. We were equally impressed with the horror that they should live without Christ. Out of such rhetoric, usually delivered passionately by an ever-growing number of sincere humanists within our churches, come myriads of worldly social programs. Such efforts really snatch salvation and true redemption from the poor, condemning them to eternity in hell. Of course, there is a basic truth to the statement. Living this life without Christ is an existence of horrible emptiness, one that offers no hope or meaning. But the subtle humanist lie it hides places the accent on the welfare of this present physical life. What few realize is that this teaching grew out of the influence of 19th century humanists, the very same men who gave us modern atheism, communism, and many other modern philosophies that deny God's sovereignty in the affairs of men. They are, as the Bible says, anti-Christ. Modern man unconsciously holds highest the humanistic ideals of happiness, freedom, and economic, cultural, and social progress for all mankind. This secular view says there is no God, heaven or hell, there is just one chance at life, so do what makes you most happy. It also teaches that since all men are brothers, we should work for that which contributes toward the welfare of all men. This teaching, so attractive on the surface, has entered our churches in many ways, creating a man-centered and man-made gospel based on changing the outside and social status of man by meeting his physical needs. The cost is his eternal soul. The so-called humanist gospel, which isn't really the good news at all, is called by many names. Some argue for it in familiar biblical and theological terms, some call it the social gospel or the holistic gospel, but the label is not important. You can tell the humanist gospel because it refuses to admit that the basic problem of humanity is not physical but spiritual. The humanist won't tell you sin is the root cause of all human suffering. The latest emphasis of the movement starts by arguing that we should operate mission outreach that provides care for the whole man, but it ends up providing help only for the body and soul, ignoring the spirit. Because of this teaching, many churches and mission societies now are redirecting their limited outreach funds and personnel away from evangelism to something vaguely called social concern. Today, the majority of Christian missionaries find themselves primarily involved in feeding the hungry, caring for the sick through hospitals, housing the homeless, or other kinds of relief and development work. In extreme cases, among non-evangelicals, the logical direction of this thinking can lead to organizing guerrilla forces, planning terrorist bombs, or less extreme activities like sponsoring dance and aerobic exercise classes. This is done in the name of Jesus and supposedly is based on His command to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. The mission of the church as defined by these humanists can be almost anything except winning people to Christ and discipling them. History already has taught us that this gospel, without the blood of Christ, conversion, and the cross, is a total failure. In China and India, we have had seven generations of this teaching, brought to us by the British missionaries in a slightly different form in the middle of the 19th century. My people have watched the English hospitals and schools come and go without any noticeable effect on either our churches or society. Watchman Nee, an early Chinese native missionary, put his finger on the problem in a series of lectures delivered in the years before World War II. Listen to some of his comments on such efforts as recorded in the book, Love, Not the World. When material things are under spiritual control, they fulfill their proper subordinate role. Released from that restraint, they manifest very quickly the power that lies behind them. The law of their nature asserts itself, and their worldly character is proved by the course they take. The spread of missionary enterprise in our present era gives us an opportunity to test this principle in the religious institution of our day and of our land. Over a century ago, the church set out to establish in China schools and hospitals with a definite spiritual tone and an evangelistic objective. In those early days, not much importance was attached to the buildings, while considerable emphasis was placed on the institution's role in the proclamation of the gospel. Ten or fifteen years ago, you could go over the same ground and in many places find much larger and finer institutions on those original sites. But compared with the earlier years, far fewer converts. And by today, many of those splendid schools and colleges have become purely educational centers, lacking in any true evangelistic motive at all, while to an almost equal extent, many of the hospitals exist now solely as places merely of physical and no longer spiritual healing. The men who had initiated them had, by their close walk with God, held those institutions steadfastly into His purpose. But when they passed away, the institutions themselves quickly gravitated toward worldly standards and goals, and in doing so classified themselves as things of the world. We should not be surprised that this is so. Nee continues to expand on the theme, this time addressing the problem of emergency relief efforts for the suffering. In the early chapters of the Acts, we read how a contingency arose which led the church to institute relief for the poorer saints. That urgent institution of social service was clearly blessed of God, but it was of a temporary nature. Do you exclaim, how good if it had continued? Only one who does not know God would say that. Had those relief measures been prolonged indefinitely, they would certainly have veered in the direction of the world once the spiritual influence at work in their inception was removed. It is inevitable. For there is a distinction between the church of God's building on the one hand, and on the other of those valuable social and charitable byproducts that are thrown off by it from time to time through the faith and vision of its members. The latter, for all their origin and spiritual vision, possess in themselves a power of independent survival which the church of God does not have. They are works which the faith of God's children may initiate and pioneer, but which, once the way has been shown and the professional standards set, can be readily sustained or imitated by men of the world quite apart from that faith. The church of God, let me repeat, never ceases to be dependent upon the life of God for its maintenance. The trouble with the social gospel, even when it is clothed in religious garb and operating within Christian institutions, is that it seeks to fight what is basically a spiritual warfare with weapons of the flesh. Our battle is not against flesh and blood or symptoms of sin like poverty and sickness. It is against Lucifer and countless demons who struggle day and night to take human souls into a Christless eternity. As much as we want to see hundreds and thousands of new missionaries go into all the dark places, if they don't know what they are there to do, the result will be fatal. We must send soldiers into battle with the right weapons and understanding of the enemy's tactics. If we intend to answer man's greatest problem, his separation from the eternal God, with rice handouts, then we are throwing a drowning man aboard instead of helping him out of the water. A spiritual battle fought with spiritual weapons will produce eternal victories. This is why we insist upon restoring a right balance to gospel outreach. The accent must first and always be on evangelism and discipleship.