EMQ » January–March 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 1
By Tom MacIntosh
Having entered the third century of what is called the modern missionary movement, as an Evangelical culture we have developed a missiological vernacular that serves in part, to offer compact, easily digestible definitions of complex theological subjects. One prominent example of this is the way we understand and describe missionary calling.
In the New Testament the words used for “called” roughly alternate between the meanings of being invited to something and being appointed for something. By far the most prominent New Testament concept of calling or being called is our call to respond to the gospel of the kingdom. What might be called a kind of suggested sub-theme on the subject of New Testament calling refers to God’s appointment of an individual or group to a specific responsibility or task. Paul is the most obvious example of someone who represents our modern understanding of one called or sent to preach the gospel to a particular group (the Gentiles).
In a somewhat less obvious example, some scripture implies that Peter may have been called, led or directed to preach the gospel to the Jews, (although after his experience with Cornelius, tradition suggests that he did make a long and significant missionary journey to Gentile lands). In both of these examples we see that the suggested calling wasn’t exclusive. Paul also preached to the Jews, and Peter, as we have seen, also preached to the Gentiles. New Testament ministerial calling, it would seem, is more of a strong emphasis on a ministry direction rather than a lifelong inflexible lock on one strategic focus.
Called to What?
As a missionary for the past thirty-five years I have heard a lot of variations of people’s understanding of a calling. Often people will say they are called to a place, or called to a people group, or called to a particular type of ministry, or even called to a specific amount of time. For many years I took exception to this and insisted that God doesn’t call or appoint us to an abstract concept but to a specific objective. For instance, I used to say God has called me to plant clusters of self-sustaining, reproducing, indigenous churches among a particular people group in a particular place. That, in my mind, was a measurable objective, a mission that could be accomplished, a task worthy of the name “calling.” But for all my well-intentioned commitment, I was probably exceeding the biblical parameters of the meaning of biblical calling by imposing my particular pragmatic bias.
Observing the lives of solid missionary colleagues from many different organizations and backgrounds I have seen that the majority of missionaries who spend at least twenty years on the field, transition into different kinds of ministry sometime during their career. Some go from an emphasis in community-based work to teaching. Others move from work with one people group to a new work with another. Others go from church planting to translation. Sometimes ministerial transitions follow natural seasons of life, singleness, married with children, empty nest couples, etc. My point here is that even though strategic focus is a sound missiological strategy and one which I strongly endorse, it probably should not be given the weight of scriptural mandate. Now well into a post-modern, globalized twenty-first century, and while experiencing an epoch of massive contribution to missiological thought, it may be time to come up with a more biblically representative term for missionary commitment than “calling.”
Conflicted by Circumstances and Values
When a missionary or pastor, Christian health worker, youth worker, evangelist, church planter, teacher, researcher, or the like, enter their ministry with a dogmatic understanding of a specific ministerial calling, legitimate transitions to other kinds of work, within the providential will of God, can cause the minister to be unnecessarily conflicted by self-imposed pressures. Most prominent among these is confusion and an accompanying sense of failure or mediocrity. If God opens the doors for a new and different direction, the minister may wonder if he has failed his first calling or is maybe running away from discouragement and stress to a ministry that appeals more to him.
Of course, some missionaries do leave good work left undone because they feel more comfortable someplace else. That is another issue entirely which needs to be honestly examined on a case to case basis. But generally, if we have acquitted ourselves well on the field and have brought things as far as we can reasonably be expected to go, can we move on without the association of failure and guilt for not being able to put bookends on a missionary highlight reel? This becomes harder when our social media culture constantly barrages us with epic success stories, real or fabricated. In our environment, a job well done that doesn’t move the social media needle often doesn’t measure up. If there is no buzz, the validity of our work tends to not be valued.
Generational values permeate deeply into the personal concept of ministerial calling which we embrace. Nearly forty years ago when I was praying for guidance about my missionary “call,” the paradigm was that you heard from God about a place or people, made a commitment to those details, and spent the rest of your productive years being faithful to that original vision. That sounds kind of archaic these days where people often spend years going on mission exposure trips to see what God is doing before making a tentative commitment to a mission field. But each paradigm represents a belief system about how God leads us. Each has its unique value but, for better or worse, neither really represents the way God led his first generation of missionaries in Acts and beyond into the first century of Christian witness to the world.
Spiritual Guidance
All of this speaks to the important issue of spiritual guidance and our understanding of it. Although the Great Commission is a universal imperative for all Christians, the specific details of how a praying individual is to carry out his role in that great endeavor can, at times, be exasperatingly vague. The Bible doesn’t give us a clear, how to guide, on how to know, imperatively, God’s direction for our great commission involvement. Spiritual guidance is subjective because it personalizes a dependent faith in God and a willingness to take steps for God into areas that are not as clear as we would often like. The degree to which we emphatically bind ourselves to our brand of spiritual guidance can be to the degree that we close off our receptivity to be freely led by God into other areas.
When, as a young, single missionary I set out for a covert church planting mission in a Muslim nation I proudly proclaimed to my supporters that I was called to the Muslims of that country. Less than two years into that ministry, I was confronted by a unique situation. An animistic tribe which had literally never heard the name of Jesus was being heavy handedly Islamicized while being coerced out of their ancestral domain by the Muslim majority. They were traditionally hunter-gatherers, but their jungle was being cleared to make way for oil palm plantations. If they embraced Islam, they were promised a house, a stipend, and possibly a job. If they didn’t, they were on their own.
It was a Kairos moment and I had to make a decision to leave my stated “call” and bring the gospel to a different people group and keep them from becoming culturally entrenched in a new religion. Of course this meant that I had to explain the course change to my supporters who had listened to me boldly assert my understanding of my “calling.” To make a long story short, in less than year, a move of God swept through that tribe and villages exponentially embraced the gospel faster than I could ever hope to keep track of. During my ministry career I have been faced with one or two other major course changing decisions like this and each time, after the fact, the clear favor of the Lord banished any possible doubts that I had followed the leading of God. My rigid ideas of ministerial calling began to relax and allowed me to experience a freer and more emotionally healthy service to God.
Our understanding of spiritual guidance cuts to the heart of our living relationship with God. We know he is able to speak, but do we consciously, and regularly put ourselves in a state quiet enough, submissive enough and unbiased enough to hear? Without this kind of connection, our faith can easily become a cognitive lifestyle of good, but traditional rituals. As hard as it is for me to admit, I am now an “older” missionary. I must realize that there is often a gap in values and expectations between generations. Newer missionaries who I might view as espousing a scaled back commitment level are according to their understanding, expressing their spiritual connection with God’s direction with as much sincerity as I did in the mid-’80s. Our mutual commitment to our roles in the kingdom finds resonance in the understanding that it should be deeply biblical, deeply spiritual, and deeply experiential.
Destination Selection
Traditionally the way missionary destinations are decided upon lie in two general categories. The first, and most popular, is a strong sense of attraction to a particular place or people. This is often referred to as a call. The second is simply being assigned to a particular place by a mission organization. In my career I have experienced both. It is here that I would like to introduce a third category, one that combines some of the best elements from the first two but incorporates insights from 2,000 years of church growth.
Historically, there are about eight or ten consistent social patterns which together or separately seem to have contributed to a fertile receptivity to the gospel in times when God has moved significantly to advance his kingdom. These social and worldview components appear to transcend culture and time periods. Although only God can move men’s hearts to faith in him, he has often moved more dramatically in situations where at least some of these social realities are present. What if the meaning of Jesus’ parable of the soils went beyond individual receptivity and spoke to entire societies? What if we could historically and sociologically identify the ingredients that consistently constituted the “fertile soil” on which God chose to rapidly expand his church? The implications for strategic modern missions could dramatically accelerate the growth of global Christianity in our lifetime.[1]
Avoiding the extremes of extra biblical commitment legalism and flighty, superficial spiritual guidance, we should aim for the solid center of freedom to obey and freedom to commit as God leads. As a younger zealot I used to view, “balance” as a term of compromise. Now, with a few decades of missionary experience under my belt I see clearly that the purest form of ministerial obedience is where no well-intentioned but extra-biblical meanings are imposed upon the process of spiritual guidance. Radical obedience? Call it that. “This is where I feel God is leading me, but I don’t know what comes afterwards…?” Own it. “I am ready to make a long-term commitment as a church planting missionary…” Great. “I’m doing this because I feel it is a good thing, but I don’t really have any specific guidance from the Lord…” Take a step of faith.
Will of God
The exasperating conundrum of the “perfect will” belief system unnecessarily and extra-biblically asserts that there is only one perfect will of God for our lives and if we miss it for some other well-intentioned pursuit, we will never reach our God-appointed destiny. This popular idea puts an incredible amount of unnecessary pressure on good Christians and often delays or paralyzes adequate response to the Great Commission. Do we really think God will get mad at us because we have a desire to serve him but don’t clearly understand his specific direction? The degree to which we despiritualize biblically founded rational thought and intent, is the degree to which we limit ourselves to a small and often unattainable spiritual paradigm.
Unpretentious honesty is far more attractive than conjured overconfidence in knowing a future which God has not yet completely revealed. I believe that one of the keys to ministerial success is not giving up. But I also believe that being open to God’s leading even if it is different from our presupposed expectations is the best way to cooperate with God’s mostly unrevealed plan for our lives.
I used to teach young missionaries that faith is the response to God’s revealed will. Years later, having seen many good ministers conflicted when what they thought was God’s revealed will didn’t really play out the way they envisioned, I believe that our understanding of God’s will is always limited. Faith is our best effort to obey a God we cannot see and whom we don’t usually hear as clearly as we would like. In the end, we are imperfect travelers who have the foundation of general biblical imperatives to build upon.
Conclusion
As we lay the blocks upon this foundation, God will sometimes redirect our straight lines to improve the design. For us, the solid foundation of the Christian life has been laid. Our personal life blueprints are a work in progress. The degree to which we give God a free hand to direct the construction of our lives and ministry, without feeling the need to label or define it, is the degree to which the finished work will best reflect his divine craftmanship.
Tom MacIntosh has been a church planting practitioner in SE Asia since 1985. He divides his time between personal, community-based church planting efforts, teaching missions, mentoring, and building collaborative networks for regional church planting. He is currently working on a book entitled, Socio/Religious Patterns and Historical Church Growth: The Fertile Ground upon which Best Practices Succeed.
[1] Observing the unprecedented church growth in the global south in the past 100 years, we see some socio/religious themes that have been consistently present in other significant church growth movements throughout history. Some seem intuitive, while others open our eyes to new possibilities of new insights for fruitful mission endeavour that have all historically contributed to higher receptivity toward the gospel message: (1) Intentional missions, (2) Scholarship where theology is developed within the local cultural context (contextualization), (3) Commerce and the exchange of ideas through a mobile, economy, (4) Diaspora/migration, population growth, examples of love and community among Christians seen in contrast to local non-Christian cultural values, (5) An expressive, experiential form of Christianity that resonates with cultural values and expectations, (6) Decentralized, autonomous organization of Christian movements, (7) An expression of Christianity that intentionally connects with pressing issues of daily life among the common people, (8) The strategic placement or natural development of Christian centers, or clusters of Christian communities along influential trade or migratory routes, (9) Group oriented decision making processes by which many in the culture decide to embrace a new faith at the same time, and (10) Dissatisfaction or disillusionment with former religions.
EMQ, Volume 57, Issue 1. Copyright © 2021 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
