EMQ » January–April 2024 » Volume 60 Issue 1
Summary: What does it mean to send and be sent? Understanding sending as deeply rooted in the intimacy of an abiding relationship with Christ, (reflecting his relationship with his Father) has reminded me how often I forget that it is God who sends, not me.
By Jon Fuller
In 2016, I was approached by a group of international mission agency leaders to put together a consultation in North America on the topic of mission and sending. After many years in Asia, I was still finding my way in the Canadian scene but agreed to take on this challenge. The consultation eventually took place in 2013. However, by that time the focus had shifted from sending, to being fit for the challenges of the future. That shift was driven in large part by my somewhat shocked discovery that there was little interest amongst Canadian mission agency leaders in a consultation on sending.
In the years since, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the constellation of concerns around missionary sending, along with many who have written on colonialism, indigeneity, and mutuality. Jay Matenga referred to that concern in his 2020 “Leader’s Missions Forecast” when he wrote, “… the margin of tolerance toward the imposition of one world’s ideas onto another world’s reality has reached zero.”[i] How has missionary sending become so tainted with suspicion? Do accusations of colonialism undermine generations of missionary work? What does it mean to send and be sent?
Sending and the One Who Sends
In the early 1990s, my wife and I found ourselves in a Muslim village on an island in the southern Philippines. We’d been sent by faithful churches and friends as the first workers to live among to this people group. After five years, three languages and eight moves, we finally arrived in a small Muslim community. Village life was challenging with three small children and no electricity or running water, but our Muslim friends and neighbours were a great help. They just weren’t particularly interested in hearing about Jesus.
Each morning, I would rise with the Muslim call to prayer, reading my Bible and praying while the men attended morning prayers in the mosque. After months of this, God interrupted my morning routine with a simple question, “What are you doing?” I was hurt. “I’m trying to live for you, Lord,” I said, but the question kept coming until it slowly dawned on me that my morning devotions were more about impressing my Muslims friends than about intimacy with Jesus. Devotion had become strategy.
Being sent must find its deepest meaning in being in love with the one who sent me. How had I managed to leave Jesus behind in my pursuit of his mission? Like many before me, I’d obeyed Jesus’ commission (Matthew 28:18–20) to make disciples of all nations, to proclaim his kingdom “… to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8). At an Urbana gathering in 1981, when I’d felt Jesus’ say, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” (Isaiah 6:8), I’d stood up, filled out a card and embraced the apostolic life. Now, looking back at those Scripture passages, I realize that I overlooked or underestimated how deeply relational they were.
Isaiah responds to God’s call for someone to send, from a place of loss after the death of King Uzziah, and at a time of impending peril from the surrounding nations. He responds to his commissioning for a ministry to those who are “… ever hearing but never understanding,” (Isaiah 6:9) with a cry, “For how long, O Lord” (6:11). In a time of turmoil and loss, the assurance of God’s continued sovereign presence in his life and ministry was essential to his sending.
The great commission passages of Matthew 28 and Acts 1 are rooted in the disciple’s confusion and grief over Jesus’ death, resurrection, and impending departure. Christ’s commitment to be with them always was not just a promise of strategic direction but an assurance of continued presence for the journey ahead. The power and authority being promised was deeply rooted in the disciples’ journey together with him along the dusty paths of Palestine. Their commissioning flowed out of his promise to be with them.
Hudson Taylor was famously described by missionary historian Kenneth Scott Latourette as, “… one of the greatest missionaries of all time, and … one of the four or five most influential foreigners who came to China in the nineteenth century for any purpose.”[ii] Taylor’s passion for the gospel, compassion for millions of Chinese living inland, and commitment to incarnationally living have shaped generations of missionaries, including me. But Taylor’s most lasting legacy is arguably none of these, as important as they are.
I first encountered Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret[iii] when my dorm parent gave it to me because I was reading too many Louis L’amour novels. I approached the dusty old book with distaste, reading it only because I had to tell my dorm parent the “secret” before getting back to my western and science fiction novels. At fourteen though, I fell in love with the book, have reread it dozens of times and still go back regularly to chapter fourteen, “The Exchanged Life.” Taylor’s life and work flowed from a deep and abiding love of Jesus, something expressed in his lesser-known reflections on the Song of Solomon.
In the secret of His presence
How my soul delights to hide!
Oh, how precious are the lessons
Which I learn at JESUS’ side:
Earthly cares can never vex me,
Neither trials lay me low;
For when Satan comes to vex me,
To the secret place I go![iv]
Sending and Power
If we can leave Jesus behind in our pursuit of his mission, we can also make too much of ourselves. Mantenga’s concern about the danger of imposing one world’s ideas on another happens when we become enamoured of our ideas, our identity, our power.
My wife, Marilyn, and I were blessed to work closely with a local Filipino pastor and his wife. Herbert and Ame moved into our village, where Ame taught in the small preschool we started. We also worked with the village leadership on a water project.
One day, Herbert and I needed to see the local mayor about our project. We joined the long line of people waiting at the Town Hall, but one of the mayor’s staff waved us to the front of the line. We were ushered into the office, served coffee, and assured of the mayor’s support for our project. Leaving the office, I was embarrassed passing the long line of others waiting.
As we walked away, Herbert turned to me and said, “Don’t let it bother you. We know your heart, so don’t be too proud to let God use you being a foreigner for his purposes.” Herbert was, and is a dear friend, whose wise and gentle challenge has stayed with me.
Rightly navigating the complexities of colonialism does not mean denying who I am or abdicating any devolved power. Rather, it requires placing my identity fully in the context of a living relationship with the one who sent me. The God who chose me, who sent me, knows me fully and intimately. As Herbert pointed out, the issue wasn’t my skin colour but who I was serving.
In Leading Across Cultures:Effective Ministry and Mission in the Global Church, James Pluedemann says, “In Christ no one should have an inferiority complex, nor should anyone have a superiority complex …. All of us in the body of Christ, no matter what our formal position, must love and obey the Lord while we honour and submit to one another in love.”[v] Herbert reminded me that day that being “in Christ” allowed me to redeem our colonial reality for Christ’s redemptive purposes.
We see this paradigm at work when Jesus appeared to the disciples hiding behind locked doors for fear of the Jewish leaders. He said to them, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). As with the missionary sending passages we’ve already looked at, this passage needs to be read in the context of fear and loss, but also in light of the disciples’ relationship with Jesus.
Jesus comes to them in the midst of their grief over his death, their confusion at rumours that he is alive and their fear of the authorities. He declares his peace to meet their fears and he commissions them into his Father’s sending relationship, confirmed by his gift to them of the Holy Spirit. He gives them no great plan or strategy, but he draws them into the intimacy of his relationship with the Father and the Spirit. The context has not changed but the disciples are transformed by the Spirit’s expression of the Father’s sending, to the point where the Jewish authorities “… took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).
Sending and Receiving
Understanding sending as deeply rooted in the intimacy of an abiding relationship with Christ, (reflecting his relationship with his Father) has also reminded me how often I forget that it is God who sends, not me. As a mission mobilizer, I embraced the role of a sender, doing everything I could to help others be everything God has called them to be. Too often though, I inflated my role as sender, forgetting that ultimately, it is God who sends.
In fact, a right understanding of God’s sending, inevitably places us in the role of receiving. It’s impossible to send well if you aren’t willing to also receive. When we see ourselves only as senders, and presume that the others are the mission field, that arrogance robs us of the opportunity to receive God’s grace through other’s mission toward us. This corrosive Christendom posture never reflected the biblical model of sending, and it has become increasingly less tenable in our polycentric world. I learned this lesson from Ate Delor[vi] and a small, struggling Filipino church.
We first arrived on our island for trade language consolidation, before moving to a Muslim community. Ate Delor opened her home to us, despite her busy life as a single mother and respected professional. Ate Delor refused to speak English with us, forcing us to use our limited new language skills. For a year, she and the small church she attended, cared for us, putting up with our many cultural and language mistakes. It was through Ate Delor’s relationships that God opened up a Muslim community, which became our new village home.
Those early months in the village were difficult, filled with loneliness and fear. We arrived at church one Sunday after a particularly hard night of illness and troubled dreams. Ate Delor listened patiently and, with the church, prayed for us before we headed home. A few hours later, we heard a motorbike wind through the coconut trees into our village.
Ate Delor thanked the taxi driver, handed us a gift of bananas, and asked if she could stay to visit. She played with our six-month-old daughter, chatted with the neighbours and helped Marilyn around the house. Without electricity or phones, we knew that getting home meant a long walk and that Ate Delor needed to be at work in town on Monday morning. To our surprise, she informed us she was staying the night. She slept alongside our little one, slipping out early in the morning to look for a motorcycle taxi into town.
Looking back, I recognize what a gift Ate Delor and that little church were for us. We had been sent to the Philippines by five wonderful North American churches, but it was this little Antioch church that stood with us for the final stretch of our incarnational journey.
As Filipino Christians, they had their own fears of Islam, based on hundreds of years of conflict between Christians and Muslims. Despite those fears, they received us with great generosity, embraced our vision, prayed for us, and supported us on our journey. Ate Delor’s choice to be with us in the village that night was only one of many ways in which this church stood with us.
This act of graciously receiving us developed into a mutual understanding of God’s sending, a partnership in the gospel to use Paul’s words (Philippians 1:5). As in Philippi, this partnership was based on a shared confidence of God at work (1:6), a shared experience of God’s grace (1:7), all rooted in Paul’s “Christ Jesus affection” (1:8). Paul arrived in Philippi to share Christ with those who did not know him, but in time the Philippian church came to share his calling. They received both him and his message, becoming co-workers in the gospel, sharers in God’s sending.
Reflecting on the support we received from that little Filipino church, I find myself wondering how willing am I to receive those whom God is sending to Canada as missionaries? Do I recognize that we need help from Nigerians, Koreans, Filipinos, and many others to reach our neighbours and friends?
Like that little church, am I willing to be a generous, sacrificial receiver of others whom God is sending? Their welcome came with a cost, when God called their beloved pastor Herbert and his wife to join us in the village. As mentioned earlier, Herbert continues to lead the work after many years, fruit of a mutual sending and receiving before God.
Sending and Unity
It’s impossible to reflect on missionary sending without asking, “Why is it that God’s sent ones, so often end up in conflict with each other?” In John 17, we are invited with the disciples into the intimacy of Jesus’ relationship with the one who sent him. He says to his Father, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18) and then he prays for us that we may, “… be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23).
If the very foundation of missionary sending is an abiding relationship with the one who sends us, then we must accept the challenge with Paul to embrace the “… unity of the Spirit” because there is “… one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” The is the calling which we have received (Ephesians 4:1–4), the mission on which we are sent.
Years ago, I was travelling in a closed (or creative) access country. I had been invited to join the tenth anniversary celebration of a local NGO with whom we had placed some personnel. At a celebration banquet, a local government official spoke glowingly of these foreigners who had come from many different countries to sacrificially serve his people.
He went on to say, “I was very impressed that you could partner together when you came from such different cultures, but as I worked with you, I realized that you fought all the time. What surprised me is that you didn’t quit but forgave each other and found a way to continue working together.”
He paused and then added, “I know what you believe. My grandparents believed what you believe, and I can see the evidence of its truth in how you live.” Talking with the team afterwards, they pointed me to their times of worship and prayer together as the centre of their hard-fought unity.
With Tip on Signal Hill
After 12 years of life and ministry in the southern Philippines, God used a medical emergency to bring us home to Canada. Reflecting on those years, Marilyn and I struggled with a sense of failure. As far as we knew, none of our Muslim friends had chosen to follow Jesus. Had we heard God wrongly? Were we not sent? In the rush of evacuating, our team of Filipino co-workers, threw us a despidida or farewell party.
Marilyn and I shared our gratitude for all the team had meant to us, and our questions about whether we’d accomplished anything. One of our friends smiled and said, “Kuya Jon[vii] and Ate Marilyn, God used you to teach us two things; first that Christians could live with Muslims, and second, that we Filipinos could do it better than you!”
I treasure that moment still for its generous honesty and for the deep relationships from which it came. While this wasn’t our plan for mission, we felt God clearly say, “This is why I sent you.” That moment of intimacy with our sender, was a gift of peace.
Frank Laubach garnered global acclaim for his literacy work, developed while living and working as a missionary amongst the Maranao Muslims of the southern Philippines in the early 1900s. Laubach and his dog Tip became companions and guides for me as fellow sojourners with our Muslim friends. Dallas Willard reflected, “Frank Laubach wrote of how, in his personal experiment of moment-by-moment submission to the will of God, the fine texture of his work and life experience was transformed.”[viii]
I stumbled on a collection of Laubach’s letters written to his father and collected in a little book titled Letters by a Modern Mystic. He wrote, “If there is any contribution that I have to make to the world that will live, surely it must be my experience of God on Signal Hill.”[ix] Looking out over the Maranao people to whom God had sent him, Laubach wrote, “Clearly, clearly, my job here is not to go to the town plaza and make proselytes, it is to live wrapped in God, trembling to His thoughts, burning with His passion.”[x]
Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, so send I you” (John 20:21, GNV). Frank Laubach captures that truth when he writes, “Tip and I and God were together tonight on Signal Hill.”[xi] To whatever Signal Hill you are sent, be there together with God.
Jon Fuller (jon.fuller@theefc.ca) served in a Filipino Muslim community, and then with the international leadership team of OMF based in Singapore. In 2023, Jon took a new role as resident missiologist with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC). As a missiologist, he spends time at the intersection of gospel, church, and culture. Jon also loves investing in the next generation, helping them become everything God has called them to be.
[i] Jay Matenga, “Reflection on Missions in a Covid Crisis,” Leader’s Mission Forecast, August 21, 2020, https://weamc.global/lb2020-2/.
[ii] Kenneth Scott Latourette, Review of Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, https://www.wakefieldbooks.com/book/9781789432275.
[iii] Howard and Geraldine Taylor, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, Moody Classics (The Moody Bible Institute, 2009).
[iv] Hudson Taylor, The Hudson Taylor Collection, 7-in-1 (Illustrated): A Retrospect, Union and Communion, Separation and Service, Ribband of Blue, Taylor in Early Years, Growth of a Work of God, Choice Sayings (Christian Classics Treasury, 2023), 2034.
[v] James E. Plueddemann, Leading Across Cultures: Effective Ministry and Mission in the Global Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 1552.
[vi] Ate is an honorific term used before the name of a respected older female.
[vii] Kuya is an honorific term used before the name of a respected older male.
[viii] Dallas Willard, “A Quote from The Divine Conspiracy,” October 30, 2023, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7378726-frank-laubach-wrote-of-how-in-his-personal-experiment-of.
[ix] Frank Laubach, Letters by a Modern Mystic (Purposeful Design Publications, 2007), 515.
[x] Laubach, Letters, 167.
[xi] Laubach, Letters, 431.
EMQ, Volume 60, Issue 1. Copyright © 2024 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.
