“Good morning, Auntie. We’ve come to dress you up. And please, won’t you have your husband take a picture?” Four Oriental-looking young women stood at the door of the old British bungalow.
It’s postmortem time – the time every three years when, after an Urbana missionary convention, we look around and wonder when we are going to see a groundswell of young missionary candidates applying for service overseas.
From Reformation times reference to the missionary mandate of the Great Commission has raised serious questions.
Does the world need 120,000 North American missionaries by the year 2000? All along it’s been assumed by missions strategists, recruiters and promoters that the way to reach the unreached is to pump more North Americans into the realms of the unevangelized.
It is a great calling and privilege to be a missionary. It is my joy to have rubbed shoulders with hundreds of foreign missionaries over the past two decades. By and large, they impress me very positively.
There is a need for a different understanding of “missionary” than what many people have.
As the church enters the last quarter of this century, there is a new sense of reality and urgency about the missionary task.
I may be able to speak fluently the language of my chosen field and even understand its culture, but if I have no love, the impact of my speech is no more for Christ than that of a businessman who comes to exploit the people.
A year ago we published an article on the necessity of evaluating the work of missionaries after they get to the field. Some of our readers applauded and some booed. It remains difficult for some to put a “spiritual” activity under the microscope of objective scrutiny.
With this religious heritage, and two foreign occupations in this century, the following generalizations are quite understandable.
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