Protestant missionaries from North America now total over 3,000. They are spread around the world perhaps more widely than missionaries from any other continent. In recent years the distribution of these Christian workers has been altered, and we need to see the new patterns in light of our rapidly changing world.
The claim of God’s Holy Spirit on an individual’s heart regarding commitment to service is certainly a most sacred and cherished matter. However, the way in which a potential missionary candidate finds his place of service is often characterized by some as a sort of “mission board roulette.”
In Scripture, we see God fulfilling his purposes in the world through men. Usually he begins with one man-burning his divine objective into that man’s heart and mind, and giving him promises to guarantee the fulfillment of the objective. Rarely, however, does God begin and end with one man.
The relationship of evangelical Christianity to the middle classes of Latin America is a new field of study, although the same problem has been debated for several decades in the English and German speaking world.1 This is a relationship which some would call bondage.
The decade of the 60s saw the development of what might well be considered the first Latin American Protestant theological movement. We are referring to the group of thinkers related to the Latin American Commission on Church and Society (ISAL)1, and, through this commission, to the World Council of Churches.
Some years ago in the city of Shikarpur, West Pakistan, a blind Christian evangelist and I were invited to meet with some of the Muslim religious leaders in the courtyard of a neighborhood mosque.
Has anybody here seen a missionary? It is much easier to spot one than it is to define one. They have been engaged in a variety of tasks from auto maintenance to evangelism, from school teaching to administration, from medical work to translating the Scriptures. But still the question remains: What is a missionary?
Because so many students have come to me with a very simple question, I have finally decided that it is time to put something down on paper that might help concerned students in the area of missions. And, not only students, but perhaps missionaries.
The critical discussion between religions has fallen on hard times. Due in large measure to what Francis Schaeffer calls “escape from reason,” men are coming to view religion as an exclusively non-cognitive activity, the doing of one’s “thing” which somehow infuses human life with transcendental significance.
The pastoral care of missionaries is not something for which I can produce proof texts from Scripture, although we might reasonably assume that Paul and Barnabas gave loving care to John Mark and other fellow-workers as they traveled and toiled with them.
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