On May 20, Affinity held its annual Churches and Mission Day at Highbury Baptist Church in London, discussing the question ‘Is sending cross-cultural missionaries preferable to supporting indigenous gospel workers?’. John McDonald of Grace Baptist Mission urged churches to see that supporting a gifted national believer may be a far better way of using limited resources. If encouraged to support an indigenous worker, churches may say that they cannot support or pray for someone they have never met. And how will he or she send prayer letters if they do not speak English? Yet Paul had never met the Colossians and was constantly praying for them (Colossians 1.9). This is a challenge to our churches.
Culture of dependency
Do our mission strategies help or hinder? Do we ‘use’ national believers in our strategy, or do we serve them in theirs? If some level of control and accountability is lost in the process, is that a sacrifice worth making? Unless we let them lead, they may not escape from a culture of dependency which will stunt their maturity as leaders and churches.
Brian Kirik, UK Director of Gospel for Asia, gave the example of one illiterate woman in India who saw her whole village converted. We would never develop an ‘illiterate woman strategy’!
Always a command to go
It was agreed that there will always be a need for people from other cultures to go to nations where there are very few believers and established churches. But the consensus at the end of the day appeared to be that the UK church needs to recognise the growing importance of financing and training local believers for gospel ministry — people who, as Andy Lines, Director of Crosslinks, put it, ‘will preach in places I will never go, with an understanding of the culture I will never fully possess, in languages I will never learn’. One way we can continue to be actively involved is to send church pastors from the UK for regular visits to join one of the growing number of training programmes for nationals. This will be good for us and for them.
The day left those attending with a greater sense of what the Lord is doing in bringing huge numbers of people to himself in many parts of the world, despite the fact that Europe is now known in some places as ‘The Dark Continent’.
