Nazarene Theological Seminary

The theology of missions is once again in the spotlight with the development of the ecumenical movement. Present-day political forces such as communism and nationalism have brought about critical examination of mission theory and practice. Some of the larger denominations have gone through a period of self-examination and emerged with an inferiority complex about their missionary enterprise–which has resulted in radically changed goals and methods. Is there a need for this same sort of thing in the Church of the Nazarene and other holiness denominations?

First of all, let us not be stampeded into the present fad for denigrating the actually stupendous missionary achievements of the past generation. The Church of the Nazarene has sometimes purposely, sometimes unwittingly, avoided some of the pitfalls which other denominations bemoan so publicly these days. Much of its missionary work has been started so recently that it has been able to profit by the failures of others in many cases.

However, there is a need for retooling our mission concepts. There is a need for our making explicit what is implicit in our methods and policies. There is a need for discovering and developing the theological base for our practical approach. We came into existence as a holiness denomination. In many other areas of theology we have rarely been concerned about what our distinctive view is. Some of these areas related to missions are: the doctrine of the Church, the relation between revelation and culture, and the theology of misisons itself. There is also the need for getting these clarified ideas operational in our thinking and implementing them in our churches at home and abroad.

We shall discuss some of tee problems under two headings: (1) the missionary call and task, ands (2) the indigenous church concept. But before we enter the main discussion there are two myths in the practical area which we should like to sweep away.

Contrary to a widespread rumor, there is not an oversupply of missionary applicants. One version of this myth has it that there are several hundred waiting to be sent out and this has discouraged some who were called from applying. The partial truth in this statement is that there are always many who apply who can never be appointed and sent out because they lack some necessary qualifications. There is always a shortage of well-qualified, experienced missionary applicants. Young people with a call should begin contact with the Department of World Missions from high school on, so as to receive proper guidance in their preparation.

Another myth is in the area of finances. When gifts are sent to a missionary through the general treasurer’s office, nothing is subtracted from the funds before they are sent to the field or after. Some independent and interdenominational missions may take a cut of a certain percentage from all funds sent in for missionaries, which is used for their office and general expenses.  But this is not true of the missionary program of the Church of the Nazarene. That is what the General Budget is for. Neither are deputation offerings diverted or diminished, but they are put to the account of the missionary for whom they were designated and may be sued by him only at his discretion for purchasing needed equipment. The only condition for the use of such equipment bought from church-donated funds is that it remain in missionary use if he ceases to be a missionary for any reason.

I. The Missionary Call and Task

One of the areas where we most need retooling in mission thought is in what constitutes a missionary call. The supernatural, spectacular type everyone recognizes. It seems to carry with it its own authentication, like other mystical experiences. [page 15 begins] But this is not the usual type of call, nor should it necessarily be the ideal.

I would not go so far as to say that such calls are automatically suspect , but experience has shown that some people who have claimed such calls are poor risks on the mission field, if they ever get there, because they permit themselves to be too susceptible to impressions and not enough governed by the witness of Scripture and reason. Such people may tend to be unpredictable, starting new projects on impulse and seldom following through.  Let me emphasize that this is only some of those who have such calls. I do firmly believe that sometimes God does definitely give some individuals outstanding unusual calls. This has been authenticated by their faithfulness and tenacity in fulfilling the call successfully.

On the other hand, we should emphasize the fact that most missionaries have had a call which began through a disposition to be completely at the disposal of the Spirit of God. The guidance of the Spirit continued either intuitively or circumstantially until the call became a conscious, clear assurance that God wanted them to be missionaries. In point of time, this moment of consciousness of the call may come in eerily childhood, or it may be deferred until the early part of a young pastor’s ministry. We should not be surprised or shocked if some successful young pastors do suddenly feel a missionary call.

Because some people have received a call to a definite country or area at the time of, or subsequent to, their missionary call, we have developed a habit of asking all called missionaries where they are called to. This can be a mistake. It can lead some to doubt their calling because they do not know where they are called or lead others to a neurotic searching or mistaken decision. God does not always reveal intuitively to the individual where he is called to. In fact, the where has been revealed to most missionaries through the open door which the church has offered to them. If we must pry into the details of the young person’s calling (and sometimes we must when counseling with them), we should take care not to give the impression that he ought to be called some definite field and give him a chance to reveal a general call. If he has a definite call to some field he will be quick to reveal this.

Some called missionaries have mistakenly believed that the where of their call as they understood it was of equal importance with the fact of their call. Then when that field was closed circumstantially to them, they have not known what to do. They have maintained a false sense of obligation to the field, as did Dr. Hamlin, who felt called to China in earlier days, but who, as a missionary surgeon in Africa, is reported to have recently stated something like this: “If only I had known that I could have fulfilled my call in Africa!” many a life of missionary service has been lost through a mistaken concept of the nature of a missionary call.

In the field of world missions, we have sometimes limited our concept as to the way in which a missionary call comes to an individual. Strangely enough, in our overseas home missions appointments, we operate largely on the basis of a call by the request of the church, just as we so by pastoral calls. Why should we not assume that this is one of the normal ways in which God can let His call be known for “foreign” missionary service under the Department of World Missions? As a matter of fact, we have done this in a few cases, and will probably have to do it more frequently in some countries such as India where Americans find it hard to get visas while British citizens can obtain them. The church may have to “call” a few British couples if the Lord does not call them in another way, in order to keep up our staff there. Here again the need is for retooling our concepts so that they fit the methods that God is using.

A final area of confusion related to the missionary call is that of the type of service one is called to. There is a parallel between this and the concept of where one is called to. The providential leadings of God must take precedence over our preconceived ideas of God’s will for us. In some circles we have built up a prejudice in favor of missionary work among primitive, uncivilized, or underdeveloped peoples. When a missionary goes to a modern metropolis like San Juan, Puerto Rico, where many of the people he wants to reach have television sets, he is under pressure to say that he doesn’t feel like a missionary. If his previous experience was in a primitive area, e probably doesn’t But does this feeling make him any less a missionary? The pagan cities with their exploding populations are just as much a worthy object of missionary endeavor as a handful of headhunters in the jungles. What we need is not a sentimental view of misisons but the clear-eyed, practical visiosn of Christ whose ministry took in the whole scope of human need wherever He found it.

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II. The Indigenous Church Concept

The indigenous church concept is nothing new for the Church of the Nazarene. It is found in essence in Harmon Schmelzenbach’s statement to Mrs. Louise Robinson Chapman shortly after her arrival in Africa. He said that he did not want to catch her doing something that an African can do. Our early missionary pioneers built well and knowingly, in Africa, in India, in Guatemala. If the indigenous church concept seems novel to us today it is simply because of our ignorance.

As Peter Beyerhaus and Henry LeFever point out in their new book, The Responsible Church and the Foreign Mission, the three-selves theory (self-government, self-support, self-propagation) is a method and not a goal. Beyerhaus summarizes his book in an article in the International Review of Missions, October 1964: the goal of missions is to produce a responsible church in these three areas.

As sound a business principle as self-support may be, it is the most vulnerable of the three from the standpoint of our sentimental pity for the poor, downtrodden “natives.” For some reason or other we have split the world into the economic haves and the economic have-nots, and then we have directed our overseas home missions to the economic haves and our world (formerly “foreign”) misisons to the economic have-nots. Not only that, but we have expected fairly rap[id progress toward self-support in our home misisons areas and until fairly recently we have assumed a practically unending program of support for our “foreign” misisons fields. Why should it be any more difficult for tithing Nazarene Haitians to support their church and pastors than for tithing German Nazarenes? From the spiritual standpoint, let alone the practical, we must expect our new churches everywhere to begin developing financial responsibility from the very start. We must not discourage them with too much help.

Self-support is often thought of as the condition of self-government. We pay the piper and we call the tune–and they must dance to it. Admittedly, if we fail to communicate financial responsibility to these new churches, there will be difficulties in phasing into self-government. But it must be remembered that responsible leadership cannot be developed without actual decision-making. The national church must have the privilege of making mistakes–while the missionaries are still available for counsel. God will give leaders to the church, and it is our duty to help the church recognize and train these leaders in responsible leadership on both the local and the district level.

There are two false attitudes toward national leadership. Some missionaries have been suspicious of all nationals, because of some bad experiences, and have hardly had confidence in the ability of divine grace to change national character sufficiently to permit the development of responsible and spiritual leaders. Others have gone overboard for an uncritical view of indigenous leadership and feel that any national is better than any missionary because he is a national. Some people in the homeland are charmed by nationals, in letter or in person, simply because they are nationals, when they ought to find out whether they are worthy of confidence and help. It does take years to develop responsible, loyal national leaders (and many fall by the wayside), but develop them we must or we are failing in our task. When a relationship of mutual love and confidence is maintained, the national leaders are impelled to come to the missionaries for counsel and guidance. Such missionaries will always be wanted by nationals.

Some people are worried about the doctrine deteriorating in the hands of the nationals. Grounding our nationals in biblical doctrine and experience is one of our prime responsibilities, but there is more hope theologically for a newly literate mountain Indian in Mexico with his Bible than for an oversophisticated American pastor who has a weak devotional life. The Holy Spirit is a great Teacher and is not limited to the educated in teaching the essentials of holiness. Some of the missionary lands may yet have to send black and brown missionaries to our materialistic society to help us evangelize our pagan people.

Self-propagation means that the national church takes full-responsibility for its share in fulfilling the great commission. It means that growth is to be expected through the effective witness of the national church. The missionary must train the people for this from the very start. He will lead in example in both pulpit and personal evangelism, but soon he must push the nationals to the forefront and get them to take soul-winning as their own right and responsibility. Growth presupposes a climate permitting spontaneous action, both in the individual church and on the district.

In our discussion about the indigenous church so far, there is one question which [page 17 begins] we have not yet asked or answered: What kind of church are we trying to plant? Idf we follow Baptist literature on the indigenous church, we will develop a Baptist type of church with complete local autonomy. We do not want this. If we follow Roland Allen, we are heading for an Episcopal church type which is not our goal either.

We must ourselves understand the kind of church we are trying to develop and through self-support, self government, and self-propagation, or we will create problems that will make it difficult for a responsible church to result from our missionary efforts. I believe there are two points where we desperately need to bring our doctrine of the church into consideration in our mission theory and practice. We must see: (1) the nature of our missionary operation as church extension rather than a missionary society approach, and (2) the unified nature of the church.

When a missionary enterprise is operated as a society or mission which is developing an indigenous church, there is of necessity a contrast between the missionaries as a group and the nationals as a group. The concept of Henry Venn of the Anglican Church Missionary Society was that the missionary society is like the scaffolding which is put up temporarily until the building is completed. When the indigenous church was established, he felt that the missionary society was no longer necessary and should be removed to another place to repeat the same process. There are some values to this view, and it is essentially the only view that a missionary society which is not a church can take.

However, we are a church. There is no need for us to take on the special organizational problems of the missionary society approach when we can avoid them by conceiving of our missionary work as church extension. In our case, the church is the “mission.” And the church is one. The missionaries are part of it–the nationals are part of it. The missionaries do not have the right to act as if it were their church alone, nor do the nationals have this right. They must act together. The missionaries must see this, and the nationals also. The church on foreign fields should be the church at every stage of its development, a unified, responsible church under the leadership of Christ.

The chief difference between church extension work in the homeland and missionary work abroad is that organized, functioning districts are already established in the homeland and it remains only to start new local churches and occasionally split one district into two. On the mission field one must not only start new local churches, but he must at the same time create the district organization and develop its functions. We have been generally successful in developing indigenous local Nazarene churches which are at least moving rapidly toward self-support, self-government, and self proclamation on the local level. The place where we have been less successful is in developing responsible district organizations which are indigenous in all of these aspects. Has it been that we have failed to see clearly that the district is the most crucial level of our particular type of church organization, and that national participation in the district government and activities can begin from the very start?

For my part, I should like to erase the very concept and word “mission” in the sense of an organization in contrast to the district, for here is the root of many problems between nationals and missionaries. Instead of “Let the mission do it,” let us say, “Let the district do it”–and immediately we have an organization involved which is indigenous and permanent instead of foreign and in some sense temporary. This change must be more than verbal–it involves moving to a concept and method which always involves all the church, both missionaries and nationals. It is a church in which missionaries exercise their leadership under Christ with the aim of training national fellow-Christians to replace them so that they can pioneer in other geographical or organizational areas. It is a church in which nationals will feel that they are missionaries when they pioneer as the missionaries do, and will feel a greater urge to copy them in their ministry than in their foreign culture, standard of living, and status. It is a church which is responsible district in a worldwide Nazarene fellowship.

Bibliography and New Books

Beyerhaus, Peter, and LeFever, Henry. The Responsible Church and the Foreign Mission. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964. Comparative missionary methods.

Dodge, Ralph E. The Unpopular Missionary. Westwood, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1964. Missionary problems in today’s world.

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McGavran, Donald Anderson. How Churches Grow. The New Frontiers of Mission. London: World Dominion Press, 1955. Available through the Association Press, New York. The most important book on missions in print.

Orchard, R.K. A Time of Testing. Thought and Practice in Contemporary Missions. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964. An important restudy of the biblical foundation of missions and its application.

Scherer, James A. Missionary Go Home! A reappraisal of the Christian World Mission. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey” Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1964. An introduction to missions in the contemporary setting.