For a movement that believes in indigenous churches, we sure do make our missionaries dependent upon the homeland.
Since I started ranting about missionaries in the last entry, I’ll follow that up in this one.
I greatly disapprove of a missionary system that reduces apostles of God to traveling beggars. The Assemblies of God’s belief is a valid one—if God really has called you to minister somewhere, he’ll provide the finances. How that’s supposed to work is that God simply provides the finances: Someone gives you money to get there; a job opens up in the place where you’re sent; locals come to assist you and chip in for expenses; you get favor from the local government… You know, like Barnabas, Paul, Silas, or Priscilla. The ancient system worked. It ain’t broke.
But the way that the Assemblies, and many an Assemblies missionary, puts this concept into practice is by going to church after church and preaching a missions sermon for money. It’s the equivalent of a freakin’ street performer. God called them to minister, not to be dancing monkeys. The idea of “furlough” is also one I disapprove of. I can understand a brief vacation—a few weeks to visit family and friends, relax, unwind, etc. Instead I have known missionaries who have spent up to a year in the States, begging for financial and prayer support, when they should be in their adoptive homelands, ministering. They should not be forced to visit us; we should be visiting (and assisting) them.
Basically, we’re encouraging our missionaries to depend on money from the States, not God. We should be raising up self-supporting indigenous churches. After all, once the missionary dies, does that mean the mission collapses, or we have to send back to the States for another American to run the place?… God forbid.
Even worse: we’re teaching these cultures that they have to run their churches American-style in order for them to be valid, and not even realizing it. See, a culture worships God with what resources it has. In the U.S., our most prominent resource is money. We have a lot of it. Even our poor have TVs, cars, Dish network… This is why Americans never truly understand Jesus’s parable of the woman who calls in the neighbors to rejoice when she finds a coin. [Lk 15.8-10] In any event, Americans worship God with our money; thus the offering takes a prominent position in our services, most churches in America can afford to pay their pastors enough to not need a parsonage; and I have often seen, in churches of less than 100 people, pastors with wireless microphones.
Now, go to another nation with different resources—and notice what it says to them that their pastor has to keep returning to the States for money to keep the church afloat. Note what it says about their—and God’s—inability to provide.
Comments…
Mori commented,
We still have the echoes of the general concept behind “Manifest Destiny” in the system, I see.
Indeed we do.