“For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you…. but with toil and labour we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate.”
Thus wrote Paul to the Thessalonians. An interesting situation is it not? The full-time Christian worker demonstrating to the average work-going people, how to work. (In both his correspondences with them no less!)
Yet this reality shouldn’t really surprise us. After all, war is the greatest advancer of technology. Every time you fly in a jet-engine aircraft, or watch a rocket launch, or enjoy the weather forecast that is provided by radar, or scroll through this blog on your computer, you are experiencing something which was accelerated in its development by war. There is a certain urgency and expediency that demands that people involved in advancing their cause work hard to think through technological innovation. It forces critical thinking.
This is true also in the realms of Christianity. It has often been noted that new theological shifts in the West are normally downstream of conversations happening on the foreign mission field. Not all these are good shifts of course. Some are very damaging. But the fact remains that missionaries are forced to grapple with many issues as they engage with foreign cultures and the difficulties of ministering among them. They are forced to reassess methods, practices and many other areas of practical theology, and this then is slowly transmitted overseas to home cultures. Beneficial things for the church such as healthy contextualisation, and mixed bag things like church growth principles are taken for granted by many church leaders in the West now but were once just discussions by a few norm-rattling pioneers on the mission field. It is not that churches in the West would never have come to adopt these or similar means of ministering, but it is true to say that being forced to consider issues brought missionaries to these conclusions somewhat in advance.
A few weeks ago, I was in Scotland, speaking at a missions conference with our teammates. On the Friday night we did our usual overview of South Asia and our plans, Lord willing, as we head there. At this stage I must have done the main body of it about thirty times. My teammate usually talks about what life will look like for the first two years as we land there and go to language school in order to be able to communicate well. I then follow on with describing the different possibilities after the two years. Of course we don’t know what that will look like. We will need a visa platform to remain in the country, and we won’t know what fits the context well until we’ve been there and seen where the Lord is opening doors. We do, however, know how we want to go about doing it. As we’ve interacted with missionaries, and studied mission, and talked and prayed, we want to have a platform that does not just fulfil some paperwork requirements, but which actually benefits ministry in itself. I will put the whole list at the end of this post, but for now the important point is that I usually say something along the lines of this:
“The purpose of this list is that we want to avoid mission drift. It would be easy to go and set up a business, sit in an office all day at a computer, and not interact with anybody, and go home tired at the end of the day. We could run a successful business, but are we fulfilling our purpose for being there? We want to think hard about how to use our business, NGO etc. to evangelise and disciple people.”
I don’t think it is the most exciting part of the presentation for people, so I try to keep it short. On top of that, we’re largely speaking into a completely unknown reality. We have zero idea of what it will truly look like at this early stage. Our purpose in including it is to give people a window into what mission in closed countries looks like for all missionaries. This time, however, someone picked up on what I said. One of the elders came to me afterwards and said, “that is interesting what you say about thinking how not to merely work, interact with nobody and go home… that’s the way most people here live!”
His point hit home. We have been forced to think long and hard about how to live intentional lives on the mission field. When you know the call of God to a work, and the people of God are giving sacrificially to that end, you cannot afford to be haphazard about how you minister. It is a weight on our shoulders. But not everyone feels that weight. I felt a little bad, thinking that I had maybe inadvertently offended people by insinuating that their jobs had no worth. But this brother was not suggesting that. He was interested in his own flock thinking about their lives/jobs through the same lens. Missionaries are forced to; we don’t have any choice. But we are not called to do so more than any other follower of Christ. We all have a responsibility to think critically about issues like:
- Where we live? (E.g. who can we reach, what will impact the community most)
- What job do we take? (E.g. just best position for my family, or something we can leverage for evangelism and discipleship)
- What church do we join? (E.g. The one that best serves our needs, or the one that we can bless most)
- How can we invest in the community around us? (E.g. what clubs can we join, friends can we make)
These are just a few areas where we can be more intentional. Of course there’s many factors that influence these things, they are not black and white. And most importantly they must be subject to prayer.
I am very thankful for one family in our home church who have asked these questions. They were willing to pay more for a smaller house to live in the town where the church is, to be in the community. The wife, who has a managerial role, has been thinking of the possibility of trying to reduce hours, to invest more time in preparing for youth work. These are the right attitudes to have, regardless of exactly how they work out practically.
As we’ve been forced to ask some of these already as we prepare to move overseas, I pray that like Paul teaching the workers how to work, it may be a case of filtering ideas down to the church at large. Paul had thought through the implications of work from a practical theology standpoint, something which the Thessalonians clearly had not. What he was forced to do enabled him to be imitable. I pray we may all look at missionaries, church leaders, and others who do a good job of thinking through these issues, and learn to imitate them.
I will add, finally, that I don’t have many of the answers for this off hand. I would love to hear your thoughts on theoretical or actual ways to implement some of the above. We must all think critically about these issues, so you can help me out with your wisdom too!
Visa Platform List:
Tier 1:
- Will it allow you to stay in the country?
- Is it possible in this context?
- Can we do it?
Tier 2:
- Is it stable?
- Does it have longevity?
- Is it conducive to evangelism & discipleship in itself?
- How much time does it consume that isn’t “ministry”? (This is quite arbitrary, as all good work is glorifying to God, but you get the point)
- Does it build relationships with locals?
- Does it inadvertently bypass/undermine locals?
- Does it promote itself to local leaders? (Thus making connections which promote longevity and ministry opportunities)
- Does it make good stewardship of time and money?
- Does it give legitimacy?
Tier 3:
- Does it have scalability? (We unashamedly stole this one from “Entrusted to the Dirt”)
- Does it aid future mission workers?
- For visa opportunities
- For lifestyle helps (E.g. starting a school may allow workers to stay in a remote area for a longer period of time)
- Is it replicable or only possible in one context? (E.g. only useful in a university city context)
Imitators of Those 
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