Missions in the 21st Century — Searching for a Third Way

By Keith Holmes

When we moved to Europe in 1996 some of our senior colleagues seemed to still have the impression that missions meant taking a ship to Africa. We were told that if a grandparent or aunt or uncle died, no one at home would expect us to come for the funeral. We would need to return to the United States States for a long furlough every 3 or 4 years so that our children could attend American schools and be re-acclimated into American culture; otherwise they would feel lost when they went to college and wouldn’t understand what the other kids were talking about when they mentioned popular TV shows or pop bands.

But by 1996 the world was already changing. When my grandmother died in 1998, I got on a plane in Amsterdam, flew to Dallas/Fort Worth, spent two days there, then flew home. I didn’t bother to change my internal clock; I simply got up very early each morning and went to bed early each evening. While my brother in Tennessee could call my father in Louisiana on Dime Line for 10 cents per minute, I could call him from the Netherlands for one and a half cents. Now we all talk for free on Skype.

If our girls wanted to watch the latest American TV shows they just turned on the television. Just like their American cousins, they knew who Justin Bieber and Pink were. Fortunately, they didn’t care.

There have been, however, a few new challenges in this global village. A number of years ago, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship began a program to help connect churches with missionaries so that the churches would have a better understanding of what the missionaries are actually doing and the missionaries would know that specific churches were praying for them and their work.

This program was called “Adopt a People,” and churches were encourage to “adopt” a specific people-group. Some of the staff in the CBF office were dismayed that the Romany team of missionaries chose not to use the “Adopt a People” material and instead asked churches to “partner” with the team.

When the staff questioned us about this we explained that, while the “Rock” people in the hills of Thailand might not read prayer letters, the Romany do, and some of them did not care to be “adopted.” In the past missionaries could say whatever they wanted to about the people they were “rescuing from the quagmire of ignorance and poverty,” but these days such paternalism doesn’t sit very well with our ‘Friends’ on Facebook.

Some of the biggest challenges come from the new waves of volunteers who go on short-term mission trips. Mission trips are a wonderful way to expose church members to the realities of mission work, but that exposure also has consequences. The Dutch use the word “vacationfriends” to describe kids who spend a week at the same campground or resort, get to know each other, then on the last day exchange addresses, and never write or meet again. These kids might not have really had that much in common, except that they were in the same place at the same time and spoke the same language.

Sometimes mission volunteers make “mission trip friends” with local Christians; often young pastors or church leaders who have some education and who speak English. Unlike the “vacationfriends”, these “mission trip friends” actually do keep in touch. They pray for each other and keep up with their family and ministry.

The problem comes when the church members in America start to say, “You know Boris and Alina are such a nice couple and they speak English so well, and they only make $300 per month. They could make so much more if they would come to America.”

It is true; they could.

But what then is the point of sending missionaries to train and mentor church leaders if American churches practice a spiritual brain drain? Of all the problems the evangelical church in America has, shortage of trained young people is not one of them. Even emigrant churches are producing emigrant church leaders.

Jesus said that, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” But where two or three, made in the image of God and thus capable of independent thought, are gathered, there are also disagreements. As the Dutch say of their own strong opinions, “One Dutchman is a theologian, two Dutchmen are a church, three Dutchmen are a schism.” There have been disagreements in the church since the fifth chapter of the Book of Acts. But when mission groups make “mission trip friends,” local disagreements can become global disagreements.

All schools of higher learning must occasionally add or drop programs, and affected students are not always happy. But when the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague announced that they were phasing out their Bachelor’s programs to concentrate on master’s and doctoral programs, just like American seminaries do, the students started an open revolt.

They began a letter-writing campaign asking all the mission volunteers to put pressure on the board of trustees to stop the closures. The volunteers, who were also significant donors, were perplexed to hear that the school they so dearly supported was suffering major closures. While the situation could have been handled more wisely, and affected students were offered assistance in transferring to Bachelor’s-level schools, most volunteers were probably not even aware that there ever was a Bachelor’s program.

Small, local disagreements can now, with news-hungry Christian media and the internet, grow so huge that they shake a mission organization to its very core.

Almost every Middle-Eastern country has a small, dwindling Christian ethnic group that feels threatened not only by militant Muslims, but also by new evangelical Christian converts. Not only do the new Christians want to worship in a more open style than the conservative ethnic Christians (worship wars), they also want a more accessible Bible translation (NIV vs. KJV). When some Christians thought that translators had crossed the line from “accessible” to “unbiblical,” headlines began to scream “Stop Supporting Wycliffe’s Current Bible Translations For Muslims, PCA Advises Churches.”[1]

Wycliffe responded by asking the World Evangelical Alliance to form a committee to help oversee the translation guidelines that were developed in the wake of the controversy and provide an external “quality assurance” process. Some translators in the middle of the controversy were deeply hurt and felt misunderstood, and some who had nothing to do with the headlines (translators in South America, for example) were hurt that their life’s work was now being questioned. Tempers flared and some people resigned.

Some missionaries in heavily top-down organizations avoid controversy by simply not telling their leadership what is happening on the field. “We planted six new churches,” forgetting to mention, “and four of them have women as pastors.”

These conflicts lead to situations where either:

1) the top priority of mission strategies is to appease supporters, or
2) leadership is kept clueless with smoke and mirrors while missionaries on the field have no real accountability, or both.

Is there a third way?

Keith Holmes and his wife, Mary van Rheenen serve as Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel in The Netherlands, where they minister among and work with the Roma people throughout Europe. Learn more about and support their ministry here.