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Article Summary- Today churches and missionaries are being told that to imitate the ministry of Jesus they must add social justice to their understanding of the church’s mission. As pastors and missions committees embrace the idea that social action and gospel proclamation are “two wings of the same bird,” the kind of work that they send their missionaries to do changes, and this has a negative effect on world missions. This article highlights those negative effects in an African context, offers historical, practical, and biblical critiques of the trend, and redirects the church’s attention to understanding and fulfilling the Great Commission in the way the apostles did in Acts and the Epistles.
Introduction- "Evangelical missions in Africa is changing. Or more accurately, it has changed. In the past, the bulk of the theologically conservative missionaries in Africa came to do church planting and leadership training. No longer. Today many of the new missionaries being sent are focused on social relief, with the church tacked on as a theological addendum. By all appearances there has been a mega-shift in evangelical missions away from church planting and leadership training toward social justice or social action.
Social action and social justice are elastic, elusive, and basically interchangeable terms that include, for example, caring for the poor and promoting just government that keeps the wealthy from strong– arming the vulnerable.
Social justice also often includes the idea that everyone deserves his fair bit of his local or global society’s affluence, and therefore, lobbies for some kind of forced or freewill redistribution of wealth.
What we used to do, we aren’t doing anymore. In fact, mission agency representatives who visit the campuses of Christian colleges in the United States to recruit new missionaries report that the compass needle of student interest is clearly swinging away from gospel proclamation toward medical relief, orphan care, and digging wells. It’s no surprise. The influential “missional” voices currently dominating the evangelical conversation about missions are promoting a new kind of mission: shalom, social justice, or the gospel of good deeds and human flourishing. Of course, because of their concern for biblical truth, the better authors and speakers emphasize the church and the preaching of Christ crucified for sinners. However, across the board a categorical shift in emphasis is unmistakable.
And it appears that the new generation of evangelicals—the Y.R. and R—has bought in. Churches, keen to support their enthusiastic young missionaries, often loosen their purse strings whatever the theological significance or insignificance of the mission. And market-sensitive mission agencies, having noted the change, are reworking their images to accommodate the new Peace Corps mentality.
As a result, the evangelical church in the West is commissioning and sending a generation of missionaries to Africa whose primary enthusiasm is for orphan care, distributing medicine, combating poverty, and other social action projects. For the most part, these new missionaries value the church, but in many cases they seem to view the church primarily as a platform from which to run and fund their relief projects.
And in a surprising number of cases, their local church involvement is nominal. We have watched these trends in Africa with growing disquiet over the last few years, and that concern has led us to write this article. By doing so we hope to warn pastors and churches of the trend and offer an alternative. We will speak about the situation in Africa because that is the continent we are familiar with, but we have no doubt that what we say applies equally well to missions endeavors everywhere.
To quantify his concern, one of the authors recently conducted a survey of missionaries in Malawi. The following graph shows some of the results. This is the report of a friend of the authors who serves as a recruiting representative for his mission agency, and of the other agency representatives with whom he rubs shoulders. In his Ph.D. research project involving missionaries in Malawi, Brian Biedebach discovered that one-third of the missionaries who focus on social relief do not attend the same church on a weekly basis. It is no surprise that international missions is a place where the issue of social action comes sharply into focus. In 1923, contrasting the liberals’ social mission with a more biblical philosophy of ministry, J. Gresham Machen wrote in Christianity and Liberalism, “This difference is not a mere difference in theory, but makes itself felt everywhere in the practical realm. It is particularly evident on the missions field” (This survey was conducted by Brian Biedebach for his doctoral dissertation Making Disciples in Current Missionary Practice in Malawi for the University of Stellenbosch). Seventy-two percent of the missionaries surveyed had been in Malawi for five years or less, meaning these figures naturally reflect what the most recent generation of missionaries is doing.
According to the survey, thirty-eight percent of the missionaries in Malawi are involved in direct gospel-proclamation ministry, such as evangelism, church planting, and theological training. Sixty-two percent are involved in social action or serve as support staff. In fact, there are as many Western school teacher missionaries in Malawi as there are evangelists, church planters, and theological instructors combined. Some argue that the church needs to emphasize social action in missions to correct the imbalance of too many years of focusing on proclamation ministries. In light of these figures, one wonders exactly what imbalance is being redressed.
When asked if they share their faith with others, twenty-five percent of the missionaries surveyed responded by ticking the seldom or never box. Thirty-one percent said that they are not currently discipling anyone. These are the patterns that concern us: numerically speaking, social action efforts are outstripping gospel proclamation efforts, and compounding the problem is the fact that social relief missions do not seem to easily lend themselves to fulfilling Christ’s commission to make disciples. These figures reveal a trend, but where has the trend come from?"
Sources of the Current Trend-
(Article to be continued)...
This piece was originally published in MSJ 25/1 (Spring 2014) 29–50
