Infiltration

So yesterday was my eleventh day in the Perspectives class, and it was thought-provoking to say the least. I'm a little reluctant to say that the speaker wasn't a very good teacher because he did get his point across to most of us, but there was still a lot of miscommunication. The majority of the confusion was caused by semantics: redefining missions to get a better sense of progress in reaching the unreached. The idea was that mission is not going on a short-term mission trip and connecting with a local church to do service projects. Although those kinds of short-term "ministry," or "vision," trips are necessary for the encouragement of both the local church and the ministers, we cannot call them "mission trips." Mission is taking the gospel to people who have never heard or accepted it before. Short-term ministry trips are typically associated primarily with the local church, while, according to last night's speaker, a "real" mission trip is when a missionary immerses himself in a primarily non-Christian culture without church connections. Unfortunately, the speaker had a hard time explaining this and didn't do a great job of answering questions, nearly resulting in full-blown arguments more than once. But fortunately, there were some sound minds in the class who understood what he was trying to get across, and we had a good discussion about the topic after class. The biggest misunderstanding was that short-term "mission" trips are bad because they don't really qualify as missions (it definitely sounded like that was the speaker's opinion because of the way he talked about short-term mission trips); however, short-term mission trips are still beneficial, edifying the missionary and the local church, leading the missionary to a better understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus so that he or she can later be effective on a "real" (long-term, relational) mission trip.

Anyway, that was a lot of rambling on one topic. One thing that caught my attention during the session was that churches are progressively leaning toward missions as a works-centered task—going on mission trips to provide practical aid for the physically needy (money for the poor, food for the starving, shelter for the homeless)—and leaving out the spiritual aspect of missions—the much more important need for a Savior. More and more churches are giving temporary aid and neglecting eternal aid, building houses for the homeless without preaching the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. The analogy the speaker used was that church mission (works-based service) without kingdom mission (Word-based service) is like moving chairs on the Titanic: it's all going down anyway, so what's the point? We have to learn to prioritize; address spiritual needs more urgently than physical needs, but continue to provide for physical needs in order to strengthen relationships with the locals and encourage acceptance of the gospel.

When the speaker mentioned the fact that short-term mission trips usually work with local churches in the mission site, I was reminded of something I had heard on Tuesday: Alex, a friend from TNT, is going to Africa on a service trip with a non-Christian organization, so she asked for prayer that she would be able to minister both to the Africans and to her teammates. This got me thinking: What if missionaries started going on "mission trips" with non-Christian organizations? After all, secular service groups aren't going to be associated with foreign churches. Most mission organizations only send missionaries to where a growing church community has already been established, but a secular organization may be able to slip through the cracks and reach areas where the gospel has never been heard. This is the idea of "business-as-mission"; in other words, Paul's tent-making strategy, using his business as a way of getting connected with people so that he could share the gospel with them. So if secular organizations can get to where no church can reach (due to government restrictions against Christianity), wouldn't it seem like a good idea to send missionaries with those groups to reach the unreached?

I mentioned this to my friend Shelby, who was visiting the Perspectives class. She summed up the idea in a single word: infiltration. It sounds drastic, but that's essentially what it is. Then she said that she had been thinking about joining the Peace Corps for a while, and with infiltration as new motivation, she seemed even more confident that the Peace Corps is where God wants her. And after hearing that, I'm slowly starting to see what God may have planned for me. Ever since I started thinking about being a missionary, I've wanted to go to the unreached to share the gospel with people who have never heard it before. But when I started looking for mission organizations to work with, I had a hard time finding any organizations that are sending missionaries to unreached and unengaged areas (according to the Joshua Project). And now it seems like working with an organization outside of the church would be a great way of getting to where I want to go.

But now the question is where God is going to take me. I've been wanting to go to India since last summer, but I keep hearing people say that they also want to go to India on mission trips. It seems like there are so many people who want to go to India that all the smaller, less known countries are being forgotten. Thanks to some information from my friend Meg, Kazakhstan is looking kind of appealing to me. (Kazakhstan is one of the few places that the Peace Corps works where the community is very closed-minded against Christians.) But I've felt so strongly for so long that I'm supposed to go to India that I can't tell if my reluctance to not go to India is because of my own desire to go there or because God wants me to go there. I'm kind of thinking that it's because God has called me there because, despite my desire to take the gospel to people who have never heard it or accepted it (who are abundant in Kazakhstan where the Muslim communities thrive), my desire for a specific spiritual audience (the unreached of the world) isn't as strong as my desire for a specific ethnic audience (the unbelieving Indians). In other words, I want to go to the Indian non-believers who have heard the gospel but haven't accepted it more than I want to go to the Kazakhstani who have never heard the name of Jesus. That sounds bad, but I think God has called me to go to India, while He has called others to go to Kazakhstan. But I don't know. This will obviously take a lot of prayer and listening, so any and all prayers are appreciated.