Word, Spirit, Gospel and Mission (Part 4)

Donald A. McGavran (1897-1990) was born in India as a son and grandson of American missionaries. He served as a missionary in India for thirty years, then returned to the United States and in 1965 became the first dean of Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission. McGavran is known as the founder of the Church Growth movement. His scholarly yet practical writings on the subject are interesting and provocative. Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, cites McGavran as one of his biggest influences. The Church Growth movement has many supporters and critics. I have some opinions about this movement, but I will not discuss them here. This is a purpose-driven article. My purpose in bringing up Donald McGavran is to talk about his observations of 20th century mission agencies in India.

McGavran noticed that some agencies were successful at making converts, but others were stagnant and barely growing. He set out to discover why. After careful observation, he found that the stagnant agencies exhibited some common features. He called their strategy a “mission station” approach. A mission station resembled a North American or European church. Western values and customs were on display, giving the church a decidedly non-Indian look and feel. Converts of these missionaries had powerful conversion experiences, but the converts were few and far between. In The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains why (p. 122):

In the “mission station” approach, as McGavran sees it, converts are detached from the natural communities to which they belong, attached to the foreign missions and institutions, and required to conform to ethical and cultural standards that belong to the Christianity of the foreign missionary. The effect of this policy is twofold. On the one hand the convert, having been transplanted into an alien culture, is no longer in a position to influence non-Christian relatives and neighbors; on the other hand, the energies of the mission are exhausted in the effort to bring the converts, or more often their children, into conformity with the standards supposed by the missionaries to be required by the gospel. Both factors have the effect of stopping the growth of the church.

I’ll bet that the leaders of the “mission station” agencies didn’t like McGavran’s analysis. I can almost hear them saying, “We focus on quality rather than quantity.” They may have justified their approach by noting that their converts, though few, looked like outstanding examples of Christian discipleship because they had been so thoroughly transformed. Indeed, in the way that they spoke, dressed, and acted, they resembled miniature versions of the missionaries themselves! I suppose that these missionaries had the best of intentions. They were sincere, sacrificial, loving and devout, never imagining that they were imposing western cultural values. From their perspective, their standards were matters of biblical principle, right versus wrong. They imagined they were reading the Bible straight, interpreting Scripture just as it is. Whatever they taught the converts to do was just what they had done when they were converted and discipled.

McGavran concluded that the “mission station” approach was based on a faulty reading of the Great Commission. In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus said, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Based on those verses, McGavran said that the mission of the church has three aspects: discipling, baptizing, and perfecting. (Note that McGavran’s use of the term “discipling” is quite different from the way we use it in UBF. To us, “discipling” suggests discipleship training, helping converts to obey the teachings of the Bible. In McGavran’s terminology, that kind of training is called “perfecting”, and “discipling” means to help them make the initial commitment to identify themselves as followers of Christ.) McGavran believed that the order of the three activities in Matthew 28:19-20 is very significant, reflecting an order in time and priority. He thought that the missionary should focus on discipling and baptizing, and leave the task of perfecting to leaders of the indigenized church. The “mission station” agencies lose their effectiveness when they spend their time, resources and energy on perfecting rather than discipling and baptizing.

Personally, I disagree with some of McGavran’s conclusions. I am not convinced that Matthew 28:19-20 implies an order of priority, and the distinction between discipling and perfecting seems artificial. But McGavran’s basic observations are compelling. Lesslie Newbigin, who was also a missionary to India, agreed with McGavran’s assessment (p. 124):

The criticism of the “mission station” strategy has a great deal of force. It is also true that missions have, in McGavran’s phrase, tended to put perfecting before discipling and thereby fallen into the old legalist trap. They have become proponents of a new law rather than a liberating gospel. The church has been made to appear more like a school where examinations have to be passed than a place where the community meets to celebrate its freedom.

My purpose in writing this article is not to make hidden, indirect criticisms of UBF. To avoid any misunderstandings, I will tell you directly what I think. Speaking as a North American disciple of UBF missionaries, I have seen the missionaries’ dedication and sacrifice firsthand. I respect and love our missionaries. It is obvious that they have passed on many cultural influences to their converts. That is an inevitable result of cross-cultural witness, and it is not inherently bad. The fertilization of one culture with gospel seeds from another is, in my opinion, an essential part of God’s overall plan for the people and nations of the world. This cross-cultural aspect of UBF was very helpful in my own spiritual development.

Yet it is impossible to look at UBF chapters in North America and not see resemblances to the mission stations. Any North American who visits a UBF worship service for the first time instinctively feels that we are different, and we wear those differences as a badge of honor. Newcomers hear this message loud and clear: “You are very welcome here. But if you enter this fellowship, we expect you to become like us. Your standing in our community will rise and you will be rewarded as you accept and adopt our methods, manners, standards and traditions.” Of course, we never think of them as our traditions; we call them “God’s” mission,” “God’s” commands, and “Bible” principles. By the language that we use, we canonize and absolutize our ways of doing things. Use of that language is itself rewarded and taken as a sign of growing faith and commitment to Christ. But anyone who makes significant contact with Christ-loving people outside of UBF knows that many of the things that we hold dear are not absolutes but simply our own manners, methods and traditions.

When I came into UBF nearly three decades ago, I was, as McGavran observed, detached from my American Christian heritage and transplanted into an alien culture. I neglected and severed relationships with friends, family and neighbors. This detachment from my own people was a consequence of the way that Samuel Lee ran the ministry during the 1980’s and 1990’s. It drastically changed my life and brought me to Christ, but it left me emotionally isolated from people and confused about my identity, and it limited my influence and Christian witness to society outside of UBF. Now that I realize what has happened, I am trying to recover that lost identity and repair relationships with people whom I wrongly ignored.

And to me it seems undeniable that the factors cited by McGavran are stifling growth. It has just been reported that our average Sunday worship attendance in North America increased about 4% in 2010. I wonder what that figure would be if you remove the effect of inflow of missionaries from Korea and the natural increase from children born to UBF families coming of age. Regardless, we have not been seeing the growth that many had hoped for, and we have fallen far short of the target of doubling the ministry by 2010. To what do we attribute this slow growth? Reading through the yearly reports appearing on ubf.org, the top reasons cited by our missionaries for falling short are not praying enough, not studying the Bible enough, and so on. These ideas are reinforced by messages from leaders that exhort members to work harder, sacrifice more, recover zeal for the gospel, have an absolute attitude, etc. Everywhere I look, the assumption is that our mission strategy is impeccably sound, and all problems are due to individuals who did not get with the program and carry it out with enough intensity and sincerity. There is an elephant in the room, but no one seems willing to talk about it. That elephant is our overall mission strategy. This is the reason why I have been claiming that we lack a coherent theology of mission. We lack this theology because we trained ourselves not to discuss it, not even to think about it.

The mission station strategy is built on the assumption that the gospel message travels in just one direction, flowing from the missionaries to the converts. Sooner or later, as the community matures, there must be a backflow as the missionaries are re-evangelized by the converts. We see that happening in the early church beginning in Acts chapter 10. The passage that is often titled “The Conversion of Cornelius” could just as well be called “The Conversion of Peter.” The divinely arranged encounter between the centurion and the apostle shook Peter to the core. It challenged his lifelong assumptions about purity and righteousness and brought him to a new, deeper understanding of the gospel. Peter’s first reaction to the Holy Spirit’s vision was, “Surely not, Lord! I have never eaten anything impure or unclean” (Acts 10:14). That reaction reveals that, although he was a committed follower of Jesus, he still regarded his adherence to the law as a badge of honor, something that made him better than others in the sight of God. To see a non-law abiding Gentile be instantly accepted into God’s family made him realize that, even after being a Christian for many years, his own standing before God was still not based on anything he does but on what Christ has done for him. The gospel of Jesus Christ is, from first to last, a gospel of grace and faith alone.

The tensions in a cross-cultural ministry are inevitable. Eventually there must be a Jerusalem Council, an open dialogue between foreign missionaries and native converts, to inquire of God and enlarge their understanding of the gospel. I think we can all agree that the gospel must bring tangible, visible change to the lives of those who receive it. But what should the fruit of the gospel look like? Should the fruit of the gospel planted on Korean soil look just like the fruit on American soil? How different can they be?

The participants at the original Jerusalem Council thought hard about this and concluded that Jewish and Gentile Christians should look different. Yet they were also aware of the need for compromise to maintain friendships and spiritual unity. In the letter that James drafted to the Gentile Christians, he urged them “to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.” (Acts 15:29) That list of prohibitions includes behavior that we still regard as sinful (sexual immorality) and behavior that we now see as benign (eating of blood — Have you ever tried “black pudding”? It’s quite, um, interesting). So even the outcome of the Jerusalem Council was not an absolute ruling that could remain in place for all time. I take that as a meaningful principle. The ethical requirements of the gospel can never be fixed. Some aspects will remain constant over time, but other aspects will have to change.

And that raises another very important question. Who gets to decide what those ethical requirements are? That is not an easy one. So the series shall continue…