in the whole world
as a testimony to all nations,
and then the end will come.
Matthew 24:14
Right now, in Cape Town, South Africa, more than 4,000 Christian pastors, missionaries, teachers, researchers and others, from 198 countries, are meeting together to discuss the future of the Church in the world and how to best share the Gospel of Christ with those who have yet to hear His name. The Lausanne 2010 Congress will last throughout the week. In all of history, there has never been a gathering with Christians from more countries than what is taking place right now in Cape Town. Of course, it is receiving little media attention, but that is not surprising.
For those of us who would have loved to have been there, but can't go in person, the internet is proving to be very helpful with much coverage of what is going on. Lausanne 2010
I've read much already and am just getting started. It is so exciting to learn about what God is doing in this world and to see how I can be a part of it!
I wanted to share parts of a blog, written by Justin Long who is attending Lausanne 2010. It has to do with why we should be engaged in missions. You can access it at The Long View
A meditation: Can Doug Birdsall’s prayer at Cape Town be answered?
OCTOBER 18, 2010
On the first night of the Lausanne Cape Town 2010 meetings, during the opening address, Doug Birdsall reflected on the how the idea of unreached people groups was first presented at the first Lausanne Congress in the early 1970s. Since then, enormous efforts have pushed the number of unreached peoples down—yet there are still unreached peoples with us today (depending on the estimate you use, somewhere between 4,000 and perhaps 8,000 or so). He said, “We pray that by the next Lausanne Congress, the number of unreached people groups will be zero.”
This is a noble and admirable prayer, of course, and one that I join heartily in praying with him. But it wouldn’t be me writing if we didn’t pause for a moment and ask—can this prayer be answered? and is it likely that it will be?
1. When learning about praying a prayer, and how prayers get answered, we find motivation is as important as the prayer itself. We are praying for God’s will to be done. So when we pray, “Let the number of unreached groups fall to zero,” what are we actually praying for? Are we praying, for example, “God, proclaim your divine word to the nations” or are we praying, “God, send sufficient workers to proclaim your word? perhaps, God, send me?”
When Jesus looked on the fields “white unto harvest,” he neither set out to preach to them nor did he pray for God to divinely show them the truth. Instead, he instructed his disciples to pray for workers. (And then, shortly later, he sent the disciples out as workers).
With God all things are possible—as the many dreams of Jesus in the Middle East presently being seen attest—but at the same time we must also remember that God requires human interaction too. God could instantaneously present himself to all unreached peoples worldwide: but this would immediately relieve his Church, his lovely bride, of the responsibility that he gave us. If we are to obey the Great Commandment (to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, mind and to love our neighbor as our self) then we must obey the Great Commission (to proclaim the good news to all the ethne). But there’s a catch: obedience to the Great Commission isn’t a one time event.
Not too long back I was telling one of our kids that he needed to go and clean his room. “But dad,” he said, “I cleaned it already.” When pressed for when he cleaned it, he said, “I cleaned it on Monday!” I then had to explain to him that a room needed to be cleaned more than once. Picking up needed to be done on a daily basis.
It could have gone differently. I could have told him to clean his room—and then, when he failed to get it done in an appropriate time, I could have gone and done it for him. It would have gotten the job done yet taught him nothing. The job, in effect, wasn’t about cleaning the room so much as it was about teaching the skills and habits of cleaning which he will use the rest of his life.
And how are we doing on our own task? This news, despite the wonderful visuals of the opening night in Cape Town, is not good. The number of people who have no access to Christ, Christianity or the Gospel is presently increasing by an estimated 19 million per year. The reason is simple: not enough people are working among these groups to make a sustainable difference in the long run.
It is the long run that is important. It is not enough to engage a group with a few missionaries. We must engage them with sufficient missionaries—but even that is not enough, because that’s like cleaning our room once. We need to to pioneer a church planting movement which will plant churches capable of evangelizing the group to its cultural borders and sustaining that evangelism through future generations. That’s cleaning a room and keeping it clean. That’s learning the habits that are necessary—the habit of passing on to future generations what has been passed on to us, as Paul instructed Timothy to do.
In other words “completion” of the Great Commission is a task that is not done once and then forgotten. We must have sufficient resources to complete it every day. It’s possible for rooms to become messy, and possible for a group to become unevangelized. For a live fire demonstration of this, look at Europe. It’s very simple, really: if all a group has are missionaries, then when the missionaries go home – and they will, folks, as ReMAP I and II so ably investigated – then future generations will not be evangelized. A non-christian home will not evangelize its children. If a growing church is not planted then in 20 or 25 years the seeds of the Gospel will be scorched, die and wither away.
To reach a group sustainably over time requires people willing to be long-term servants, humble older brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers in the faith. Otherwise it’s all for naught. Short-term workers can be useful, but they’re less like parents and more like doctors, dropping in when they’re desperately needed but not there for the day-in and day-out growth that keep them from being needed in the first place. Short term is useful but not the answer to the long-term inculturation of the gospel, translation of the Word, and discipling of first believers necessary for a church to be pioneered.
You can point to a place like China where the Gospel grew without outside missionaries, but don’t forget that missionaries like Hudson Taylor and many others pioneered it there first. They endured long enough to plant a church which could withstand persecution.
2. Another cautionary note we must have about praying this prayer: let us pray it with the right attitude. We pray, “Let the number of unreached groups fall to zero!” But let us pause to reflect on why we are asking for this to happen. I could tell my sons and daughters that once their room is clean we’ll go get ice cream. I know what will happen: they will think, hey, maybe “cleaning room = getting ice cream.” A week from now they’ll come back to me and say, “Dad, we cleaned our room—let’s go get ice cream!” When ice cream is no longer a part of the equation, will they still clean their room?
Sometimes I think we tend to emphasize Matthew 24:14 (the gospel will be preached to all the nations, and then the end shall come) a little bit more than we should. Jesus listed off a bunch of things and called them “birth pangs.” Yet we seem to approach this final “birth pang” as the “blastoff timer”—when this one is done, some morning, at 12:05 am, when the last group is “reached” (whatever that means in God’s terms), then suddenly the timer will click over, and Jesus will appear in the sky. In other words a=b. Do this and immediately Jesus comes back. If we clean our room, we get ice cream. But when we reach a goal and Jesus doesn’t immediately appear—will we sustain that same effort over the long run? Will we continue to clean our room, even when there’s no ice cream, cake or soda in the picture—just because we should?
Yes, I do believe that Christ’s return is in some fashion tied to world evangelization. But at the same time I don’t think that we can evangelize the world and “force Christ’s return.” He is the sovereign one, not us. Jesus may not have known the precise hour of his return but there is a precise hour already set – God knows it – and Jesus knew that precise hour would fall after the evangelization of the world.
I don’t think we’ll ever have sufficient missionary workers to evangelize the whole world at one point, and at that point Christ will return. So we need to build up a church capable of sustaining that effort over time so that at some future point the task is accomplished and will continue to be accomplished. It is “after” the task is accomplished (and sustainably so, I think) that Jesus will return.
Let’s treat the Great Commission as less of a countdown timer and more of a pilgrimage of obedience to a destination. Let’s think of ourselves as the wise virgins who were prepared for the groom’s appearance, as the stewards who “did business and made a profit and occupied ourselves” until the return of the King. We are not obeying the Great Commission to force Christ’s return. We are obeying it because He gave it to us. Because it is our form of preparation for Christ’s return.
3. Yes, I do think the prayer can be answered. But I think it will be a challenge and it will not be the easy path. It requires us to think eternally rather than in terms of the short-term. In terms of my earlier analogy, we need to think less about cleaning up our room once and more about forming habits of ongoing cleaning.
I wish we could abandon “end times” thinking. I think it’s a bit of a oxymoron. For Christians there are no “end times” or “last days” in the long view. This age may end, but we will continue on. For people who will live eternally, “last days” is a bit of tunnel thinking.
What will happen after Jesus’ returns? We will worship him forever, enjoy him forever, and rule and reign with him. Thus, worship continues. Learning about him and his nature continues. Caring for his creation continues. Love never fails. Obedience to Christ never stops. A million years from now, I’ll still be alive, still loving my wife and children, still worshipping my king, and—I hope!—exploring this wonderful universe He has created. I’ll be laughing over this 70 years and the trials I endure. A billion years from now, I may not even remember this period.
What does not continue? Fame. Fortune. Power. Hunger. Sickness. Sin. Death. (and possibly many more things.)
So as was noted last night, let’s not consider the church to be the waiting room for eternity, but rather be about the business of the Kingdom now. Let’s do the things that will last for eternity. Ok, I know I just said missionary effort wouldn’t continue, but it is a form of worship and it has direct eternal significance (unlike the storing up of wealth). And besides missions is a form of obedience.
I for one do believe it’s possible for the unreached to be reached. But let’s not do it as a countdown clock in which we mobilize enough workers to “do it once.” Let’s do it as a pilgrimage to obedience where we disciple enough followers of Jesus to see the whole world discipled, and stay discipled, forever.
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