“Baptizing yourself is silly. And going to the nations without the support of a local church is a little like baptizing yourself. Being a self-proclaimed lone-ranger missionary is as ridiculous and arrogant as baptizing yourself.”

Recently, I felt a burden in my heart for an unreached people group in the Middle East. So I went and visited. It seemed God had aligned a need in that place with my gifts in ministry. My wife said her heart was warm to go. My extended family gave the thumbs up. The financial support was there. As we prayed, our desire to go only increased.

Ready. Set. Go. Right? We had the desire, training, means, support, and sense of calling from God. Just choose a missionary organization and head out?

Nope.

Not on your life. Not without the support of a healthy local church.

Greatest Problem in Missions

Modern missions endeavors face many thorny challenges: contextualization, indigeneity, and autonomy, among other cultural issues. Yet in our globalized world, with so many doing great work on cultural issues, there seems to be an ascendant problem: a lack of understanding of the church’s nature and its role in missions.

This is the greatest challenge to modern missions, and it raises a variety of other issues. Here I’d like to focus on one small, yet significant, corner of this challenge: partnering with a healthy sending church for missionary work.

But first, let me tell you a story.

‘I Baptized Myself!’

I was a campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in the United States for decades. One of the joys of working in that ministry was an annual week-long camp on the beach at the end of school year. One year, in one of our evening share times, a student said, “I was having a great time on the beach reading through the book of Acts—which, by the way, I’d never read before—and I got to this part about Philip and the guy from Ethiopia.”

At this point, the staff workers glanced at one another with bemused looks.

“And I started thinking,” the fledgling theologian continued, “that I’d never been baptized. And there was all the ocean in front of me, and I thought, why not? So I jumped in, prayed, and fell backward into the water. I baptized myself!”

Yup. The student “baptized” himself.

Now, I’m not going to outline all the reasons why Christians shouldn’t do that. Virtually no historic or contemporary Christian organization has practiced self-baptisms. Most Christians rightly understand baptism to signify being incorporated into Christ and his visible body, the church. As such, it’s a portal into the community of believers.

Baptizing yourself is silly. And going to the nations without the support of a local church is a little like baptizing yourself. Being a self-proclaimed lone-ranger missionary is as ridiculous and arrogant as baptizing yourself.

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