Prioritizing the well-being of the political and cultural environment here in America that actually empowers us to be a force for global missions is, again, a “distraction.” We use the term “gospel centered” too often this way. If I can convince you that it’s more “gospel-centered,” it must be the best. What we usually mean by that is anything evangelistic, for the lost, or maxing out our witness! And anything that looks like care for existing Christians, families, cultures, societies, or institutions looks like a “good thing” but is actually a distraction. It’s all mission drift.

This article is not abstract for me. It comes from the deepest wound of my life and ministry. It is the story of how my family was sent to the Netherlands to reach the Turkish-speaking population with the gospel and how, in the process, we were abandoned by the very church that sent us.

We were abandoned not because we rejected our mission, but because we refused to sacrifice the fundamental Christian loves that make foreign missions possible.

Before we ever left the United States, there was complete agreement between us and our previous pastors: if we were going to minister long-term among Turkish Muslims in Europe, we needed a healthy international church for our family, for our spiritual stability, and for local believers in the Netherlands. Everyone understood and affirmed this. It was part of the official sending plan. It was part of the visa sponsorship. It was part of the pastoral counsel we received. And it was, we believed, part of the Lord’s wisdom.

But the church we joined upon arrival soon drifted into theological error, and the pastor fell into deep sin. The environment became spiritually unhealthy, not only for us but for the Christians already there. With no healthy international church option available, we urged our pastors in America to support the planting of one—not as a shift in calling, not as a new direction, but as a necessary step back to keep going faithfully in the same direction we were sent.

Their answer stunned us.

They told us they agreed that our family needed a healthy church. They agreed that the local believers needed a healthy church. They agreed the Netherlands needed a healthy church. But they did not believe it was “best” for reaching Turkish Muslims.

Their sentence haunts me to this day: “We believe these things are important, but they are not the best thing. The best thing is staying focused on the Turks.”

In other words, remain in an unhealthy church. Ignore the theological drift. Pretend the sin is not there. Don’t think about the believers around you. Don’t think about the spiritual oxygen your family needs. Don’t think about the long-term presence of gospel witness in the Netherlands.

Just “stay focused on the Turks.”

And in that moment, I realized: a false hierarchy of loves had formed. A missional value system that placed “the unreached” above Christ’s church, above the health of missionaries, above the spiritual needs of Christians, and above the basic order God himself commands.

This is the effect of something I have previously written about: Gospel-Onlyism. I’ve defined this as “a mindset that treats anything beyond the message of personal salvation as a ‘distraction,’ encumbrance, or even a danger to the mission of the church.”

And it is the silent engine driving many unhealthy decisions in missions today.

How Gospel-Onlyism Distorts Missions

Gospel-Onlyism is not an overcommitment to the gospel. It is an underdeveloped understanding of how the gospel works in the world. It insists that reaching the lost is the only priority that really matters, and everything else is a distraction. Even the very means Christ has ordained to sustain the mission, like the local church, the health of Christian families, the cultivation of stable Christian communities, and the long, slow, generational presence of believers.

When this mindset dominates, “the unreached” becomes a category so revered that anything already reached can be neglected, dismissed, or sacrificed. This is precisely what has happened to Europe, and is what happened to us. The “best” thing was defined as whatever was hardest, most extreme, most sacrificial, most dangerous, most “focused on the lost,” even if it meant ignoring the very conditions necessary for long-term faithfulness.

This is not biblical. This is not our historical Christian mission. This is not the Great Commission. It is a disordered love.

Three SBC-Formed Errors That Make This Problem Worse

My story is personal, but it is not unique. It is symptomatic of three structural flaws that have come to shape large parts of the Southern Baptist Convention and a strong part of our mission culture.

Read More