Over the course of the past ten years or so, we’ve worked closely with our church’s missionaries to find out who among them is working directly to fulfill the Great Commission, or is willing to turn in that direction? What we’ve found is that Evangelical missions today has changed from preaching the Gospel to dispensing vitamins to pregnant women, digging wells for villages, and handing out nets to keep malaria at bay.

There was a time when missions meant preaching the Gospel to all the world and being a missionary meant being sent to all the world to preach the Gospel. The Auca martyrs went to the Aucas to preach the Gospel. They went from love of their fellow men to tell them about sin and righteousness and judgment, then the hope of forgiveness and eternal life through the cross of the Only Lord Jesus Christ.

They did not go as a publicity stunt to “raise awareness” about the “marginalized.”

Today, though, we have a different kind of missions and a different kind of missionary. Christian missions has evolved and has little to do with preaching the Gospel. And yet every Christian missionary and Christian mission non-profit organization claims to be…

fulfilling the Great Commission:

And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20)

Take the time to read the “missions” letters sent out every couple of months by the “missionaries” out on the “mission field”; spend some time asking them pointed questions when they’re back in the States on home assignment; and often you’ll find their major concerns and commitments aren’t preaching the Gospel and planting churches for the salvation of mankind, but helping their children get ahead as they grow up and making their presence in whatever country they serve innocuous enough that they fit in and don’t awaken any hostility. In other words, family and job security.

Their lives are given to anthropology, linguistics, literacy, wells and water, refugee camps, education, leadership training; to everything but preaching the Gospel as the Apostle Paul preached it in Athens, Corinth, and Ephesus. Note that his preaching threatened the trade in idolatry and caused the merchants to mount a riot against the foreigner:

For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, was bringing no little business to the craftsmen; these he gathered together with the workmen of similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that our prosperity depends upon this business. You see and hear that not only in Ephesus, but in almost all of Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away a considerable number of people, saying that gods made with hands are no gods at all. Not only is there danger that this trade of ours fall into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis be regarded as worthless and that she whom all of Asia and the world worship will even be dethroned from her magnificence.”

When they heard this and were filled with rage, they began crying out, saying, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Acts 19:24-28)

Jesus preceded His command that we make disciples of all the nations, baptizing and teaching them to obey everything He commanded, by declaring His Father had given Him “all authority in Heaven and on earth.” But authority is absent from missions today. Imagine Cru or I-V or Navigators or Veritas proclaiming the authority of Jesus Christ on the campuses where churches from around the country pay them to be missionaries. Imagine missionaries today repeating the Apostle Paul’s words to Athens’ Areopagus:

Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. (Acts 17:30, 31)

Yes, there are some outstanding missionaries out there still today, but you have to work to find them, and Evangelicals don’t want to do the work of discernment. Evangelicals give money to missionaries today for much the same reason Roman Catholics give money to their religious orders and the Vatican: it’s the vicarious participation in special works of godliness through which we gain favor with God and bragging rights among other Christians. “Our church gives fifty percent of its budget to foreign missions,” we say, but never mind what those missionaries actually do out there on the missions field. Foreign is sacrificial, missions is godly, and that’s the end of it. Foreign missions are the Evangelical’s works of supererogation allowing your church and mine to receive assurance of our salvation. Evangelical missions are our treasury of merit.

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