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Megatrend 11:
Thousands of Third-world mission agencies
by Justin D. Long
In Uzbekistan, Uzbek missionaries with the Uzbek Christian Fellowship have begun an outreach ministry to Afghanis in a Tajik city on the Tajik-Afghan border where many Afghanis pass through. Many of those ministered to are refugees from the Afghani civil war. This is just one example among thousands of indigenous missionaries from hard-to-reach peoples reaching out to others around them.
This is perhaps one of the least-told stories of modern missions: the incredible wave of agencies being set up by Third-World Christians. Ethiopians and Nigerians and Ghanaians reaching out to North Africa, Uzbeks reaching out to Central Asia, Koreans reaching out to Southeast Asia. Well over a thousand of these agencies have been set up, and they are not just sponsoring "home missionaries," but sending foreign missionaries too.
This approach is not without its problems: stories of missionaries returning home, unable to raise their support or to be able to accomplish anything; problems with financial accountability; difficulties in leadership training; barriers in cross-cultural sensitivity; and the overwhelming shadow of persecution, which is much harder on Third-World missionaries than on Westerners.
Another problem facing the church globally is how to support these indigenous ministries. Certainly Westerners must not take a colonial approach, in which they would "take over" the mission effort. Neither should we shower these missions with excess financial resources: while it is true that these missionaries may work with far less than what Western cross-cultural missions must use, that does not necessarily mean either that (a) they need more, (b) they would be more effective if they had more, or (c) they would appropriately use more.
The problems boil down to three issues: (1) how can the global body of Christ best help Third-World missions sustain what they have already started?; (2) how can we help them to become more effective in what they are presently doing?; (3) how can we help them to expand to do new things?
If these problems can be addressed, then there are many benefits to mobilizing Third-World missionaries, as we have noted before. Third-World missionaries will often know the languages and cultures =now= rather than having to learn them. They fade into the culture much more easily. And, the rumor of persecution has the effect of generating more commitment.
Many of the Third-World indigenous missionaries by nature work in World A. Therefore, if we enable 1,000 mission agencies to each send 8 people to World A, we are discussing an immediate doubling of the existing frontier mission force among the unevangelized. Should the agencies each send 16, the mission force would triple. These kind of gains are worth the investment necessary to identify ways of addressing the issues involved in partnership with Third-World mission agencies.
These agencies exist. There is no stopping them. If we do not help them, they will still have a tremendous effect in World A, perhaps responsible for at least a quarter of all evangelism in that region. If we do help them, they may be responsible for far more: half or three-quarters. Third-world agencies may be the difference in whether or not World A is evangelized by 2025 or not--which the present mission force is not projected to accomplish in the same time period.
We've said it before, we'll say it again. If you don't have relationships with Third-World agencies, you'd better start now. We cannot afford to exclude a mission force that equals or surpasses our own investment in the unevangelized. Apart, we are simply divisions in the army. Together, we constitute a force capable of finishing the task.