Local churches are the engine of cross-cultural missions, but it is easy for a church to see itself only as the benefactor and not also as a beneficiary. I’ve seen the shift occur in two ways.
Sometimes, a local-church missions program becomes a grant-writing foundation. A committee oversees how a slice of resources gets distributed among strategic ministries. Partnership with missionaries consists in a minimal monetary commitment and sporadic contact. In this situation, the church functions like an export terminal in a port city. Resources are loaded onto containers and shipped away in the hope that they will be used well.
In another situation, the church’s missions program serves primarily as a gauge of the spirituality and service-oriented status of the church itself. “Do we care about the world? Let me show you the list of ministries we support.” The ministries and missionaries are doing solid work, no doubt, but the program functionally exists to showcase the church’s strength and godly priorities.
In both cases — the export hub and the advertising campaign — the local sending church is the source from which missions flows out. Church leaders may want more from their missions involvement, but it can remain unclear how missions contributes to the local church’s own health and life.
Rather than focusing exclusively on the export side of missionary involvement, churches can also reflect on how global engagement shapes the local church. Missions pastors can say not only, “Look at what God is doing through us!” but also, “Look at what we are learning!” or “Here is how missions changes us.” By participating in cross-cultural missions, we invite God to shape our church in at least three ways: We learn from global churches, we guard against ethnocentrism, and we strive to show old truths in new ways.
Learning from Global Churches
Partnership with missionaries engaged in frontline cross-cultural ministry helps your local church develop a proper posture toward other churches around the world. We see this posture in the New Testament when the apostles remind churches that they stand together.
For example, Peter directs our attention to believers throughout the world when he calls the church to “resist [the devil], firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world” (1 Peter 5:9). The “brotherhood” he refers to exists globally. Your church may send missionaries, but that does not mean it is only a benefactor, parent, or teacher to other churches. It is part of a brotherhood, a family that extends around the world.
This brotherhood experiences “the same kinds of suffering.” Our struggles are not identical or equal in intensity. But wherever we live, all believers face the temptation to throw away their confidence in Christ. American Christians sometimes place a categorical difference between their own suffering (“first-world problems”) and those of Christians in other nations. We should, of course, be mindful that a church protest is not the same as an armed attack or the constant fear of imprisonment. And yet, Peter makes the Christian experience universal. We are all potential martyrs, and we all hear Jesus’s assurance that “the world hates you” (John 15:19). Remembering this unity helps us to resist the devil and stand firm in faith.
The apostles also expect that Christians can learn from the experience of others. Paul anticipates a blessing when he prepares to visit the Roman Christians, so that “we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (Romans 1:11–12). He points to the generosity of Christians in Macedonia, in spite of their suffering, as an example for the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 8:1–4). And he asks Timothy to share about his trials with the Thessalonians “to establish and exhort [them] in [their] faith, that no one be moved by these afflictions” (1 Thessalonians 3:2–3).
The normal pattern of church life includes sharing stories, inspiration, and models of courage from churches in different places. When your church has personal connections with believers around the world, often through the ministry of cross-cultural missionaries, you will view other churches as sources of mutual encouragement and benefit.
Guarding Against Ethnocentrism
Active involvement in cross-cultural ministry lifts our eyes off ourselves and so fights against ethnocentrism (the habit of thinking that our own ethnic group, nationality, or culture is inherently superior).
Ethnocentrism in missions emerges when cultural or national strengths of the sending culture become the primary values celebrated and encouraged within a target culture. For example, since I greatly appreciate the Western tradition of the rule of law, I would love to see distinctive rights of that tradition — such as trial by jury, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion — emerge in more countries. Cross-cultural missionaries, however, need the discipline of proclaiming Christ crucified as their primary goal — lest we advocate more for a certain culture than for Jesus.
Connections with cross-cultural missionaries and local believers remind us that believers in other places embody the gospel in unique ways. For example, Vietnamese believers recite, “In Jesus’s name, amen,” in unison at the end of every corporate prayer. This has at least two benefits. First, it reminds them (and us) that we pray as those who come to the Father in Christ. The practice among many English-speaking Western believers of ending prayers in a variety of ways may foster a certain freedom, but it allows for some strange and abrupt endings. Second, the unison ending means that everyone participates out loud in the prayer. It is a corporate practice that requires each person to pay attention for the cue to show that this prayer is coming to an end.
A little, distinctive practice like that gets known only through participation in that community. Perhaps a long-term missionary shares about it in your church, or short-term visitors come back with a new experience of prayer. Simply knowing that another church has committed to closing prayer “in Jesus’s name” challenges us to ask how we might better reflect the gospel in our own prayers. It teaches us that the gospel will look slightly different as it finds its home in another culture. And that unique display of Christian faith reminds us that our own cultural expression of Christianity is uniquely fitted to us.
Long-term investment in cross-cultural missions helps a local church avoid ethnocentrism as it learns to become a humble learner from other churches around the world.
Showing Old Truth in New Ways
We all tend to get bogged down in our own ruts, to ignore new questions because we are satisfied with old answers. Churches can be the same way, but cross-cultural missions demands fresh words for communicating the gospel in new places. Unchanging truths often require original expression in new cultural contexts.
The cross-cultural impulse in a church asks, “How can we explain the gospel to people who are different from us? What illustrations might we use? What words best translate the message? What songs can we compose? What shape of life can we commend to ourselves and our neighbors that will make the gospel connect?”
These aims are not achieved by simply repeating what we know from our own culture. Insight is earned through the diligent work of speaking in a local language, living in a different environment, and experiencing life from within a different culture — and then through bold attempts to make the gospel clear and persuasive there.
For East Asian cultures, sin as a trespass or disobedience requires further explanation. The personal nature of sin against God needs to be explicit for people to understand its seriousness. So, evangelists can speak about dishonoring God’s majesty or about betrayal against God’s kindness. Those aspects are mentioned in the Bible (Romans 1:21–23; 2:23), but some Western ways of sharing the gospel leave them implicit. Local Christians or cross-cultural missionaries can remind our churches that the New Testament speaks about sin in various ways, some of which may stick better in another culture.
The missionary impulse forces every local church to ask, “How are we engaging in fresh cross-cultural evangelism and outreach both to other cultures and here in our own place?”
Maturing Through Missions
Your local church missions program is neither a grant-writing institution nor an advertisement for your church’s godliness. It is, rather, a source of unity and renewal as your church grows in appreciation for God’s work around the world.
When a local church prioritizes the efforts of called men and women to proclaim the gospel among other people groups, that practice becomes part of its own growth toward maturity in Christ. Happy is the church that engages with challenges in other parts of the world and then expects to grow as it hears new echoes of gospel witness from missionaries and believers in those places.
Desiring God