John Stott on missions and Southern-hemisphere Christianity
John Stott was recently interviewed in Christianity Today. Here’s an excerpt that struck me:
[Stott:] [The] enormous growth [of the church worldwide] is a fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-4. God promised Abraham not only to bless him, not only to bless his family or his posterity, but through his posterity to bless all the families of the earth. Whenever we look at a multiethnic congregation, we are seeing a fulfillment of that amazing promise of God. A promise made by God to Abraham 4,000 years ago is being fulfilled right before our very eyes today.
[Interviewer:] You know this growing church probably as well as any Westerner does. I wonder how you evaluate it.
[Stott:] The answer is "growth without depth." None of us wants to dispute the extraordinary growth of the church. But it has been largely numerical and statistical growth. And there has not been sufficient growth in discipleship that is comparable to the growth in numbers.
[Interviewer:] How can the Western church, which surely has problems of its own, fruitfully interact with the non-Western? Right now many churches are sending mission teams all over the world.
[Stott:] I certainly want to be positive about short-term mission trips, and I think on the whole they are a good thing. They do give Westerners an awfully good opportunity to taste Southern Christianity and to be challenged by it, especially by its exuberant vitality. But I think the leaders of such mission trips would be wise to warn their members that this is only a very limited experience of cross-cultural mission.
True mission that is based on the example of Jesus involves entering another world, the world of another culture. Incarnational cross-cultural mission is and can be very costly. I want to say, please realize that if God calls you to be a cross-cultural missionary, it will take you 10 years to learn the language and to learn the culture in such a way that you are accepted more or less as a national.
[Interviewer:] So there's really no replacing the long-term missionary.
[Stott:] I think not, except of course for indigenous Christians.
Reading this was a good reminder of why Tommy, Charlie, and I are here at CBTS---as well as of the limitations we face in being here.
We’re here for discipleship, for training and equipping indigenous Christian leaders who will be involved in deepening, not just widening, the Church. Pray that we’ll remember this in the crunch of preparing lectures, grading papers, and meeting with students.
--Wes, for the team
[Stott:] [The] enormous growth [of the church worldwide] is a fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-4. God promised Abraham not only to bless him, not only to bless his family or his posterity, but through his posterity to bless all the families of the earth. Whenever we look at a multiethnic congregation, we are seeing a fulfillment of that amazing promise of God. A promise made by God to Abraham 4,000 years ago is being fulfilled right before our very eyes today.
[Interviewer:] You know this growing church probably as well as any Westerner does. I wonder how you evaluate it.
[Stott:] The answer is "growth without depth." None of us wants to dispute the extraordinary growth of the church. But it has been largely numerical and statistical growth. And there has not been sufficient growth in discipleship that is comparable to the growth in numbers.
[Interviewer:] How can the Western church, which surely has problems of its own, fruitfully interact with the non-Western? Right now many churches are sending mission teams all over the world.
[Stott:] I certainly want to be positive about short-term mission trips, and I think on the whole they are a good thing. They do give Westerners an awfully good opportunity to taste Southern Christianity and to be challenged by it, especially by its exuberant vitality. But I think the leaders of such mission trips would be wise to warn their members that this is only a very limited experience of cross-cultural mission.
True mission that is based on the example of Jesus involves entering another world, the world of another culture. Incarnational cross-cultural mission is and can be very costly. I want to say, please realize that if God calls you to be a cross-cultural missionary, it will take you 10 years to learn the language and to learn the culture in such a way that you are accepted more or less as a national.
[Interviewer:] So there's really no replacing the long-term missionary.
[Stott:] I think not, except of course for indigenous Christians.
Reading this was a good reminder of why Tommy, Charlie, and I are here at CBTS---as well as of the limitations we face in being here.
We’re here for discipleship, for training and equipping indigenous Christian leaders who will be involved in deepening, not just widening, the Church. Pray that we’ll remember this in the crunch of preparing lectures, grading papers, and meeting with students.
--Wes, for the team
posted by Charlie, Tommy, and Wesley | 9:53 AM
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