Guilt-Trip Mobilization or Missionary Devaluation?
Two wrong ways to think about missions and a better way
Last week, an American pastor who is well-known as a missions mobilizer posted a few videos to Twitter (I refuse to call it X!) while on a mission trip, and just like he has many times before in his life, he tried to motivate American Christians to look beyond themselves to God’s global purposes in places like the region he was visiting.
There was absolutely nothing surprising about the content of the pastor’s videos, but what did surprise me was the response from other Evangelical Christians. I won’t link to any of those responses here because I don’t want to platform those people. Rather here is a summary of the types of responses that were put forward:
“There are unreached people just down the street from your church. Stay home.”
“Sell your home and move there. Stop guilting others.”
“Stop making normal Christians feel guilty for serving God faithfully at home.”
Of course, these are summaries, not direct quotes, and I’ve given the “nice” version of the objections, which were often made in a critical spirit.
But what the responses showed me is that missions sending in American churches is in deep trouble. While the US still sends out the majority of Evangelical missionaries around the world, with shifting attitudes toward missions we should not expect that to remain the case much longer.
Dispense with the Guilt-Trip
One area of criticism, which I think is correct, was that this particular pastor and author tends to default toward giving American Christians a guilt-trip in order to motivate them to become more engaged with global missions.
His guilt-trip mobilization strategy follows these lines: “Look at how good you have it. Look at how available the gospel is where you are at. People in X location have nothing and no gospel access. Why are you being so selfish?”
That is the basic script, and all of us who are passionate about missions have utilized the guilt-trip methodology. I’m sure if you went back into my old sermons you would find me employing the guilt-trip method as well. We’ve all done it.
But I’ve become more and more convinced that we should try to motivate people by the beauty of a life devoted to God’s mission more than by guilting them about a lack of engagement.
Two Wrong Ways to Think about Missions
Secondly, I think both the pastor in question and his critics both have a flawed view of missions. Each of them personify opposite missions slogans. The message of the pastor is the old quip:
“Everyone is called to go unless you are called to stay.”
According to this slogan, the default among Christians shouldn’t be staying where they are but going to the unreached. This fits well with guilt-trip mobilization.
The purpose behind this slogan is to get people to truly open their hearts to the possibility that God might be calling them. The motivation is right, but the execution is wrong. Yes, Christians should be able to sing, “Wherever He leads, I’ll go,” but that doesn’t mean that Christians should go by default.
On the other hand, many of his critics operate from the following slogan that follows a missionary devaluation strategy:
“Every Christian is a missionary.”
Again, many have used this with a good motivation. They’ve wanted to motivate their churches to live “on mission” in their communities and actively share the gospel with those they encounter in their everyday lives.
However, the downside of this slogan is to equate the work of global missions with the work of local evangelism and discipleship. This devalues global missions and missionaries. Missionary devaluation was reflected in many of the criticisms on Twitter, and I’ve heard them myself when serving as a missionary. “Why go all the way there when the need is so great here?”
A Better Way
The entire encounter reminded me that we desperately need to reclaim a biblical understanding of missions and the apostolic gifting. I’ve written about these things before (here, for example) and hope to dive more deeply into them in the future. For now, let me briefly outline the major points and give one biblical example.
First, the NT church understood every single one of its members as functioning toward fulfilling the church’s mission. There are a variety of spiritual gifts, and all are important. Furthermore, every believer has the privilege and obligation of sharing the gospel in their sphere of influence.
Second, the above does not mean that every Christian is a missionary. Our term “missionary” is equivalent to the apostolic gifting described in the NT. While there were uniquely authoritative (uppercase) Apostles who bore firsthand witness to the resurrected Christ, there were also many other “sent out ones” or (lowercase) apostles in the NT church who crossed geographical and cultural boundaries to share the gospel.
Third, while every gifting is certainly important to the body of Christ, it was also simultaneously true that those with the apostolic/missionary gifting and vocation were singled out for special honor and care. No one was saying to them, “It’s great that you are a missionary and left your life in X behind to proclaim the gospel in Y, But really we are all missionaries just like you.”
Fourth, Christians in the NT were never guilted into pursuing the apostolic gift when they didn’t have it. Instead, they were encouraged to support with their prayers and offerings those who were called to be apostles/missionaries.
Let 3 John Guide Us
While we could go to a lot of texts to unpack these points, I think 3 John is the best place to see these things with simplicity and clarity. In 3 John, John identifies a group of “brothers” who have been sent out “for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles” (3 John 5–7). This description is consistent with the apostolic/missionary gifting and vocation described elsewhere in the NT.
John tells Gaius that he should support these missionaries “in a manner worthy of God.” The unique vocation of these missionaries does indeed deserve special honor and care from other Christians.
Yet, John nowhere guilts Gaius for not joining this missionary team himself. He does not say, “Why are you staying in comfort while these brothers go to new and difficult places to share the gospel?” I think this is because John knows that Gaius does not have the apostolic gifting and calling. John writes to Gaius, “Therefore we ought to support people like these, that we may be fellow workers for the truth” (3 John 8). John gives Gaius positive motivation for pursuing his God-given role in the mission.
Like I said, there is so much more that could be written about this, but the point I want to make today is that we need to adopt the biblical view of the apostolic/missionary gifting and to adopt the biblical methodology for missions mobilization.
Will people still question and oppose missions if we do this? Yes. But we will have a firm biblical basis for what we are saying and doing, and we will encourage the right people to go to the field and the right people to stay and support, guilt-free. We will also likely prevent the sending of many people who go to the field for the wrong reasons, some of whom are deeply harmed by trying to follow a calling that God has not gifted them for.
The Great Commission is urgent. The needs of the world are great. God is worthy of worship. But it is ultimately God’s mission we are pursuing, and we should trust him to call, gift, empower, and deploy his people rightly.