Why Is the Church Primary on the Mission Field?

Why is the Church primary on the mission field?

The church is primary on the mission field, because it is the primary means of getting the missionary to the field, and then it is the primary practical goal for the missionary once he gets to the field.

Let's start with a first one. When the Apostle Paul left out of Antioch in Acts 13, he was already serving as an evangelist — and you could probably say as a missionary — for at least a decade before he even arrives in Antioch in Acts chapter 13. And yet, even though he was an apostle, and even though he was a gifted communicator, and even though he was a seasoned evangelist, he still spent a year in Antioch along with Barnabas where the church could oversee their gifting, where the church could watch how they interacted with others, where the church could see how they could preach and teach, and then after that year through the spirit's leading, through prayer, and through fasting, the church sent them out. They go off on their first missionary journey and then after the first missionary journey, they come back around in Acts chapter 14. And at the end of Acts chapter 14, what do they do? They return to the local church and they recount the wonderful things that God had done. I love the very last verse of Acts chapter 14 where it says, "And they spent not a little time with the believers." That must be the case with missionaries that are returning home. It's not fly by night, it's not a Wednesday night, it's not a quick PowerPoint. They're sitting down with the believers, the believers that first sent them out, and recounting the grace of God in their ministry. Modern terminology would use the term "furlough," a time where missionaries come back to the church and report to the church. Why are they reporting to the church? They're reporting to the church for accountability. They're reporting to the church because they want them to be encouraged, they're reporting to the church because they're discouraged and they need encouragement from the church. So that's on the front end side. The church is important because it is the means, it is the tool to fling them out into the mission field.

But now he gets to the mission field. What is his task? His task  is to make disciples. How does he make disciples? The three participles in the Great Commission: he does it by going, and by baptizing and by teaching. And if you go to a place where there are no churches, as missionaries ought to, and you go and you share the gospel and they're baptized and you start teaching them, eventually they're going to have to go to to a place where they can get this every week. And we call that the church. So practically we would say that the end goal, or one of the practical end goals, of the Great Commission is planting healthy indigenous churches in needy places.

Now let me unpack that word "indigenous" a little bit because that's important. That adjective is needed in front of the word "churches" because we might plant a church that can only survive as long as the missionary is there. The missionary leaves, the missionary used all of his own methods, and then he left and he took his methods with him which they can't reproduce, and then the church fails. It reminds me a little bit about the Old Spaghetti Westerns of the past, and for the set of the movie they would put up a town. But the town just has 2x4s behind it holding it up and it looks real nice, and then when the movie's over they just quickly put it down. In some ways that's the way churches are on the mission field. They're they're just propped up by foreign methods that looks good, but as soon as the missionary leaves and there's a little bit of wind, it collapses. We don't want that we want indigenous churches.

Indigenous churches historically have been defined by the three selves: self-governing, self-propagating, and self-sustaining. I think all three of those terms can be defended from scripture. Let me use one example: when the Apostle Paul was on his second missionary journey in Acts 16, he went to a place called Philippi. He went to a riverside and shared the gospel with a group of women, and one of the women that came to Christ was Lydia. Immediately after the Lord had opened her heart and she was converted, she welcomed Paul and the other missionaries into her home. Then he moved on and eventually he led the Philippian jailer to Christ. And then he leaves Philippi for a time. Whatever happened to that church in Philippi? Was it an indigenous church? That's the question. Did he plant an indigenous church?

Thankfully the story does not end there. Years later, he writes a letter back to that church and the name of that letter is called the epistle to the Philippians. He doesn't even get a verse into the letter without getting to the first mark of the three selves, self-governing. When he had addresses the church, he says it's to the overseers and the deacons. So the first mark of a mature indigenous church is that it is self-governing, that is it has its own leadership. It's not being ruled from outside, it's not being ruled by the missionary. By the way the great missionaries did not like using the term "pastor" for themselves. They used the term missionary. In fact even John Paton, if you go through his autobiography, they often refer to him "missi." I can only guess that that was their way of saying "missionary." According to my recollection, I don't remember Paton ever being referred to as "pastor." He was a missionary, and that was important to him because a self-governing church was important to him. The church in Philippi had its own overseers and its own deacons. That's the first mark.

The second mark is self-propagating. Self-propagating is when the church can do its own discipleship and evangelism on its own.  So if we move along in the letter to the Philippians in Philippians 2, we find the name of a man named Epaphroditus. We don't know much about Epaphroditus, but we have no indication that he was a pastor. His name might have come from Aphrodite, which was a pagan goddess, so perhaps he came from a pagan background and led later on to Christ through the Apostle Paul. Paul's in prison, Paul needs help, and so this mature church sends Epaphroditus to the church planter who's languishing in prison. Think of the level of maturity. Now Paul needs help. They don't seek outside help. From within their church they send a member, and the member they send is not even an elder or a pastor. It's Epaphroditus. Epaphroditus is showing the maturity of the church in the sense that they're self-propagating, and they're telling others of Christ, even Lydia we can see immediately she's using her gifts and bringing Paul and Timothy and Luke into her home. How powerful that is! And then even the Philippian jailer, as soon as he comes to Christ, what is he doing? He's washing the wounds of those that they had persecuted. What a great example.

We move on a little bit later in the epistle: self-sustaining. Now, self-sustaining is an important point because it's probably the most debated in missiology, and certainly the principle most broken in missiology. That is we want to teach the church to sustain, to support itself without being propped up by outside funds. Again Paton spoke about this. He said, "I would never do for the local congregation what they could do for themselves." They would sell their products in order to purchase their own copies of the Bible. They learned the joy from following their own responsibility to support their local ministers. We find that at the end of the epistle to the Philippians, where Paul the church planter who had originally established that church later on says, "No one else cared for my needs except for you only." Now I can hear already the arguments that are coming from certain regions of the globe: you don't understand how poor our churches are, we have to use outside funds in order to keep our churches going, we need outside funds to support pastor so and so in third world country because they're so poor. We need to know something about the church in Philippi. When we use a cross reference and go to 2 Corinthians, Paul speaks about the churches in Macedonia, which includes the church in Philippi. And he describes the church in Philippi and the churches in Macedonia as desperately poor, and they even were willing to give out of their poverty. In other words they put their hands in their pockets, and they pulled out lint, and they said I'm going to sell my shoes so that we can do what we can to support the work. That was the church in Philippi.

Why is the church important? The church is important in order to get the missionary there in the first place and then the church is important because that's the end goal, but we must also say indigenous churches. The goal is to plant indigenous churches defined historically and, I would say biblically from the book of Acts, as self-governing, self-propagating, and self-sustaining.