FOR BIBLICAL REASONS, TOO
I have written often in this space about an organization I support called Christian Aid, which serves as a conduit of money and information in support of indigenous ministries in Third World countries. I have given to this cause for almost ten years, and have raved about the effectiveness of the women and men this agency supports – missionaries who need no language or cultural training, require no furlough, and can live on a fraction of the cost of Western missionaries, all the while penetrating areas for the gospel that no Westerner could dare set foot.
My justification for supporting Christian Aid has been mostly financial and practical, though. I’d like now to share some of the political and Biblical reasons why I like this agency. When I attended their conference a couple of months ago, they gave me a 50th anniversary video, which I just now got around to watching. It tells the story of agency founder Bob Finley, who was in China as a missionary in 1953 when Communism came to that country.
Two things happened as a result. One was that Finley saw how all the propagators of the Communist philosophy were themselves Chinese. He asked around as to how those Chinese had originally converted to Communism, speculating that it was some ambitious Russians who had seeded the doctrine in China. To his surprise, he found that the vast majority of early Chinese Communists had learned such ways when they were attending school in Europe and the US. He was told that if a Russian had come into China to win converts, Communism would’ve been known as a Russian philosophy and wouldn’t have had nearly the attractiveness than if it was Chinese people doing the converting.
Another thing that happened as a result of the spread of Communism in China was that the Western missionaries were kicked out of the country. 150 years of Western evangelizing in China had yielded about 1 million converts, in a nation of several hundreds of billions at the time. Thankfully, they were a hearty and prayerful group. And they were joined by new Chinese Christians, who, like their Communist counterparts, converted while they were students in Europe and the US. And while the nation was devoid of Western missionaries for several decades in the second half of the twentieth century, the Christian population grew from 1 million to 100 million.
Finley was convinced that reaching foreign students in Western universities and supporting indigenous missionaries in poorer countries was the way to go. And he found ample support in the Bible. For example, many Western Christians reference the Great Commission to justify sending missionaries to faraway lands. But what Jesus tells us is to reach the nations. He doesn’t tell us to necessarily go to the nations. In fact, those who physically heard the Great Commission from the mouth of Jesus were sent to a place they knew quite well, but that gave them the opportunity to reach the nations: their home city of Jerusalem, where several times a year upwards of a million pilgrims from all over the world gathered.
Acts 2 records the birth of the modern church, and references the national diversity that is taken up in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It is this group that is re-sent out to all the nations in Acts 8, as a result of a great persecution of Christians in Jerusalem. But the original apostles, themselves from Jerusalem, are not sent out of their home city; they remain in Jerusalem. It is likely Jesus never directly sent any of His followers to a nation different from his or her own. Even the great traveler Paul was reached in a manner similar to Christian Aid’s focus: originally from Tarsus, he was studying with Gamaliel in Jerusalem when he was converted. And he plays a role similar to Christian Aid’s: distributing financial resources and passing along words of encouragement and camaraderie from one region to another.
So far from just seeing indigenous missions as worth supporting just because they are more effective in their homelands than Western equivalents, and at a tiny fraction of the cost, I ought also to know I can back Christian Aid fully because their approach has political, historical, and Biblical roots. And so I do.
I have written often in this space about an organization I support called Christian Aid, which serves as a conduit of money and information in support of indigenous ministries in Third World countries. I have given to this cause for almost ten years, and have raved about the effectiveness of the women and men this agency supports – missionaries who need no language or cultural training, require no furlough, and can live on a fraction of the cost of Western missionaries, all the while penetrating areas for the gospel that no Westerner could dare set foot.
My justification for supporting Christian Aid has been mostly financial and practical, though. I’d like now to share some of the political and Biblical reasons why I like this agency. When I attended their conference a couple of months ago, they gave me a 50th anniversary video, which I just now got around to watching. It tells the story of agency founder Bob Finley, who was in China as a missionary in 1953 when Communism came to that country.
Two things happened as a result. One was that Finley saw how all the propagators of the Communist philosophy were themselves Chinese. He asked around as to how those Chinese had originally converted to Communism, speculating that it was some ambitious Russians who had seeded the doctrine in China. To his surprise, he found that the vast majority of early Chinese Communists had learned such ways when they were attending school in Europe and the US. He was told that if a Russian had come into China to win converts, Communism would’ve been known as a Russian philosophy and wouldn’t have had nearly the attractiveness than if it was Chinese people doing the converting.
Another thing that happened as a result of the spread of Communism in China was that the Western missionaries were kicked out of the country. 150 years of Western evangelizing in China had yielded about 1 million converts, in a nation of several hundreds of billions at the time. Thankfully, they were a hearty and prayerful group. And they were joined by new Chinese Christians, who, like their Communist counterparts, converted while they were students in Europe and the US. And while the nation was devoid of Western missionaries for several decades in the second half of the twentieth century, the Christian population grew from 1 million to 100 million.
Finley was convinced that reaching foreign students in Western universities and supporting indigenous missionaries in poorer countries was the way to go. And he found ample support in the Bible. For example, many Western Christians reference the Great Commission to justify sending missionaries to faraway lands. But what Jesus tells us is to reach the nations. He doesn’t tell us to necessarily go to the nations. In fact, those who physically heard the Great Commission from the mouth of Jesus were sent to a place they knew quite well, but that gave them the opportunity to reach the nations: their home city of Jerusalem, where several times a year upwards of a million pilgrims from all over the world gathered.
Acts 2 records the birth of the modern church, and references the national diversity that is taken up in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It is this group that is re-sent out to all the nations in Acts 8, as a result of a great persecution of Christians in Jerusalem. But the original apostles, themselves from Jerusalem, are not sent out of their home city; they remain in Jerusalem. It is likely Jesus never directly sent any of His followers to a nation different from his or her own. Even the great traveler Paul was reached in a manner similar to Christian Aid’s focus: originally from Tarsus, he was studying with Gamaliel in Jerusalem when he was converted. And he plays a role similar to Christian Aid’s: distributing financial resources and passing along words of encouragement and camaraderie from one region to another.
So far from just seeing indigenous missions as worth supporting just because they are more effective in their homelands than Western equivalents, and at a tiny fraction of the cost, I ought also to know I can back Christian Aid fully because their approach has political, historical, and Biblical roots. And so I do.
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