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Bryan: For aspiring missionaries, the decision to pursue training for the mission field and to raise support is a massive one. And there are plenty of books and articles, including at missionary.com, dedicated to shedding biblical light on the subject.
But that weighty decision is only the first of many that a missionary has to make before they reach the field. This week, Brooks answers a question from Justin, who asked, "What kind of qualities would make someone stand out as a candidate to be a lane three or a lane four missionary?"
In some ways, this issue of where to go can be just as hard to discern as the decision to go. Finding your lane might be the key to a fruitful mission instead of a needlessly exasperating one. And if you're wondering what we mean by lanes, just hold on. Brooks will get to that in a second.
Brooks: This is a really good question just because, one, you're looking at the lanes correctly in that there's going to be different people suited for different lanes, and that's a good thing. We should not try and lump everybody into being a lane four missionary or a lane three missionary or any one of the lanes. There's diversity in this and that's a good thing. And so I appreciate the question a lot.
Just for people that are maybe trying to catch up— we're talking about the four lanes of missions. Go back and listen to episode 9 where we talk through what are kind of the better way to look at missions and why the church is one guardrail and language is the other guardrail.
So just really briefly: lane one in missions is helping to strengthen pastors that are in typically the global south or other contexts where they don't have good theology. And it's not because they've chosen bad theology. Most of the time it's because they haven't been exposed to good theology. So lane one is helping to train and build up those churches that are in those far away places that just haven't had good teaching.
Lane two is English-speaking churches in strategic cities around the world. English is the fastest growing language. It's the dominant language of the world, especially in business and in other fields. And so we call these churches typically international churches.
And then lane three is where you're crossing the linguistic barrier for the first time. If you're an English speaker, you're learning the national language of a country where there are not enough churches— like Mandarin or Bahasa or Urdu or Spanish or some other national language, meaning the language that that nation or a group of nations speak— and you're helping to plant more churches in those languages. Praise God, all of the national languages of the world today have the gospel in them and they have churches among them, but they don't have enough. And so those are poorly reached language groups.
And then there's the fourth lane, which is minority languages. These are typically a little bit smaller languages, though I was looking at some statistics from the country of Pakistan, numbering in the millions, a minority language group that has no church, no gospel among it. So those are your four lanes of missions.
And it's a really good question as far as what do we do, or how do we look at lane three and lane four. If you're just looking cursorily at these lanes, the higher up you go in the lanes, the more training you need. And so on the lower end, like if you're going to go strengthen pastors, there's a lot of seminary profs that I know, good pastors that I know, that on their summer breaks they will go over to a foreign country and they'll help train pastors. That's a wonderful thing. You don't need a lot of training beyond what you got in seminary or Bible school or being a good pastor. You just got to have a heart to serve and you've got to have the right access point to get in.
Now, some of those programs can benefit by having a repeated visit or a repeated set of trainings. They have networks that are better and worse. And so there's different ways that those things can be better. But as far as lane two, now you've got to go over longer term. If you're going to go strengthen a church, lane three — again, you're going longer term than likely lane one and two. And then lane four, you're going the longest and you're going the deepest and the farthest into lands and languages where the gospel has not gone before.
So the training level goes up the higher you go in these lanes. Number one for all of them: you've got to know your Bible. Lane 1, 2, 3, and 4: you've got to know your Bible. And the best way to know if you know your Bible is ask your church elders. Ask them if you know how to teach well. And when I say teach well, I mean the women as well.
Now, I'm not saying the women because I think women should be teaching churches where there are mixed genders. I think that goes against what scripture clearly lays out. I think scripture is clear that there's a complementarity to the giftings that God has given men and women, and men are to be the elders, pastors, teachers in the church. But if you go to a Muslim context, ladies, you have got to know your Bible and you've got to know how to preach, because they almost always segregate by sex. And so the women are not going to sit into the teaching that your husbands or the male members of the team are going to be teaching at. So ladies have got to know their Bibles, and they've got to know their Bibles well enough to preach.
One of the best programs to help with this is Simeon Trust. They're just a great group that comes down to our campus, Radius, and they just help ladies in particular, and men, but they do it by gender. And so you've got men teaching men and you've got women teaching women. And so those things you've got to have before you go overseas. Got to know your Bible. Got to know how to preach.
And then you've got to know how to cross cultures. Obviously, if you're only going for a summer or a couple weeks, you don't have to know it as well, but you do need to know those things before you go. Lane three particularly, what I would look at and go, "Man, this might be something that you specifically are gifted towards" would be: one, if you were raised as an MK (missionary kid) in that particular country; if you've got a history of going there on short-term trips; or if your church has made a particular emphasis of this particular language or country. I've seen teams where, hey, their church — they were suited to go to a bunch of different places, but their church had chosen to make Cambodia the country that they were going to go to. So they were going to learn Khmer, the language of Cambodia, and that was where they were going to go. And that's a very valid reason. I would look at those factors for lane three.
And I just want to throw this in there. There's one particular danger with lane three: you're working in a national context. And I've seen missionaries that they start off really driven, but then as they get further and further in— and this can happen in all of the lanes, but particularly lane three— there's this Achilles heel that seems to pop up where they start to be less driven the longer they're in that culture. And they don't see as much progress as they thought they were going to. And so they start to just fade into the background as far as their drive to see a mature church or the church strengthened in that culture. There's a lot of missionaries in Thailand in particular and some other nations in that area that have seen this become an issue over time. So that's a particular danger for lane three.
Lane four— and we've talked about this in previous episodes— language ability is key. You're going to have to learn two languages. You're going to have to learn the national language; we just talked about that for lane three. But then you're going to have to learn the minority language of that language group that still has yet to hear the gospel.
The US military will say somewhere in your early 30s, your ability to learn another language starts to fade. That can change depending on your level of discipline, if you've got musical ability, or if you've learned another language as an adult before. There's this fiction that, well, if I learn Spanish I'm going to have a really hard time learning the next language. That's entirely untrue. The opposite is true. The more languages you know, the next one gets easier. And so there are ways to extend that window.
But I would look at your age. I generally don't recommend 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds going into lane four work. It's generally not going to turn out. But there's a reason why I use the word "generally" because sometimes it does.
I would also look at your family situation, their health. I would look at their size. I haven't seen a lot of seven-member families, like five kids or six kids or seven kids, going into the fourth lane. You're going to need to be fairly focused, and the more kids you have, you're going to have less time to do those things. I have seen it work. It's a rarity, though. And then your family back home.
And so I would look at the fourth lane, but honestly, to me, you're not sure if you're cut out for the fourth lane until you go to a training program. And a good training program will not only train you, but it will also vet you, and it will tell you at the end, "We think you can do this," or "We would say not right now." I would look at these things, and then they would hand you back to your church and let your church make the ultimate decision on that.
But as you go through good training— and I'm obviously speaking with the background of Radius— you get to see where you stack up in some of the skill sets that are going to be necessary for getting to those last language groups that typically are at the ends of the earth. So that's a further one out, but I wouldn't cut that out of the mix until you go through the process and then you can see clearly, yeah, I think the Lord is actually opening this door for us.
It's amazing to me some of the heroes that have landed in these places— and they were not the rock stars in the training environment. They were patient. They were ordinary and they were disciplined. And God in His mysterious providence chose to use them to reach the ends of the earth. Man, I pray that's many of you.
Bryan: If you or someone you know aspires to serve Christ on the mission field, visit us at missionary.com where you can find articles, videos, and podcasts by Brooks and others on the subject of missionary calling. You can also find out more about missionary training through Radius International as well as short-term service trips through Radius Serve. As always, please subscribe to the show and tune in for the next episode when Pastor Chad Vegas talks about the Great Commission phrase, "the ends of the earth." Thanks for listening.