Is There a Biblical Structure for Missions?

Stephen: If you've been following the Ask Missionary podcast, you've heard Brooks talk about why the Great Commission still matters, and you've heard Chad explain how the local church is critical to both sending and going. These are foundational for biblical missions that a lot of us can agree on. But what comes next when churches and missionaries have to decide how to go can be daunting. Even in sound biblical churches, many express frustration or even skepticism toward missions. Not because they don't want to obey the Great Commission, but because missions in practice can look like the Wild West. For some, missions has become a space for experimentation or just winging it, a ministry where action and results are valued more than care and fidelity. All of these should ring alarm bells for those who love the church. But there's good news. It doesn't have to be this way.

Brooks, our question today is an important one. It's one that you've written and spoken about often. Is there a biblical structure for missions?

Brooks: This is a really good question. I would say structure for missions, but I would probably prefer the term strategy for missions, a biblical strategy for missions. And I think this changes over time. I think the strategy for reaching the world or God's command to every tribe, language, people, and nation. I think there's different strategies, and I'll explicate that a little bit more later on. But I think as we look at the biblical structure, we have to come back to how God, from Scripture, what we see in Scripture, how God sees the world.

The first point that I would make in this topic would be need versus strategy. If you take a dart and you throw it at a world map, you will find need in every city, in every county, in every place on the face of the earth. There's need everywhere. There's gospel need. There's need for more churches. There's need for more people to spread the Lord's name further and further around the world in every place on earth. So you have to differentiate between need versus strategy because if it's need-based, it will be never-ending, and it will all be flattened out to where everything is of strategic importance because need is our primary indicator.

But I think if you're looking at the Bible and you're looking at the way that Paul structured his ministry, you have these two lanes. John Piper does a great job. I heard him on a talk one time speak about Timothean missions and Pauline missions. Piper has the understanding—and not just Piper but a lot of other guys pre-Piper, and I would say the apostle Paul thought in these terms as well – but the general paradigm is that the gospel goes to a new region, and then the gospel not only sees converts but sees those converts gathered into churches. I think that's the structure of missions in general, that we see churches left behind or churches strengthened.

This is the difference between Timothean and Pauline missions. Timothean missions is to strengthen churches that are established already but are weak and need to be continually strengthened. Paul sends Timothy to Ephesus. Timothy wasn't from Ephesus, but he was sent there to see the Ephesian church strengthened and brought to greater maturity. He also sends Titus to Crete, and he says, “Name elders there and strengthen that church and help them understand better what they believe and the gospel made clear to the members there.” This is Timothean missions quintessentially. It's the way that we see good churches revitalized and strengthened around the world. I thank the Lord for Timothean missionaries who go to places, who spend the time, the relational capital, to get in and know the people there. That's one lane of missions.

Then there's this other lane that Paul speaks about for himself in Romans 15, where he says this really interesting statement: there's no more work for me to do all the way from Jerusalem to Illyricum, which is modern-day Albania. There's nothing left for him to do. And it would be a generous number to say 5 percent of that population had even been exposed to the gospel—not that they were saved. But Paul sees that there are churches all around that area. There's a church in Jerusalem, in Antioch, in Corinth, in Ephesus, in Galatia. So he moves on to the places where no foundation has been laid. That's Pauline missions.

Keeping these two categories in mind: Timothean and Pauline missions—not looking down on Timothean missions or lauding Pauline missions as the pinnacle—I think we can form two general tracks that Paul is thinking along here.

With those in mind, I would contend that the guardrails for the way we should think about missions today are the church and language. The church is the way we see the finished task of missions. It's finished when we see a church planted among this people. When we see a strong, mature church, that's when we know we've hit the finish line. If we don't see a church, then we continue to press on. We strengthen or we plant, but we see a church among this language, among this people group.

Language tells us where the church has gone and where the church hasn't gone. This would be three or four podcasts to talk about the language side. But the reason I think language is your primary indicator is that when God chose to separate all the peoples of the earth, he didn't separate them by height or skin color; he separated them by language. This is Genesis 11. You have Genesis 10, the table of nations. The way that men counted themselves or differentiated themselves was primarily by language. Land is in there, but land changes. Language over time will change, but it's this fixed marker: these people are different than us, or these people are part of us.

Anthropologists the world over—and we don't look to them for biblical guidance—they can help us understand. The number one marker of an ethnic group is language, hands down, head and shoulders above all others. The linguistic element is always primary when we see people differentiating between who's us and who's them. Who speaks our language?

If you go to Acts 2 and you see the Holy Spirit come, what's the mark that the King has come? It's that all the people gathered there from different languages are proclaiming the glories of God in their own language. This is the mark that the King is among us now. The promised one has come. This is the beginning of the undoing of Babel.

There's much evidence for this in Scripture. We can see this in Ezekiel 47. We can see it in Revelation 5:9, Revelation 7:9, Romans 1:14, the way that Paul uses a linguistic term to define who are the people he's responsible for. I think language is this dominant metric. Is it the only metric? No. But it's the dominant metric for how we should look at what is left to do in the missions world today. What's our structure? What's our strategy for going after missions? Let's look at the language groups of the world and differentiate between reached, poorly reached, and unreached languages of the world. I think those three general categories help us well. They give us a better strategy for how we go after things.

With those in mind, here are the four key lanes in missions.

Number one is the training of national pastors to see some of what people like to call the global South brought back to better understanding of the gospel. When people talk about the global South, too often they start to talk about the future of missions is the global South. No, it isn't. The global South is riddled with prosperity gospel and charismatic theology that has run amok. The only way that you revitalize and bring back to true orthodox doctrine what has happened in the global South is you help train them. You help their pastors understand the Bible better. You reform them back to clear doctrine. That's the hope for the global South: the training of national pastors there. That's a very legitimate lane in missions.

Lane two would be these English-speaking congregations in strategic cities. English is the language of commerce. It's the language of aviation. If you don't speak English, you can't fly an airplane. Air traffic controllers the world over only speak English. If you want to do business, you have to learn English. English isn't the most widely spoken language, but it is the dominant language of the world because it's creeping into different countries because of its value in business platforms. These strategic cities often are called international churches. There are some good ones out there. There are a lot of bad ones too, but the good ones tend to have this effect that multiplies and sends people back out to their home contexts and home languages.

Number three would be national language churches. These national languages—Urdu, Bahasa, Mandarin, Thai—we would never call these an unreached language group because by God's grace they have churches among them. They have the Scriptures translated. Remember our other guardrail is the church. So let's look at the language. Let's look at the church. What's the state of the church in the Mandarin-speaking world? But there are entire pockets within the Mandarin world where there are no good churches. We need to see more churches planted in that language. But those are the national or dominant languages of the world.

Finally, there's this fourth lane of missions. The three previous lanes are primarily Timothean. You could make an argument that lane three would have some Pauline overtones to it, but lane four is distinctly and only Pauline. The minority languages of the world, the languages that are not the dominant languages but have thousands, millions of speakers at times, and they have no gospel, no Bible translation, and most importantly, no church among them. That's Pauline. That's where no foundation has been laid.

The thing about Pauline missions that people sometimes fail to recognize is that at one time English was a language that had no foundation laid among it. Spanish, Mandarin, Thai—no believers, no churches among them. And if someone hadn't gone to our language, there would be no lanes one, two, and three. Lane four goes where nothing has been planted. And by God's grace, from that comes lanes one, two, and three. But this is the lane that is the most lacking in resources. Most people will say less than 2 percent of all Christian monies given to missions go to lane four. Less than 3 percent of all workers go to lane four. This is why I press fairly hard on this lane. We've got to esteem all of them. All of them are good. I know men and women in every one of these lanes of missions. We want to make sure we never look down on or speak poorly of the lanes of missions. But we keep in mind this fourth lane so that, by God's grace, the gospel can flourish and the church can be planted among these places that still know nothing of our God's glory in Jesus Christ.

Stephen: To learn more about a biblical strategy for missions, visit missionary.com/about and learn more about how you and your congregation can partner with us at Missionary and grow in your understanding of the Great Commission. If you have a question you would like to hear answered on Ask Missionary, get in touch with us on social media or drop a note in the comment section, or you can contact us through missionary.com, and your question may be featured on the show. Don't forget to subscribe to the show to get notified when our next episode, “Do You Need to Learn the Language,” airs next week. Thanks for listening.