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Bryan: On a macro scale, the story of Christianity's growth from a single church in Jerusalem in the first century to statistically the largest religion in the world is incredible. For many missionaries, the two millennia-old success story of our faith is an encouragement. After all, we know from Revelation 7 that the worship of Christ will grow even further. And yet not every missionary story feels like a success. For many, maybe even most, the years spent acquiring language and cultural fluency, evangelizing, and traveling far and wide seem to produce little to no converts. As the years turn, it can begin to feel hopeless. It's a feeling listener Isaiah Little captures well with this question for missionary Brooks Buser. If you devote your life and efforts towards mission work, and you never know how many people came to Christ because of His work in you, how do you stay encouraged?
Brooks: Isaiah, thank you for the question. I think there's a good impulse in there from Christians—just from being a Christian—that we do want people to be saved. We want to see fruit from our labors, but more than fruit, we want to see people brought into the kingdom of God, rescued from darkness.
What I would say though is you have to look at the fuel that you're going to use for getting to the mission field—that's fairly easy actually—but then the fuel that's going to keep you there, and that ties into how you stay encouraged, whether you see thousands of people converted or you see none or one or something like that.
The fuel for getting and staying on the mission field is so very important, because there are certain types of fuel that will get you there and get you through certain periods of time, but they won't be sustainable long term. So one of the fuels that is really common today is the fuel of "people are dying and going to hell." And that's true, and that's real, and that's right: people are dying and going to hell. But what ends up happening for Christians that use that as the primary fuel is that they end up getting over there and then they meet the people who are dying and going to hell. And they're not very nice, and they do mean things to them. And that fuel quickly dissipates. And there's another type of fuel that "I want to see growth out of this, I want to see some movement of the Spirit, and if it doesn't happen, I don't know if the Lord is in this"—that type of fuel as well tends to fade.
But there's a lasting fuel that I believe is somewhat outlined in the pages of 1 Corinthians 3 and 1 Corinthians 4. So let me just read a couple passages and then give a couple thoughts. And then I want to get into some examples of people who gave their lives in missions and saw no results or very little results during their lifetime. And they are so widely known. They're some of the greatest Christian ambassadors that we have as far as missionaries. And we would look at them, and by worldly standards, if we're judging them numerically, they're complete failures. But somehow God has turned their lives into these things that have been motivating Christians for hundreds of years now.
1 Corinthians 3 says this in verse 5: "What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed." He's talking to the Corinthians here because the Corinthians are listing off the hero pastors that they have—one of them says I follow Paul, the other one says I follow Apollos. And Paul's making an argument here. He says these are servants through whom you heard the gospel, and then he follows up with, "as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, and God gave the growth."
Paul's eyes, as far as growth and fruit went, always came back to the Lord is responsible for these things. The Lord gives the growth. He gives the growth, He gives the fruit. He starts the tree, He grows the tree, He finishes the tree, He sees the tree brought into fruit, and He sees the tree when it goes down. The Lord does all of these things. And I think if you have that motivation, that fuel: that my God sees everything that I do, and my ultimate task is not to see how many converts, not to see how fast I can translate the New Testament, not to see how big I can plant a church—I'm not saying that's your motivation, Isaiah, or what's behind the question. But I think there are a lot of young people that think along the lines of how am I going to sustain myself if there is very little response to the gospel message or fruit that comes out of that.
And I think the bedrock of what Paul's pressing into is faithfulness. God gives the increase. And just flip over to the other side—on my Bible it's the other page—chapter 4. Paul kind of summarizes this and he says, "This is how one should regard us." Who's he talking about? Gospel ambassadors, missionaries, those who faithfully proclaim the message—"as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful." That's the ultimate metric. Are you faithful?
Faithfulness comes in all sorts of different sizes. I've seen missionaries that battled with malaria over and over and their bodies broke down and they had to go back to the US. And to encourage them on the way out: brother, you've been faithful. You stayed the course for as long as God had you here, for as long as He allowed you to be in this place. Others, their family members back home got sick and they had to go back. Others had other things happen that were out of their control. And the ultimate metric is not judged by did they even get the language, did they get a finished translation. The ultimate metric was, were they faithful? Because God's going to give the fruit. We trust that God is the originator of these things and He is the one who will see us through. But were they faithful in the midst of it?
Two historic examples really quickly. David Livingstone, the famous missionary and abolitionist who helped so much to stop the slave trafficking that was going on—he was directly responsible for seeing that stamped out, he was one of the original big voices coming out of Africa—and he only, by his own admission, had one convert his entire time in Africa. One convert, a man named Sechele. He's in the film that we did. There's a short documentary we did on David Livingstone. And this man Sechele, he ends up going back to Botswana and sharing the gospel with his language group, and there are many people that get saved. And today there are hundreds and thousands of people in Botswana that can trace their spiritual lineage, so to speak, back to David Livingstone. But he never got to see any of that. He saw one convert. He dies while he's praying—they find him hunched over on his bed, and he's praying. And the story of David Livingstone and what he did and how he loved the African people spread so far and wide that it motivated many more missionaries to take up the cause of getting the gospel to that continent. And I just think if he was measuring it by how many people got converted, that'd be pretty depressing, pretty hard to endure. But he stayed the course, and what God was pleased to use his memory for is pretty incredible.
The other one that I think is more stark is the five men that died down in Ecuador, specifically Jim Elliot and Nate Saint, and how they never saw one convert. They learned a couple of words and then they were speared to death on that beach and they never knew the outcome of their lives. And yet afterwards, Jim Elliot's wife Elisabeth Elliot and Nate Saint's sister Rachel Saint go into that language group and they are able to see many people come to Christ. Even the one who stuck the spear into Nate Saint—his name is Mincaye—he ends up becoming converted. And to think of God in His mysterious providence, the way He orchestrated these men's lives coming out of their college, how they weren't very well known, and they ended up bringing some people on their team that equally weren't very well known. And yet in the ultimate course of history, they're remembered so much for being a catalyst to go to the ends of the earth, with zero converts to their names.
And Jim Elliot would have that famous expression that he wrote in his diary, and it kind of epitomizes even this talk. He says, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." We give what we cannot keep. We give our lives, we give everything we have. We lay it on the altar and we say, "God, we leave the results to You." And we stay encouraged that the King knows these things. The King knows who are His sheep, and He will gather those sheep into that fold. And that's how we stay encouraged. The right fuel allows us to see the finish line.
Bryan: To watch the film about David Livingstone that Brooks mentioned, visit missionary.com/store to find streaming access to The Cost of Family, or you can find it on Apple TV, Prime, or YouTube. If you have a question you would like to hear answered on Ask Missionary, drop a comment on this episode, get in touch with us on social media, or send us an email through missionary.com and your question may be featured on this show. And don't forget to subscribe to the show to get notified when the next episode airs next week. Thanks for listening.