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Stephen: The Great Commission is a call for the whole body of Christ's Church to obey. Whether we are sending missionaries or going ourselves to the field, Christ's command to make disciples is for each of His followers. For those who are called to leave our homes to share the gospel, there are a whole host of questions that come up. There are questions about fundraising, about sending agencies, about language learning, about preparing your family for the field. But maybe the most obvious one is where do you go? Brooks, today's question is a useful way of getting at that question of where one might go as a missionary. It comes from Ella Bailey on Instagram. Ella asks, "Where are missionaries needed most?" Can you help us unpack that in terms of where the needs are today and maybe even how we should think about that word need?
Brooks: Ella, that's a great question. It's always a question that Christians should wrestle with. Where do we put the focus of our energies, our efforts, our treasure, so to speak. Where do we use the things that God has given us? Where should we use them most strategically?
If you throw a dart at the map anywhere in the world, there will always be need. Need is always going to exist. Jesus said that the poor will always be with you. There will be people in my home city of San Diego, California, that have never heard the gospel and did not hear the gospel all the way up until the day Jesus returns. So need is everywhere. I think the more pointed question is where is gospel need the most acute? Where has the gospel not gone sufficiently or at all to where people can understand and be reconciled to God in their own language? And so you have to separate in your terminology unreached people and unreached peoples plural. The unreached people, like I said, they will be around until the day Christ returns. There will always be people in every country, in every language, in every people group that have not heard of Jesus Christ all the way until the day He returns. But unreached peoples– and these are the groupings that we have in Revelation 5:9 and 7:9–every tribe, language, people, nation, there will be representatives from every one of those. So it's more strategic to think in terms of what are the groups of the world, where is the need most acute among the groups of the world. And this is where I would propose that there's a better way so to speak to look at the world and to kind of etch out gospel need. What is that? What are the groupings of the world that are most needy? And this is where these four lanes in missions so to speak to me are the best way to kind of think of this.
So lane one in this would be in my mind the global south, where you have a lot of prosperity gospel teaching and you have a lot of charismatic theology that's run amok. It's gone to extremes that are really unbiblical and unhelpful in any way, shape, or form. And that global south to redeem that needs to have better teaching, to have some of the professors from our seminaries, to have different leaders from different churches, to have Christians going over to support. That gospel need to me is one of the most acute needs out there. We want to see the global south in particular, but all countries that have some veneer of Christianity that hasn't gone very deep, but we want to see them better educated. We want them to know their Bibles better, to teach more historically, to know what was most important to the church 2,000 years ago, and that's one of the hallmarks of their church. Those qualities carry over. So that would be lane one, so to speak.
Lane two is a much more modern phenomenon, and things change year to year, decade to decade, century to century, but for this time period, the rise of the English-speaking language. English is the dominant language of the world. If you travel, if you go around the world much in the major cities, in most major cities, they're teaching them English in schools, just because if you're going to be an airline pilot, if you're going to be a doctor, this is the language you're going to communicate in. And most of the world is wanting to know English so that they can run businesses better. They can interact with others from different countries. And so these strategic English churches in strategic cities like these major cities of the world like Jakarta, like Dhaka, like Dubai, these major cities to have good English churches. A lot of time these English churches are called international churches. Those are an important lane of missions. The need is acute in major cities and we can see the gospel spread quite quickly in these particular areas.
And then you start to cross out of English. So lane one and lane two are primarily in English. You can have good Spanish teachers that go to Africa and they'll find the different Spanish-speaking enclaves in Africa or French-speaking or Portuguese-speaking. You can go to different parts of South America. But primarily these two lanes, the first two, are going to be in English.
And then lane three, we start to cross into a different language, the majority languages of the world. If you want to know what a majority language is, it's the language of the country. What's their national language? And so some countries would have the national language being Arabic. Others would have it being Mandarin. Indonesia is going to have it being Bahasa, Urdu, these major languages of the world. We need more churches. The need is quite acute in different parts of the world. We need more churches in these national languages. Praise God, there are churches among them, but there's not enough. We need more gospel light. The need is quite strong there.
And then the final fourth lane of missions are these minority languages. They're not majority. They're not the languages of the country, but they're the smaller languages within these countries. But small. Some of them are 10 million, some of them are 5 million, some of them are less than a million, but they are languages that they do not mix primarily with other languages. Some of them will speak the national language but not at a high level, just enough to barter, to trade, to travel between, but they mostly stay to themselves. And those languages will exist for many, many years. That's the fourth lane. In my mind, that is the most acute gospel need out there. This is where the bulk of our Christian resources, as far as talking about "should we prioritize these, should we have these on our radar"—I would say very much so. And the reason I would say that is because the opposite is true today. Most of your major foundations, most of your major clearinghouses for gathering missionary data will say that about 1.7, maybe 2%, of all of our monies are going to that fourth lane of missions. Less than 3%, some will say 3.5. But let's say 4%. 4% of our missionaries are going to that fourth lane where no church exists. Many times no Bible translation exists. All the lanes should esteem each other. We should speak well of those who work in good strategic cities, planting a good English-speaking church. But we should also look at those national language churches. Do we have enough of them? And then we should also keep in mind those fourth lane, those minority language churches that still have yet to hear of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And so the need, in my opinion, you have to talk about need not just in terms of physical need. Physical need is great. It's wonderful. It's a gateway to engage people for the gospel. But we have to acknowledge that a lot of secular organizations, non-Christian organizations, they alleviate human suffering as far as clean water and helping people out of slavery, helping people out of different poverty needs, much better than Christians do. This is not gospel need. And praise God for those organizations that do help alleviate human need. But Christians are primarily concerned with gospel need, with eternal issues—issues that extend well past this world.
I think that to categorize our needs appropriately—is this gospel need or is this need for today? Is this need for our bodies? We should make sure to differentiate between gospel need and the needs that are incumbent on humans, especially in developing countries. Need for better health, need for safety, need for freedom of movement, freedom of speech. Those types of needs are also acute. They're also very sensitive issues. But they're not gospel need. And Christians are primarily concerned with gospel need just because we believe that the things of eternity are much more important than the things of this world. What is unseen far outweighs what is seen. And so we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, and what is unseen is eternal. We press on to those areas, whether that's in lane one missions, lane two, lane three, or lane four. Those four categorizations, to me, lay out the best way to go about the Great Commission—to think strategically and to esteem all of them but to make sure we don't leave one of them behind.
Stephen: If you're interested in learning more about missions to unreached language groups, we have a new documentary film about missionary John Paton called The Patient Goal of a Church. You can stream The Patient Goal of a Church on Apple TV or Amazon. And you can purchase the film in a complete box set of all six missionary films that comes with a companion Bible study designed to help your Sunday school class or small group explore what it means to obey the Great Commission. You can find that in the store at missionary.com.
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