What Makes the Mission Field Difficult?
What are some things that can make a missions field difficult?
Well, I'd like to begin with stating 2 Timothy 2:10, one of the verses that encourages me most. And the Apostle Paul said, "I endure all things for the sake of the elect." Implied in that is, the Christian life is hard. Implied in that is, missionary work is hard because we have to endure. That means we're going to face difficulties. We're going to face hardships. And the fact that God has His people—there's an elect people: "I endure all things for the sake of the elect, that some may be saved."
Implied in that is we are going off as an armada of evangelists to go to a difficult place. What makes those places difficult? A number of things.
One would be language. I can say that the hardest thing I've ever done in missions is learning another language. The joke is a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, three languages trilingual, and one language—an American. And that's often true. Many places around the world are used to interacting with a number of languages. But oftentimes in America, we grow up with English. So that makes it especially hard, I would say, for American missionaries going to the foreign field. And yet, it is so necessary to learn the foreign language. So that makes it difficult. It's a barrier. You go there with your language, your training, and now you have to learn a new language. That makes communication with them difficult. So that would be one aspect: language.
Another aspect would be poverty. We live in a very rural area, and the rural area means, oftentimes, we define rural as a lack of tar roads, a lack of English, and a lack of infrastructure. So if you go to a place where there's little English, little tar roads, little infrastructure—that's generally poor. Poverty. That's going to make it hard.
Another area that I think can make it difficult is actually the education that you get from your home country. Now, I'm a proponent of education. I'm a proponent of going to seminary. I think seminary should probably be the rule and not the exception. But seminary can make the mission field difficult in this sense: when you have years of training in Hebrew and Greek and nouthetic counseling and hermeneutics and homiletics, and you have all of that training, and now you're going to go to a foreign field and sit down across from a grandmother who can't read. Much of my ministry is sitting down across from people who can't read well.
Mr. Shisana is a deacon in our church. I sit down with Mr. Shisana, and oftentimes, much of our Bible study is just finding the passage. Then you find the passage, and he has this little notebook, and I'm so encouraged. I'm preaching, and he's taking notes. You look later, and all of his notes are just writing down the passage: Mateo—it comes from Mateo, or it comes from Pisalema, or it comes from Shabutalo. And then he writes down the chapter and verse. That's his notes.
Now, if you come from a particular setting, a particular educational background, and you come from a seminary, and you come with all of this education, it's going to be difficult not only ministering to that place, it's going to be difficult for you even to leave that place. Which is why, I think sometimes, if I can interpret slightly differently—“Much learning has made you mad,” as someone once said to the Apostle Paul—I think in some ways, too much education can deter missionary service. It can deter missionary service because your plan is: "As soon as I finish college, I'm going to go to the mission field." He goes to college, and then says, "You know what, I need an M.Div. I need to be prepared for the mission field." Okay. So, he gets his M.Div. Then you come and say, "All right, here it is—Indonesia, time to go." "Well, you know, I need a Th.M." He gets hisTh.M. Now he's late 20s and has two kids. He gets his Th.M., and now you say, "It's time to go." And he says, "You know what, brother? I've been thinking, and I really need a Ph.D., because this is really going to help me on the field."
Okay. So now he gets his Ph.D., and he has that title, and he's 33. He has four kids and a mortgage. You think he's going to go to the mission field? You think he's going to sit across from a kucuana, a gogo, a grandmother who can't read—and sit in the dirt and teach Bible studies every day and plant a church that way? Because that's often what missions is.
And he says, "Well, actually, I don't want to be a poor steward of all of my education, so I'm going to stay back, and I'm going to teach on missions." And then the cycle just keeps on going. I'm not opposed to advanced education. I'm not opposed to professors teaching on missions. But I am opposed to education squelching missionary zeal that was once there, and now all of that education has ended it. That can be a deterrent. And in a sense, that can make hard places hard. "Too much learning has made you mad." In that sense, too much learning has made you think incorrectly about what is needed for the foreign mission field.
I think of John Paton. John Paton had a level of education. I think a lot of his education was family worship. And if you added up the educational hours, I think you could say that if you have consistent family worship—30 minutes every morning, 30 minutes every evening, five days a week, 52 weeks a year for 10 years of your life—if you add up those hours of instruction, that's two M.Div. degrees by the time you're walking out the door to college. I think that's significant.
So I would say: language makes it difficult. I would say poverty makes it difficult. I would say educational distances between the missionary and the person they're seeking to reach can make it difficult. I would say persecution can make it difficult. I would say government red tape can make it difficult.
And let this be an encouragement, a little bit, to missionaries—because many missionaries today are going to read the biographies of the past, and they're going to see a certain level of trial that Carey, Ward, and Marshman faced. Because they didn't have Zoom, and they didn't have Facebook, and they couldn't communicate. And we say, "Well, I'm not really suffering."
That is true. They had a kind of suffering that we don't have today. But we have levels of difficulty that they didn't necessarily have. I'm thinking, in some ways, of government red tape. They didn't have to go through all of the challenges of just getting into the country that we face today.
So all of us face our various levels of trial and difficulty. One of those can be red tape—getting into a country. Those would be a handful I would think of.