In the Death of Biblical Missions, I describe what I (as a missionary) see as the death of biblical missions in America. I am very critical of stuff here, so be prepared.
Contents
Death of Biblical Missions
Death of Biblical Missions
By David Cox (missionary pastor)
Firstly, let me address the reason why this topic is important. Missions is very simply the reproduction of the entirity of Christianity in new places where the gospel is not named, or having been named in the place, is currently dead. America has gone from being a missionary sending country to being a missionary needing country in my lifetime. How sad.
The fruitful activity of missions is how churches reproduce themselves on an individual saved person level as well as a church level. By this statement you can see my first salvo broadside again certain people, i.e. a missionary is a minister who’s primary ministry is the evangelization of lost souls, and the planting of churches. NOTHING ELSE IS BIBLICAL MISSIONS! Yes there can be other ministries other there besides evangelism and church planting, but THEY ARE NOT MISSIONS. Missions needs to be separate from them, and the competition for missions funds should not be set up against “Christian summer camps, Bible schools, Creation research, etc.” Let them be all in one category, and missions in another separate category that is not dimished by what is given to these other things. Let me explain why. Missions is the heartbeat of the church Jesus died and was resurrected for. Without missions, Christianity stops. So biblical missions will continue on, and Jesus himself has promised us that. These other ministries can be argued are necessary ministries also, but without reproduction of Christians and reproduction of churches (which corporately give to these ministries), Christianity is hampered and dying.
Missions has a right to certain priorities. Biblical missions must receive a lion’s share of the money given by God’s people which is spent away from the local area of the church. This is because missions pushes the reproduction process. It is like cattle. If you get a lot of steril cattle, with time your herd will not exist. Missions is what keeps Christianity going on. Without missions, all the other ministries out there will not have a population with which to work. A Christian summer camp, a Bible school, a counseling ministry, all of these become meaningless if there are not Christians out there with which to work. We can argue that all of these ministries SHOULD PUSH EVANGELISM also like missions, but then they change their character dramatically, and they resist this. But if they were also highlighting evangelism, they would help reproduce Christianity. They are not doing so for whatever reason.
For Christianity to reproduce, you must first have new people getting saved, and second these new people must bond together in a local church of likeminded believers which execute the ministry.
What is not missions is what does not directly accomplish both individual reproduction AND church level reproduction. While these other ministries can exist if God so desires, we as Christians must keep our heads clear on what our priority is. God never commanded us to focus on healing ministries (or praying for the sick), nor education ministries, nor counseling ministries. All of these things can be effectively done without the expense of personnel or funds from within local churches that are doing God’s work. Money, dedicated personnel, and especially heavy prayer activity should be given to true biblical missions, the reproduction of the church. Our world is slowly becoming pagan after having a great Christian heritage because good believing people have let biblical missions escape their grasp, and now we are paying for this on a country level, on a world level. God is judging the church in America because they have failed on sending thousands and thousands of missionaries, and so God is bringing the mission field to America. This would appear to destroy America. If the church in America does not “get the wake up call” here, if they do not reach out to these foreigners in their own communities, then God will judge the church harshly.
Loss of Bearings: Bible no longer the Authority
The primary problem in missions is that we have lost our spiritual bearings and our compass is broke. Actually the compass is fine, it is the fact that the compass is in our pockets and we never reference what is the problem. What this means is that instead of looking to the Bible, especially the New Testament as our guide for WHAT TO DO, HOW TO DO IT, SETTING OUR GOALS, etc., we now allow and use anything, and mostly nothing, whatever pops into our heads. When my best guess is what drives my life and ministry, all is lost. This is true on a personal level, and this is true when pastors and churches do it.
If we look at the New Testament, we see a Christianity that is lively, working unceasingly, dedicated, and sacrificial. Evangelism is the heartbeat of the church. Our Christianity today isn’t like that. Moreover, everybody knows that, and nobody cares, because the goal of being like the New Testament Christians just isn’t important to anybody any more. Preachers don’t preach it, they don’t emphasize its importance, and lay people don’t want it, don’t want to pay the price for it, or just ignore it as unimportant.
As a missionary, I watch my income every month. I have 40 years of living by faith from donations by churches and people. It is amazing to me that in the beginning, I was living on a little over $500/month support. Individuals in my home church were giving me $20 back then, which was a lot of money. Churches were giving between $50 to $200 each. Over time, some churches picked up my support with $35 a month. Individuals now make up the backbone of our support with one brother and his wife giving $1200. We still have churches that are giving $35/month. I see a church of thousands giving us $75/month, and a church of 3 people besides the pastor giving $50. I do not understand this. Churches apparently (or just in my case) are not giving $1000s of dollars to their missionaries, but individuals are giving $300, $500, even more than a $1000. How does that happen?
My understanding is that these people who give sacrificially are saved, and they are reeptive to the importance of missions and evangelism. As individuals, they give to missionaries. But they do not trust their sacrifices to their own churches. Is that because that money gets stuck in giving bigger salaries to the pastoral staff, and shorting the missionaries? I do not know. I have really no way of knowing. But I suspect that something is wrong in our churches when God’s people don’t trust their own churches with their donations. Missions must not get much emphasis in those churches.
I understand that some of these people know me personally, and therefore they are helping us. But none of the people who give to me on a personal basis is in a church that supports me. It is just thought provoking.
What happens when you lose your bearings is that you never know where you are going, and you don’t know if you are there or not. This futility is very much the state of Christianity in our day. When missionaries do their ministries without the guidebook of Scripture, they make a train wreck of their own life and ministry, and of Christianity in general.
Moral Change into the Image of Christ is a laughable
When we continue with the New Testament as our guide and law, we see that santification is a very high goal. What this means is that the very fabric of “church” is geared towards this moral change. A key element is people who live the principles of God teaching others by precept and by example what that moral image of Christ is. Actually “receiving Christ” means not just as Savior, but as our moral example also. Every sermon in a biblical church will be geared towards application of moral principles which are extracted from Bible exposition of Scripture, and then forcefully applied by spiritual men who preach through the power of prayer. Your church is dead and useless to God if the sermons, ALL OF THEM, are not geared towards confronting and rebuking sin, and exhorting to follow that example of Jesus Christ.
What we are seeing in the church (worldwide) today is Christians who do not look, act, or talk like Christ at all. They make Christlikeness a laughingstock for the world.
It is extremely important here to note that moral change only works when the person himself doing the instructing, first is a moral example of Christ. The transmission of morality from one person to another will not happen (hypocrisy will be replaced, knowing but not doing) if the teacher doesn’t first live that moral pattern.
In our churches, pastors and leaders don’t live the Christlife. That destroys anything and everything else they do in the ministry. Missions is built on the same.
Missions can only be really done if the sending body embodies the gospel correctly. Churches who select, support, and pay for missionaries to do the work of the ministry MUST THEMSELVES FIRST AND FOREMOST BE EXAMPLES. How are they in reaching the lost in THEIR communities? How hypocritical for a church to demand that a missionary go out and evangelize the lost when they themselves are not dedicated to doing it! The issue here is that true missions, a living and vital missions is already dead in the sending church’s life. Missions is not about paying a person to do it. It is about reproducing ourselves. When we as a sending church just throw some money at missions thinking that we are good in God’s sight by taking 10% of our budget and giving it to missions, that is wrong.
God wants us (sending churches) to embody the missionary spirit. When this happens, we are highly motivated to know what the trials, failures, and successes of our missionaries are, and most of all, to pray through these ministry problems and challenges with our missionaries. The death of missions is seen in the lack of interest in missions by our lay people. As a missionary, I remember churches that did a lot of “little things” for us. Those constant notes in the “snail mail” of yesterday meant people were supporting us (not just sending us money). I used to like to visit my supporting churches unannounced. Walking in, see how many people recognize who I am? In a lot of churches, I was just a visitor. In a very, very few, the greeting was, “Hello brother David! How is (such and such prayer situation) going?” Those were churches that really supported me.
People were interested in others in other countries becoming like Christ as they were concerned about they themselves becoming like Christ. This passion is what Christ showed us. Yet it is gone today. Missions is hopelessly going down the drain with it.
Our Mission has been Lost: We are using Another Gospel
Let me be very specific here so that people understand. There is only one purpose for any church, ministry, or missionary. That is to get to gospel out to the unsaved. That means that a person which is saved and with a good testimony must meet an unsaved, open Scripture and show them from the Word of God that they are a sinner going to hell, and that only by repenting of and abandoning that sin, and then believing in Jesus Christ’s work on the Cross in dying for him, will he go to heaven. That is the essence of the gospel, and it should saturate and embidue everything we say and do.
Moreover the thrust of the gospel should be seen constantly in our services, in our lives, in our ministries, in our churches. We should see concern and worry over that gospel message reaching to individuals. We should see laymen and laywomen in our local churches praying for the unsaved, going out and witnessing to them, and once they accept Christ, bringing these new believers in the local church to disciple them and bring them into a co-worker position with them.
When social issues cloud and overcome this gospel mission, we are lost and going down the quick path of destruction. When this is no longer our greatest priority, then we see our churches filled with nominal Christians, i.e. people that call each other Christian but are just reformed pagans. These people have no discernment nor burden to fulfill the Great Commission, and then and there missions is dead. The church is filled with tares, not wheat.
The social gospel, no mission, or a wrong gospel is commonly what takes the true biblical mission at this point. People are considered “brethren” or “saved” because their family was Christian, because they were baptized, or they made a verbal admittance to believing in Jesus but nothing really changed in their life.
Funding has been turned upside down
In the early days when I was a missionary, older missionaries would have contact with those younger wanting to go. One of the things was the hardships and the things one had to sacrifice to accomplish God’s work on the foreign mission field. Today, people stop pastoring and doing other things and go into missions, “because missions is where the money is.” I actually heard from a pastor that left the pastorate to be a missionary “because of all the money missionaries make.”
I note that these money making “ministries” are all big, showy, glamous. Missions is not like that. It is dirty, and it is dealing with sin in people’s lives, and broad is the road to destruction and narrow is the way of life, and few truly find that true road. In the United States, big churches exist, but I challenge people to show me where a church of 1000 people do the job 100 times better than a church of a hundred! They have more people, more money, more resources, yet they do not have the results that would correspond to their resources. If a church of 100 members has 30 missionaries, then a church of a 1000 should have 3000 missionaries. Usually they don’t and if they do have a large number of missionaries, they are giving $50/month/missionary. There really are doing the counterpart of praying intensively for these missionaries, and most of the members would have a hard time naming the missionary and his field if pressed.
Missions is dying because of their over financing! Yes you read that right. Some missionaries have become professional fund raisers. Instead of them actually doing the work on a foreign field, they run back and forth to the United States so much that they accomplish next to nothing on the field. They hire hirelings to do a poor job while they make tons of money. As a missionary, what work we need to do increases more and more. But some unscrupulous missionaries have taken it upon themselves to dedicate themselves to soaking up missions funds so that other missionaries cannot continue on. New missionaries cannot find funding, and other good missionary works have problems because they have no funds. I have met in my years American missionaries who are still receiving less than a $1000 dollars US support per month. They work secular jobs on the field, their spouses work, and their churches on the field help what they can. I have also seen missionary financial reports where a single couple “did so much” amazingly, to shock and wow and impress people, and they are raking in $20,000 and up per month. Does it not seem logical if a missionary has more than a thousand people in his church on the field, that he should be getting a salary from that church on the field, and he should give up with US support? Is that how reproduction works?
I know a missionary like that, that he gets a salary from his church of thousands on the field, and he gets upwards of $20,000/month from the states. He is constantly running to the states to brag about his work, and receive even more love offerings. I am not jealous, and I would never follow his tactics as a missionary. I think he is a false prophet. But it is not that I want his support, but I ask myself, do pastors in the United States not think before they act? If they have a missionary on a tight budget of $2000 or $3000/month income, and they give more and more each year to a missionary who is getting $20,000/month, does that not cross anybody’s mind as being something God will take into account when they get to heaven?
Ask your missionary how much money he makes. That is personal and ministry, and any other funds that he has discretionary authority over (like church offerings of a church on the field). When you see people making $10,000, $20,000, and even more per month, ask yourself, is it really best to have a fund raiser like this guy running back and forth, inventing ministries with lots of pictures of people to get more money, or to support half a dozen people actually doing the work of God.
Sacrifice is not a concept for many of these people. The difference between a hireling and a pastor is that a hireling is in it for the money. When missionaries have costly houses, properties in the US and on the field, and excessive and luxury elements of their lifestyle, missions is destroyed. People want to imitate these missionaries because they want their income level, nothing more. Other missionaries cannot get even minimal funding to go because churches are sending their missions monies to these missionary sponges.
Another factor here is fake missionary ministries. These are ministries that somebody has cooked up to again soak up the scarce mission funds that are out there. When I was an assistant pastor in the US, we had a young fellow come wanting our support from the church I was ministering in. He had not gone to Bible School (shows no committment nor sacrifice on his part for his ministry). He wanted us to pay for him to buy a yaght so he could minister to the millionaires in the marina every Sunday morning. My questions were (1) how is a millionaire going to respect a young fellow under 25 in anything he might say? (2) Why can’t you rent a facility nearby and invite them there? People’s solutions seems to fall into a common idea, fund me so I can live high, and maybe I can do something for Christ. Why don’t you go out on the street and get people saved from hard work and then come present what you have done?
Another one is Jewish missions. One Jewish missionary was asking for support about 4 times normal for a foreign missionary. He was working in New York city, trying to reach the Jews. He had to live in an expensive apartment “to reach them.” He had no church, and only witnessed to one or two Jewish individuals every month, having coffee with them in a restaruant. Again, there are cheaper ways of doing this, and basically churches had to shoulder the burden of this guy’s monthly support while he did very little.
Another one is a missionary which made signs that he put in people’s front yards. Why did churches have to provide him with $5000/month income to do that full time is beyond me. A guy with a good secular job can do this in his garage.
Compromise has made Unity with Liberals to be forced down our Throats
When good churches accept mediocre missionaries, then good missionaries have to go to mediocre or liberal churches or quit. I am supposing that the real options here are to do without or quit.
There is a spiritual principle at play in all of this. The truth stands as men of God stand firm for it. These men of God exist only as there are other faithful Christians who also support this truth, and their spokesmen (these men of God). As the laymen become apathetic and lose their dedication, the support of the men of God causes them to back down from their positions. Money has a lot to do with. Churches, good, fundamental, strong churches become weak and disappear or change their standards, and these men of God are slowly “left out in the cold.” Eventually there are no more strong men of God.
I write as part of my ministry. I have written books, most of my sermons are in a tract form, and I write Christian blogs (like this one). Everything is free. I do not have many printed versions of my books because it is costly. But all 60+ are or have been in print. One of my supporting churches had a change of pastors and the new pastor wrote me telling me that “I was too extreme in my fundamentalist position.” They were dropping my support. He said he was not of the fundamentalist position. So my conclusion with him was that it is wrong to denounce sin? I guess we were good in parting company. I lost that support.
The principle at work is that when good Christian people direct all their prayer, concern, and economic support into good men of God, the truth continues. When they seek Biblical Missions, where good men of God sacrifice for God’s work and his truth, then things are different. If the Christians in an area let this get away from them, God will take his hand of blessing off of them, and raise up other good men of God in some other place, and eventually, like in our situation, God moves to some other country altogether.
The weakening, decline, and eventual death of biblical missions in the United States of America is a deciding, important factor. Stand for truth. Support it. Examine what goes on, and reject the bad, seek the good.
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Pastor David Cox is a missionary. See my ministry updates here.