When Mission is Bad Business but Good Discipleship
Or “Why Donors Should Avoid Using the Language of Investors”
He said, "Go and tell this people:
"'Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.'
Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull
and close their eyes.
Otherwise, they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed."
Isaiah 6:9-10 (NIV)
In a blog from earlier this month, I encouraged missionaries to seek to understand their donors who speak the language of business so they could avoid taking unnecessary offense. There is much we can learn from businesspeople. There is a place to talk about efficiency and impact. We are called to be good stewards.
That said, there are times when God calls us to do things that don't make sense to the business mind. Not everything God is up to can be justified on a balance sheet.
But, before I jump into unpacking that, I want to reflect briefly on Isaiah 6. This is a favorite missionary text because God calls Isaiah to be his spokesmen in one of the most dramatic scenes in scripture. The Holy God himself appears to Isaiah in a terrifying vision. God is on a throne of glory surrounded with angels and in the midst of an earthquake and smoke that makes Isaiah cry out in fear for his life. But God purifies him and calls him to be his servant to declare his word. We love Isaiah 6:1-8. We love God’s call of "Whom shall I send?" and Isaiah’s response of "Send me!"
But that is where we usually stop reading. What comes next is not so inspiring. It is the challenging text that opens this blog. God calls Isaiah to preach a word that will not be heard. He commissions him to a ministry that will seem to fail. His ministry will display God's faithfulness to his people despite their refusal to hear it. Yet their hard-heartedness does not cause God to abandon them. In fact, Isaiah's faithfulness to preach a hard word to a people who would not hear continues to bless us and serve God's mission today as through the ages. Isaiah's calling served people well beyond the lifetime of the people who heard Isaiah preach in person. He was rejected and martyred (according to tradition). But, much later on, his testimony of God's faithfulness produced fruit he never got to see in his lifetime.
God still does this. While we certainly need to take the gospel to those places that are "ripe unto harvest," we have a bigger mission than that. Jesus did not commission us to preach only to open people groups. He called us to make disciples of all nations. Surprisingly, the Greek word for all means "all."
Right now, the Muslim world is open to the gospel in powerful ways like never before in 1400 years. But the missionaries who spent decades in service among Muslims in difficult countries in the past, who buried more of their children in those lands than they made converts, were not wasting their time or their supporters’ money. They were demonstrating the love of Jesus for all people, even those who don't love him back. They softened the ground and laid the prayer foundation for the harvest coming in today. Still, their work would have looked like a waste of money from a business efficiency perspective in their day. No doubt they wrestled with feelings of failure. It was a hard calling, but still a calling from God.
Nature shows us that God is not obsessed with efficiency. He is a God of abundance, not scarcity. Every oak tree makes hundreds of thousands of acorns that never become trees. Some acorns become food for animals, and many return to the earth to decompose. But God isn't worried about wasted acorns, oranges, or bananas. Why? Because God can always make more. God isn't cheap, and he isn't stingy. In the parable of the sower, the farmer doesn’t reserve seed for the best soil, but casts it broadly (Luke 8:1-80). That appears to be a waste, but it is not in God’s economy.
The God who multiplies loaves and fishes may like it when we pick up leftovers because who wants to waste them, but he isn't obsessed with efficiency. He is more concerned that everyone hears the gospel than he is with making sure every dollar achieves maximum impact. We are called to reach out to all people groups because they all matter to God, even when they won’t hear yet.
But if all souls are worth the same, why would we not invest all our resources in the places where we can have the greatest impact? Didn't Jesus tell us to shake the dust off our feet when people won't receive us? Didn't Paul and his fellow missionaries leave cities that threatened, deported, or threw stones at them?
True, all souls are worth the same, and we need to go through the doors God opens. No one would contradict that. Every time any part of the world opens to the gospel in a dramatic way, the rush of workers there is amazing. But we aren't just seeking to save generic souls. God loves "nations" and wants every nation (people group/culture) reached, so none is unrepresented when he gathers the saved of every nation and puts them on display in the new Jerusalem. Read the end of Revelation 21 and the beginning of 22. Nations matter too. Missions is not just a numbers game.
True, Jesus told us not to force-feed pearls to pigs and move on when people didn't want to hear. Yes, Paul left cities that stoned or deported him. But Jesus also died for people who were rejecting him. Crucifixion is a strong rejection statement. Yet, Jesus also came back for those same people and sent us to go to all of them. Paul also returned to the same cities where he was stoned or rejected and worked with the few who did listen. There is a time to walk away and a time to return, but God doesn't give up on anyone.
God needs witnesses in hard places as well as in the ripe fields. He doesn't send as many to hard places as open places, but he never abandons any place or any people. And like in Isaiah's day, when he does place some people under judgment for a time, he still sends them messengers, and he never, never, never, ever gives up on any people group.
Here is the way one missionary who is working in a hard place right now expressed what I'm trying to say:
Do we really think that the Trinity sat in heaven and strategized on the cheapest and most efficient ways to spread the good news and then came up with the cross as the best dollar per baptism strategy out there where all of God's resources could be put to the most efficient use? We worry about waste because we have a scarcity mentality. God did the most expensive and potentially wasteful thing that can be imagined to express his love with no guarantees. The giving came from his love not from his belief in the efficiency of the means used to get results.
Using "stewardship" as the battle cry, we seek the best dollar for baptism strategy that's out there, much like we look for stock market profit and investment returns.
Instead of giving out of obedience to what the Spirit is saying, we look for the mission works that will give us the highest returns for our investments (baptism per dollar is a phrase I've heard in several mission committee settings over the past 25 years). Then if the returns in one mission field begin to go down (or aren't fast enough), we look for better mission fields and strategies that promise better return for the dollars that we are stewarding…
We love harvesting more than we love planting… This can lead to "fad" or popular hotspot-based missions.
As workers, we inspire our donor base with hopes of high returns for their investments in our works. In many ways, we workers created the system because we see limited resources out there and have sought to persuade churches and committees that our mission work is a better investment… I've done it, and these days I'm repenting…
So, while we need to work smart, avoid unnecessary waste, and join God where he opens doors, we also need to remember that God loves all people and all nations. Math matters, but mission is bigger than math. Sometimes being a good disciple will make us look like bad businesspeople.