Can I Get That with Grits?

Dan Bouchelle and Andy Johnson

What is the single most important factor in determining the effectiveness of a missionary? Is it love for God? Love for lost people? Evangelistic gifting? Prayer life? Cultural adaptability? Linguistic aptitude? Humility? Ability to discern the move of the Spirit? 

We honestly don’t know how one could possibly rank the qualities missionaries need in order of importance. None of us will ever understand the complexity of the mission enterprise well enough to provide a reliable ranking. We can though name with some certainty one of the most overlooked yet essential qualities for missionaries: grit. A more impressive word might be perseverance or maybe resilience, but we prefer the one-syllable route of grit. We’re talking about self-starters (and, more accurately, self-restarters!) who put their heads down, show up every day, give it their all, and keep going. 

The Humanitarian Disaster Institute recently published their COVID-19 Mental Health Handbook. Based on research, they set out to determine the best practices to thrive during a global pandemic. Where did these 3 editors and their 58 contributing professionals decide to start their report? With resilience - what we’re calling grit. It’s what sets a person up to survive a pandemic, and we believe it’s one of the most important indicators of potential success on the mission field.

Before going further, we must pause to make clear that prayer is essential, and we can do nothing without God’s empowerment. We all know this to be true even when we neglect it. There is no substitute for God’s anointing. A disciple-maker serving in a middle eastern country who has served as a consultant to us said it well, “One day of anointing is worth a thousand of human effort.” A worker in the Mediterranean Rim Initiative has taken to reminding us lately of the need to trust that God is the source for everything we do: finding a vision, finding people to go, finding access, or finding funding. If organizations and churches don’t trust that, we won’t teach that, and we’ll pass along an unhealthy dependence on outside leadership and outside money instead of the Father. God’s primacy above human effort is a given. 

Healthy, Christ-centered resilience is based in the confidence that God is the source. However, it is not a passive but rather an active trust that gets up and gets going because we have prayed, because we trust, and because we believe that God is “preparing good works in advance for us to do.” Trust acts consistently in season and out, when there is fruit to harvest or when it is winter and all we are called to do is tend the vine. It is the kind of faith that can live through a 2 Corinthians 1 experience of “despairing of life itself” and still keep going like Paul’s mission team. 

Winsome people skills and powerful gifts of presentation and persuasion are all helpful, but none of them matter for long on the mission field if the workers don’t have faith-infused grit. The best people skills are ineffective when you are not out with people every day. The most exciting presentation is useless if the missionary quits with the first failure (for there will be many!).

The plodding missionaries with grit who grind out their prayer life through dry seasons, who move daily among sometimes resistant people, who show up when they’d rather go home, who serve and listen and are present day after day will outperform the gifted-but-easily-discouraged missionaries every time. God responds to the faithful not the gifted. While perhaps overly alliterative, presence and persistence matter more than preparation and presentation. 

The problem is that the gifted often find it easier to get to the field than the gritty. Their skills shine on their resumes and impress in interviews with churches. It is sometimes hard to sift through the glitter of the gifted to discover the less-flashy gritty applicants. Without grit, though, the difficulty of the task combined with the isolation and lack of accountability leads to discouragement, disenchantment, and (far too often) disengagement. 

Something we have learned at MRN is the need to assess and train for resilience. We want to see who has the ability to grind when there seems to be no gain. When we asses resiliency, we consider these domains: spiritual, physical, emotional, cognitive/creative, and social. We seek to discern who will trust God to make a way when they don’t see a way and keep going anyway. Honestly, the greatest indicator of grit on the field is usually a track record of persevering here. People who have failed but gotten back up again in their home culture are the ones most likely to do so in a new culture.

When churches consider whom to support, they certainly need to assess things like spiritual life, calling, vision, gifts, and preparation. It is a huge oversight to overlook grit, though. It is vital to talk to people who have worked with prospective missionaries and can vouch for their resilience and persistence. It is important to explore how they have handled failure in the past and how they have not only acquired knowledge but then applied it.

We cannot work effectively if we do not have faith. As James reminds us, however, faith always works. It is not passive but joins God with the same perseverance with which He has pursued us through many millennia.