The work of missions is one of the most
important that any church can engage in. It is the responsibility of every
Christian. We are either supposed to go into the mission field or we should be
supporting those who have gone with our prayers and our finances. This is
because our God is a God of missions. That is what the whole Bible is about. It
is God’s agenda. Whereas I knew this from the time I became a Christian,
somehow the penny never quite dropped that I should put this into practice both
as a Christian and later as a church pastor.
How come? It is because we are all
creatures of our own day. We live with many unconscious beliefs that dictate
our priorities and how we relate to situations in life. I was once with
presuppositions that made me conclude that at least for now the work of
missions was none of my business. Looking back, I realise that those
unconscious beliefs were all lies. There were many of them but, at the risk of
embarrassing myself, let me share with you seven of them. Many fellow African
Christians may find themselves making similar confessions.
Lie 1: We Africans were at the end of
the process of missions
I always believed in missions. However,
somewhere at the back of my mind I was of the unconscious belief that I was at
the finishing end of the factory line of missions. Other people had brought the
gospel to me and to my people. Our task here in Africa was simply that of
evangelising our own people. That was all. Hence, in our prayer meetings we
prayed for our evangelistic programmes. In our scheduling we only planned for
evangelistic activities. In our budgeting we set aside funds for evangelistic
trips and tracts. There was no sense of guilt that we rarely ever prayed for
actual missionaries by name. Prayer meetings came and went without a single cry
to God to raise up missionaries from among us. And we had nothing in our annual
church planner and budget that was to do directly with missions work. It was
all about neighbourhood evangelism, which was to result in our own church’s
growth.
Lie 2: Missionaries were “white people”
To me, missionaries were from Europe or
America. They were “white skinned” men and women. That fitted the pictures and
paintings of missionaries that I was brought up seeing in books. William Carey,
David Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, Adoniram Judson, Stanley Moffat, Olive Doke,
and Mary Slesser were all “muzungus”. It also fitted what I saw as I visited
mission stations around the country as a young believer. I made friends with a
number of them. They were all “white people”. Whenever it was announced that a
missionary would share in our church about the work they were doing, a “white
skinned” man or woman would stand up and go to the front to speak. That
stereotype remained in my subconscious mind. I ended up with the unconscious
belief that a black man like me was not in that category.
Lie 3: Missionaries were extraordinary
people
The little I knew about the life of a
missionary convinced me that these were men and women who were a notch above
ordinary mortals like me. I thought they probably heard an audible voice
telling them to leave the comforts of their world to go and spend the rest of
their lives in the jungles of Africa among ferocious beasts and unpredictable
tribal chiefs or in Islamic and Communist countries where upon being discovered
they would face certain death. I was convinced that missionaries possessed
super human strength and courage. I admired them the way I admired Marvel’s
Captain America, Iron Man, and Spiderman. Since I knew that I was an ordinary
mortal who almost collapses at the sight of a spider and I also knew my church
members were of the same ilk, I was of the unconscious opinion that we did not
have men and women among us who could be missionaries. So, I never bothered to
challenge our people to seriously consider going into the work of missions.
Never!
Lie 4: Those who supported missions had
a lot of money
I was convinced that God did not expect
my church or me to give finances towards missions because only Christians and
churches with plenty of money did such a thing. And I thought such Christians
and churches were only found in America and Europe. I did not realise that many
individuals and churches that were giving to missions in the West were doing so
out of their poverty. They were doing so primarily because they saw it not as
an optional extra to their Christian lives but as an intrinsic part of it. Some
of them were students who had to forgo perhaps a meal a day in order to give the
money they could have spent on that meal to the work of missions. In other
words, I did not realise that we too could and were obligated to support the
work of missions financially while we were struggling to make ends meet.
Lie 5: We must support a missionary’s
total budget
This was another barrier to my
involvement in missions. I always thought that a single church must have all
the money needed to support a missionary’s total budget before they can get
involved in supporting missions work. Since our church could not do so, I
assumed God was leaving us out of this obligation. It was not until I got close
enough to individual Western missionaries that I realised that many of them get
“bits and pieces” from different churches and from different Christians to meet
their needs on the mission field. Sometimes some churches and individuals drop
off and they have to get back home to raise further support. In this way, even
small struggling churches and poor Christians could participate in missions.
Missions work is a joint effort where we all must contribute our little to make
it happen!
Lie 6: Only churches with missionaries
should pray for them
I thought that only those churches that
have actually sent out missionaries are expected to pray for missionaries by
name. After all, they have seen them grow up among them, get married, and even
begin raising a family. So, they know them very well. For the rest of us it was
enough to simply pray generally for “the advancement of God’s kingdom through
the work of missions”. Thus even when I visited churches in the USA and heard
them praying specifically for missionaries by name and sharing about the
circumstances they were going through, I concluded, “They must have been
members here and are now serving abroad.” It never dawned on me that some of
them were never members in those churches but that churches in the West tend to
adopt and support missionaries sent out by sister churches.
Lie 7: It is not yet time for us to get
involved in missions
This was the final lie, which was a
result of the cumulative effect of the smaller lies mentioned above. We were
not “white” people and did not have a lot of money. None of our members showed
extraordinary faith and courage. Therefore, it was not yet time for us to get
involved in missions. We must keep the best of our young adults in good
well-paying jobs to add to our numbers and funds. Our church prayer meetings
should rightly concentrate only on our evangelism. One day it will be our turn,
but that is somewhere in the distant future. The application of the Great
Commission to us in Africa is simply that we continue to evangelise. What a BIG lie!
Conclusion
These seven lies and many more shut my
eyes to the obligation that I had as an African Christian and pastor towards
the work of missions for a number of years. How else could I have missed the
fact that we are called to fulfil the Great Commission even as African
believers and that this goes beyond reaching out to our neighbourhood? I am
glad that my eyes have since been opened and as a result Kabwata Baptist Church
and its members are engaged in the work of missions—sending out missionaries to
plant churches, raising funds to support them, and praying for them by name
every week in our prayer meetings.
I kick at myself for taking so long to
see the light. Yet, when I talk with fellow pastors in Africa about missions I
notice the same false beliefs that I once had in many of them. These are
unconscious beliefs that are betrayed by a lack of actual action. They agree
with me in theory that the work of missions is important but they remain
inactive about it. The cumulative effect of these lies causes them to think,
“It is not yet time for us to get involved in missions.” I will not throw the
first stone at them because sadly I was once in their shoes.
