Missions for 21^st Century America

By Ryan Nichols

One of the great challenges for Christians of any era and location is to faithfully translate the Christian faith for the next generation of believers. In our current situation, 21^st century America, that translation process has taken on a much more missionary flavor. For the most part, younger people today have not grown up in Christian homes, know nothing about the Bible, and their opinions of the Christian faith are based on stereotypes promoted by the media. The challenge for current Christians who take the Great Commission seriously is immense: how do we communicate the essentials of the Church to pagans?

A possible answer to this is to begin to think like a missionary. The days of the pith helmet are over, but we can still learn from the missionaries of the past. The first is to involve yourself in the community to which you are proclaiming the Gospel. One of the biggest failures of many 19^th century missionaries to Africa was in not doing this. English and Dutch missionaries would instead build missionary compounds, schools, and hospitals and sit inside, waiting for the natives to show up. Today, we must learn from the mistakes of the past and go out into our communities, instead of waiting inside a building for the natives of this land to show up.

A second strategy for missions in 21^st century America is to know the culture to which you are going. Another mistake of the 19^th century missionary movement in Africa was to assume that British or Dutch culture and the Gospel were identical. These missionaries taught the natives that faith and Western civilization were both necessary and good for them, in effect, in order to be a good Christian one needed to dress and act like an Englishman or Dutchman. As today’s missionaries, we must not make the same mistake. Christianity can thrive in almost any culture, and it is one of the most powerful parts of the Gospel to watch it transform culture from the inside out, while still retaining elements of that culture. Doing missions in America today involves serious study of American culture and awareness of what matters most to the people we are reaching.

Strategy number three is flexibility. If we take a truly missional approach to our communities, we must be willing to allow for flexibility when it comes to non-essentials. Non-essentials are those areas of life where there is no explicit teaching from Scripture, and the issue is left to the conscience of the person. In 19^th century Africa, one of those issues was polygamy. It was a matter of course for important men in African tribes to have several wives. English and Dutch missionaries puzzled over this matter – What do we do with these extras wives? Many of the men were counseled to divorce all but their first wife, which in many cases resulted in the divorced wives being shamed and ostracized from the community. One might wonder if the better solution was to teach monogamy to those who had yet to marry, and allow the polygamous family structure to slowly die out. Today, 21^st century American pagans will have cultural issues that we will need to be flexible about and allow time and God’s grace to change as these people embrace the Gospel and make it their own.

The final strategy is humility. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is based on the person of Jesus Christ, God-who-became-man, the ultimate humiliation. Humility must be at the core of every missionary effort. This was probably the most tragic mistake of missions in 19^th century Africa. Lack of humility on the part of the English and Dutch missionaries and settlers provoked the native peoples and created a deep-seated resentment of the European nations who were colonizing their land. Many of the missionaries considered the Africans to be second class people who would never be as civilized as the Westerners. This type of attitude resulted in the official racism of apartheid in South Africa, and the seeds of revolution in most of the African countries against the West. Today, in America, we must take care not to make the same mistake. We must prevail through humility in order to overcome the perceptions of many pagan people that Christians are self-righteous, bigoted, and arrogant.