For a while now I’ve been meaning to add this our site, but I’ve been a little too busy. I should have read Jon Walker’s article Did Jesus Rush Through His Week?!
My wife and I are considered missionaries by the Assemblies of God. That catches some people off-guard. After all, aren’t missionaries people who serve exclusively in pagan lands (preferably while wearing a pith helmet in the jungle)?
Not necessarily. A missionary is someone who is called to proclaim the gospel where there is no church to proclaim it.
There are a lot of nuances and qualifications I could add to that definition of a missionary, but I think it will suffice for this discussion. The key phrase is where there is no church to proclaim it.
That describes the college campus. College campuses (excluding commuter schools) are communities unto themselves. Students can attend classes, sleep, eat, watch movies, play games, do laundry, and shop for the necessities without ever leaving their campus. In fact, many campuses don’t even allow freshmen to have vehicles.
What’s the ramification? It doesn’t matter how many churches there are in the surrounding town–the college campus is a different world. Students are in great need of the gospel, yet they are insulated from the churches that proclaim it.
And so when we minister on campus we’re proclaiming the gospel in a place where there is no church to proclaim it. We’re missionaries.
That’s not to say there aren’t any differences between us and other missionaries. For example, the goal of most missionaries is to establish an indigenous church that is self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. In other words, they’re trying to establish a church that makes the missionary unnecessary!
Our goal is different. We can’t create a church at Stanford that meets all three criteria (being self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating) because of the nature of the campus and the students who inhabit it. The challenges are chiefly in the area of self-governance (the students keep graduating, making totally student-run groups unstable) and self-support (college students have no money to provide for a full-time pastor). Incidentally, that’s why we raise missionary support.
In other words, the college campus is a perpetual mission field. We simply can’t build a church that will make our ministry unnecessary or redundant.
And that’s why universities need missionaries–they are self-sufficient communities that are isolated from any nearby churches. Since the students won’t come to church, the church must go to them.
And that’s missions.
Oh–I shouldn’t finish this without mentioning two more details:
1) There are roughly 14,000,000 college students in America: almost half the nations in the world have lower populations!
2) The world comes to America for education: of those 14,000,000 students over 500,000 are from other nations (over half of those are from Asia and another 7% are from the Middle East). Walking across virtually any college campus you can find students from countries that don’t allow missionaries entry. They’ve come here and they can be reached here. That’s one of the reasons Chi Alpha emphasizes International Student Friendship Ministries so strongly.
Glen,
It is good for me to get a perspective on “missiology” from a Protestant perspective. Particularly it is interesting to see your criteria (and I presume that it is shared by other, if not all, Protestants) of where missionary work is to occur: “where there is no church to proclaim it.”
Sean
The Catholic Church in the past have had a similar understanding of where mission work should occur. We have called this kind of missionary work “ad gentes” (to the nations).
However, Pope John Paul II has called for a “new evangelization” that is to reach out to those nations, with established churches and once traditionally Christian, but now with a strong trend toward secularization.
Included among these would be many of the countries of the “First World” (including the United States). However, it would not have as a special focus some developing nations, especially in Central and South America, where the Catholic Church has been present for several centuries but surely needs revitalization (at least in some areas).
This, then, leads me to ask you a question based upon your criteria for where mission work should occur. If such work, the proclamation of the Gospel, should occur “where there is no church to proclaim it”, would you support it in countries, such as those of Central and South America, where, arguably, there is a church to proclaim it?
I’d be interested to read your views on that.
I should have seen that coming. 🙂
This wasn’t a full treatise on missiology. It was an attempt to explain to peope why we count as missionaries even though we’re here in America. As I said, “there are a lot of nuances and qualifications I could add to that definition of a missionary…”
If I was writing a more abstract treatise I would have also mentioned that we consider stateside church planters to be missionaries in the Assemblies of God–even if they’re planting in an area that already has one or more Assembly of God churches. Their goal is enter a community that doesn’t have enough churches and establish a new one. Once the church becomes self-supporting and self-governing, they aren’t considered missionaries in the same way anymore.
No urbanized area in America has even close to enough churches. I understand the situation is even worse in Latin & South America. http://www.providence.edu/las/Statistics.htm for corroboration on that last claim: I note in Brazil that there are only 16,000 priests serving 135,000,000 baptized Catholics. That’s about 1 per 8500 (and for the whole population of Brazil the number is closer to 1 per 11,000).
So yes, I fully support the sending of Assembly of God missionaries to Latin and South America. Moreover, I’d have to say that my impression of Catholicism in those areas is that it contains an even lower percentage of Christians than the churches here in the States (but that ties back in to our ongoing discussion).
Good stuff, Glen! A Missionary must have a mission and you have one.