Step 7: Hands-On Missionary Training
by Steve HokeLet’s assume you’ve completed your basic academic training. Let’s also assume you’ve had serious on-the-job ministry training within a local church - and (hopefully) have been gainfully employed in the meantime!
Assuming all these things means that by now you have probably spent at least one brief period of time in another culture, and perhaps as long as two years in a ministry-focused local or international short-term or cross-cultural experience. You’ve been stretched. You’ve been shaken. And you’ve grown stronger as a result.
Now it’s time to figure out what kind of practical missionary training and/or advanced training you’re going to need. Our focus here is to highlight practical equipping for the particular kind of ministry work you will do on the field. We know of some church planters whose only stateside ministry experience was discipling high school students and teaching an adult Sunday school class. This is neither adequate nor realistic practical training for persons who will be ministering in multilevel, multicultural contexts.
By now you may have determined the kind of missionary role you want to fill. This workbook centers on leading you toward a role in church planting. But bivocational (tentmaking) ministry and training/mentoring other missionaries are examples of other vital roles toward which God may be directing you. As you know by now, we’re assuming that all these roles contribute to the ultimate goal of taking the gospel to a group of people who have never heard it before and being used by the Holy Spirit to plant a community of Jesus worshipers in their midst. In other words, a missionary is one who is trying to reach less-reached or unreached people with the Good News of Christ. These unreached peoples are located all over the world. Some live in cities. Some are in suburban areas. Some are in remote rural communities or tribes. Perhaps by now you know specifically that God is calling you to work with a remote tribal group or within one of the exploding “megacities.” Maybe you know where you’re going and the church or agency you’ll partner with.
Perhaps God has shown you a particular continent, country, or people group among whom He wants you to minister. Maybe you’ve had the opportunity to study the many needs for a holistic ministry that have been identified there. You may feel led by the Spirit to attempt to reach a particular one. Or you may be part of a church with a particular missions focus, such as sending church based teams to plant churches among an “adopted” unreached people group or nation.
All these factors will affect the extent and type of practical missionary training you will need. It will require time and actual ministry experience to develop competencies in all three of the dimensions described in the profiles - character and spirituality qualities, ministry skills, and knowledge goals. You’ll need to drive your foundations deep into the substrata of God Himself.
Master the fundamentals. First, you must build a solid God and Word foundation - a strong working knowledge of Scripture that establishes your faith, undergirds your values, and guides your behavior. Second, you must have a good grasp of the cultures within which the Scriptures were written. Without this, you will be unable to communicate God’s Word effectively to another culture. Third, you will dream of the day when this living Word comes supernaturally alive in a new culture.
Your biblical knowledge is to be valued, not because it affords prestige or power, but because it is useful for guiding your ministry. It enables you to be and/or do what would otherwise be impossible. That’s why, in The Cross-Cultural Church Planter Profile, we focused first on character qualities (“being” goals) and ministry skills (“doing” goals). Those first two qualifications help you determine what knowledge you need to acquire for effective missionary service.
Build a solid set of ministry skills. If your work on the field is to be effective, your missionary training should be intentional and purposeful. Your early on-the-job training in a church was meant to expose you to the range of ministries needed in a church and to stretch your ministry “muscles” while letting you try your hand at teaching, witnessing, discipling, and so on. This practical training phase of your preparation is a time in which you need to sharpen the specific ministry skills you will most likely use overseas. Hopefully you were part of a church based cell group team that witnessed growth and even multiplied itself.
Knowing your role is critical to focusing your training. The most relevant preparation for church planting overseas is participation in and significant responsibility on a church planting team at home. Witnessing in your neighborhood, door-to-door canvassing, starting evangelistic Bible studies, creating cell groups, raising up leaders from the harvest, and discipling new believers to the second and third generation are critical church planting skills. These are practical traits you can acquire, develop, and refine in your own congregation.
You must have adequate missiological and theological preparation, including an understanding of God’s purposes in history, how His Spirit has worked in the history of the church, how theology has developed, and the way men and women through the ages have worked out their understanding of what God has been saying to us. But keep it practical. The purpose of this study is to help you be more effective in living and equipping others to live meaningful, Christ-centered lives. Your knowledge is never an end in itself.
Avoid simplistic mission slogans and sloppy reductionism of the Great Commission. Develop a strong theology of creation and of kingdom values. Many missionaries have greatly benefited from one to three years of formal studies, but it doesn’t work that way for others.
The “Perspectives on the World Christian Movement” course is the single best introduction to a theology of international missions. If you haven’t yet taken the course, now is the time to do so.
You must have broad training in the social sciences, especially anthropology, sociology, and political science. These disciplines go hand in hand with the history and present effectiveness of missionary work around the world.
Anthropology enables you to consider the origin and nature of cultures - your own and that of the people you will be serving. Sociology provides a vocabulary and mental models for understanding how people establish rules for living together. Political science gives you tools for understanding the dynamic tensions that flow (or rip) through societies and how societies organize themselves politically. As missionaries learn about the beliefs and customs of a people, they discover effective bridges for the communication of biblical truth.
Language and culture learning are of supreme importance. No effort should be spared here. Wise churches and most sending agencies have a clear policy that lays out the orientation, cultural study, and language proficiency expected of all missionaries. However, because this can be one of the most difficult parts of practical missionary training, some churches and agencies may ease off the requirements in this area.
Actually, churches and mission agencies should encourage missionaries to do more than the required minimum. There are hundreds of missionaries who would say with regret, “How I wish that years ago we had spent the time and the effort to become fluent in the language! The demands of family, the needs of the field, and the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ drew us into ministry with less than adequate adult literacy. As a result, the impact of our ministry was lessened over the course of our missionary career. Don’t repeat our experience!”
Language acquisition and culture learning go hand in hand. It’s difficult to really understand a culture until you can think in its terms - until you can use its idioms, laugh at its jokes, weep at its pain. Thinking culturally requires fluency in the language, and not just the trade language used in the cities, either.
Missionaries desperately need to speak the heart language or dialect of the local people in their communities and villages. As a friend of ours says, “You want to communicate fluently in the language that people think in, dream in, and make love in!”
Most North Americans have little training in language learning and language theory. The majority of us are monolingual. The rest of the world is not. That puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to learning a language. Therefore, a basic understanding of language theory or linguistics may prove useful before you plunge into learning a new language. In addition, it’s even more useful to study some of the new language acquisition techniques that have recently been developed.
One of the most effective language acquisition methods is to learn among people who speak the language. Tom and Betty Sue Brewster pioneered the LAMP (Language Acquisition Made Practical) method in the 1970s. The method emphasizes learning simple phrases and repeatedly using them while living with a host family or conversing regularly with a local “language helper” from your target culture. This “total immersion” approach to learning language and culture is the most natural way of “bonding” with your new culture. Today it is widely practiced by many mission agencies as a primary language acquisition technique.
As the world becomes more urban, there’s a growing emphasis on preparing missionaries to live and minister in cities. Missions internships in urban centers throughout North America provide ideal preparation for incarnational living among city dwellers, especially the urban poor.
For instance, each summer several mission agencies and local churches jointly sponsor an eight- to 10-week urban internship in Los Angeles. Missionary appointees learn while ministering in a context similar to that of the “target people” to whom they’ll eventually go. Each participant lives with a family from the ethnic group with whom he or she plans to minister. Faculty come from participating churches, mission agencies, and nearby seminaries. The participants’ training includes highly interactive on-site cultural exposure and investigation, LAMP methods of language acquisition, spiritual formation (including biblical study and reflection), team building, and leadership development. Similar training programs are conducted by other agencies and churches in other major cities such as New York and Chicago.
Several other innovative language study programs, like that of the Russian Language Ministry at Columbia International University in Columbia, South Carolina, have arisen in response to the growing demand of North Americans who are moving to Eastern Europe and regions of unreached peoples. Based on recent developments in linguistics and language learning, these U.S. based programs provide a solid foundation in language basics within a stable, more familiar environment before you move overseas and encounter cultural and language stress. Thankfully, there are two-week intensive courses that provide language learning skills for you. Check these options out.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you will only have to learn one language in your lifetime. God may move you to another field. The future of missions will see an increasing redeployment of missionaries from one country to another, often in mid-career.
Having an ability to learn other languages increases your flexibility, making you ready to take new assignments elsewhere in the kingdom. And don’t let a negative experience of trying to learn a language in high school prejudice you. Your classroom attempts may not have been a true test of your abilities at all!
If North Americans are weak in speaking other languages, they are even weaker in understanding and being sensitive to other cultures. North America is such a large continent, and one can travel such vast distances without encountering large groups of people who are “not like us” that, at least until recently, we have had very little understanding and appreciation of other cultures. Despite the cultural diversity that has enriched North American culture for over 200 years, we have tended to see it as a rather bland “melting pot” of many cultures rather than a “stew pot” or “tossed salad” of coexisting, rather distinctive cultures and peoples. Certainly the ’90s have brought us a new emphasis on diversity and inclusiveness, and Generation X has a broader perspective on culture and the world than did most of our ancestors. Yet the headlines frequently testify to the fact that North Americans still tend to react to differences, rather than accepting and celebrating them. Thankfully, this situation is radically changing as the “nations” flow again into North America.
The history of missions includes countless examples of sincere but sad attempts to reach a people - attempts made by missionaries who understood neither their own culture nor the culture of the people they were trying to reach. Learning about the culture right next door to you will start you on the path toward learning to be a “cultural detective” - naturally inquisitive and genuinely interested in learning about other people and comprehending their ways of life.
The first step is to understand yourself and your own cultural background and biases.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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