The Receiving Church
by Isabelo F. Magalitread more Urbana 81 talks.
About Isabelo Magalit (as of 1981).
The mandate for worldwide witness is given to the whole church, and therefore to every church. That is why it is wrong to think of the North American church as the sending church, and of the Asian church as the receiving church. Every church is a sending church. Likewise, every church must be willing to receive.
We heard about the sending church from a North American pastor. Tonight a pastor from Asia has been asked to speak about the receiving church. The implication is obvious: the North American church is the sending church, and the church in Asia is the receiving church. That conclusion is false, and I will attempt to show why. Nevertheless, Urbana 81 is a North American missions convention, so I will seek to speak from the perspective of the churches that receive missionaries from North America.
My thesis is quite simple and can be summed up in three short sentences:
- the church is international;
- our task is immense; and
- partnership is imperative.
The Church Is International
Today the Christian church exists in every corner of the globe from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, from Thailand to Turkey. In every nation there are at least a handful of believers who are disciples of Jesus Christ. Some of them meet as bustling congregations in Rio de Janeiro or Seoul, Korea, while others can only meet as underground groups as they do in Albania or North Korea. But the church is everywhere.
Thus, the church is everywhere so long as we include as church (or ekklesia) any two or three who are gathered in Christ's name (Mt 18:20). The word ekklesia also describes believers gathered in a house (Col 4:15). This church in the house of Nympha seems also to have been part of a larger grouping, the local congregation in the city of Colossae (Col 1:2). Ephesians 3:10 also refers to ekklesia, and I understand this fourth meaning as including all true believers in all the world - past, present and future.
Perhaps we cannot completely understand all the relationships among these four meanings of the word church (ekklesia). It is a difficult problem, which the philosophers call that of the one and the many. No matter. We know that the church is indeed international, so that it is possible to speak of the American church or of the Filipino church.
These two churches - the American church and the Filipino church - are not the same. One is wealthy materially; the other is relatively poor. One has at least a hundred fifty years of experience in sending out foreign missionaries; the other has just barely begun. There are other cultural differences. But the two churches belong to the one body, for there is only one body (Eph 4:4). Ephesians 4 also tells us that Christian unity is not uniformity. It is a unity in diversity with a multiplicity of gifts. It is not dull uniformity, but multicolored diversity that is characteristic of God's church. Thus, the American church ought to be thoroughly American, and the Filipino church ought to be truly Filipino. Each is to be indigenous, native to its own soil.
There is a beautiful verse in Revelation 21 (v. 24) that speaks of the New Jerusalem and how the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it. I believe that means that there is a distinctive American contribution to the holy city as well as a Filipino contribution. Each church is distinctive, and both churches are equal in standing before God. While Jerusalem, the older congregation which counted the apostles among its members, sent Barnabas to investigate the church in Antioch (Acts 11:22), Jerusalem never lorded it over Antioch, never regarded Antioch as a ward, responsible to her. There was rich fellowship between them, but it was a fellowship of equals. The apostle Peter, writing to early believers, could speak of their faith as of equal standing with his (2 Peter 2:1). Each was distinctive, but both were equal and called to a common task. Our priority today remains the same as that of the early church: worldwide witness (Acts 1:8). We are to be witnesses to Christ, not only in Jerusalem, but also in all Judea, and in Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
But now that the church is worldwide, where is the end of the earth? From Jerusalem, the end of the earth, or halfway round the globe, is Honolulu. From Manila, the end of the earth is Buenos Aires. From Chicago, the end of the earth is Dacca, Bangladesh. The point is: your end of the earth may be my Samaria; my end of the earth may be your Jerusalem.
The mandate for worldwide witness is given to the whole church, and therefore to every church. That is why it is wrong to think of the North American church as the sending church, and of the Asian church as the receiving church. Every church is a sending church. Likewise, every church must be willing to receive.
The theme of the 1967 Urbana Convention expressed this truth well: God's Men from All Nations to All Nations.
Our Task Is Immense
We need to understand that it is the whole church that is sent, not just an elite - a corps of apostles, or a specially called group called "missionaries" - but the whole church. Acts 1:8 was fulfilled, not only by the eleven, but by others as well - Stephen and Philip, evangelists from Cyprus and Cyrene, Paul and Barnabas. I do not agree with the thesis that all are called and only some are sent. I prefer to say that all are sent - but we are not all sent in the same way, or to the same places. I see in Acts 8, 11 and 13 three kinds of missionaries.
- M1 missionaries are the stay-put missionaries, like the apostles who stayed put in Jerusalem in spite of the persecution (Acts 8:1).
- M2 missionaries are the share-as-you-go missionaries, like Philip and the nameless evangelists from Cyprus and Cyrene who preached the gospel wherever they went (Acts 8:4; 11:19; 20).
- M3 missionaries are the set-apart missionaries, like Barnabas and Saul, whom the Holy Spirit and the church in Antioch set apart for the evangelization of Cyprus.
We need all three types of missionaries, for our task is immense. There are nearly 4.5 billion people on planet Earth, distributed among 220 territories, which include 160 sovereign states or nations. Only about a billion of this large number are Christians - including all those who are Christians only by name. While the church is growing in many places, there is tough resistance to the gospel and severe difficulties for the church in others. In our day, the church not only has to face the restrictions of communist governments, it also has to contend with militant Islam.
China, India and the world of Islam already account for more than two billion people. The overwhelming majority of Chinese and Indians are not Christians. Mission experts also tell us that about forty nations, representing nearly two billion people, do not admit foreign missionaries at all, nor give much freedom to native preachers of the gospel. Even if the church grew to keep pace with the rate of world population expansion, the absolute number of non-Christians would continue to grow. There are more non-Christians in the world today than at any other time in the entire history of the world. Our task is immense.
Partnership Is Imperative
We must work together. Unless we learn to work together, we will not get the job done. The marketplace may be good for keeping the quality of consumer products high and their prices low, but the spirit of competition is not for the church of Jesus Christ. Cooperation is what we need, not competition.
We must learn to be partners. Otherwise, we will not only discover that we are getting in each other's way and wasting precious resources, we may actually end up working at cross- purposes. We also deny the unity of the one body. Thus partnership is not only required because the task is immense. but also because the international church is only one body. I think we all agree that partnership is imperative. But we have different ideas about the meaning of partnership. One form of partnership, or working together, is represented by the multinational corporation. Let us take McDonald's as an example.
McDonald's was started on April 15, 1955, by an astute Chicago businessman named Ray Kroc. Since he opened his first restaurant in Illinois, Mr. Kroc has sold 40 billion McDonald's hamburgers! In 1966, the clown Ronald McDonald was created and appointed spokesman, and he now speaks eleven languages. In 1970, McDonald's set up an international division, and what started as a uniquely American concern became truly global, with branches in twenty-five countries.
On October 17, 1981, McDonald's opened with fanfare in Manila, right in the middle of university belt, only five hundred meters from my office. It is now doing well under a Filipino manager, who was first trained in McDonald's Hong Kong but went on to finish a bachelor of hamburgerology and a minor in French fries at Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Illinois.
We are told that Hamburger University is the ultimate in training and development
for aspiring managers of McDonald's stores.
That's the McDonald's story. Now I am not critical of McDonald's; in fact, I
like their hamburger. But not for my daily diet. It is not indigenous; not Filipino.
I prefer rice. Still, McDonald's is welcome in Manila. It is indeed a form of
partnership.
Unfortunately, however, this pattern of internationalizing is often the same pattern adopted by Western mission agencies. I find this hard to accept. What I can welcome in the matter of marketing hamburgers, I find unacceptable in relation to the gospel. For I believe that the gospel must become truly indigenous everywhere it is preached. For the gospel to really grow deep and spread widely among native populations, it must become native to the soil. When Western mission agencies appoint a Filipino head who acts simply as their "agent in Manila" to spread their westernized form of the gospel, their theological distinctives, their particular methods - they do not help the gospel really take root. The Filipino head may be called national director, or even president, but he is only "a little brown American." My brothers and sisters in Christ, please do not make us into little brown Americans. We want to be, we need to be, genuinely Filipino Christians for the sake of the gospel.
Models of Partnership
There are patterns of partnership to commend. Let me tell you about the Presbyterian Church of Brazil and the Presbyterian Church of the USA.
The Presbyterian Church of the USA has had missionary work in Brazil for more than one hundred years. As the Presbyterian Church of Brazil has taken root and grown over the years, the relationship between the two churches has also evolved. In 1973, the two churches drafted the First Agreement of Cooperation to govern the relationship between them. In October 1980, representatives from both churches met to work out an amended agreement which was submitted for approval to the two General Assemblies in 1981.
What is the goal of the agreement? The preamble says: "the goal [is] full integration of our missionaries in the midst of the church in which they will be working ... recognizing that the work will be more fruitful for the glory of God when undertaken together and with the same objectives."
The central principle in the agreement is the principle of mutuality. Mutuality is recognizing each other as full partners in the common task of proclaiming the Lord Jesus Christ. This mutuality is worked out under the different headings: The Missionary, Finances, Freedom of Action, Properties, and so forth. The common task is "proclaiming the Lord Jesus Christ in word and deed in Brazil, within the United States of America, and, God willing, in other countries as well." Notice it says "in other countries as well," not just to help each other evangelize their own peoples, but to work together to bring the gospel to third parties. Or, in the precise words of Article 26: "Both partner churches shall seek opportunities for cooperation in mission to peoples in countries other than their own."
Of course, the agreement raises questions. For example, this church to church relationship does not cover all situations. What about parachurch agencies and missionary societies? The agreement also implies a theology of the church and of church polity that is not acceptable to everyone.
Nevertheless, the agreement presents us with a specific model of cooperation that spells out what a partnership of equals means. If we are committed to the principle of mutuality, whatever our situation, we can work out the applications to ourselves. There are other models of partnership. There is the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Fifty men and women from across the world, representing many nations and the whole spectrum of evangelical faith, have pledged to work together for the speediest evangelization of the world. The chairman of the committee is evangelist Leighton Ford from North America, and the executive secretary is Gottfried Osei-Mensah from Ghana, Africa.
Then there is the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Let me commend the IFES to you. The IFES is composed of 75 national evangelical student movements working together to reach students for Christ. Some of the member movements are large and established, like Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, USA. Others are small and struggling, like the Thai Christian Students. But each national movement is autonomous, and the international fellowship is a fellowship of equals.
Every four years, each national movement sends representatives-a maximum of three-to a General Committee which meets also as an international conference to survey the worldwide student scene, to learn together from God's Word, to pray and consult together, and to make plans for further outreach. The General Committee also chooses eleven men and women - from all six continents - to serve on an Executive Committee which meets every year and carries out the mandate of the General Committee, as well as guides the decisions of the General Secretary. The General Secretary and all the staff of IFES are appointed by the Executive Committee, subject to confirmation by the General Committee. The IFES General Secretary is Mr. Chua Wee Hian from Singapore, and the present chairman of the Executive Committee is Dr. John W. Alexander of the USA.
There is no uniformity of methods or structures, or even name among the 75 members of the IFES. The Brazilian movement is called Alianca Biblica Universitaria do Brasil (ABUB); the German movement is called Studentemnission in Deutschland (SMD); the fellowship in Nigeria is simply known as the Nigerian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (NIFES); the Japanese movement is called Kirisutosha Gakusei Kai (KGK); the Indian movement is called Union of Evangelical Students of India (UESI); the affiliate in Papua New Guinea is called Tertiary Students Christian Fellowship of PNG (TSCF). Each one is distinctive and indigenous, but all are committed to the one Lord and to his one gospel. The IFES: the international fellowship of equals.
Many of you will not have much to do with the IFES or the Lausanne Committee or the Presbyterian Church of the USA. That does not matter. We want you to come and help us. But please come as real partners. Let us work together to make the Lord Jesus known to the ends of the earth.
There is another lovely passage in Revelation:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation$ from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!"
Rev 7:9-10
What a magnificent scene! What is even more remarkable is this: God has called you and me to be his coworkers in bringing that scene to reality. As we work together as real partners in bringing the good news to the end of the earth, we ensure that there will be people from every tribe and people and tongue and nation who will sing glory to God and to the Lamb.
"Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen"
Rev 7:12
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