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Pursue Missions for the Long Haul
In our church in Dubai, there are several airline pilots who regularly fly 12-hour, even 16-hour, flights in some of the biggest, most sophisticated aircraft in the world. They tell me that long-haul flying is a different kind of aviation. For one, it gets monotonous as hour passes hour in the cockpit. Except for the aurora borealis or the occasional spy-balloon sighting, not much is happening up there. Plus, there’s the fight to stay awake through the different time zones.
Not long ago, an Ethiopian Airlines flight overshot its approach into Addis Ababa. Both pilots had fallen asleep, even though they were responsible for the safety of hundreds in the back. The incident highlighted the importance of watchfulness and care when people’s lives are at stake.
How much more so in gospel ministry? Missionaries and ministers face the challenge of regular, daily vigilance as we proclaim the gospel and care for people’s souls. It’s crucial to take the long view in the missions enterprise.
The New Testament models a church-centered approach to missions, where gathered assemblies are the means (Acts 13:3; 3 John 6) and end (Acts 14:23, 27; Titus 1:5) of missions. Patient application of the ordinary means of grace—both at home and overseas—is how healthy, enduring churches are planted across cultures. The goal is a gospel witness that lasts for generations.
Short-Sighted Need for Speed
Modern missions strategies emphasize the need for speed. Success stories and massive numbers dazzle Western churches, but are the conversions genuine?
One of the architects of modern missions methodology criticized more traditional methods: “Whom do they get? They get a man here, a woman there, a boy here, a girl there. . . . That is a sure way to guarantee that any churches started will be small, non-growing, one-by-one churches.” They say that unless you use what’s called a “People Movement Approach” (e.g., entire villages coming to faith simultaneously), you’re doomed to “one-by-one” ministry.
Patient application of the ordinary means of grace is how healthy, enduring churches are planted across cultures.
This demonstrates a short-sighted impatience with ministry strategies that don’t yield immediate, visible results. A deliberate, settled ministry dedicated to the ordinary means of grace is criticized as a “slow to grow” approach.
Since speed is supreme, biblical criteria like sound doctrine and leaders’ qualifications are often downplayed. Reproducibility is highlighted, but the patient, deliberate work of preparation and ministry is minimized. Movements say that trained teachers slow down the process, so new believers—or sometimes even nonbelievers—can teach. “Let the lost lead the Bible studies,” they say. False conversions and phantom churches too often result. The long-term consequences are incalculable. Bad churches are anti-missions, presenting a distorted gospel to the world.
Movement-driven methods remain dominant in Western missions today. A new generation is sounding the same notes—ambiguity about the church, critique of ministry that “takes too long,” and emphasis on techniques and sure-fire strategies to spark movements.
But no formula can force the Spirit’s work. Instead, churches today must equip and send qualified workers and patiently proclaim the Word with the goal of planting churches that will endure for generations. Paul’s ambition was to proclaim the gospel where Christ hadn’t yet been named. But he wasn’t in a frantic hurry to evangelize the nations (see Acts 18:11; 19:10). He regularly slowed down, with the goal of “[presenting] everyone mature in Christ” (Col. 1:28). Paul didn’t check a box once a city was “reached.”
Better Strategy
During the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin expressed the importance of a long-term mindset. Writing to pastors he’d trained who were headed toward martyrdom in France, Calvin said, “Though the fruit may not all at once appear, yet in time it shall spring up more abundantly than we can express.” Missionary pioneer William Carey counseled his son in India, “The conversion of one soul is worth the labor of a life. Hold on therefore, be steady in your work, and leave the result with God.” David Livingstone, who penetrated the interior of Africa in the mid-1800s, noted in his journal, “A quiet audience today. The seed being sown, the least of all seeds now, but it will grow into a mighty tree.”
That doesn’t mean we should sit on our hands. We long for revival and numerical growth. But here’s the difference: Church-centered missions doesn’t rely on techniques or silver-bullet methods. Our hope is in the sovereign Lord who rules history and has moved extraordinarily time and again. But usually he moves gradually, through ordinary means: preaching, oversight, discipling, and administering the ordinances.
Patient endurance on the mission field requires local church involvement. Otherwise, missionaries tend to burn out. The missionary should be an extension—not of an agency but of a local body of Christ. In the 1960s, a missionary to Bedouin tribes in Arabia wrote to his home church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Despite the 7,000 miles separating them, it was a close, decades-long relationship (long before Zoom and Signal). They’d been praying, and fruit was slowly beginning to appear.
Our hope is in the sovereign Lord who rules history and has moved extraordinarily time and again.
The missionary wrote, “I hope you folks are aware of the unique ministry you’ve got out here.” It was not only his ministry but theirs, since they’d sent him. He believed God was “pleased to make known his arm of salvation and his redeeming love out [there] when a little group of saints in Carlisle [were] in one mind and spirit earnestly desiring their Arab brethren in the flesh to be found praising God with their lives and lips.”
Church-centered missions involves more than just a name on the back of the church bulletin or a line item in a budget. It involves a genuine, long-term partnership between the missionary and the congregation.
Don’t Rush
John Paton, who devoted 30 years to preaching the gospel to cannibals in the South Sea islands, gave this caution to missionaries: “Rush not from Land to Land, from People to People, in a breathless and fruitless mission. . . . The consecrated common-sense that builds for eternity will receive the fullest approval of God in Time.”
They may be ordinary and unflashy, but healthy churches are the consecrated common sense that builds for eternity. They’re the Bible’s missions strategy. Just as the gospel “sounded forth” from the first-century churches in Macedonia and Achaia (1 Thess. 1:8), so it continues to sound forth from churches today. Sometimes God moves in surprising ways, but generally the harvest doesn’t come immediately. It’s “first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear” (Mark 4:28). The sower doesn’t even know how the seed sprouts. “By itself,” the earth produces grain.
So don’t be like the Ethiopian Airlines pilots. Be vigilant, and pursue a plodding, patient, decades-long time horizon of a ministry. And don’t neglect the church.
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