Mission Has Never Advanced on Neutral Ground

It is tempting to imagine a golden age when mission advanced without resistance, as though today's difficulties were some recent anomaly. Resistance to mission, however, is historical. The early church faced imperial persecution; the Reformers, the Inquisition; and the nineteenth-century missionary pioneers, disease, distance, and rejection. The resistance we face today merely takes new forms within an old historical pattern. It does not inaugurate some new reality. Recognizing this changes how we face these challenges: they are not necessarily signs that something has gone wrong in our own time, but part of the cost that missionary work has always historically demanded.

Part of the contemporary missionary crisis, however, lies within the church itself. There is a silent erosion of commitment, a nearsightedness that shrinks the horizon to what is close and comfortable, a pragmatism that replaces faithfulness with measurable results, and an activism that confuses doing with being sent. At the same time, the world that receives the mission presents challenges of equal complexity: entire peoples without access to the gospel, countries that restrict Christian presence, cities marked by concentrated power and inequality, and modern ideologies that directly contest the place of Christ's message. Each of these realities has its own contours, and none can be adequately addressed by a generic formula applied indiscriminately to all of them.

Let this be clear from the outset: this article offers no easy formulas. It calls for honest reflection on the true cost of obedience to the missionary calling, a cost the church sometimes prefers not to name. In its place, the church often settles for motivational rhetoric that ends up concealing the real dimensions of what is at stake. Jesus told his disciples that certain things are impossible for men, but that with God all things are possible (Matt 19:26). Those words were spoken precisely in the face of a situation that, from a human standpoint, seemed to have no solution.

For this reason, missionary hope does not depend on an optimistic reading of the current landscape, nor does it vanish when that landscape proves darker than we expected. It is grounded in the One who governs the field, not in a statistical analysis of circumstances. The great missionary omission, therefore, is not merely a failure of strategy or planning. It also reveals a theological disobedience to the very missionary heart of God, revealed in Scripture from beginning to end. Honestly recognizing this is the first step toward any real change, both personal and institutional.

Make a personal list of the challenges introduced here that you have already encountered, closely or from a distance, in your own church or experience with missions. Ask God for the clarity to face that list without minimizing the problems, but also without inflating them beyond what they truly are. Keep the promise of Galatians 6:9 close at hand, and return to it whenever, in the coming weeks of reflection on this subject, some obstacle seems larger than the promise that sustains it. “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Gal 6:9).