Supporting national evangelists

[Leslie]

I've heard some arguments both ways about supporting national evangelists. Pro is cultural familiarity, better able to adapt to lack of creature comforts, less need for furlough time, etc. On the other hand, there is concern about what actually is accomplished. The local church here has a lot of evangelists that they support. Some of them (especially near the Kenya border) endure incredible hardship for the gospel. Others live at ease and view their salary like a welfare check; they feel no obligation to put in time and effort. Does anyone have wisdom about how to discern who is worthy of support and who is not?

 

[jwithnell]

Please define the term "national evangelist."

 

[Leslie]

A national evangelist is a citizen of a developing country who lives and evangelizes within his own country (that is, political entity). It might or might not be within his own ethnic group. In the case of Ethiopia, there are more than 50 language groups, so many of these evangelists live and work cross-culturally. They might have to learn another language, but at least the trade language enables them to travel, and they don't have to worry about visas.

 

[jwithnell]

I am more familiar with efforts to establish local churches which would then take on preaching and teaching in the local language and cultural context.

 

[Pergamum]

A blog post I wrote a few years ago:

Missions - a Sovereign Grace Perspective: Thoughts on Supporting Indigenous Evangelists

Advantages of supporting indigenous workers:

There are many reasons why we should seek to support our Christian brothers and sister engaged in Gospel work overseas:

• First, we should support their work because they are Christian brothers. And, seeing the Global Church as One Body, if we are willing to support white-skinned Western missionaries with monetary funding, why would we not also desire to gift our overseas brothers and sisters in Christ in the same manner?

Also, pragmatically, there are a variety of reasons as well

• Indigenous workers do not need furloughs back to the States.
• They won’t puke when the locals give them salt fish, snails, grub worms or dog to eat.
• Indigenous workers won’t distract their listeners with inappropriate postures and social blunders like using the “impolite hand” to eat, calling the “village head” the “village coconut” or showing the soles of one’s feet as one sits and eats with locals.
• Locals usually don’t talk with distracting and funny dialects.
• Indigenous workers may be better able of actually “plant” a local church rather than “transplant” a Western church onto foreign soil. A church must not be seen as a foreign import, and Christianity must spread as a native plant growing on native soil; not as a North American pine wilting in the tropics. Though the Gospel condemns aspects of every culture that it encounters, there are also points of contact and open windows of understanding by which local believers can work from the known to the unknown in order to facilitate communication and receptivity and use bridges of understanding when teaching the Gospel, rather than beating one’s head against closed doors due to a lack of properly contextualizing the unchanging Word of God into variable human cultures.
• Local and personal ownership of the Gospel is vital. A people must own God as their own God and know that God is not merely the God of the ___(fill in the nationality or ethnic group). One need not become a Westerner in order to become a Christian, and indigenous evangelists can best model this truth. They are living proof.
• With the rise of radical Islam and the closing of many countries, indigenous evangelists may be the only possible missions strategy in many areas. Also, in countries with past histories of colonialism and racism, locals may associate the Christian faith with the sins of those who have come from “Christian lands.” In these contexts, indigenous evangelists may meet with much more success to their message due to the greater openness of the people to the indigenous messengers.

 

[Jack K]

When I was a kid and my family was in the mission field, there was a mixture of native missionaries and those sent from afar. They often worked in tandem, and that seemed to work pretty well. Each brought a different set of necessary gifts, and each could watch the other regarding the particular cultural temptations and challenges each faced. Support raising could be more difficult for the local guys, though. Where there's oversight in place, churches ought to be willing to support national missionaries even if those guys might not be able to visit as often.

Oversight is key though, for anyone in ministry. I wouldn't send support to a guy who had no credible oversight in place, no matter how compelling his tale of working to evangelize among his own people.

 

[Leslie]

Oversight is the key. But how do we know it's actually happening? The local church reportedly has oversight over its 150 evangelists, yet some of them feel no obligation to put in time and effort doing what they are paid to do. Others are suffering with insufficient funds, in difficult locations, doing exemplary ministry. Oversight needs to be at-location, not merely in the same country, or sending in written reports. One of our colleagues has "oversight" of a local evangelist to the M's, but he has not been in-country for the past year and the "evangelist" is merely pastoring a church in a solidly Christian neighborhood, still pulling his pay. Pergie, how can one come up with worthy indigenous missionaries to support? Especially for M evangelism.

 

[Pergamum]

I would be careful how the "oversight" is carried out.

All too often, "oversight" of indigenous evangelists by western churches means this: -The Payer/Sponsor (the rich western church) is exercising "oversight" to make sure the indigenous evangelist (the Receiver) is doing what they tell him.

In effect, this often makes the local guy an employee or paid servant of some distant entity who holds the purse strings and uses words like "oversight" and "accountability" to control the poor brown-skinned pastor who really hurts without that support. These sponsors will often cut those purse strings, not in the event of pastors failing morally or departing into apostasy, but over simple disagreements or disobedience to the sponsor's wishes. Many times Western churches want local pastors to implement western programs and do not follow the lead of the locals. Dissenting and fiery God-called local evangelists who defend their own strategies against the hair-brained schemes of American churches and who have strong opinions and take initiative get labeled as "rebellious." Passive, obedient indigenous evangelists who are more willing to go along with the inferior methodologies of Western sponsors then get the support and are labeled as the "good" evangelists (of course they are good...they listen to us and let us lead, right!).

I've heard local pastors complain of being "bought" and one man on this board expressed to me the feeling of "being bought by a Korean sponsor. Many Christians in rich countries give money not out of charity alone but to hire others to fulfill their visions instead of getting behind the locally-informed visions/strategies of the indigenous church planter on the ground.

 

[Pergamum]

Oversight is the key. But how do we know it's actually happening? The local church reportedly has oversight over its 150 evangelists, yet some of them feel no obligation to put in time and effort doing what they are paid to do. Others are suffering with insufficient funds, in difficult locations, doing exemplary ministry. Oversight needs to be at-location, not merely in the same country, or sending in written reports. One of our colleagues has "oversight" of a local evangelist to the M's, but he has not been in-country for the past year and the "evangelist" is merely pastoring a church in a solidly Christian neighborhood, still pulling his pay. Pergie, how can one come up with worthy indigenous missionaries to support? Especially for M evangelism.

Leslie,

Dissecting your sentence above:

Oversight is the key. But how do we know it's actually happening? The local church reportedly has oversight over its 150 evangelists, yet some of them feel no obligation to put in time and effort doing what they are paid to do. Others are suffering with insufficient funds, in difficult locations, doing exemplary ministry.

The phrase "doing what they are paid to do..." I think is an inferior way of phrasing this. They should be doing it no matter what. The funds are not there to pay for evangelism that is to be done, but is there to support the evangelist in his lifestyle of already-evangelizing wherever he goes. The evangelist should never think of funds as "his salary" or evangelism as "his job."

If Western sponsorship comes, it shouldn't be to pay for the evangelism they do, but to support those that are already doing it. If we see somebody not producing and we pay them in the hopes of having them produce, I think this is a faulty strategy. It is like supporting a missionary candidate who has never done any US ministry and has borne no ministry fruit in their US neighborhood and expecting them to become a church-planter once they step off the plane in a foreign country.

In answer to your question about the method of figuring out who to support: I would find those evangelists that are doing evangelism even though they are poor and unsupported and try to brainstorm with them what they would do if they only had a little support. What sort of new initiatives or projects they would undertake or new areas they would try to penetrate. Then, after hearing that locally-informed vision from a proven guy who clearly is not merely doing it for money, support him or support these new efforts for several months and see what the results are (my apologies for writing the word "results" in regards to evangelism). The local guy thus sets the vision, that vision is supported, and the Westerner can exercise generosity without taking over the driver's seat and while still being able to check on the implementation and the results of that local evangelists' plans.

Also, we should remember that if giving a drink of cold water to one of "these little ones" will not go unrewarded, we should be motivated to exercise lavish generosity to those that show God's call on their lives by going into these hard area whether they get "paid" to do so or not.

 

[Leslie]

I would be careful how the "oversight" is carried out.

All too often, "oversight" of indigenous evangelists by western churches means this: -The Payer/Sponsor (the rich western church) is exercising "oversight" to make sure the indigenous evangelist (the Receiver) is doing what they tell him.

In effect, this often makes the local guy an employee or paid servant of some distant entity who holds the purse strings and uses words like "oversight" and "accountability" to control the poor brown-skinned pastor who really hurts without that support. These sponsors will often cut those purse strings, not in the event of pastors failing morally or departing into apostasy, but over simple disagreements or disobedience to the sponsor's wishes. Many times Western churches want local pastors to implement western programs and do not follow the lead of the locals. Dissenting and fiery God-called local evangelists who defend their own strategies against the hair-brained schemes of American churches and who have strong opinions and take initiative get labeled as "rebellious." Passive, obedient indigenous evangelists who are more willing to go along with the inferior methodologies of Western sponsors then get the support and are labeled as the "good" evangelists (of course they are good...they listen to us and let us lead, right!).

I've heard local pastors complain of being "bought" and one man on this board expressed to me the feeling of "being bought by a Korean sponsor. Many Christians in rich countries give money not out of charity alone but to hire others to fulfill their visions instead of getting behind the locally-informed visions/strategies of the indigenous church planter on the ground.

This is a powerful argument. I'm all for having indigenous guys make their own agendas, give them freedom, support them without controlling them. But how can one tell if they are actually doing something, or if they are just living high off of strings-free dole. Quite some years back an Ethiopian we know was royally supported by a church in California. He lived high, did little or no work, manufactured a lot of fiction of his grand successes which the church back home bought into. He even had visitors from this church who affirmed what he was doing. The local missionaries knew better, but no one took the initiative to blow the whistle on him. The Lord took him off the scene with a malignancy.

On the other hand, a local saint, now over 90 years old, until recently made a habit of travelling by public transport all over the south, near the Kenya border, encouraging real evangelists living out in the bush in hostile territory, doing a real work of God. He's too frail now to travel, but if I could find someone else like him, I'd be inclined to engineer support for these guys, both the ones in the bush and the old saints with oversight. They have a track record, a proven heart to do what it takes to win people for the Kingdom. They just need to be able to keep body and soul together to accomplish what's in their hearts.

 

[Pergamum]

If Western missionaries are working closely with indigenous believers, then a local missionary's labors will be better known.

I often wonder how many indigenous pastors wonder these same questions about us Western-supported missionaries. So many of us seem so little inclined to work hard and so many of us spend so lavishly to maintain a lifestyle far above theirs, and yet we are often quick to judge locals much more critically for the occasional indulgence they spend on themselves.

Today, I met with an evangelist and was surprised to see that he had a new hand phone with a camera and I mentally judged him (how did he get that when he said he was broke 2 months ago and asked me to help him fly out to the city when he was sick). I found out later it was a gift from a family member in his sending church. Meanwhile, I am on PB chatting using a satellite that cost several thousand dollars.

 

[Edward]

yet some of them feel no obligation to put in time and effort doing what they are paid to do. Others are suffering with insufficient funds, in difficult locations, doing exemplary ministry.

I expect if you dug deep enough, you could find western missionaries and pastors about which the same could be said.

One of our colleagues has "oversight" of a local evangelist to the M's, but he has not been in-country for the past year

Sort of proves my point above, doesn't it?

the "evangelist" is merely pastoring a church in a solidly Christian neighborhood, still pulling his pay

Which might actually be a better long term model than him going to some remote village.

By the way, as I've suggested before - if one wants to be a missionary to the M's, there are plenty of opportunities in Cologne, or London, or the nicer suburbs of Dallas.

 

[Leslie]

I really like your approach, Pergie, finding someone who is already doing M evangelism and asking what he would do with some additional support. This gives me an idea for approaching my situation, finding someone like this godly 90 year old, asking him what use he could make of X amount of birr (Ethiopian currency) a month.

This guy who is supposed to be doing M evangelism but is simply pastoring, previously he showed real enthusiasm for M evangelism. But that was in a context where M's came to be physically present on Christian turf. He was never threatened, since his organization provided service to the M's. I think he found it entirely a different deal when he was expected to go out into M turf. Realistically it's dangerous. And, as you point out, there are some Western "missionaries" who use their salary to finance a "ministry" exclusively to their family. In one case a car mechanic who was supposed to service mission cars moved to a place so remote that only someone with an excellent vehicle in good condition could get to him. James Dobson was the unwitting founder of the Society of Missionary Loafers. It's a problem in a lot of mission boards.

 

[Pergamum]

yet some of them feel no obligation to put in time and effort doing what they are paid to do. Others are suffering with insufficient funds, in difficult locations, doing exemplary ministry.

I expect if you dug deep enough, you could find western missionaries and pastors about which the same could be said.

One of our colleagues has "oversight" of a local evangelist to the M's, but he has not been in-country for the past year

Sort of proves my point above, doesn't it?

the "evangelist" is merely pastoring a church in a solidly Christian neighborhood, still pulling his pay

Which might actually be a better long term model than him going to some remote village.

By the way, as I've suggested before - if one wants to be a missionary to the M's, there are plenty of opportunities in Cologne, or London, or the nicer suburbs of Dallas.

Edward,

You wrote:

By the way, as I've suggested before - if one wants to be a missionary to the M's, there are plenty of opportunities in Cologne, or London, or the nicer suburbs of Dallas.

What do you mean by this? The nicer suburbs of Dallas are just as legitimate a target for evangelization as the Muslim world itself? I really hope you are not advocating this.

 

[Leslie]

Pergie, regarding people who have never had ministry at home, many times these folk do much better overseas. Some people just don't have social skills. Or they have something like a speech impediment, or painful shyness, or a hyperactive child that precludes active deputation. People like this, many times, have extra longevity overseas; they regard avoiding Stateside culture as a big advantage. My father had a friend like this, a fellow who was painfully shy and had a speech problem, who taught in a seminary in Nigeria for years. He never married. Maybe my father was his only friend. He hung around our house whenever he was back in the States. He was a powerful influence on me to consider missions. He was supported by the church as an organization; he could never have raised support the way most evangelical missionaries have to.

 

[Toasty]

Though the Gospel condemns aspects of every culture that it encounters, there are also points of contact and open windows of understanding by which local believers can work from the known to the unknown in order to facilitate communication and receptivity and use bridges of understanding when teaching the Gospel, rather than beating one’s head against closed doors due to a lack of properly contextualizing the unchanging Word of God into variable human cultures.

Could anyone here give some examples of points of contact and open windows of understanding?

 

[Leslie]

Don Richardson has a book, Eternity in Their Hearts, a collection of short stories about how the oral traditions of various tribal groups prepared them to receive the gospel. In the case of the local group where we live and work, there was a pre-evangelist who urged people to not sacrifice to evil spirits. He told them there is one creator God. They were to take honey-water (their usual daily drink), and sacrifice to Him by dipping their fingers in, and flicking it up to the sky. It was a point of contact for the first missionaries who arrived here about 1929.

 

[Edward]

What do you mean by this? The nicer suburbs of Dallas are just as legitimate a target for evangelization as the Muslim world itself? I really hope you are not advocating this.

I do think that Muslims in the Metroplex are just as legitimate a target as the Muslims in north Africa or Asia. While there is nothing as impressive as the new Mosque in Colonge, there are a number of nice, new facilities. There are at least 3 Muslim worship centers (two mosques, one Jamatkhana ) closer to me than than the nearest PCA church. The neighboring town has an Iranian Muslim city councilman. The governor even came up for the dedication of the Ismaili center - they are not a political force to be ignored in North Texas. Burkinis are not an unusual sight at public pools and gyms around town, at least in the nicer areas. We've even had our own terror attempt a couple of miles down the street. http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/201...nvestigate-injured-man-natural-gas-leak.html/

 

[Pergamum]

Pergie, regarding people who have never had ministry at home, many times these folk do much better overseas. Some people just don't have social skills. Or they have something like a speech impediment, or painful shyness, or a hyperactive child that precludes active deputation. People like this, many times, have extra longevity overseas; they regard avoiding Stateside culture as a big advantage. My father had a friend like this, a fellow who was painfully shy and had a speech problem, who taught in a seminary in Nigeria for years. He never married. Maybe my father was his only friend. He hung around our house whenever he was back in the States. He was a powerful influence on me to consider missions. He was supported by the church as an organization; he could never have raised support the way most evangelical missionaries have to.

Yes, Mary, I think you are right. I have seen some who are the same way. Hmmmm... now, I am trying to reconcile my theoretical belief now that one should show aptitude and fruit in ministry Stateside before being sent overseas, yet what you observe is true and some folks who are a poor fit in the US do great in a foreign context. I was just talking to a guest here yesterday about how I am afraid that I wouldn't fit into a western ministry but seem to fit in okay here.

I need to think about this more....

 

[Pergamum]

What do you mean by this? The nicer suburbs of Dallas are just as legitimate a target for evangelization as the Muslim world itself? I really hope you are not advocating this.

I do think that Muslims in the Metroplex are just as legitimate a target as the Muslims in north Africa or Asia. While there is nothing as impressive as the new Mosque in Colonge, there are a number of nice, new facilities. There are at least 3 Muslim worship centers (two mosques, one Jamatkhana ) closer to me than than the nearest PCA church. The neighboring town has an Iranian Muslim city councilman. The governor even came up for the dedication of the Ismaili center - they are not a political force to be ignored in North Texas. Burkinis are not an unusual sight at public pools and gyms around town, at least in the nicer areas. We've even had our own terror attempt a couple of miles down the street. http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/201...nvestigate-injured-man-natural-gas-leak.html/

Edward,

Can you define your phrase, "Just as legitimate a target" for me?

Every soul is of infinite worth. But, some nonbelievers are surrounded by access to the Gospel whereas other whole towns, cities, people-groups do not have access to the Gospel. Viewed through the lens of prioritizing those with the least access to the Gospel and the least number of believers, there are some targets of evangelization that should be prioritized higher than others by missionaries trained to cross cultures. Dallas is a low priority for sending cross-cultural missionaries whereas the Middle East would rate higher.

 

[Leslie]

True, Pergie. Given that God has chosen some of even the most resistant ethnic groups to eternal life, we need to spread out. When one of these is ready to seek, it's important that someone should be there for him/her, to show the way into the kingdom. In this regard media ministries are crucial. There are so many areas of the world where it would be suicidal to even attempt to go there to evangelize. But people have radios. I'm aware of a large group of M background believers who were entirely evangelized and discipled for about 2 years before having any contact whatsoever with any Christians. It was all by radio.