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The shortest path between two points is not a straight line, as conventional wisdom says, but a wrinkle. Think paper napkin, slightly crumpled.
It’s a metaphor a leading Christian missions agency leader used to describe the rapid multiplication methods needed to reach the last frontier of unevangelized people groups, as related by M. David Sills in his book “Reaching and Teaching: A Call to Great Commission Obedience.”
Sills is professor of Christian missions and cultural anthropology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a veteran missionary who served the SBC International Mission Board in Ecuador as a church planter and educator.
Sills’ book critiques such “need for speed” (thus the wrinkle) in what he views as a well-meaning but flawed missiology that is eschatologically dubious.
He argues for a full-orbed Great Commission missiology rooted in Matthew 28:18-20 to make disciples worldwide, baptizing them and teaching them all of Christ’s commands?a complex task as varied in difficulty and duration as the many cultures missionaries engage.
History and experience have shown, Sills writes, that a lack of adequate discipleship (teaching) by theologically grounded missionaries often leads to nominalism, syncretism or an outright return to paganism. He rightly lauds the urgency of gospel proclamation, but laments a trend toward quick-strike missions that leaves too much of the work to native peoples before, he contends, they are properly equipped.
Sills’ book is welcomed and overdue if the prevailing missionary culture is how he describes it, with long-held missiological tenets that involved years of plowing the proverbial hard soil supplanted by methods to “reach” (meaning 2 percent evangelized) every known people as quickly as possible so that Jesus may come back.
In perhaps the most important chapter, “Search versus Harvest Theology: Reaching or Teaching?” Sills argues that a biblical missiology doesn’t divide between “search” missions (preaching Christ to the unreached peoples) and “harvest” missions (harvesting among responsive people).
He writes: “It is a mistake to view harvest and search theologies as incompatible or mutually exclusive positions. God has called and equipped some missionaries to take the gospel to unreached, unengaged areas of the world, while He has called others to disciple, teach, organize disciples into churches, and establish schools and support ministries.”
Throughout the book, Sills mentions the IMB at various points, but never directly addresses the board’s strategies, preferring instead to speak in general terms about trends in evangelical missions culture. The reader is left to wonder if the IMB is partly in view in his critiques, but it seems apparent it is.
Sills summarizes how, beginning in the 1970s with a desire to identify unreached peoples, some mission groups began moving toward a greater emphasis on these “hidden peoples,” eventually leading to a formula for deciding which groups were “reached” or “unreached” based on whether or not 2 percent of the people were identified as evangelical.
The 2 percent figure was intended as an arbitrary marker for statistical purposes, Sills writes, and a much lower percentage than the business model from which it was borrowed that said if 20 percent of a culture adopted an idea, they had a sufficient base to propagate that idea. But some mission agencies took the 2 percent figure and adopted it as a benchmark for a strategy of engaging the unreached people groups.
“In most missions circles, it has become a ‘fact’ as widely accepted as the laws of physics that when a people group’s population is 2 percent evangelical, the missionaries can pass over them because they are considered reached,” Sills wrote.
ESCHATOLOGY & THE MISSION
In addition to repeated references to Matthew 28:18-20 and 2 Timothy 2:2 (Paul’s mandate to Timothy to train faithful men to teach others), Sills also interacts with the context of Matthew 24:14, which he says has become “the driving force of the missionary task” for many organizations.
The passage?”And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come”?is part of a discourse in which Jesus is urging his disciples to be patient and endure the coming afflictions in their time, not a strategy “to speed up the kingdom,” Sills argues.
“[Some mission agencies] further believe that Jesus cannot come back until we have finished this task,” he writes.
It is debated among conservative scholars, Sills writes, about whether Jesus is speaking of the end of the world or the end of the Jewish state and Jerusalem in the first century, noting Jerusalem’s destruction in A.D. 70. He adds that the Greek word used in the passage for “whole world” is oikoumene, which was also used in the New Testament by Paul to describe the world of the Roman Empire.
Sills asks, if such interpretations are correct that Jesus was speaking of the end of time, then what is considered “the gospel of the kingdom?” How may we determine if it has been thoroughly preached? And was Jesus promising to return immediately after the task was finished?
“Given the doctrinally unsound state of the church around the world where the need for speed has led missionaries to preach a simple gospel message through an interpreter, get a show of hands, call them a church, and move on, we should shudder to consider what the church would be like at the end of such a missions strategy,” he adds.
“What would become of the church should Jesus delay His return for fifty years? Or, five hundred years? How many heresies would creep into an untaught church?”
Sills goes on to address other relevant subjects such as church planting movements (CPMs), championed largely by the IMB, the need to re-emphasize theological training, and the challenges of reaching a world of 70 percent oral, mostly pre-literate peoples.
In addressing church planting movements, Southern Baptists will be encouraged to read that the IMB has written that “no rapid reproduction of churches can be contrived or manipulated by human ingenuity or programming. An explosive eruption of legitimate churches is the work of the Holy Spirit; but often takes years of patient planting until a rich harvest is reaped.”
Sills’ discussion of ecclesiology (“Your ecclesiology will drive your missiology”) is also helpful; he contrasts the New Testament requirements against tempting definitions of church that may pad numbers and affirm missionaries.
The book carries endorsements by SBC seminary presidents Daniel Akin of Southeastern and Al Mohler of Southern, as well as David Hesselgrave, professor emeritus of missions at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
