Success Through Failure
Posted by C. Holland on Nov 13, 2008In a previous post, I mentioned what happens when missionaries leave on bad terms. Specific to that post was the negativity that the missionary takes on when leaving their mission field, especially when it’s earlier than expected. Evidently, this post over at Money Missions reflects a similar observation, especially about the accompanying guilt missionaries feel for leaving.
To me, being a missionary is really just about being in ministry, albeit with some different parameters but essentially the same expected result: to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ and (hopefully) bring new people into a life-changing relationship with God. Other than the fact that a missionary may be using a foreign language or living in dramatically different circumstances than which they were raised, I don’t see the difference between us and a pastor in the States. Well, except that a much smaller percentage of American pastors would need to raise all of their own funding to serve, but fundraising for native pastors is the case in other parts of the world.
I said it in the previous post, and I’ll state it again: people don’t seem to have the same response to a pastor uprooting his family to move across his native country and serve in or start a new church. Moving to different parts of the States can be just as culturally different, and many church leaders make difficult sacrifices every day; why is the sacrifice of the Missionary any different than any other church leader, or any other self-sacrificing Christian, for that matter?
However, I don’t think every missionary has been called to serve in their mission field for the rest of their life, even if they may have originally thought otherwise. I believe there are three reasons this comes up so frequently:
1) Expectations by Fellow Christians
Perhaps it’s the exalted status of missionary in some circles that lends itself to expectations of lifelong mission service. Or maybe it’s the well-intentioned goals promised early in the mission that never materialised. And it could be the overuse of “God’s leading me to change…” that makes some Christians suspect that the missionary isn’t being honest about motives. But I really think it’s a misunderstanding of the concept of Seasons in Ministry that hang everyone up.
Some will be called to serve an amazing amount of time, but I’ve heard so many stories of fruit coming from a season of ministry, whether in a foreign mission field or not. It may not be a lot of fruit, but it can mean another soul going to heaven. Why do we think ministries/groups/functions must last forever? It leads to point #2…
2) Secular Norms
In our day-to-day dealings, we admire people who have lived in the same house all their adult life, worked at the same job for decades, and basically stuck to the same stuff for years and years. The American credit system rewards you for longevity in these things, essentially saying that you’re trustworthy. We’ve been acculturated that someone who changes direction is potentially dangerous, unreliable, or not serious about work. You can find truth in this in some extreme cases, but we aren’t taught in society to consider the risk-taker as a good thing. And change scares us. Any change, even if it ultimately leads to a better situation.
3) Spiritual Warfare
Seriously, if Satan can convince you that you’ve “failed” in your mission field, it makes the job easier to also convince you that you’ll be useless returning back to your homeland. Of course, God may want you to step out of ministry for a time, but He uses all of our experiences for good. It’s a perception issue that change equals failure; it can’t if God is really leading you to the next step.
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