Every Church A Mission Team

At a mission conference a few years ago, I attended a small session led by a highly creative and strategic-minded woman.  She was leading a seminar on mission strategies to reach the unreached cities and peoples of Asia.  She proposed a simple but powerful idea:  what if churches became strategy coordinators for this?

I was greatly stirred by this proposal.  Up until this point it had never occurred to me that a local church could play such a vital role in world missions.  I could see how this might work, and work so much better than the typical models of church involvement, where the church contributes very little at the strategic level.

After the session, I spent a significant amount of time with her discussing the details of what such an approach might look like in a local church and how to get it done.  I attended a couple more of her consultations.  And then as a church we set out to strategically engage an unreached people.  How freeing and revitalizing for ministry and mission it has been to be both a sodality and a modality!

The Split

Many Christians are not familiar with the terms “sodality” and “modality,” or understand their meaning, but ever since they were introduced in 1974 by Ralph Winter, the relationship of local churches to the world mission have changed.  Churches have come to accept the position of being a modality, focusing primarily on their local ministry, while giving up their leadership role and responsibility in world mission to the sodalities, that is to agencies, to operate independently, while only utilizing the churches. (n1)

We should be suspicious of this two-tiered structural analysis of the Church in its splitting the Church and local congregations from their primary responsibility in missions and evangelism.  Instead of empowering the Church, this new paradigm has inappropriately shifted power to the para-churches by legitimizing them as another form of church. (n2)

The Splice

What if we could mobilize complete congregations in world evangelization and strategic church planting, especially among the unengaged unreached?  Might the results end up being healthier and more effective churches, both here and abroad?

What if agencies even made it their goal to serve local churches in helping them take the lead in world mission and get the job done?  Might it be more helpful to re-think the meaning of para-church, or even use a new term like dia-church, that is “through the church?”
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¹ Eckhard J. Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, rev. ed. (Downers Grove:  IVP, 2004), vol. 2, 1578-1579.  See also David J. Hesselgrave, Planting Churches Cross-Culturally, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids:  Baker, 2000).

² Bruce K. Camp, “A Theological Examination of the Two-Structure Theory,” Missiology 23:2 (1995), 197-209.