Mongolia & Missionary Myopia
Janice and I had the privilege of ministering in Mongolia over the weekend. The Church of God is just getting underway in that nation, and it was immensely exciting to be able to sit down with the pastors and discuss where they were going.
Mongolia itself is, of course, the homeland of Genghis Khan. This remarkable individual rose from being an outcast from a tiny tribe to become the ruler of the largest land empire the world has ever seen. Statues and references to Genghis (or Chingis, as the Mongolians more correctly call him) are all over the place. In fact the word ‘khan’ is still used in Mongolian to refer to a king – so Jesus is “the Khan of Khans”!
The capital city, Ulaan Baator, bears witness to the years of Soviet rule. Many buildings are crumbling, and the unbelievably harsh winters (minus 45 centigrade) and hot summers cause the roads to contract and expand producing huge potholes and uneven surfaces.
There are some Mongolians who are evidently prospering – we saw department stores where shirts are on sale for 80 or 90 dollars each – but many people still live in poverty. Many live in ‘Gers’ (traditional tents) and the homeless hide in manholes where at least some heat can be found in the steam that rises from the sewers. Those drunks who fail to find a manhole at night freeze to death – as do some of the dogs on the streets.
One of things that we found strangest was that every Mongolian car is also a taxi! You stand on the street and wave your hand at every private car you see, and almost immediately one will stop and take you where you’re going – even if you need to squeeze in with the driver’s family. There are no meters – everyone seems to know the approximate distance and cost between two points.
We thank God for the missionaries that have sacrificed so much to go to Mongolia – many of them from Korea. A few years ago there were only 4 known evangelical Christians in the entire nation, but now there are over 500 churches. Yet there are problems. In our missions efforts we often suffer from short-sightedness (the ‘myopia’ of my alliterative title) – even when we are operating from the very best of intentions.
The goal in every missionary effort should be to produce a strong national church that develops its own spiritual DNA. Such a church should aim to be self-governing, self-financing, and self-propagating (these ideas have been abused in China by the government calling its puppet church ‘the Three-Self Patriotic Movement’ – but the three principles remain vital and valid when used correctly). Good missiological practices help the national church towards this goal, but missionary myopia often hinders it.
When missionaries start work in virgin territory they frequently begin by planting churches, and this is very necessary when no churches exist. However, as soon as possible the church planting and pastoral tasks need to be handed over to indigenous workers. Otherwise the new churches will tend to reflect the missionary’s culture (eg American, British, Korean) rather than being an authentically Mongolian church. For example, in Mongolia many missionaries have taught that a pastor must be full-time, even if there are insufficient funds in the church to pay a pastor. The idea was taught that a pastor who supports himself in a secular job is not fully committed (strange that in a country where so many people live in tents that the missionaries forgot about an apostle who supported himself as a tent maker!). As a result many Mongolian pastors are unable to feed their families or heat their homes because they are afraid that they will be criticised as unspiritual if they support themselves by secular employment.
Another example of missionary myopia is when missionaries pay the wages of local pastors. At first this seems attractive. When I was first planting a church I would have loved it if someone offered to pay my salary for me! But this money then becomes a source of control. The local pastor has to do things the way the missionaries want, or else the funds stop. This has two devastating effects:
a) It stifles innovative local pastors who would otherwise discover their own national church’s DNA. Fear of losing their finances is a strong incentive to knuckle down and obey the foreign missionary’s agenda.
b) A dependency mentality is fostered, meaning that the local church takes much longer to reach, and perhaps never will reach, the goal of being self-financing.
So what is the answer? How can missionaries channel their sacrifices and commitment in a way that benefits the local churches in the long term?
Firstly, foreign missionaries should concentrate their efforts on that which will help the new field to achieve financial, governmental, and evangelistic strength. This means that missionaries should be effectively trying to work themselves out of a job!
Secondly, financial aid should be directed in a way that will build infrastructure, not in a way that encourages continuing dependence. One-off projects that equip the local church for the future are preferable to ongoing funding of programmes.
It was a privilege and an honour last Monday to sit with the Mongolian pastors and share these principles. I rejoice that the Church of God there is starting on a sound footing with men and women who are committed to the long-term development of the Kingdom of God ion their nation. It was exciting to see them wrestling with the idea of what a Mongolian Church’s spiritual DNA should look like. At the end of our meeting they pretty well forgot about me and Janice and started an animated discussion among themselves in Mongolian. They were discussing how they could help one another with their differing needs rather than just looking outside for help. Being left out of a conversation has never felt so good!
Janice and I left Mongolia with a deep sense of gratitude and respect for the leaders the Church of God has there, and for the wise way that they are being helped and envisioned by visionary and apostolic leaders in World Missions such as our friend Hong Yang.
The New Ireland 
Thought provoking. I am a ” tent maker” pastor here in Ireland and I must say even here there can be a similar view of lack of faith , lack of committement etc. The hardest thing though is that those who are already well funded and full-time attract the additional supports , the visiting teams and so on, leaving the “tent makers” under-resourced and overstretched.
Hi Paul, that is a very good point. Actually, I believe that cultural and financial changes taking place in both Europe and North America will result in more and more pastors being tent-makers rather than fulltime (I plan in a future blog post to explain this trend more fully). This is not necessarily a bad thing at all. There is, as you say, a tendency for larger churches/ministries to attract more attention, people and help (some of the teams that visit are very helpful, some not so!). This, while certainly not fair, appears to be a reality that we have to deal with. We need to explore ways in which larger and smaller churches can cooperate together more in genuine partnership.
It’s ironic that, just over the mountain in China, many of the same sentiments re encouraging indigenous autonomy were expressed by the Anglican Roland Allen in his work Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?.
And this was almost a century ago.
I think this should be required reading, esp. for Pentecostal churches (which actually advanced the agenda of getting indigenous churches “up to speed” faster than others).