From their earliest days, Baptists in the United States have had a love affair with missions — wanting people both domestic and overseas to hear the good news of reconciliation to Christ.
Bill Webb
|
Baptists celebrate missions, learn more about missions and lend financial support to missions during particular seasons like Easter and Christmas. These are our distinctive Christian holidays when Baptists seek to draw nearer to God and to better understand God’s will for their lives as his hands and feet in the world — his missionaries, so to speak.
Missions is not season-limited for believers, of course. Baptists use missionary prayer calendars to remember to pray for, learn about and support the cause of Christ daily.
They organize into men’s, women’s and children’s groups to do these things more passionately and more effectively.
Mission fervor is a mark of spiritual maturity. Through the years, Baptists of many persuasions as well as other Christians have discovered more and more innovative ways to extend Christian missions. In the wake of natural and man-made catastrophes, many Baptists use vacation time to man mobile feeding units, dig mud out of flooded homes, clear out debris from destroyed residences, chain saw blown-down trees and extend dozens of other forms of kindness.
No longer a summer activity, believers do these things year-round. Some religiously watch the news to better inform their prayers for suffering humanity; a lot of it appears daily on the news.
Summers are the times when we send our children and grandchildren out on mission trips with capable leaders. This is when they are free from school responsibilities. Christian young people find such experiences to be spiritually refreshing. Many repeat the experience at least annually. Many point to such experiences when they become spiritually mature and active adults. They learn the value of caring about what God cares about and putting that caring to life-changing use for the benefit of others.
Earlier on in the missionary enterprise, the work of missions was more limited to vocational missionaries. After all, they were specifically trained and their lives carefully scrutinized before they were commissioned as missionaries, with the expectation that they were either expected to fulfill that call until death perhaps, or at least until an agreed-upon retirement age.
For overseas missionaries in the earlier days, stateside visits were something of a rarity because they could be time-consuming, expensive and dangerous. In time, furloughs were not only granted but encouraged, especially as modes of travel improved in convenience and safely.
Distant mission trips by the laity were discouraged. Mission fields could be dangerous.
And mission-sending agencies didn’t feel that missionaries should detract from their field ministries to orient, train or babysit mission teams. Some were concerned that such teams might inadvertently undo gains made by field missionaries.
The concern about short-term or amateur missionaries taking on field assignments changed over time. Laymen could afford to travel to many of these places — either across the country or around the world — for personal vacations. It did not make sense to them that they could not pay their own expenses and go to such places to render Christian service.
These days, lay Christians not only give to support professional missionaries but they go just about everywhere, including places that carry some risk for the travelers. Most Baptists can name some missionary martyrs we have learned about, both generations ago and more recently. Mission teams work hard to help ensure the safety of their travelers and to try to avoid places in this world where unrest is a consistent reality.
We prepare better these days. We don’t just gather a group on the spur of the moment and run off to do missions or engage in a specific mission project. We travel prudently and with the best advance information we can get. Whether we are going to a Native American reservation in our own country or to somewhere else in the world, we learn something about the culture ahead of time. We do not want to even unknowingly offend people or cause them alarm in the name of Christ. Christian maturity requires that we be sensitive to their sensitivities.
Sometimes we even learn a new language before we engage in direct missions. Most Americans do not, so the effort to try to speak in another’s birth — or heart — language tends to be deeply appreciated. Like the American Baptist mission team featured on page 7 of our print edition, we sometimes find opportunities to put our values to the test in ways we might not have imagined, such as standing with another religious group in support of its religious freedom.
That’s the other thing about participating directly in missions — we never know what form mission opportunities will take once we make the commitment. That’s one reason we encourage families and other supporters to keep praying for us and for those we do our best to serve.
Bill Webb is editor of Word&Way.
