If I could, I would make every church in America give their mission work (if they’re doing mission work) a second thought. Many churches have no business touching missions work or evangelism with a ten foot pole.
Huh? Churches shouldn’t be doing evangelism? Is this guy against the Gospel or what?
No, actually, I’m very much for the Gospel. I’m so much for the Gospel, that I think we should actually be giving it to people.
In short, we export what we produce. When a seminary, like my own local seminary, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is practically touching the property of a church waving a pride flag, but they make students pay thousands of dollars to go on vacations disguised as mission trips to Turkey, there’s a serious problem.
There are people who need the Gospel in Turkey. But there are also people who need the Gospel right next door to you. Is it a good and godly use of resources to spend thousands of dollars to go on a trip for a week to a foreign country where you don’t even speak the language, to not even share the Gospel in any substantive way with anyone?
This really happens. As someone who’s been on these kinds of mission trips too many times, and spoken with many more people who’ve had the misfortune of being deceived into thinking their $4000 (mostly spent on plane tickets, lodging, and shopping) is actually doing good for the Kingdom of God, I can guarantee to you that this is the majority of “missions” that churches participate in today.
And the fact that this even has a chance of offending anyone calling themselves a Christian shows how deep we’re stuck in the mud in our nation. We’re stuck so deep that we need to be evangelized out of it. Right here where we are.
If our national theology is so bad that we believe we’re totally fine, but those poor people overseas aren’t, the we don’t have our eyes open, and shouldn’t be spreading our twisted up theology to anyone else anyway.
Here’s an episode of Spare no Arrows you can check out related to this subject:
