To the Ends of the Earth, Just Not to the Wrong Side of Town

This is part of a series about what I call “evangelical safety culture.” To catch up you can read part 1 here.

If you grew up on a steady diet of inspirational-devotional biographies, the point was pretty clear. Committing one’s life to international missions was a radical choice. Almost any other vocation one could pursue as an expression of their faith was noble at best, lukewarm at worst. But a career in missions was something one was called to, something one announced, trained for, sacrificed for.

I made this radical choice at 14 years old, and as I waded into the world of missions I soon discovered that the water got a whole lot deeper.

While a commitment to missions was indeed radical, I learned that the relative radicalness of one’s commitment was measured by how far they were willing to travel--geographically, culturally, and linguistically--outside of their comfort zone. The harder places were holier. A commitment to serve the unreached placed one solidly in the group of those most radically committed to hastening the Lord’s return.¹

Also, a career in missions (as it has been practiced in recent history) is a pricy endeavor, and the closer to home one’s mission field happened to be, the more difficult it would be to convince other Christians to offer their “support.” Support raising and partnership building are, at their core, marketing activities.

In my brief missionary career I raised support for three different short-term trips. Every time it was a slog. I wrote, folded, and mailed dozens of letters, sent hundreds of emails, and always it seemed to come down to the last few days before departure. Would I meet my goal? Or would my parents have to cover the difference so I could still jet off to “preach the gospel” in a country where I understood neither the language nor the culture? I would ask prospective donors to consider the “leading of the Spirit”, but I also knew (subconsciously) that I had to sell what I was doing. I knew that if I could paint my destination and work as exotic it would become more desirable and thus result in the investment I needed.

But for those who do not make a commitment to take the gospel to the ends of earth, the concerns of radicalism strangely disappear. In one’s own locale resisting discomfort is not required. On the contrary, keeping one’s family as safe and comfortable as possible might be the mark of the most mature Christians on the home front.

Instead of seminars and strategies for selling your radical commitment to the gospel, we are sold books and music and films and TV shows and degrees at institutions of higher education and curriculums to home educate our children that will keep us safe from the big bad world. And we are told that buying and consuming all these things make us just the right amount of radical, too.

Instead of deciding whether to serve in the jungles of Ecuador and the souks of Saudi Arabia we’re considering crime statistics in suburban neighborhoods and looking for a backyard large enough for our kids to play in as we search for a new home. And we believe that these comforts are key to raising the kind of Christian family that is the foundation of a godly nation.

In the same week we sign up for our church’s short-term mission trip to Mexico and scoff at the Central American families seeking asylum at our Southern border, incensed that our politicians are not doing more to keep us safe. And we rarely consider that perhaps this disintegrated identity we have been peddled is not a reflection of faithful Christian discipleship.

We have found a way to have our cake and eat it, too. And it is making us very, very sick.

Beauty in Collaboration
I’m sorry to leave us on a pessimistic note. I promise we’ll explore more hopeful solutions to these challenges in the coming weeks. In fact, next week I am honored to share with you Beautiful Discipleship’s first guest post.

Chris Wheeler

is a fellow alumni of Moody Bible Institute (we overlapped, but didn’t connect at the time) and will be writing about faithful ways to engage politics in this election year.

Beauty in Chaos
Okay, chaos might be too strong a word, but it feels accurate at certain moments. We’re packing our apartment into a storage unit by the end of this month so that we can spend part of the summer in Germany with family. When we return we’ll look for a new place closer to our church. The next three months will be a whirlwind, but a mostly lovely one.

In pursuit of Beauty,

1. The focus on Unreached People Groups and the 10/40 window in the last 50 years of missiology is based largely on an interpretation of Matthew 24:14 that says Jesus cannot return until every individually distinguishable people group has heard the gospel.