Books and Missions

Welcome to Episode 86 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will be talking about my favorite topic: foreign missions. Let me tell you a secret about myself: whatever else you thought I was, I am first and foremost a missionary at heart; I want to see foreign cultures evangelized for Christ, and I want to see true message and true challenge to all the cultures to submit to Christ. Now, contrary to what most Christians say today, I don’t think everyone should be a missionary – at least not in the traditional sense. Christendom needs more than just make everyone a missionary, and the more it grows, the more it will require a division of labor. It needs financial experts, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, etc. In a sense, of course, all these are part of the greater mission task of the church, because they all speak of the superiority of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and we will have a future episode of Axe to the Root that will speak to the fact that evangelism is much more than simply preaching and trying to attract people’s attention with psychological methods. But even then, the task of bringing the truth of the Word to other cultures is still a very specific task, and there are people called to it, and they should be particularly trained to do it. Evangelist, after all, is a special ministry in the New Testament (Eph. 4:11), and I also believe that the ministry mentioned as “apostles,” is actually what we call today “missionaries.” The modern church has surrounded the word “apostle” with an almost mythical and magical meaning, to mean some superheroes of the early church who can’t be seen around today, but that is an ideology only adopted in the last century and a half. For most of its history, the church simply called its missionaries “apostles,” and no one saw any problem with it: Patrick, Apostle to Ireland, the Twelve Apostles to Ireland, Boniface, Apostle to the Germans, Cyril and Methodius, Apostles to the Slavs, John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians, John Knox, Prophet and Apostle of Scotland, etc. So, the biblical ministry of apostles is simply missionaries, and the word “missionary” was first used to replace “apostle” by Jesuits in the 16th century with the purpose to establish “apostle” as a very special post or office in the church which ceased in the 1st century. Modern Protestants and especially cessationists have just adopted the Jesuit use of the word. Either way, my purpose here is not to insist on the restoration of the Biblical word “apostle”; and, indeed, “apostle” and “missionary” mean the same thing anyway, one in Greek, the other in Latin. My point is that even in the Bible, a missionary still has to be a person with a special kind of ministry, someone who is first called before he is “sent” (which is the meaning of “missionary”). Anyway, for the practical purposes of our topic today, it doesn’t really matter whether you insist on the modern word “missionary” or want the original Biblical word in Greek, “apostle.” My point was that while every single Christian is a missionary of a sort, bringing the Kingdom of God to his area of work and social activity, still, there are people who have a special gift and call of being missionaries.

Over the last three years, since I started this Axe to the Root podcast, I have used it to advertise the mission organization I started almost 20 years ago, Bulgarian Reformation Ministries. As a matter of fact, I have been on the mission field for much longer, 26 years, and BRM is simply an US-based non-profit representative of what we have been doing in Bulgaria for 26 years. Since I started advertizing BRM here, a number of listeners have been asking me questions about the nature of our mission. And since I have made claims that our mission is very different from what modern missions are, I have been asked the question, “How is it different?”, multiple times. Different reasons for asking the question: most people want to know what makes it different because they donate to missions and they want to make sure they understand what they need to be looking for in a mission; a few because they are called to go to the mission field and they want to know of successful models to mimic and implement – and our model has been quite successful. Believe it or not, there were a few individuals who wanted to understand my mission methods because they believed they could be replicated in either politics or business; and it may as well be the case, given that the same Biblical principles should apply to every area. So, this episode is a partial response to at least one of the questions I have been asked. Not to all of them, to be sure, because it will take more than just one episode to do it. Only one question, which has been asked many times: “Why books?” I have been quite insistent that a true mission must be more focused on books than on planting churches. Or even on “making disciples.” In fact, I even believe that putting books on the market is a better tool of making disciples than planting a church and having people gather once a week or even three times a week. (Actually, to be precise, I don’t believe in the hype of “discipleship” semantics as a special way of training people. But that I will leave to a future episode. For now, let’s focus on the question, “Why books?”)

You know how modern missions work, for the most part. About 15 to 20 years ago, the International Mission Board did a survey on the amount of money the world’s churches donate to foreign missions every year. The total was about $2.8 billion. The lion’s share of it, as is to be expected, fell on the shoulders – and the purses – of US Christians: $2.5 billion. The other big supporters of foreign missions were the UK and South Korea. So, let’s acknowledge the truth: American Christians are not stingy when it comes to foreign missions: they contribute between 80% and 90% of all the support for them. Translated in gold at current prices, $2.5 billion is 60 tons of gold every year, for foreign missions. That’s probably as much as the whole church paid for missions between AD 30 and 1900. And we today pay as much every year. No matter how critical we can be of the American church, this is something worth celebrating and praising.

There’s a “but,” though. And that “but” is in the fact that while American Christians are so generous when it comes to foreign missions, they are just as gullible as to how that money is spent. Suffice to say, there is next to zero control and accountability when it comes to missions. And the results are obvious: just look at the world today and tell me, how much impact have our missions had? Have we changed the world to the better? Where are the christianized nations as the result of our money that we have spent? Where are the cultures that converted from paganism to Christianity as the result of the money we have spent? Missionaries in the past went out and converted whole nations. Where is this today? Why are we spending that much money if there is no visible result? In an early episode of Axe to the Root titled, “Denethor Ministries,” I asked the same question about donating money to our domestic ministries: Why are we spending so much money on them if the results are negative? We could have spent the money on booze and have better results. And the same applies to the mission field.

Every time I look at modern missions and the way they are done, I think of Waylon Jennings’s song, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” No, I am not a big fan of country music, but I have a friend who deserves to be mentioned here, Joe Driscoll, who believes that Waylon is the greatest country singer ever. And since I trust Joe, I decided to hear some of Waylon’s songs. And Joe was right. So I am a Waylon’s fan now. But I digress. So you probably know the song:

Lord it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar

Where do we take it from here?

Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars

It’s been the same way for years

We need a change

So, yeah, that’s how I feel about missions when I watch modern missionaries work on the mission field. Especially modern Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries, but many others as well. Charismatics, for the most part, are a bit better, but only by a bit. For the last 60 or 70 years, a certain model has been established for missions: large bureaucratic mission organizations associated with this or that large denomination in the US, dispensing endorsements for candidates for missionaries to go visit churches of those denominations, taking certain percentage of the donations, and then, after the missionary goes to the mission field, they are closely monitored and controlled to follow the policies – and the politics – of their mission organization. Of course, the endorsement is only given after the missionary has spent a good amount of money on seminary education, which is not cheap (getting a seminary education may be more expensive than getting an advanced engineering degree at an elite university). So the missionary is pretty much chained to obey the rules, otherwise, without an endorsement and the money that comes with it, he may have trouble paying his student debts. Which is OK, though, because if he follows the rules, the money is not small; and I have seen missions where dozens of missionaries “serve” in a country, living in mansions for $1,500 a month, while the local population survives on $150 a month. So I am looking at this gigantic scheme and I am thinking, “Are y’all sure Paul done it this way?”

Don’t get