Reformed Missionaries

When I was at seminary every year, all the time, they had missions focus. The first thing that everyone would tell you is that the country they were a missionary in was beautiful. The people were beautiful, they were serving God, God was moving. They would always show you how exotic their country was and how much cool stuff you could do there. It always seemed to me that it was an emotional appeal, kinda like the Navy used to advertise, "See the world. Join the Navy." One of my friends was a missions recruiter and I called him out about this one time. I asked him, "how come we are made to feel guilty if we don't go to the mission field?" My friend was very apologetic about this approach but he would also say, what do you expect? This is true, almost every missionary I've known (except for one if you count internet friends) have been extremely emotional about missions. In fact, these people haven't known their theology, all they want to tell people is that, "Jesus loves you." I'll get back to this later, but first I want to mention another point of contention I raised with my friend. I asked him, how come most people treat mission trips, or being a missionary as an extended vacation. It also seemed like a lot of people that did missions, did so because they didn't know what else to do. My friend also responded to this, very gracefully I might add, that they did have counseling sessions with people before they left and told them about the hardships that they would face in the field. Yet, many people go overseas without truly being called by God - my friend was upfront about this. This is why I suppose it's difficult to become a full-time missionary.

Back to theology. It's great to tell people that Jesus loves them, people need to know that, but there's a slight problem with this. Why is it important for people to know that Jesus loves them? Who is Jesus? He's the Son of God, what does this mean? Why did God send Jesus to die on the cross - Jesus died for my sins. Well if God is all-powerful, why couldn't He forgive us without sending His son to die on the cross? God had to punish somebody so He put Jesus in your place? Yeah, but just because I lie doesn't mean that I should be put to death - right? Even then, God can forgive me for lying, so what kind of God would kill His own Son? God must not be very powerful if He couldn't forgive us without killing His own Son. Now I realize that many people don't follow this line of thinking, though when I was in Vancouver for a intership as a church planter, this is the attitude that I was met with. Canada is different from many places that missionaries visit, yet, missionaries need to know their theology. How can you tell people about God if you don't know who God is? I realize that none of us will ever fully understand who God is - that's besides the point - we need to do the best we can to explain who God is if we are to present the gospel to people. If we tell someone in England to come down and get saved she would have no idea what we are talking about. It's difficult to speak another language than Christianese if you don't understand the gospel yourself.

I have more to say about how the Southern Baptist Convention does missions but I'll save it for later...

What I really wanted to say is that I praise God for reformed missionaries who have an idea about what they believe and have a biblical theology. I truly sleep better at night because of this - honestly.