We were newly appointed missionaries who hadn’t left for the field yet, and our paths crossed with some other workers who spoke about a previous overseas experience. They had been ministering alongside a veteran missionary who’d been there for decades. “But he wasn’t very effective,” they said. “He’d been there for nearly thirty years and didn’t have a single convert! He clearly didn’t know what he was doing.”
In the moment, I didn’t know how to respond. On the one hand, I was shocked and outraged that these people would judge someone for an apparent lack of obvious fruit in his ministry. On the other hand, I was suddenly and worriedly faced with the question, “Will someone say that of us someday?”
I suppose it’s entirely possible that this poor fellow, whoever he was, was an altogether ineffective missionary. There are plenty of people who are ill-suited to the task of living and ministering cross-culturally, and perhaps this guy was one of them.
But the context of the conversation made it clear there was a direct connection being made between his many years of service and his overall lack of success. No converts = bad missionary.
This conclusion demands a question of us all: How do we measure success as missionaries?
That’s a broad question, so let me ask another, narrower question: Is one missionary’s success more worthy of celebration than another?
Even narrower still: Are there tiers in ministry work? Is the work of an evangelist more important than the work of an educator? Is a Bible translator given special honor over and above someone doing Farming God’s Way?
It’s important to ask these questions because they help inform and shape our understanding of the Great Commission, as well as our understanding of how we view each other’s ministry work.
As someone who is primarily in the ministry of discipleship, the number of times I’ve led someone to belief in Jesus is low. The number of times I’ve helped someone grow deeper in their knowledge of and love for Jesus is extremely high, however. That line of work is how God has gifted me and called me. Would I pass the “conversion statistics” test? Probably not. But am I glorifying God by doing what He’s invited me to do? I sure hope so.
While I readily admit that it’s possible the veteran missionary in the story was actually ineffective, I imagine it’s more likely that he was wrongly accused of being so. If that’s the case, it’s worth exploring why such people are deemed ineffective, and why we really need people like that in missions.
It all comes back to being members of the Body of Christ. As Paul said, “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Romans 12:4-5).
Put another way: “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow” (1 Corinthians 3:6).
This means that someone in one area of ministry might be more likely to actually lead people to conversion, while others are more likely to lead up to that point or disciple people after that point.
Being able to record a large number on your missions report card for the number of conversions you’ve overseen is all well and good (truly, so good!) but it should never detract from all the other work done in an effort to bear fruit for God’s kingdom.
Later, after I had time to consider the critical assessment of the veteran missionary’s years of service, I hoped that he really did lead some people to Christ, whether anyone else knew it or not (including himself). It reminded me of two people who, years after the fact, told my husband that he was instrumental in helping them come to Christ.
As it turns out, he had planted a seed, or maybe watered it, and then God made it grow. My husband didn’t know they’d become followers of Jesus, and he still wouldn’t know to this day if it weren’t for these people choosing to reach out and tell him so. Maybe that’s the story of the veteran missionary too.
But even if it’s not, even if the missionary truly didn’t lead anyone to Christ in all those years on the mission field, does that mean he had no idea what he was doing? Does that mean his ministry was ineffective, useless, or dishonoring to God somehow?
Is an “ineffective” ministry completely fruitless?
Even if no one made a confession of faith as a direct result of this man’s ministry, we cannot and should not discount the soil he tilled, the seeds he planted, or the plants he watered (not to mention the fruit born within himself, as we hopefully can all attest to as ministers of the Gospel).
If we minimize this important work, we minimize the entire fruit-bearing process.
If we mistakenly assume that some parts of the process are more essential than others, the entire process is undermined. If we erroneously think that some aspects of mission work are more worthy than others, we’ve established an unholy tier system that has no place in the kingdom of God.
I’m reminded of the specialty “tiers” in the medical world, which became obvious to us leading up to my husband’s Match Day – the single most important day for any medical student, in which every fourth-year student is matched to a residency program for the next several years of their life. Match Day determines not only where you will go for your next season of training, but what specialty you will train in (internal medicine, pediatrics, neurosurgery, radiology, etc.).
For months before Match Day, there were ongoing discussions among my husband and his classmates about what specialties everyone hoped for. Everyone can choose their own specialty but must match to a residency program in order to actually train in that specialty.
Within the medical culture, specialties are unofficially placed in a tier system based on a variety of factors, namely the number of years you need to spend doing further training, the number of hours you’ll typically have to work once you’re a board-certified specialist, and your future expected salary.
My husband, who chose to pursue family medicine, was admonished more than once by fellow healthcare workers for choosing a specialty that “doesn’t pay much.” Family medicine is a low-tier specialty. You train for the least amount of time (only a three-year residency, which doesn’t scream prestige) and receive relatively low pay as far as doctors go.
Conversely, anyone hoping to become a pediatric heart surgeon will typically undergo a five-year general surgery residency followed by another three years in fellowship training. It makes my husband’s three-year family medicine residency pale in comparison. Such an extremely-specialized doctor will also undoubtedly receive a very nice paycheck.
Despite the stereotypes, the question must be asked: are some doctors more important by virtue of being more specialized?
Is my husband’s medical care less necessary because he’s never taken out an appendix or cured cataracts?
I would answer emphatically: no.
We need all medical specialties to cover the vast medical needs of the human body. When you don’t have access to all the specialties (as we certainly don’t at our rural mission hospital), you become acutely aware of how diverse and complex the human body is and how broad the gaps in medical care really are when certain specialties are MIA.
Again: “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”
We need missionaries whose ministries convert people in droves, and we need people who faithfully till the soil even if they don’t see a single baptism after a lifetime on the field. Both are needed and both should be valued as doing essential kingdom work. Just like an internal medicine doctor consults with a general surgeon about a patient needing surgery, then the surgeon puts the patient back into the hands of a family medicine doctor for post-op care, each part of the Body relies on each other to get the job done.
If we recognize and value all those who labor for the Gospel, then we can see the big picture of what God is doing. God is a God who works over time, a God who writes stories that most of us will only ever see a sliver of.
Believing that God is on the move even when there is little if any obvious fruit in our ministries is why we can remember someone like David Livingstone, often considered one of the greatest missionaries of his day, as a paragon when he only had one convert who eventually backslid.
Grouping missionary work into tiers and/or assuming that success is gauged primarily by outward achievements exposes a lack of patience with God’s process and a narrow perspective of His kingdom.
Missionaries in all manner of ministries around the world are bringing Jesus to the world. Praise God! We need the ways of Jesus practiced and proclaimed around the world, through word and deed, and we should encourage and help each other along as we co-labor toward that end.
I’ve ministered cross-culturally for nine years and I’m not sure anyone has chosen to believe in Jesus as a direct result of my ministry. By all accounts, I’m a fairly “ineffective” missionary if the standard being used is how flashy or report-card-worthy my ministry is. But I like to think I’m in good company, both with others who’ve gone before me and with those who are faithfully ministering in this day and age.
Regardless of how many people I lead to Christ through my ministry, I hope others will be able to look at my years of service on the mission field and declare, “She obeyed and she went, and she was fruitful.”
Photo by Yurii Khomitskyi on Unsplash
