Scattered or sent?
From ancient Antioch to contemporary Ukraine, real-life mission resists easy categorisation
South Sudanese refugees worship in a refugee camp where they also run trauma healing workshops
Can you be a missionary without being sent?
by Tyler Horton
The Canadian Baptist churches which formed me imparted a strong sense that every Christian is involved with mission.
This is a valuable legacy that should not be taken for granted, but I’ve also started to recognise limitations in the way that my tradition framed the involvement of ‘every Christian’ in mission.
Especially as I’ve thought more about mission and migration over the past few years, I’ve come to realise that my framework for mission leaves a significant amount of people out.
A sender or a goer?
The chain of inferences that Paul builds in Romans 10 was frequently invoked as I was growing up.
For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? (Romans 10:13–15, NRSV)
The apostle makes the astounding declaration that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, but acknowledges that people cannot call on someone that they do not believe in. They cannot believe in someone that they have never heard of, and they cannot hear without someone proclaiming to them. The final question brings it home: “how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?”
As the sermon goes in the tradition that shaped me, every Christian is called to mission but not every Christian needs to go as a missionary. There are senders and goers, but senders are just as important because without them, the proclaimers don’t go. We were asked, which one is God calling you to be: sender or goer? Supporter or missionary?
If every Christian is either a sender or a goer, everybody is involved. The value of the ‘sender-or-goer’ framework lies partly in the admirable aim to include the whole church. We are all called to mission. The irony is then that this framework overlooks people, particularly those who go without attachments to the senders that it leads us to expect.
Where are the senders?
Take the following story from Andy McCollough’s helpful book, Global Humility:
In 2014, when many from East Ukraine had to leave their homes and flee the region or even the country, my dear friend Andrey Bondarenko, who serves a number of churches in East Ukraine (and who also had to flee his home with his wife and two children), had to make a choice. He could be distraught that everything he had been building had been dismantled, or he could see this as an (albeit unexpected and painful) opportunity for sowing. “We told our people they were not refugees. They were missionaries,” says Andrey. “Church members have scattered all over the place, and wherever they go they are starting new congregations. We are even planting churches in India and Portugal as a result!” (pages 27–28)
Where are the senders in this situation?
In one sense, the churches that Andrey works with are doing the sending: “We told our people they were not refugees. They were missionaries.” But this is very different from what comes to mind when we think of churches and mission agencies sending missionaries.
These Ukrainian Christians did not go because their church acknowledged a vocational calling and enlisted an agency to help prepare and support them in ministry. What sent them was an unsettled political situation and the threat of danger.
Pastor Andrey’s story is not an isolated case. The name of our project is inspired by a very similar account in Acts 11:
Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that took place over Stephen travelled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, and they spoke the word to no one except Jews. But among them were some men of Cyprus and Cyrene who, on coming to Antioch, spoke to the Hellenists also, proclaiming the Lord Jesus. The hand of the Lord was with them, and great number became believers and turned to the Lord. (Acts 11:19–21)
Again, where are the senders in this story?
A great number call on the Lord, but the only senders are those pushing the persecution that followed the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7.
The ‘sender-or-goer’ framework has a problem because it tends to overlook these situations. It creates an expectation that all goers will have what the machinery of modern missions recognises as senders.
When these senders are not apparent, as is the case in these accounts from Antioch and Eastern Ukraine, we have a harder time recognising what is happening as mission.
The scattered and the sent
Not all goers are directly tied to what we think of as senders. In fact, Jehu Hanciles wrote 450 pages showing that “the migration of Christians has typically contributed to the spread of Christianity and represents a predominant element in the globalisation of the faith” (page 2).
The scattered and the sent are not mutually exclusive categories and this is part of why we say that migration is good for mission.
We recognise that there are deep connections between migration and mission and that our inherited frameworks are not well-equipped to account for this. One of our objectives at the Acts 11 Project is to help develop structures in mission which acknowledge the variety of ways that people are sent.
It is important that we use our terminology carefully and there are pitfalls in declaring that every Christian is a missionary. At the same time, as they are on their way to plant churches from India to Portugal, would we really want Pastor Andrey to tell his scattering people that they are not missionaries?
We need to challenge our compulsion to have people think that they are not refugees so that they can see themselves as missionaries. Imagine a world where we helped Christians to say: because I am a refugee, I could be a missionary.
The scattered and the sent are not mutually exclusive categories.
