Missions Myth 2 (Missions Series 2 of 6)

You can have a commitment to sound theology without having a commitment to missions.

Myth number two. You can have a commitment to sound theology without having a commitment to missions. And there is an opposite myth that you can have a commitment to missions without having a commitment to sound theology.

Many people think that a commitment to sound theology is only for those relatively few Christians who like to study and teach Christian doctrine. This view is that those who are committed to having sound theology and doctrine are normally not committed to missions, and they don’t really need to be. And those who are committed to missions are not normally interested in doctrine and theology, and they don’t really need to be either.

So it’s common to hear people talking about a missionary like this, “He was not a very good student of the Bible and theology, but he has a great zeal and heart for lost people in other cultures who do not know Jesus. So we think it’s best for him to be on the mission field.”

Think about the absurdity of this way of thinking about theology and missions. Who should go to the mission field? The answer is our very best bible scholars and theologians should be our missionaries, not our worst. Why?

Because understanding the bible and theology in order to teach God’s word faithfully in your same culture is challenging enough. But teaching God’s word faithfully in another culture than your own is far more challenging. This is why it’s even more important to have a commitment to developing strong, biblical doctrine and theology in order to communicate God’s word accurately across cultures in missions.

And yet, many people committed to missions are not committed to developing sound biblical doctrine and theology. And many people committed to developing sound biblical doctrine and theology are not committed to missions.

The Apostle Paul is an example of someone very committed to both sound theology and missions. This is the man who wrote the great doctrinal letters in the New Testament to the Romans and Galatians. Yet this is also the man who gave his life to doing evangelism and discipleship cross-culturally all over the world in order to plant and strengthen churches that would continue these ministries after he left.

When Paul wrote the doctrinally rich letter to the Romans, he didn’t write it like a seminary professor would write and publish a scholarly article. Instead he wrote it as a missionary, church planting movement leader to prepare the church in Rome for his upcoming visit to them on his way to the unreached people of Spain where Christ was not named.

In a little more than ten years (A.D. 47 – A. D. 57), the Apostle Paul planted and established churches in four major provinces of the Roman Empire: Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia. Under his missionary methods, the church flourished so much throughout the Mediterranean world that Paul considered his work done there.

So Paul decided to move his mission headquarters to the West, from Antioch to Rome, in order to use Rome as his new base to reach out into the far Western world, Spain, where Christ had never been named.

But before he arrived in Rome, he wrote them a letter to help them better understand the gospel, our New Testament book of Romans. Paul knew that if they were deeply grounded in the rich doctrines and theology of the gospel, their hearts would be stirred up to see all people, all nations, especially Spain, know about this astonishing grace of God’s love in Christ.

This is why you cannot separate a commitment to sound, biblical doctrine and theology from a commitment to missions. Instead missionaries need to see themselves as those whom Arthur Glasser calls, Task Theologians:

The New Testament authors and local communities of faith, in whose midst these documents were written, talking about the New Testament, were not marginal to participation in the mission to which God had called His church. These authors were all missionaries. When they were engaged in theological reflection, its focus was on the missionary task at hand. They were task theologians. And what they produced had relevance to the particular task in which they were involved.

John Stott often writes that God-centered theology is always missional because God is a missionary God. God the Father sent the Son. God the Son sent the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit sends His church. That's a Trinitarian, missiological understanding of the nature of God as a sending God.

David Bosch writes, "Theology ceases to be true theology if it loses its missionary character … Just as the church ceases to be the church if it is not missionary, theology ceases to be theology if it loses its missionary character. We are in need of a missiological agenda for theology, rather than just a theological agenda for mission, for theology rightly understood has no reason to exist other than critically to accompany the Missio Dei (Mission of God).”

This is why John Piper often says, “You can easily measure the authenticity of your theology by measuring your commitment to God’s global cause”.

Many do not realize that almost all of the fathers of the modern missionary movement, were men with deep, solid theological and doctrinal commitments. As you study the passion for world evangelism in men like William Carey, called “The Father of Modern Missions”, you find that it flowed out of a rich theology planted deep in his heart through the writings of theologians like Jonathan Edwards.

The same can be said of the other great missionaries of this era, including Livingstone, John Patton, Sutcliffe, and Judson. These were all frontline missionaries who were deeply committed to a robust theology who gave their lives to promote Christian missions globally.

The more biblical your understanding of God, the more passionate will be your commitment to global evangelization. You cannot be a truly sound theologian without having a burning heart for world evangelization. And you cannot be a truly effective missionary without having a commitment to sound theology.