Here’s a picture worth questioning. Ask most American churchgoers what the Great Commission looks like, and you will likely hear a familiar story. A young family feels the call, raises support, finishes seminary, studies a language, and boards a plane for a faraway country. We pray for them on Sunday, pin their photo to the bulletin board, and call it obedience to Jesus’ command in Matthew 28 to “go and make disciples of all nations.”
That story has real heroes in it, (and some villains too) . . . and God has used it. But it’s no longer the main story of global Christianity, not that it really ever was, and treating it as the default may be costing the church more than we realize. If we want to be faithful to the Great Commission in our generation, we need to rethink who is doing the going. Here are five reasons to start the process of reconsidering what faithfulness requires.
1. The church is growing fastest where we aren’t
The center of gravity in Christianity has shifted. Most of the world’s Christians now live in the Global South, and by some estimates the church outside the West is growing about 13 times faster than it is here. House churches in Asia, village congregations in Africa, and urban churches across Latin America are multiplying, and that growth is being led by local believers. The question is not whether God is moving, but whether we will recognize where He is moving and join in.
2. Local Christians already know the language and culture
An American missionary may spend years learning a language and still miss the joke, mangle the idiom, or misread the room. And that’s just looking at their teaching and preaching in another culture. On the other hand, a local pastor grew up with the proverbs, the family structures, the religious history, and the unspoken rules. He knows why his neighbor hesitates to follow Jesus and what it will cost her. That kind of understanding can’t be fully learned in language school. It’s lived.
3. They will be buried where they serve
The pastors and evangelists reaching their neighbors in Nairobi, Manila, or Lima are not on a term of service. Their children grow up on the same streets. Their parents rest in the local cemetery, and one day they will too. Their commitment is not a chapter in their story; it is the whole story, and their neighbors know it.
4. The math of short tenures of American missionaries
Consider what it takes to send an American family overseas: seminary, fundraising, language school, and the years required to understand a new culture. That can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet many families return home in less than three years, often just as they are starting to be noticed within a community. Their reasons are usually understandable, from health to children’s schooling to burnout. But the pattern raises a hard stewardship question. The same resources, invested in local Christians, could sustain multiple ministry leaders for decades.
5. The Great Commission never started in the West in the first place
In Acts 1:8, Jesus told His disciples they would be His witnesses “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Notice where the map begins. The gospel moved from the Middle East into Africa and Asia long before it reached America. The Ethiopian official carried it south. Churches in Egypt, Syria, Persia, and India flourished for centuries while much of Europe was still pagan. Christianity has never been a Western possession. We are not the source of the faith; we are among its many receivers.
From sending to partnering, from going to giving
None of this means Americans should stop going. There will always be a place for cross-cultural workers who come alongside, serve with humility, and bring needed skills and resources. But the posture has to change, from leading to partnering, and from sending to supporting. And since America controls over one-third of the world’s wealth, we have a responsiblity to support Christians where resources are often limited.
Maybe instead of going, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to send a small group of Americans for a short time with an arguably limited impact, or the years spent getting a missionary family on the field who will come back to America in less than one presidential election cycle, what if we began focusing on giving? On supporting the leaders who eat and breath every day in their culture, who will live and die there, and who are doing all they can to
In practice, that might mean funding the theological training of a pastor in Kenya, backing a church-planting network in Southeast Asia, or simply asking leaders in the Global South what they need instead of telling them. It means treating our sisters and brothers around the world as co-laborers, not as mission fields.
The Great Commission is still our calling. We may find that the most faithful way to obey it is to celebrate what God is already doing through His people across the globe, and to put our prayers and resources behind them.
For those who know me, this post is an outgrowth of my love for the type of work I get to do with Scholar Leaders. I welcome anyone interested in our work of cultivating leaders to serve the Global Church to visit our get involved page here.
