Let’s help start new mission agencies

A recent MorganStanley report at the Web2.0 conference highlights how digitalization is spreading worldwide:

• Google had 7.6b global searches, 384m global unique visitors
• Broadband subscribers: 179m worldwide, 57m in Asia, 45m in North America
• Yahoo: 917m streaming video sessions
• Digital music: 695m cumulative iTunes downloads (as of 2005), 6m iPods sold in the 2Q 2005.
• Personalization: 40m MyYahoo users
• Blogging: 27% of US Internet users read blogs
• Tencent: 16m peak simultaneous IM users in China, Q2
• Ringtones: $3b annualized ringtone sales vis $495m iTunes sales
• VoIP: 54m Skype users – possibly fastest product ramp ever
• Denmark: VoIP minutes are greater than landline voice minutes
• Mobile Messaging: 1.1trillion sent, $50B revenue 2004, more emails sent in Japan via mobile than PC
• PayPal: 79m accounts, 23m users
• Mobile payments: 4m wallet phone users in Japan
• Global: North America: 23% of Internet users in 2005, down from 66% in 1995.
• S Korea: Broadband penetration 70%, no. 1 in the world
• China: more Internet users under the age of 30 than anywhere.

John Edge’s recent blog article, “Bra Blowback” is another look at how nations around the world are increasingly growing competitive with the West’s economies. In his article he details how China and India are not just competing on the “low-end” (think low-wage sweatshops of seamstresses creating bras) but also on the “high-end” (think extremely high tech manufacturing processes that make no-seam bras using advanced production systems, with very few seamstresses involved at all). The typical “low-wage” worker is increasingly no longer the typical case.

Thomas Friedman (“The World is Flat”) and Richard Florida (“The World is Spiky”) have both been commenting on the increasing interconnectedness of our world – the increasing ease of a company in Bangalore or Delhi to compete on the world stage along with Seattle. We know that this is also the case with missions.

There have been, in the past, two different views:

1. send missionaries from one place to another place, crossing cultural barriers, as either there are no locals capable of carrying the Gospel to their near-neighbors or else, for reasons of culture clash or whatever, they are not necessarily the most able.
2. fund/pay/support nationals to do the same job.

Much has been written on these two subjects. I won’t try to rehash all the issues here. Anyone can do a google search or just start reading the back issues of the major mission journals and you’ll find lots of material written on the two.

Rather, I am suggesting a third possibility: help mission agencies within other countries start and expand, make them completely independent of Western funds, and have Western mission agencies partner with them.

In other words, let’s:

1) abandon any “colonial” mindset that Westerners are better than their Asian or African counterparts. As the business world is demonstrating, Africans and Asians are just as good at technology, medicine, or economics as we are. The more connected they have, and the more experience they acquire, the closer they get to us. They have just as much intelligence and wisdom, and we should help them become more and more connected and experience-equipped in the field of missions.

2) abandon the traditional concept of funding non-Western missionaries. It’s one thing to decentralize and flatten the fund-raising mechanism. In this globally connected world, a worker in India, China or Nepal may have connections worldwide that bring him funding. But I think we should get rid of the idea that the West should completely fund Asians and Africans and not fund Western missionaries. I think that most of the support for African missions should be found within Africa. Yes, that’s entirely possible.

3) totally abandon the idea that we should abandon Western missionaries. Remember that the Great Commission is given to believers everywhere, and we should all be involved. Western missions have a role to play, and we have to constantly review what our role is. We may not be the ideal evangelists or church planters – although in some cases we are – but we may have other roles to play.

4) totally level the playing field between Africans, Asians, Europeans, Americans, Australians, and everyone else. We should be cooperating, not competing.

Tagged as: mission agencies