Give someone else the best start you can
Luke 3, John 1, and John 3 record a remarkable progression about the life of John the Baptist. He bursts on the scene, seemingly out of nowhere. It is as if his life blazes suddenly into being, a bonfire that explodes up into the night. He inspires people to action: his message seems to draw people nearly inexorably to the river where he is challenging them to repentance and baptizing those who respond.
From the recorded story, it’s almost as if his ministry is over the same day it begins. First he is chastizing the Pharisees, and then he is telling repentant rogues and soldiers what to do. Suddenly his cousin shows up on the edge of the river, and everything changes. John dips him under, clouds part, lights shine, doves fly, voices speak in thunderous tones–and John’s day is done.
His disciples–every reputable minister in those days, it seems, had them–come to him, a little surprised. In John 3:26, they tell the Baptist about the success of “the one you bore witness to.” John goes into an extended rhapsody on how great Jesus’ ministry is (and will be), and how content he is to drop off the air. “For,” he says in the famous verse 30, “he must increase, and I must decrease.”
Yes, there is an important lesson about humility in John’s words. However, there is another lesson, too, that we often forget, but that is crucial for mission mobilization and the missionary task in general: John had learned the lesson of scale.
1.
There seem to be three challenges to missionary mobilization today. The first is the challenge of inspiration: getting people to be interested in missionary activity at all. Just to illustrate, there are 2 billion Christians (of all traditions) in the world today, and just 400,000 cross-cultural missionaries are sent out. They represent 0.02% of the Christians in the world. There are, of course, a fair number of pray-ers and send-ers on behalf of missionaries, but the fact that Operation World measures distribution of its missionary prayer guide in terms of millions, not hundreds of millions, shows the general lack of interest of the church. Inspiration is a problem that is being capably tackled by many who are far more charismatic than I, fortunately. George Verwer, for example, comes to mind.
The second problem is the challenge of motivation: or, what the inspired person should do. This is an equally hard barrier to cross. A young, passionate follower of Christ hears an inspiring sermon, listens to the music, feels the tug on his heart to give his life in service, perhaps as a missionary to some far-off, unimaginable field with nearly-naked, mostly-hungry, different-looking people living in poor, dusty huts. But he has no idea what to do next. Unfortunately, very often a congregation sees this young, passionate do-gooder and thinks of all sorts of wonderful ways that he (or she) could serve those unreached souls right next door. Logistically connecting someone to the frontier is another huge challenge. This, too, is a challenge being worked on by many: those in SVM2 or the Traveling Team or Perspectives or YWAM’s DTSes for example.
The third problem is even greater than the first two, yet it we seem to think about it least: the problem of scale. It rears its ugly head whenever we stop to consider, not just the challenge of inspiring a single person to consider Christ’s claims on their life, or the challenge of logistically connecting them with something concrete to do, but also the scope of the remaining task.
Our world is made up of roughly 6 billion people. We can think of these as three sections: 2 billion believers, 4 billion people who have access to the Gospel but have not responded, and 2 billion people who have no access whatsoever. (Those in the latter category would include, for example, Arabs in Saudi Arabia, or Chinese immigrants to England who speak Mandarin and only enough English to survive.) A calculation of how many missionaries are required to “reach the unreached” ranges from the estimate of 32,000 workers tendered by the US Center for World Mission in the latest issue of Mission Frontiers, on up to my own estimate of roughly 58,000 teams or 150,000 workers.
From the smallest to the largest estimate, the problem of scale presents itself. Some 32,000 workers represents a number six times larger than the total missionary force of the International Mission Board (for which it recently raised some $150 million). My own estimate is thirty times the size of the IMB and eight times the size of Youth With A Mission.
Inspiring, motivating, training, equipping, deploying and supporting one worker is qualitatively different from the challenge of doing the same thing for tens of thousands of workers. Presently, we have a lot of solutions for inspiring workers: Urbana, for example, inspires thousands. We have not bad solutions for linking those inspired with the field, though all of them could do with some improvement.
This same challenge can be found in many other problems that the world and the church face. The problem of 1 billion hungry. The problem of the $65 billion dollar drug trade from Afghanistan. The problem of water shortages.
We do a lot about these problems. But admittedly, nothing of what we presently do scales very well, or can completely solve the problem once and for all.
2.
There are two ways to try to meet a significant problem. One is to grow big enough to meet the problem yourself. The other is to grow others to meet the problem together.
The first uses linear growth. Size and resources increase until we achieve our goal. Google grows itself to a big enough size to reach its mission of “organizing the world’s information.” World Vision has become the largest NGO in the world in order to help the poor. Campus Crusade has grown to nearly 20,000 full-time staff in its goal to present the Gospel to the world.
Large organizations can do some impressive things: billions of dollars in aid, billions of showings of the JESUS Film, billions of web pages indexed and instantaneously searched. But there are some problems that organizations cannot grow large enough to solve by themselves. Everyone knows this. It’s why we form partnerships and networks. We understand that linear growth cannot solve problems or meet demands which are growing exponentially.
Exponential growth is powered by the force of demographics–people having babies. World population today is nearly 7 billion, and by 2050 it is expected to reach 9 billion. You can see how it happens: if a community of 100 homes (200 people) has an average of 3 children each, the community grows to 500. The children grow up, and they in turn have an average of 3 children each. Now the community has become 1,400. Of course there are deaths along the way, but the community is expanding exponentially.
Any problems that the children are born into–hunger, joblessness, oppression, etc.–will expand along with those children, and their children, and their grand-children. Most of these new infants are being born in that part of the world most beset by challenges of poverty, disease, war, disasters, and least reached by the Good News. To meet these problems, we must have solutions which scale exponentially: which can be taught and done by others without us earning a dime or having a second’s say in how or where or why.
We must be willing to build ministries that discover scalable solutions to problems, and do whatever we can to get those solutions used broadly enough to solve the problem. Even if it means giving the solution away so others can use it freely. Even if it means spending every last bit of energy we have and having our organization go out of business, bankrupt, unable to carry forward, but having expended ourselves to solve a problem and see it eradicated.
A radical view, perhaps. But how invested in our vision are we? What are we willing to do–not just to build a successful, sustainable ministry, but to once and for all solve a problem?
3.
John understood his purpose in life was to give someone else the best start he possibly could. He was true to his calling, built a great reputation, and invested the whole of it in one single moment: “he bore witness.” He highlighted Jesus, confirmed him, and sent his own disciples to follow Him.
John knew the world had huge problems. He understood only a solution that would scale well would meet the problems. I’m sure he cared about his work and his ministry, for he was willing to stand up to the Pharisees in a show of integrity. But he cared more about the solution than about his long term “success.” When his remaining disciples came to him to point out the growth of Jesus’ ministry seemed to come at the expense of his own, John pointed out the simple fact: his own ministry wouldn’t solve the problem he was passionate about–human sin and eternal life. Great as it was, John’s ministry had to decrease if Jesus’ were to increase.
Seeking scalable solutions requires us to have the same attitude. It’s not false modesty on John’s part, or ours. Our ministries can be effective, have terrific reputations, and be full of integrity. Eventually, however, someone else’s ministry needs to surpass us, to take over, to carry the race forward. The exponent is the small number that lifts another to greater power: we must become small and lift others up if we are to achieve exponential growth.
