Intro to World Missions

“Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, ‘What does this babbler wish to say?’ Others said, ‘He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities’ —because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection” (Acts 17:18 ESV). In the book of Acts, Paul is shown to have kept the message of the gospel homogenous while adjusting his delivery to match the culture to which he was speaking. This example has been reversed in the recent century by allowing Western Missionary Ministries to use suffocating measures of power and influence through means of finance and technology among third world cultures. In doing so, the model of missions has been forced through a Western Eurocentric outcome for the measurement of success.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde is an outspoken character from the Anne of Green Gables series who has a knack for saying what the populace is thinking. “I don’t believe any but fools enter the ministry nowadays…he says he doesn’t believe all the heathen will be eternally lost. The idea! If they won’t all the money we’ve been giving to Foreign Missions will be clean wasted, that’s what!” John Stott and Christopher J. H. Wright disagree in Christian Mission in the Modern World that if you give those in mission work a certain amount of money it will yield a predetermined outcome.