–– Seth Meyers

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Mission boards

A mission board is an organization that gathers together numerous missionaries and helps them with technical details like visas, finances, and networks of like-minded churches. Churches in the USA have started numerous mission boards sending out hundreds and even thousands of missionaries from America to different nations of the world. 

Roughly 64% of Americans claim to be Christian today which represents about 200 million adults. It is difficult to get precise numbers, but an estimated 60,000 Bible-believing, full-time missionaries are currently living and serving in other countries having been sent from the US. 

200 million people sending 60,000 missionaries. 

In Africa, 650 million people claim to be Christian. But where are the missionaries? Following the statistics, 85% of the population of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya calls itself Christian. Zambia and Congo poll above 90%. Where are the mission boards to help send out the cross-cultural, language-learning, church-planting missionaries yearning to obey their Lord’s command? 

That I know of, and I would gladly learn better, there are no mission boards started by African churches. From this, two observations have suggested themselves to me. 

The true church in Africa is small. 

Though the numbers look large, the reality is not. On two separate occasions our Lord said that the false Christians would be “many” in comparison to the true believers (Matt. 7:13; Luke 13:24). In the parable of the soils, 3 represent false Christians, and only 1 stands for the truth. Some say that these statements only refers to the days of Christ, but He Himself asked, “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” implying that the Second Coming will see proportions like He had previously predicted. 

Obedience to the Great Commission is one of the hardest commands of Christ because it demands a united, group commitment of money, prayer, and men. But Jonathan Edwards said in The Religious Affections that true faith and true love are best seen by a lifestyle of obedience. When we see decade after decade pass, with very little concern about the evangelization of the world, what does that say about the faith of millions who claim to be Christian?

It is hard to believe that hundreds of millions of people are truly converted when they care very little about the conversion of their neighbors, their language group, and the world. Show me zeal for the Great Commission, and I, like J. C. Ryle in chapter 6 of Holiness, will have more confidence that the Christianity is real. 

African pastors should speak more frequently about missions. 

True Christians will be bothered that they have not done more in the path of obedience to the Lord. They are full of zeal for even the smallest of His wishes. How much more ought we to speak and hear and pray about missions? Where are the missions conferences? Do our churches have regular prayer meetings that the Lord of the Harvest would send forth laborers? Can missionary prayers be heard when the believers gather on the Lord’s Day? Where is the public confession for this Great Omission? 

Driving to preach each Thursday, I pass two new buildings being built around older buildings. That is, a current building stands that may hold 80-100 people. Around that existing structure, there are now metal trusses in the ground so that a new, marginally larger building can take the place of the former and increase the seating by 30%. Really? That is what you are going to spend your money on when you already have a building, and you’ve never sent a church planter to a poorer place within your own language group. How dwells the love of God in them? 

And sending a church planter 30 kilometers away within the same language group is not even the fullest obedience of the Great Commission. Jesus demanded us to cross barriers into all the world so that all the nations would become disciples. Why is a new structure being built from your meager funds when you have not yet sent a missionary to the 40 million Yemenis or the 170 million Bangladeshi? 

Perhaps, you read these words, and think longingly to send missionaries and yet your church is very small. Among the Tsongas, I know of a church with 6 members and another with 4. Then when you are still very few, you can at least pray and speak about the hope you have that God will increase your numbers and enable you to obey the command to evangelize not merely to your neighbor in your mother tongue, or to a nearby village of the same culture, but eventually before the White Horse makes all our hopes reality, a member from your assembly might go to another language group in another country. 

Conclusion

To meet this need, it is not sufficient merely to find foreign funds and channel them to Africans who stay in their own village and within their own languages. The great thing is to see African assemblies making financial sacrifices, investments of prayer, and weeping as their own friends leave their fellowship permanently to move to other cultures for the sake of church planting. 

This and nothing short of this will prove the maturity and—let us not doubt—the reality of our faith. The early church did this in poverty because their faith stood not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Perhaps we do not have because we do not ask.