Every week I receive an article about current culture from Collin Garbarino of World Magazine. We exchange emails from time to time. Recently, he closed an article with this sentence:

It’s not just missionaries who have to learn the culture and language of the people they want to reach. – Collin Garbarino, World Magazine

It’s a good sentence, encouraging us to stay up on what’s going on around us so that we can relate to all kinds of people. I commended him for the sentence but suggested:

I think that sentence would be improved if we inserted the word “professional” before missionaries. We’re all missionaries.

He agreed and so stated in his next weekly article. Then he told me in an email:

You might be interested to know that one of my readers wrote to complain about your idea that we’re all missionaries. She’s a professional missionary in the Middle East, and she only wants the word to apply to people living overseas.

To which I fired off this mild tirade:

Re the lady overseas, it’s precisely that attitude that limits the number of people on mission, regardless of what you call them. As long as people think there’s a hierarchy:

• Foreign missionaries
• Domestic missionaries / Pastors
• Everyone else

The “everyone else” are content to let the paid professionals do the work. I don’t know your writer, of course, but I’d bet real money that her ministry does NOT involve investing in people so that they can do what she does. I tried to motivate some missionaries once to not only do their job but also invest in individual people in the city they were serving. Most of them didn’t get it.

Once in Haiti, there were a group of Canadians who were there for a month on a short-term work-project mission. They were very sad to leave and go back home and didn’t understand that it’s wonderful to go to Haiti and do a work project for 4 weeks, but what about the other 48 weeks?

This is a non-trivial subject that you can tell I’m very exercised about.

Collin shared with me how he responded to the missionary lady (much kinder than my tirade but right on point):

I wrote to her saying that I believed that if more Christians considered themselves missionaries at home, then there would be more zeal for the gospel. And more zeal for the gospel would lead to more Christians going overseas to become missionaries abroad.

Well said. I wrote about this recently in the story of the great “missionary” hymn “So Send I You,” written by…wait for it…a schoolteacher who learned that her mission field was where she was.

Paul said it:

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Timothy 2.2, NIV)

I like to add: 2 Timothy 2.2…

• It’s so easy, anyone can do it…even lay people.
• It’s so important, everyone must do it…even Christian professionals.