Posted by Brad Byrd

Below is a very helpful post, courtesy of our friends @ Desiring God, on the continuing need for Western churches to send mission partners in today's multipolar world mission context... 

While Ryan and his family prepared for long-term missions, he graciously gave his time as a volunteer for Desiring God International Outreach. He brought tremendous skill and integrity to his work which bore wonderful fruit including the following: 

'As our family prepares to move overseas, we sometimes encounter this question in one form or another: Is the Western missionary model* still legitimate?” 

The question stems from a variety of concerns and perspectives, but our basic answer must be “yes.”  Even with the high cost of sending and recent shifts in the global Church, it is still strategic and fitting for Western missionaries to cross geographical and linguistic boundaries in the pursuit of new worshipers of Jesus. 

Here is why I think so:

1. God wants his name to be great in every place as well as among every people. 

Though missiologists in the past couple of decades have rightly emphasized the importance of unreached people groups ("nations") as the focus of the Great Commission, there are a number of texts which seem to require a geographic and not exclusively an ethnic focus (e.g.Malachi 1:11). 

The Great Commission cannot be fulfilled by only reaching the unreached who migrate to America, or Christ doesn’t receive the glory he deserves.

2.  There are still hundreds of remote peoples who haven’t heard the gospel.

Many Unreached peoples are unrepresented in reached cities. In these cases, someone is going to have to cross cultural and geographic boundaries to deliver the message in the flesh.

3. Too little money is given to missions, not too much. 

God has blessed this nation with an abundance of resources, yet a staggeringly low percentage of Christian spending is channeled toward missions, especially missions to the unreached. 

When God’s people here in America are biblically calibrated, there are plenty of resources both to continue sending workers from the West, and to support indigenous pastors and church planters.

4. In many cases, the Church in the West has something to offer. 

With a long history of Christian thought, abundant resources, and relative lack of persecution, the Western Church can often make a contribution in places where the Church is younger and less grounded. 

Just as it would be arrogant to think that we know it all and have no need of the global Church, it would be arrogant to sit on our wealth of resources, history, and doctrinal development rather than make it accessible to the world.

5. Crossing cultures is a fitting means for the message. 

When Christians from more privileged and dominant-language cultures (such as America), set aside their comforts, rights, and security in order to identify with and minister to people of lesser-privileged cultures and more obscure languages, something powerful and gospel-adorning is communicated. 

It is the purpose of God that the incarnational activities of going and identifying illustrate and glorify the gospel (1 Thess. 2:1-8).

(*Editor's note: Some western missionary thinking operated on the assumption that the West was 'Christian' and the rest were not, an unhelpful model from which most Western missionary thinking has now departed. So, yes it is right to continue sending and going within the parameters set out above.)