Don’t Waste Your Missional Calling

 
January 18th, 2007 by iMonk

These Lives and Deaths Were No Tragedy
In April 2000, Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards were killed in Cameroon, West Africa. Ruby was over eighty. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing eighty years old, and serving at Ruby’s side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over a cliff, and they were both killed instantly. I asked my congregation: Was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great passion, namely, to be spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ—even two decades after most of their American counterparts had retired to throw away their lives on trifles. No, that is not a tragedy. That is a glory. These lives were not wasted. And these lives were not lost. “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).
I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who “took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.” At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life—your one and only precious, God-given life—and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: “Look, Lord. See my shells.” That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don’t buy it. Don’t waste your life.
-John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life, Crossway Books, pp 45-46.
Our “Men’s Mornings With God” group gathered today and continued our discussion of John Piper’s book, Don’t Waste Your Life. In chapter 3 of that book are the two stories excerpted above. I’d ended the previous study with this section, and now was beginning this morning’s study with an unusual angle: I was going to disagree with Dr. Piper.
I’ve been reading and listening to Dr. Piper for two decades. He’s a favorite teacher and guide to the faith, but I have some disagreements with him. This part of the book brought me face to face with one of them: Piper’s handling of the potential abuses of some aspects of Christian Hedonism. Particularly, the tendency to interpret the missional calling of every Christian as personal involvement in going overseas.
One of the reasons I welcome the emphasis on missional Christianity is my rejection of the traditional paradigm of doing missions primarily through sending westerners to other countries. While I see a place for this, I think any reasonable study of the world Christian movement and the Kingdom of God will lead us to the conclusion that we need to find the best way to support indigenous missionaries and church movements, and we need to become missionaries in our own culture, outside the church but in our own callings.
The current emphasis on producing missional Christians is often misunderstood. We need to value the shift from a “church-serving” kind of discipleship model to a “go into your world and find ways to serve” model. The kinds of teaching that can produce Christians going into the community to make it better and to witness to the lost through missional ministry is also the kind of teaching that produces solid missionary Christians.
Dr. Piper advocates a number of approaches to the Christian life that stress intense commitment and a “wartime” or crisis mindset. This is almost entirely interpreted as a universal need to go into foreign missions in the 10/40 window nations and to organize with this as a priority. When Dr. Piper discusses missions in detail, it’s generally always from the standpoint that as many Christians–especially young people–as possible need to go into the 10/40 window countries personally. In addition, suffering, persecution and martyrdom are norms for him when he describes the life that is not wasted, but goes overseas.
Dr. Piper advocates the Biblical message of a single-minded passion centered on glorifying God through the cross of Jesus. Dr. Piper likes verses such as Acts 20:24

But my life is worth nothing to me unless I use it for finishing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus—the work of telling others the Good News about the wonderful grace of God

And Philippians 3:7

I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. 8 Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ.

This revaluing of life in comparison to Christ is powerful aspect of the Kingdom of Jesus, but I do not believe its only or best expression is always or normally personally going overseas as a missionary. That is one glorious expression, but others are all around us, near and far and in many different vocations with various levels of risk and costs.
In Don’t Waste Your Life, Piper does a good job of showing how the singleness of our focus on the cross reaches into all that makes up our lives. He effectively makes the case that Christ’s work on the cross unifies all gifts, blessings, experiences and phases of life. It is the cross that makes it possible for us to enjoy any and all of God’s gifts, and for him to be merciful and generous to us.
So rather than saying we are to think only of one thing, i.e. the single focus of the cross, we are able to think of all things through the cross, or more exactly, in and through the person and work of the one on the cross. I believe this is the key to properly seeing how all Christians magnify Christ in all they do.
I do believe, however, that it is possible to overbalance the cross against all that Jesus is and does. I do not mean in any way to minimize the cross, but to simply assert that we are, first of all, glorifying Jesus as Son of God, mediator and Lord, and that while the cross is the “one thing” Paul speaks of, it’s undeniably true that he frequently presents Christ in other ways, and our relationship to him in other ways. Hebrews also presents Jesus as the crucified one, but not only or completely as the crucified one.
Therefore we can glorify Christ in various roles and we can magnify him in various callings. We are not restricted to glorifying only the crucified one in sacrificially and personally going overseas. I may glorify Christ as mediator, Lord, intercessor, high priest, prophet and example, and I may do so in a variety of ways I spend my life stewardship at a particular point in my journey.
Piper’s emphasis on going overseas, suffering and single-passioned focus on the cross of Jesus raises, further, another issue with some persons. Christians of a sensitively zealous, fragile or fanatical temperament can take Dr. Piper’s emphasis and go in some directions that I believe are unwise, unbalanced and potentially harmful.
I frequently find myself counseling young people preparing to spend large amounts of money to go overseas with no language training, no sense of the needs of the church in the country they are going to, and no real plan to live a life that includes mission as a large component of stewardship. In my opinion, many organizations play on this zeal and send unprepared and unsuited persons into the field. I have no doubt that many Christian leaders overseas deeply wish we would rethink our entire emphasis on personally going into a country, and instead look at an overall response to the needs on the field and in the world.
I want to be clear that in no way have I ever felt that Dr. Piper was advocating fanaticism or any of the poor decisions I might mention. He clearly understands the need for a solid personal and family life, responsibility, preparation and informed placement of personnel. In fact, in this same book, Piper makes many helpful and specific observations that could be easily rewritten into prudent cautions. Still, Dr. Piper’s choice of metaphors for the Christian life do tend to leave the impression that the preferred destiny of the normal Christian life should be going overseas, choosing risk and suffering, with the goal of ultimate sacrifice in the cause. He frequently cites martyrdom or loss of wife and children as pinnacle acts of glorifying Christ. I agree with these examples, but working with young people has taught me that such examples must be placed in a fully helpful and healthy context to avoid some of the errors of the enthusiastic and unstable.
I stated my response this way:
When someone magnifies the cross by sacrifice and suffering, we must remember that sacrifice and suffering are not the only ways that person, or any person, magnifies Christ and the cross. Jesus himself chose to go to the cross…after living 30 years as a family man, member of his community and operator of a small business.
One of the factors that stays with me in reading this book is an incident several years ago involving a college friend who was suddenly converted and, within a year, vanished into a closed country to evangelize. With no training, no support and little discipleship, he undertook his mission with commendable enthusiasm but no real idea what he was doing. I have no doubt he would have sought and welcomed martyrdom. After an extended stay, all the while out of touch with his family, he returned and has shown no interest in missions since.
One of the problems this young man experienced was put very well by one of the men in my group. Leadership, at some level, motivated this young man for evangelism, but did not equip him with the sense that Christ can be magnified in many different ways in ordinary things that should, even must, be addressed by any disciple. When leaders don’t help us to all to see that Christ is magnified in ordinary things, as well as extraordinary, they leave us at the mercy of our own enthusiasms and the manipulation of others.
Let’s look again at the two stories Dr. Piper told. One set of women used their retirement years to go overseas and do medical missions. A married couple took a typical American retirement in Florida. Is the tragedy that the retired couple went to Florida rather than the mission field?
I believe the tragedy is that the retired couple has no idea how to glorify Christ by being Kingdom agents at their station in life. (Now please understand: our ministry at OBI thrives on retired couples. I “amen” Piper’s basic point, but I still disagree with the either/or here.)
A retired couple can support missions significantly in retirement. They can do so financially. They can join a missions motivated church. They can fund or participate in missions organizations. With a ministry like Gospel for Asia, they can funnel significant amounts of resources to the field.
Their personal involvement in missions is also critical, and Dr. Piper is right that to merely loaf is a tragedy. While in Florida they could start an outreach Bible study to their neighbors. They could chaplain in the dock community or a local senior adult housing village. They could sponsor a softball league that encouraged Christians to reach out to those who don’t know Christ. They could establish mentoring relationships with younger couples and guide them. They could start a prayer ministry, or help pay for language mission pastors at a local church.
There are many ways that the retired couple could say “We are where we are, who we are, and have what we have because of Jesus Christ. We are going to magnify him right now in as many ways as we can.” I am not disappointed they aren’t on the mission field…because they are on the mission field. I am disappointed they don’t see it. I believe Dr. Piper would join this assessment, and I don’t feel it in any way detracts from his point.
Later on in Don’t Waste Your Life, in a chapter called “Making Much of Christ From 8 to 5,” Piper addresses magnifying Christ in secular callings. This is a significant chapter because it is one of the few places that Piper departs from the “wartime mindset” to describe how “missional” living happens in secular settings. I would hope for much more in this direction in the future. While Don’t Waste Your Life is meant to motivate young people to consider missions, this chapter begins to move in the right direction of thinking missionally about all of our callings.
What is needed in a genuinely mission-concerned post-evangelical Christianity is an emphasis on 1) Jesus Christ and the Gospel, 2) the Kingdom of God, 3) local communities of believers, 4) missional living for every Christian and 5) the worldwide implications of the entire network of Christian vocation, communities and callings. This kind of emphasis will happen when pastors and leaders are prepared to translate the teaching of the Bible into our immediate contexts, and to look at the mission field with a real desire to assess and respond in a way that makes a lasting, substantial difference.
The call to Don’t Waste Your Life is appropriate and Biblical. Purchase and study the book with your church or Bible study. This call needs to go to every Christian, wherever they are, and in whatever chapter of life they occupy. And should any of us believe God is calling us to serve in other countries, it will be important to pass on a template of the Christian life that will enable believers in those countries to magnify Christ where they are in every way they can, not just by becoming foreign missionaries themselves.
NOTE: A previous post that modestly disagreed with Dr. Piper yielded so much negative mail that I removed the post. If you would like to interact in the comments with the substance of this post, I welcome your input, but please do not respond as if I am attacking a man I love, respect, and continue to learn from.

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