A Missionary's Real Assignment

Years ago in Arequipa, someone asked me the wrong question. They asked how many services I preached that week. That's not the question a missionary should be asking himself. The right question is: how many of my people preached this week without me standing there?

I spent over fifty years learning the answer to that question in many countries, with many mistakes along the way. What I found is that indigenous church planting isn't a technique. It's a posture. You either believe the people God gives you are capable of carrying His work, or you don't. Everything else follows from that.

Pick the Right City

Start with a strategic city, not just any city. Some places sit at a region's crossroads. Reach them well, and the roads, the trade, the movement of people carry the gospel out further than you ever could on your own two feet.

This isn't strategy for strategy's sake. Paul planted in Ephesus, Corinth, and Antioch cities that became launching points for entire regions. Think about where the traffic already flows, then plant your first church there.

Start Among People Who Can Actually Reach Others

Here's a mistake I watched good men make for years. They started their work either among the wealthy, who had every reason to protect what they had, or among the very poor, who often lacked the means and mobility to reach anyone beyond their own street.

Instead, look for the people in the middle, the ones with enough stability to travel, to host, to give, to lead, and enough hunger to actually want something more. Not because God loves them more. He doesn't. But because they're the ones positioned to carry the gospel to the people around them.

Train Them Before They Can Walk

The moment someone gets saved, start discipling them personally. Don't wait for them to prove themselves first. Teach them immediately that reaching their own people isn't a job handed down to them; it was always theirs.

Start a night Bible institute early, so people with day jobs can still be trained. Eventually, build a Bible college to raise up preachers and church planters, not just informed church members. Training is not something you add once a church is stable. Training is how the church becomes stable.

And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also. 2 Timothy 2:2

That's not a suggestion for exceptional believers. That's the plan for every believer.

Build Outward, Not Just Upward

Develop outreach that does three things at once: builds the church, trains your people in real ministry, and starts new churches. If your programs only serve people who are already sitting in your pews, you've built a nice room. You haven't built a church that reaches a country.

Look at your whole country and realize something freeing: you can start a training program in every major region. You were never meant to be the only source.

Never Do for Them What They Can Do

This is the line that separates a mission that multiplies from a mission that stalls: never do for your people what they can do for themselves, and never keep doing what they can do instead of you.

We miss this constantly, and usually for a reason that sounds humble but isn't. We assume they can't do it as well as we can. Or, if we're honest, we just enjoy doing it, so we keep doing it. Either way, the result is the same: a church that never learns to stand.

People rarely rise above what you expect of them. If you expect them to always need you, they will. If you expect them to lead, and you build room for them to try, most of them will surprise you.

Play Every Position Then Stop Playing Any

Here's the picture I've used for decades. You start out playing every position in the ministry. You're the preacher, the teacher, the janitor, the treasurer, the visitor of the sick, all of it.

Then you begin training people one at a time to take those positions, until you're the quarterback and they're running the rest of the field. Keep going, and you become the coach calling plays, not making them. Keep going further, and you become the general manager, working yourself completely out of the picture.

That last step is the one most of us resist. We like being needed. But being needed forever isn't the goal. Sonship: men and women who know who they are in Christ and lead from that identity, not from your permission. That's the goal.

Practice Leaving Before You Have To

From day one, start turning over what you can to people who are ready. Take planned absences early, on purpose, before there's an emergency that forces your hand.

If you actually intend to reach your whole country, you'll naturally find yourself needing to be in other places doing other things. That's not a distraction from the work. That pressure is what forces leadership to develop. Live with the furlough in view; someday you'll be back in the States, and someone needs to already be equipped to pastor and carry the ministry while you're gone.

Hand Them Real Weight

Give leadership positions to others early, and treat them in ways that earn the people's respect. What you say about them in public, how you speak to them, whether they're compensated fairly, all of it shapes what your people believe about their new leaders.

From the beginning, teach believers to give and to tithe, and expect as much from them as you would from an American church. Underestimating a congregation because of where they live is its own kind of condescension, and people can feel it.

And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they believed. Acts 14:23

That's not reckless. That's trust. Need will move people toward the responsibility that's needed. A child never learns to walk if you carry him everywhere. Neither does a church.

You Get What You Honor

Time is short. Souls are dying without Christ.

The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few. Matthew 9:37

That urgency isn't manufactured pressure. It's just true, and it should live in you and in the people you're training.

Here's the last thing, and maybe the most important: you get what you look for, and you get what you honor. If you honor dependence on you, you'll get dependence. If you honor initiative, faithfulness, and growth in others, that's what will multiply.

The Real Finish Line

None of this works if it's built on ego dressed up as strategy. It only works if it's built on what Jesus modeled with twelve ordinary men: He gave them everything, trusted them with the work, and then went to the Father, promising the Spirit would finish what He started.

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. 1 Corinthians 3:6

None of us causes anything to grow. We're just faithful with the part we're given, then we let go.

That's the whole assignment. Not to be needed forever, but to be faithful long enough that you're not needed anymore. Plant the church, train the leader, hand him the keys, and go stand somewhere else that's waiting on the gospel too.

If this stirred something in you about your own field, your own team, or your own tendency to hold on too long, I'd love to hear where you're at. Hit reply, or drop a comment. This newsletter exists for conversations like that one.



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