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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
The discussion is broadcast live on Facebook then available in video on our website <u><b><a href="http://www.thepastorsheart.net">http://www.thepastorsheart.net</a></u></b> and via audio podcast.
The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Are churches losing global mission focus? + How to fix this! - with Tim Silberman
Is the church losing its global mission focus?
The number of overseas missionaries being sent out is down on ten years ago.
Church and mission leaders have encouraged Christians to respond to the need for mission locally, especially as church decline accelerates.
Yet there’s a growing concern that global mission involvement is being neglected in many local churches.
Sydney Missionary and Bible College Lecturer Tim Silberman has just completed a study on practices and perspectives on mission among evangelical churches in Australia.
Tim says for mission to prosper, churches need to have strong relationships with overseas mission partners, and this will help the gospel globally and our local mission work.
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it is the pastor's heart and dominic steel, and the number of missionaries is down. We asked the tough question today have we lost focus on global mission? For mission to go forward, churches need to have strong relationships with distant mission partners. That will aid the gospel globally and it will help our local mission work. There's a new survey out on 204 churches on how we all think about mission. What is our responsibility, our capacity and what is the opportunity that mission presents? Tim Silberman is lecturer in cross-cultural mission at Sydney Missionary and Bible College. His PhD has just been published. It's a fascinating expose on the way churches work in regards to mission, engaging neighbours and nations. Tim, thanks for coming in. Thank you. I'm imagining if you've just looked hard at what's going on under the bonnet at 204 churches, there's going to be moments that have really warmed your pastor's heart and other moments that you've gone and thought, oh, what are we doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, it's a mixed blessing, always looking carefully at the church, isn't it? I mean, the church is a beautiful thing, the bride of Christ, and we see God's people doing wonderful things by God's grace, and so it has been a great encouragement, but it's not all good.
Speaker 1:All right, let's go right to the top. What's really excited you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I was able to following up from the survey. I was able to sit down with people in their churches and hear their stories.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you did, if you like, 204 quantitative research surveys and then 10 or so 10 churches.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I dug deep into.
Speaker 1:And you spoke to senior leaders and church members. That's right. Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:So that was an opportunity to hear the stories behind the numbers, I suppose, and that gave me a really good insight to see the way that some churches are just so engaged, excited by the opportunities that participating in mission in their local communities and to the ends of the earth presents, and seeing that sort of become part of the culture, climate, temperature of the church. That's enormously encouraging to see them sending people out, partnering well with them. And then other churches, I mean I also saw wonderful churches that were really highly engaged in their local community, which is also wonderful, great fruit that the gospel's bearing there, but not always with that kind of global vision. And so I was wrestling with why do those differences exist? And then there are some churches that seem to be struggling on all fronts and often I think a real lack of engagement with evangelism and global mission is actually perhaps a sign that there are some deeper issues going on.
Speaker 1:This number going down in the number of missionaries? What's going on there? How big a drop is it? Yeah, because that sounded concerning to me and it was the first time I'd heard it.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, it's been a slow decline. I wouldn't say it hasn't fallen off the edge of a cliff, but I think we see a slow trajectory down, and we've been seeing, over the past couple of decades, I think, sort of progressive deterioration in church attendance across the board, and so that's. I think one of the fruits of that is that you get fewer people.
Speaker 1:Less people going to theological college, less people going to the mission field.
Speaker 2:I think also as a sign of it too, is I think we've put a lot more energy and effort into developing structures and systems to help move people who are excited about the gospel into ministry locally, whether that be student ministry, whether that be pastoral ministry, whether that be ministry.
Speaker 1:within Australia, we have seen an explosion in the number of people who are working at the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students, for example.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah and praise the Lord for it. But I can't help but suspect that that's actually been something of an exchange that there's been. Some of those gospel-enthused people are moving into ministries within Australia rather than perhaps going globally. Now that's my read of the.
Speaker 2:I haven't got hard data to kind of prove that's the cause of the shift, but I think there are some factors in terms of if you create good pathways into ministry that naturally lead into student ministry, naturally lead into pastoral ministry, then I think you get more people following those pathways, and I don't think we have the same pathways that lead people into global cross-cultural ministry. And so a consequence of that is that we just see fewer people taking up that call.
Speaker 1:I suppose. I suppose the people who are the heroes in it are now overseas and so they're not taught.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right, and I think modelling is a huge part of it, isn't it into leading into ministry in all sorts of forms? And so if you haven't got that clear vision of what it looks like to be engaging in cross-cultural ministry, to going into unengaged contexts, then it's hard to imagine yourself doing that.
Speaker 1:So let's just think for a moment. How do the evangelical churches in our area vary in their patterns of local and distant mission involvement?
Speaker 2:Well, there's the full gamut of examples. I suppose we see some if we think about what's the difference between different churches. I guess I was looking at what are the ways that these churches are engaging in evangelism to their local communities, how are they reaching out? And we see a whole range of different ways that people are doing that. We see, you know, the wonderful opportunities to investigate Christianity. You know exploring the gospel in groups, and we see people engaging in those local evangelistic opportunities but, to be honest, that's not the norm.
Speaker 2:I suppose Lots of churches are not doing that very well. That's not the norm. I suppose Lots of churches are not doing that very well. We see some churches that are doing well in terms of their sending and global engagement and we see a group of churches doing both really well and it's great when you see those things coming together. As we've talked about before, that engagement in global mission seems to have something of a stimulatory effect on our local engagement. So it's less common to see churches that are really highly engaged at a distance and not so engaged locally whereas it is comparatively more common for churches to have strong local engagement, but with limited global engagement.
Speaker 1:What's going on in regards to church sizes? Can you say that bigger churches are better and smaller churches are less, or how does that work my data?
Speaker 2:seems to suggest there's a sweet spot, that, in terms of local engagement, I think bigger is better. I suppose there's a sense in which it….
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:I think to a certain extent it is. It's just numbers, it's people, it's opportunity to engage, although I mean to be honest, there aren't a lot of churches that were included in my survey that are kind of right. You know over 1,000.
Speaker 1:And so it's a bit hard for me. There aren't that many churches like that in Sydney Right and so it's a bit hard for me. There aren't that many churches like that in Sydney Right exactly. And I mean I know in the Anglican network we've gone from 21 over 400 to 11 over 400 in Sydney in the last decade.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it's hard for me to make really solid conclusions about what's happening at that kind of top end if I can call it that, but I think you know if you've got a church of 400 or 500, you're likely to be doing a lot, have a lot more activity going on than if you've got a church of 150.
Speaker 1:But you found actually something a little surprising in terms of overseas commitment, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So yeah, overseas commitment it seems that the sweet spot for that is actually probably around 200, 250. Churches of that size seem to have the greatest level of engagement and I do think that when churches get beyond that in size I do wonder if they get a little too much gravity. If that makes sense, that kind of pulls attention in, focuses it on the local ministries. It's harder to lift your eyes. Now that might be a little bit harsh, but I think that it does seem that churches that get above that tend to, from my research, have less, proportionally less. I suppose, if that makes sense, like for the numbers of people engaged, they're not seeing more and more engagement in global mission.
Speaker 1:What about theological or missiological differences?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting, I found, and so really I needed the qualitative data to be able to dig into that and I found Not a lot, is the short answer between the different churches that I looked at. So, admittedly, those that I went and sat down with and talked to about their approach to mission were showing high levels of engagement in either local or global and local Right. So they had a fairly high temperature for mission, but in terms of the way they thought about the gospel, in terms of the way they thought about the church and things like that, there weren't big differences, but there were some significant differences in terms of what I call their missional beliefs.
Speaker 1:Ah, differences on missional beliefs? Yeah, give us those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that was particularly around. I mean, for me I put them under the headings of kind of beliefs about themselves, beliefs about God and beliefs about the world. So under beliefs about the world, it seems that churches that had those really high levels of global engagement they had a greater appreciation, a greater sensitivity to their role in God's global purposes. They felt the responsibility of seeing the gospel go to the ends of the earth. They had a. I guess perhaps it came simply from just more understanding of what's happening outside of Australia.
Speaker 1:I mean, I can imagine that the smaller church is just almost so busy surviving that maybe then is that right.
Speaker 2:Well, it was wonderful to see even amongst smaller churches there were some that were really highly engaged globally. Now they weren't giving millions of dollars away. They're small but in terms of the temperature.
Speaker 2:Their focus of emphasis, yeah right, in terms of prayer communication, the way that it was, the way they talked about mission. So they fell to these churches that had the missional belief of a high responsibility for mission, global mission, that that was something that they sort of owned, that wasn't dependent on size. The second, so that's belief about the world. The second one is sort of belief about themselves, and that falls into the area of kind of what's my capacity, what can I contribute? And so in churches that seem to have less engagement globally, there was more of a tendency to emphasise the limitations of the church's capacity. So people were more often saying things like well, resources are scarce, we have to be careful, we have to think, you know, very cautiously about how we're spending our resources what we're doing with our people.
Speaker 2:There are huge needs here, because these are churches that are highly engaged in local mission, and so they feel the need to direct their resources there.
Speaker 1:And every yes here is a no there.
Speaker 2:Right. So I talk about it in the book as, I guess, a sort of a theology of scarcity. I don't know if that's too strong a concept, but that idea of resources are limited, we need to be much more careful Whereas churches that I saw had this more global engagement, there was more a theology of abundance. There was, I remember, sitting down with one chap who was chair of the missions committee in their church and this was a church that had a long history of engagement with global mission, and I talked to him about the process of how do they decide which missionaries to send and who to send, and he said our approach is, if God provides the person and they have the right gifting, then he will provide the resources. And they've seen God enable them to be sending people out and supporting them generously. So there's kind of this, just a belief in God's abundant provision for participation in his global resource.
Speaker 2:Now, that doesn't always mean money, and I think we do naturally think about money, but it also means people. It means time, attention, it means a willingness to engage and pray and feel invested in somebody's relationship. So that was the second one understanding about themselves. And then was the second one understanding about themselves and then also a shift in our understanding about God. There's been a lot of talk about kind of our theology of mission and those sorts of things, but in churches that had this high global engagement, there was a greater the way that people talked. They much more often spoke about God is doing things and we have the privilege of participating.
Speaker 1:We can ride that wave almost yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly, that's right. God's at work. Let's get on board. We're enjoying being a part of what God's doing and so participating in global ministry seemed more like an opportunity than it did, a challenge that needed to be navigated or an important thing that needed to be done. But we have important thing that needed to be done, but we have to be careful about how we do that because of our limited resources.
Speaker 2:So, just in the way that people spoke and this is the joy of qualitative data is that you get to just listen to the conversation and hear what's kind of beneath people's comments and you just hear people saying you know we get to participate in what God's doing. We're seeing God at work in this part of the world. We have our friend John and Mary there and we're in the ministry with them through our support and our prayers, and what a privilege, what a privilege it is to be part of that ministry. So they were the sort of missional beliefs that I noted a difference in, that I noted a difference in so a belief about responsibility for mission, about capacity for mission and about the opportunity, I guess, to participate in mission.
Speaker 1:What about ecclesiology?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was interesting in ecclesiology so it's always good to try and dig into someone's understanding of the church and what its purpose is, and I'd have to say that, broadly speaking, there weren't big differences amongst the churches that I looked at.
Speaker 1:I mean, even though you did Anglican Presbyterian Baptist, yeah, Right, yeah, so I had lots of I was expecting bigger differences.
Speaker 2:I was too to be honest, and it was I mean. Obviously they have different forms of governance. They have different beliefs about the sacraments and things like that, which you know wasn't a key part of my concern, but in terms of understanding, I guess, the purpose of the church, I was also a little bit surprised in your research that you basically said that they weren't really paying too much attention to their denominational allegiances.
Speaker 1:No, that's right.
Speaker 2:Now that may be a particular feature of the neck of the woods that we live in here. We do sometimes have a bit of a post-denominational flavour. The way that I guess denominational differences were most evident was really who did they partner with? Who were there? Which organisations, which parachurches?
Speaker 1:So that was still clearly in place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's right, and so that's where you see the denominational influence. But in terms of the way they talked about, why does the church exist? What are we here to do? What is the gospel? How does the gospel relate to who we are as God's people? And particularly, I guess a key lens that I used was what are the metaphors that people use to describe the church?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, give us those yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's, you know, the most common one is obviously with the body of Christ. And again, I'm not asking you know, how do you describe? The church, I'm just listening to the language that they're using. So body of Christ is kind of that, and the parts of the body and the body. You know that key edification piece, I suppose in terms of understanding why the church exists. That was consistent amongst them all, and then all of the other metaphors that were employed by people had a sort of missions dimension to them.
Speaker 1:You've got church family as well, though. Oh, yes, right, right, that's right.
Speaker 2:So that relationship together there, that's true. So building up one another and investing in each other, yeah, but yeah, a lot of the other ones you know the light was kind of a key part of it that was shining a light.
Speaker 1:I mean that we have a big church now in Australia City on a Hill with the key name. We're about shining a light, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. So that's a key part of it. Yeah, to be honest, I'm stretching my mind to think of what the other ones were Lifeboat, oh. But to be honest, I'm stretching my mind to think of what the other ones were Lifeboat, oh. Thank you, yes, yeah, yeah. So that's an interesting one because, again, very much focused on that kind of missional image, that kind of we're in the midst of, and it was fun actually to sort of dig into the history of where does this language come from?
Speaker 1:I heard it from Andrew Heard, but you quoted DL Moody, right, that's where it seems to have actually had its birth from. Tell us that story.
Speaker 2:I mean DL Moody had a great evangelist.
Speaker 1:Actually some people listening won't even know who Andrew Heard or DL Moody are Right.
Speaker 2:I mean DL Moody, I mean Andrew Heard. Well, you can look at other Pastors Hearts episodes if you want to know who he is.
Speaker 1:He's been a regular guest.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah evangelist and preacher and, you know, led to the Moody Bible Institute, of course, in the US, but had a real focus on proclaiming the gospel and seeing people want in and so he spoke about the church is.
Speaker 2:You know, we are in a sea of lost people and so we as the church have a responsibility to pull people in so that they might be saved. It's a beautiful image. I don't think he was taking it from Scripture explicitly, if that makes sense. It's not. I mean there's all sorts of church. As you look back through church history you see all sorts of ways that the church has been thought of as a boat. In fact, even the shape of traditional churches was reflected on the shape of a boat. But I think DL Moody was really just seeing the needs of the people around him and saying we need to reach people in Now. As wonderful as that image is, and as much as it reflects a real heart for the gospel and a heart for the lost, it does have limited reach, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:It's not really in the Bible. No, it's not really that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's something that.
Speaker 1:But it does have power emotionally. I mean that I'm about trying to rescue people in our district you know and get as many people as possible and we want you to be involved in this that is great.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:But you talked about it having a limitation, because it tends to focus my attention on the immediate neighbourhood rather than, as a metaphor, giving me making disciples in all the world.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, that's right, that's right. So, as a metaphor, every metaphor has its limitations, right, and I think for that one it's a case of. It does emphasise the needs of the lost, but there's a sense in which a lifeboat can only reach those who are in the waters immediately around it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Rather than having that global vision, I suppose that are picked up in some of the other language and imagery that people use around the church.
Speaker 1:One of the lines you helped me think through is actually, sometimes our church's missional emphasis isn't actually due to a theological conviction or any of those things. It's actually just due to what's relationally become available. Do you want to speak to that?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think that's probably, and I mean my research was I guess you'd say it was social research right, I was looking at what are the human levers that God is using to bring about his purposes, and I was trying to attend to their theology.
Speaker 2:But what I saw was the power of these kind of social influences in shaping the way that people actually engage and that people often tend to follow in the footsteps of those models that they see around them and engage in the relationships that they have access to, and that naturally kind of shapes the way that they engage in the world. So I mean, I say it all the time at Sydney Missionary Bible College, where I teach, we have lots of people come and who are passionate about global mission and then, as I see them head out, it's like what are the things that motivate them? Well, often it's about relational links that they've formed with different people that provide the natural you know opportunities to go forward.
Speaker 1:Now, that's not always the case. Whatever the strategic reason might be to go there, I've got a friend who's over there, right right right Now, praise the Lord.
Speaker 2:There are some people that are happy to throw that aside, but sometimes they have connections with those models who have gone to the most needy strategic places, whatever, and that's been key influence. But I think, as learning beings as we are, as humans, we are very drawn to the concrete rather than the abstract, and so, while we'll have a conviction about the needs of the lost, the needs for the gospel to go out, the needs to see churches planted in every community, when we see that in concrete forms, when we see people doing that, then that's what helps us to go. I can do that, I want to be a part of that. That excites me or I see an opportunity there that I have the capacity to participate in, and that happens at the local end as much as it does people heading out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I want to drill into this chapter of yours participatory, delegatory and bifurcated mission. What did you mean by that?
Speaker 2:Look, one of the things that you have to do when you write a PhD is you have to Come up with some new terms.
Speaker 2:So what I was trying to. So there are categories that I developed that I saw coming out of the data. Really, I was trying to explain these different approaches to engaging locally and engaging at a distance. So I basically saw this matrix of churches, that there are churches who show different levels of participation in their local mission. So they're low levels of participation or rather than low levels. What I saw more often was that they're kind of like local mission's important, but someone else can do it, so they've got a delegating it to others. So it's like local mission is really important. We're going to delegate it to the SRE teachers in our schools. We're going to delegate it to the people doing prison ministry. We're going to delegate it to Mission Australia or to Anglicare or to an organisation out there, whereas other churches are much more like. This is something that we're engaged in, we're participating, we own it. It's something that we're engaged in, we're participating, we own it. It's something that we're doing, even if we're doing it through our partners.
Speaker 2:It's our mission and so that dynamic works, both in their local engagement and in their global engagement. Is it something that we're doing, it, or is it something that we're kind of delegating to someone else to do?
Speaker 1:Did you feel like the different mission organisations had different cultures on that issue?
Speaker 2:On that issue?
Speaker 1:yes, because I do, I mean one of the missionary organisations we engage in. Their people are always talking to us about you own us you know, and the other one, it feels much more like they own them, you know, and we're just kind of along for the ride, definitely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I mean that's interesting if you look into the history of kind of mission organisations over the last century. So this is, you know, something that we've seen is the way that mission organisations a lot of them kind of came out of frustration with the church not participating, not sending people out.
Speaker 2:They sort of became independent entities. Especially after the Second World War, we saw this proliferation of mission organisations that were sort of like well, the church isn't doing it, so we better. But as we got into the 1980s, particularly into the 1990s, we actually saw a shift in the way mission organisations were thinking about it and realizing actually, we do have, we have to acknowledge, no, we have to honor the role that local churches have, and so mission agencies started talking about themselves as agencies rather than organizations where an organization will take you in and use you to do something.
Speaker 2:An agency will help you to do something. They'll be your agent. So a mission agency is kind of an agent to the church to help them do mission. So there's churches sorry, mission organizations are different places along that spectrum. Some of them are much more like you give us your people and send some money and pray occasionally and we'll make sure they are fully implemented. And others are much more like we want you to do it and we'll help you do it as much as we can.
Speaker 1:How has this research changed what you teach at the Theological College and what do you hope this research that you've done will change what I do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's changed what I teach in a number of different ways. I think it's given me a greater appreciation of, I think, some of the blind spots that people might pick up from their churches, and so there's more.
Speaker 1:Keep going. What are the blind spots?
Speaker 2:Well, I think some of those things I was talking about before in terms of capacity, in terms of our responsibility in terms of the opportunity that participation in mission provides so. So there's um, there's a sense in which we want I want to help, I want to address some of those head-on. When students come in, kind of like you're coming from different churches that have different cultures and views about this, let's explore these ideas and I feel like I have a much clearer idea of where I need to be focusing the arrow.
Speaker 2:I guess, as we explore that, as we dig into the scriptures and think about it theologically and understand who we are and who the church is and what our role is in the world.
Speaker 2:But on the more practical side, it's really helped me to see that the emphasis is much more on building strong relational networks rather than building strong processes and policies. Now, that's part of it. You can't neglect that. And certainly I found some really interesting things in terms of what helps a church to engage. But I'm telling my students at SMBC, if you're going to be in church ministry, then you always need to be thinking how am I connecting my church to people who are participating in God's mission beyond my local community? Because I think it gives a bigger vision for what God's doing and also a piece I wrote recently for the SMBC blog looks at really that these mission partners are a resource for the church, that they have expertise and insights and they can teach us about contextualisation, about communicating the gospel, about how to see churches flourish and multiply. So let's engage with them. Let them inspire and equip and strengthen our church as much as we support and partner with them.
Speaker 1:I forgot. I didn't ask you the word mission. What's the history of that word Wow?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's a big question. Look, the word mission comes from Latin. Missio was essentially. It literally means to send. It's really the we've turned it into an English word, but it's actually the word apostle apostolic, so to send in the Greek, and so we've applied it to all sorts of things. Originally it was only applied to the sending of the sun and the spirit. That's where Missio was first talked about in that.
Speaker 1:Trinitarian concept. Really that? John 14, 26?
Speaker 2:Right, yeah yeah, when the theologians were reflecting on that, they used this Missio language but then as particularly with the Jesuits and those sorts of things started using it.
Speaker 2:Now there's some people who are very unhappy with the language of mission because they feel like it has too much colonial baggage. There's a book recently called Transcending Mission that we shouldn't use the language at all. But essentially, the way I understand it is, it's a reflection of God's desire to see all peoples exposed to the good news of the gospel, to have opportunity to respond to that and to align their lives with it. So if we're participating in mission, we can do that in our local community. There are lots of people here who haven't had significant exposure, but I also have a firm conviction that when we look at the world as a whole, there's much greater need in other parts of the world. It was interesting at the Lausanne Congress recently, which I know you had a conversation about, but they talk there about the fact that if every single Christian spoke to everyone that they know about the gospel, there'd still be 3 billion people in the world who wouldn't hear the gospel.
Speaker 2:There's a sense in which the church has limited reach in many parts of the world, and so if we're serious about seeing the gospel go to all peoples, then we have to keep attending to the fact that gospel resources are not equally distributed around the world, and we do have a responsibility, I believe, to be doing what we can to see it reach those less engaged, less reached people.
Speaker 1:There's more to talk about. We'll look forward to getting you back, sure, but Tim Silberman has been my guest. He's a lecturer in cross-cultural mission at Sydney Missionary and Bible College and he's just finished his PhD Engaging Neighbours and Nations a fascinating expose on the way churches work in regards to mission. My name is Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Art and we'll look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
