The Largest New Factor in Mission Strategy in the 21st Century:

New global partnerships for world mission.

Ralph D. Winter
Asia Missions Association, Moscow, September, 2003

This is no time to talk about the fine points of mission strategy. This is a global conference. It is not something that occurs every year. I want to address not several factors in the future but what I see to be the largest new factor in 21st Century missions .

Earlier New Factors

In past history there have been other “major factors” in mission strategy. Unfortunately in most of those cases, we did not see them clearly until it was already too late to maximize our strategies in their light. I will give some examples from the past so that we can be more alert to new factors in the present.

1. The William Carey factor . Almost single handedly William Carey broke down all kinds of silly theologies which seemed to oppose the thought of sending missionaries. He went and did it. Protestantism finally became aware of the Great Commission. But Protestants had been blind to missions for over two hundred years. Their coveted Reformed theology did not help them.

2. The Hudson Taylor factor . Taylor almost single handedly broke down the idea that we cannot penetrate inland, and with confidence seek to evangelize whole countries . Seventy years after Carey's Enquiry was published token missions, touching only coastlands, was all Protestants could conceive.

3. The Archbishop William Temple factor . He is the one who tore back the curtain so that all could see the existence and vitality of the non-western church movements. He spoke of a global church as “the great new fact of our time.” Most mission supporters back home simply could not believe that a new force had been born in the mission lands.

4. The Townsend/McGavran factor . Townsend focused our attention upon geographically distributed tribal societies. McGavran pointed out sociologically isolated people groups. These men tore back the curtain on the existence of thousands of new places to go and new peoples to be reached, who formerly were by-passed. Together these two men took cultural identity seriously. For many years missions talked about reaching a whole country once a church movement existed within any one of the ethnic spheres of that country. Some missions prided themselves on having missionaries in every “country” being blind to the divergent peoples within those countries.

5. The non-Western mission factor . David Cho in Korea, perhaps more than any other person, helped to tear back the curtain on the vital existence of mission agencies being born in the former mission lands. For many people this was an entirely new phenomenon. We still have much to learn from this sturdy emerging reality. In my opinion, the general failure of Western missions, historically, to plant mission societies not merely churches is the largest and most serious strategic error Western missionaries ever committed.

6. The “Churchless Christianity” factor . This, factor, now, is the thesis of this paper. This factor is, to me, the largest new factor in 21st century missions. Very few understand it. It is not yet taken seriously. To some it may come as a huge, disturbing surprise. To others it may constitute the final evidence of the power of the Bible over all other strategies of mission. In any case it radically changes our understanding of the kingdom of God and the work of God on earth in regard to the role of what we call Christianity.

The Big New Factor Today

“Churchless Christianity,” is the title of a book compiled by a Bible-believing Missouri-Synod Lutheran missionary and theology professor. Thus, when I speak of C hurchless Christianity I am referring to that book. The book contains the results of a scientific survey of the largest city in Southern India, Madras it was called, and today Chennai. It gives the evidence that masses of Hindus have a high regard for Jesus Christ, and about 25% of that city of millions of people have given up their idols and are daily Bible-reading followers of Christ. The surprise is that the majority of these followers of Christ study the Bible and worship at the home level, continue to associate within the Hindu social sphere, and do not routinely associate with the somewhat “western” Christian churches. That is why the book is entitled Churchless Christianity.

In my perspective it would be more accurate to speak of “Christianity-less churches.” Why? Because we are talking about fervent, Bible-believers who at least meet in “house churches,” even in they do not normally meet in exisiting “Christian churches.” This fact is itself very reminiscent of the New Testament worshipping households, such as that of Cornelius, Lydia, Crispus.

Moreover, this is not a tiny, isolated phenomenon. We are talking about millions of believers who neither call themselves Christians and nor are called Christians by their Hindu neighbors.

This subject which I have labeled the “Churchless Christianity Factor” is, however, little recognized. I myself have long been unaware of it. It is so little understood that we may need to describe it more fully before commenting on it from a viewpoint of mission strategy—that is, what we can or cannot do about it.

What It Is

Note well that a cautious, Bible-believing Missouri-Synod Lutheran seminary professor brought this factor into limited prominence when he made a professional survey of that great South India city of Madras (Chennai) in the 1980s. His survey revealed millions of fervent, daily Bible-reading followers of Jesus Christ who continued to identify with Hindu and Muslim families, but who lived largely in total isolation from the formal Christian movement in India. While this was surprising, disturbing, and perplexing, and he even wrote a book about it, it did not attract much attention for ten to twenty years.

You can imagine reactions such as “Then, are the traditional Christian movements in India wrong?” “Do all Hindus and Muslims have to go this route”? The published book describing this careful survey,entitled, Churchless Christianity , has a somewhat misleading title as I have pointed out.

Is This Only a Phenomenon of India?

In regard to missions in other parts of the world, this one survey of this one large city in India raises insistently the more general question, “Can believers in Jesus Christ in other countries continue as part of a cultural tradition which is distinctly different from the Western Christian tradition?” Many of us might believe this could happen in theory and yet recoil emotionally at its appearance and existence in real life.

In other words, it raises an even more significant question for mission strategy. Is this seeming “breakaway” movement something that is happening only in South India or are there parallels in Africa and Asia in general? How would we find out? What book might we consult?

Here the answer is swift in coming. The World Christian Encyclopedia reports 52 million Bible believers in Africa and 14 to 24 million believers in India who are outside of the formal Christian movement. Furthermore, we also know that there are from 50 to 70 million Chinese followers of Christ who are clearly additional and outside of the 15 million Chinese believers within the formal Christian church movement in China today.

These are not small numbers! How do they compare to the number of Christians in these various countries? Or, more accurately, how do these numbers compare to the number of sincere, Bible-believers who are formally Christians in the same countries? (Many within the Christian sphere are quite nominal.)

In actuality, the astounding and perhaps alarming fact is that there may now exist in the non-western world as many (or even more) truly devout believers in the Bible and Jesus Christ who are outside of formal, Western-related Christianity as there aretruly devout believers within it.

Curiously, mission leaders have talked about “contextualization” or “indigenization” for many years, under the assumption that we could develop, as it were, new “clothing” for the Western church to make it more acceptable to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.

But amazingly it has not until recently dawned on us that God may have a different strategy altogether. He has been with us as we planted identifiable Christianity, but He now seems, in addition, to be bringing forth large movements entirely from within these huge non-western cultural traditions.

Alert mission observers have already seen some evidence of these new movements. But they may have ignored them as “breakaway heresies” rather than understood them in large part as sincere responses to the Bible.

What Is Our Response?

What will be, what should be, the mission response to this major new factor? Shall we call it “unofficial Christianity” and just live with it? Shall we drop the term Christianity altogether and start counting not Christians but Bible believers?

We need to pause and think clearly. Christianity is not a Biblical term. Even the word Christian which is in the Bible only three times is apparently a “sneer” word employed by outsiders and not a word the New Testament believers called themselves. That is, NT believers were in some cases, by others, called Christians , but apparently no one in the NT ever called himself a Christian. When Agrippa asked Paul if he were trying to make him into a Christian Paul did not make any use of the word.

My personal perspective is that we recognize again is that our mission is simply the Biblical faith. We preach Christ not Christianity. In this regard I see a parallel to the New Testament Biblical faith escaping the Jewish cultural tradition and being born from within the Greek culture. I see this phenomenon in the book of Acts not as a unique event but as a major example of a process that must happen over and over again as missionaries cross into new cultures.

We see in the NT the consternation of Jewish followers of Christ viewing the Greek followers of Christ as somehow inferior. And the Greek believers apparently also looked down on Jewish believers—or Paul would not have defended them in Romans 14.

Not only do we see the Greek believers scoffing at the Jewish wrappings. We see earnest Jewish followers of Christ, the “Judaizers,” insistently seeking to make the Greek followers more Jewish. Do we today sometimes think like the Judaizers? Do we seek to make Muslim and Hindu followers of Christ more “Christian,” by urging them to call themselves Christian? Or, by following certain Western Christian customs?

Is This Radical Contextualization?

What we are talking about goes beyond ordinary “contextualization.” Some have called it “Radical contextualization.” What we call this phenomenon is not the point. It is really not a new phenomenon. Christianity itself is the result of radical contextualization.

When the Gospel moved beyond the Jewish cradle in which it was born it not only took on Greek clothing it carried within it the same Biblical demands of heart faith. When later it was taken up by Latin-speaking people it outwardly changed again, so much that eventually the Greek church and the Latin church movements went separate ways. Still later as Biblical faith penetrated the Teutonic forests of middle Europe, it divested itself of a good deal of the Latin tradition and now reappeared as a German, Lutheran, tradition. About the same time it broke away as an English phenomenon. These new traditions were much more than a change of language.

The Biblical faith became at an early point a Celtic phenomenon, and there was antagonism for a long time between Roman and Celtic forms of faith. A bit later than the Celtic but before the Lutheran we see the Biblical faith emerge within the Arabic tradition in the form of Islam, which is only partially Biblical.

Many ancient observers felt that Islam was simply an Arabic form of Christianity. But, the Christianity to which Muhammed was exposed was very weak and defective. It possessed only parts of the Bible, and in particular it had a defective understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. Muhammed was apparently able to evaluate the defective trinity of the Christians he knew and rejected it just as we today reject such a misunderstanding.

Meanwhile Christianity for many centuries was tied in with local governments which could not allow social diversity and so Christians of one sort even tried to exterminate Christians of another sort, and certainly opposed the followers of Islam. Instead of sharing the Bible and studying it together they simply tried to remove the cultural diversity through persecution and even genocide. In general, Christians have actually been more intolerant than Muslims. This is the view of Dr. Dudley Woodberry at Fuller Seminary.

Today, in America, we face a rapidly growing movement which has a partially Biblical faith, called Mormonism. Mormons believe the whole Bible, but like Islam, they have their own special prophet and additional book, not the Qur'an but the Book of Mormon.

Early on, American Christians killed many Mormons, tried to covert them, and drove them out of the eastern part of the country. But they have continued to grow into a large movement today. Many of them as in all streams of Christianity, are purely cultural in adherence. Many of them are very sincere and godly people. And, they have retained a concept of the Christian family which in many ways is superior to general American family perspectives.

Now, the practical question that arises no matter what kind of a person we are dealing with—whether Presbyterian, Mormon, or Muslim—is do they hunger and seek after righteousness? Do they in their hearts seek to know God and do His will. If they are Catholic, or Muslim, or Lutheran or Hindu or Baptist, do we feel they must leave their own people and join ours and call themselves by our name, whether Presbyterian or Anglican or Evangelical or just Christian?

In other words, is it our mission to insist on a change of name and a change of clothing? Isn't the Bible, isn't Jesus, God's Son, more important to them than what they call themselves or how they worship?

In this regard are we afraid that our supporters, our donors are forcing us to report on how many “Christians” or “Baptists” we have created, or how many church buildings we have brought into being that look like our own church buildings?

What Can We Do?

One thing we can try to do. We can go humbly to these groups and try to help them understand the Bible more clearly without assuming they will accept our form of Christianity when they read the Bible.

Furthermore, we can rejoice that there are millions outside the formal Christian tradition who are hungering and thirsting after righteousness and who have in their hands the Bible. Isn't that better than to add more millions who may call themselves Christians but who do not pay much attention to the Bible and who can hardly be described as “hungering and thirsting after righteousness?”