A Far Green Country

The following is an excerpt posted with permission from the author, Dr. Greg Wilton. Please pray for him and his family and they are commissioned today to serve as missionaries in Southeast Asia. I heartily agree with the whole quote from Dr. Wilton, and appreciate the grace he pushes back with when making the case for reclaiming the term "missionary."

Those with the perspective that every Christian is a missionary are trying to help all Christians see that God’s mission is for all of God’s people. When you see the point behind the point, it not only makes sense, but it is also very helpful for Christian living and practice.

On the other hand, some disagree with the notion that all Christians are missionaries. For instance, Stephen J. Strauss and Craig Ott believe McLaren’s statement and subsequent belief distorts the specific calling on some Christians to devote their lives to full-time, cross-cultural witness:

If we nevertheless choose to call every Christian a missionary, then we will need to create a new term for the Christian who is specially called, gifted, and commissioned for cross-cultural mission. Otherwise, this unique, essential, and divinely appointed role is at risk of being lost altogether. (2010, 225) 

Strauss and Ott believe that all Christians are called to live on mission for God, but some are called to mission in a specific way. They believe the word “missionary” was created to help define a particular group of Christian men and women who were called to fill a particular kind of mission. They suggest new terms to replace what the word should mean, but I believe the word must not be replaced, but rather reclaimed.

- Dr. Greg Wilton @gregwilton

This week I've been beset by some slow, rolling cold or sinus or allergy thing that no over-the-counter medicine seems able to cure. I was able to function and operate and plow through most days, but everyday by 3pm, I was exhausted.

As Wednesday night rolled around, I was responsible for teaching on prayer and biblical repentance out of Psalm 51. That morning I arranged things where half the class I was "up front," but the second half of class was a time to break up into small groups and look over Psalm 51 together to reflect on that beautiful, hope-filled passage. It gave us some time to be in the Word more intimately as men and women (groups broke up by gender) as well as kept me from passing out from teaching for over an hour.

As we probed, studied, read, reflected on, and discussed the weight and glory of Psalm 51, my missions mind kicked into overdrive.

For almost four years I never had the opportunity to do what was so accessible to me at that moment. While I was a missionary in Japan, I never got together with another believer who spoke my mother tongue to study and reflect on a passage from the Bible. Our time together on Wednesday night was so rich, and even being just over a year removed from Japan, I was almost acclimated enough to US church life again that I took it for granted.

But that nagging missions bug I have, the one that there is no cure for, the one that has been given to me by God, out-dueled my flesh and won the day.

We don't even know what we don't know. We have no idea how blessed we are that we can go to our church library, or to a computer, and within seconds or a couple of days, have our choice of hundreds of resources to better equip us for whatever we are struggling with. Want to know how to be a better parent? Want to know what the Bible says about raising teens? Want to learn more about the Trinity? Want to figure out how to be a more godly steward of your money? Want to preach better? Want to know how you can fight depression in truth with the power of prayer, the Word, and the Spirit?

All you have to do is spend a few seconds and you can download or purchase resources - books, CD's, mp3's, sermons, journals, go to friends, pastors, trained professionals, experienced believers, and there's a wealth of equipping and insight and resources to help you fight for faith.

Even during my time in Japan, a modern country with high speed internet, getting my hands on a helpful resource in English was extremely costly and usually involved me putting out some family members to get them here. After I received a Kindle as a gift, it did become much easier to get possession of some tools that could help me grow.

But even in a place like that, even with a technological tool like a Kindle, it cannot replace for you what community with the body centered around the Word can do for you. This Wednesday night I was challenged, convicted, encouraged, amazed, saw anew God's glorious character in a refreshing way, and felt the love and camaraderie that only the saints of God share during that 45 or so minutes with my brothers in Christ.

Next time you are having a good day - think of those believers who are minorities in their cultures, think of those missionaries who have voluntarily forsaken those relationships and resources, and pray for them. Next time you're having a bad day, remember those same believers and missionaries, and think what it must be like for them to have a "bad day" and not be able to be surrounded by resources and the body of Christ and corporate worship the way you are.

When you're healthy, think of the advanced medicine and patient care and facilities and technology we have to care for us. And think how scary it would be, even if all those things were in place, to not understand what your doctors were saying to you because you were learning the language. Or you knew a lot of the language but not the medical terms. Think what it would be like if you had both poor medical care, run down facilities, and you did not know the language or understand what was wrong. Pray for missionaries and believers in areas where sickness is a serious life issue, not just a hindrance to their plans for the week.

Next time you're looking for help with something, and you download a resource at the touch of a button, go to your mailbox and hungrily pour over it, benefit from a mature brother or sister's advice to you, or find the answer sitting under the sermon of your faithful pastor, pray for believers across the nations and missionaries among them who are parched for the very gift you just enjoyed.

We're so ignorant that we don't even know what we don't know. Next time it's Wednesday night or Sunday morning or evening, or your small group meets, don't act like that's an optional add-on to your life. Understand what a precious gift it is that you are so surrounded by the Word and God's people to the degree that you have actually come to the point of taking it for granted! What a loving God that He would so saturate your life with spiritual riches that you would think of diamonds as dirt.

If we're not going, the least we could do is give and truly pray for the nations and those serving among them. And if we're staying, the least we could do is live in gratitude at the spiritual treasure of people and resources He has given us to help us grow into maturity.

If you've read this far, now you know what you didn't know before. One way you could do something about it - send a missionary a Kindle or an iPad along with gift certificates from Amazon throughout the year to make sure that they at least have some access to self feed themselves while they're away from church and home. I'm serious. Do it! Because now you know!

by Robert Frost

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

-----------------------------------------------------

I know I'm a broken record always yapping about Japan, but you can't tell me that this poem doesn't seem like it was written about the Great Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of 3/11/11. Uncanny. It almost feels like Frost was prophesying about this event (I'm well aware he wasn't). Chilling. God save Japan! 

Andy Crouch (or his headline writer) coined the catchy term “metro-evangelicals” to describe the growing urban resurgence within American evangelicalism. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Crouch explains that pastors like Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll see cities as the beachhead of a new evangelization. Crouch’s magazine, Christianity Today, has launched an extensive series on this work of God (This is Our City).


My first two reactions are profound rejoicing at the sending of workers into the harvest and profound prayer that these efforts may bear much fruit. To all who are called there (like my two siblings in Manhattan) the great opportunity and great difficulty should always occasion our concern and support.

Yet there is a timbre amidst all of this city-centrism that troubles me.

Maybe this is because the metro-evangelicals are not counter-cultural, but rather a baptized version of New Urbanism. In a culture that idolizes living in a loft in a gentrifying art district, a church planter is not exactly bearing a cross in deciding to “rough it” under such conditions.


Maybe it is that some of its advocates tell a story that previous generations fearfully abdicated the dirty, sinful cities. Thus, all this new “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” generation needs do is show up and things will get better. It’s worth noting that this mythical Evangelical abandonment never really happened and we should be more careful at imputing impure motives to previous generations of believers.

Or maybe the metro-evangelicals’ claims of self-importance are so hyperbolic that they insult the gospel work being done in less densely populated zipcodes. For example, some urbanist church planters claim that cultural transformation emanates exclusively from cities, as Mark Driscoll writes:

[C]ities are of greater strategic importance because they are upstream where culture is made and changed, yet most Christians today are downstream and subsequently are incapable of effecting cultural transformation. (Vintage Church, p. 298)

Incapable. Incapable? I do not think that word means what you think it means. /Inigo_Montoya_voice



I did my time in the Big Apple, but now reside in a thriving metropolis of 8,305. Yet I live alongside a whole lot of faithful Christians who sacrificially love their neighbors, share the gospel, build civil society and raise their families in the fear and admonition of the Lord. It may take some time, but I would wager that these folks will have some kind of transformative impact on the culture when all is said and done.

Remember the story of Abraham and Lot. When they parted ways over business squabbles, Lot chose to pitch his tent near the affluent big city while Abraham sojourned in wilderness isolation. Yet which of them ended up displaying a greater capacity for cultural transformation?

Metro-Evangelicals have developed a kind of “theology of the city” that roots city-centric strategy in biblical proof-texts. Keller’s message, as quoted by Couch, is typical:

“You go to the city to reach the culture,” Mr. Keller tells his congregation. This, he explains, is as old as religion itself, and points to what New Testament scholar Wayne Meeks called “the first urban Christians”—the first-century churches founded in provincial cities all over the Roman world, and very quickly in Rome itself.

Generalizing from Paul’s missionary strategies as recorded in the Book of Acts—hopping from one major city to the next throughout the Roman empire; planting churches all along the way—Metro-Evangelicals argue that our evangelistic strategy must also prioritize cities. Keller has explained that we should do so because “urbanites are much more open to radically new ideas—like the gospel!” Once ideas catch in the urban center, say the metro-evangelicals, they inevitably filter our to the surrounding region.

Of course, God blessed Paul’s urban strategy to build the church, but I’m not sure metro-evangelicals are gathering the right lesson from this history. It is true that Paul avoided the countryside for the most part, but not because he expected to find more open-minded folks in the cities. ‘Cause that isn’t what he found. In Ephesus, for example, some of these purportedly-open-to-new-things types tried to kill him.

One alternative explanation for why Paul chose cities is the locus of diaspora Jews gathered in synagogue worship there. Luke records that Paul always started his ministries in the synagogues where the Gospel message made the most sense. After all, the Jews and pious Gentiles gathered there were already familiar with the one true God and understood Biblical categories like sin and Messiah. Only after reasoning with the Jews, would Paul proceed to preach out in the marketplace as well.

So, if we are to draw missiological lessons from Paul, we could just as well say today’s Christians should first preach the gospel in the heart of the religious subculture before they move out into the mainstream. By analogy, the way we could follow Paul’s model would be to first go into the culturally Evangelical south and the culturally Catholic Hispanic communities before proceeding on to the comparatively unprepared big cities.

All of this may seem to be a pretty counter-intuitive marketing strategy, but we serve a God who has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

- by Kieth Miller at MereOrthodoxy.com

Midnight, Christians, it is the solemn hour,

When God as man descended unto us

To erase the stain of original sin

And to end the wrath of His Father.

The entire world thrills with hope

On this night that gives it a Savior.

People kneel down, wait for your deliverance.

Christmas, Christmas, here is the Redeemer,

Christmas, Christmas, here is the Redeemer!

May the ardent light of our Faith

Guide us all to the cradle of the infant,

As in ancient times a brilliant star

Guided the Oriental kings there.

The King of Kings was born in a humble manger;

O mighty ones of today, proud of your greatness,

It is to your pride that God preaches.

Bow your heads before the Redeemer!

Bow your heads before the Redeemer!

The Redeemer has broken every bond:

The Earth is free, and Heaven is open.

He sees a brother where there was only a slave,

Love unites those that iron had chained.

Who will tell Him of our gratitude,

For all of us He is born, He suffers and dies.

People stand up! Sing of your deliverance,

Christmas, Christmas, sing of the Redeemer,

Christmas, Christmas, sing of the Redeemer!

from Sovereign Grace Music:

VERSE 1
Now why this fear and unbelief?
Has not the Father put to grief
His spotless Son for us?
And will the righteous Judge of men
Condemn me for that debt of sin
Now canceled at the cross?

CHORUS
Jesus, all my trust is in Your blood
Jesus, You’ve rescued us
Through Your great love

VERSE 2
Complete atonement You have made
And by Your death have fully paid
The debt Your people owed
No wrath remains for us to face
We’re sheltered by Your saving grace
And sprinkled with Your blood

BRIDGE
How sweet the sound of saving grace
How sweet the sound of saving grace
Christ died for me

VERSE 3
Be still my soul and know this peace
The merits of your great high priest
Have bought your liberty
Rely then on His precious blood
Don’t fear your banishment from God
Since Jesus sets you free

Brilliant.