Send your best: training and testing

Which is to say the missionaries we send must be able to teach. Or as Paul puts it in Titus 1, they must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught so that they are able to give instruction and sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. Because you see, my friends, the fact is that modern missions is a cesspool of destructive theology and bad ecclesiology.

Missionaries must be able to teach and refute (Titus 1:9).

When Paul wanted to go to the nations, in the letter to the Romans, his missions manifesto, he begins with 11 chapters of doctrine. So, friends when you send missionaries to the field send them as those who are equipped with sound hermeneutics and able to do exegesis.

Paul opened his missions manifesto with eleven chapters of doctrine.

Brothers and sisters, if you're going to send missionaries to live among the lost in the nations, please send those who have lived among you faithfully, Whom you've taken the time to get to know. in whom you have observed the character qualifications of an elder or a deacon as laid out in God's word. If you're sending a man to be the primary church planter on the mission field, make sure he meets the character qualifications laid out in 1 Timothy 3:1-7.

Send those whose character you have observed for years.

Robertson and Bennett say, we're concerned that the world has higher standards for doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, and accountants than many churches do for missionaries. Missionaries are sometimes sent without any qualification except for their willingness to go and ability to fundraise, end quote. I would add churches tend to be a lot more picky and careful about the pastors that they get for themselves than the missionaries that they send to others.

Churches are pickier about their own pastors than about the missionaries they send.

Yeah, I think before missionary goes to the field and that vetting process, the church really needs to know the character of the guy. We have churches all the time that are ambivalent about their folks come down the Radius because he's not the Apostle Paul and she's not the Virgin Mary. Well, you're not going to find those guys as missionary candidates that they're gone. But, yeah, to get to know your people, warts and all. Do they have potential?

Brad Buser: know your people's character, warts and all, before they go.

Right. You're going to be agreed. And then inevitably the passion fades, you know. And so, but that's the standard we hold. If you can't be an effective church member first, right, and then we progress. And so I think there's all kinds of things you can do to ignite passion and give opportunity. And they'll see God in a different context, worshipped in a different language. But it'll always come back to, can you be a faithful church member?

Eric Burns: the first question is whether they are faithful church members.

That's how the Holy Spirit worked. They sent their best. They sent men who were trained. They sent men who had proven themselves. They sent men that they could hardly imagine losing, I'm sure. And yet they sent them anyway.

Antioch sent its very best: trained and proven.

Why should we give our life for Christ's church here and among the people in every language around the globe? Because Christ's church reflects Christ's character and so brings him glory. The stakes literally could not be higher. So, mistakes which fundamentally lose the regenerate nature of the church and defeat they by losing the regenerate nature of the church defeat the church's entire reason for being.

Your Sunday service and membership are the main training any missionary gets.

Those who are working diligently at home. This term, fellow worker, was a favorite term of the Apostle Paul. He used it for Priscilla and Aquila, Timothy, Titus, Clement, Philemon. Listen, God will not dust off lazy antique Christians at home and send them overseas in the missions. We need workers and he calls him a fellow worker and too many churches send missionaries overseas that they would never want as elders at home.

Too many churches send people they would never want as elders.

Second, seminaries. Now, I'm a proponent of well-educated missionaries. They ought to be able to teach. Yes, give them a heavy dose of systematic theology and hermeneutics and homiletics, languages and church history, yes. But let us be careful that we do not swing to the other side.

Train them well, but don't let education kill the dream.