COURAGE IN LIGHT OF THE BIG PICTURE A lesson from Missional Failure ELLE RAE BRYCE Everyone has a different image that pops into their head when they hear the word ‘missionary’. For me, that picture often looks like a hardy, weathered person, dusty from the toil of travelling to some distant village, having overcome all manner of physical and spiritual danger to share the gospel. But what if you’re not quite as adventurous as that? What if the idea of jumping on a plane and landing in a foreign land fills you with dread? What if you feel like you would so easily fail in the face of all the unfamiliar challenges of a new context? I sometimes wonder at my own capacity to deal with the unique challenges and stresses of ministry life. In these moments I have found it helpful to reflect on the fact that mission is never about me. The biblical picture of mission is so much bigger. There are many passages I could point to in the Bible which reveal this to us, not to mention the entire scope of biblical
theological narrative, in which God has always been the one to reach into the world and raise up for himself people to trust and obey him. This is all the more evident in the reality of the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself to humbly die on a cross (Phil 2:6-8). The bigger reality of mission is that it began before I was born, even before the foundations of the world were created (Eph 1:3-10). And it will continue unceasingly after I die, until the end of time as we know it, when a great multitude of people from all tribes and nations are gathered up at the throne of God (Rev 7:9-10). One story which helps ground these reflections for me is that of Dr. Karl Gutzlaff, who was a German medical missionary and evangelist to China in the mid-19th century. He made seven missionary journeys by boat around the Chinese coast, adopting local attire and language to serve the people. He hired about 130 local converts to help him in the task of evangelism, giving them gospel tracts to distribute and sending them inland to where he could not go himself. These workers reported multitudes of converts, proclaiming that China was indeed ripe for the harvest. But disaster struck when it eventually came to light that an overwhelming percentage of Gutzlaff’s workers were thieving from him, reselling the tracts he provided back to him via the printers and fabricating their reports of inland conversions. Gutzlaff was absolutely crushed by this shocking news and died soon after its revelation, his spirit and body withered. He died believing that all his missionary efforts were a complete failure. However, he never knew that as he strained to convert and train believers in China, a young English man named James Hudson Taylor was studying his missionary efforts via published reports in a missionary magazine, The Chinese and General Missionary Gleaner. This young man was deeply inspired by the missional creativity of Gutzlaff, having developed a heart for China
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FIG HT T HE GOOD FIGHT
