Apr. - Jun. 2012
Mission Truth For The World
Taking Souls from Hearing to Heaven
The Faulty Measure of Success in Mission Work by Phillip Vanwinkle The writing teacher in elementary school was frustrated with her student. We will call that student “Bill.” The teacher was constantly sending home assignments to be done; she would assign papers for Bill. Bill couldn’t understand why the marks on the papers were constantly bad. His parents were also confused and frustrated as to why his papers weren’t getting higher scores. His paper on John F. Kennedy was 20 pages long. His paper on Malcolm X was 18 pages long, and his writing piece on Unicorns turned out to be 25 pages long. The report card came, and sure enough, Bill got very poor grades in writing class. He was frustrated, his parents were frustrated, and soon little Bill wanted to quit. He just didn’t understand why he was not succeeding, when his papers were by far the longest in the class. At the parent conference a few weeks later, the answer was revealed. An exasperated teacher explained: “Yes! Bill’s papers are long. But, there is no substance to any of them. They are done on time, they are presented on nice paper, and the penmanship is quite nice, but there is absolutely no substance to what is inside the papers.” She went on to explain, “He is not being judged by how long the paper is. He is not being graded on how beautiful his handwriting is. He is being graded by the substance of the paper, by what the paper actually says.” And once that was established, the frustrations were over. Now, apply that principle to success. When people have a faulty view of success, then no matter how hard they try, they will live in constant frustration. Such is the case with many missionaries today. Many in the church, and even some missionaries, are being held up to a faulty standard. Mission work is seen as successful if the missionary has baptized “x” amount of people. But, does God view success the same as man does? If a person were to ask, “Which is more important - for a missionary to baptize 20 people who, in a year’s time, 18 of them will be back in the world? Or, is it more important for a missionary to preach to the saved, to water and to cultivate the church, so that it can grow in faith, mature and then it can then reach out to its community?” What would your answer be?