Rethinking "Missionaries": An Introduction

This blog series is one that has been stewing for a while, but a few recent developments sparked off a memory of an incident from last year... Which I'm hoping will help set the framework for why this is a necessary conversation for the time we live in.

In the final unit I did with the children's ministry I was previously on staff at, we did a series on what it means to be a missionary. On of the first discussions we had was what is a missionary, and so I asked the kids if they knew anyone who were missionaries. It took them a little while, but they finally figured out that both our senior pastor and I were missionaries, as were all the other previous pastoral staff at the church.

The conversation took off in a different tangent when one of the kids suddenly remembered that their parents had served a year in the US on short-term missions, which, under the definition we were using ("people who go to a different culture to tell them about Jesus"), meant that their parents were missionaries too.

And then it took another interesting twist when they suddenly named all the other expats in our church community. They came from a different culture, and they love Jesus. And once in a while, some of them take a rotation with kids' church. Are they missionaries too?

How do we draw that distinction for kids?

And then my mind went back a little further to a conversation I had with one of the parents at that same church earlier in the year. We had somehow started talking about missionaries, and I said something about, "I don't really see myself as a missionary" (because there are negative connotations to the term "missionary" -- Bible bashers, colonialists etc). To which this parent responded with, "Well, I don't really see you as a missionary either because you just live here with us".

But by the definition used with the kids that missionaries were people who go to a different culture to tell people about Jesus, I would be considered a missionary. Except not in that parent's perspective.


Well, this is the initial opening of this conversation. In the next few posts, I'm hoping to sort out the various pieces in my brain about what the term "missionary" means in this age of increasing globalisation.

Watch this space and feel free to jump in the conversation.