Developing a Strategy for Missions (Encountering Mission)

A Biblical, Historical, and Cultural Introduction

J. D. Payne, John Mark Terry

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780801039539
• eBook ISBN: 9781441244826
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In this addition to the highly acclaimed Encountering Mission series, two leading missionary scholars offer an up-to-date discussion of missionary strategy that is designed for a global audience. The authors focus on the biblical, missiological, historical, cultural, and practical issues that inform and guide the development of an effective missions strategy. The book includes all the features that have made other series volumes useful classroom tools, such as figures, sidebars, and case studies. Students of global or domestic mission work and mission practitioners will value this new resource.

1

Strategy Defined

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone, thinking that you knew what the person was talking about when you realized that, even though you were both using the same terminology, your definitions differed? Such situations are frustrating and sometimes even embarrassing. For that reason, rather than assuming that you already know the definitions we have in mind, we begin with a chapter that focuses on the question, “What is strategy?” In order to answer this question, we will define important foundational concepts and ground the discussion by touching on several important historical matters.

The notion of strategy has its roots in the fields of military science and marketing. An internet or library catalog search using the word strategy is likely to yield a list of resources related to warfare and how to succeed in the corporate world. While such fields do not directly relate to the missionary labors of the church, as will be noted, these fields still offer some helpful insights for understanding missionary strategy.

One of the earliest writings on the topic of strategy was specifically related to military tactics. The Art of War, written in China by Sun Tzu, is believed to have been written 2,500 years ago. Over the centuries the notion of strategy became coupled to warfare. It is not uncommon to find definitions of strategy related to knowing how to take the offensive against an enemy or to defend against an enemy’s incursion on the battlefield. While a wealth of information exists about military strategy, we are not addressing strategy from this perspective. Granted, being engaged in missionary activity is a spiritual battle, but we war not against flesh and blood but “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12). And, yes, since all truth is God’s truth wherever it can be found, we can learn from military strategy.

The second major area related to strategy is that of the business world. While the realm of business has its own way of conceptualizing and operationalizing strategy, its foundations are never far removed from military science. For example, Richard Luecke notes this historic connection: “Businesspeople have always liked military analogies, so it is not surprising that they have embraced the notion of strategy. They too began to think of strategy as a plan for controlling and utilizing their resources (human, physical, and financial) with the goal of promoting and securing their vital interests” (2005, xii).

While the corporate world did not begin writing books on this topic until 1971 with the publication of Kenneth Andrews’s The Concept of Corporate Strategy, today a plethora of books exist on marketing strategy (Luecke 2005, xii). As I (J. D.) write this chapter, in my study are titles such as Choosing the Future: The Power of Strategic Thinking (Wells 1998); Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life (Dixit and Nalebuff 1993); Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t (Collins 2001); Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Kim and Mauborgne 2005); and Strategy: Create and Implement the Best Strategy for Your Business (Harvard Business School 2005), just to mention a few. As with military science, while there are certain truths found in the world of business strategy that the church can take captive for the sake of kingdom advancement, that is not our focus.

The church is not selling a product, marketing a commodity, or launching a new service for the consumer. The church is not in competition or at war with another church, for there is only one church. The church is not a corporation but rather a family. It is not a nonprofit organization but a body of priests on mission until Jesus returns.

Over the past thirty years, within American evangelical circles, the church has been guilty of embracing the world of corporate America and drinking too deeply from the well of business strategy. We have marketed worship services, children’s programs, Bible studies, and sermons—just like businesses do in promoting their jeans, soft drinks, or hamburgers. While we reference writers whose primary audience is not the church, we want to be clear that we are not writing from the perspective of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, or a five-star general. Rather, we write from the perspective of kingdom citizens seeking to make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:18–20) by calling people to repentance and faith in Jesus (Acts 20:21) and to serve him through local churches.

WHAT IS STRATEGY?

It is helpful to start by listing a few common definitions of strategy, without getting distracted by each definition’s military, marketing, or missional emphasis:

• “Strategy is a plan that aims to give the enterprise a competitive advantage over rivals through differentiation” (Luecke 2005, xiv).
• “The overall planning and conduct of large-scale military operations” (“Strategy” 1983, 672).
• “A plan of action” (ibid.).
• “Strategy is simply the means agreed upon to reach a certain goal” (Wagner 1983, 106).
• “A strategy is an overview of how we will go about something” (Dayton and Engstrom 1979, 100).
• “The process that determines how your ministry will accomplish its mission” (Malphurs 2005, 167).
• “Strategy is basically betting the farm on who the company is and what it intends to become” (Wells 1998, 65).

All these definitions have in common the notions of a future orientation and a plan for process. To understand strategy, it is important that these two commonalities are kept in mind. While wise strategy development involves a healthy understanding of the past and present, it moves us beyond history to future actions and results.

Future Orientation

Strategy involves the future. Although a team learns from the past and recognizes what it is in the present (e.g., its talents, gifts, passions, resources), strategy belongs to the future. Strategy is about how to accomplish something desired. If it is the Lord’s will that tomorrow arrive (James 4:13–16), the team will plan to do this or that. Dayton and Fraser note this future orientation: “If we are going to get on with the business of world evangelization we need to have a way of thinking about the future. Since we cannot predict it in any detail, we can only consider the future and our actions in it in broad terms. But think of them we must” (1990, 24).

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SIDEBAR 1.1
RIGHT STRATEGY

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In the following excerpt Donald McGavran writes about some of the components of healthy strategy.

Right strategy tailors mission to fit each of the thousands of separate communities, so that in it the Church may grow. There is no one humanity in which the Church grows. The one world we often speak of is made up of numerous ethnic units, suddenly brought close together but not yet fused into one race. . . .

Right strategy will also take church growth with life-and-death seriousness. Right strategy will not so focus attention on “many good things to do” that church growth is not desired. . . .

The continual checking of every aspect of Christian mission against the church growth achieved is the esse of right strategy. Methods of church and mission work, systems of training missionaries, forms of ministerial and pastoral training, ways of producing tens of thousands of unpaid leaders, church mergers and co-operative enterprises of various kinds, institutional expressions of the faith—all these must be checked against the growth of the Church. . . .

Right strategy will devise hard, bold plans for planting churches, and will put them into execution. . . .

Right strategy recognizes that church growth is an exceedingly complex process and cannot be commanded. . . .

The Church can develop right strategy in mission. All she has to do is to observe what has taken place in the hundreds of matchless laboratories which a hundred and sixty years of modern missions have provided. By amassing knowledge, by pooling the common experience of missions and churches, by assembling the evidences of instances where the Church was planted, where it grew, where it stopped growing, and where it never even started, she can discern which processes in which specific circumstances receive God’s blessing and which do not. Right strategy will spend large sums of money and the lives of some of its best men and women in intensive research into the most effective ways and means of reconciling men to God and of multiplying churches. . . .

Right strategy can be discerned, learned, taught and executed. When it is, the enormous potential in today’s missions will be realized. When it is, the confusion and frustration that mark so much mission today will happily become a thing of the past. (1965, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461)

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REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

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• What aspects of McGavran’s understanding of “right strategy” were surprising to you? Why?
• What are the dangers of a strategy focusing attention on “many good things to do”?
• Do you agree that right strategy can be “discerned, learned, taught and executed”? Explain.

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Strategy includes an attempt to discern what the Lord would desire to be accomplished among a particular people, population segment, village, tribe, or city. The focus of strategy is not on the present realities but rather on future possibilities. Strategy allows the team to look down the corridor of time, asking, “Lord willing, what will become of these people?” Strategy forces the team to think in terms of the practical outworking of the power of the gospel to transform an individual, family, tribe, or society. Strategy helps the team members discern where to go in their efforts.

Plan for Process

Strategy involves making plans. The future orientation component of strategy is a dream or a vision—but not the process of getting to the vision. Strategy therefore includes not only prayerfully discerning future realities but also developing a plan of action to reach them. Strategy assists in putting feet on future desire. It helps move a team from where it is to where it believes the Lord would have it go.

The plan to reach a vision involves a process. A strategy is typically not a single-step event that results in the fulfillment of the vision. Strategy involves a process of major steps as the team climbs the stairs to reach the desired end. And along the climb each major step taken will consist of several smaller, minor—yet important—steps along the journey. While this journey may not be a linear one (e.g., many times several steps will happen simultaneously), the outworking of a strategy involves a procession, and movement from point A to point B, and so on, until the team reaches the vision on the horizon.

Our working definition of strategy throughout this book is the following:

Mission strategy is the overall process describing what we believe the Lord would have us accomplish to make disciples of all nations.

While this book is not the place to address the debate revolving around the definition of “mission,” we need to explain the term and its relationship to strategy. We understand mission first and foremost as related to making worshipers for the Creator and, therefore, mission strategy as related to the process of seeing such disciples made.

First, mission is derived from a conversionistic theology. From Genesis to Revelation, the metanarrative of the Scriptures is that all creation has been affected by the fall. While God will create a new heaven and a new earth (Isa. 65:17), the redemption of people through the atoning work of Jesus on the cross is primary in his mission. The promise to crush the head of the serpent via the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15) was fulfilled with the death and resurrection of Jesus. From the promises made in the garden, and more clearly defined with Abram (Gen. 17), to the wedding of the Lamb (Rev. 19:7), the Creator is glorifying himself by building his church (Eph. 2:19–22) as men, women, boys, and girls repent, confessing Jesus as Lord (Phil. 2:11).

Second, the Father’s means of redeeming fallen humanity is through the gospel being proclaimed (1 Cor. 1:21). As the Spirit works his regenerative process in the lives of people who come face-to-face with the exclusive truth of Jesus, they leave the kingdom of darkness and enter into the kingdom of God (Col. 1:13). And while this proclamation is the means by which God works, the medium that brings this good news to people is his church (Acts 13:47). The redeemed have not been made into kingdom citizens to be disengaged from the rest of creation. Rather, as priests they are called to proclaim his truth (1 Pet. 2:9), make disciples of all peoples (Matt. 28:19), and be his witnesses (Matt. 5:14–16). Such are the primary responsibilities of kingdom citizens.

Third, while there are many excellent activities that kingdom citizens can be involved in to bring glory to God, the primary New Testament teaching is that the mission of God is first and foremost to do evangelism that results in the birth and growth of churches. The kingdom advances and Jesus builds his church numerically as people are converted. We recognize that the mission of God includes matters such as healing, casting out demons, caring for the poor, and issues of justice. But we would add that such matters either follow conversion, with newly planted churches carrying out such tasks, or are done to open doors for the calling of others to repentance and faith in Jesus, as observed throughout the Gospels and Acts. Service and conducting social ministry are both necessary and extremely important but should be carried out in the world so that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Strategy Defined
• 2. The Crafting of Mission Strategy
• 3. Contemporary Objections to Missionary Strategy
• 4. Strategic Planning in Biblical Perspective
• 5. Missiological Principles for Strategy Development
• 6. The Apostle Paul’s Missionary Strategy
• 7. Missions Strategy in the Early Church
• 8. Roman Catholic Strategy
• 9. Pioneer Protestant Strategies
• 10. Faith Missions Strategy
• 11. Mission Strategies on the American Frontier
• 12. The Indigenous Mission Strategy
• 13. The Church Growth Movement
• 14. Frontier Strategies
• 15. Contextualization Strategies
• 16. Understanding Cultural Research
• 17. Developing a People-Group Profile
• 18. Developing a Communication Strategy
• 19. Discerning Receptivity
• 20. Discerning Need
• 21. Visioning for the Future
• 22. Forming a Team
• 23. Assessing the Resources
• 24. Setting Goals
• 25. Choosing Appropriate Methods
• 26. Execution
• 27. Evaluation
• Appendix: People-Group Profile
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Notes
• Back Cover