Whom Will I Send?

A VISION FOR SERVING ASIA’S URBAN POOR

Reference: Grigg, V. (2004). Companion to the Poor. GA, USA: Authentic Media in partnership with World Vision.

Verses from Ecclesiastes came to mind one evening when I was back in New Zealand.

There was a little city with a few men in it;
and a great king came against it and besieged it,
building great siege works against it.
But there was found in it a poor, wise man,
and he by his wisdom delivered the city.
Yet no one remembered that poor man.
But I say that wisdom is better than might,
though the poor man’s wisdom is despised,

and his words are not heeded
(Ecclesiastes 9:13–16).
 

Battered by reverse culture shock, by illness, and by the rejection of friends, I was wandering down a bush track in the evening light. As I prayed, God brought a picture to my mind; a brilliant picture, in a manner I’ve come to recognize as from God.

He showed me a hundred “poor, wise” men and women wandering the byways of the slums, dwelling among the poor of ten great cities in Asia—men and women who would, as Wesley says, “fear nothing but God and hate nothing but sin.”

A few days later, an artist living up the road dropped me a note with a message the Lord had given her. It spoke of the same call to establish a new movement.
    For months, I delayed, praying, “Lord, I have no contacts with the influential men of the church. Why call me to establish a movement? Physically, I feel sick! Emotionally, I am in shock! Socially, I have lost my friends!”

But the Lord continued to encourage me. I decided not to visit the influential people, but to start where I was, take what I had, and do what I could. I visited some friends. As I began to speak of the need in the slums, the Spirit of God was evident in unusual ways.

Wherever I went, I found renewal—renewal that would break out when proud Christian leaders had humbled themselves before God. People would take me to meet these leaders. Most would listen humbly to this unknown missionary, and then confirm that indeed this was God’s voice and that he would rise up this work.

God had already spoken to many others about the poor of Asia’s cities. He had prepared the way, and a new missionary movement began.

Wanted: rugged laborers

My message to these churches was simple. God’s method is people!

Do we not hear a call to go as servants of that rugged cross, laborers whose delight is work, sacrifice and suffering, whose souls are filled with compassion, and whose lifestyle is that of simple poverty?
    In the next few years, there needs to be an ever-growing stream, a new thrust to these dirt-and-plywood jungles. We need bands of people who, on fire with the message of Christ’s kingdom, will choose a lifestyle of simplicity to proclaim that kingdom to the poorest of the poor.

These bands can include people at different life stages or of different marital status, but primarily include men and women who deliberately choose singleness for a period, couples without children, or couples whose children have grown up. Together they will form “cells” or “communities” of six to ten workers to go to each of these great cities.
    These teams need to be trained in the sending country. When they arrive in the host city, they will begin a full year of language study and continued orientation. During this time, these teams will be split up, going two-by-two to dif­ferent squatter areas. One day a week, they will gather to­gether for relaxation, mutual ministry, further training and celebration of the Lord’s Supper at a retreat center, led by an older mature couple with pastoral and administrative oversight for the “community.”

We need men and women willing to commit themselves to this task initially for six years—this being long enough to establish a first church—but with the intention of spending fifteen to twenty years in the urban community to establish a discipling movement.

It is not unreasonable for a young person to trust that God will bring fruit during these fifteen to twenty years. Is it a big enough request to ask God for 1500 new Christians—or 3,000 or 15,000? A harvest like that would be a worthy lifetime’s work. Many have seen God do this elsewhere.
    In 1898, Hudson Taylor, with the vast needs of inland China in mind, issued a call for “twenty able, earnest and healthy young men willing to consecrate five years of their lives to itinerant work, without thought of marriage or of settling down till their special work is accomplished.” We need a similar breed of Christians for today’s “new” mission field in the Asian mega-cities.

Younger couples may need to delay having children until they have had time to establish themselves in these slum communities, know how to cope with poverty, drunken­ness, the food, the climate, hatred, and learn how to raise children in such an environment.
    On each team, the gifts needed are infinite: a comic designer, an apostle-evangelist, or an apostle-pastor team leader, an administrator, or a poet-communicator, a specialist in establishing small-scale industries, etc. But above all, men and women with a drive, zeal, and the training in the practice of establishing the Kingdom of God are needed. People who can preach and disciple, consolidate small Bible studies and transform multitudes of believers into movements of disciples. Men and women with eternity in their hearts, the promises of God in their souls, and the fire of holiness in their spirits. Men and women of a rugged cross.

The apostle Peter was such a man. He walked in a poor man’s wooden sandals (Acts 12:8) and had no gold for the beggar at the Temple (Acts 3:6).

Similarly, the apostle Paul underwent stoning, beatings and shipwrecks, living “as poor, yet making many rich” in his desire to reach the cities of his world.

Stories are told of Toribio, who traveled barefoot through Mexico. Other Mexicans called him “the poor one” because he was evidently poorer than they were. He learned the Aztec language quickly and preached fluently in that language. The Indians loved him like a father and regarded him almost like a divine Inca because of his total commitment and absolute poverty. He covered 40,000 miles on foot. He had nothing of his own to leave behind when he died.

Above all, we need to remember the Master, who calls us to walk in his sandaled footsteps. He chose poverty in birth, poverty in life and finally, blood dripping from thorn-crowned brow, chose poverty on the cross of a criminal.

Who will go? Who will take up the cross and follow him?

Who will give fifteen or twenty years for the poorest of the people in the slums of Asia? Who will live among them, love them, and show them the King? Is this such an unreasonable request from the Lord who gave his all?

Renewal

As I visited churches calling for these “rugged laborers,” God was going before me, bringing renewal.

There seemed to be four phases of renewal. The first was a phase of brokenness, humbling, repentance, restitution and seeking the Lord. In this phase, God broke into people’s lives in a new way with power, resulting in worship, evangelism, and the exercise of spiritual gifts.
    The second phase was a restructuring of traditional church life. House groups developed. Deep relationships and spiritual ministry to inner personal need occurred. Evangelism, flowing through normal social relationships, multiplied new believers. Where there was strong leader­ship training and disciplined intake of the word of God, economic changes and care for the poor became part of a new pattern of life.

Four or five years after renewal of an older church or the birth of a new fellowship, a third phase emerged. Scores of people developed an eagerness to be involved in missions. Hundreds upon hundreds volunteered for the field.

My role was to walk behind the movement, sensing what God was doing, and providing a structure to facilitate these missions thrust. We formed a new mission structure called “Urban Leadership Foundation” to accommodate the people who wanted to serve Asia’s urban poor
 

No unemployment

The vision I had seen called for a hundred laborers. A hundred laborers means a hundred church-planters—peo­ple who can pioneer new fellowships in unreached areas. Such a task requires all the social, intellectual, and spiri­tual capacities a person has. No lifestyle can match the thrill of church-planting. None demands so much from a person.

Renewal alone will not produce such men and women. It takes eight or nine years of mature training in a dynamic church situation to produce a leader ready to serve in Asia. If we would develop long-term cross-cultural missionaries, the critical element is an apprenticeship relationship.

Elisha, apprentice to Elijah, received a double portion of Elijah’s spirit. Joshua, forty years’ servant of Moses, led the people into Israel. Paul could say of Timothy: “I have no one else like him, who is genuinely interested in your welfare.”

In the past, training has been a unique contribution of a number of para-church organizations in the body of Christ. Churches need encouragement to develop this apprentice­ship model of training laborers.
As God called more men and women to work among the poor, I would sit down with the pastor and elders of a church and discuss with them principles and phases of training potential laborers. Pastors were excited to see a new pattern of ministry opening up before them. Theologi­cally, they had moved to a commitment to training. They appreciated practical input that helped them implement this new theology.

In response, I adapted a “Focus Chart” that had been de­veloped by Gene Tabor. My version came to be known as “The Four Seasons of Christian Training.” Rather than giv­ing an entire program of training as most groups do, this model gives training principles to use during the four com­monly identifiable stages of growth of a potential worker. Pastors and elders would spend considerable time enthusi­astically discussing what stages they were in and what the next steps of growth should be.

The first phase is a healthy Christian “babyhood” in a warm, relational, celebrating home-group and church fel­lowship. Most growing churches had become skilled in pro­viding this.

The second phase requires more personal discipling of the person by an elder or house group leader in the context of ministering to a small group of other believers.

The third phase is the involvement of disciples in minis­try to others as part of the church’s ministry team—as house-group leaders, youth leaders, part of the counseling or outreach team, and so on. Even the leader of a nursery can use this role to disciple young mothers.

During this phase of ministry, the critical element is de­velopment of character. Potential leaders need to meet at least fortnightly to minister to one another at the personal level, relating scriptural teaching to the problems or mat­ters that have emerged during the past fortnight.

The fourth phase of training focuses on developing gifts and calling. It can involve a semi-independent ministry: es­tablishing a church or pioneering a new ministry thrust.
 

Robin and his merry men

There is another kind of laborer in the Scriptures—men and women skilled as deacons and deaconesses. We not only need the apostle, the pastor-teacher, and the evange­list; we need men and women filled with the Holy Spirit and with wisdom—men and women skilled in using money given by the rich to meet the needs of the poor. (The early deacons’ biggest responsibility was not giving out hymnals at the door!)
    We need people skilled in establishing small-scale indus­tries: carpentry shops, electronic shops, and machine shops. We need men and women skilled in social work, ad­ministration, and community development. Couples in their forties and fifties whose children are now independent are the best possible people for such tasks.

Wisdom
    In Ecclesiastes, the poor man who saved the city was wise. The wisdom needed to minister in the slums is not primarily learned in school. Christ imparted his wisdom in the context of loving action. His type of wisdom has to do with character, decision-making, ethical issues, and rela­tionships.
    Yet godly wisdom is not only acquired “on the street.” As Solomon adds, wisdom is based on “getting knowledge, get­ting understanding.” It has an intellectual component.
    The urban mission field needs men and women of the finest academic training. The cultural understanding needed to mobilize a movement comes from the finest train­ing in language learning, cross-cultural missions’ theory, and church history. Community development and church growth principles must be mastered if the kingdom will be established in a community. The complexity of issues is un­ending.
    We must upgrade our schools to provide the best post­graduate evangelical training in such areas. If we find an un-biblical anti-intellectualism inherent in our churches (despite our penchant for academic degrees and titles), we must renounce it.
    God’s wisdom comes from the Spirit revealing the mind of Christ. Finely trained minds are the outworking of the gift of spiritual discernment. Workers need to have discern­ment concerning the leading of the Spirit. They need to know how to use spiritual gifts in confrontations with the demonic, in healing the sick, in prophecy, through a (su­pernatural) word of discernment, through a word of knowl­edge, or through the interpretation of dreams.
    The missionary needs to be a person of balance—sound in theology, bold and authoritative, but meek and flexible; able to exercise spiritual gifts and power, but not extremist; fully developing his academic capacities, but deeply spiri­tual and pragmatic.
    Urban workers need to be able to grapple with the con­cepts of the Scriptures. They will not teach using books and concepts, but like their Master, using story and parable. The ability to tell stories grows out of a full life, marked by a fine sensitivity—an ability to feel what others around you are feeling. The urban missionary must be a leader in the midst of the people, able to incarnate a people’s soul, speak their poetry, and understand their aspirations.
    This is the gift of cross-cultural communication. It re­quires strength of will on the inside, an inner fiber cou­pled with above-average sensitivity, flexibility, and adaptability. It involves a capacity for suspended judg­ment—being able to hold two opposing views in one’s mind without feeling buried by tension. The black-and-white ab­solutist or judgmental thinker is not a natural missionary.
    Above all, urban missionaries need to be men and women of the word of God. A layperson can do an in-depth study of all the scriptures over five or six years, and memo­rize several hundred passages that will transform thought patterns. The main goal of studying the Bible is to know, love, and understand Jesus. The values and actions he talks about in the Sermon on the Mount will best prepare us to cross cultures. Perhaps memorizing that sermon is the place to begin.

Missionary school

Along with theological and vocational education, training for such a man or woman is along the lines of the training Jesus gave the disciples—spending time with alcoholics, rescuing lesbians and homosexuals, walking for months with the drug addict, explaining the gospel to abusive stu­dents, living among the poorest immigrant community, healing prejudice, and visiting prisoners. The more difficult the sufferings encountered in our comfortable Western so­ciety, the better equipped the missionary will be.
    Missionaries to the poor should study the lives of those who have walked before them: Hudson Taylor, Xavier, Assisi or Mother Teresa, Amy Carmichael, Sadhu Sundar Singh, and so on. They should grapple with the social im­plications of the gospel in their own country to have a basis for grappling with it elsewhere, picking up social work and community development skills where possible.

Learning to work under authority is important. Only those with the power of submission, those able to trust oth­ers with decisions about their lives will survive the ten­sions of a mission community. Such lessons must be learned before reaching the field.

Potential missionaries should be taught to live without possessions (except books, since these contribute to wis­dom and tools of the trade). They should learn to eat little meat and few desserts, to know how to keep their bodies healthy through wise diet, natural foods, the use of herbs and good exercise. They should practice living in crowded conditions and coping with constant pressures.
    The urban missionary must be able to integrate a life that relates both to the poor as well as to the rich. In this way, the missionary to the slums will find life less comfort­able than the missionary to a remote village. Village mis­sionaries can reassume their Western roles when they visit the city. But slum missionaries must continually balance an incarnational lifestyle against the need to build relation­ships with mentors and officials in universities and govern­ment agencies. They must wear several hats at the same time.

Francis Xavier was insistent on tested men for the mis­sion field. He suggested the following tests for potential missionaries:

The spiritual exercises will be made for a month, in order to judge the nature of the individual, his steadfastness, temperament, inclinations and voca­tion. For another month, he will serve the poor in the hospitals in every kind of menial work he might be ordered to perform, because to humble oneself in all meekness and care nothing for the esteem of the world is to set at naught human respect. Dur­ing the third month, he must make a pilgrimage on foot and without money, placing his entire hope in the Creator and Lord, accustoming himself to bad food and a comfortless bed. He who cannot either rest or travel without food and with poor sleep for twenty-four hours will be unable, we believe, to per­severe in the Society.¹

It was not enough to Xavier that we have spiritual yearn­ings and romantic dreams. We need to pass tough tests be­fore qualifying as workers among the poor. The harvest is urgent, but God takes time to train his harvesters.

Sacrifice

The call is costly in terms of family relationships, sepa­ration from children and health. “How lonesome the weary hours confined to my room,” wrote Hudson Taylor upon the death of his wife. “How I missed my dear wife and the little pattering footsteps of the children far away in England.” While God never calls us to desert our family responsibili­ties, he may, for a limited season, call us to sever those links.
    Most great mission leaders, while knowing God’s power in prayer for the sick, were often sickly themselves, living in difficult climates, in situations of poorly controlled hygiene.
    All extension of the kingdom is accomplished at cost. Yet the Lord is not our debtor. Our children, our wives, our husbands, our bodies are his. He holds them in his hands and can do as he wills with them.

Kagawa wrote this poem to his wife:

You who dwell
in the heart of my heart
Listen to me;
This you must know—
I am a child of grief and pain
Bending my fingers to count my woe.
You yield me everything;

But I have nothing
I can bring

To give to you.
Know

You have married

Poverty, sorrow;

Bear it with me;

The storm will be over

Tomorrow.

A little while

For us
The rod;
And then,
Then God.²
 

His wife Haru had not only married a man who would al­ways be wandering—she had married a life of poverty and sorrow.

For many, work in the slums is a call to celibacy; for others, a life of singleness for some years. This call to sin­gleness is not a call to individualism, but to involvement in a community. Singleness in the ancient orders involved vows of chastity. A commitment to chastity, or purity of heart, is contrary to all the tendencies of nature. But cho­sen singleness is not a breaking of human affections. It is given that we might love our neighbor more fully. Single­ness is a calling in God’s economy, enabling people to more deeply know their Lord. Many people give their early years to the pursuit of love—we must give it to the pursuit of God.

A poor man
    In Ecclesiastes, the wise man who saved cities was also poor. The missionary of today is one who can support him­self and others using income earned through a trade or profession. Our choice of poverty is not a choice of depen­dency. Our poverty is chosen as a sign of love and justice. It is not to be a burden, but to bring joy! It will set free for it is freely chosen. “Laboring poverty” cannot be legislated by the rules of a mission. It is chosen freely by those who, hav­ing forsaken wealth, cannot be bought by money; having forsaken power, cannot be bought position and influence; having forsaken all security, cannot be bought by the offer of security.
    Such a lifestyle and level of commitment is hard to maintain. Enthusiasm of the early days passes away; easier courses appear; the capacity to suffer often decreases as one suffers. Idealism easily dims, and in doing so, it may either bring balance or turn one back from earlier single-mindedness. And the constant glitter of the cities in which we dwell subtly brings captivity to the desire for things.
    The Apostle Peter struggled, too. He once told Jesus, “Lord, we have left everything to follow you.” What he really was asking was, “What do we get out of it?”

Jesus did not rebuke him. His reply was:

There is no one who has left house or brothers and sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions and, in the age to come, eternal life (Mark 10:28–30).

The movement

Behind such a mission thrust of poor, wise men and women, we need a movement of hundreds of men and women in the sending base. These “senders” choose an­other sort of poverty—that of simplicity.

This is the commitment of my home church. They send and support almost thirty missionaries. The means of sup­porting these laborers? Simplicity!
    One church leader has chosen to limit his engineering business to supply only his basic needs and devote himself to the business of the kingdom. Some have chosen homes half as expensive as they formerly owned. Others sit down and calculate every area of expense to see if they can spend less. They count each item in their possession, sell the ex­cess items counted, and give to the poor. Many have given their best clothes to the poor. Some have sold their jewelry. One couple, in response to the Lord’s prompting, gave a welding machine for the poor in the slums.

These are ordinary men and women, “living simply that others may simply live,” living frugally that missionaries may continue spreading the kingdom, living without to win the fight against the demon of materialism that controls our nations. They live out their simplicity communally with other believers to battle the twin brother of materialism— excessive individualism. It has destroyed not only our society, but also our nuclear family structures. It is the cause of the new poverty of the urban West.

How can we live communally? In New Zealand, the most effective communal structure has been the house group, a weekly meeting of six to fifteen people learning to mold their lives together as “family,” seeking to hear God’s direc­tion, worshipping, and studying the word together. Mem­bers struggle together with the social and economic implications of the kingdom. Sharing money, recreation, garden tools, meals, vehicles, and ministry all have emerged as natural outcomes.

Some have added semi-detached quarters to their home for a solo mother, widow, or single young folk. Others have obtained three or four houses close to each other in the same street to share the load of hospitality, child supervi­sion, and possessions.
    Along with such communities of committed believers, God longs to raise up a band of praying people who will give their lives to prayer for the slums. An older woman of 84 has prayed daily for me these 13 years. A young woman has chosen to work half time and give her life to prayer. A band of women in my church are known as women of inter­cession. This is the pattern of history. Nunneries have been the source of power for numerous movements. Assisi and his men, in times of confusion and uncertainty, would re­pair to Saint Clara and her sisters and ask these cloistered women to seek the Lord’s will on their behalf.
 

Servants of the Lord

Seventy of us were gathered in prayer, worshipping God. Seven had just been commissioned to Asia’s slums. Others had committed themselves to training in preparation to go.

As we sang together, a picture of the Lord came to mind.

He came from Mount Zion on a magnificent white char­ger, descending upon one of the great cities of Asia. Mil­lions of city-dwellers lined its streets, all worshipping God in song and dance. There seemed to be no rich, no poor. Each one had a home. But all had left their work and homes to worship the King.
    By the city gates, in the middle of the crowd, was a wiz­ened, simply garbed man leaning on his staff—not notice­ably different from the crowd. But as the King swept through the gates, he paused, looked across the crowd, and greeted the servant with a smile, a nod and a simple “well done.”
    The King continued on his way as the millions delighted with him. And the companion to the poor was content with his labor.

NOTES

1.      Xavier Leon Du Jour, S.J., St. Francis Xavier, pp.65,66 — trans.
Henry Pascual Oiz, S.J., St. Paul Press Training School, Bandra, Bombay, 1950.

2.      Toyohiko Kagawa, “The Cross of the Whole Christ,” in Meditations on the Cross. SCM, 1936.