Pastor Jacob Birch and Disturbing Trends in Missions

Updated - September 23rd 2013

Yesterday while the biggest issue at my church was who did and didn't get to do announcements - seriously - 81 Pakistani Christians were blown up by 2 suicide bombers in Peshawar, Pakistan as a reprisal they claimed for US drone attacks. 

I think that North American Chrisitans need to adopt a policy similar to the informal policy of the Israelis. An IDF solider was killed by a sniper in Hebron on Saturday. Within hours PM Benjamin Netanyahu announced that a building previously emptied by the IDF of its illegally squanting Jewish settlers would now be opened up to legal Jewish settlement. You snipe our soldiers, we will build homes. The PM said, “Those who attempt to uproot us from the city of our forefathers will achieve the opposite effect. We will continue on one hand to fight terror and to harm terrorists and on the other hand to strengthen settlements.”

IN the same way North American Christians should adopt a policy of 2 for 1. For every 1 Christian killed for their faith in places like Pakistan, we should send in 2 missionaries. We have the money (see below). WE have the people wanting to go. What we lack is the will. Pray that the Lord will strengthen us. 

While there are lots and lots of trends in world missions to be excited about and hopeful for, here are 5 trends that i find - as a pastor in a "missionary" denomination - very disturbing based on a July 25th article in Christianity Today:

#1 - That the United States continues to be the largest missionary RECEIVING country in the world. In 2010 the USA RECEIVED 32,400 missionaries. 

#2 - That the unreached of the world continue to go largely unreached. The Top 10 most-un-reached countries have 73% of all the un-reached people in the world and yet received only 9% of the missionaries sent.

#3 - That missionaries still overwhelmingly go to countries that already have large and growing Christian movements. What are the numbers? 34% of the total number of missionaries sent worldwide go to 9 countries that have collectively only 3.5% of the world's un-reached peoples. For example warm, tropical, little, peaceful Samoa receives 1 Christian missionary for every 3 non-Christians whereas harsh, difficult, fractious Pakistan receives 1 for every 272,000 non-Christians.

#4 - That ON MY WATCH the Christian church is forecast to grow only .1% in the 50 years from 1970 to 2020.

#5 - That 60% of the Christian church lives in the global south but only have 17% of the total financial resources available to them. Furthermore fewer than 1 in 500 Christian foreign missionaries work among the urban-poor (in the slums) of our world's burgeoning cities (page 85).