“We are
praying and believing that through the efforts of our little paper, and through
the united prayers of our people, it will not be long until our missionary
force shall reach at least one hundred missionaries or three hundred native
workers.”
51
missionaries. In July 1917, the
Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene had sent 51 missionaries out onto the
mission field. While I could not find a
specific (or even general) number of missionaries currently supported by the Church
of the Nazarene, it’s safe to presume there has been some growth (one rather
unreliable source puts the number at more than 700, but the church apparently
does not publish numbers).
Why do I
start out my blog post in this way?
Because the growth is incredibly striking. But it is not just the growth of simple
numbers signals movement. The locational focus has changed, the language has
changed, the styles of dress and transportation have changed. If this were what I wanted to focus on
exclusively, there would be plenty of material here to talk about the shift in
mission work, the shift in ways fundraising occurred, or even the simple change
in what words were politically correct.
And while all of these things are interesting and rather consuming,
there was something even more striking that came from this reading.
The editorial
section of this special expanded edition (they usually run eight pages, but
this issue was 16) included a short article titled “Why I Believe in Missions”
penned by N. B. Herrell. Herrell lists
ten reasons missions should be important not just to the Pentecostal Church of
the Nazarene, but to every Christian. I
read this section with a particular interest because I hoped it would be just
another literary relic of this magazine, its meaning lost with changing ideas about
the world and the core values of Christianity.
I expected it to be humorous, or at the very least, so full of “sappy”
discussion of Christian mission it was barely readable. Instead, every point hit every nail on the
head. It was a complete summation of
every reason I think missions are important.
It didn’t make me roll my eyes or shake my head. It made me proud to realize that these are
the principles my church has always cared about. It made me happy to think that these were the
ideas we were built on.
I think there is probably an important lesson in our cynicism here (one that I'm sure I need to learn as much as the next person. But what were some of the specific reasons why Herrell believed in missions? And which ones resonated with you particularly?
ReplyDeleteAnd, by the way, I feel like that 700 number has been around quite a while, but I think we've also entered a stage in which figuring out who to count as missionaries in the church has become somewhat complicated with the proliferation of roles.