• Missionaries as Ambassadors
• Communicating Clearly as a Missionary
• How Important is Contextualization and Credibility as a Missionary?
• Missionaries Should Communicate Boldy and Broadly
• What Should Churches Look For in Missionaries?

Jonathan Leeman:

Hi, I am Jonathan Leeman.

Mark Dever:

I’m Mark Dever, and welcome to this episode of 9Marks, can I get an amen?

Jonathan Leeman:

And if you want to amen our work, that’d be great, and do it by just doing it by continuing to listen and read our stuff, including this conversation.

Mark Dever:

Pray for us to have good conversations.

Jonathan Leeman:

Oh goodness. Yes. Thank you. Learn more at 9marks.org. We had a conversation released on February 8th with our present guest, Matt Rhodes.

Matt Rhodes:

Good to be here again.

Jonathan Leeman:

Thank you for being here, Matt. We talked about the first half of your book, No Shortcut to Success: A Manifesto for Modern Missions, and we want to have a second conversation about the second half of your book. Remind us what you’ve been doing for the last decade or two of your life, Matt, for those who missed the first conversation.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, I work on a church planting team in Northern Africa, and so we are working with a large unreached Muslim tribe that spreads about 500 miles across Northern Africa.

Missionaries as Ambassadors

Mark Dever:

And Matt, would you describe yourself as more of an ambassador or more of an apostle?

Matt Rhodes:

I definitely prefer the word ambassador. Apostle just has too many connotations that I’m not always comfortable taking on.

Mark Dever:

And are you an ambassador for Christ in the same sense that Paul says he is to the Corinthians?

Matt Rhodes:

No, not in that sense because I think that Paul when he talks about being an ambassador for Christ, he is definitely talking about his own apostleship. And in fact, that’s one of the reasons we read his writings is because they are Christ’s direct message through him.

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, Mark, you anticipated right where I want to go, which is a positive way of thinking about how doing missions, and that’s one of the first things that you say in the second part of your book. Matt, you talk about ambassadorship and you seem to suggest that missionaries are ambassadors uniquely. So help us understand what you’re saying there.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, I think when we look at the spread of the gospel as Christ’s kingdom coming, he’s definitely sending his apostles out as his representatives, but he has something larger than that in mind because he knows they’re not going to finish the task. And so there is a sense where missionaries sort of in a lesser subsidiary way than how the apostles did still act as Christ’s ambassadors.

Jonathan Leeman:

Okay, so this is kind of a question for both of you. When I’m preaching through Two Corinthians five and I read Paul say I’m an ambassador for Christ, should I or shouldn’t I say, Hey church, you too are ambassadors for Christ? Like Paul says here, should I or should I not say that? And I don’t assume the two of you agree.

Matt Rhodes:

Right. So I would say that there’s something appropriate about that everyone needs to represent Christ well, but I think that takes the passage out of context. Paul says, he says, therefore we are ambassadors of Christ.

And then he goes on to you, the Corinthians to listen to his message. And so he’s not claiming everyone is, he’s claiming that he is in a unique way and that’s why they need to listen to him.

Mark Dever:

Matt, I’m curious about your theology of being an ambassador in the way you understand missionaries are and are not ambassadors like Paul, does that affect how they give their time? Should they spend their time in language learning or in humanitarian work?

Communicating Clearly as a Missionary

Matt Rhodes:

Right, and this is the core of why I think I’m trying to develop that missionaries do work as ambassadors for Christ because, like any ambassador, our main job is to communicate the message of our king. So for missionaries who are there as ambassadors to plant churches, communication is the entire ballgame.

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, that brings us to you’re now chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8. What is the nature of that communication and why is it so central?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, and let me say first of all that that doesn’t mean that missionaries shouldn’t be showing compassion or doing humanitarian things, but those aren’t their job. In the same way that for a pastor, or an engineer back in the States, those things aren’t necessarily their job.

But yeah, I think we see three sorts of keys of missionary communication in the New Testament. The first is that they communicate clearly, and that’s something that they insist on doing that’s repeated over and over. They communicate in ways that are credible and persuasive. Third, they communicate boldly and broadly.

Do Missionaries Need to Know the Language?

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, I want to think about each of those briefly. Does communicating clearly mean a missionary has to learn the language?

Matt Rhodes:

I would say that it does. If you are working in a culture where you don’t know the language, you’re not going to be able to communicate with people. And we can sort of understand that if I was running into marriage problems, I wouldn’t want to go to a counselor who could just stammer their way through an English conversation.

They’re not going to pick up nuances. And discipling people gets a lot more complicated than that and partly because it may involve walking them through marriage problems.

Mark Dever:

So Matt, when Paul writes to the Colossians and he asks them to pray for him that he may share the gospel clearly, does Paul have the concern to work in vernacular languages? He’s always writing in Greek. Greek was a lingua franca, but maybe kind of like English is more than that in the Roman Empire, but still, many of the people he addressed had to be speaking Greek as a second language.

I mean, you could even wonder was Paul, I mean Hebrew and Greek. So I just wonder with that clarity that Paul was praying for, what did that mean in his own life in ministry where we see him operating both in Hebrew and in

Matt Rhodes:

Greek? Yeah, that’s a great question. I think when you look at the level of Greek that Paul is using, I think we have to assume he had mastery of Greek, and I think there would be people among his listeners who clearly did as well.

Paul isn’t doing mission work across linguistic boundaries. He’s primarily a fluent Greek speaker reaching out to other fluent Greek speakers even if it is their second language.

Jonathan Leeman:

Surely missionaries in the past have had the practice, the pattern of going into a place spinning several years learning the language, but we can’t take that for granted today. It does seem like a lot of missionaries or mission agencies are saying it’s optional. Is that correct? Help me understand what the dynamic at play there is.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah. When we look at missions history, we have people like Adoniram Judson, who I don’t think most people can handle this so I’m not recommending it, but he and his wife were spending 12 hours a day on language learning when they first arrived in Burma. And nowadays, most missionaries are given one to two years of part-time, language learning.

And what happens is they come back and they report to their churches, yes, I learned the language, but what their church can’t really do is evaluate their level of fluency with the level of mastery Most missionaries are acquiring. They’re probably at about a six or 7-year-old level in the language, and they can stammer their way through basic conversations with close friends. But when things get fast and colloquial and emotional and spiritual, they’re often really left behind.

Jonathan Leeman:

But again, this is a big deal in your book.

Mark Dever:

You use the ARBs clearly, credibly, and boldly, and this really interferes with all three of those things.

Matt Rhodes:

Absolutely.

Mark Dever:

You really can’t speak clearly. You’re not going to be believed in the same sense and your boldness is blunted.

Matt Rhodes:

Absolutely. Missionaries who don’t have real mastery of the language are not going to be able, first of all, to pick up a lot of nuances in what the people around them actually believe and understand.

They will miss nuances of character because we know English so well that we understand where people are really coming from and they’re not going to be able to answer questions.

Jonathan Leeman:

One of nine Mark’s interests in adopting this book as a nine Mark’s book was our discovery in recent years that many missionaries and missionaries’ mission agencies don’t necessarily agree with this line of thinking. And we wanted to raise awareness, which is why I appreciate you raising in the book.

I remember having a conversation with somebody who came and visited us here in dc, a guy with some agency, and I remember him trying to persuade me that language learning wasn’t necessary, what was necessary. He said, in fact, even went a step further.

He said it’s not even necessary that pastors that we establish in churches know how to read. Instead, what we do is we teach the pastors of these churches in the villages like 50 sermons to memorize

Mark Dever:

Orality,

Jonathan Leeman:

And if they can memorize these as it were, 50 sermons we’re good. Our work here is done.

Mark Dever:

Can I get an amen?

Jonathan Leeman:

No, not on that point. That did not fit.

Mark Dever:

No.

Jonathan Leeman:

And I just remember thinking, so what are those people going to do when the prosperity Gospel preachers all start preaching into that village that pastors cooked? Those people are gunners. They’re going to go straightforward if he didn’t learn to read the Bible and if the missionary didn’t disciple train him in some sense to understand these harder truths of doctrine and so forth.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah. This idea that you just record 30 to 50 stories usually on a solar MP three player and give them away, and that this is enough for a church to survive, it’s really common. And the idea behind it is often that people in sort of non-academic or less developed world areas, they don’t deal with abstract concepts.

Well, they only deal with stories well, and that’s all they really need. And I think that really just underestimates people and Jesus and Paul’s day, something like 3% of the Roman world could read. So these are pre-literate people, but everyone’s capable of abstract thought and a lot of times the reason we don’t understand that is because we don’t know their languages very well.

Jonathan Leeman:

What do you mean by credible and what’s the Holy Spirit’s role in that?

Matt Rhodes:

Credible, I think we see this in the book of Acts and a number of occasions, I’ll just for the sake of example, refer to Steven. He is persuading people so powerfully that his enemies are really upset. But we see this in a lot of places.

The apostles and early missionaries, the New Testament are able to express the gospel in persuasive ways. And yes, it’s the spirit that’s at work to persuade people, but he’s working through their words and through the wisdom that they speak with.

How Important is Contextualization and Credibility as a Missionary?

Jonathan Leeman:

How important is contextualization and credibility? How should we think about that topic?

Matt Rhodes:

I think it absolutely is important. So contextualization for those who aren’t familiar with the term is basically when you cross a culture and even in your own culture, presenting the gospel in ways that people culturally can understand. And so as a missionary, when you go into a new culture, there’s a lot of things that will easily give offense here in the States.

If I visit my neighbors without an invitation that’s pretty pushy and pretty offensive where I work in North Africa to not visit my neighbors uninvited would be offensive. And basically these things I’ll add up to establish my credibility as a person. If I’m giving offense everywhere, if I’m being a bad neighbor, people aren’t going to be very interested in what I hear about Christ.

Jonathan Leeman:

You sound like you’re defining it the way Paul does in terms of removing stumbling blocks.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, the gospel has its own stumbling blocks to people, and I think that’s something we have to keep in mind in the contextualization debate. We don’t want to remove the stumbling blocks that are native to the gospel itself, but we certainly want to get any stumbling blocks out of the way that we bring to the table. And I think that is what Paul does when he says to the Jews, I became a Jew to those under the law as went under the law.

Jonathan Leeman:

What’s interesting to me about you, Mark, is that you tend never to talk about contextualizing yet. You seem to do it pretty intuitively. Is that a fair assessment of you? You think about Washington DC and the people here and what they’re like,

Mark Dever:

Yeah, I probably am. I live here. My mind is here. I read local news. I’m involved in the issues that the people in my congregation work in and deal with in the Congress and the community and the courts. So those things, my mind’s just naturally on those things,

Jonathan Leeman:

But people today talk a lot about it and you don’t. Do you have concerns about those who make a big deal of it? Maybe not.

Mark Dever:

I don’t think any amount of work that you or I or Matt do to make the gospel apparently contextualized will overcome the depravity and the opposition, the hatred that the natural sin has in their heart to God and his laws.

So people who want to suggest that there is a kind of golden key of if you can only put it in appropriate terms, then you will win the people. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think Jesus was a very effective teacher and people yelled for his crucifixion.

Jonathan Leeman:

You can’t make the offense less offensive, the offensive of the gospel less offensive.

Mark Dever:

That’s right.

Jonathan Leeman:

Now, Matt, you talk though about the need to earn the right to be heard. Yes. Since we come with Christ’s authority, we already have that right

Matt Rhodes:

Coming with Christ’s authority. It does give us a right to speak, but in people’s own minds, they don’t know who we are and we’re weird and we’re outsiders. So I think we really do have to, through our lives, earn people’s trust.

And I think that’s something that we see Paul doing really well. When you look at the ways that he built relationships, that he, at the end of every letter, he’s so careful to greet people, and you really get the idea that he’s not sort of the dry academic people understand him to be. He is remarkably bright and learned, but he’s also a people person.

Mark Dever:

Well, he is also as the book of Acts says again and again, bold in his speech. Absolutely.

Missionaries Should Communicate Boldy and Broadly

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, let’s talk about what you mean by boldness. You devote a whole chapter to it.

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah. I think with boldness, especially because a lot of parts of the unreached world today are Muslim, are Hindu, are Buddhist people have a religious identity and they’re self-consciously not Christian. And so we don’t want to provoke that in unnecessary ways, but I think we can take a step back too far in that direction.

When I was on my way to the field, a lot of what I was told was, you just stick to telling stories about Jesus. Don’t engage with people too much about Islam, don’t engage too much with them about the Quran or about Muhammad.

And there are no issues that New Testament evangelists and missionaries think are off limits. They’re not going to go out of their way to tangle about things that make people mad, and we need to be careful about that. But there absolutely are times when people’s own misbeliefs need to be addressed.

Mark Dever:

So Matt, a lot of your book really has to do with a call to how we and churches here, and this book was published in America, so let’s say in America should be differently preparing those who want to go into work taking the gospel to a different country or a different language group.

Matt Rhodes:

And I think that churches need to know that most people who go to the mission field, a lot of them are still in their twenties, some in their early thirties, but people go to the mission field without a lot of life experience. And I think that a lot of churches, when they don’t have experience overseas, they just feel sort of out of their depth.

What Should Churches Look For in Missionaries?

And so part of what I want to do is to give churches an idea of what are the things that they should be looking for? What are the directions they should be directing their missionaries in, and what should they require of those missionaries?

Mark Dever:

Well into that last point, you said in most vocations, some degree of preparation or training is necessary, but for some reason we tend to think of missions as requiring far less training than other vocations. Sure. Doctors, dentists, and mechanics need to formally prepare, but missionaries not so much.

Matt Rhodes:

And it does baffle me in a way. Even pastors generally assume that they should have at least an MDiv, and not all pastors do, and you can get by without it if you get training in other ways.

But essentially what you’re asking a missionary to do is not just a pastor a church, but to go across cultures to plant a church where one has never existed and to pastor it until that missionary, him or herself is no longer needed. And so at least the kind of training that we give pastors should be absolutely necessary.

Jonathan Leeman:

Why are those disparate expectations, do you think? Mark? Among many churches that we still say yes, pastor, but yeah, the missionary,

What is the Difference Between a Pastor and a Missionary?

Mark Dever:

Oh, you mean disparate between pastoring and being a missionary?

Jonathan Leeman:

No, why? The disparate expectations of churches today and the training that’s required for our pastors because if you go to the average I, let’s just say Southern Baptist Church, they expect their pastor to be trained nonetheless. It does seem like we’re more and more willing to send missionaries who aren’t. Why the difference?

Mark Dever:

Oh, we probably innately are enjoying the benefits of churches the way they’ve been set up here, and we are assuming that those same skills and talents are not needed for the way Christianity grows and expands and expresses itself in house churches overseas.

Jonathan Leeman:

It’s strange, isn’t it? I have a hard time honestly, just making sense of that.

Mark Dever:

Yeah, people assume there’s a huge difference between, or they’re trying to be hermeneutically humble about how Western our churches are, and so many pastors these days don’t really think you need to meet on Sunday. They don’t think you need to meet altogether. They don’t know that you need to meet literally every week.

They don’t know that you need elders. They don’t know that you need a congregation that is defined as members. They don’t know that you need people to buy in that they can actually be put out of membership as an active discipline. I mean, I could go on and on and on.

Jonathan Leeman:

So we’re doing it here by inertia, but when kind of asked like, ah, that stuff’s not all that necessary. Do you have any further insights on this, Matt? Why the disparate expectations that American churches can impose on?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, I mean, I think one reason is practical pastors find a salary that allows them to pay off seminary debt, and that’s just not going to be possible for most missionaries. So I think most missionaries aren’t able to get the same level of training that pastors are, but they might be able to go out with the same set of skills.

And that’s a different thing. I think people really do think that the spirit works in a different way overseas. I mean, I have people ask me, doesn’t the spirit do way more miracles where you are overseas?

And there’s kind of an idea that somehow in the American church, Christianity has grown weary and the spirit isn’t active because we have grown faithless. But overseas is sort of where it’s really at, and I just don’t think that’s the case everywhere. The church has problems and everywhere you find incredible believers,

Mark Dever:

Well, and you find real pastoral challenges when you are in settings that you’re not used to culturally, you bring up in your book the question of how does Christ want me to relate to my multiple wives. What will I do with the wider community if they take my family away from me?

How do I share with my family and community what has happened? How do I handle rejection, violent mistreatment? Where will I be buried? I mean, there’s so many situations that not only would you think someone who’s trying to do ministry in another cultural setting like you’ve done, not only do they need to be as competent as their friend who stays in Omaha or Jacksonville, but they will need additional competencies

Matt Rhodes:

And missions teams can split over issues of what does this new believer do with his multiple wives as can families. So these are really important things. We can’t just look the other way.

Jonathan Leeman:

I read one critical review of your book that I sent to you. You saw it and I was a little surprised by he says, no doubt Rhodes considers the church to be essential to the missionary attack, but he does not articulate this aspect well, I thought, huh? I sure thought he did. You do make the church central to missions, right?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, I absolutely think it is. And that puzzled me a little too at first, but I think his concern was that, well, I think he would’ve preferred for me to have sort of an entire chapter maybe on how does a missionary relate to their local church. I think that that is a really important topic.

It wasn’t in the scope of this book, but I think a lot of what I’m trying to do here is actually to talk about how important humans are, right? Good human stuff like training and language learning and diligence and preaching. And that is a part of our theology of church is that God only, he only in the Book of Acts is ever working through human means.

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, I appreciate the way you define what a mature church looks like. It holds to orthodox doctrine and it’s not easily swayed by false teaching. And you go on through 11 marks. Now that is a bit of a problem. If you had nine, does that have been better? But you did 11 marks?

Matt Rhodes:

Yeah, I’ll have to check with the editors on that. I’m pretty sure I had nine initially until I sent it to the editors.

Jonathan Leeman:

That may have been you conclude with William Carey. Why did you do that?

Matt Rhodes:

Well, so for me, William Carey’s, his point when he sort of launched the Protestant missions movement was that God works through means. And so his seminal book, it was the obligation of Christians to use means because he had been told when God wants to convert the heathen, he was told he will do it without your help or mine either.

And that just wasn’t how carrie’s eye Carey was. He absolutely believed in predestination in that sense. He would be a staunch Calvinist, but he believed that God predestined people to come to him through the efforts and labors of ordinary people.

Jonathan Leeman:

Amen. Well, brother, thank you again for your work on this volume and we were excited when we read it, as I think I mentioned last time, because we saw a lot of like-mindedness in it and think it can help churches and pastors and elder boards out there better understand the task of missions. And so we highly recommend it.

Mark Dever:

And specifically if pastor, if you’re thinking about what do we do with our missions budget, how much emphasis do we put on short-term mission trips? How much time emphasis do we put on people doing one or two year stints in order to sort of introduce them?

I would just say one of the things that Matt’s book hopefully does is maybe rebalance you to try to pray publicly and regularly for your congregation to see raised up those who will give themselves to serious language learning and really be willing to invest not one or two weeks or one or two years, but one or two decades at least in the kind of work that needs to go on overseas.

Matt Rhodes:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for your time guys.

Mark Dever:

Thank you.

Matt Rhodes:

Thank you for having me on.