“We discovered that the scarcity of Paul-type missionaries has been obscured by the quantity of Timothy-type missionaries.……. There seem to be two kinds of missionaries needed in the world. There is the Timothy-type missionary and the Paul-type missionary. We call Timothy a missionary because he left home (Lystra, Acts 16:1), joined a traveling team of missionaries, crossed cultures, and ended up overseeing the younger church in Ephesus (1 Tim. 1:3) far from his homeland. But we have come to distinguish this Timothy-type missionary from the Paul-type missionary because Timothy stayed and ministered on the “mission field” long after there was a church planted with its own elders (Acts 20:17) and its own outreach (Acts 19:10). Paul (the Paul-type missionary), on the other hand, was driven by a passion to make God’s name known among all the unreached peoples of the world. He never stayed in a place long, once the church was established. He said in Romans 15:20, “I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named” (Rom. 15:20). That is what we call “frontier missions” or “pioneer missions.” That is a Paul-type missionary.
For me, back in 1983, it proved to be a stunning revelation that perhaps 90 percent of our missionary force from North America are Timothy-type missionaries working with established churches among reached peoples, and only 10 percent are Paul-type missionaries, even though hundreds of people groups, some would say several thousand, remain unreached—that is, there is no indigenous evangelizing movement among them at all.”
(“Brothers, We are not Professionals” John Piper, pg 192, 2002, Broadman & Holman pub)
No comments:
Post a Comment