The Great Commission Loses Meaning for the Church of the West?

"(There)..... is the vast ignorance of its own members about the texts and traditions of their faith. A clergy friend of mine put on their calling card “Great Commission minded.” When his spouse gave that card to a friend who was in trouble, she looked at it and said, “It says here that you are Great Commission minded. How big a cut do you take of the offering?”

(So Beautiful. Leonard Sweet. David C Cook, 2009. pp37)

Mission Is Leading People to Discover The "True"

" Every lurch forward in the christian tradition springs from the recovery of the true, not the discovery of the new"

(So Beautiful, Lenonard Sweet. David C. Cook, 2009, pp29)

Supporting Nationals & The "Unspoken" Issues

"Many mission societies still hire national workers to evangelize the unreached. These men know their culture, are expert in the local language, can survive on a minimal salary, and are extremely mobile. But the credibility gap that exists between their lives and message is often severe. The non-Christian tends to regard such “agents” merely as paid employees of the foreigner. They have no more status than a medicine salesman. Preaching is looked upon as a profession, not a passion for which no sacrifice is too great. It is all too easy for the Muslim to sneer at and ridicule such paid evangelists."

(Muslim Evangelism, Phil Parshall Gabriel Publishing, 2003, pp199)

I will simply add that this is a reality in Africa where we pioneered new churches and a new grassroots leadership training program. There is this authoritarian "power pastor" mentality deeply rooted on the continent of Africa that I despise as very non-biblical. Character and integrity is questionable in many leadership training candidates.

I have often been criticized deeply by other missionaries for sharing this. They begin to questioned the "True conversion" of the men we worked with, or the methods we use. But they simply had their head in the sky. We began training 68 various men over the years, and came down to a handful to lead the 15 churches we planted. Even many of them still have issues. I will spare you. This is not the exception, this is the norm in all the churches in the country of all stripes. We simply knew the truth for our training program not at an institute, but decentralized into the bush near the people and villages. We hung in hammocks and ate with these men and we were among their people often. We knew the truth and sought to work with them with the truth of the situation. One missionary who was critical of this "situation" was simply unaware of the life of the few men he worked with. How do I know you ask? Members of his churches would come and speak to me about the conduct of their leaders because they were discouraged by it. I never bothered to share this with this fellow missionary. He simply refused to see.

Having explained the reality, this is not to suggest that there are not many godly men doing a great job. I know many. However as Leonard Sweet commented about the west;

"It is less that Western Christianity needs a course correction than a character correction." (So Beautiful, David C cook, 2009 pp38)

The same is true on the mission field where I served also in Pioneer work, not 2nd or 3rd generation works.
Every trained leader in our churches are self-supported farmers, carpenters etc.