Zambia Hunt

A Candid Word to Missionaries and Sending Churches 

“The American naturalizes what the African spiritualizes. These views are at polar opposites on a continuum, running from animism on one extreme to secularism on the other, yet each culture believes its own perceptions are valid.” — VanRheenan

This cultural gap between Western missionaries and African believers is not merely academic. It is the starting point of a much larger problem — one that has quietly undermined gospel work across Africa for generations. Western missionaries and sending churches, we need to talk.

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Seeing Through the Wrong Lens

Missionaries from the West often view host cultures and peoples through Western eyes and understandings and are moved to do something to help. Without understanding and care, that help can often perpetuate the problem instead of meeting needs. Compassion fades quickly when the Westerner learns that they have been “played” or that the people do not want their help. Compassion may be what gets your attention but love for Christ is what keeps you going year after year.

This is a critical distinction. Ministry fueled by compassion alone is fragile. It is easily exhausted, easily offended, and easily manipulated. It is the love of Christ — not feelings of pity or cultural guilt — that sustains a missionary through years of sacrifice, misunderstanding, and slow fruit.

The Problem of Unhealthy Relationships

In the history of modern missions, there have been far too many instances of unhealthy relationships between Western missionaries and local gospel workers. This is often due to a lack of transparency and investment in the relationship, leading to a lack of knowledge and trust. Sometimes, one or both parties seek an advantage over the other and may create an unhealthy one-way dependency maintained by the Westerner. Whether through material wealth or knowledge, real or perceived, the national worker may become subservient to the Western counterpart’s ideas and wishes.

To have healthy relationships between Western and local workers, reciprocity is key. This means mutual respect, sharing, and the giving of oneself. Both parties must be willing to open up and communicate their feelings, struggles, hopes, and temptations without fear of being wrongly judged. Missionaries must humbly enter into these relationships under the assurance of God’s sovereignty, the control of the Holy Spirit, and the direction of God’s Word.

The Danger of Paternalism

Beneath many well-meaning Western missions efforts lies a quiet but destructive assumption. Paternalism is “when missionaries and their sending churches and agencies assume, sometimes unconsciously, that they possess superior knowledge, experience, and skills. As a result of these assumptions, they exert control over local Christians and their leaders. This control usually involves financial arrangements and the implicit authority of money.” Paternalism occurs when a missionary turns over responsibility but then seeks to take it back when local leaders do not make decisions that they agree with.

This is not partnership. It is control dressed in the language of care.

When Western Money Bypasses the Local Church

A popular trend in post-colonial missions in Africa is for wealthier Christians in the West to directly support pastors and missionary church planters in the global south. Robert Reese suggests several serious hindrances that result from this trend:

1. It perpetuates the colonial mentality of wealthier Christians holding the purse strings while the rest do the actual work. In fact, it is often advertised this way in the West: “The local brother can do missions much cheaper than if we send our own.”
2. It removes local accountability, where local churches in the global South should be identifying and training their own workers.
3. It easily creates a dependency where Christians in the global South may decide not to engage in the work of God if no “sponsors” from the North are paying for it.

A much better way is a true church planting partnership between local churches — including those in the global North and the local sending church in the global South.

When Strategies Undermine Independence

The damage is not always financial. When missionaries fail to use reproducible strategies for church planting — such as investing in a church building that indigenous people cannot afford to maintain, installing equipment, or developing programs outside the ability of the mature congregation — it sends a clear message, even if unintentional: that the local congregation cannot plant churches on their own. Every resource introduced that the local church cannot reproduce becomes a ceiling on their future growth and a quiet vote of no confidence in their capacity.

A Direct Word to Our Western Church Friends

We appreciate your heart for the gospel and your desire to invest in missions worldwide. Please do not lose that vision and burden, born out of your commitment to a biblical theology of missions. However, your strategies to accomplish missions may hurt or defeat the very goal you are pursuing — the development of healthy, reproducing churches in Africa. With that in mind, beware of:

• Directly supporting men not under the authority of a local sending church. Many “free agents” in Africa attempt ministry without local church mandate or authority.
• Placing yourself in the position of primary accountability for a church-planting brother who is foreign to you. The local sending church is best positioned to manage this accountability.
• Bypassing church-to-church partnerships by taking on direct support of a cross-cultural missionary or church planter yourself.
• Supporting overseas pastors with monthly personal support, thus short-circuiting healthy church development by taking the place and responsibility of the local assembly.
• Buying into pop-missions culture, which suggests there is a quick methodology for raising leaders and growing healthy, reproducing churches.
• Assuming you no longer need to prepare your best people and send them out from your local congregation. A cultural sense of capitalism must not drive church-planting missions, where strategy is driven by economic considerations rather than obedience. Yes, it costs more to send your own church member to the field — but you are called to prepare servants and send them.
• Confusing Christian social projects with gospel missions. Community social projects may flow out of gospel missions, but they are not the same thing.

A Better Way Forward

The answer is not for the West to disengage. It is for the West to engage rightly — with humility, with genuine partnership, and with a strategy that always asks: Will this produce a church that can stand, reproduce, and thrive when we are gone?

The goal was never a ministry that depends on Western presence, Western money, or Western approval. The goal is healthy, indigenous, reproducing churches that glorify God — churches that need no purse strings attached to fulfill the mission Christ has given them.

Stay the course, brothers. But make sure it is His course you are staying on.

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This post draws on the work of VanRheenan, Robert Reese, and others laboring faithfully to think clearly about the theology and practice of global missions.