Sending and Receiving Missionaries

This post is the continuation of “Who is a Missionary?”.

In the Christendom model of mission, missionaries were sent from “here” to “there.” “Here” tended to be Europe and North America. “There” tended to be “the ends of the earth.” Today, missionaries are able to serve cross-culturally without necessarily going overseas. These “home missionaries” work in their home country with newly-arrived immigrants, international students, refugees, or specialized subpopulations such as Native Americans, or inner-city residents.[1]

In the postmodern world, not only is the church in non-Western nations maturing and sending missionaries to the West, the churches in the West are declining in authority. In the minds of many theologians and missiologists, Western culture has become “repaganized,” meaning that the values and worldview of the culture are shaped by forces other than the Christian vision.[2] The countries of Europe and North America which were previously viewed as being Christian nations are now being included with all other nations as mission fields – ready to receive missionaries from other countries. In fact, almost every nation has become a sending nation. The missionary enterprise is becoming truly international.[3]

In this time of change, we in the United States must consider what it would mean for the church in our country to receive missionaries as well as send them. We must apply the same role of a missionary from the U.S. to another country as we would to a missionary from another culture to the U.S.

When we talk about missionaries coming to America, we often think of persons of a certain nation coming to the United States to work with others from that same nation (e.g. a Chinese pastor coming to minister to Chinese immigrants in New York City). Although they have crossed national boundaries to minister to immigrants from their own native countries, they are not, in the technical sense of the word, to be defined as missionaries, since they are ministering to their own people group. Missionaries are outsiders among those with whom they work. “In a biblically rooted ecclesiology, pastors or elders plant or shepherd individual congregations within their own cultural group while missionaries or apostles are those who develop church planting and discipleship movements in other cultures.”[4] Although a technical distinction, it is still an important distinction to make. To truly be a missionary-receiving nation, the United States must welcome missionaries from other countries to work with Americans* in churches and to plant churches for Americans.

While it is important to understand this technical distinction of a missionary as one who is called by God to minister cross-culturally, we must not limit participation in mission to a few trained professionals who cross cultures to participate in God’s mission. Every Christian is called to participate in God’s mission.[5] This missional nature of the Church is the subject of the next post in this series.


*I use the term “Americans” here to distinguish it from the subpopulations with whom missionaries often come to the U.S. to work. In this context, “Americans” can refer to Americans of European, African, Asian, or Native American descent, but which is a different culture than the missionary’s.

1. Craig Van Gelder, “A Missional Understanding of the Church” in The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 30.
2. Jim Kitchens, The Postmodern Parish: New Ministry For a New Era (The Alban Institute, 2003), 74.
3. Thomas Hale, On Being a Missionary (Pasadena, California: William Carey Library, 1995), 1.
4. Charles R. Gailey and Howard Culbertson, Discovering Missions (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2007), 16.
5. Hale, 6.