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AFMI > |
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2010-07-17 |
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관리자 (admin) |
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| Comment from the View of Asian Initiative—Facing the Challenge of the Evangelization of Asia |
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| David S. Lim, Ph.D. |
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David S. Lim, Ph.D.
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest to send forth workers into his harvest field.” Matthew 9:36-38
Can Asian Evangelicals together with our international partners work cooperatively to get Asia effectively evangelized and discipled by 2020? By the mercies of God, we should at least try. The obvious biblical rationale is that this is the priority of God: God wants all peoples saved! (2 Pet. 3:9; 1 Tim. 2:3-5). Yet there are also 3 historically important reasons why we must emphasize the “evangelization of Asia” in this new decade.
1. Asia remains the least evangelized continent. In recent years, Asia is filled with fast-emerging global economic centers, like many mega-cities in China, India and Indonesia, which have joined those in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand. Yet in the these fast-secularizing, fast-urbanizing cities of the global post-modern age of mass media, internet and mobile phones, the spiritual influence and transformational impact of Christianity seems to be very negligible indeed.
Europe was evangelized in the first millennium, the Americas in the middle of the second millennium, and Africa in the post-World War II years. Yet Asia remains largely populated with atheists (Communists and secularists largely), Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and even folk religionists. This is not for lack of prayers, missionary efforts and even sacrificial martyrdom of national and expatriate believers. A spiritual telescopic view of heaven and hell will surely be a very sad sight – of hell mainly populated with Asians!
2. Models of effective strategies in missions have emerged recently. In the last two decades, we have collected a lot of stories of effective mass evangelization among the unreached, especially in Asia. Traditional missions have proven to be slow and ineffective, mainly transplanting denominations which looked foreign to local peoples, especially among Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Communist communities. Hence, transformational missions have become more and more prominent, now even being adopted in Western nations. It consists of the combination of church multiplication movements (CMM), contextualized spirituality (CS) and community development (CD) approaches, now popularly called “Insider Movements” (IM).
IM may now be the “in thing” for many enlightened missions today, but some of them are struggling in being wholistic or transformational, because of their church’s mono-cultural expectations. Most CD practitioners may like to also do CMM, but have been constrained by their policies of non-proselytism. Most of us have started to excel in tentmaking ministries in Communist, Buddhist and Muslim contexts, yet only in few instances have CMM occurred. So, there needs to be a quick multiplication of consultations in the next few years for “reflective practitioners” (esp. those who train missionaries) to learn from one another, and especially to learn from the successful models. In fact, a few of us have started to train and deploy missionaries in doing IM. We hope that in our ASFM sessions, we can learn more from their updates as well as other new initiatives in IM.
3. We need to cooperate to maximize our limited resources. We need to admit that as Evangelicals, we function almost always individualistically. This can be a strength, because new initiatives can be born through missional obedience by a few committed to a common vision and mission. But on the other hand, it has evolved a lot of duplication, if not competition in the field and even in the sending centers across Asia. This has produced a lot of wasted energies and resources that are quite limited in supply. Besides in many religiously-sensitive parts of Asia, we can not afford to commit too many mistakes; one’s lapse can affect many who work in nearby contexts.
Thus, cooperation is sorely needed. We hope that when we come together in our Asia Mission Leaders Fora (AMLF), perhaps once a year, missions executives, church leaders, “reflective practitioners,” and frontline missionaries can pray, consult, plan and work together as a convergence, as partners in the Gospel to reach Asia together for Christ. May God use AFMI and each of us to send out more effective harvesters into His desperately needy harvest-fields in Asia!
(Continued from page 2)
One is the conviction that Asians need to take initiatives in frontier missions. The other is that these cooperation and initiatives should take place with the insider perspectives in mind. These two foci are unique to Asian Mission Leaders Forum and Asia Society for Frontier Mission.
Come and join us as we probe further on this topic and as we continue to build on what we addressed last year.
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