Etica y Misiones
By Joe E. Trull, Editor

Ethics and missions. How do they relate?

In April Audra and I visited Argentina, joining our close friends Jack and Jean Glaze. The two served as missionaries in Buenos Aires for 25 years, Jack as professor and president at the seminary, as both of them witnessed and worked establishing churches in the country.

Almost 80 now, Jack is remarkably healthy and sharp as ever, the epitome of an earnest biblical scholar and a warm-hearted evangelist.

Second only to ethics has been my love and commitment to missions. Every church I pastored strongly supported mission work. Each year I have joined congregates and students in mission trips. For eight years I served as a trustee of the Foreign Mission Board of the SBC (now the International Mission Board) visiting over twenty countries and working with scores of missionaries.

My trip to Argentina has confirmed recent concerns about some major changes in SBC mission strategy. My thoughts here are not meant in any way to hinder the work of our missionaries-with few exceptions, they continue in faithful service, often under difficult restrictions.

As a pastor, a former trustee, and a Christian deeply committed to missions, I am distressed at several changes in mission strategy-especially its questionable theological premise and some disastrous ethical consequences of that basis.

After numerous conversations with missionaries and IMB staff, I have reached these conclusions which my trip verified:

1. The IMB now focuses exclusively on church planting and evangelism. I have no quarrel with either strategy. But I am troubled to see our IMB abdicate medical missions, abandon theological education, and relinquish social ministries that have opened so many doors in cultures resistant to Christian witness.
   
   All missionaries are now required to be "church planters"-seminary teachers, doctors and nurses, and social workers, if they continue as SBC missionaries, must change their missionary calling or resign! No more do they heal the sick in the hospital at Bangalore, India, or teach the 230 students at the International Seminary in Buenos Aires.
   
   This is not new. It is the same battle Baptists fought 50 years ago, when narrow Fundamentalism opposed social ethics and social ministry. The rationale then was the fear of Liberalism and the "Social Gospel." It took awhile, but even the most conservative came to realize the gospel is social, and teaching, healing, and ministering in Jesus' name are the heart and soul of evangelism and church planting.
    
2. Today, however, the mission strategy of the IMB is based on a flawed theological understanding of "end times." The present leader of the IMB seems to be driven by his understanding of the Second Coming, based on one verse in Mark: "And the good news must be proclaimed to all nations" (13:10). Each year while teaching at NOBTS, I heard the IMB President preach in chapel-always he referred to this verse.
   
   To be certain, I have discussed this issue with missionaries and administrators closest to Dr. Rankin. I am now convinced that he genuinely believes the role of the IMB is to take the gospel to every nation as quickly as possible, in order that Jesus may return! This view seems to resemble a form of dispensational theology that discredits ethics and social ministry.
   
   This interpretation raises many serious questions about missionology. What does it mean to "proclaim the good news to all nations?" Does one gospel sermon to a "people group" or one church planted in an area remove a hindrance to Jesus' return? Is the purpose of mission work to "speed-up" the Second Coming?
    
3. On the practical side, decades of successful mission programs have been terminated. The IMB has closed hospitals around the world and sent medical missionaries home. Our only school for training ministers in the Caribbean (where I have taught four times) is no more. The influential and growing seminary in Buenos Aires, filled to capacity with over 230 students, no longer has missionary teachers or economic support. (In Argentina's present economic crisis, students cannot even afford books!) A media ministry that reached millions in gated high-rise apartments, was eliminated. The list is endless.
   
   I have no doubt the IMB President is sincere in his belief-but I believe he is sincerely wrong! I know the spin. "We are shifting these institutions to the nationals," Dr. Rankin told me personally. In most countries, however, the national convention cannot absorb the costs. Schools and hospitals close. Empty buildings are sold. The IMB is abandoning the very work thousands of missionaries spent a lifetime nurturing to maturity.

In the front yard of a mission house where the Glazes lived in Buenos Aires stands a majestic pecan tree, planted fifty years ago from one Mississippi pecan. Today it produces hundreds of nuts to the delight of students, faculty, and missionaries. The tree symbolizes the work of missions worldwide. To plant is basic. To water, cultivate, prune, and protect from disease is also important.

If all we do in world missions is plant seeds, the full harvest will never come. But if we follow the example of Jesus, we will preach, teach, heal and be the love of God in word and deed. Ethics and missions, like faith and works, belong together.

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Updated Sunday, October 13, 2002